+I cosplayed [Rose Quartz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Steven_Universe_characters#Rose_Quartz) on Saturday at [FanimeCon](https://www.fanime.com/) the other month! (Okay, it was May. I'm [not a very productive writer](/2017/Nov/the-blockhead/).) It was fun, I think! I guess?
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+I'm not really sure what other people get out of fandom conventions. There are panels, but pop-culture analysis is better in blog form than live discussion. There are autographs, but there are only so many celebrities I want to pay forty dollars in order to meet for forty seconds. There's the vendor hall, but I don't need more useless material possessions: my life is about bits, not atoms.
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+<a href="/images/rose_quartz_fanime_2019.jpg"><img src="/images/rose_quartz_fanime_2019.jpg" width="240" style="float: left; margin: 0.8pc;"></a>
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+For me, it's my one socially-acceptable excuse for crossdressing in public.
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+... well, that's not quite right; "socially-acceptable" isn't the concept I want. I live in goddamned _"Portland"_. (Which is actually Berkeley, but when I started my pseudonymous gender blog, I took my savvy friends' cowardly and paranoid advice to obfuscate even my location, and now I have to keep saying "'Portland'" for backwards compatibility, even though at this point my bad opsec is more akin to a genre convention or a running joke, rather than a real attempt to conceal my identity.) Everyone _and her dog_ has trans friends here. My new young male coworker just staight-up wears a dress and makeup some days, and no one bats an eye. (My attempt to "Blanchpill" him was ... uneventful.)
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+So if I don't need to fear getting beaten up or even menacing stares, why do I need conventions to dress up? Could part of it be that I'm too old? (The fact that I wouldn't be caught dead wearing a dress _to work_ (!!) probably has something to do with my sense of propriety being calibrated to the world of 'aught-six, in contrast to my coworker, who I guess would have come of age in the _Obergefell_- and Jenner-era world of 'fifteen.)
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+Maybe. But I think another part of it is that I don't
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