Okay, so I went to furlandia's first con this past weekend and well I wasn't at all impressed. To start things off, the hotel was just horrible. The rooms were small even when we were staying in a "deluxe" room, there was hardly any room in it at all. Inside this room there was a sliding glass door that lead to an unstable balcony and had a broken latch so it couldn't lock but there was a jimmy rigged lock on the bottom of the door. Next to this sliding glass door, behind a curtain was a brick wall, it was painted and chipping. The A/C unit in our room wasn't working right when we first got there. I had to go and talk to the front desk saturday morning to have them send someone up to switch the A/C from it's winter setting to summer so it would blow cold air instead of warm. Down the hall from where our room was, another room full of members from our group, their room was worse from what they told us, No sliding door to a balcony just a small window for them to open to let air in, their A/C unit caught fire, so they were given a new room.

On to the con itself. I don't consider myself an expert con-goer, but I've been to a fair share and I believe I know what to expect. First off, we got to the hotel around 6:45 pm friday so we were expecting registration to be up and running by now but we checked in and there were furs sitting around in the main lobby waiting for registration to open up. We stood in line for what felt like 2 hours, I didn't keep track but it was close to that. Sadly the registration line was the most exciting thing out of the con. There was a dance held that night in a room where tables were still set up from a coaches meeting earlier in the day which was part of the reason why registration was late but not the whole reason. After we went through the registration line, we had gone out to eat then came back around 10 to check out the dance which was already over, that was a sign things weren't going well. So we went to our room and drank more than we should have, I felt really bad for one of our group members, he drank way to much but we were all kind of responsible for that. On saturday, we got up for our free breakfast from the hotel, wasn't extravagant but what can you expect for free? I went to suit up and go to the opening ceremonies. We had gone into the main hall room for the ceremonies and was told as we sat down, if we wanted to be filmed to sit on the left side of the room, and if we didn't to sit on the right. Thinking this was going to be a video for the con, all of our group had gone to the left side thinking it'd be fun but only after the ceremonies started were we told it was for MTV so I'm just thinking "fuck" to myself right now. So I'm really hopping that a positive spin is put on to the convention and the fandom but with MTV being behind it, what can you expect but for them to cut and edit scenes to make us look like horrible deviants, not to mention they also filmed a furry that has been black listed from all cons aside from this one since this was a new con maybe they didn't know. I didn't know who the person was until later in the day, when I was playing cards in the game room. That was fun though, playing cards against humanity, think apples to apples but more inappropriate lol. Before the card game was the parade and it really sucked. We I was walking around in suit when the con chair spotted me and said, "are you going to be in the parade?" I nodded and followed him to the main room and stood around for another 15-20 minutes until the parade started. There was no, "This is the rout we're taking" or anything, it was "line up at the door and follow me" even though he didn't lead us and half the parade went one way while the other half went another way, but we met back up in the lobby, so not a total loss I guess. We then were paraded another two blocks away from the con hotel in the heat to go stand in front of a fountain for the group photo. To get to this fountain though was a mass of steps for any fursuiter to twist their ankle on, and there was cracks between concrete slabs where the water was running between them. Not safe at all. I'd gone to play laser tag for a little bit after the card game, but it was really boring since there wasn't any real set up for it. After that, most of us sat in the room and watched tv for the rest of the night until two of us got really bored and went to a panel which really sucked. So back to the room we went, I put my tail on and left for the "rave" with one other member from our group and joined with the members from down the hall. was maybe 20 people there in total, we stayed for about 20 minutes then decided to come back to the room and have more booze. We had drinks but not enough to get plastered. We had just sat and talked with our friends for a while then went to sleep. Sunday morning came, again up for breakfast was really just lack luster once more. We wandered around for a little bit then packed and checked out. We didn't do a whole lot sunday but what stood out to me was the con chair asking people what their membership levels were, saw my badge and said "Oh, you're just a lame attendee." So this con chairperson didn't care about anyone other than those who could afford the super-sponsor or higher membership. I wont be going back to this con.