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I had a fine time at Furry Connection North, held in Novi, Michigan 2 weekends ago.

It was a "regular" working convention for me. I was on security with the Dorsai Irregulars again. I worked several shifts and then got to hang out, attend a few panels, and meet up with friends.

Finally, here are some stats from the convention:

Total attendance: 1179 members

Fursuit Parade count: 230 fursuiters

Total Charity Donations for Mutts and Mutts Rescue: $5000 ($1,214 in cash, $440 from the poker tournament, $1,975 from the Charity Auction, and $1,371 from the con!)

The rest of my set of pictures can be found over here on Flickr.

I had a great time at Furry Connection North, and intend to be back in 2013!

A story by Gil 'the Great' Ruiz



*** IMPORTANT NOTE ***

  This story is a SEQUEL to The Visitor, and it 
probably won't make much sense if you haven't read "The Visitor"
first.  I recommend that you go back where you found this
story, and get the first part before you read this one.

  Then again, you don't have to and I can't make you.  But I
would if I were you.

*** END OF IMPORTANT NOTE ***




Legal Stuff:  This whole story and all of its characters are
copyright 1997, Gil Ruiz.  This story may be distributed

FurFright went well for me this year.

I don't have much specifically to say, because other than working security, socializing with old friends (and making a few new ones), and catching up on my sleep, I didn't do much else. But that's the kind of convention experience that I'm okay with.

Wanna see the rest of my pictures? They're over here.

Next con for me is Midwest FurFest, which is just around the corner. I'll be working in Operations there (huge surprise, I know). See ya soon!

This year's Anthrocon went pretty well for me, at least from a staff/Operations standpoint! This being our 6th year in Pittsburgh, things went pretty well. Equipment arrived when it was supposed to, nothing went horribly wrong or got broken, and set up and teardown went fairly well. In that aspect, the con was somewhat "boring" for me, which is actually fantastic.

During my slow days (Friday and Saturday), I actually got to spend some time out enjoying the con, dropped in on a couple of panels, and got some facetime with some folks. My socializing was to such an extent that I didn't even drink all that much, which my wallet had no issues with.

Total stats for this year's Anthrocon were 4,400 furries from 39 countries, 854 fursuits in the fursuit parade, and $11,522 raised for The Toonseum.

Here's a picture of the Toonseum folks (except for the chef, which was Chiaroscuro):

There's not much else for me to add, because the con was more of the same awesomeness that I'm used to experiencing.

Naturally, I have many more photos than are show on in this post The full collection can be found here, with my "main" pictures found here.

Enjoy!

Having missed last year's FCN due to injury, I had to use this con to make up for 2 years' worth of FCN and well, it worked! Here's how I felt:

I had an enormous amount of fun at this year's FCN. Highlights include:

- Making lots of sushi (sushi-grade fish was ordered for this)

- Watching the "Will It Blend" panel, wherein the presenters proceeded to both blend and freeze various items

- Making sushi for the second day in a row

- Getting to see/socialize with people I don't normally get to talk to because we're both busy at other cons

- Working security again, and doing badge check in higher traffic areas, so I got to chat with people who came by

What else was there to like? Ah yes, the bartenders! They absolutely loved us this year, and one of them even remembered me from 2 years ago. (and gave me grief about not making it last year, haha)

I have many more pictures that I can't post here, so instead I'll give the link, as usual: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157626479309537/

Next con for me is Anthrocon! I'll see you all there. Stay safe.

FurFright was a fun convention this year! It started off with a bang in my first security shift on Friday afternoon. I got a call for "first aid in the parking lot", which Cliff Husky and I responded to. Turned out that "first aid" was an understatement. We arrived on the scene of an (MVA) motor vehicle accident at the entrance of the parking lot, with one person injured pretty badly. We attended to him, with Cliff taking his vitals and history and me holding his neck in the c-spine position for a good 10 minutes until an ambulance arrived and EMTs relieved us.

That was the first ever auto accident that I worked. Was a little nervous afterward, but not nearly as shaken up as I thought I'd be. And what did I learn from this? Get first aid training. You never know when you'll need it.

The rest of the shift was uneventful, other than trying to figure out the hotel's weird layout. Apparently it was added onto twice, and had been rebuilt after a fire at least once, so the layout was very... unplanned. Hallways that had multiple ramps on them, stairways that only went up 1 floor or even skipped a floor, and ramps that went in circles. It was like M.C. Escher himself designed the hotel!

Saturday afternoon had me killing time with P-Kitty and other folks, and somewhere along the line it was suggested that I borrow a fur named Manik's fursuit. He was cool with this, so I put on the head, paws, and my overcoat, and walked around the con for about half an hour. I went up to several folks I knew in personal and said hi. Poor Protocollie... I think I broke his brain!

That's right: it was the first time I ever fursuited. And in a cheetah fursuit, at that. Draw your own conclusions.

On a related note, I went and registered the domain cheopard.com. Be afraid.

On Saturday night, I dropped by the Gun Furs panel, hosted by Cliff Husky. It was pretty informative, and I learned quite a bit about all the different details that surround guns, and the legal aspects of them.

On Friday and Saturday nights, I went to the dances, and played around with the ISO and shutter speed settings on my camera. I got some pretty interesting pictures:

The whole set of dance photos can be found here.

My birthday was also on Halloween, and the first time I celebrated it. Shortwave, Ferian, and others bought me drinks at the bar, an acceptable birthday present! Chiaroscuro also got me a bottle of cider called "Lucky Lion", that I hope to enjoy with some friends soon.

As the con came to a close, I realized what an awesome time I had. Between the health issues I've had the last several months, and some other personal issues I had to deal with over the summer (which I now call "the lost summer"), I'd say that FurFright was a high point over the last 6 months or so. And I hope that this uphill trend in my mood and life in general continues.

Extra special thanks to Athy for the repeated doses of coffee. The stuff I had at 2:30 on Saturday morning was a huge help. It kept me up through 8 AM when my shift ended.

For the rest of my pictures, they can be found here.

Total attendance for the con was 1,284 attendees, as announced at closing ceremonies. The count for fursuiters in the parade was 287 coming out the ballroom, though the official count of fursuiters who actually made it to the end of the parade was about 40 lower. (don't have that number handy)

Finally, there were a few folks I was hoping to get contact info for:

- P-Kitty
- The guy I did first aid on (anyone know if he was okay?)
- Manik (the gentleman who let me borrow his fursuit)
- Clementine (the fox with the super bright glow sticks)

If anyone knows of online contact info for these people, please let me know in the comments!

Next con for me will be Midwest FurFest. See you all then.

I drove out to Pittsburgh this past weekend for the Western PA Furry Weekend, a small gathering of furs from the Pittsburgh and surrounding areas. Despite being in existence for 10 years, I never attended before, and since I missed a few cons last spring, I decided to change things up a little and visit this one. I'm glad I did!

I spent most of Friday evening helping out Firefox at registration. It was quite a change to work reg at a con where 116 attendees in total is less than the number of folks waiting in the on-site registration line at Anthrocon. In other words, it was rather relaxing and a pleasant change of pace.

Saturday afternoon was the picnic at Fireman's park. I got to spend several hours hanging out and socializing with friends, taking lots of pictures. I ended up bumping into Dobie and chatting about photography. He showed me how to use a flash in outdoor photography to "fill in" shadows cast by the sun, as well as how to tweak my camera settings to properly meter pictures. Here's a picture taken without flash fill and the same picture taken with flash fill. The second picture looks much closer to how the scene looked in person.

After dinner, the charity auction was held, and I ended up winning the pile of feline-related things:

One innovative thing that I saw WPAFW do was to put their all of their programming, plus their sponsor art onto a 2 GB USB stick and include it with their sponsorships. That was a pretty neat idea, and with 1.99 GB left on the USB stick, I now have something that I can use in the future.

Healthwise, my feet held up fine most of the weekend. They started to hurt after being on my feet for about 6 hours straight on Saturday, at which point I sat down for about 10 minutes, then was able to walk around some more. In other words: better than they've been in months!

Naturally, I took lots of pictures. The full archive can be found at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157625097235542/

Overall, I had a rather good time this weekend. I'm going to try and make WPAFW next year. You should, too!

There has been some increased activity on Pennsylvania Furries website recently, so I decided it justified finally biting the bullet and upgrading the site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6.16. That upgrade was fun and... interesting. But now that I have a much more recent version of Drupal installed, I've been able to add some features such as these:

- Event Calendar. Want to know when upcoming furmeets, gathers, etc. are? We now have a calendar that anyone may post events to.

- Buddy lists. Yes, they are what you think they are. Users can now have an actual "friends" list on this site. Go to any user's page and click the link towards the bottom to become their buddy. (Here's an example)

- Private messages. Just what the name implies. Users on the site can now send each other private messages. When you're logged into the site, just click the "Messages" link to get started.

- Searching. I reindexed the entire site (and set up crontabs to keep that happening) so now the search engine works again, and posts (and users) on this site are fully searchable.

- Tagging posts. All posts can now be tagged. Even posts made by others. Go ahead. Give it a try. There is also a tag cloud that lists the most popular tags on the site.

- User profiles that don't suck. All user profiles now have links to a number of social networks, along with support for forum signatures, private messaging, and buddy lists.

And the URL for the Pennsylvania Furries website?

http://pa-furry.claws-and-paws.com/

Check it out, and let me know what you all think!

A conbadge of me being struck by a flying toilet. Drawn by Finnish Fox.

The original idea for this badge came from Midwest FurFrest in 2008, when I saw AndrewNeo wearing a t-shirt of someone being struck in the head by a flying toilet. I liked the idea, and commissioned a conbadge of that from Finnish Fox.