This was written for a non-furry audience on my Livejournal at http://davidn.livejournal.com/475930.html , but it would seem wrong not to post it here as well!

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Well, I really am one of them now. This weekend, the people I know at work thought that I was on holiday with Whitney, and my parents thought I was at some sort of independent game conference. I'm going to have to prepare two separate cover stories before I talk to any of them again, because where I actually spent my weekend was at a convention for people who dress up as woodland creatures and go out for tea and biscuits.

Furfright is a (slightly) Halloween-themed furry convention, held in a hotel in Connecticut. I had said for a while that I should go to at least one of these things in my life, and as it's a smallish convention (1,500 people and/or bipedal animal-things) that's only a hundred-mile drive for me, it sounded like a good start. Far from the red strobe-lit writhing nightmarescape of the underworld that you might have seen on television, it's more like a convention for general geekery with slightly more ears and tails being worn than you would normally expect and only a couple of events specifically enabled by the wearing of huge animal suits. There was a cake-tasting event, for example, with a sheet of instructions that began in slightly worrying fashion:

1. Enter Cake-Con
2. Allow musical notes to insert themselves into your ears
3. Insert cake into all other holes

Though I met a lot of people who I'd vaguely known the names of over the Internet for a long time, some of the best moments of the weekend weren't actually furry-related. Once we had our extended group together, our first dinner as real-life almost normal people was at a hibachi restaurant, which is a term for teppanyaki cooking here for some reason, and that I think I can only describe as Japanese cookery mixed with an episode of Banzai. Food is prepared on a griddle at your table with the ninjutsu-trained chef doing all sorts of physically impossible things with the utensils and eggs - at this one, they were also fond of launching bits of vegetable into the air and seeing who could catch them in their mouth. The chef would then shout "SAKE!!!", pick up a squeeze bottle and fire it five feet across the room at whoever had caught it, keeping time by whacking his spatula against the table until his target's mouth capacity overflowed and it fountained out across them and everyone else in the vicinity.

The other thing that I most loved doing at the convention was an improvisation games event, styled after such things as Whose Line Is It Anyway and I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue (as in Britain we are unable to make any programmes with titles less than five words long). At that point I was going around with  susi and  scani, and I don't think I would have had the confidence to get up and take part without them. I hadn't done anything in front of people like that since being in the church youth group many, many years ago, and it made me remember how much I enjoyed it. At first I was afraid of people absolutely dying up there (especially if it were me), but even though a couple of people were identifiably amazing at it, everyone involved managed to work with the surreal flow of the games, and drew real laughs from the audience - I'd forgotten how wonderful that felt. Unlike here, where as much as I appreciate you all, it's like writing on a brick wall somewhere and hoping that someone will eventually come along and read it.

There were two other things about the event that I didn't notice at the time but can be counted as barely short of miraculous:

1. Only one Portal reference was made throughout the entire one and a half hours
2. It was actually good

And that made me think about something else I discovered - as great as the people I know are, the convention actually made me slowly realize I hate the Internet and wonder why I spend quite so much of my time on it, full as it is of people who actually use words like "omnoms" in daily conversation. As I might have touched on before, for a subculture which I see as so creative, a lot of what it holds up as good is based so much on imitation rather than creativity. I was looking through a folder of artwork at a dealer's table, when a rather sweaty individual poked his head over my shoulder, pointed down at one rather shocking picture and shouted "Starfox - do a barrel roll!" as if it were the funniest thing ever. It is, however, fortunate that people can't yet talk entirely in cat pictures in real life.

Other firsts for the weekend were that I found myself having to go to a Wal-Mart, which is like a slightly more obnoxious Asda but I don't feel irreversibly tainted by having gone there, and we were in a Wendy's for one dinner. (People gave me a large explanation of what it was like before we set off, though I had to interrupt saying that despite my outward appearances, I had actually been in a McDonald's at least once in my life and knew the concept of fast food.) And it was edible enough - on our way back to the car we went outside and nearly fell over the manager, who was sitting crumpled on the pavement having a cigarette. Surely the mark of a classy place.

Even though I said above that most of the events aren't actually centred around them, there's something that I haven't even really mentioned so far - the unusual (non-zero) number of people walking around the place dressed up as six-foot anthropomorphous or mythological creatures of their own design. And that made it really special. I know you're sitting there, with your left elbow on the desk and your hand planted somewhere on your forehead by now, thinking "What could possibly be appealing about these absurd creatures? I'm sure Dante had visions much like this in his Inferno." I used to think the same way, that they had this uncanny look and that they were frightening parodies of things that were much more attractive in make-believe. Then I got to know a few people who built them, and I could see the amount of effort and love that went into them, but I thought that would be the limit of their appeal for me.

But when you're in amongst them and interacting with them, it's different - the back of your brain keeps trying to tell you that there are just humans in there doing slightly stupid things in strategically cut carpets, but with the reactions they get whenever they come into a room, you really do want to believe for a moment that these six foot anthropomorphs just exist alongside normal humans. With a good performer inside, the most mundane of things become wonderful - watching them drink (much-needed) water through long straws that reach through their artificial muzzles, standing around talking to each other, or just going around shaking people's hands and ruffling their hair. I wandered outside at one point and bumped into a purple dog playing the saxophone, and - unlike the incident above - it really did seem like the funniest thing ever.

Susi has two character suits - a brown gryphon called Angel in particular got a lot of attention in the convention space, perhaps for being one of the few bird-inspired creatures there, and I felt very honoured to be his sort of wardrobe assistant (wrangler?) for when he needed extra hands (because when in those things, you can't really see). Normally, in any genre of dance without specific instructions provided, the dance floor is made up of people vaguely moving their limbs about rhythmically and hoping they don't look stupid. While wearing a gryphon-suit... somehow the same thing becomes adorable, as you can see in this video from the party during the last night. (For the impatient, the highlight is at 3:00.)



And, what can I say... it's really nice when they hug you.