MFF 2017: Oh Fuck I Really Hope This Works

As I mentioned in my Canadian adventure journal, I’ve recently stumbled haphazardly into a new occupation and residence. It was quite jarring to go from a year-long wall of crushing indifference to a company that wanted me to start working there right now. So it was a bit of a whirlwind coming back from the aforementioned continent-spanning relocation bonanza to find that I had about three weeks to find, tour, rent and move into a new apartment. Certainly didn’t help that the transition team from Firstenergy took forEVER to get back to me about that kind of stuff. We certainly got an early start on the bafflingly inefficient corporate bullshit with those first few trips. My flights to Toledo for background check, drug tests, physical exams and other new employee stuff, had to happen very close to my househunting trip just by virtue of there being very limited time left. It would’ve been really easy to combine the two trips, but human resources wouldn’t cover my expenses if I was doing anything other than their stuff, and the transition team wouldn’t cover my expenses unless THEY flew me there. So I flew home for a night, booked $770 next-day airfare back and then poked around to look for a place to live. The inefficiency of it all really bothered me, but whatever I guess. It’s not my money! Hey, maybe I’m learning how corporate infrastructure works after all.

Anyways, these events were temporally and physically quite close to MFF. So I thought, what better way to further complicate an already-critically-hastened major life change by jamming a furry convention in there? I know, right? I’m responsible and exercise judicious forethought at all times. Wohoo. It was destined to be a short trip, because although I had that weekend off, that was all I could get. When I asked about taking some time off they were just like “bitch, you ain’t even got any time ON yet.” Which I'd credibly call "tough but fair". Taking a vacation literally the week that you start working there is a bit much to ask. So yeah, short high-compression con, then!

I got there pretty late Friday night because I had to fit in a full day of work and then a five-hour drive, so there wasn’t a lot of energy left in me or the con by the time I came around. Still, I got to meet up with my homies this time around, Nimbus and Vene. Good guys all around. Heh, one of the things that’s so striking about the furry fandom is how well it illustrates your mind’s capacity to normalize things just because they happen a lot. Why do I know these guys? Oh because we’re into the same particular niche fetishes and we commiserated about that online for a while, exchanging various porn content and just generally being the weird wonderful freaks that we are. You know, as one does.

However such things present themselves, it’s really a relief to be able to find some guys that you actually know decently well to split a room with, rather than having to spin the roulette wheel. That’s definitely where this con would’ve been headed had I not managed to finagle something by sitting on the reservation sites and checking in twice weekly for over a month. MFF has grown precipitously since I last attended, and even outpaced Anthrocon this year. Even this single room at a comically large distance from the actual site I had to really fight for. The brilliant innovation that I’ll have to remember for next year is that there are plenty of area hotels that aren't associated with the con, so I’ll just have to widen my search pattern a little bit. Might not get as good of a deal, but it’s better than the stress of wondering if I’ll end up sleeping in a parking garage. Seeing as I actually did manage to fight my way to a bed though, and I’d had quite a long day by then, I had a quick meal with Ronan Otter (long enough to differentiate him in my mind from Roman Otter) and then I availed myself of my hard-won accommodations fairly early that night.

The next day I got to make the acquaintance of Liam Einar, a charming young wolf that I’d spoken with extensively online, even to the point of voice-chatting and other such futuristic things on occasion. He was really excited to meet me. A number of people have been excited to meet me in person, actually. I really can’t explain it. There's no accounting for taste I suppose. Anyways, we got along great. It’s always a surreal experience to first meet someone that you’ve been talking to frequently for over a year, but that is the strange new quagmire that our insane web-connected future hath wrought. Anyways, I came across Liam through the Hypnofurs groupchat, and it turned out they were having a big meetup, so I went along for that. We went to this German place called Hofbrauhaus. If you’re wondering how German it was, whatever you’re thinking is probably not German enough. Like, not only lederhosen and tankards of beer, but soccer games on the TV, alphorn players and the whole shebang. Absolutely everything that America thinks Germany is.

So yeah, it was an afternoon of great food and weird first-time speed-dating-but-with-friends kinds of interactions. It’s hard to describe the experience of thinking of someone as this neon-blue hulking stormdragon for like three years and then meeting this trucker from Minnesota and having him be like “Yeah, that’s me.” Ah well, I’m sure I underwhelmed several people similarly. Really it just highlights the magic of this… whatever it is we’re doing here. People can be so creative and so committed to their beautiful fantasy, that it actually starts to feel more natural than the people behind the masks. Really cool stuff. I got a ‘Moscow Mule’ there just because it was on special and it sounded interesting. If I recall correctly it was vodka, lime juice, ginger beer and Hefeweizen. The fact that it included a beer made me wary, but let’s face it, beer was kinda hard to avoid in this place. I went for it because conventions are a time for adventure! And it’s not adventure with a little risk. I was richly rewarded for my daring, as that Moscow Mule actually tasted totally fucking amazeballs and I immediately ordered a second one. Like I’ve always said, I’m definitely open to enjoying lots of drinks, but they’d better impress me quick. I’ve never been one for that “It’s an acquired taste” Stockholm Syndrome bullshit. Why would I want to acquire a taste for something that my body is clearly trying to reject when there are all these things out there in the world that taste delicious the first time?

An interesting conundrum faced me upon my return to the venue. Very soon after we’d all walked back and gone our separate ways, I heard from my perennial favorite avian Archai that he and a group of nearly 20 folks were getting together, and they asked if I’d like to come along. The whole caravan was headed to, you’ll never guess, Hofbrauhaus. Now this was quite a pickle, really. Not wholly unprecedented, to be sure. Eating is a pretty common social event at cons, so the “Oh well I just ate” dilemma is familiar to many congoers. This one had me in a bind though. Hof2brau2hauser had a good half-dozen people going to it that I was really looking forward to seeing, and to hell with food! Those people are what I was here to see! Shallow as it sounds, the presence of additional Moscow Mules was, in all likelihood, the straw that prompted me to turn my mule around and ride straight back to Little Germany as fast as its dusty hooves could carry me.

Now of course, I wasn't going to be eating very much. In fact I didn't order anything and fell back on what I knew would be dependable from my previous experience, browsing at the indescribably giant soft pretzels that everybody wanted but severely underestimated. Since I was there mostly to socialize and get another couple mules, I set to work quickly on both of those things. I sat with Archai's better half Metric Fox, perennial favorite Loomy the bunny, and quite a few others within easy shouting distance. I tried to get them to bring out a liter of Moscow Mule instead of a traditional size because I knew that I'd be there awhile, only to find that such a size was not an option. I could only get a single drink or a pitcher. Naturally I did the sensible thing and ordered the single ENTIRE PITCHER and drank the whole thing myself! You know, sensible-like.

If you think that's a bad idea then you seem to be in agreement with the numerous people who observed this behavior and told me this was probably a bad idea. And also, likely, the people whom I exchanged text messages during that time, all of whom remarked on how I'm probably drunk enough by now and could probably ease up a bit. Fortunately for my dubious foresight in how I began the evening, time was on my side. With such a large group, there was much socializing and shenanigans that tempered the rate at which the meal progressed. The shots where they'd spank you afterwards were certainly a big hit. (Do you get it? We're not moving on unless you get it.) That's another thing that might've been seen as kinda weird if it weren't occurring on the backdrop of a furry con. Naturally I didn't go for the shots. Not because of the spanking thing, but because, ill-advised as embarking on it may have been, I was well aware of the scope of the mission that faced me.

For my part, I did in fact methodically and consistently wear down my charge over the course of the night. The restaurant was quite busy by then and they were getting pretty swamped. I think by the end of the process I was the only one not upset about the delay in getting our checks taken care of, as it provided me the vital convalescent time required for me to get into a walking/respectful public appearance sort of state, which required a great deal of determination and collecting my focus beforehand. In all, we spent a little on the south side of five hours there, which is about the right amount of time to spend drinking like 56 ounces of heavy mixed drink without killing yourself. I'd say that doing such things in bulk is a bargain, but I never did the math on it, and paying a $50 tab just for one drink certainly didn't feel good. Wooooooh holy shit I'm glad I have a job now! And with that, I was off into the night once more.

From there I finally managed to catch up with Stormy Kittyhawk. She was a tough one to pin down this time around because she staffs this con. When I hear that I still can't help the feeling of "Dear God why would anyone do that?" even though I've staffed several times myself now. Regardless, I came across her in service of donating one of my treasures to the charity auction, which I figured I might as well attend since I had a slot open and that's not usually the type of thing I have a slot open for. The auctions can vary quite broadly as an experience, largely because they vary so dramatically based on the stage presence of the host, and the inherent entertainingness of what happens when you ask a bunch of furries to toss in the spoils of their adventures for a good cause. I was tempted by the Zootopia banner, until the bidding on that thing long ago left me in the dust. I did like the stack of nature books that's been sold 13 times because people keep donating it back every year. Generating a couple thousand bucks for charity is a pretty darn good use of a white elephant gift. A few things had trouble finding takers too. It was a small crowd, and that's the risk you take with niche-of-a-niche items like these. The pattern seemed to hold throughout the auction, so I never really got close to buying anything. It was always either something that seems pretty cool going for 4x the max you'd ever consider bidding, or something that's not really worth the $10 opening bid so somebody just grabs it to be nice. Still, we get a whirlwind tour of the museum of furry curios (furrios?) and get to save some homeless doggos. It's a good time in the end!

"Fuck, I have to leave" is a lame way to start a day, but it was the reality of Sunday morning. With another workday starting at 6AM on Monday and the onus to make a good impression at my workplace still upon me, I knew that I'd really have to get going pretty soon. So naturally I dicked around and talked to a bunch of my friends first. I had a late brunch-kinda-thing? I dunno it was like 1:30 and it was the first time any of us had eaten that day, whatever you call that. That let me see off Arc and Metric. I also got to stop by for a last-chance dealers' den run and chill with Liam's crew for a bit. The big highlight there was getting to meet Hajinn, as he's a very interesting sort. Not only do his tastes align with mine, but he does a lot of fascinating and innovative stuff with his writing that's always very interesting to check out. Challenging himself to write a story with no direct dialogue quotations and innovative suchlike. I was right about to take off when I heard that Stormy and Toby really wanted to see me off first. I was really pressed for time by then, but I couldn't turn down something like that. With all the crazed bouncing around that I do at events like this, streaking in and out of different circles at a frenetic pace, sometimes I lose track of the fact that there are people who really do genuinely enjoy my company, and that's certainly something worth paying due reverence. So I did manage to at least show up to their place and give them a hug before I was off to see the wizard once again.

It's really tough to do a convention on a really strict time budget. You show up having already missed so many things and leave knowing that the party will long outlast you. I didn't even manage any time to fursuit! Well, that was more a function of travel logistics than temporal ones. The shuttle that serviced the hotel I was in was quite overwhelmed, and wait times were often long and fluctuated dramatically. I saw a fursuiter get left behind on one run because the van was full and my only two thoughts were 1: Oh holy mother of Jesus that is the saddest thing I have ever fucking seen if my car were here I'd totally give him a ride and 2: No way in hell am I letting that happen to me. When I need to bail out of my fursuit I need to bail NOW. Ah well, the regrets from having done something sting far less than the regrets of having not. I really enjoyed MFF, and apparently it's the place to be. Hopefully it'll become a regular feature for me now that I live in this area.

Further Confusion 2018: Apparently I just came here to hang out and chat

My annual tradition of swinging by the bay area went a bit more smoothly in terms of coordinating it with work. I get my entire year's vacation allowance on January 1st, so they were perfectly happy to have me run off for a furry adventure this time. This being something like the seventh furry con to slip off the edge into oblivion the way that so many before it had, my attention to detail had degraded quite a bit by then. I think I'd accepted the inevitability of my simply giving up on my age-old practice of high-fidelity furry con reports. Well, it turns out I was wrong about giving up. Maybe I'll be wrong about having forgotten a good chunk of this stuff. Only time will tell. Fortunately time keeps moving and against all odds you guys keep reading, so let's find out the thrilling conclusion together, shall we?

The time off that I managed to bargain for didn't start until Friday, but I got a whole week off by taking the late start. Archai said that I'd miss a good chunk of the con by arriving Friday night. That assertion is a bit debatable. A chunk, sure, but whether it's good or not is pretty easy to contest. I've really enjoyed my time at Further Confusion, but the con itself, events and programming-wise, is resolutely a bit of a snooze. I didn't see as I lost a lot by letting it warm up for a bit before bursting onto the scene partway through like a coked-out popstar, as one does. It really didn't feel like I'd missed much upon arrival, so I'm gonna call my vacation negotiations (vacotiations?) a successful endeavor.

The room-scramble for FC was a lot less contentious, and I managed to stumble into one without even trying. Stormy mentioned she'd had a friend whose roommate canceled on them, so I ended up at the abode of Kyoo Coyote. He was a good guy, more subdued than I'd come to expect from the furry crowd, but that works great as a roommate. Not being able to turn off the manic blitzkrieg of emotions that makes up a typical furry's temperament is a common problem one faces when trying to get some rest in proximity to them. His set of My Little Pony tableware also attested to his being a good dude. He agreed that food was a priority, so he joined Archai and I on the hunt for some. When nobody could come up with any particular selection of food that they felt particularly passionate about, I suggested Pita Pit. It was a simple enough option, and I had fond memories of the place. After much criss-crossing about looking for a place we were all somewhat sure we remembered being here, we finally gave up and Googled it to find that it had closed forever. An auspicious start to be sure. But alternative sandwiches are easily uncovered, and we did so, moving on with our adventure afterwards.

Flying to San Jose and getting settled had burned up most of the day, but I still had time for the crowning achievement of this convention, #Turntscience! It's a panel where they have furries with jobs in science and other technical disciplines give a presentation about their field whilst fueled by a roughly 40% ethanol solution. Refueling operations increase in frequency the longer they talk, so the topics presented are quite engaging! You know you're in for a good time when the first presentation opens with "Alright, quiet down you guys! Now I'm gonna *whisky burp* tellya about fuckin' rockets and stuff, here we go!" Our four presenters gave very dramatic and entertaining accounts of their experience with: NASA spaceflight engineering, tracking extrasolar objects, graph theory, and 3D animation. It's all the fun of drunken story time mixed with all the fun of hearing people talk about something fascinating that they're really passionate about. And of course, the generous application of organic solvents during the presentation kept them from getting too technical, so it never got too dry, so to speak. I'm definitely gonna look up these guys and see if I can hop on for the next time they're doing this. I would LOVE to have an audience while I drunkenly ramble about nuclear power. Make sure to look for that next time around!

I got to chat and catch and drink up with Stormy and Toby for a bit in their room. A simple thing, but given how abbreviated our interactions at MFF were it was great to have the chance. We went fairly long into the night catching up, but it was well worth the trip. They were doing a whole lot of events and panels, so seizing my chance to get a quiet moment they could spare was definitely the right call. A late first night had me getting up on Saturday and pretty much heading straight to the fursuit parade. I got there with a good amount of time to spare, so I could schmooze with the crowd a bit. I got to chat and fursuit-snug the indomitable Scotty Minotaur there and got to know him a bit more. I've crossed paths a few times with his well-known Raptor Jesus cosplay, but it was nice to get a bit of back and forth there. He's a charming and disarming sort, a wonderful compliment to his beasty bestie Zarafa. They both exude tremendous gregarious energy towards everyone within reach, so a visit is always worth fighting past the crowd for. The parade was long, but still fun. Having a route that goes outside is always a treat, especially on a sunny California day. I tried out a few novel ways of strutting my stuff. Not many that I felt really worked, but it's worth experimenting once in awhile.

After that I caught up with Lunarkeys and Catmonkshiro who were going to see Mothmonarch in the dealers' den and run a few other missions. I tagged along on those. Got some food with them and I got to hang out for a bit with Digi, she was fun to have around, and I was glad for the opportunity as it's quite rare to have the chance to observe a specimen of a Digi in the wild. I dropped in on Toby and Stormy's sexy late-night panel and had a good time talking about all manner of delightful debauchery, as one does.

From there, Scotty had invited me to come dance with him that night. He'd meant for both of us to be suiting, but I had actually torn mine during the parade. So I went with just my human costume. I still had a lovely time though. I quite frequently seem to need to be invited to the dance to really have a good time. It just really helps to have somebody you can kinda connect with out there while you're doing your thing. Scotty is well-known for dancing the night away, suited up the whole time. It makes a little more sense that he's able to manage that now that I've seen his dancing style is more cuddle-hug-slowdance than really tearing up the dancefloor. That suited me just fine. I would've thought that a pretty weird place for just holding onto someone for awhile, but I found it to be really easy to lose myself in a weird, wonderful moment like that. The night really flew by, wrapped up in a gryphon's wings. At the end I came across the stringy pulp that remained of Roman Otter. He'd been dance fursuiting at a much higher intensity, and it showed. I was wearing down by then myself, so I was happy to aid in psyching him up enough to stumble out of there and then helping him get back to his room.

The next day I got to hook up with another handful of Hypnofurs to go out for a bite to eat. Archai also needed food to live so I brought him along. Such events are always an interesting game where you're kind of rolling the dice on whether these friends will get along with these other friends. This was a particularly risky gamble as most of these guys I'd yet to meet in person. Went great though. I think he interacted with my new friends more than I did. Found a lot of common ground there, so despite being outshined by my plus-one on that occasion I'll call that one a win.

Ordinarily I tend to avoid tabletop and video gaming at cons. Not because I don't enjoy those things, but because conventions always have two or three things that I'm missing out on in any given single hour, let alone the afternoon-spanning breadth of even a modest fantasy adventure. I thought at first to refuse an offer of some arpeegee-quetee, but then I remembered that I'm at Further "It's really more of a social experience" Confusion in [current year] so there was fuck all for events happening in general, and even more desolate on Sunday. So I went for it. Lanhao and his crew had a game of a Star Wars tabletop adventure going, and I took him up on his invite to throw my hat into the ring and have it immediately be stolen by jawas.

I was the only one who had the guts and moral turpitude to play a dark-side character, a move sure to earn sidelong glances from my compatriots. Hey guys, we're working for what is clearly some kind of mostly-cyborg mafia don. Don't blame ME when this party's ethos starts to turn a little gray! Anyways, we rode on a triumphant wave of glory to a conclusion that looked a lot like nearly all of us being bludgeoned unconscious in an engagement that still technically fulfilled the mission objective because the bloody row actually did manage to disrupt the enemy operation we were sent to stop. So yeah, big win there. Post-campaign dinner with Arc and Lan was a lot less of a dice roll because they're Air Force and defense contractor respectively, so we've got lots of war stories to swap. Naturally I have the dubious honor of worst military experience of the bunch as is typical for me. Woohoo?

The day finished off with a bit of fursuit chaperoning, which was all well and good as I'd run out of things to do, as one does on the last day of FC. Archai's latest fursuits (I swear, he buys a new one every year) are big plushy pillowy extravagances that can be a bit unwieldy to operate. So I got to be ground crew on that sortie. It's not quite the chore that it sounds. Really high-design suits like that generate a lot of buzz, so it's great fun to watch him work. The latest acquisition is a Thumper (of Bambi fame) getup that is just the most cute that could possible be stuffed into roughly 2-4 cubic yards. There's a lot of hare is what I'm saying. For that one I had to lug around a carpet-blower for life support. That IS the chore that it sounds, but I made the most of it. I'm sure Arc got tired of hearing my joke about calling it "the football" on account of the fact that he'll explode if he gets more than 15 feet away from it. So after burning him out (that didn't take long) and extracting him from his Disney suffocation chamber, there was not much left to do but dance the night away. Something I find far easier to do now that experience has given me the prescience to bring earplugs to such events. I knew that it bothered me, but until I was able to tamp it down a bit I didn't realize that the volume was literally the number one thing that bothered me about dances. Particularly the last-night dead-dog ones where they move all their industrial-grade air-slapping machines into a much smaller room and really raise the roof, and then lower it again and then raise it again several times a second. Along with the walls, and any other surface in the room.

Let it not be said that my efforts went unrewarded though. As after the post-con wind down I did get an opportunity for a role-swap. I don't know why Arc seemed unsure when he made the offer.

"Yeah like, it would be fine, if ya want."
"IF I want to? Fuck yeah I want to be the bunny! Show me the BUNNY!"

It's a pretty wild experience. Fursuiting is already pretty extreme, and plush suits are everything that fursuiting already is ramped up to a billion. No fingers, no range of motion, it weighs a ton and balance is a nightmare. But all the good stuff is ramped up too. It's exactly as comforting as you'd expect a bodysuit made out of pillows to be, and of course it's adorable as all hell. I did just a quick jaunt without all the cold packs or other support equipment et al, but I didn't want to overstay my welcome, and really, just a few moments is all you need to really take in the mystic grandeur that is the bean-bag-hare experience. The rest of the requisite squatting at Arc's place that accompanies any voyage on the effsea was occupied by intermittently assisting with electrical repairs thanks to some rats that thought the place's wiring could use a few modifications. Mainly it was scurrying about and flipping switches to help the repair guy with troubleshooting, but hey, troubleshooting used to be my life! It's nice to do once in awhile, really takes me back. Heh, I also got plenty of time in the way-back machine when we went to visit Arc's friend Taiyo. He kindly whipped up a hearty feast for us and the night was occupied mostly by me telling sea stories. I really felt like I was monopolizing the night, but he seemed really interested. So I rolled with it and, ostensibly, a good time was had by all.

You know it's funny. I do a lot of that kind of thing on my furry adventures. Just stumble upon a new person or group of people and really hit it off. Being the sun-fearing introspective nerd that I am, that's never something that I thought I'd do hardly at all, let alone consistently enough to get GOOD at it. I guess that's really it though. I got dumped into dozens of situations like that within the social pinball game that makes up most furry cons, and just through sheer volume of practice I gained a decent social sense. And I have plenty to talk about, and a compelling way of saying it. People like getting to know me. Heh, that's another thing I never would've been arrogant enough to expect of myself. Really though, it's starting to feel like, after all these years, now I'M one of those interesting people that you go to furry cons to talk to! I could ask no higher honor to be bestowed upon me by my contemporaries.