Proctor's European Adventure 2025: Stroopwafel Edition

[Hotdogs Aplenty]

Always keep a picture of your oshi prominently on display. Maybe on a shirt.

He is just going to scare everyone away by carrying his copy of The Complete Works of Adam Smith under his arm.



Asexual Proctor can awkwardly not hit on asexual Penrose.

 

[The Proctor]

Just two days till I go. Starting to get travel anxiety now.

 

[Hotdogs Aplenty]

Proctor is now off on his journey of self discovery and asexual awaking

 

[thhrang]

Proctor is now off on his journey of self discovery and asexual awaking

I can't believe he's gonna go meet his boyfriend at Twitchcon.

 

[NotDecatto]

@The Proctor I hope your travel documents are in order with your British passport. Border agents are starting to sound like a pain to deal with nowadays.


Archive

 

[PleaseCheckYourReceipts]

@The Proctor I hope your travel documents are in order with your British passport. Border agents are starting to sound like a pain to deal with nowadays.


Archive

Huh, a little harder to visit than I would have thought. The Antwerp drug smuggling scene is probably the primary cause of this.

 

[The Proctor]

I hope your travel documents are in order with your British passport. Border agents are starting to sound like a pain to deal with nowadays.

I had zero issues with passport control. Literally just walked up, handed it over and was waved through instantly. Longest delay was the guy asking if I was there for the weekend (apparently there's some party in Amsterdam that a bunch of foreigners were attending) and me pausing to say that no, I was also going to Germany.

Quick recap of Twitchcon 2025 so far. I had a good time. Worst moment was getting engulfed in a gargantuan cloud of weed smoke while out in a smoking area where some vtubers were meeting. The lines for meet & greets were hilariously, insanely long. Didn't get into any of those. Some people I know who have them scheduled for tomorrow aren't going to bother due to the need to queue 2+ hours in advance for them. It's insane, but not really Twitchcon's fault.

Clancy's announcements of new features were pretty well received. However, his twitch moderator appreciation thingy was the most cringe thing I've ever seen in my life. They had trannyjannies up on stage waving wooden swords with the names of their streamer carved on them. There's also some kind of new super awesome jannycord for twitch jannies, which I'm SURE won't be scraped or raided within days or weeks at most.

In the evening after Twitchcon I went and had pancakes at a nearby restaurant. They were delicious. The food is is so massively superior to Irish or English slop it's comical. The bill wasn't bad at all either.

Sadly, there is a downside;

Rotterdam absolutely reeks of weed. Every evening a cloud of it fills the air, clinging to everyone and everything. Most places are open till 6AM at night. Mornings are totally dead, I presume everyone is sleeping off the previous night's excess. It's also filthy. The outlying areas are rather scenic and attractive, but the inner city is a groaning dustbin. Junk piles up everywhere. Though on the bright side, I see no signs of homeless or insane people wandering at random either.

 

[NeneLOVE]

I had zero issues with passport control. Literally just walked up, handed it over and was waved through instantly. Longest delay was the guy asking if I was there for the weekend (apparently there's some party in Amsterdam that a bunch of foreigners were attending) and me pausing to say that no, I was also going to Germany.

Quick recap of Twitchcon 2025 so far. I had a good time. Worst moment was getting engulfed in a gargantuan cloud of weed smoke while out in a smoking area where some vtubers were meeting. The lines for meet & greets were hilariously, insanely long. Didn't get into any of those. Some people I know who have them scheduled for tomorrow aren't going to bother due to the need to queue 2+ hours in advance for them. It's insane, but not really Twitchcon's fault.

Clancy's announcements of new features were pretty well received. However, his twitch moderator appreciation thingy was the most cringe thing I've ever seen in my life. They had trannyjannies up on stage waving wooden swords with the names of their streamer carved on them. There's also some kind of new super awesome jannycord for twitch jannies, which I'm SURE won't be scraped or raided within days or weeks at most.

In the evening after Twitchcon I went and had pancakes at a nearby restaurant. They were delicious. The food is is so massively superior to Irish or English slop it's comical. The bill wasn't bad at all either.

Sadly, there is a downside;

Rotterdam absolutely reeks of weed. Every evening a cloud of it fills the air, clinging to everyone and everything. Most places are open till 6AM at night. Mornings are totally dead, I presume everyone is sleeping off the previous night's excess. It's also filthy. The outlying areas are rather scenic and attractive, but the inner city is a groaning dustbin. Junk piles up everywhere. Though on the bright side, I see no signs of homeless or insane people wandering at random either.

Netherlands really is like if hipsters had a whole country to themselves imo.

 

[Compressed jpg]

Rotterdam absolutely reeks of weed. Every evening a cloud of it fills the air, clinging to everyone and everything. Most places are open till 6AM at night. Mornings are totally dead, I presume everyone is sleeping off the previous night's excess. It's also filthy. The outlying areas are rather scenic and attractive, but the inner city is a groaning dustbin. Junk piles up everywhere. Though on the bright side, I see no signs of homeless or insane people wandering at random either.

It's a student/party city, like the rest of europe nothing closes till 6 AM (even later if they're an afterclub).

 

[Little Stone]

Rotterdam absolutely reeks of weed. Every evening a cloud of it fills the air, clinging to everyone and everything. Most places are open till 6AM at night. Mornings are totally dead, I presume everyone is sleeping off the previous night's excess. It's also filthy. The outlying areas are rather scenic and attractive, but the inner city is a groaning dustbin. Junk piles up everywhere. Though on the bright side, I see no signs of homeless or insane people wandering at random either.

That is true, but I will say that Rotterdam is the shittiest of the Netherlands' cities – a) it has none of the beautiful historical architecture that the other Dutch cities have, because the city was entirely destroyed by WW2 bombings, and b) while every large Dutch city has many immigrants, Rotterdam has the most (38% of the city's population is non-Western). (Actually, both of those things are also true for Düsseldorf, where Dokomi is being held.)

If you have some free time in between the conventions, there are a number of more historical and attractive cities within a short train ride from Rotterdam, including Gouda, Dordrecht and Delft. For the Düsseldorf area, I don't have any recommendations, though – the whole of the Ruhr region consists of industrial cities filled with cheap post-WW2 buildings, unfortunately.

 

[The Proctor]

One funny thing I'll relate. I caught a lift back to my hostel with some other people who were heading the same place. This gave me a chance to observe blacks practicing their ancient and unique Culture. In this case, it involved the driver brake-checking a black woman driver when she tried to blatantly steal his lane priority, which resulted in her driving 2 millimeters behind the car for the next few kilometers, before racing past us while giving our car the finger. This is the first time I observed this kind of behavior in the wild, and I found it extraordinarily funny. So did everyone else in the car.