The Plaid Pladd

Day 2 of our trip was the first day of the convention!!! Super exciting!! At first, some of my wariness from the night before lingered:

But luckily it was short-lived:

It was super easy and fun to be a scientist! First, because I am one, no matter what lies Dr. Dodds tells you, and second because I was totally dressed for it:

Daring Do, like Indiana Jones, is probably at least nominally a scientist, right?

So I spent the rest of the trip giving Live Science coverage! Which, like most science, consisted of extrapolating from limited data and guessing at statistics. Science!!!!

Steven also looked super awesome because he found a way to also dye his mustache rainbow colors!

Sorry, ladies, he’s taken

All you have to do is paint it with washable Elmer’s school glue, wait for that to dry, and then paint it with washable kids’ paint! The glue layer gives the paint something to cling to, but since they’re both washable, it came right off at the end of the day with just water. It hardened to a prickly consistency Steven likened to a “rainbow Christmas wreath”, but as long as he was a little careful how he ate lunch, it stayed on great!

Here is a full costume shot:

Yeah, applique butt tattoo!!

Here’s the front of the convention center before they opened the doors:

And another:

The big red truck was pretty cool. The side of it had rotating ads and art, and it played My Little Pony music, both from the show and fan made.

Taken later in the day, when I needed a break from the polite but persistent crowds

I’ve seen every episode of this show at least twice, but I was still way out of my depth. At one point, everyone started singing along to a song I had never even heard before. I guess it was one of the many fan made character theme songs, and somehow everyone but me knew all of the words. It’s okay, as a scientist, I’m used to be an outside observer. Here are some science facts I discovered:

I even think this estimate might be a little too conservative, but when you take into account guys in college, Steven was probably one of the oldest fans there! Weird! A lot of the high school guys had brought their parents, so I always had somewhat baffled sitting companions on the outside steps.

Then, at lunch, I remembered the first rule of science:

I mean, I DO have an MS degree.

SCIENCE!!!

The afternoon went much better after that, especially since the last presentation of the day was from a clinical psychologist about his giant ongoing Brony Study!!! Click the link if you want to take the survey (for bronies and non-bronies alike) and further amazing pony and fandom science!

Give me a chi square value at the beginning of anything and my heart will just melt a little.

Sorry it’s not a better picture; we were sitting about halfway back, by a speaker for maximum listening comprehension

It was an interesting, though perhaps too wordy PowerPoint presentation about brony demographics and motivations as compared with the general population. Both scientists were wearing lab coats, and whenever the audience would clap for something, they’d look vaguely annoyed, like “Stop interrupting me, class, I’m trying to teach you something.” It was definitely my favorite thing we saw. Is that sad? NO THAT IS SCIENCE

Yay!!!!

Next: BronyCon Day 3
Previously: BronyCon Day 1