I have my UK PonyCon ticket!

I won't bother posting a picture here as it's just a confirmation email, but I have now bought my ticket for UK PonyCon this October. I've gone for the standard Weekend Pass at £30, which is £5 more than last year but still less than a third of the equivalent ticket for BUCK 2016. (The £70 VIP tickets have already sold out.) With luck I'll actually stay for the weekend this time -- as some of you may remember, I was unwell last year and had to come home on Saturday evening. I still had a good time, though!

I intend to stay in Loughborough, since Leicester city centre hotels are expensive this year as there's a Rugby World Cup match on the Sunday. It's only ten minutes on the train or 25 minutes by airport bus, and since said bus runs 24/7 I won't have to worry about clock-watching after any late-evening events. (I've no idea whether there'll be any, but at the very least I expect there'll be some informal meetups in local pubs and suchlike.)

I've said this before -- last year, for example -- but I really, really like the convenience of a city-centre location. (Specifically, this hotel.) It helps enormously if (like me) you don't have a car, and it's also nice to be able to step outside and into the real world for a few minutes. I remember last year, nipping out to the pub for lunch and Tesco for a snack was quite refreshing. BUCK 2016, if I go, will be the first pony convention I'll have been to that won't have had this advantage.

Spike episode today. It would be nice if it were the fantastic Spike episode many of us have been waiting for... but it would also be a surprise.