This weekend is VancouFur, the local furry convention, and that means that my blogging may end up being rather spotty as I consider myself to be officially en vacance now and, if I am lucky, I will be too busy for the bloggening.
This year, just like last year, the convention is extremely local to me, as it’s happening in our living room.
Just kidding. It’s happening at a hotel just six blocks from my home, and that is dang convenient as it means there is absolutely no need for a hotel room and I can get there via a quick bus ride or an even quicker cab ride.
That makes the whole deal a lot less expensive and time consuming, and best of all. I get to come home and sleep in my own bed when the day’s festivities are done.
I’ve already done one thing, namely the Eye of Argon panel. For those of you who are blessedly ignorant of this phenomenon, The Eye Of Argon is widely consider to be one of the worst fantasy stories ever published.
But be warned : it is truly terrible. It starts off bad and only gets worse from there. It commits every literary crime in the book.
But it reserves a special spot in its heart for the wholesale abuse of adjectives. In fact, it’s writing like the Eye of Argon that makes writing teachers declare a fatwa on adjectives and ruthlessly hunt them down in their students’ prose.
Not only does the novella use far too many adjectives in a way that seems almost compulsive, it uses them in bafflingly inappropriate ways that suggest that the author only has a vague sense of what these words mean but likes to use them anyhow because they make him feel smart.
I mean, at one point, the hero, Grignr, admires a woman’s opaque nose. Opaque.
I guess he has a “things which fully reflect light” fetish.
Anyhow, the idea of doing this monstrosity as a panel is that people take turns reading the blasted thing out loud and their turn ends either when they reach the end of the page or when they laugh.
SImple, effective, and goddamn fun. Reading it out without laughing is a real challenge, and the frigging thing is so badly written that reading it out at all is hilarious.
So I had a lot of fun doing that last night. It’s a bit of a marathon, as the thing IS a novella, and what with all the laughing and riffing and whatnot, it takes around three hours to get through.
But man, is it fun.
Today, I will be going to a Writers Meet n’ Greet. Not sure exactly what that will entail, but it sounds like my kind of thing.
I will also be attending Carthage’s “Furries in the Media” panel, which started off small in the first year of the convention and now has grown to such epic proportions that last year, it took place in the biggest room in the hotel and it was standing room only.
Apparently, this year, Carthage was unable to sufficiently convey the magnitude of the event to the programming coordinator, and the event will take place in a much smaller room than last year.
So that should be fun. I plan to get there as early as possible so I can be sure to get a seat, hopefully up front so I can more effectively annoy Carthage.
Annoy in the most affectionate possible way, of course.
The first thing he said to me this year was how good I looked. And that kind of fkloored me because I don’t get that a lot.
Anyhow. after that will be supper with tout la gang, plus hopefully a few bonus furries we have stolen from the convention.
Preferably, it will be furries we know, but I have roofies.
After dinner, I plan on going to the How To Draw Naughty Bits panel. I went to it last year and had a lot of fun. Didn’t learn a thing, as I am not an artist, but it’s still ten tons of fun to be in the room with a bunch of people giggling and making dirty jokes as someone tries to teach us how to draw furry genitals etc.
Then at 11:30 pm there is something called “Bad Fanfiction : The Movie”, and there is no way I can miss something that so perfectly fits my interests.
So its going to be a long, full day.
Right now, that Rock Crab voice in my head is trying to convince me that it’s all too much and I should stay in my hole here at home instead.
I suppose that’s one downside to the whole being able to go home every night thing. If I was at a convention far from home and staying in a hotel room, I would not have to produce the willpower to leave home every morning.
Sheer boredom alone would get me out of the hotel room and off to panels.
But whatever. I will get showered and dressed and out the door, and once I am at the convention, it will be easy for me to keep the momentum going.
So I will ignore the Rock Crab as it tries to convince me to just crawl back into bed and sleep until it’s all over.
If I did that, I would only end up hating myself for being too much of a pussy to take advantage of all the awesomeness a furry convention has to offer.
Instead, I will get a shower, get dressed, throw a few things I think I might need into my backpack, and take a cab to the hotel.
And verily, I shall romp and frisk and frolic with my own kind, and bask in the company of like-minded individuals, and bond with my tribe.
I will try to make people laugh, and sometimes succeed.
I will contribute to discussions and learn from neato panels.
I will hang out in the games room and, for the first time ever, visit the dealer’s room with actual money to spend there.
And when it is all done, I will come home, sleep, and be well.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.