I’ve been to South by Southwest four times now, and each time has had a very different flavor to it. The first time was inspiring and overwhelming (in a good way); the second was overwhelming in a not-so-good way; the third was deliberately much more intimate; and the most recent was a strange mixture of large-scale and small-scale, starting off overwhelming and ending up pretty much like your typical good old SxSW, namely, quite a lot of fun.

SxSW seems to take a predictable trajectory for me: I spend the first few days wondering why I bothered to come, and then suddenly it’s all over and I don’t want to leave. That feeling was particularly pronounced this year, largely, I suspect, because of how many people were there for the interactive part alone: 15,000 by most accounts, about 40% more than last year.

For the first two days of the conference, Jeremy and I wandered around feeling somewhat lost, surrounded by a sea of unfamiliar faces, wondering where everyone was (“everyone” being “everyone we know”). The conference felt bland and anonymous, and we had several melancholy discussions about whether it had really gotten too big and finally jumped the shark for real.

On the third day, whenever I bumped into someone I knew in the hallway, our conversation would turn to how we weren’t bumping into anyone we knew this year. After this happened multiple times, the irony of the situation dawned on me and I realized that “our peeps” were out there, it would just take a bit more effort to find them.

The social side of this year’s SxSW was less about serendipity and more about planning—or at least announcing on Twitter that you were in a certain place at a certain time. When the entirety of the interactive conference took place in one corner of one wing of the convention center, as it did several years ago, you could stand in the hallway and be fairly certain that everyone you knew would pass you by at some point. But with the conference proper distributed throughout the entire convention center and three nearby hotels, and with parties all over the city, the chances of casually running into friends were much slimmer than they ever were in the past.

Of course, SxSW is about meeting new people as well, and I had some really great conversations with new acquaintances. Like last year (and the year before), I found I had the best times in smaller, quieter groups, away from the heaving throngs of the official parties. Lazy breakfasts, convivial outdoor drinks, the occasional late-night empanada—these will be my favorite memories of this year’s SxSW.

Oh, yeah, and I went to some presentations and panels too. To be honest, I was much more casual about getting to talks this year than I was in past years, but the select few panels I went to were very enjoyable. The “Why Keep Blogging?” panel was an exploration of long-term blogging and why (and how) people keep blogging for years. Weirdly, I felt like the old lady of the so-called blogosphere in this talk. Early on, the panelists asked for a show of hands as to how many people had had a blog for as long as five years. They didn’t go any further than that, though, and I’m genuinely curious as to how many people (besides me) would still have had their hands up if they had asked who had had a blog for 10 years or more (even the panelists themselves seem to have only been blogging for about six years). The upshot of the panel was blog because you enjoy it, not because you feel obligated to do it or you’re expecting to get more out of it than personal pleasure. Panelist Scott Rosenberg (co-founder of Salon.com) had some wise words to say about this, including the idea that blogs are “writing projects” with a natural ebb and flow, so it’s okay to let them lie fallow for a time if need be (thank goodness for that).

There weren’t as many foodie talks this year as last year, though I did go to “Cooking for Geeks”, which was fun both for the tips it offered on how to hack your oven so it can reach 900 degrees Fahrenheit (something I won’t be doing anytime soon) and for the little test we got participate in to find out whether we were super-tasters or not (I’m not, but I’m also not a non-taster, which surprised me).

I also went to a “core conversation” on food sustainability issues, which was interesting if frustratingly inconclusive (lots of people asking open-ended questions or volunteering opinions, but no in-depth discussion of any particular issue). Sadly, I missed the only other foodie presentation (a reading by the blogger behind Not Eating Out in New York and now author of a book on the same subject), and the “street food festival” organized by Foodspotting was shut down due to permit issues, but I managed to squeeze in some good foodie experiences anyway, including a tasty steak dinner at Finn & Porter with Jeremy and the above-mentioned breakfasts and empanadas.

With the exception of a film talk on the “Art of Main Title Design” presented by two women who designed the opening titles to loads of impressive films (from Ratatouille to The Truman Show) and a panel on “Post-Digital Media Design” which was largely about the beauty of paper, the rest of my SxSW revolved around science and space. The “Moon 2.0” panel about lunar exploration (which included Veronica McGregor, the voice of Mars Phoenix on Twitter!) and the “Open Science” panel about collaborative science projects were both very exciting and inspiring—so inspiring to Jeremy, in fact, that he’s now trying to organize a Science Hack Day. And the funniest moment I experienced at SxSW this year was a science-related conversation over breakfast burritos with Tantek one morning which once again hammered home not just why I like going to SxSW, but why I like hanging out with geeks in general: because geeks make me laugh, because I am a geek at heart.

So that was this year’s South by Southwest. Will I be back next year? I reckon so. I suspect I’ll hem and haw a bit at first, then I’ll book a ticket, then I’ll go and initially wish I hadn’t, then I’ll find myself eagerly scribbling notes in my Moleskine and having lunch in the sunshine surrounded by old and new friends and wondering how I ever could have doubted that SxSW is still one of the highlights of the year.