So yeah if you hadn't guessed FurAffinity once again can't handle the true might and breadth of my prose all in one go. Second part will be forthcoming.

Alright, so if you hadn’t heard of the circumstances during the preparation for this con, I’ll summarize them quickly for you. I mentioned a bit of this in a previous journal, so if you haven’t read that I’ll wait. It’s really easy to spare a moment for you because the reading process doesn’t happen in realtime. Subjective time solves a lot of problems, you know? Okay, so I met someone at an Upstate New York Furries meet a few weeks ago who was kind of down on his luck. I’m going to call him Marius, after the penniless loser in Diablo II who managed to fuck up everything for literally the entire human race without ever so much as understanding what was happening or making a real conscious decision. Marius had been working hard on his plans to attend Anthrocon, which would be his first furry convention, and his ride hadn't panned out. He heard where I was from and asked if I could drive him because his place was "on the way". That assertion demonstrated a rather grievous misunderstanding of either maps or the meaning of those words. Stopping by to pick him up would add about six hours to my drive time, so I wasn't terribly enthused about the prospect.

I told him he could stay in my room, but he'd have to find his own way there. He managed to NOT find his own way there, shockingly, so eventually I thought I'd help him out with that too. I can hardly say I'm pressed for time, and if the gas is getting covered I don't have a whole lot else to complain about. That's far too long of a drive to do after a day at the con though, so I had to extend my stay by booking a room for Sunday night, and he agreed to split the cost of that as well. That was still going to be a pain in the ass, but I figured I'd go for it. Marius seemed really excited about this and I'd hate for him to miss it because of dumb logistical things. And maybe it's a little bit because I remember my first convention, which was also Anthrocon. Wherein I also had no idea what I was doing, and I also some things went wrong out of nowhere, whereupon some people I'd never met were happy to help me. So yeah, I decided that I was going to get him to the Greek come hell or highwater. The ensuing weeks merely served to confirm to me a dozen times over what a terrible decision this was.

Marius was fretting about money a lot, saying he only had $180 to pay for rooms and transport, which would be a close shave, certainly, even with how many ways we were splitting the cost of the room. I was willing to be flexible and committed to making this work, so I was fine with just taking whatever he had left to spare at the end and just rolling with it. I later came to find out that this was ALL he had to spare to pay for EVERYTHING. And he was the one giving me funny looks when I screamed at him 46 times about how cons cost a LOT OF MONEY and he should be prepared for this from the outset because I was continually gaining the impression that he failed to understand just how expensive cons are. When I asked what he was going to do for food he just kind of went "Oh... Oh, yeah." as though the fact that he needs food to live hadn't occurred to him until right then. Whatever, it's fine. This is his first rodeo so he hasn't had a chance to learn and he's obviously not going to get it until after he's seen it first-hand. I was still on board with the "whatever's left" approach to payment, and I was even willing to take on the risk that the amount remaining might be $0. This bastard is lucky I saved quite responsibly before leaving the navy.

After waffling back and forth several times about whether or not he'd join me in the group room that I was going to be in for the bulk of the con, which was a pain in the ass because I was a middle-man relaying that to Astrozerk through Croc who were the ones actually holding the reservations, Marius decided that he wasn't going to stay with me. Fine, whatever. There were already like seven people in that room so no one was going to be hurting there. His new arrangement though, had him staying there Sunday night also, so he backed out of that night with me because the room I booked at the Wyndham Grand was too expensive for him. So in effect, I put my wallet on the line again to book a room at the Wyndham solely in order to accommodate him and after he insisted on a double because he didn't want to share a bed he chooses right then to flake on me. Fucking brilliant.

When I tried to be at all assertive in saying that he'd better stay in this room because it's his fault that I'm in this position I got back a long sob story about how broke he is and how he'd really rather spend the time with his boyfriend in the other room. I found the significant other angle to be compelling, so I let it drop. I found out later that he's never met his current boyfriend in person, and I don't know if that makes me more or less pissed off. I mean, yay for them being all romantic and shit meeting for the first time, but fuck man, you're hanging me out to dry for someone you've never even seen in person? Calling someone you've never met "my boyfriend" is the kind of red flag that would've had me bail on this thing had I not already gotten so deep into it, and it was not the only such flag by any means. Anyways, the Wyndham charges you one night's rate and fees if you cancel, meaning that since I only booked one night I had the lovely options of paying $150 to stay in the room or I could just pay $150 to go fuck myself. As such, I ended up staying in the room. The journal discussing this got a handful of responses letting me know how entertaining and well composed it was. This was encouraging, but basically added up to “Oh wow! It’s hilarious how much that sucks for you. Looks like you’re fucked!” Though it is nice to know that I can still be entertaining when all I’m doing is complaining about my problems. Yinzer actually offered some money to help out, which I was astonished and quite flattered by. It was my mistake though, so I should most definitely be the one to pay for it. I’m sure there are far more deserving folks out there. I hope he found one.

Subsequent interactions with Marius were less than encouraging. Even when he's not dropping some new expensive or inconvenient bombshell on me that his capricious little mind has come up with it's nothing but complaints and sob stories that I have no need to hear. Oh, I've always wanted to go to a con but I could never make it work. Oh, I came out to my family and now half of them hate me. Oh, it's so hard never getting to see my boyfriend. Oh, my stepdad is being such a jerk about all this. Oh, my dog died last week and that made me really sad. Goddamn. I'd feel sorry for this kid if I ever got anything from him other than whiny bullshit. What is it about the fandom that attracts broken people and people with no clue how to live their own damn lives? I encounter SO many of them and they're all just so damn needy. I did as I said and supported this trainwreck of a man through the con because it was too late to go back on that promise by the time I figured out what a catastrofuck he was. I knew enough to be careful to distance myself though, especially now that this whole Nantucket Sleighride is over. Though I'm open to the possibility of this guy not being an outright cancer of a human being, I definitely want him to stop being my problem ASAP. And for that I need to push back a little. A lot of these types of people get real clingy when they can smell responsibility on you. Then you'll never get rid of 'em.

Wednesday:
Now then, the actual meeting. His home life was about what I expected from someone with this level of irresponsibility and disconnect from the world. Marius lives in a trailer park and made a point of complaining about how he’s gotten too old to be issued a share of his stepdad’s food stamps. I talked to his stepfather a fair bit. Got to hear about the great, lumbering disaster of a truck out in the driveway, the reason that Marius was unable to get there on his own. I also got to talk for over an hour about his previous three trucks, which he had photos of, and previous two wives, whom there were NOT photos of. Also got to talk about Kenny, who died last year and left all this junk that was lying around the trailer to them. Why is it that broke-ass rednecks always know someone named Kenny?

One of the only things that I was able to fight for from my apparently very limited negotiating position of being the only person who could cart his fat ass to Anthrocon was the ability to spend Wednesday night at his place. That way I’d have a two hour drive followed by a six hour one. (As opposed to the 4.5 hour drive I would’ve required had I sensibly told him to go fuck himself at the outset.) So yeah, I got to spend a little time on a lumpy old couch, the sole fruit of my desperate efforts to make this sinkhole I’d let myself stumble into suck a little less. I really hoped to get us moving early in the morning so that all this nonsense wouldn’t delay me from arriving at the con on time. That, at least, actually worked. He was like a kid on Christmas morning, hauling out at 5:30 to get everything ready. Oh joy.

Thursday:
On the drive, it was actually rather nice to have someone there with me. I usually drive alone, and the time goes very slowly that way. It’s lonely and you have nothing to focus on but your own fatigue and various aches from sitting in one place too long. Now, he certainly wasn’t a positive source of human contact, but I suppose he was a bit better than the accompaniment of nothing more than crushing loneliness. Yay, I guess? We talked about music and a few sundry things. He killed his phone battery going through his playlist, most of which was pretty inoffensive. The fact that he’d only recently discovered Breaking Benjamin was just adorable. It went pretty well downhill from there though. I’m willing to put up with gearheads so long as they’re otherwise alright, but Marius would not shut up about cars. Every ten goddamn minutes it was “Oh look it’s [car model] check out its [obvious features] that one’s got [massive list of extraneous details] isn’t that awesome?” and then of course he looks at me like a lost puppy, desperately wanting me to give a shit, and erroneously expecting that I would. They’re all just cars, dammit. And it’s Pittsburgh so a fair majority of them are trying to kill us. As such, I’m focusing much more carefully on that than their exact litany of design specifications.

Anyways, I managed to haul Marius to the Hampton and take the long-anticipated step of getting him to kindly fuck off so I could get to what I was actually there to do. Despite the various shenanigans of the day I’d managed to make it there in good time. That didn’t actually matter at all though, as the folks I was meant to be meeting to room with at the Doubletree had been eaten by the registration line. They’d had a substantial head start on me, but were still quite far from the front of the line, quite far as in like 150 yards or so. I had no wish to intern myself in that particular prison, so I planned to wait for them on site. Or rather kind of close to the site I suppose, seeing as the Doubletree’s wifi wasn’t public. I covertly snuck over to the Omni to steal their internet for a bit while I waited on my hosts to get their ducks in a row and then… put badges on all of them I guess. Can’t have ducks without ID ya know? It was actually a rather valuable opportunity. Trying to coordinate things at a con mandates that one have an eye on half a dozen social networks at any given time, so a chance to tinker with my computer a bit before really getting into things was welcome.

I managed to connect with ArcRa, a member of that highly exclusive subset of furries that used to be on my ship with me. I thought having lunch with him would be a nice opportunity to catch up with him. And then of course I was informed again and again how badly I’d underestimated that line. A justifiable mistake seeing as I’d never actually witnessed said line in person. Given how long it took them to get through I’m impressed that I couldn’t see the damn thing from the Doubletree. It was more than two hours before I got any contact from the line internees who I was waiting on. The decision to just keep sitting around was painful, especially since it made me miss lunch with Arc, but I really did want to secure a key to the room before I did anything else. I guess I needn’t have bothered, because the keymaster didn’t show up even after the end of registrationgate 2015. Croc was nice enough to get me in there to drop off stuff though, so though my con appeared to be starting with an ever-growing string of disasters it wasn’t a total loss.

The first stop was the Zoo, as it usually is, and I caught up with Arc and eventually Croc there. I joined up in a game of Cards Against Humanity, a statistical inevitability for any convention, which passed the time quite handily. After that I went to pick up my badge, because being the seasoned convention adventurer (conventurer?) that I am I know that the line dies down later in the day and since there are no badge-required events on day zero there’s nothing to be lost by picking it up later. I spent about ten minutes in line, receiving both a badge and a smug sense of self-satisfaction for having accomplished this feat so quickly. On my way back I found LanHao there also, and we ended up collecting a few people together to have dinner at TenPenny. I’m glad that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, because that’s the sort of place that you need to be hungry to eat at. Great food, but it costs enough that you’d damn well better not be leaving anything on your plate. Though I suppose there’s also a shenanigans fee, as in ‘putting up with our shenanigans’. We sat five, and LanHao got a call that two more would be joining us. We got tables moved around, and in a few minutes two other people showed up, shortly followed by the two we were expecting, who brought two more people of their own. For those keeping track, that means the people we added were actually a larger group than the original party, and we ended up with eleven of us. As you can imagine, it took awhile for us to sort out all our orders, especially with new people coming in the whole time. For her part, our waitress was wonderfully patient with all of us, and got everything in front of us and even billed to the correct people. I ordered crab-stuffed flounder because the description had a lot of words in it that I didn’t know and I was feeling adventurous. It was quite tasty, though a bit heavy on the quinoa, which by the way passed largely unchanged into the toilet the next day. How is this stuff supposed to be healthy if my body doesn’t interact with it in any way? Regardless, the meal was an interesting time and took a couple hours, not that I minded. I had a lot of fun talking to all those people. The only one I had so much as heard of before was Kato, but that kind of thing has become standard practice for me at cons. It was good to get a head start on it.

In the course of this I got a text letting me know that all my roommates were in bed already; something that I was baffled and quite pleasantly surprised by. I’m used to trying to sleep and having people stumbling in at 3 AM, tripping over me and acting like I’m the asshole for being in their way. They certainly had a point though. This was hardly the time to go hard, before anything even started, so I wrapped things up and turned in alongside them. I managed to stretch out on the floor and get a good night’s rest to ready myself for the start of the con proper. I found out the next day that I needn’t have bothered with the sleeping bag. Initial estimates of occupation had floated around seven people, so I fully expected floorspace. The actual count ended up at five, so there was a spot in bed waiting for me that I failed to use. Communication problems, another thing that’s par for the course.

Regardless, day one then! That’s Friday for those of you not using the metric calendar. We were all up sort of early thanks to this bizarre and unfamiliar sense of responsibility that pervaded the room. That’s good for me though, since I was on the hook for setting up the Furthe’More booth in the Dealer’s Den. Or I would’ve been, had the paperwork actually been worked out properly. I never managed to get issued a ‘dealer’ or ‘assist’ badge so I wasn’t allowed to go in there. I pinged Sciggles about it a few times and got a resounding “Pfffffff-” as a response. She said she’d call if she needed me and she never did, so I figured all was well and went about my day. Unfortunately the stop in the lobby to attend to those communications attracted Marius, (See? I knew they could smell responsibility.) who also wasn’t up to much that morning and decided that meant he ought to tag along. This left me at lack of an excuse to dispose of him so yeah, we were hanging out again. Just like old times, that I was already trying so hard to forget.

Anyway, I managed to work out meeting up with Impy and Lord Grey before opening ceremonies. It was nice to see those two again. I don’t know if I’m upset that I had the lumbering oaf following me around or glad that I had someone else to diffuse Marius’ oafishness onto for a little while. Marius is one of those people who seems only familiar with human conversation on an academic basis, if even that. It’s more like he heard twisted rumors of it five years ago and is trying to reconstruct the concept from those smeared old memories. Regardless, my actual friends put up with him pretty well and we got to catch up on a few things. One interesting fact I learned was that Impy had never hugged a fursuiter, even though she always really wanted to. None of her friends suit, and she’s kinda shocky about touching people she doesn’t know. I made certain to keep that in mind as I moved on with my con.

Impy and Grey had to beat-feet to the Artist’s Alley to man their table after the ceremonies though, so I was left alone. Or, thanks to Marius, substantially worse than alone. Grappling hooks were in short supply, so I had to be a little more clever about extracting myself from that situation. I knew there was a writing panel coming up, so I made sure to overtly mention how I was going to head out to a boardroom and talk about grammar and shit for like an hour and a half, hoping that Marius would find this boring and go literally anywhere else. I commended myself repeatedly for suppressing my effeminate squeals of delight when he said he’d rather go check out the Dealer’s Den. It took me a minute to look into exactly which writing panel it was that had spared me this fate, but as long as it was the “Get Marius the hell out of my sight” panel I was happy with it. It was characterizations and dialog, actually, which was fine. I’m a beast at characterizations, so I had fun with it. Incidentally, me “having fun with it” is the reason that Ashe greets me with “Oh, this fuckin’ guy.” At all of his panels.

I figured an hour and a half was a sufficient wait time to De-Marius the Dealer’s Den, so I dropped by down there. I usually don’t buy any art or swag, largely as a function of how long it’s been since I’ve had a job. I just go there because it’s a great place to meet people. Particularly if those people are selling art and swag. Those ones you’ll probably never see anywhere else. Boy did that ever work. I came across my biggest fan from Furthe’More, Crux and his better half, BGS. I stopped by Cobalt’s booth and ran into LunarKeys there as well. Keys is another one who greeted my arrival with “Oh goddamn it what are you doing here?” and I recall a farewell of his being “Shut the fuck up. Just shut up forever and I will be happy.” Fo’ real doe, we like best bros forever. For serious.

I was at something of a disadvantage whilst dealing with LunarKeys it seems, as apparently Cobalt had been enthusiastically pushing my account of the previous year’s Anthrocon on just about everyone he knows, so Keys was pretty much sick of me before I even got there. As my long-time readers will recall, last year’s AC report contained the disasteriffic road trip to Wal-Mart that none of us will soon forget. Maybe Keys didn’t like it because I made him the villain of that story. Don’t worry, Keys. The villain is usually a far more interesting character than the hero. Anyways, I was glad to hear that someone was getting something out of listening to me talk about myself all the time in my journals. I was worried that I was doing this just to convince myself that my life is interesting and stave off the slow creeping of madness closing in all around me, or at the very least provide some good context for assembling my psychological profile after the murders start. Speaking of that unspeakable night though, it’s worth noting that both LanHao and LunarKeys extended invitations to Lucius (and of course me, these people love me) for the TF art jam that night. I hope Lucius appreciates how highly my weird friends thought of him.

Friday apparently had one more disaster in store for me though, as I came to find out when I took a break to check on things on my laptop on my way to meet up with some of my other targets. You see I hadn’t done that since the early morning, and of course since we live just a hair’s breadth away from Star Trek, or at least the hyperviolent lens-flare movie version of it, in terms of communications technology, I should’ve known that I would pay for that oversight. During the communications blackout, I got a number of notes asking after my location from TechCoyote, a longtime fan of mine. I’d mentioned my activities in my correspondence that morning and he had just figured out that I, and in fact both of us, were at Anthrocon, at the same time even. By the time I made it online again that evening, he had already left. I had made it up to Archai’s room before we had properly exchanged phone numbers and managed to contact each other directly. I felt kind of dumb visiting Arc to just talk on the phone with someone else the whole time, but apparently he enjoyed that experience immensely. To quote him directly “Listening to just one end of that conversation was almost more than I could handle.” I’m going to take that as confirmation that I’m equally clever and entertaining at all times no matter what I’m doing.

Since this was the first time Tech and I talked with actual face noises into the air there was quite a lot to go over very quickly, but the meat of the conversation was basically him asking why in the hell I wasn’t checking messages. My reasoning was that my phone doesn’t do internet at things so the only way for me to check FA notes is to stop doing fun convention things and go sit in the lobby by myself (Or worse, as I’m also in danger of Marius finding me there). All that rage was cut off with “Oh yeah. That makes sense.” And then of course I asked him who in the hell visits a furry convention for like six hours and then just goes home, to which he responded that his mother had driven him there and she was weirded out by all the furries and wanted to go home. Which made me say “Oh yeah. That makes sense.” So yeah, we’re both good, sensible people who would’ve really liked to meet each other but couldn’t because we just had utterly incompatible lives at that exact moment. So yeah, instead of getting to meet him and hang out a little, I just made his mom think I’m weird. Can’t win ‘em all I guess. We’ll do better next time. At least I managed to entertain both those involved and a couple bystanders with all this. That’s what really matters though, right? That people find my failures amusing?

So disaster number 56 blew a lot of time and I didn’t actually manage to hang out with Archai very much right then. Drank a lot though, and that’s kind of the same thing. I wasn’t too worried because I knew I’d find other chances to chill with him, so I didn’t feel too bad about skipping town to head down to the Transformation art jam. I was really thinking that it would be a simple and quiet affair like it had been other years. Boy was I wrong. I thought they were optimistic by dragging together three tables in the Zoo, but we had them all filled by ten minutes in, and spilled over onto two more before long. Apparently it’s a considerably larger niche than I thought. I got to see Altered, whom it was a privilege to meet for the first time. There was also Splyced and Crayola, both of whom remembered me from the Delaware Fur Bowl and were happy to see me again. I got to chat with them for a while before things happened and the tables got rearranged. I ended up in the company of Bird of Paradise and sprech4, both of whom were very interesting to talk to. The time just flew by sitting there and chatting with them about everything under the sun. It was a quick first encounter, but they both seemed to enjoy my company, so I’ll call that a win. Also someone gave me free orange chicken, so double-win absolutely.

In any case, time wore on and it was soon time for the ultimate can’t-miss, the late-night sexy writing panel. Obviously I won’t go into excess detail there, but it was a ton of fun as always. Just to give an idea of the tenor of the discussion, I’ll give you a few segment titles. “Slang terms and artful names for genitalia”, “this does not bend that way”, “realistically describing sex involving women”, and “things that are not lube”. Yeah, it’s good stuff. I had a lot of fun because I’d gotten pretty schwacked at Archai’s room that afternoon, so by 10:00 my liver was finally pulling into the lead again, making me practically manic with energy. I felt like I could bareknuckle box a grizzly bear, and that attitude was certainly reflected in how I approached these delicate topics. At one point Ashe declared that I had won the panel, which was a first for me. I didn’t know you could win panels, but I was honored all the same. There was someone there with the badge name “Long Trot” whose information I’ve been unable to pin down. He was a Nuke mechanic and was spectacularly unsurprised to hear that I was a Nuke Electronics Technician after hearing all my enthusiasm about what I had to say on the subject of animal people boning each other.

I had invited Bluedude as I always do, but he didn’t manage to show up until the end when we switched over from mere erotic writing to the weird and kinky stuff. It actually was a fair bit more subdued during the latter half than during the supposedly mundane first part. Maybe it’s because Rukis left. She was there with Amon for the first half and was a tremendous addition to the panel as always. I liked having Amon spectating in the back especially. A lot of the times when I said something I could hear Amon’s bangles jingling when he nodded or laughed. I wished I could’ve gotten to talk with him a little afterwards, but it was late and he was tired so I let him be.

So yeah, finished out that noble endeavor in good time. By that I mean like 1 AM, but I was fine with that. No part of “late-night sexy writing panel” is a misnomer. I’d planned to head to bed, but I’d made the earlier mistake of making Archai aware of my existence. As such, I got a text asking if I’d like to join him for whatever it is one does at this ungodly hour of the morning. And then another text saying much the same thing from someone who had stolen Archai’s phone. Though this is typically when my night ends, I agreed to go with them. May as well live it up when I have the chance. I soon came to find that what people do this late at night is typically “get shitfaced and go to the rave.” I don’t know what I expected. I won’t say it wasn’t fun, certainly. Arc runs with a good crew. There was Ciaphas, who was almost creepily in sync with all my pop culture references, even the terribly dated ones. Like, if there’s such a thing as a joke wingman he should have that on his business card. Also in the group was Pookie, whom I called “Awesometail” for all of two days because seriously you guys she had the greatest fucking tail. It wasn’t even like there were crazy articulations or anything to it. It was just a sturdy snow leopard tail, but it had just the right balance and bounce, a really sultry curve, lively swing to the fur as it moved, everything was perfect. I guess the girl attached to it was pretty cool too. She put up with me even whilst wasted and increasingly sleep deprived. She certainly gets points for that. Actually she shared a number of sensibilities with me as well. Quite the group of like minds there. I believe I’ve mentioned before how Archai has a lot of verbal riffs that match up closely with mine. If I haven’t I’ll let you extrapolate based on a little snippet of conversation we had shortly after meeting up when he had some news for me.

“So I’ve got a boyfriend now.”
“That’s pretty gay.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I suppose that, by definition it actually is. Woulda thought you might like, be happy for me or maybe mention how it’s odd given that I had a girlfriend last time or something.”
“Nope. Gonna stick with obvious surface observations, thanks.”
“Well okay then.”

That’s the crazy thing about it though, had our roles been reversed, that conversation probably would’ve gone exactly the same way. Anywize, we kept swilling back our Gatorade, which at that point had to be at least 70% rum, as we moved to the beat. I was more stomping on the ground and lurching haphazardly somewhat adjacent to the beat, with the beat occasionally peeking through the venetian blinds to see if I was still out in front of its house, but there actually seemed to be a lot of people there doing that, so I didn’t really feel left out. A rather surreal experience for me that I’d never had before was checking out some of the visualizations that were up on the projectors alongside the DJ’s set. I mean, I know that it’s supposed to be just a bunch of brightly-colored nonsense that makes it so that you take longer to coast down off of all the E or Salvia that you just did, but the fact that such a lengthy montage comes together with such professional editing begs the “things that must have happened” question. I’m just trying to imagine the editing room wherein someone or perhaps even a group of people had to make the serious judgment calls of:

“Okay we’re going to open with hectic digital color-static that makes it look like the HDMI cable isn’t plugged in correctly, then star-wipe to a screensaver of a multicolored cube that endlessly turns inside out. The cube is gonna start spinning really fast and then fly off to the side and a bunch of deer drawn in that real rough style of Regular Show are gonna pop out and start dancing like the Peanuts characters. Then when the bass hits we’ll smash cut to Scooby Doo falling on his face, umm loop that one. Yeah, just loop it a few times, maybe play it backwards during the bridge and then two more loops straight into Carl Sagan talking about gravity on a sailboat, yeah gonna have to spiral warp his face or something during that part to keep things moving along. Alright so after that a flying saucer knocks Sagan off the screen and clears the stage for Spongebob, yep. Spongebob is gonna… not do anything he’ll just be a static image, maybe bounce around a little bit like he’s a kindergarten popsicle stick puppet and then a big spin, spin, spin faster and faster until he fades out into a montage of indecipherable blueprints in varying amounts of transparency all flying in different directions across the screen and cut straight from there into a wireframe animation of a corgi being hit in the face with a Frisbee, yep, loop that a few times, yes, yes! Right there, right at the moment of impact when his head flops around and he falls over we’ll just loop that segment right there for like two minutes just two solid minutes of that golden 700 milliseconds of confused agony on that synthetic dog’s adorable little face, yep a bunch of loops of that then play the whole sequence over again one more time and we’ll ride out on that I can really feel riding out on the corgi whiplash loop.”

So yeah, that’s… a thing. Definitely. In any case, I was all thinged out before long, but fortunately the dance closes at 2:00. I’d never been at a dance all the way until they shut it down before. Of course with how rarely I go to dances that’s not all that surprising. The last dance I was at I was wearing Brinkley and I quite sensibly danced myself into a coma in about 30 minutes. My companions seemed to believe that the night was still young, however, and they wanted to go eat at Primanti Brothers. I’m not certain on the details, but they somehow persuaded me towards their line of thinking. I guess my convictions fade quickly in the wee hours of the morning. I noted that The Super Primanti Bros were located substantially in the opposite direction of my hotel, which itself was a substantial distance from the convention hall. That didn’t sit well with me as I was rather against the idea of a long walk back after my long walk back. I’d heard that there were only three people staying in Archai’s room, so I issued the terribly intimidating ultimatum of “I’ll only go with you to eat if I can sleep with you tonight.” Arc graciously accepted because really, who can say no to that?

In any case, we were soon off on a quest to reach the Flying Primanti Brothers to have a hearty meal with our conservative little group of about 25 people. Not sure where the rest of them came from, but that happened. I was kind of glad for it, actually. Since the Cool Story Bros were located at the end of a three-mile trench walled on either side with sheer cliffs made of disheveled alleyways and urban decay. I know alcohol is supposed to make you feel invincible but I was drinking quite heavily throughout and remained acutely aware of my vulnerability to being stabbed. So yeah, we stopped in and dined for a bit. I nearly asphyxiated Ciaphas with laughter on multiple occasions so I guess we made a good night of it. I had a slick, mushy greasewad of the Venture Bros signature “try-not-to-get-shanked Boulevard” fries, or whatever street they were named after, since I wasn’t feeling too hungry. And I’d point out that none of those descriptors are indictments against the food by the way. That was the most fucking delicious mushy greasewad I’ve ever had. So yeah, after that we worked our way back upriver through the dilapidated infrastructure gauntlet and found our way to bed. A good day in all. It could’ve stood to not end quite so far into tomorrow, but I had fun. Also, Archai follows the definition of “tomorrow” that all computer systems engineers follow, basically meaning “on the other side of whenever I go to sleep next”.

Saturday:
The next day I managed to wake up actually rather close to my normal time, around 8:15. Not that I wanted to, it just happened. That was a bit too close to the start of the Milfurs breakfast for me to consider it a reliable option. That and I was now sick with whatever Archai had been suffering through all the previous day. So if you’ve been keeping up, the short version of that is I forwent the nice bed that I paid for in order to just sleep with some dude that night and I caught a disease as a result. I’m so good at making decisions! And also phrasing things. Anyways, I rehydrated a bit and went back to bed. Despite the ungodly hour at which it’s always scheduled, this marks the first time I’ve missed the Milfurs breakfast. Ah well, casualties of war. I’m sure they’ll understand. Eventually, the lot of us managed to blearily haul out at around 11:00 or so. I ran into Raptor Jesus in the lobby and he came right over to give me a hug and tell me how great it was to see me. Since he called me by name I figured I’d go look up his player to see if we’d met before and I didn’t remember. I found that his secret identity is Scotty The Minotaur, who was not at all familiar to me. I checked around a bit and found two other people who had similar experiences. Tough call on this one. It could be that we’re all walking around with badges that have our names on them. Or perhaps it may simply be that Raptor Jesus is a friend to us all.

Next up I headed down to the Artist’s Alley to cruise for a few more contacts and certainly was not disappointed. I caught ws6transam in suit there. He was also looking for someone so I played seeing-eye human for him for a bit. I got to see Bluedude again, who was gathering a group to go to lunch. Progress on doing so was slow, so I wasn’t too broken up about it when Rekzar yanked me to his side to chat a bit. He was waiting in the interminable purchase line, so I was happy to help him pass the time. Having your friends distract you from your other friends is actually a pretty good description of the convention as a whole, actually. Once I lost track of Bluedude I got a little worried and ran off again, seeing as food was a high priority for me at the time. Bluedude came by again soon enough and all was well. We were banking on a nice restaurant that he knew about, but there was a pretty big line outside, and it takes a while to move a line at a sit down place. The majority agreed upon “Ain’t nobody got time fo’ dat” and we went to the Five Guys around the corner. It was another big group of folks who were new to me all heading out to eat together, and again only one familiar name because it pops up a dozen times in my favorites gallery. This time it was SulferDragon. Blue rolls with a good crew as well, so we had a fine time together.

After I got back I headed over to The Gneech’s table to meet up with the Cross Time Café crowd. That’s always a nice opportunity there. Managed to collect together Mooncat, DHLawrence, and McClaw there, so a good showing. Dovetailed nicely into the fursuit parade also. That’s always a wonderful event, a show of force for Anthrocon’s muscle. It’s always strange how there are so many people that I only ever see in the parade. I saw a whole crowd of RadFoxes out there. He’s certainly been busy getting his entourage together. I really had to respect the fox playing the trombone though, that’s some skill there. That plus a guitar wolf and a handful of percussion that I saw here and there might mean this is the start of a very interesting trend.

There was a big change for the parade this year, in that they had a substantial outdoor portion, and I don’t mean a little jaunt along the sidewalk either. They marched everyone straight down Tenth Street. Apparently they’d asked the city planners if they could shut the road down completely to have animal people walk up and down it and they thought that was a great idea. And it’s not like this is some little access sideroad. Tenth Street is a main thoroughfare right at the waterfront, so shutting it down was actually a pretty big deal logistically. Yet somehow, it actually was a great idea. With the parade being outside of controlled convention space, that meant that we could actually attract spectators along the streets. You know, something that a parade pretty much by definition actually has to do. And boy did we ever pull in some spectators. Estimates of the crowd usually were in the range of 5000, which is just insane. I know the businesses love to have us here, for very obvious reasons. We sold Chipotle out of chips, Ben n’ Jerry’s out of ice cream, and Tonic ran out of liquor. Not all that surprising, really. “Tacos and ice cream, then get wasted!” sounds like a pretty good representative schedule of an AC attendee. But far beyond just giving them so much business we force them to close down things, I had no idea that we connected so well with the common people. It was truly an awesome and wonderful thing to see in action. And in saying that I don’t mean the “teenage girl text message” awesome, I mean like the biblical kind of awesome from when the apostles were watching God wreck everything and then had to clean the terror-shit out of their pants and had to write it all down.

I managed to run into AnubisLivess on my way to the parade, so I was able to coordinate meeting up with him at Tonic. I missed him the first time around because we meant to meet in the zoo and I forgot that they hid that in the basement after day zero. That’s a relatively recent and tremendously irritating innovation. Of course it’s one of those things where I don’t really see a solution for it. There’s just so damn many of us that the room in the Westin just can’t handle everyone during the con’s peak. Anyways, I got to Tonic and sat down with Anubis. Y’all know what comes next. I’ve gotta muddle through name-dropping the people who I remember from his crew and point out the one familiar name among them. Let’s give it a whirl, shall we? Alright, in the course of the time spent (and pitchers bought) at tonic, the table played host to some combination of Anubis’ friends PitterPat, Red Dye Number 5, Leefuu, and Mei5683, whom I was watching, as well as fellow watcher, Lexxure. Yeah, so that’s definitely a roster. I found out that if you drink hard enough you earn entries into a raffle. I was the only one who brought a pen and I drank pretty damn hard, so I entered into that thing like four times.

So of course we drank heavily and had lots of fun as is that not the point of this whole grand adventure in the first place? Mei is gender neutral and let us know this so we could keep our pronouns straight, which of course led to most of us fucking it up the vast majority of the time. I’m good about picking the preferred personal pronoun when it’s one or the other, but I struggle with using ‘they’. It’s not grammatically correct in a lot of situations, so I resist using it even if I know it’s a preference, which leads to me forgetting frequently. Fortunately I saved the day with my ethanol-fueled ingenuity by figuring out that “this fuckin’ guy” is gender neutral. It was much easier for me to slip into my vernacular and was somehow less offensive than “she”, so everybody wins! Also Artica showed up and we were all just drunk enough that we thought going downstairs to fanboy all over him would be a good idea. I was last in line for that and I got to watch poor Artica nod politely as everyone explained where he should know them from. I tried to take a little pressure off of him by saying that we’d never really met and there was no way he should know me. And then he’s like “Oh, no. I totally remember you.” Naturally I come back with a tactful and gentlemanly “What? You lying piece of shit, no way! Nobody important knows who I am this is ridiculous.” Did I mention that we’d been drinking a lot? I get the feeling that factored into how that meeting went down.

Anyways, I’d heard that Nevir, Ryoken and Arashiin were nearby, as in “in the building right next to us AKA TenPenny” so I went to stop by those guys. I was planning to check in on them anyways, because that’s yet another crew of cool dudes whom I would kick myself for missing out on. I did have an ulterior motive though. I know that Ryo is cool with bodysnatching, and maybe even Nevir could be talked into it on a special occasion, so I wanted to ask about bumming a ride in one of their suits. That way I could get Impy her long-awaited hug. She knew me and had hugged me a few times before, so if I got furred up I figured she’d be okay with it. Theoretically at least. I thought it was a cool plan. Causality didn’t seem to agree with me though.

Ryoken said that his suit was falling to ribbons, and also sopping wet with raunchy sweat and concentrated scrag-nasty. I may have paraphrased that a little, but it was severe enough that he had retired his suit for the rest of the con. I’m guessing that his fursuit-sized fumigation tent was at home. I wouldn’t have mound, really. Jumping into a sweatsponge is a risk you take when you’re hijacking other peoples’ fluffy critter characters. I may actually rename the practice “sweatjumping”, now that I think of it. It’s just the right combination of badass and disgusting to describe it. Anyways, even if I didn’t care, that still would’ve made for a pretty bad first impression for Impy. So no go there. With Nevir, even if I could find a work around for him being a notable fraction shorter than I am, his suit Shawshank was in an even more catastrophic state of disrepair; dismemberment, in fact. Someone had yanked his tail clean off during the fursuit parade. Nev was understandably distressed by this, especially given that the necessary tools and parts for the reattachment surgery were in Colorado. We discussed a few alternatives and I came up with my trusty labcoat. Shawshank still wouldn’t have a tail, but the coat was long enough to fully cover the axe wound on his butt and make it look like that ensemble was kinda on purpose. He said he’d give it a try, so we went to retrieve it after dinner. Or whatever. It was like 4:30 and we were eating food. Whatever you call that.

Next up was Kage’s Story Hour, a must as always. It was actually so crowded that I couldn’t sit next to anyone I knew, even though I knew a dozen people in attendance. Hell, I didn’t get to sit at all, that’s how popular the event was. It’s pretty insane that we’ve gotten big enough to fill the Spirit of Pittsburgh Ballroom. There are actually quite a few signs of AC beginning to outgrow this venue. The Westin Zoo is too small, the main ballroom is too small, we’ve eaten all of the city’s parking, the Westin sells out completely within a day of opening reservations, and we sell out six other hotels completely by the time the event starts. Talk like that was what got rumors started that the con may have to move, but I never really believed them. Pittsburgh loves us far too much for us to leave now, and it’s quite uncertain that we’d receive such a warm welcome anywhere else.

I’d heard from the legendary Book of Faces that there would be an Upstate New York Furries meetup after the Story Hour so I searched about in the hall for something resembling that, though I was not particularly certain what such a thing resembled. At one point, someone bellowed out “NEW YORK FURMEET OVER HERE!” and by a series of cunning logical deductions I determined the location we were meeting at. The event started with drama, because of course it did. Apparently a bunch of New York City furries were the ones who pushed for the meetup to happen, by which I mean coerced other people to organize it for them. Once we all got together, the NYC furs all either never showed up in the first place or realized that there was no one around even remotely close to their home turf and then just left. At the very least it was briefly amusing to hear them say “Yeah I’m from way upstate, you know, Woodbury?” and we’re all just like “Fucking seriously? You live like an hour from the city. Some of us live an hour from fucking Canada!” It’s actually really nice to see people who have had conversations like that a billion times before. When someone finds out that you’re from New York they ask “Oh, what’s the city like?” and the response is “Fucking five hours away so I don’t go there.”

In any case, good folks. The ones I can remember are Ponk and Hextoler, unfortunately I haven’t been able to find any links for them, so you’re on your own with those guys I guess. It’s a shame I can’t track them, really, as they’re the folks I’m most likely to run into in non-Anthrocon situations. I guess I’ll just have to depend on Facebook for that stuff. Finding that group was really a boon to me. Heh, I also failed to get details for our illustrious event organizer because he gave me a business card, a card that I find only recently is for a business (shocker) but as such does not contain a web handle or FA for the person himself. I’ll have to work harder on that one, as he was trying to recruit me as a dialog editor for a flash game that his studio is working on. Networking is a funny thing that way, I suppose, as Cobalt came in to buy a sandwich a bit later on. I for one, being his friend, and for two, recalling that his degree was in 2D animation, invited him over. Whereupon he got the pitch for the project as well. Could be an exciting opportunity, who knows?

I guess I had fun with those guys, because I spent a hell of a lot of time talking with them. That actually became a concern after a while because I was texting back and forth a lot with Arc about pulling off some possible sweatjumping later. I felt like such a twit telling him to wait just a little bit longer while I wrapped things up at Furnando’s. I knew that I was putting him out even after he’d just agreed to help me. It worked out okay though because the crew there soon wanted to head to Tonic and that made a clean break for me. Having spent most of the afternoon and having drank multiple pitchers at Tonic already I had no real desire to go back there, so I headed out. It was too late by then though, Impy had left the building. She actually seemed rather concerned by my efforts to get in touch with her in person. I was just trying to keep my latest mission a secret and I think I ended up worrying her. Yet one more thing to feel stupid about.

Making this work was just going to be a matter of coordination though. I knew I’d just have to push harder for it the next day, and I could still hang out with Arc that night. I saw Nevir in the hall on my way there. The labcoat appeared to be working out quite well for Shawshank. Not only just covering up the tail carnage but it also really seemed to suit the character. For those uninitiated, a Crux is essentially what would happen if you went to Tim Burton and gave him only the words “terrifying kangaroo” as creature design notes and let him go to town on it, then slapped a two-tone tribal modern art color scheme on the result. So having such a creation wearing a labcoat and silently skulking about the convention hall looking like he’s preparing to conduct some experiments is quite genuinely unsettling, and I think Nev played to that very well. I was happy to see that it worked out for him.

Crew additions for this latest adventure with Archai included but were not limited to Roman Maximilian and Flux. Like most furry adventures, it started off with a big distraction. I wanted to go ditch my backpack before dancing, so I went out to my car. On the way I got a call from Tonic saying that I’d won a prize. All I could think was “Goddammit I already said I don’t want to go back to Tonic!” It was a tough trip too, particularly given that they said I had a time limit. I needn’t have bothered hurrying. As I mentioned, we were in the process of stripping the walls bare and shutting the place down with our rabid, insatiable alcoholism, so there were very few people actually paying attention to the contest stuff. It took me about 15 minutes to even get someone’s attention so I could ask about it. Regardless, I got out of there with a bucket of Sailor Jerry swag and a cool pin with a blinking LED on it that everyone agreed was SUPER annoying. Even the people in the rave where there were strobes in the ceiling and hundreds of lasers lining the walls were like “wow, that pin is like, super distracting.” The return trip was pretty complicated as well, because they closed the half of the convention center that has street level doors for obfuscating contractual reasons, sending everyone through the parking garage on the other side of the street. They vastly underestimated either the complexity of that parking garage, or the capacity for bewilderment of their attendees, because there were a hilarious number of people (okay like four but still) wandering around in that garage. How in the hell do they think a bunch of ravers who are running on fumes and are probably also high are going to navigate that thing? Regardless, my superior sense of direction and accomplished basic literacy skills got me to the correct elevator and I made it back. I even made sure to send up a signal flare for the other weary travelers captured by parking purgatory before I went up.

So yeah, we all got drunk and danced all night to the best song ever etc. Arc even busted a few moves in Jake Caribou, so getting to dance with him was pretty fun. He was only there for a little bit because Arc takes inhuman amounts of time to accomplish even the most sundry of tasks, so it’s a wonder turning into a caribou takes him anything less than a day and a half. (For the record, Arc’s opinion on my opinion on his particular lack of haste is: “Shut yer whore mouth!” Wise words from a wise, if rather slow, man.) In any case the dance was a lot more relaxed now that I’d broken the ice and really let myself get into it. It had worn on me a bit though. I heard from a few other people that they felt like they’d already been through an entire con on Friday, and that’s definitely how I was. So I didn’t have a lot of steam left to go on. I had a pretty good time closing out the dance again, but I was starting to feel like I was getting a bit irascible towards the end.

I’m well aware that I get a fair bit less fun to be around when I’m lacking sleep quite severely. That’s rather distressing at a con as I recall quite vividly that all I bring to the table around there is humor and personability. I know a lot of people like these guys who can run for days on adrenaline, heavy bass, lasers and energy drinks, but I start having a bad time when I don't get sleep. Realistically though, I wouldn't put up with their shit if they weren't great guys. This time they were handing me free liquor all night and took me cool places, so I can't very well say it was torture. Even if it did end in several late... mornings. Really though, if I’d turned down the chance to hang with these guys, I’m sure I would’ve regretted that too. Basically the lesson is that I’ll always find a way to hate myself so I may as well go with the more fun option. Finally, after having a breakfast sandwich at Subway at like three in the morning because why the hell not? I managed to excuse myself at least somewhat gracefully from that particular adventuring party and head back to bed.

Find out the exciting conclusion on the next episode of Dragonball Z etc, etc. Part II is right here