Something weird I've noticed: Lou's supposedly gone to every Anthrocon since 2016, yet in all the time I've wasted tracking Lou's old accounts, I've seen very little evidence that he ever tweeted or was tweeted about from there. His tendency to rage out and DFE every few weeks seriously hampers this sort of research, of course, but it's still possible to pick up his track here and there by looking for other tweets that mention whatever user account he was using at the time. But for some reason, he seems to largely go dark every year around Anthrocon. The evidence:
Anthrocon 2016: June 30 - July 3; known accounts: @loug28, @fzygal
Lou established the @fzygal account in
May 2016, but there are no surviving tweets mentioning it until
July 10, a week after the con. He was still using the @loug28 account at the time, but it's only mentioned once during the con in a cryptic tweet containing only a
unicorn emoji. That same account tweeted him three weeks later with the strongest evidence that he attended:
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(That relationship eventually soured, I'm sorry to say: )
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Anthrocon 2017: June 29- July 2; known accounts: none
This period is particularly frustrating, because this is one of the few remaining large gaps in the fossil record. Lou apparently stopped using the @prrflr account around
May 10, but didn't start using @aceleeu until about
July 21. We can see a constant stream of mentions before and after the gap, so it's hard to believe he stopped using Twitter entirely for more than a month, especially during Anthrocon. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts I haven't found any accounts he was using during that time. The search continues!
Anthrocon 2018: July 5 - July 8; known accounts: @acetyg
The @acetyg account is unusual in that Lou didn't DFE when he ragequit. However, that account currently has only four surviving tweets. One of them is a passive-aggressive whine about being shadow banned so he's not going to use Twitter anymore and life sucks:
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The other three tweets, though, were
actually sent during the convention. Have we at last found the Holy Grail!? Not exactly...
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Three identical tweets sent to Boozy Badger within the same minute, in reply to a tweet of Boozy's that itself has been deleted. Lou pestering Boozy about something is hardly a unique occurrence, so I'm afraid we can't treat this as proof of anything. On the other hand, we have this mention from @kibayoukai, who definitely
was at the con:
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Lou actually appears
a few more times in conversations from around the same time that involve Anthrocon or related meetups, so this seems to be pretty solid proof that Lou either was at Anthrocon 2018 or came out to socialize with attendees. So... good for you, Lou, I guess. Although that just makes it even weirder that the only tweets from the con that Lou didn't delete are the three autistic squawks directed at Boozy.
Anthrocon 2019: July 4 - July 7; known accounts: none
Here again we have no known active accounts during the con, but this is not a gap in the fossil record--this is a period during which Lou is known to have been banned from Twitter:
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@MazBeforeLight and a few others continued to
e-beg on Lou's behalf until the beginning of August, when he showed up again as
@alexamckay8. That account itself was actually created on
March 1, 2019, but although the Wayback Machine has archived more than
2500 tweets from that account (and oh yes, I do intend to go through them eventually, oh yes), none of them are from before early August. So that leaves us with another mystery: do we really believe that Lou was able to stay off of Twitter for nearly two months, with Anthrocon in the middle? Clearly, more investigation is warranted.
Taken as a whole, then, this all makes very little sense. Lou repeatedly characterizes Anthrocon the happiest time in his life and the only break he ever gets from his limitless hellscape of a family, so it seems inconceivable that someone as extremely online as him would leave so little of a footprint there. Does he only tweet when he's unhappy? Does he think that leaving evidence of him enjoying himself might make it harder to pitybeg? Whatever the answer, I find that for the first time,
I'm actually disappointed that Anthrocon was canceled, because it means we'll have to wait another year to find out.
