"Got it," he says after grabbing his own everything. "I'll be there."

The Oddball Blogs panel has a small convention room rented out with seats for seventy-five in the audience. Pelape shoves a chair to the wall for Ohan to slide into its space on their way in and takes her place at the table in front; there's a paper sign in front of her on that table with her name and the subtitle "Statistics (Sports, Crime, Miscellaneous)". The other panelists are the aforementioned Utota Malain, yellow, Vintage Furniture; a purple on quirks of the Anitami language; another purple who blogs about true crime and excerpts the fun parts of the more entertaining subset of trial interviews; a third purple who blogs in character as a plantation boss from 3100 and has come in appropriate cosplay, an orange who renders pop songs in traditional poetic forms and vice versa, and an orange who has two blogs, one with funny dramatized stories from the nursing home where he works and one with creative cardboard box based architecture he makes with his daughter.

Ohan slides to his appointed place and waves cheerfully in her direction.

The host announces the forty-third Oddball Blogs Panel, takes a picture of the panelists, gives them each one and a half minutes to recite their spiels. Pelape's is full of very subtextual wryness about her topic selection - "this is my day job, so you know I selected crime and sports as my most high-volume topics out of sheer passion" - and then there's a bit where the panelists can ask each other questions. The purple in cosplay wants to know whether they still play cattlerace in her time. She tells him that they do not but that the arcball borrows an obscure rule about inclement weather from a successor game to cattlerace.

It's kind of hot that she knows this.

Pelape asks a question of the linguist about antagonyms, gets a question from the nursing home orange about whether one of the patients' tales of sporting derring-do is plausible (no), asks the poet if she'll do Basket of Sunshine as a ten-liner. And then the audience can ask things.

Ohan raises his hand.

The moderator calls on him.

"Pelape said she's started this blog out of sheer passion and it is her day job, but what about everyone else? What made you decide to create your blogs, and with those specific themes?"

Pelape snorts to herself, and Ohan gets a series of answers about serendipitous online finds and classes they took, and in the case of the one in character the assertion that it is perfectly normal to keep a diary and why would that require any particular explanation.

Whyever would Pelape snort to herself, Ohan has no idea, truly.

He thanks them for the answers and doesn't really have any other questions.

Then he will be treated to their opinions on monetization and website backend and comment moderation and all sorts of fun trivia about their blogs.

What's the distribution on those, are they mostly sensible (like Pelape) or not?

Pelape, of the group, does the most of her own technical end, though she's had to hire out some of it. Many of the bloggers can't monetize much, though the plantation one sells merch and the one with two blogs sells patterns for cardboard box architecture and the yellow sells consultation on where and how to get inexpensive vintage furniture acquired or restored. The plantation boss has a lot of problems with "missives" from "rascals" who try to pretend to knowledge there's no way for anyone to have and "tosses these foolish messages into the fire". The true crime blogger doesn't allow any comments on main posts and has separate open threads to contain everyone's opinions out of the way of the actual blog content. Pop poem orange has a thriving core of readers who like trying to find images that match a song/poem rendering, like this picture of a song's singer moonlighting as an actress in period costume.

Huh, that's actually pretty interesting. Ohan is kind of over the whole in-character thing going on with the one person there but he's intrigued by true crime blogger.

The panel is followed by light refreshments. Bloggers get to go first; Pelape maneuvers over to Ohan with an extra lemonade for him, offers one of her biscuits.

He accepts. "That was pretty cool. How often do these happen?"

"Every month, but it's not the same people every time, I've never been a panelist before."

"Do they stream it?"

"Yeah, and you can watch the archives too, but they remind you to support the organizer or contribute to the crowdsourced transcription every five minutes."

"Even if you have already done it before?"

"Especially! Then it's obvious you have money!"

"Isn't that bad incentives?"

"In theory but they have A/B tested it. I mean, not these folks in particular, but there are studies."

"Huh. Smart."