Well, this delay for the flight home seems like the perfect time to type up my account of the delays on the flight here. I've gotten a wondrous first impression of Spirit Airlines if you couldn't tell. It all started off innocently enough. I was using my typical protocol of twiddling the dates and airports on a travel metasearch engine to get the best deal to fly to the San Francisco bay. Yes I know that BLFC isn't there, but my friends are! And of course they were willing to take me with them to the con. In my search, I was intrigued by a notably cheap five hour direct flight. Yeah, Detroit to Oakland is a real all-star world-tour, but a direct flight is a big quality-of-life upgrade, and a rare one at that. Perhaps twice in my life I've found myself on a plane actually going to exactly where I want to go on the first try. Sure I'd have to cover bag fees, but the ticket was a little cheaper and the convenience certainly justified an extra $25-35 or whatever, like bag fees usually are. I figured I was in the clear.

Yeah, didn't expect to have to bible-scholar these terms of sale to uncover what was really going on, but I paid for my lack of scrutiny, literally. I saw "starting at $40-50" as a checked bag fee on their site and called it good. That was a little hefty, but the convenience justified it. How much could that really add up to anyways? Well it turns out that it can add up quite a lot! They also charge for carry-on bags, a practice so barbaric that I didn't even think to look for it. So my standard complement of one carry-on bag and one fursuit case set me back over $180. That's not the kind of thing you can bury in the fine print. If you're going to charge so much and also charge basically the same rate even for carry-ons then that should be a little clearer on the front end, not squirreled away in a half-assed fare calculator app somewhere. But they had me. I'm only so mad about their bullshit because it totally worked. So I ponied up and then got on the plane. Then off the plane. Then on the plane again. Then off the plane. Then on a different plane, all without ever leaving the ground. Hey, wasn't this ill-gotten pound of flesh supposed to fucking simplify this process?

Yeah, we had to plane and deplane TWICE while they figured out a mechanical issue. We all boarded and then they closed the door, just in time to say "Oh shit the plane's broken! Everybody off!" throwing us back into the confusion of the terminal. That had been an adventure because of a different problem. There were a couple people in the wrong line that they had to sort through. The attendants gave them such exasperation when explaining the problem, which was a bit rude considering that the airline was the one who swapped the gates 90 minutes before departure. Not only that, they swapped it with an adjacent gate for a flight using the same class of aircraft that was leaving at about the same time. What the hell could've been the necessity of that? Other than, you know, being engineered to be as confusing as possible. After a long wait, we got our second chance at our flight. Round two got us all the way to taxiing away from the gate before they got cold feet and decided that the plane was broken again and sent us all back to terminal purgatory.

If it feels like I'm going into too much detail again, that too, is part of the experience. During the ensuing chaos I was also bombarded with eleven oft-contradictory status update emails, even though I was already standing at the gate, keenly aware of the status of our flight delay. I spent a good chunk of the time walking backwards up the moving walkway. Turns out nobody even yells at you if you do that, which is pretty neat. Though I did sustain potentially lethal doses of side-eye from the gate attendants. I may have started something though. Three different people joined me in experiencing utter futility for a few minutes apiece. I didn't speak to any of them, but I feel like we connected on a spiritual level. Managed to get my lap time on it down to like 4 minutes, which is some kind of progress I guess. I also discovered that if you walk backwards on the people conveyor for like 10 minutes, then turn around and walk the right way on it, the sudden shift in apparent speed feels like you're being rocketed into space. Not a bad entertainment value for something free and handy. I wish I'd been wearing a Fitbit. That routine probably would've confused the hell out of it.

Anyways, they found us another plane, and parked it at the gate that was supposed to be our gate in the first place, after clearing all the confused Dallas-bound folks out of there. We had at least gotten fairly well practiced at the boarding process by then. So that went smoothly enough even though our tickets didn't match the aircraft class anymore. A bunch of us were on the edge of our seats waiting for what would get us kicked off this one. They actually got it together this time though. And as we sailed triumphantly into the air, we learned that the two hours that were just painfully excised from our lives would be compensated with... a free glass of water. Am I being challenged to a freestyle rap battle? Because that's one of the most vindictive and devastatingly insulting things I've ever heard! Free water as recompense was more of a slap in the face than getting nothing at all. I would've preferred a literal slap in the face. At least then I could say they were being up front with how they felt about me. Being offered "free water" is just a backhanded reminder of "oh yeah usually we charge for this unlike basically every other business capable of providing customers a glass of water".

Okay, I get that their model is all about the whole "no-frills consider-the-true-cost-of-free-stuff" optimization... thing, but they stripped out water, carry-ons, having your checked bag stickers applied for you, choosing your seat, in-flight entertainment, and the seat leaning back. I didn't even know that shit was negotiable! I didn't even have to go but I went to the bathroom just to check the toilet for a fucking coin slot. Apparently they read my sarcastic "economy minus" fare class idea from a few years ago and decided "Yes, that's it! I shall build a whole airline this way! This is how I will make my mark on the world." I'm not even exaggerating, really. They are sickeningly proud of every tiny comfort that they've callously and brutally excised from the travel experience. If you print your boarding pass at home, the white space gets helpfully occupied by a message saying "We don't have any in-flight entertainment to keep you busy, so enjoy this Sudoku puzzle!" Some flights have entertainment and some don't. I can accept that, but don't fucking smile while you deny me things, you sadistic freaks! The constant reminders of all the stuff that I wasn't getting were quite grating, particularly when a lot of full-feature alternatives still often out-compete them for price. Because fares are such a crapshoot, those fools that wasted all that money on modern entertainment and free carry-ons still often have a comparable or even cheaper base rate. If the savings were dramatic then all this ascetic torture would perhaps be worth it, but from what I've seen, the best that ol' feckless, gutted Spirit Airlines can offer you is the same $30-ish advantage that you can get just from shopping around all the other main carriers. About the only advantage that they've got is serving almost the exact corridor that I need, and in a testament to the power of the airline industry's potent anti-competitive oligopoly, I still found myself considering flying with them again to take advantage of that. If I ever happen to be traveling without a fursuit that is.

In any case, my triumphant return to the Left Coast kicked off with a weekend of... helping four guys move house? Wait that can't be right. I go to The Bay to do fun things! What happened here? Temporal conspiracy, it seems. I just so happened to pretty much fall out of the sky at exactly the moment that the move was going on, so having come freshly off of moving heavy things at Furthemore I signed right up for a second round of that. Because really I'm happy to help out my hosts in The Bay and my alternative was snubbing them with a quick "you kids have fun" and spending a bunch of time away from the people I was there to see.

That household was in a bit of a bind as well, the move having come as much of a surprise to them as it did to me. The house that their landlady lived in had slid down a mountain, or had a mountain slide into the living room, I forget which. In any case, it suffered terribly from mobile-terrain-related complications common to the greater Los Angeles region and that house wasn't resurrecting any time soon. So she thought to depose a set of her current tenants and live in one of her rental properties. A bit gruff towards the renters, but she is in rather exceptional circumstances. Would've been fairly forgivable if the whole process wasn't something of a ham-fisted mess on her end. I only overheard things casually, but when Archai asked if I knew that the landlady wasn't quite playing with a full deck I could confirm that I had gathered as much by then. Just from what I'd heard over a couple days it seems as if her deck was down to 34 cards even though it was fluffed out with a green Skip-Turn from Uno and a half-dozen duplicates of the seven of diamonds.

All the back-and-forth was a nice chance to check out Damian's Tesla though. Even loaded down with a bunch of stuff that we were moving my pilot occasionally advised "You're gonna want to put your head back." And he meant it! Despite having the footprint of a luxury Armored Personnel Carrier, that thing teleports to highway speed with the kind of baffling instantaneousness I thought only achievable with railguns or GPS glitches. Such a shame that the charging network gets so sparse out in my neck of the woods. I'm tempted more than ever to get one of these things. Of course, high-concept luxury cars tend to be more of a job-secure sort of decision, so I guess that's getting put off again.

We got in a good measure of thing-moving to be sure. Archai is fairly skilled with space-economizing when getting everything into a trailer. You can tell that he's serious about it because he calls it "tessellation" instead of "Tetrising". Of course I'd probably be pretty good at it too if I were quite regularly trying to bring a significant fraction of a collection of six fursuits of varying designs and fluffiness plus a sound system and a couple hundred pounds of support gear to every convention. In any case, a couple days' work got all the stuff to the place and the whole crew stopped at a German sausage place called Wursthall (yeah I know you'd never guess what they served) for dinner. The whole crew, since I've gone this whole time without mentioning it, included Archai and Kyreeth, who were my hosts in the bay, the bridge between the two groups, Archai's boyfriend Metric Foxton, and the other displaced refugees that he lived with, Quinten, Neys, and Kali Wolf.

The restaurant gained points for having more than zero kinds of cider, which made up for the lawless thunderdome that was their serving methodology. Any time you needed something, you just hailed a random server by any means available (though signal flares and airhorns were discouraged) and they just came over and figured it out for you no matter who they were. I guess the human interchangeability is more efficient but socially that's a really awkward interaction. Calls to mind a wealthy manor owner just arbitrarily grabbing the nearest servant and tasking them with things, too much like getting randomly stabbed with extra duty in the navy. I promised myself I wouldn't subject other people to that. Anyways I tried both of their ciders and found the South City to be quite good, a good touch of sweet but remarkably good balance in the flavor, it's definitely one that I'll look for again. The Two Rivers was perhaps the most profoundly average thing that I've had in my mouth to date. It was like I had tried to eat the concept of a control group, or found the factory reset button on my tongue. I tried very hard to hate it, an effort informed by a long life of hating many things in great detail, but I came up with nothing. It was remarkable, at the very least, for being a singularity. A great, yawning void of anti-passion that one could not possibly feel any intense way about. Had it been any further lacking in any observable qualities, considering it at length might've led me to achieve enlightenment or something.

The next night was a furry dinner appropriately enough at the Lazy Dog restaurant, with a pretty good crowd. Arc and Metric in the lead, naturally. Avwuff I knew I'd crossed paths with before, and was flattered to hear that he remembered my fondly. I found Srice there, who I remembered from RMFC and got him to do the same with a little coaxing. We had a French visitor named Nightwolf whose name is too much of a needle-in-a-needlestack for me to pin down but he seemed like a pretty cool dude. And of course there was Kiswara, a guy that I was very happy to make the acquaintance of, learn the actual name of, and have some substantial interaction with other than just getting drunk and mistaking him for Roman Otter, which I've done like a billion times and I feel terrible about it. He's always fairly polite when I do it though, so that's certainly a mark in his favor. We had a lot of good laughs that night. I'd say it was definitely worth the many overpriced drinks that I bought. Goddamn, I got like, the gentlest wispy buzz off of that. Back home $50 worth of alcohol would've killed me twice over. Maybe it's for the best that I couldn't manage living in the bay quite yet.

Another prominent adventure was rock climbing, a completely new one on me, actually. We managed to land a husky as our instructor to show us the ropes, so to speak. Fluke definitely comports more like a spider than a dog when he's on the wall, so I knew that we were in good hands, and impossibly nimble toes as well. There was a bit of a learning curve for me. I was too freaked out to make it all the way up my first time, but like, I've got a rope. I really shouldn't be freaked out. That part passes once you realize what a complete non-thing falling is when you've got maybe a couple inches of slack at any given time, depending on how on the ball your ground crew is. I actually found belaying to be a pretty well-designed support minigame. Simple principles, dynamic interaction and quick feedback, yeah, app developers could learn a thing or two from that interaction.

Similar to the go-karting experience I had several years back, starting out as a first-timer with a crowd of hyperenthusiasts has a way of screwing things up for you. Just as I was on the cusp of moving past "conquering fear" to "having fun", Archai swooped in to bury me in too much advice for me to move another inch. "Oh no you're doing it wrong, you're only supposed to use the green ones!" This is literally my third lifetime attempt at ascending a climbing wall. Of course I'm fucking doing it wrong! Not all of us came out of the womb with a carabiner hooked around our umbilical cord. I was really just trying to get comfortable with the heights involved and the movements to push myself upward with my legs, figuring out the mechanics of grip, you know, all the base level stuff that you really just need to fiddle with for a bit without thinking too hard. Naturally the team of advanced climbers knew exactly what was needed to help with that, shouting the full text of a hundred-page strategy guide at me! They got me actually doing it by the rules next run, which is a lot like stepping up from Connect Four to that microgravity orbital laser arena in Ender's Game in a single transition. Sending Kyreeth up alongside as a tutor was a good thought, but there was WAY too much to think about for me to actually learn anything and it was NOT a good time. Some excerpts:

"Alright, now grab this one here."
"By what fucking demon magic? There are nowhere near enough elbows OR spatial dimensions to achieve such a movement."

"Don't keep your arms bent like that."
"Well I'd LOVE to straighten them out but that would send them into the forbidden zone with all those disgusting NON-GREENS that would apparently sear my flesh on contact."

"You're going to want to push yourself up by that one."
"What? That gum-wad the size of a tic-tac box? Yeah there's a reason I've been avoiding that thing. I'm pretty sure it's just decorative, or some kind of mimic."

"Yes, that one right there, with your right hand."
"You want me to CROSS MY ARMS? Are you trying to get me strung up by this rope? If I'm to die in this undignified fashion I am one HUNDRED percent taking you with me."

"That's a foothold, not a handhold."
"Save it for the semantics wall, E.B. White!"

"Go for that one up and to your right."
"THAT thing? There's enough real-estate between here and there that I could rent the space out for $2600 a month! I'd need to wire up a signal repeater to send that handhold a text message!"
"It's really not that far."
"Oh look I just got a reply 'OMG ur never gonna reach dis XD'."

So yeah, if you couldn't tell it didn't go so well. I gave up about 60% of the way up, partly out of exhaustion and partly because I couldn't take the micromanaging anymore. I guess it was for the best that I called it quits, as I was pretty sick when I got back to the ground. As it happens, I hadn't learned any low-energy holding positions yet. That was fine when I was just scrambling up whatever way worked by rapidly spinning my arms Scooby-Doo style, but when I had to pause to get my roctorate in rockology every couple seconds a high-strain position really cost me. The psychological pressure of 'Okay, now that you've exhausted yourself hanging here, flip upside down and jam your wrist through your sternum' only masked the fact that I really was overexerting my muscles. I had lots of numbness in my limbs, my lips swelling and lots of other troubling circulation artifacts that forced me to sit for the rest of the session.

The last time I felt like that was at work. We had to wing open a couple huge, heavy valves to change our cooling lineup. It was cool to be really doing something in the plant, but somewhere in the requisite 135 turns I overdid it. Got the thing open, but had tunnel vision and ringing in my ears afterwards. I probably would've passed out if someone hadn't startled me at just the right moment with a well-timed congratulatory pat on the back. I had beaten the other guy who was opening the second valve. Anyways, back in the near-past I fought the wall and the wall won. I'd be willing to give it another go, potentially. Now that I've made it clear to Archai that if I ever hear that he's tried to introduce someone to climbing in that fashion again I'll string him up there by his neck and bash him against those rocks until his spine sounds like coffee grinder.

On the eve of our departure, Zed Hyena joined us, as he was going to be along for the ride to Reno. He and his boyfriend Damien subjected us to the surreal comedy that arises when a couple furries buy a shock collar. The guilt about laughing at someone else's suffering goes away when you know that they are also super into that suffering, though the further implications of that second part are perhaps even more troubling than the surface premise. True of many activities, I suppose. So unlike most subjects, I won't dwell on it in detail.

Anyways, the next day Archai stuffed the Yukon with a loadout that he assured me was much smaller than usual because we weren't throwing a suite party this year. The fact that the great behemoth vehicle was filled to capacity didn't seem to contradict this in any way in his mind, though the change in equipment config did seem to slow him down a fair bit in terms of selecting what to bring. Ordinarily I wouldn't think too much of the delay, but there actually were a few Thursday events to speak of. It was perhaps the only time during that sparsely-populated schedule that I felt like I was really missing out on something, so it's great that we got it out of the way early I guess?

Much of the first morning was consumed by the all-encompassing debacle that was the opening of the Dealers' Den. I mean, I had no part in it of course. That thing's gonna be open for like 20 hours total over the weekend, I've never seen the need to stampede in there immediately. Then again I've never been one of those people that felt strongly compelled to divest myself of all my money the moment that I arrive at a con. A strange urge, really. I've found that if I really desperately need to be rid of money that fast I could just throw it off a bridge, or in this case use the far more efficient method, the attached casino at the venue. Anyways, that kind of thing did set the tone a bit. What had happened was they'd increased the super-spacegod-emperor buffer on the opening from 15 minutes to 60 minutes without really telling anybody. Most announcements had been made that morning, leading most people to have already settled upon their money-disposing plans for the day. So yeah, not only were there quite a volume of people, there were many who showed up later on who assumed the line would let up by then, only to find the line hadn't even started to get let IN yet. That was kind of a distressing lack of organization and audience-savvy for supposedly the BEST CON in the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD, or so it had been billed to me. I was trying to nail down exactly what was going on with their schedule, and it turned out that I needn't have bothered fighting my way to the electronic one, as it had exactly the same update mechanism as the paper one. None, or at best some manner of vague shouting at arbitrary times. Kind of a waste of the potential of having an online schedule if you just leave it up as a static document the whole con. Once again that's a pretty average thing for a supposedly exceptional convention to do. In any case, I got away from that madhouse to eat burgers with Lanhao and catch up with him for a bit.

I got to know the other occupants of the suite, who were quite numerous but I'll do my best here. The familiar ones were Archai, Metric, Groggy, Damian, Zed and Brokenwing, with newcomers Strixidos, Tirian Cat, Woofy Bunny and Devoss Wilberg. Yeah, it was a packed house. I was still just getting warmed up, but the suite seemed to really mean it this time. With liquor sloshing around, a few people in various states of undress and Groggy in the big armchair double-fisting a vape and nitrous oxide, I knew that the party had begun. I tried to do a few whip-its with him, but apparently I'm just really bad at doing drugs because even after extensive rounds of advice from the many learned huffers around me I never really got much out of it. Oh well, I suppose there are far worse flaws to have.

I had a chance to meet Nomad, whose commissions I've been a fan of for a long time. He was very flattered that I'd heard of him, which is always a nice feeling to give somebody. I dropped by Stormy and Toby's kink panel, a fun time as always. It was opposite the "fursuit festival", a gathering that BLFC has in place of a parade. I would've been interested to see what kind of thing they cooked up there, but I wasn't really up for fursuiting right then and I wanted to go with the sure thing. The fact that the kink panel has never gotten old for me even having been to quite a few of them speaks for itself. And of course it was a good chance to catch up with them afterwards. With a big con like this you never want to miss a chance to connect with someone. It's way too easy to lose people in the shuffle.

After Stormy and her crew had to run off to a rubber party I went down to the ballroom to see "I Comedy Better when I've had a few" with Alkali and his usual basket of deplorables. Nobody was at the appointed time and place though. I figured it was yet another scheduling snag that they'd neglected to say anything about, so I wandered a bit around that spot, checked out the dance and such. I found little of interest, but when I came back Pandez, Alkali and Draggor were there doing the show, so I guess my do-over did the trick. I was glad to see those guys here, because their stories are quite reliably entertaining, and hearing them told in comic fashion is exactly the kind of thing that I come to a furry con to do. They're rather the old guard of this phenomenon, so they've seen the most shit even among those who have really seen some shit. Their compatriot Xander the Blue runs what I believe was the first furry website that I ever visited, back when I was still only just realizing that furry was a thing. So yeah, it's great to hear from our history. Particularly when they're liquored up and exhausted. It's fun to be paying attention to what's coming out of someone's mouth when they very much are not keeping tabs on that.

Saturday I got up a bit late because of similar demotivation reasons that plagued me during Furthemore. And also because my eyes were killing me. I’d thought it had just been a weird sleep pattern thing when they’d started hurting and turning red the previous night, but they were like that the whole con. The only thing I can think to explain it is all the smoking on the casino floor. In the northeast, we banned smoking a LONG time before it was cool to hate on it, so it’s been many years since I’ve been in a building that you could smoke in. It certainly didn't help the difficult bed-breakup that the only event I was particularly compelled by didn't happen until 3:00. I did make it to that though. It was the dance competition, which was a absolute joy as always. I was really hoping that would be the boost that I needed and it most certainly was. When the Weeb Warriors incorporated the Dragon Ball Z fusion dance into their routine it really brought down the house. It was a very pure and bafflingly specific kind of joy. I even got to see Fluke up on stage doing his thing. Apparently he's got other hobbies that make great use of his endurance and flexibility. Kaira Tiger also totally shredded a routine to Fallout Boy's Phoenix, a song that has long been a source of inner-fire for me.

After that Groggy let me take another spin in Tonga the panda as he threw on his native suit Torque. He was on his way to the inflatables meet and I stopped by with him for a bit to play with the giant hamster ball bubbles that they had down there. Those things are incredibly fun in fursuit, even if a finite volume of oxygen is absolutely the LAST thing you need when dressed up like a Carnivale parade float. Even after I debubbled and wandered off Tonga was great fun. He's a real flashy design, and as such a huge attention-getter. Naturally all the identity theft tends to bewilder people that I'm meeting, like Kory Leo, whom I encountered for the first time in like fashion. Hopefully I can catch up with him again some other time dressed as me. I also stopped by Lanhao’s tabletop game to lend them a little color. I had meant to meet Ryoken and his crew out by the pool, but it didn't quite come together. I did take a spin out there, but it was dark by then, and thus a profoundly unpleasant place to fursuit, particularly to guest-fursuit. Tonga’s beautiful tail naturally has to be kept clear of the water and mud, and beyond that concern there’s the fire pits, puddles, poor lighting, and tricky glass walls, all of which make it pretty stressful to move around and basically impossible to find anyone.

That was actually my only occasion to visit the pool other than going out there to get better signal to call my mom on Mother’s day. I didn’t feel much draw towards the nightly pool party because of how cold it was. Granted it was spring-desert-cold, so like mid-fifties usually, but still not a great time to be wet. Metric tried to explain the weird, westcoastian anti-logic of it when I mentioned it. "Oh well you’re not using the pool when you go there. You’re just being at the pool party." Kind of like how ads for alcohol aren’t allowed to show anyone physically putting the drink in their mouth, so they make a big show of ordering it and pouring it, only to just kind of walk around the party with the drink while more interesting things happen around them. Anyways, after expending all the energy I had for panda-ing, I headed back to our room to hang out with the crowd there and have a great time. I also invited Wikiwarrior up to hang out because he's also one of those prolific commissioners whose art wallpapers my FA. It was a little awkward to drag him into a big group of people, half of whom even I didn't know that well, but we got to chat and there was pizza and wings. If we're just golden-ruling this interaction, I'd have a tough time being upset with it! I got to see Clyde Hyena again, who was delighted to hear me tell of my trip to one of his house parties awhile back. There was also an Yonoa, whose unabashed joy and enthusiasm for all he does is always a treat to have around. I’m fairly tempted to commission him for a fursuit, honestly. I feel like he’d get bored with a dog though. He’s always innovating with his designs and looking for new challenges. He’s the last person I’d want to disappoint with a fairly pedestrian canine project.

I wasn’t quite up for the fursuit games the next morning, but Quipfur (furry Quiplash) was opposite that in the schedule, so I made time for it. It was another Dragett crew event, and it was easily one of the most spectacular disasters I’ve ever been a part of. This hotel has not just terrible internet availability, it seems like their network protocols are set up to actively sabotage anybody trying to transmit information, to the point that a few learned users in the crowd were looking up FCC regs to see if the way they were virtually dicking us around was even legal. We spent a good 15 minutes or so just trying to get a local network connected so that we could transmit answers up to the board, resulting in a broad and baffling array of failure modes. We were literally trying to relay a couple words 15 feet and we just got shit all over the entire time. Alkali showed up in the middle of this process and his journey to the panel room is both a wonderfully "typically Alkali" thing and is a decent allegory about how organized the network setup process was. His account follows:

"I went to the wrong panel room. I wouldn’t have known it because they welcomed me in there and invited me to participate, so I did. I have no idea what the hell that event was, but it involved me singing at one point so I knew I had to get out of there."

We ended up just putting up two of the phones that randomly happened to work up front so that everyone could enter in answers on those. I came up with some suggestions that fared pretty well with the audience. One of which was just unabashedly shitting on Draggor for the wifi disastrophe, but it was still funny. One of my answers may also have inadvertently created "The Knotzi Party" and for that crime only the gods can judge me.

After that I did, not much really. It’s hard for me to articulate how unbearably sparse this schedule is, but I’ll give that my best shot in the wrap-up. So stay tuned for that, fans of me complaining! I did finally stop by the art show during that period, once I eventually figured out that the doors to the art show room that were labeled "art show" and had been locked the whole time weren’t the ones one was supposed to use to get to the art show. You actually had to go through registration to get to tabletop gaming and go from there to the art show. You know, sensibly. I actually did see a couple pieces that I really liked. There was this one picture by Bubbles Fennec of an African painted dog painting spots on a hyena (it's in the middle here) that was just AAAGHPFH! I think Kathy would've loved it but I tapped out after getting outbid twice. It seems a bunch of rich silicon valley people also saw all the fun cool art. That's personally disappointing, but putting the art in front of the money in hopes of attracting one to the other is how auctions are supposed to function. I’m glad the artists are getting a good value for their work.

I tried to drag Archai along for the closing ceremonies, but about 20 minutes into the string of delays and even longer string of giant-ass line filling up the ballroom he gave up. Truly amazing lines in there, for realz. The whole second ballroom was basically a main events line-handling region, and we still had a Family Circus chaotic criss-cross going on in there. I gave up on the line as well actually, except un-give-up-ing somehow ended up working out. I had time to wait in line for all of that, give up, wander around, go outside and talk to my mom on the phone for 20 minutes, and come back in, all before they actually started. They were a whole HOUR late in starting the actual thing. I missed a good chunk of the opening number because I was texting Archai "Good call my dude. Didn’t start until literally just now."

It was a decent ceremony. The con theme that year was music, so there was a bit more showmanship on display than was typical, which was kind of nice actually. Apparently the musical earlier went really well. I wish they'd made it clearer what that event was. The way it was listed I just saw another one among a half-dozen musical performances on the schedule, which have always been kind of take-it-or-leave-it for me. I didn't realize that they were doing the first performance of an all-new custom musical that Fox n' Peppers had created just for the con. They really buried the lead on that one and I regret missing it. The ceremony blew a LOT of time reading off every last number on their balance sheet for the charity and hosting another auction piece. I mean I support them and it's really cool how much we raised but going through the whole Excel spreadsheet line by line is as interesting as... well most other Excel spreadsheets. It made the ceremony incredibly long for an event that neither dispensed attendance numbers, nor announced the next year's theme. I’m definitely glad that I stuck it out until the end though. Their closing song was a fucking masterpiece. A tremendously engaging performance, and a message that brought out the kind of biting, achingly beautiful sadness that can only come from having first known great, soaring joy. We have to go, but it’s not really goodbye, because we’ll see each other again. It was a vision of grace like nothing else my eyes have seen, and a resonance of emotion like nothing my heart has ever felt. I would fervently encourage all of you to watch it when it comes up online. I looked online and the only closing video I've seen cuts out a mere 36 minutes in (told ya it ran on a bit) and doesn't cover the second half. I'll update when a video shows up.

The great behemoth of closing ceremonies pushed back the next event a bit, as it tied up many of the hosts. Regardless, Whose Lion is it Anyway fired up and proceeded apace into the night. It was a really great time, and I contributed a few fun ones there too. World’s Worst and Scenes from a Hat have always been my strong spots. That’s how my humor is. I’m always good at quickly coming up with one and only one funny thing in one specific scenario at a time. Keeping that momentum up for a whole scene is something that I’ve gotta work on. My heart goes out to the audience members that had to do a hoedown, as that silly drinking song is actually one of the toughest games. The look of joy on Alkali’s face when one of the people up there completely dunked on a verse was a palpable moment of triumph. It looked like he’d finally found meaning in his life.

I actually hadn’t worn my own suit all con up until that point, so it was quite literally now or never. I was waffling about it for a bit because I wasn't quite feeling it, but fortunately Metric introduced me to shouldIbefursuitingnow.com, a site he operates which handily resolved the conflict. It was actually pretty funny, that outing. When bereft of my phone and ability to see clearly, I actually had much better luck finding some people that I’d been looking for. I managed to find and congratulate a number of dancers on their routines, to include Fluke! I didn’t explain precisely who I was, but hopefully the fact that he taught me rock climbing narrowed the field at least a little. I also found Roman Otter for the first and only time. He’d been working at the con, so he was pretty toast by then, but was still having lots of fun. There were others, but I’ve either mentioned them already in other parts or completely forgotten who they were because I was running out of brain by then. Many thanks to all of you!

Naturally at the deepest, darkest, most dangerous part of the night, the last event of the con was the adult fursuit games, an event that I had never seen the like of before. I mean, I knew of a few "adult fursuit games" *wiggles eyebrows* but not as a panel, so I thought this one would be worth dressing up and turning out for. I was a little dubious as to what we might get up to, but it was actually a TON of fun, and not nearly so depraved as what one might think given the title and audience. I found Axton Collie there, who of course mistook me for Acefox because of my inherited costume. When he gleefully recanted the complications of having sex with Ace in the shower upon my clarifying who I was and then proceeded to massively dunk on the Never-have-I-Ever game, I got a better idea of exactly why he and Ace got along so well in the past.

The games were actually pretty well designed, and never seemed to get old. For that first one, the chairs were in a circle and every time you had done one of the mentioned lasciviousnesses you had to move one chair to the right. The combination of the hads and the had-nots meant that there was some overlap among those assembled, occasionally creating chairs with four or five fursuiters on them, which typically goes about how you’d imagine it would go. I also really liked the game where two suiters had to pop a balloon between the two of them without touching it with their hands or feet. That’s such a cool idea because it seems like a children’s game until you realize that there are very few non-suggestive ways of accomplishing that. Despite the legacy of my fantastic fornicating fox forbearer, this would in fact be the first time I’ve grabbed another fursuiters hips and sharply shoved them against mine. It definitely popped the balloon though! Maybe I’ve got a knack for this. Anyways, all of that furry adulting wore out the last of my energy for the night and I turned in.

Next day was of course the packing. After I’d effectively boxed up all my stuff and moved it out of my adjoining room, I ran off to say hello/goodbye to Ryoken, Reggie, and Reo Grayfox (see Reo? I remembered you!). I’d been trying to find them the whole con, but hadn’t managed it thus far. Certainly didn’t help that Ryo would say that they were "on the casino floor" if I was looking for him. Oh thanks. Not like that’s a noisy, crowded room the size of a football field that’s designed to be intentionally disorienting or anything. I felt a little bad leaving Archai behind to pack up all his troubles, but he dug this hole, and then filled it with pilotable bean-bag-chair animals, so that’s his problem! At least for as long as it takes to see a couple people off. We ended up with plenty of time for loadout anyways. Since everyone else in the hotel was also trying to move fleets of suitcases and squishy animals outside at the same time there was quite a delay in bringing to bear the necessary flotilla of luggage carts. A delay which was technically not our fault and thus we could be insulated from late checkout consequences. Archai went to complete checkout and get cash to tip everybody, and our bellhop seemed pretty new at this, so I got to try my hand at Yukon Tessellating, which is both a skill that I’d honed on this trip and also the new name of my Stonesour coverband.

And that, as they say, was that. We spent the next couple days recovering from all that fun we’d been having and then I was on my way. Though there was a chance for a few interesting interactions squeezed in there. Archai had been surprised and baffled by how archaic my laptop was when he’d tried to hook it up to his speakers via Bluetooth. It didn’t quite predate the technology, but its antenna was only suited to file transfers. It didn’t have the bandwidth for music. I thought that this was just the same ribbing that I get with much of my technology, but it turned out that the nerds upstairs had been sorting through their collective recycle bins and Damien had found me a laptop that was a couple generations newer. Another Lenovo Thinkpad even, such as would smooth the transition. I thanked him profusely for the upgrade, and joked "well, you got any phones up there?" And it would seem karma saw fit to cancel out some of those jokes that got me into such trouble. I now have a fairly good-condition Galaxy S7 Edge to replace the one that had struggled so futilely through my last two cons. Goddamn, I should bring a shopping list when I come here! I also learned that Kyreeth is a pretty big fan of Freefall as it turns out. I really wish we’d had time to nerd out over that, but I learned it literally as I was leaving, so all I had time to do was pimp out my fanfic to him and hope that he follows up on it. I’ll have to bookmark that topic for another visit.

I had remembered what a deathmarch that a morning flight had been on my last visit there, so I opted for an overnight to get back this time. This meant that the trip through security was blindingly fast, with there being next to no lines at any step. For someone traveling with two laptops, three phones and a tablet, I expected there to be a disaster. I did get subjected to extra screening at the gate though. That went fine because I’d just been at a furry con, so I was well prepared for the experience of having strangers rub all over my body. They did forget to give me my nailclippers back though. I just got new ones after my previous set had been eaten by a different airline. Dammit, hangnails really suck! Stop denying me the tools I need to live my life!

Naturally this evening departure plan of mine ran afoul of Spirit Airlines and their ingenious dismissal of the ability of seats to lean back seriously how expensive could that mechanism possibly be you cheap fucks. So not much sleep happened on the trip back wherein I really wished it had. Anyways, if you’d forgotten from up top, that flight was also delayed and that’s what got me started writing. Fortunately it wasn’t a long enough delay for me to get all of this typed up, I’d still be in California if that were the case. It’s nice to have something to get the ball rolling though. During the interminable wait for my $180 worth of bags at the carousel I helped an old man negotiate some terribly impatient sliding doors with his own luggage. He tipped me $4. Wait, did he assume that I work there? Why does that keep happening? Anyways, I got my stuff into the elevator only to find that the button for my floor didn’t work and staggeringly the solution was not to punch it really hard and get a button-cover-shaped abrasion on the side of your hand. Yup, this was Detroit alright. I had to overshoot and go back down one. Naturally in the course of this interaction my MP3 player fell out of my pocket and bounced right into the gap at the door jamb of the elevator, falling six stories to its painful demise. ‘Twas a faithful soldier, one who had served me well for eight years. Since I only used it traveling these days, it ended up being kind of a fun time capsule since I never remembered to update the playlist. Ah well, can’t fight back the march of time and all that. I wonder if Damien has any newer ones. I’ll have to ask next time I’m visiting.

So yeah, closing remarks then. This con definitely didn’t live up to expectations, but it would be irresponsible of me to fail to qualify that with the fact that most everybody I talked to told me that this con was LIFE-CHANGINGLY AMAZING and they would JUST DIE if I didn’t come out there and join them for it. So BLFC was kind of set up to fail in that regard. Honestly I kind of wish I hadn’t heard about it before. Which is a dumb thing to want, because I never would’ve gone if I hadn’t heard about it. Still, I feel like that’s a big chunk of why I came away from it feeling so tepid. I feel like I could’ve done better with this one if I hadn’t come at it with so many preconceptions. It’s kind of like Teen Titans: Go. A fairly competent show, I’m sure, but I can’t help but dislike it because the original Teen Titans was an absolute masterpiece that set the bar cartoonishly high. So high that even a highly cartoonish cartoon couldn’t cartoon that high.

There’s certainly a bit of trouble with my standards, but some things are more objective. There were definitely a lot of venue things that were odd. Not sure how much control the con has have there, but such things are still worth mentioning. They have zoned elevators, which is wonderful for helping to fight elevator congestion, but this year they made the baffling and completely arbitrary decision to make all the stairwell doors lock from the outside. So you could never use the stairs to get from one floor to another, which turned around and fucked the elevators right back up. It’s incredibly frustrating to be on floor eight and realize that if you want to get to floor seven you have to take an elevator down to the lobby and then get on a different elevator to go back up. Madness! I assume it’s so that people wouldn’t fuck or do drugs or whatever in the stairwell but like, is that ever that big of a problem when there’s so many people using the stairs regularly? Would making them even MORE private help or hurt that? And also, we’re having drugs and doing sex in our rooms anyway! What’s it matter?

I’ve mentioned their network weirdness before, but I need to again because it was huge, pervasive and a big drag on the con. This had to be another one of those cases where they’d intentionally sabotaged a certain network path because much of the time web browser traffic would be kinda okay most of the time, but Telegram would be completely unusable almost always. Seems slight, but that’s actually a HUGE deal now that Telegram is the reigning monarch of all furry networking platforms. I know this used to be how I always lived, but these days I can’t go back to the dark ages of having to run back to my room all the time to check my laptop to see what’s up and where people are at. That's how I end up just sitting in my room all the time and not interacting with anybody, as did happen a couple times this con, for that reason. Don’t build me up just to bring me down, technology! Also this probably seems minor, and it is, but their sheets and mattress pads aren’t fitted. Sure it’s hardly a warcrime but it’s fucking weird and it makes it really hard to get in the bed quietly in the dark so you don’t wake your roommates, especially the first time when you don’t yet know of this bizarre, arbitrary bed paradigm. There are certainly things that are nice about this place. It's a casino, so it's definitely a venue that's tuned for entertainment. The bowling, mini golf and go-karting included with registration are certainly something you wouldn't find elsewhere. Shame I couldn't find anybody else interested in them. So yeah, some good, some bad, but altogether a pretty weird vibe from this hotel. Especially for one that's been around the block and should understand the particulars of a furry con a bit better by now.

The feel of this con also reminded very strongly of my first FC. If you'll recall, back then I was thinking that FC wasn't worth the $300 plane tickets after my first experience with it. But Archai kept inviting me back and eventually I got a feel for it. This whole west-coast feel where the schedule is kinda sparse and it's mostly about socializing? Even with my years of getting used to that at FC I was wildly unprepared for the extreme to which that philosophy is taken at this con. There were maybe like five events in the whole thing that I had a real, keen interest in, whereas at most east-coast cons I'll be buried in events and I've gotta pointedly choose the ones I'll miss. It's like someone took a look at how far FC had gone in that direction and decided "Well those bay-armpit wusses didn't go nearly far enough! We're gonna make the emptiest, quietest, kinkiest, west-coastiest, room-partiest, drug-doingest con there is. I see so little con going on during this con. Just people blowing money in the casino while smoking like chimneys, getting shwacked and then sloppily grinding on each other. I mean, don’t get me wrong those are fine things that happen at any con, but the attitude of this one seemed to be "Oh yeah, all the drugs and gambling and elaborate sex parties are the WHOLE CON. Why do you think we hosted it in budget-Vegas? If you don’t want to be a part of the sickest, banginest seven-deadly-sins-fest there is then go back to Pax East and play Mancala or some shit, whatever it is you squares do!" I'm surprised that the signature drink of this con wasn't just an everclear-spiked can of Monster energy drink garnished with some Viagra, a concoction referred to as the "Mount-and-do".

This comparison is far too extreme, but the tone does remind me of the way that RainFurrest felt that all the in-public weird shit that shook up the normies was the one quintessential thing that their con needed to be based on. Now, that's not to say that BLFC has a public image problem, in fact the staff presents as outstandingly professional, it's just a comparison that I think is apt for the way that they've kinda missed me with their apparent mission statement. I found FC to be fairly approachable from such a state, but BLFC is a bit further out into the reeds. I may or may not be able to bridge the gap. I wouldn't say they're doing a bad job, necessarily. Beyond scheduling snags it seems fairly well run, they've got great AV, and have a good track record of commitment to their themes. Obviously they can't be doing too bad if they're shooting up like... um, I can't think of a simile for shooting up that's not heroin-related and I feel like I've talked about drugs enough so we'll just say that their numbers are growing precipitously.

I guess that's the final word then. I didn't have the rending-of-the-cosmos complete blast of a time that I was promised, but I had a good time. I think I'd be willing to give them another chance now that I've got a better idea what their deal is. But yeah, in all I feel like I've been as transparent with what BLFC's MO is as I can. So all I can say is if it sounds like their thing is your thing then I bet you'll have a great time there! And even if it's not quite my thing, I'm glad its out there. There's enough cons now that they should be able to specialize and appeal to more particular tastes. It seems like a lot of people have found that this is the right con for them, and a lot of those people are really cool dudes. So yeah. Enjoy your thing, cool dudes! You've earned it.