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Attended first fur con!
8 years ago
Anthro New England in Boston! I declare it to have been successful! I walked in the door knowing zero people, and I left having hugged some fursuiters and met some fun people! My biggest hope/goal was to meet some local furs so I'd have some contact points for insinuating myself into local social circles. And I think that kind of worked! So yay!
The hotel where it's held is only a 10 minute walk from the place I work, so it was super easy to get to. I had a conflict that kept me from being there Saturday during the day, but I was there Friday and Saturday nights, and for the everyone-is-exhausted Sunday.
I wore jingly and shiny chainmail around, and handed out business cards when people were interested in it. That's basically my standard procedure when attending other conventions. (I've been to the Arisia sci-fi/fantasy convention a number of times, so I'm comfortable doing that even if I don't have any clue what else is happening.) I missed some cool-sounding stuff just due to not having heard about them until afterwards, but oh well.
Socially, it was an interesting experience. As I kind of expected, I'd say the bell curve of social skills was shifted a bit in the awkward direction, but not too badly. At a con like like Arisia, which has a few thousand people attending, it mostly doesn't feel appropriate to try to strike up a conversation with a random person. There're just too many people, too big an overload of sensation. But the size of ANE made it feel more manageable and open.
It looks like I'll be downloading Telegram and actually getting up on Twitter in the next week or two, since those seemed to be the ways most people were keeping in touch with each other. This might signal that it's time for me to give up on my vague attempts to keep my furry habits obscured from my IRL life. (Though it's super easy to internet-stalk, I've got a totally unique hyphenated name and my FA and DA accounts use the same username.) But you know what, my current social circle from school is getting spread a bit thin from people drifting apart, it's been 6 years since I graduated. I need some fresh socializing. You gotta remake yourself every so often, and new social contexts are a huge part of that.
Anyway. I was also pretty surprised by how many people (at least among people I met) had traveled 6+ hours to get there. I'd been assuming it was a mostly local con, I hadn't expected so many people would be traveling from as far as like Pennsylvania.
Hooray meeting people! I'm looking forward to doing this again!
The hotel where it's held is only a 10 minute walk from the place I work, so it was super easy to get to. I had a conflict that kept me from being there Saturday during the day, but I was there Friday and Saturday nights, and for the everyone-is-exhausted Sunday.
I wore jingly and shiny chainmail around, and handed out business cards when people were interested in it. That's basically my standard procedure when attending other conventions. (I've been to the Arisia sci-fi/fantasy convention a number of times, so I'm comfortable doing that even if I don't have any clue what else is happening.) I missed some cool-sounding stuff just due to not having heard about them until afterwards, but oh well.
Socially, it was an interesting experience. As I kind of expected, I'd say the bell curve of social skills was shifted a bit in the awkward direction, but not too badly. At a con like like Arisia, which has a few thousand people attending, it mostly doesn't feel appropriate to try to strike up a conversation with a random person. There're just too many people, too big an overload of sensation. But the size of ANE made it feel more manageable and open.
It looks like I'll be downloading Telegram and actually getting up on Twitter in the next week or two, since those seemed to be the ways most people were keeping in touch with each other. This might signal that it's time for me to give up on my vague attempts to keep my furry habits obscured from my IRL life. (Though it's super easy to internet-stalk, I've got a totally unique hyphenated name and my FA and DA accounts use the same username.) But you know what, my current social circle from school is getting spread a bit thin from people drifting apart, it's been 6 years since I graduated. I need some fresh socializing. You gotta remake yourself every so often, and new social contexts are a huge part of that.
Anyway. I was also pretty surprised by how many people (at least among people I met) had traveled 6+ hours to get there. I'd been assuming it was a mostly local con, I hadn't expected so many people would be traveling from as far as like Pennsylvania.
Hooray meeting people! I'm looking forward to doing this again!
Telegram is fun, tho it's being drained a bit by Discord. Because, primarily, discord has the voice option.