Muhahahahaha!

[miko2]

The only posts any of my friends have made in the last 3 or 4 days have come from people that weren't attending Conifur. The overlap between my LiveJournal friends and my friends who attend/help run Conifur is insanely high.



(Aside: For the few of you who are not part of my local group, Conifur is a "furry" or "anthropomorphics" convention that is held every year in the Seattle area. "Furry" fandom revolves around animals with human-like qualities, from cartoon stuff and talking-animal stories to stories about human or humanoid people with animal characteristics such as fur, ears, tail, claws, that sort of thing. This particular convention is run entirely by people I know, so I enjoy it because for me a con is really about hanging out with your friends, regardless of what else is going on).

(Aside #2: I am not a furry fan. Many or most of my friends, who are in charge of putting on this convention, are not furry fans. At the most, some will admit to being "on the fringe" of said fandom. Why? Any fandom attracts weirdos, but furry fandom is almost defined by the weirder elements in it... and some of them are frightenly weird. And many furry fans seem to think that anyone with any ties to the fandom is just like them. All I do is write stories set in a universe where many genetically altered human/animal hybrids exist, and a few alien races and "uplifted" species such as dolphins and gorillas. ^_^ Honest!)

So, Wednesday I cleaned up, did laundry, made copies of my latest stupid mix cd to give out to unsuspecting friends, and then I ran some errands, including withdrawing $300 from the bank in small unmarked bills that I hoped would see me through the convention. Later I went over to genebreshears house and maybe we went to dinner or something, I can't remember what we did at this point. Tom my ex roommate came home and we watched some anime -- Hyper Police and I My Me Strawberry Eggs, both borrowed from sora_kitsune.

And I talked kehf into letting me stay in the room she and David had, and I got Sky to agree to let me caravan down to Tacoma with him, since I didn't want to be parking my car in downtown Tacoma, especially when I didn't have a hotel room of my own (and thus hotel parking priveledges).

So I got up the next day with too little sleep, finished getting ready, packed the car and drove to Gene and miertam's place. I was supposed to be there at 12 from what I remembered... I got there at 12:12 and nobody was home. I got to feel sad and alone for 10 or 15 minutes, thinking everyone had left me behind, and then Sky and Kristin showed up and said that Gene and Mike had gone out to Cash & Carry to grab some supplies.

Maybe I need a cellphone? Nah....

So we went down to the con, got into our rooms, helped jwyldragon and calecharis set up registration... I found out that I was preregistered since I was Gene's second (backup to do the con newsletter). That was nice, especially since I couldn't have registered for the con until Friday otherwise. Sky and I helped Mike, shandower, and... Shyfox? set up the art show panels, which involved a lot of drilling with electric drills and moving big wooden panels about. We broke for dinner, found a great Chinese restaurant just down the street, and then Mike, Shy and I worked until midnight assembling art show panels while other people stood around and watched and talked. Not that you could really have used more than three people to do the job, there were only two electric drills after all. But we were very tired and sore by the time we were done. But I felt like I earned some of my so-called "Con Staff" position, since I really hadn't attended any con meetings or done anything else to help the con out up to that point.

I spent the majority of Friday in the Dealer's Room, behind our Tai-Pan table or Sky's table (right next to it). We were selling issues of our fanzine, of course, and Sky was selling prints and original artwork. I had a panel with Gene called "The Bones of the Story" which was about writing and having a plot. It was pretty easy to talk about writing for a while, and Chuck was on the panel too, so we had three people who know a bit about writing. ^_^ Gene especially. I let him talk as much as possible.

Let's talk about Con Badges. At a normal con... well actually what con is normal? I mean like a big science fiction convention, like Norwescon that some of us attend every year, you buy a membership and wear a badge that allows you to enter the various con-related places like the dealer's room, the art show, various panels, con hospitality, the dance, the masquerade/costume show, etc. And at most cons the badge is made of paper and held in a plastic badge holder, and has a nice picture on it, usually from the artist guest of honor, and has your registration number and name or fan name on it.

But the furry fandon is unusual in that it's mostly fan-driven. By that, I mean that there aren't many movies, books, tv shows, whatever that are targeted at furry fans or even fit the genre. Brian Jaques's Redwall series of fantasy books would be one of the few exceptions I can think of. So most of furry fandom is driven by small-press comics, fanzines (like Tales of the Tai-Pan which I write and edit for), and especially by artists who draw furry pin-ups and the like and sell them at cons, through the mail, and over the internet. There's even an e-bay style web site set up specifically for furry art. So anyway, it's a very popular thing among furry fans to have an art book and to pay artists to draw pictures for you in it, and also to draw badge art, usually something like a picture of that person as their favorite animal (cat, dog, ferret, whatever) with their fan name.

(I'm going a long way to make a relatively minor point here.)

So... the cool thing at a furry con is to get a badge that is a clear plastic holder with your name & registration number stuck on the outside, and with a blank piece of white cardboard on the inside. The idea is to draw whatever you want on that cardboard, or to find an artist you like and pay them $5 or $10 to draw something for you.

So... early on Friday I tossed my badge and $10 at Sky and asked him to draw me something. Gene and Kristin immediately followed suite. Later Sky had dakotamoon do something for his badge, and Jeff had anther artist friend, Todd, do something for his badge. Sky did a very cool picture for Kristin's badge, one of her characters from the Tai-Pan universe, Aki, with a halo and wings (it was "Good Aki"). Jen did Sky as a Sailor Scout, which was pretty funny. Todd did a really cool badge for Jeff that involved an advertisement for the Space Corps and a drunk octopus-like alien in front of it.

Sky finished my badge Saturday. He depicted me as one of the weird spirits from the new Miyazaki movie "Spirited Away". Sky labelled it "That No-Face Miko" because the strange spirit's name is "No-Face". Although, now that I've thought of it, his name is probably "Noh-Face" not "No-Face", because his face is a Noh mask. But I didn't even think of that until ten minutes ago. ^_^

Friday dinner was at the Chinese restaurant again. We had four people on Thursday night, and eight people on Friday. The food was very good. ^_^ dolphinchatter and jeffreycornish had shown up by that point and joined us, along with Cale and Todd and a few others.

Anyway, we hung out in the room for a while, but being at a con where your friends are in charge doesn't allow you to goof off or relax much. Michael was running around the entire con, Sky was busy getting things ready for the dance that night, Gene was working on the con newsletter every night... I went to check out the dance, which didn't go especially well. Sky had mixed a lot of music ahead of time, but he had too much unfamiliar stuff and people weren't happy, so we lost what crowd there was after an hour and shut things down early.

Saturday -- well, a busy con always turns into a blur, so it's sometimes hard to remember exactly what I did all weekend. We had far too many people who wanted to hang out behind the table in the dealer's room, so I wandered around and found other things to do. I checked out the art show and bid on a couple of pieces, but didn't win either in the end. I had my other panel, which was "Furry Gaming" or something like that. What do I know about Furry Gaming? I was only on the panel because Mike was the program coordinator and knew that I played Everquest, which qualifies as "furry" because of the cat-morph race, the lizard race, and the fact that people can turn into animals with certain spells. But most of the people in the room didn't want to hear about Everquest, really. Michael is a big Neverwinter Nights and Counterstrike fan, so he talked a bit about various furry-related skins and tricks for those games, but what really saved us was Omaha sitting on the panel, who's worked in the gaming industry a bit and knew more about console games than we did, and another guy sitting in the audience who works in tech support for... I think it was Infogames, who were somehow involved in making (or at least supporting) Neverwinter Nights, and who had a lot of stories and inside information about the gaming market in general. Really, he should have been on the panel rather than me. ^_^

I guess the cool "furry" games of the moment are really console games like Bloody Roar and Starfox.

Dinner was at the Chinese place again, for the third night in a row. This time instead of four or eight people, we had at least ten, maybe twelve. I can't remember, it was a large crowd though, I think this time brombear and zorkfox and Jennifer were with us.

Saturday night was interesting. Sky was sick and worn out and went to sleep, and Gene had to help with the dance. For a long time nobody knew where Virusfox was... technically, Virus was in charge of the dance and Gene and Sky were helping him, but practically speaking, Sky had been prepared to do the whole dance both nights, with seven hour-long continuous music mixes on his laptop coputer. Gene had assembled an hour of eighties dance music so that he could do one hour, and initially Virus hadn't been prepared to do anything but help Sky. Luckily, after the semi-fiasco of the night before, Sky and Virus had spent part of Saturday morning driving up to Virus's place to get his turntables and some records, so when Sky decided he was too sick to do the Saturday dance, Gene and Virus were ready to take over. Gene played eighties music for the first hour and then Virus played various stuff including requests the second hour, and I guess people were happier about it.

But that meant that Gene couldn't do the con newsletter. I was officially his second, so he told me I was in charge. Then he did the smart thing and turned most of it over to Kristin and David, who actually know Pagemaker. I helped a little. ^_^ But of course, it was pretty busy, even if we did hang out and talk a bit as Kristin worked at getting everything printed up. I brought two movies and my big box of games to the con, and we never got to watch a movie or play more than a single hand of "Before I Kill You, Mr. Bond" on Sunday afternoon.

Sunday... I wandered some more. I eventually bought several prints from various artists in the dealer's room. Sky was still sick and wiped out, so he kept making me go buy prints for him, or he'd make another artist drag his art portfolio over to his table so that he could look at it. I don't think he move from behind the table most of the day. I checked out some panels and sat out in the artist's alley with Tom, and later we checked out of the hotel and eventaully gathered together and went to dinner... this time, at The Keg. Dinner was pricey but very good... we had ten people for that, too.

And that was the con for me... all of my money went to the hotel room, food, one con tee shirt, and a handful of prints. I didn't use my credit card or check book though, so the $300 covered everything for me, which was cool. I had fun. I wish I could have spent a little more time behind the table though, but we have too many helpers, which is funny because every other artist/table has trouble finding people to watch things when they want to run out for dinner or to check out a panel or whatever.

Anyway, got home about 9 pm, which gives me some time to goof around and unwind before I go to bed. ^_^