Sounds like a winning plan to me! Count me in.

I'm not sure. Silvermane (of FOB:Equestria) is handling the organization of the panels, but I don't know if that would include things like Fighting is Magic. On the other hand, if he's not the one in charge, he'll know who is.

You could try contacting him through fobequestria.com (check the Staff page) or through babscon.com and their forums at http://mlpforums.com/forum/136-babscon/ ... I'm just doing this, a panel on low-intensity fundraising, and the bar. Mostly the bar.

There are many reasons we're not doing it that way.

1. It would take too long. A traditional pyramid-style tournament would require devoting a site for hours, and keep the winners tied to that room for hours. Nobody comes to a convention for that.
2. More wresting tables would have to be built. That's a lot of time and money better spent elsewhere (like, say, increasing the prize pool).
3. The possibility of injury goes WAY up when participants aren't pre-screened and when there are thirty or forty matches instead of just one. The convention can't take that risk.
4. The reasons to have this at all are to raise money for the charities, to debunk the stereotype of bronies as fat basement-dwellers, and to provide some entertainment. Actually hunting for the strongest brony isn't on that list at all. (In any event, armwrestling is as much technique as strength... last year Dusty beat SnowflakeIRL even though Snowflake was stronger by any objective measurement, e.g. how much you can benchpress, curl, etc. Dusty's been armwrestling for bar-bets for years.)
5. The organizer/sponsor (me) wants something quick, then DONE. I've got more things to do at Babs than to run an all-day armwrestling tournament.

I will emphasize that the results aren't rigged. Neither Tetsuo nor Dusty is going to let the other guy take a title or get more for their charity just to follow some script or another. Yes, the hype stuff and the wrestlin' bragging stuff is show, and should be taken about as seriously as you take WWE... not at all. But once it's time to wrestle, it's the real deal.

If you want to put together a tournament yourself, go for it, but realize there's a lot more to it than saying "someone should do it". You will find you need the approval of a lot of people who have their own worries, and that it's a lot of work.

The showmanship, of course.

The outcome? Not a chance in hell. Once the match starts, it's all real. Nobody's going to accept their charity getting less than the other guy's because they threw the match.

If you're that bent out of shape about something like this, you'd be better off not reading fan-made material at all. Seriously, no artist or writer is obligated to obey your ideas of what a "huge kick in the balls" is. The exit is to the right.
http://www.equestriadaily.com/2014/06/ashleigh-ba... must have REALLY ruined your life.

I'd disagree about the example citied being what "SJWs think". One of the defining characteristics of SJWs is that they think they have the only handle on the truth, and therefore what they say is The One True Way. SJWs don't have a unified opinion, because they sneer at each other almost as much as they sneer at everyone else. Whether motivated by zealotry or by smug narcissism as they hijack a cause, the methods and behaviors are similar.... but they are certainly not unified. There is room for only one font of Truth Absolute, and it's everybody else's job to recognize that and become disciples at the feet of the Superior One. They scramble to be at the top, tearing each other down, just as surely as those they criticize. And in a way, that's a good thing, because it keeps them fragmented and ineffective and utterly irrelevant to the world.

I will also strongly disagree with your statement about the online gaming community. While it may be true that most are reasonable people, the bad ones are incredibly loud, and nothing is being done about it beyond lip service to Codes of Conduct that are not enforced. The online shooter community (i.e. the XBox crowd) and most MMOs (including World of Warcraft) see such behavior as normal, and accept it even while mildly disapproving of it. ("Strongly disapproving" would be "not one more penny from me til you clean up your act, Microsoft/Blizzard/whoever"). Unlike explicit art, you don't have to go looking for it... it is there, immediately and pervasively. I wish it were otherwise, but that's reality, and until the well-behaved portion of the online gaming community AND the game providers decide to clean things up, it will only get worse and worse. The bad ones know they're untouchable, and the borderline bad ones see others getting away with it and migrate into the hateful side of things.

RE: The Voice....

Exalted? No. Accepted as equals (TRUE equals)? Yes. That's what it looks like. I'm going to guess that the author isn't used to seeing male-female interaction like that, and therefore didn't recognize it. Understandable, it you get your ideas about what the norm for such interactions is from the Internet and mainstream media.

That being said, I can understand how someone used to seeing women either treated like unattainable garbage (like the online gaming community does), or seeing women iconified into a distorted noble-fragile parody of what a human being is (like any social justice warrior does), would be confused. Recall also that this is The Voice, and anyone writing for The Voice is going to have their own set of preconceptions and filters about how women and men interact. Anything that is different from that preconception is going to come across as unusual and interesting, and will tend to be magnified.

That magnification isn't doing anybody any favors either, but at least it's in a more positive direction than a lot of other coverage. Idealization is a distortion, and while less harmful than demonization it still doesn't prepare people for reality.

As for "cloppers" being "expunged"... this is what happens when someone has a small, possibly biased, interview pool. It's the result of people wanting to give a particular group image to the media and people thinking that they are appointed spokesmen for the group. And who knows, it may have been on the agenda for the author. Like the rest of the coverage, it's magnified and subject to selection-bias.

How about people who think they are entitled to have something for free that other people spent a lot to create? Where does that fall on your moral compass? Sounds like greed to me.

I hate the RIAA but people like you prove they're absolutely right to promote DRM.

No, the major causes of fan civil war is that there are humans involved.

1. Some fans think they are "better" than others, and are willing to cause harm to prove it.
2. Some fans want to be big shots, and think it's better to be a big fish in a small ocean than a small fish in a big ocean. Fragment the fans, then dominate a section.
3. Some fans just plain get off on causing trouble.
4. Some fans think they are in a position to tell others how they can participate in fandom.

Fanon isn't even on the radar.

My MLP toys are a reminder for the great stuff in the show. But I am neither their scriptwriter nor their voice actor.

As for tying this to losing a parent... I've lost both, some time ago. It's not like that. Not even close.