You know how sometimes you run into something in the world that means one thing to everyone else, and something completely different to furries?

Yeah, this was one of those times. The backstory is that my dad has taken up the cult of woodworking as a hobby. And I do mean cult. Suddenly he's immersed in a world of strange new terms. A biscuit to him is not a flaky food item that is delicious when covered in gravy or when sliced and used as bread for a breakfast sandwich. It's something you use when joining two pieces of wood together. Snipe is not either a real wading bird or a nonexistent bird used as part of a practical joke on novice hunters. It's an artifact from running a board through a planing machine. And so on.

So anyway, I was talking with him today. I was with  foxnight, but I stepped out of line of sight for a moment. He kept on talking to Foxnight. I was around the corner and I heard him announce that he was going to start "dog breeding" in the basement.

I held my breath and silently willed Fox to have the self control not to respond to that the way he would if I said it. There are some things you don't just casually say to foxes.

Fox later confessed to me that he was thinking it. He managed to keep from making that "baroo" noise, but he still did the tilted head gesture of curiosity. But my dad didn't really get the full implication of that body language.

Apparently what my dad meant is that he was going to start mass producing bench dogs, which are kind of like pegs you can put into holes in a workbench and use for clamping purposes. And yes, the holes you put them into are indeed called dog holes. It gets better, though, because he was going to mass produce the dogs through the use of a blank, a template that would guide the cutting of the wood. And that template would be called his "dog breeder".

Give me credit. I kept a straight face until Fox and I were out of earshot.

I had honestly forgotten that some fiction had unhappy endings. I don't know what this says about me, but I don't typically watch movies with unhappy endings. I was convinced to watch a Stephen King movie with a really revoltingly bad ending, one designed to be not only very unhappy, but futile at the same time. I nearly wanted to punch out the one responsible for me seeing it. Especially when I found out he knew that's how it ended. Let's say it will likely be my last Stephen King movie as well. It's not that it was too scary, just too goddamn depressing.

But no, see, I was reading a story in a magazine I got at MFF some years ago. It was a story about someone in a relationship that he felt had gone cold, with a mate who seemed to like it that way. The main character had been feeling the desire to cheat.

I was reading along, wondering where it was going. I was trying to see how it was going to be resolved, I mean it was a short story, it had to result in the couple reconciling. But the pages were running out, and it wasn't happening. I was on the last page, and it was looking bad, but no, something else had to happen, didn't it? Sentences keep coming, and then it's over, ending on a suggestion that maybe things aren't going to get better.

Sorry, I did a garbage job explaining it, but I didn't want to retell the story, on the offchance that anyone reading this runs into it and doesn't want it ruined.

I was about to go to bed. I thought it was going to be a happier story. I thought it was going to give me something to drift off to sleep thinking about. Now I'm left with the thought "sometimes things don't work out" repeating in my head. How can I sleep after that?

Damnit furry authors... aren't you supposed to be writing porn? I mean, there was sex in it... it was pretty hot. But this author was shooting for erotica, not porn, so he put the rest of the story in there too and I'm left feeling distinctly unsettled.

Still... I need to learn to stop reading this stuff before bed. The last time I did this I was left quite traumatized by a particularly difficult passage in a longer book, and it took me hours to get to sleep.

Gah... now I need to find something to distract and relax me from the thing that was supposed to help me relax. This could get to become a vicious cycle. Believe me, I've learned my lesson, I'm not touching anymore short fiction tonight. Maybe I'll go with someone playing some pleasantly slow paced game on youtube.

Occasionally my dreams are interesting.

Last night I had a dream I was moving to Washington DC. I blame playing the game Payday 2 too much for that one, since it's set in DC. But I was moving in to an apartment building in a city. As the dream progressed the landlady of the building kept being involved.

The dream was a little vague and unfocused, so there wasn't exactly a clear narrative. But at some point it became clear that the landlady was a werewolf. As was her daughter, who had an interest in me. Somehow a family of werewolves took an interest in kind of adopting me.

At some point I think I got turned into a werewolf and spent a lot of time hanging out with the daughter, and also being taught something or another by an older guy who was either the landlady's husband or perhaps father. He kind of took on a guru role in the dream, showing me how to be a werewolf. Teaching me the dos and don'ts.

Sadly I can't say there was a lot more detail. There were a number of themes being expressed in this dream, it wasn't just a werewolf fantasy. The rest was just general feelings of insecurity, worry over the future, and that kind of thing. But I think for a while at least I got to kind of roam a city by night as a werewolf. I didn't kill anybody or anything, it was more the narrative of experimenting with the new powers and considering whether I wanted to go back to the people who were teaching me or rebel and go out on my own.

Still, kind of a fun dream. With some REALLY weird, specific, pointless details. Like one where I was using some kind of online admission card maker for the Smithsonian Museums. As you typed in your name and other details it filled in a QR code on the card it was making. The thing is, the Smithsonian museums don't charge admission. I knew that. But my dream didn't. And I just find that interesting.

One of my last memories from MFF involved going to the top level of the parking garage to try to get some video of the aircraft flying overhead. A plane had just flown overhead and I when looked in the direction it had come from I saw a train of lights stretching towards the horizon, but they didn't seem to be moving.

I've seen this before, I knew better, but still for a moment I couldn't believe those were the planes in the landing pattern. I mean, airliners move fast. That's their reason for existing. Even when on final approach they're still moving well over 100 mph. But at that moment they seemed frozen in the night sky. And also impossibly close together.

I wanted to tell this story as a thinly veiled metaphor for the way that perspective changes everything. From my perspective I couldn't see them moving much at all until they got closer. But I realized that there was another one hidden in that concept. The reason I couldn't see much motion is that they were mostly heading straight towards me.

There's something else in that. In the idea of seeing a thing on the horizon, and although it's coming straight towards you you can't see it move because it's coming at you.

But then again I'm trying to make something happen that seems impossibly distant. No, no stories about that yet, I'm not superstitious by nature but I still don't want to jinx it.

I've got a weird brain. Someone once referred to my "Ipod mind". To put it simply, I like music a lot and even when I'm not listening to music I'm often hearing some remembered song in my head. I sometimes have original songs appear in my dreams, not complex stuff but basic things that I don't think I've heard before. Sometimes I wake up with the theme song to my last dream still playing in my head.

But the thing is, my subconscious sometimes communicates to me through music. More to the point it teases me through music. The best way I can explain with an example. Ages ago I knew someone who had some kind of problem where she had a hole in her heart. One day she was explaining it, and all of a sudden the Extreme song Hole Hearted started playing in my head. And the thing is it takes me a moment to realize what's happened. This is definitely my subconscious at work, it's not like I was trying to think of an ironically appropriate song for the moment.

Perhaps my favorite example of this was a ways back with my ex girlfriend. We were together around the hour of midnight, doing... the things a couple tends to do together in the evening hours. And all of a sudden I hear "In the midnight hour, she cried more more more". That's right, I get Billy Idol playing in my head at that moment. And when I realize what's happened I just start laughing. In the middle of THAT activity.

So I have to stop and explain what's happened in my head, because laughter there is too easy to misinterpret. She sort of gave me a stern look and said that it was a good thing she liked Billy Idol.

So flash forward to now. Christmas is fast approaching and I can't stop thinking about the fact that last year I was spending it with a certain fox that I'd rather be spending it with again this year, but can't. I get the feeling I won't be able to spend new years with him either, and I hate that. This would be the first year in three years I haven't been able to do that.

So what keeps playing in my head? "All I want for Christmas is you". Mariah freaking Carey. To quote Homer Simpson, shut up brain or I'll stab you with a q-tip!

It's bad enough that it gives me sad 80s love songs (like Foreigner, "I Want to Know What Love Is") when I'm feeling lonely. Yeah, for some reason my subconscious likes to make me feel worse when I'm already feeling down. But at least there it has taste. But Mariah Carey? That's going too far, brain.

I am ALIVE! I look back on yesterday and it kind of feels like I was a zombie for a day. I know too many people who regularly do that to themselves so perhaps there's no point in describing what it was like any further.

And now I'm just sore all over, but especially my hands. It's so odd, I never get sore hands. The hands never do the real work. The closest I get is my regular sore right wrist from bowling. But now the muscles for each of my fingers are even sore.

The grunt work in gophering is usually not in the gripping of things. The stuff I had to deal with yesterday was still boxed, so sometimes all I could do was grip the sides.

It's actually screwing up my typing, my fingers are a little clumsy today.

File this under general grumbling. But I got up super early (for me) today to help with unloading some stuff for the art show at MFF. Gophering (as volunteering to do work for a convention is known) is typically always interesting, you get to see a different perspective on the convention. I've never gophered for a furcon before and had been wanting to, so I went for it even though I had to get up at around 5am, a time I'm normally still awake from the previous day. Yes, I'm nocturnal, and typically quite happy about it.

The most interesting thing about it to me about this gophering trip was to see a kind of ghost of convention past. Those that went to MFF 2012 may remember the pop machine, instead of the usual rows of ice tables full of cans of pop MFF had a pop dispenser. With custom artwork on the labels to indicate what drink was coming out of what tap.

It was there in the storage facility where they keep all their stuff in the off season. I'm used to seeing the usual boxed up collection of convention stuff. One box of general convention stuff looks much like another, a furcon's stock of stuff doesn't really look any different from a science fiction conventions stock. But the pop dispenser was something identifiable. I could see it and think oh yeah, I remember that, I remember waiting in the line for it, hearing the constant popping sound of the regulator feeding CO2 to the machine. I remember thinking that the character on the Mountain Dew dispenser needed to look a little manic, like he was crazily holding on to the giant can of mountain dew in the image as if it was his "precious". It looked a little eerie just sitting there in the storage locker, I know that sounds absurd but the context of things matter to me. I was used to seeing it in the con suite, typically surrounded by furs who were filling up their cups of the precious sugar water. But now it was sitting there in a dark locker, with some damage to the artwork from some mishap from last year. Maybe being critically sleep deprived made me a bit weird, but I just felt like it was a ghost from the past.

Anyway, gophering went as it usually does. Lots of general bitching about how heavy the stuff is, chit chat amongst the staff that gives you an appreciation about what they go through to make the convention happen, that kind of thing.

After it was over I was driving home, feeling generally satisfied about having done a good deed to help out. And then I took a rock to the windshield, thrown by some vehicle ahead of me. Oy. I've checked it out, and there's a tiny chip that the rock took out of the glass. Hopefully not significant, and hopefully not something that will spread into a crack over time.

So thanks a lot for that one, fate. Way to encourage me to try to be generally helpful. Screw you too.

Anyway, I apologize if this was horribly written, I feel like the words aren't coming out right, my brain is really impaired from how short on sleep I am. You should see what it's like on the inside, it's almost like being drunk but not quite.

It'll be interesting tonight. Either I'll be in supergrump mode, in which case everybody beware, or else I might just be slap happy and laughing at everything, which is rather fun really.

I've been reminded that I haven't written any journal entries in too many months, so here's an idea for a topic. Memories of my first furry convention, MFF in 2008.

2008 was kind of a the year of my full entry into convention life. I'd been to a science fiction convention many years earlier and had a great time, but that was with people that were familiar with the con and who were willing to kind of be my guides to how to do the whole con thing. I mean I was sharing a room with the guy who ran the dances every night. It was also in another state, so I had no local contacts for conventions out here. I'd heard of MFF before, but it felt rather intimidating and I never really considered going. At that point I was largely a solo furry, I was familiar with the fandom but had never talked to another furry and never really considered trying to. It just wasn't a social thing for me at that point.

But in 2008 I started off by going to my second sci-fi con, and a local one that time. I'd had a great time again, and the friend I'd gone with suggested going to MFF that year with me, even though he wasn't a furry. I think he'd had a good time at the one con and wanted to try another one, and was a little curious about seeing what a furry con would be like. Maybe he also wanted to push me to go to it because he thought I'd enjoy it.

It was an intense experience. I arrived in the parking lot and saw my first fursuiter walking around outside and realized I wanted to howl out in celebration. I was there, I was really doing it!

The enthusiasm ended as soon as I walked into the hotel. As soon as I entered all I could think of was how it was filled with people I didn't know, and yet who all seemed to know each other. Yes, I'm not the most socially adept, it was an intimidating experience. I told myself that it would be better that night at the parties. Because that's the thing about sci-fi cons, at night it's all about the parties. There's typically a designated party floor where people hold public room parties, it doesn't matter if you know anybody there or not.

I was discouraged when I didn't see any sign posts with promotions for room parties, which sci-fi cons always have, but I told myself that things just must be different there. Maybe they just weren't up yet. But they never came up. I never found any public parties, and now I know that most furcons specifically prohibit the one standard element of a room party that I was looking for, the room door being propped open to advertise it as a public party.

That night I was pretty upset. I was almost angry at myself. As I was brushing my teeth, I was telling myself that it was a mistake to go, and that I was an idiot for thinking it would be any different there. Just because they were furries didn't mean I'd find it any easier to fit in.

You have to understand how intimidating the social scene was. I could see that there were a number of cliques. The fursuiters hung out together, the artists hung out, and so on. Well I'm kind of a writer, but there was no writer clique. I actually did find a photographer clique to hang out with at a later MFF, but that year I didn't see it. There seemed to be nowhere for me. I felt like a total outcast somewhere that I expected to instantly belong.

That was Friday. So Saturday found me doing the panel thing, going to the events I wanted to see and trying to make the most of what I thought was going to be a lost cause. I don't really remember what I did that day, all I remember is that night when I attended the variety show. Actually I think it started with Uncle Kage's story hour, but I'm not sure. And suddenly I started to feel it. I still didn't know any of those people, but I was sitting in a sea of them, surrounded by them on all sides. We were all laughing at the same jokes, and I started to feel the shared experience.

And then later that night there was the dance. That blew my mind. I'm an odd one, I've liked electronic dance music for a long time but have never really been a dancer. I'm too inhibited. But to be there and to see everything that was going on was amazing to me. The lights and the sounds and all the moving colorful furry things were intoxicating. The thing that I couldn't get over was how everyone was doing something different. All these different dancing styles all intermingling, and somehow it all worked together.

And then it happened. I'd heard about DJs supposedly being masters at controlling the flow of emotion of the dance, of mixing the songs together to maximize the intensity of it, but that all kind of sounded like overblown nonsense to me. That is until the DJ playing at the time did this transition to a bit of rather obscure Jpop, and somehow I had the most intense experience of the convention. I wasn't even dancing, but just being there and hearing and seeing it all was enough. This wave of feeling washed over me, it's hard to explain but it basically was the feeling that I was there, I was experiencing it, I was living! Just one of those magic moments that you can't really understand, all you can do is feel it.

Eventually I had to call an end to the night. I had panels to do the next day and reluctantly left the dance. And that was when the disembodied robo llama head spoke to me. Umm.. yes. I can't remember what name he went by, but there was one super elaborate costume that was of a kind of cyborg llama, at least I think it was a llama. And apparently the head had a camera in it, and the owner had set it on the table by the dance doors. I walked up to it, and it called me by name and invited me to have some of the candy that was scattered about the table. "Come take some candy from a stranger" was how he worded it. So on that surreal note I headed back to my room.

The friend that I'd gone with was already in his bed, and I didn't want to wake him up. But somehow I ended up talking to him, almost shouting when my exuberance started spilling out. I couldn't help it, I was just so jazzed about how I felt. It was like a yoyo of emotion, after feeling so dejected the first day I had come all the way around to elation, and I just had to talk about it. I think he was laughing at me, and that was okay. I was ridiculous, I knew it even then. I didn't care. When you get a moment like that you don't question it, you just go along for the ride.

I looked for a copy of that DJ's set for months, but I never even knew who he was. Months later I finally found it, I was on my laptop in my bed and just winding down before I went to sleep. Then I hit that transition and it all came back to me, and I got so excited that I couldn't sleep for hours. He now goes by Audiodile, and I still watch his web site for any new sets.

Sunday was the usual bittersweet ending. I was walking around thinking how nothing really had changed, it's not like I'd suddenly fallen in with a group of people that I could easily socialize with, but at the same time I felt that sense of belonging. I'd seen a lot of amazing things, and I got my picture taken with this one fursuiter that I was kind of fond of.

And then on the drive back, I experienced PCD. Post Con Depression. Holy crap that was vicious. All I could think of was that the world looked so cold and grey. After being surrounded by brightly colored furry things I was suddenly surrounded by the bleak midwestern winter. I don't know how it hits anyone else, but I couldn't get over this feeling that life would never be okay again.

But I learned that a good night's sleep can do wonders. I woke up feeling much better, but still with the good memories of what I'd just been through.

I've built on that experience. I've been every year since then, and after I learned of a local furry group in my area from a stranger I roomed with in 2009 (who turned out to live about 5 minutes from me) I started going to their monthly bowling meets.

The MFF experience for me now is so different. For the past couple years it's been a case of walking around and having all these people call out to me. I know I always react weird, it's just that I have a really difficult time figuring out who they are. I have difficulty recognizing faces, and when I'm surrounded by so many strange faces it just kind of overloads me and I don't see the familiar ones. So if I go strangely blank when you greet me just understand, it totally is me, not you. I offended someone before who thought that my lack of response indicated that I didn't want to talk to him, and I feel terrible for that. It's just that it takes me a while to shift gears and get into the chit chat mode.

But believe me, it matters to me. It makes me feel like I belong. Okay, so I still don't know most of the people there. That's over a thousand people, of course I don't know them. But I'm amazed at how many people I do know, and who know me. I know a bunch from the local meets, I know a snow leopard fursuiter that I roomed with in 2009, and then there's this one girl who apparently I talked to initially in 2011. I don't remember at all, she says I was very drunk, and that part at least rings true. And yet she seems happy to see me every year, so it can't have gone that badly.

All you guys rock. You make MFF amazing for me every year. I should not be comfortable at an event this large, I should be running away screaming from it. Instead I feel like it's my event, I feel that confidence that comes from believing that you belong.

I invite anyone reading this to share a convention story of their own in the comments. I admit to being curious what these things are like for other people.

A little over a week ago I was at my local furry bowling meet, talking to some people about the question of what name you offer when you're introducing yourself to someone new. It's a problem I've encountered, it seems like every time I introduce myself as Nomad the other person offers their real first name and I feel like a dork. I commented that the same problem often arises at sci-fi cons, and someone responded by saying that of course you'd have to use your real first name because otherwise everyone would be calling themselves Spock.

And I realized that there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what sci-fi cons are like. My fellow furries, I hope I don't need to explain why misunderstandings are not good. In this case I'm not so much concerned about defending the good name of sci-fi cons, or in trying to make people think I'm not a geek (I totally am). No, the thing that bothers me here is, well... For those of you that have been to a furcon and enjoyed it, imagine if you'd heard bad things about furcons and stayed away because you didn't think you'd enjoy them. If you're not a fursuiter and thought that furcons are only for fursuiters, think of everything you'd have missed out on based on that misconception. Science fiction conventions are more than dressing up in Star Trek costumes and debating who was the better Starfleet captain. I know how geeky my fellow furs are, a lot of you might find common ground with other sci-fi convention attendees and it'd be a shame if you missed out because you fear being trapped into an argument about whether Star Trek or Star Wars is better.

So this is my attempt at a PSA on the true nature of sci-fi conventions. First off it must be said that I'm talking about fancons, as opposed to media cons which are the kind of convention that has a lot of big name guest actors and such. There's one of those coming up in Chicago that has basically the entire cast of Star Trek TNG. I've never been to one of those so I can't really speak to what they're like. But a sci-fi fancon is more or less like what furcons are. It's basically a weekend long party, I've heard it described as a party for you and hundreds of your closest friends that you never knew you had. As with furcons you have panels that can be anything from a small discussion to a large lecture style presentation. You can hang out in the con suite and socialize, and I know people that spend most of their time in the tabletop gaming room.

Understand also that they're really typically science fiction and fantasy conventions. It's really more about alternate realities than the future specifically.

So let's talk costumes. Honestly I tend to see very little Star Trek costuming, except for one convention that has a strong Klingon presence. It's kind of like a furcon, fursuits are not the rule there, people dress up in whatever they enjoy wearing. Both fandoms embrace geeky t-shirts, steampunk is another common element. One thing you see a lot of at sci-fi cons is what I call the generic adventurer, which is typically some variation on the theme of boots, pants, a vest, a hat, and maybe a jacket. The thing to understand is it's not specifically about emulating some specific commercial series, for a lot of people costuming is more about dressing up in a way that they enjoy. I think a lot of people's costume is themselves, what they like to think of their true nature as being. For example, I normally make do with a geek t-shirt during the day, and at night I don the colorful plumage of a Hawaiian shirt. Just like I do at furcons. I don't wear the Hawaiian shirt because I think it's the height of high fashion, I wear it because I enjoy it.

Now let's talk social scene. Oh yeah, you can certainly get into geeky conversations there. I once confessed that I'd always wanted a garage door that sounded like the heavy duty blast doors in the movie Aliens. Someone else responded with his dream of a door that had the alarm sound from a specific model Enterprise's shuttle bay, and when he did an impression of the alarm I knew exactly what he was talking about. But at the same time, again, this is not unique. Heck, I first learned that Star Trek The Original Series had a robotic space probe character named Nomad at a furcon. I've since looked it up, and let me tell you it's weird hearing Captain Kirk yelling "Nomad!" angrily. I keep wanting to yell back "What did I do?" The furry fandom is quite geeky on its own, it's not really a big step up to go to a sci-fi con.

At the same time there's so much more you can get into. I once talked with someone about the procedures for rescuing someone from an experimental stealth aircraft. A long time ago I got to witness an argument between two fairly drunk people at a sci-fi con about the merits of beat poetry versus another kind of poetry. This kind of thing just tends to happen at sci-fi cons, you have an extremely eclectic group of people with experience in a lot of things, and you never know what you might end up hearing about if you're open to talking to new people. A few years ago I got to talk studio lighting with a photographer who was using a compact studio setup in a convention hallway to photograph costumes. At least one local convention has lately had regular hypnotism programming, which has been very interesting. I was actually hypnotized once, not to a large degree but the guy doing it managed to get my arms to rise when my eyes were closed without my intending to do it or even being aware of it. I also saw a stage full of women get hypnotized into seeing the audience as if they were naked. That was interesting, I felt strangely violated.

For those of you that enjoy alcohol, sci-fi cons again cater to that. Don't get me wrong, I've met a lot of people lately that don't drink, and that's fine. More power to you. But to those that do enjoy the sauce, you need to know that sci-fi cons are often a good place to go for that. See, whereas most furcons I've been to specifically forbid throwing public parties in your hotel room, with rules against propping your door open and such, sci-fi cons actively encourage it. They tend to have a designated party floor to try to keep the noisy rooms in one area. You'll find advertisements for the parties everywhere, often in the main convention space as well as on signboards near the elevator on every floor of the guest room space. It was just outside a room party that I got into the talk about experimental stealth aircraft. In a chat with someone who was checking IDs at the door (often they wristband or handstamp you to try to cover their butts with regards to age checking) I learned of a local, regularly recurring poi spinning event that I still need to check out. Sci-fi cons usually have official competitions for best room party drink and decorations and such, you can vote for your favorites which get announced at closing ceremonies. So rooms compete with their own signature drinks. I'll tell you one thing right now, if they pull out the virgin punch beware. That stuff is basically liquid hazing.

Science fiction conventions also have their own musical subculture. This one surprised the heck out of me when I first learned of it, but it's called filk (apparently that can be traced back to a typo of folk) and is often folk styled but can be anything including rock or rap. Step into the right room at night and you might find a circle of people holding guitars and drums, rotating around playing and singing songs. I've encountered someone playing a banjo, and once there was a lone drummer in a hallway playing something that sounded just perfect echoing through the long corridor as the soundtrack of the night. I even got to play with a theremin once.

There's one last thing I want to mention. Sci-fi cons are often more fur friendly than you might think. I've been surprised how many tails I see worn at a Chicago sci-fi convention called Duckon, but I really shouldn't be. See, there's this little event called Midwest Furfest that you might have heard of, and it got its start as the furry programming track at Duckon. Eventually it got to be too big and split off into a separate event, but Duckon still sometimes has furry programming. I've attended a talk by a former Disney animator, as well as panels on fursuit construction and fursuit animatronics at Duckon.

I'm bringing all this up because there's a good Chicago sci-fi con fast approaching, called Capricon. So sci-fi cons are on my mind. Capricon has an especially strong party floor, actually it seems to usually run two designated party floors. Don't misunderstand, this doesn't mean that each floor is full of nothing but party rooms, you end up with a handful of rooms on each floor, but still it makes for a lot of parties to check out.

I was going to say that Capricon is the same weekend as the furry rave, but I see that it's been postponed until further notice. I'm disappointed that I have to wait, but hey, now I don't have to skip out on the Saturday night parties. Often Saturday can be the best party night.

So hey, if you're sitting there asking yourself if a sci-fi con might be right for you, check one out. Look up a local event and see what shenanigans they get up to. The schedule for this year's Capricon is now up at http://www.capricon.org/capricon33/.....ex.php/reports for an example of the goings on. Just don't be surprised if you decide to attend one and end up finding some familiar faces. The sci-fi fans live among you.

As for me, I'll be at Capricon. I'm always a little intimidated heading towards one of these things, but I know it'll be a good time. Incidentally Capricon is always a bit weird for me, because it's held at the Westin Chicago North Shore, which is the previous location MFF used before moving to their current hotel. I attended two MFFs there, so the memories tend to bleed together, and when I'm walking through a dark hallway in the middle of the night feeling the mixture of fatigue and happy, comfortable relaxation that you get at a con, I sometimes have a difficult time remembering I'm at a sci-fi con and not a furcon. It'll be even worse this year because Duckon is being held there as well. So many memories are going to end up co-mingling, I'm not going to be able to keep anything straight anymore.

In my process of trying to look back at the dances I shot last year to prepare for the furry rave coming up next month I went through my shots from MFF 2012 and posted a few. That event was a new challenge again.

At the MFF dances last year I was trying to get the dancers to be lit, not just black outlines with colored lights behind them. But the lights that I was trying to use to illuminate them were a bunch of pan/tilt spots, which made for excellent ambiance but were kind of hard to predict. The end result was I just had to spam the shutter release and take a bunch of pictures and hope that a few worked. Still it was an opportunity I never had before, the lighting setup was all new and made it possible to try to shoot like that for the first time at MFF. And it gave me lots of lovely colored shafts of light to play with, like the purple shot that I posted.

Bring on the furry rave sequel, I'm ready. Or at least as ready as I'm going to get.

So I just posted a few pictures from Tails & Glowsticks, the furry rave event put on in Chicago last year. It was a hell of an event, as I said in the comments to the pictures I was very impressed with it. They promised a top notch laser and light show and they delivered. Look, I know I'm missing the point of these kinds of dances. I'm one of those people that stand on the edges of the dancefloor and watch the goings on, I know it's lame but my inhibitions are industrial strength. But damn if I don't enjoy a good dance anyway, even if I'm not directly participating I can still pick up on the feel of the energy of the event, even from the periphery the feel is electrifying.

The thing I want to comment on is that I was at a total loss as to how to photograph such an event. I want to share the experience for anyone else interested in such things, either how to adjust to a new subject or to raves in particular.

I seem to keep putting myself into situations where I'm trying to photograph unusual stuff. Long exposure night pictures, auroras, large tesla coils (you get to see some interesting things at sci-fi cons), just all sorts of odd stuff. There's often no conventional wisdom involving these subjects. I mean how do you figure out the white balance setting for an aurora? I still have no idea, there's no reference white level to use.

So shooting a rave was just this all over again. I'd been to a number of furcons that had large scale dances with various degrees of dance lighting, but there I'd focused mostly on poi spinners because that became my dominant light source. The rave had next to no poi spinners, besides it was probably a little too tight for someone to have room to spin things like that around.

What I did have was four spotlights with motorized pan tilt heads, a multicolor laser, and a fog machine. The fog machine proved to be the vital element with what I ended up doing. I just kind of tried various approaches, including having my flash turned on or off. Every time I tried something I looked at what the camera had captured to see if it worked.

Check out the picture with the two fursuiters walking towards the camera. Notice how that image looks a bit less dramatic than the others? I used the flash to try to illuminate the suiters, but it bounced around enough in the small space that it evenly illuminated the background. I ended up with flash exposed shots that made the room look fairly normally lit, but it ruined the feel of the scene so I stopped doing that. I still want to experiment more with making the flash intentionally underpowered so it illuminates the subjects only slightly, enough to reveal some detail and keep them from being black outlines, but still not overpower the ambient lighting. Maybe I'll get the chance next month.

What I learned of that event was that to try to capture the feel of the rave environment I had to work with the combination of low ambient lighting levels but bright spotlights and lasers. If I brightened up the room so that the dancers were more visible the effect was lost, so I exposed for the bright lighting and let the dancers appear as dark silhouettes in front of the shafts of light.

The question remains what would have happened if I could have gotten up to the DJ table and shot back towards the dancers. I just couldn't get up there, other people with cameras had already grabbed the best spots there so I took what I could get. I have no idea what kind of shots I would have gotten, but at least I wouldn't have gotten so many pictures of people's backs, since they were mostly facing the DJ table.

So anyway, that's adapted to shooting such a challenging environment. The short version is that I try a little bit of everything and try to repeat what seems to work. I was thinking about posting a question about this on a photography forum I frequent, but I just didn't think anyone else there would have ever shot a rave either. The shots I got aren't necessarily great, the angles were less than ideal and I was mostly experimenting all night. But I'm easily pleased by bright colors and strong lights, and I managed to capture that kind of feel in abundance. And now I have that experience and I can start from that level next time and maybe improve some more.

That rave set an interesting precedent. It was a curious thing, I'd been to Midwest FurFest four times already and had been thinking that what they really needed was some fog to make their lighting stand out. Then I finally got to see fog at Tails & Glowsticks, and it was even better than I thought it would have been. The laser was kinda cool before the fog was turned on, the beams are visible as a trail of speckles in the air, reflecting off dust I suppose. But then the fog was turned on and all the lights suddenly became visible and the impact of the laser was amplified. And then last year MFF added fog to their dance lighting setup. And then I went to the Furry End of the World party, and they had heavy fog for their dance setup, heavy enough that you could see it leaking out the entrance to the dance room.

I never want to go back to fogless dances again. Not only do they make the experience so much better, but they make for more dramatic pictures as well.

I figure some nature of introduction is in order.

I go by Nomad. I'm increasingly uncertain if it's an appropriate handle for me anymore, but it's all I have to go by, so there it is. I've probably been a furry since before I knew that such a thing existed by that name, followed the fandom from afar for several more years once I discovered it, and then started attending cons and eventually local meets once I found out they existed.

Somehow I've never acquired an FA account until now. As a photographer I'm often asked what my FA name is, my subjects want to know where they can find their pictures and that sort of thing. Well I owe enough people pictures by now, so I'll see about learning how this site works and getting some stuff uploaded.

If anything seems odd on my profile or whatnot, well that's the learning curve for ya. I've pretty much never used a social media type website before, so I've got not only the site itself to figure out, but the general concept of this kind of site.