Okay, I've put this one off for a long time. Partly because I've been busy and partly because "I don't remember anything due to sleep deprivation" doesn't really make for a very interesting con report. Anyways, as you may or may not be aware, this was my first time working at a con as an official staff member. I didn't think I had any special knack for this, but a lot of these folks seemed to think I did, so I'll take their word for it. The long drive kept me from showing up on scene any too early Thursday, but it was still kinda quiet when I got there so I feel like I didn't miss too much. When I got there it seemed like the major project was in operations. All of the convention supplies had been unloaded there into a certain arrangement. I believe that the industry term is "a bigass pile". Digging through it was a bewildering process, but I could at least count and identify things. By the time I stumbled out of ops there was at least a radio pile, a registration pile, a programming pile, and the like. It was a lot of digging, but it really needed to be done. After that, people started asking for stuff, so the piles started shrinking. That was encouraging. Still pretty quiet that night though. I managed to get settled in and get some rest without a lot of trouble.

Since I'd had the rare chance to sleep actual normal human hours, I was up pretty early the next morning. I made it to ops around 8:00, confusing Kiba, who knew that I had very little reason for being there. Having been somewhat in this position before last year, I knew it wouldn't be long before my purpose there became clear. Not even ten minutes later, Protocollie kicks in the door saying "I need all the hands we have down in main events right now or we are fucked!" So apparently I was in ops to... fix whatever that was. He was really looking for volunteers, but it was far too early for any of them to be around. In any case, the AV crew had some difficulty with getting access to the main events room, and also with how the electric power infrastructure had been set up in there. Both of these things had cost precious time, so a lot of things had to be assembled very quickly in order for main events to start up on time. Proto was struggling with the curtains when I got there. They were too thin and too long to serve the purpose we needed. I came up with a solution that mostly involved folding them in half lengthwise and throwing a bunch of binder clips we stole from the artshow at them until they resembled a stage. It was a clever idea, sure, but Proto treated me like I was Jesus the whole rest of the time I was working with him. Well it was more like John The Baptist by the end but he had a lot on his mind. I was there all morning and the prep ran straight into opening ceremonies, which I also ended up being in because of reasons. It turned out that Sparf and I both had Aperture Science labcoats, so we did this whole Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense thing to introduce the theme. That was pretty cool. I like to think that it didn't look like something we came up with in the 20 minutes before we went up on stage.

After that it was on to my first writing panel. Or rather I should say, the first one I've ever hosted. Beginning Writing seemed like a good fit for me since that was where I was at, pretty much. I got the expected scoffs when I mentioned that I wasn't published, especially being up there next to The Gneech and Friday Donnelly, both authors of some note. (Being listed as just "Friday" in the conbook caused no small amount of scheduling confusion.) That was a rocky start for me, but I think they respected my sincerity and the audience warmed up to me through the course of the discussion. That early tension soon vanished and we all had a great time. Some of them even wanted to write down my FA and watch me, which was very encouraging. The second panel was just a little bit after that one. It was, sensibly enough, Intermediate Writing. In which we swapped out Friday for Phil Geusz, who has been doing furry writing since before it was even called that, so he was fun to work with. Very insightful as well. He knows a great deal about the philosophical mindset that gets an author the best results. You can tell he's had a lot of time to think about this stuff.

I helped Sparf out with the talent show auditions, evaluating all the various acts and judging them with an iron fist. Fortunately my iron fist missed completely and they all made the cut. After that it was a few rounds of that classic game of "Take the thing from where it is to where it needs to be", which is quite reliably entertaining. It was useful for getting down the layout of the new digs down at the Tyson's Corner Sheraton. The venue is quite spacious, but the layout gets kind of confusing with hallways looping back on each other, "express" staircases that skip floors, and a few floorplan choices that I don't think are allowed for by Euclidean geometry. At least it made my list of fetch quests more interesting. I also got to slowly cultivate lots of cheatcodes for working with the labyrinth. Knowing about the service corridors and hidden elevators kinda makes you feel like a secret agent. And if Furthe’More was the spy flick’s setting, then I was heavily involved in the business of trafficking in MacGuffins and key plot devices.

If it sounds a bit like I was just wandering around kind of doing whatever like I had no real job, that's because that's exactly what happened. It has been a tumultuous time since my conscription into this organization, so do allow me a moment to try and put it all into words. Since last year, the con has moved south somewhat, and I got out of the Navy and moved quite far north. This left me with about a six hour drive to the con. Had I not answered the call to arms, I might not have even attended this year. One thing that I made clear when I signed on was that I was happy to work at the con itself, but I certainly wasn't going to drive 12 hours just to attend a planning meeting. Since "wander around and do whatever" was also my MO when I was volunteering last year, I worked with security, registration, programming, operations, main events, among others. Just about everyone, actually. Everywhere I helped out they seemed impressed with my work. So at these planning meetings that I wasn't around for, when the question came up as to where I was going to work, four different departments claimed me.

It would seem that a proper resolution was never reached on that and I just kind of ended up as "Sir not appearing in this film" at the end of the credits. That works fine for me, as it let me continue to do my wherever-you-need-more-hands freelancing shtick, which I actually think is a lot of fun. I get to work with lots of different people and it's very satisfying to just be wherever I'm needed most. I'm doing approximately ALL the things, so it never gets boring. I'm also not really accountable to anyone, so I'm free to decide to end the evening by coasting down with something low pressure like helping out in the game room. "Oh what's that? You need someone to help teach people Pandemic? By playing Pandemic for an hour and a half? Yeah, I think I can take that bullet." I hear that we've created a "staff pool" to have available in order to just throw people at whatever needs people the most at the time, and I think that's where I'll end up next year. It's essentially what I was doing already, just with some oversight and communications to make better use of my time. In any case, that was Friday. At least as much of it as I can remember.

Saturday started with a fire alarm, or maybe two. I'm not sure. There were four in total over the course of the con and I won't speak to the details too much. They all kind of run together for me at this point. Only one of them was definitively our fault though, so it's all good. Honestly I think that's a furry convention rite of passage. You're not a real con until you have a couple fire alarms. Those actually went pretty well. I expected to be on a wild goose chase the whole morning, despite not having seen anyone with a goose character the whole con. It's actually pretty easy to move furries around if you've got the knack for it. You've just gotta shout "Wanna go for a walk? You wanna go outside?" and get them all psyched-up first. Then it's pretty easy to get them out the door en masse. Regardless, the herding experience was useful, as the fursuit parade was next up. Being a signpost to keep the parade from wandering into a bathroom or whatever isn't the most satisfying job, but it's a prime spot to see the amazing Technicolor march go by. We had a really good turnout there and it was a lot of fun as always.

After that I was running errands for programming and soon became trapped there. Something we started doing this year was establishing a room for "Programming Operations". It's useful and a pretty cool idea to have a centralized location for coordinating things and handling supplies and stuff. I do hope we continue doing that. The problem with it was that all our programming staff bailed out, so Programming Ops ended up pretty much being a little box for Sparf to slowly go insane in. As such it didn't surprise me that I ended up minding the shop for quite some time while he tended other things. Fortunately my time there was mostly uneventful. That's about the best you can hope for, because when you're in charge people only come to you with problems, and very seldom to tell you what an awesome job you're doing. It helped a lot having one of my old friends stop by. ArcRa is a member of that very small but wonderful overlap between people I know from the navy and furries. He brought along Eyen and we caught up on things and chatted a lot. I had considered visiting Norfolk since I was somewhat close, but according to his report there's practically no one that I knew all that well left in the Tidewater area. So that's kind of a bummer. In any case, I held out in Programming Ops for a couple hours without anything catching on fire, so I'll call that an accomplishment.

From there I dropped in at one of the rich/important people dinners in the evening to get something to eat. I sat down with Raltz whom I recognized from FurryCon. He apparently also recognized me, because he stopped in the middle of the conversation he was having to shout "This guy! Yeah, this asshole right here!" Apparently my exploits at the Dominion tournament were not the sort of thing that was easily forgotten. It was kind of funny to learn that around five or six other people had done two cons in two weekends just as I had. Many of them staffed one of the cons, but only one. It's popularly agreed upon that staffing two cons in a row is a great way to run yourself straight into the ground. Hanging out with him and his crew led back into the game room, where I got to try out the Fluxx board game. Certainly an interesting one there, though still rather experimental. I also got to meet CruxVV, a member of that even smaller and more awesome subset, people who are fans of my work online. I'm always ecstatic to meet someone who likes my work, so that really made my night.

That put me in a good mood for the legendary Late Night Adult Writing Panels. I'd been anticipating those with no small amount of fervor, as they're always a hell of a lot of fun. This one was with Ianus and Friday. The latter of which brought (and shared) some Bold Rock hard cider, for which he is now my greatest friend in all the universe forever. Seriously, I don’t think I adequately conveyed how much of a hero he is for that, and I devoted about five minutes trying to bring that point across. From that wondrous start, the discussion just kept getting better and better from there. I loved the energy that people brought to this one. There were also quite a few women there, which adds a lot to the content and lends us a fair deal of credibility when we have that check available to us.

It's hard to stick to writing sometimes because people can get pretty passionate and opinionated when we talk about sex in very detailed ways. We actually managed to work in a lot of tolerance and sex-positive stuff as we went along, so that felt good. Having two newcomers to the panel at the head led to some meandering that might not have been the most productive thing in the world, but overall it was quite a rewarding experience. We went all the way from 10PM to 2AM when they asked us to leave. I always call that the sign of a successful panel. Nobody wants it to end! I probably should've wanted it to end a little more though. That late night really cost me and I started to feel the hit from all this... whatever it was I was doing. I also had a little trouble sleeping because my room had the big 'Sheraton' letters mounted in front of the window, filling the place with an eerie red glow. Demonic auras aside, I still managed to crash pretty hard right then.

I was up pretty late Sunday morning, but it was quite mercifully quiet then. I gathered myself as best I was able and shuffled through the day. I got to hang out some with Bluepaw and Flyinfox to chat about old times. Or new times, given that I'd never met Flyinfox before. There were some housekeeping things to take care of here and there, but things slowed down pretty quickly. A big part of that was the charity auction and closing ceremonies both taking about 46 hours. During the third act of the auction I drove Raltz' crew to Wendy's for a bite just because I was bored by then. The closing ceremonies were fun though. Kit Drago made the gaff heard round the world in the course of his speech he accidentally declared himself chairman of Anthrocon. The crowd really loved that one. I even ran off to go get my labcoat and anoint him with it on stage. It was a touching moment, really. Be sure to follow #KageKon on the Twitter.

Things actually remained pretty slow after closing ceremonies went down. I'd expected a big teardown push, and there kinda was one for things that really needed to happen right then, but for the most part everyone came to the consensus that it was nearly 10:00 and we could deal with this shit tomorrow. As it was, I caught up with people and talked some more as they tried (and often failed repeatedly) to leave. The better half of Crux, BGS, was out there on the dancefloor trying to throw down as hard as he could without killing himself, and looked to be succeeding. With the dancing part, not the dancing-assisted suicide part. That would suck. I also had to break from the conversation at one point and race across the lobby to tackle two small dogs which, anywhere else, would've been a rather unusual occurrence. As it was I slid pretty nonchalantly into and out of that task. I actually didn't expect to nab them as quickly as I did. I kinda just thought it would be fun to chase them. Got them both in just 20 yards or so though. Maybe I missed my true calling. Anyways, I talked, I drank, I danced, I got to witness Matthew Ebel's batshit insane Victorian horse costume. It was good times. Hell it had to be the time of my life. That was all that would keep me out of bed at that point.

So Monday was when that slow night came back to bite us. Our volunteers tapered off and left us with a lot fewer hands to handle the monumental stuff-moving challenge that lay ahead. It was pretty much a solid day of pushing around heavy things. Not great. I'm glad I studied hard and got into a field where neither customer service nor the pushing of heavy things feature prominently. Both of those are very draining. That effort was broken up by a meal that got comp'd by the hotel, one of those rare, positive surprises. I should hang out with Kiba more often. She clearly holds the leash in dealings with the venue, and apparently being leash-adjacent has perks. And after a whole bunch more work I was pretty hungry again, fortunately it was about that time that Drago took us all out to a place that he described only as "a meat faucet". It was called Texas de Brazil and for those of you not familiar with Brazilian barbeque let me give you a rundown. The waiters walk around with the rotisserie skewers that the meat was cooked on, ever ready to shave off meat onto someone's plate. You have a little sign that says "no meat" or "yes meat", and you just go to town on it. That's a great way to end a day. It was a wonderful place. It really took the sting out of the fact that we spent all of Monday working at it before we finally had everything loaded onto the truck. I really must thank Chassie for her help in breaking up that monotony. She was one of the fugitives that I corralled earlier, a really sweet little Corgi that Irime belongs to. We got along just famously and both wore each other thin playing while we waited for Kit to get things in order.

In the course of my labors though, I hadn't really managed to plan much beyond finishing the job. I had a vague idea in my head of just stumbling in a general homeward direction and stopping at a Super 8 or whatever if I couldn't make it. At a reasonable time that might've been workable, but given that we'd worked pretty well into the night that wasn't looking like such a great idea anymore. Kit said that he'd much rather I spend the night with him and Irime, and I would also much rather I do that. So there was very little debate on it. I was struck by how well they take care of all us worker bees in the course of all this. I didn't pay for food once the whole time I was there, and everyone really banded together to make sure it all came out alright in the end. When Matt's flight was cancelled, Serval was up late into the night making sure that he had a place to sleep too. That kind of stuff was going on all over the place. It was a really great team and I had a fantastic time working with them. Here's hoping that I'll be a bigger part of this next year when we all actually have some idea of exactly what it is I'm doing there. That'll be nice.

By Tuesday morning it was just myself, Kit and Irime still in the neigborhood, so I managed to be the last man standing without at any point ever really intending to. Yay? Anyway, as I was driving to breakfast (which Kit also paid for because ya just can't stop these people) Honey I'm Good by Andy Grammer came on the radio. I think I'm adding that one to my playlist because it's a really great song and it very well encapsulated how I felt right then. Not so much the turning down solicitations from women part in the actual lyrics, really. I didn't have THAT good of a weekend. But just the general feel of it synched up so perfectly with the state the con left me in. This was a hell of a thing, and I was proud to be part of it. So, with a few fond farewells I was on my way home. Well, after picking up two six packs of Bold Rock first. Must remember my priorities after all.