#dragoncon 2017

[sheliesshattered]

Jack’s college roommate and best man at our wedding (with whom he keeps in fairly regular contact) just messaged Jack to ask if Mad Mad Fury Road is any good

sir.

sir.

it’s been eight years

[twinklebat99]

Jem and the Holograms at Dragon Con 2017. 📸 by David Leo

[kores-pomegranate]

Story time!

I grew up evangelical Christian, specifically Pentecostal. My parents were very devout, but over the years they’ve both become slightly less rigid in their beliefs. My dad in particular has undergone such growth and I’m so proud of him, but my mom, while less rigid than she once was, is still Christian and still pretty conservative.

I am queer, nonbinary, and polyamorous. My girlfriend is moving in with me on Saturday, which meant that I really couldn’t avoid coming out to them about all of this. Today, I sent them this email:

Hey y’all,

I didn't necessarily want to have this conversation over writing, but I think I'm too nervous to have it any other way. There's a lot that I've wanted to tell you both for a long time but I've been nervous about it and putting it off indefinitely. There's a lot in my life that is going to change very soon, but I wanted to get through DragonCon and [my child’s] birthday before dropping all of this on y'all. Telling you about those changes requires giving you some background information first. 

So, I would say around 2017-2018ish, I came out to [my now ex-husband] as pansexual (which is similar to bisexual but basically a little more expansive). He was supportive and kind about it and it led to us having conversations about opening our relationship to give me the opportunity to have experiences that I wasn't able to have because we got married so young. We decided to try it out and it was bumpy but generally went well. After a little while we decided that we wanted to try polyamory (instead of just being "open") because it felt more natural to us to be able to pursue meaningful and loving relationships with other people if we found someone we wanted to do that with. During this time I also realized that I am nonbinary, meaning that I don't really identify with male or female as a gender and I use they/them pronouns to reflect that.

Through the pursuit of polyamory, we discovered a lot of weak points in our marriage. That's to be expected, because nonmonogamy has a way of exposing cracks and forces you to address them. That's when we started couple's therapy. I would say that polyamory and couple's therapy did a great job of showing us the weaknesses in our relationship. In particular it showed me how it felt to be treated well in a relationship. The differences between my relationship with [ex-husband] and my relationships with others were stark, and over time I couldn't ignore how unwilling or unable [ex-husband] was to change, and how unhappy I was with him. Couple's therapy for the years we were in it was mostly focused on what [ex-husband] perceived to be my deficits, which were almost entirely the fact that he felt like we didn't have sex enough. So, after years of going to couple's therapy and feeling as though all of the difficulties in our marriage were my fault, coupled with the experience of being treated well by a partner and finding that I am actually capable of functioning healthily in a relationship, I asked [ex-husband] for the divorce. 

My partner through this since May of 2022 has been [girlfriend], that I believe both of you met before and after her transition. We met at [convention] and she was also in a polyamorous relationship. She lived in [city] with her partner, [partner’s] husband, and the child they were raising together as a family. For the entirety of our relationship we have been long distance, and that has been hard but we have made it work. Recently for reasons that aren't dissimilar to the reasons that [ex-husband] and I ended things, [girlfriend’s] relationship with [partner] also ended. After a lot of conversations and brainstorming and problem solving, we decided that the best thing and the thing that will make us both the happiest is for [girlfriend] to move to [city] to move in with me. We weren't sure until very recently that this was going to be what happened, but it is now a done deal and she'll be moving in with me on Saturday.

I know this is a hard thing for y'all to hear, and I know that it goes against more than one of your values and beliefs as people. My partner, a trans woman of two and a half years who I started consensually dating with the full knowledge of all parties involved while I was still married has now parted ways with her polyamorous partner and will be moving in with me even though we're not married. It will also make it publicly undeniable that I am a queer person, whereas before I suppose there was some amount of deniability in that fact if you weren't looking at it too closely. 

This is a lot to throw at y'all and I'm not sure how much of it you had already guessed or suspected, but we've not really ever talked about it explicitly and I figured my partner moving in with me was the time to talk about it. I wanted to send the info dump in writing first so that you could have time to process all of it without having me right in front of you, but I really would like to talk about it face to face or over the phone or something if that is something y'all would ever like to do. I understand that this may change some things about our relationship--I don't know if y'all will continue to want to spend holidays at my house or if [girlfriend] will be welcome at family things, but I do hope that eventually that is something that can happen.

Please know that I am the happiest I have ever been with her, and I truly never thought that I would be able to find a person that I love as much as I love her, let alone get to have her in my life every day. I really want to be able to share that happiness with y'all, and I hope we can get there some day.

I love y'all,

--

[signed name] 

I have been wracked with anxiety all day, because I genuinely did not know how they would respond, especially my mom. Here is her response:

I cannot express how I never, in a million billion years, would have guess that this is how my mom would respond. I immediately started crying…hard.

Then my dad’s response came in and it completely wrecked me in the best way possible:

Even reading over it now is making me really emotional. I can’t believe that my family is unconditionally accepting of this news from me. I have been afraid to have these conversations with them for years. *Years.* It hasn’t settled on me yet that I will get to live with the love of my life AND my family is happy for me and won’t be cutting me out of their lives.

I think I am the luckiest person that’s ever lived and I have such gratitude to the universe for that fact.

[tsulean]

i just realized that i forgot to mention, i got into that fancy weeklong residential writing workshop i applied for back in february! the only other workshop i've done was the dragoncon 2-day workshop back in 2017 and it was enormously helpful so here's hoping this one is too *fingers crossed*

[membracid]

2018 Annual Report

For the last 6 years I’ve been writing a personal annual report. It’s a useful way to evaluate what I did, and a lot of times a year that feels like a failure looks better when I take a longer view.

This will also include some 2017 stuff, since I completely skipped even trying to write a report last year. If you look at these reports over time, you’ll see a pattern: my health has steadily declined since I started working at Purdue. 

I really love what I do there (see adorable photo above), but it’s not much of a surprise that it’s a physically demanding job with a lot of stress associated with it. And as I’ve devoted more and more of my life to this job -- so that I have health insurance, which is REALLY important as you will see below -- the rest of my life has shrunk.

My first year running Bug Bowl in 2015, I had what I thought was a stroke. I’m in charge of a massive outreach event for >30K people, and I’m a part-time employee. Seems reasonable that I might over do it.

I stopped writing for WIRED in 2016, because I didn’t have the time or energy to keep it up. In late April (right after Bug Bowl) I discovered lesions on my spinal cord were the reason I was having trouble walking.

 I turned down most speaking invites in 2017, because I didn’t have the time or energy to travel. I’m pretty sure I had more health things going on, but because I was still paying off my 2016 health bills, I didn’t go to the doctor.  I did still do three awesome things:

I attended SciFoo in August at Google Headquarters

I was a visiting scientist at DragonCon in September

I got to hang out with Mary Roach for a day in December.

I think the big thing I realized in 2017 is that I don’t have do do everything myself. Other people can go hang out at Google or take over my work at Sci Fi Cons. Bug outreach will be more sustainable long term, if more people are doing it.

So 2018. Well.

This year I decided to try to run a crowdfunding campaign for Bug Bowl, since a lot of our equipment was over 20 years old.  The video helps show the scale of Bug Bowl:

Success! Thanks to my many online friends, and community members, we did fund repairs. (you can still make a tax deductible contribution here). THANK YOU!

In 2018, in addition to the successful crowdfunding, I also:

Had a paper accepted to Annals of the Entomological Society of America, and I’m co-author on another that’s been submitted to American Entomologist. 

Did a super fun training for librarians about how science news gets made and covered 

Collaborated with Indiana Humanities on a bee project

Survived 4,800 girl scouts

Had someone in a position of authority at Purdue text me a penis photo

Did a bunch of media interviews, including this one which is about native bees, I SWEAR

My advice to anyone considering a crowdfunding campaign is: don’t. It’s a huge amount of effort. And I was an idiot to take it on during the busiest part of my year. Which is probably why this year’s crop of central nervous system lesions were in my brain, and I finally got my official diagnosis: MS.

I’ve suspected it for quite a while, but it’s only this year I’ve started talking about it. And seriously, folks. Please. Please don’t make your first response to someone telling you they have MS be “Oh, my [aunt/mother-in-law/nephew] had that and they died.”

This is not a fatal disease. It is a pain-in-the-ass disease, and yeah it will get worse over time. I’m gonna die, but so are you. We all will die. “Multiple sclerosis is seldom fatal and life expectancy is shortened by only a few months.”

If you look back at everything I’ve accomplished in the last 15 years: I did that with untreated MS. It’s a pretty decent list of accomplishments for anyone. 

[that-hologram-girl]

[justabrowncoatedwench]

Throwback to when @bonestructureandcontempt and I took our Peaches-inspired Vex, Vax, and Percy to DragonCon in 2017. 😁 we've had a few upgrades ourselves since then too ❤️

my “critical redraw” from earlier this year that I forgot to post!

a rework of what was originally bone structure and contempt, from 2017. 

[barrybluejules]

You're doing amazing, box d.va!

[shrupdedup]

It's hot in T̶o̶p̶e̶k̶a̶ Atlanta. --- Shoutout to @eva-wings for sending this to me! Keeping cool with @unokins 's umbrella at the Overwatch photoshoot at Dragoncon.

[imploder]

DragonCon 2017 - Implode's Con Vlog

So as DragonCon 2018 comes up this weekend, I decided to finally finish last year's log....oops

[katbaerrell]

[so-i-did-this-thing]

“It’s too hot for a coat at DragonCon” Percy.

It me. Fabric by my partner, @crowtoed, everything else by me. Breastplate design by @alienfirst

[thespacehairandthespaceidiot]

Matt’s thoughts on baby making with Alex. (X)

[adreecosplays]

“I CREATE LIFE . . .             . . . and I destroy it.”  1/2

DragonCon 2017 | Photo & Costume by AdreeCosplays (me) | Balem is my boy

[seiya234]

Look at this absolutely amazing journal 3 dress! It took 100 hours of HAND EMBROIDERING to do the skirt

[katbarrelldaily]

Katherine Barrell during 5 Truths and a Lie @ DragonCon © BadtzBee