FC2016
important pre-con prep from a few days beforehand
Thursday: I went to the airport and got on the plane. The scanner detected an anomaly in my crotch, which was pretty quickly resolved by me telling the TSA folks that I’m trans - no humiliating three-hour nightmare of patdown, screaming, and being held in a tiny room by an assortment of TSA and cops for me, just “oh yeah let’s scan you again” and hitting a different button this time so the image processing software expects me to have more stuff between my legs. Hooray for living in a queer enough city that this is a pretty uninteresting event.
I made an exciting new error in my flight choice for this trip and got a flight from Seattle to San Jose via Orange County, which meant that I spent about five hours on a plane with multiple families with kids going to and from Disneyland. None of the kids in earshot were crying, but it was a lot more time in an enclosed tube full of pre-used air than was good for me.
I shared a cab to the con with Matrices, who had made the same error. Hooked up with my roomies Iris and Nero, dumped my stuff in the room, and then we went off to dealer’s room setup. When I was mostly done setting up, the results of my flight hit me: I stood up and suddenly I had a cold. Fuck. I was gonna be one of the people who helped make the inevitable Con Crud happen, it seemed. My apologies to anyone who caught it from me.
Then me and Nero and Iris went to Pizz’a Chicago for pizza and beers. I got tizzly enough to shake my titties at Dana when she came in while we were finishing up.
There was a bunch of hassle with Iris and Nero getting their badges; FC was experimenting with making con membership separate from a dealer’s table. Which I and every dealer I know hates when cons do that, because it is one more damn thing we have to worry about remembering to do as part of the con prep. Apparently we weren’t the only ones who had these problems, because FC has said they’re not gonna do that again in the future. HOORAY. There were a lot of other problems with reg as well, and FC made a pretty good apology post saying “we tried some new things, they didn’t work, we’re sorry and won’t be trying them again” the next morning.
I was way too used up from the flight and the oncoming cold to hit the Thursday night dance, so I went to bed.
Friday: Yeah I definitely had a cold. And it turned out that there was a fly in the ointment of my plan to get a tiny printer and do digital badges: I’d packed up the printer, its input tray, its paper and ink, its battery, the battery’s charger… and left the power brick at home. And nobody had a 24v brick handy. I sat at my table taking badges anyway and drawing them. I also took two sketch commissions, which I really wasn’t promoting this year - I didn’t have them on my sign. But they all went to repeat customers who I was happy to work with. I got the first one 90% done thay day, along with the badges, and decided to turn the second one into a digital piece because they didn’t provide a book to draw in and I just really didn’t feel like wrangling their complicated character in real media. Illustrator’s easier for complex stuff for me.
Breakfast in the sunshine at Whispers, a few blocks away from the convention center.
The combination of “having a cold” and “not having new stuff to promote” meant that I was really low-key at my table. I kept my head down drawing unless folks actually started a conversation with me. I still talked a hell of a lot but I wasn’t trying to grab everyone who slowed down and looked at my stuff with my pitches. It was kind of a nice change to not run Table Peggy. I still performed my usual post-dealer’s-room ritual of “lying in a dark room not talking to anyone for a half hour”, though.
After food I ended up back at the inevitable Homework Party in the hotel room. I got enough done on the badges I took the first day to make me not feel guilty about being off to the dance, and went out to shake my ass; sadly the DJ spinning when I got there really didn’t make my ass want to move. They kept on switching from music that had a beat to dreamy bits or random samples that just left the whole floor kinda waving uncertainly for multiple measures at a time; it was really kinda frustrating. Especially with me still nursing that cold. So I gave up and went to bed.
As I was lying there trying to sleep, I had these visions of lots of tactical displays about hunting down the last of an army. This is not the first time I have gotten that when I have a cold; I think it is my brain’s way of interpreting the news coming from my immune system.
“This is my new fursona, a slutty anthro whatever-the-hell-Q*Bert-was. Her name is P*Beth and she will be replacing Peganthyrus immediately.” - me, during Homework Party
Saturday: I was still full of snot but I was pretty happy about it, because I knew last night’s not-quite-dreams meant I was in the cleanup and rebuilding phase of a cold, rather than the war-against-the-viral-invasion phase.
As I walked down the length of the convention center, I heard whistles and thumping. Ah, the teenage lady’s volleyball tournament was back. That would make for a really interesting mix, what with there also being a Smash Brothers tournament taking place in the convention center this weekend.
I sat in the Creator’s Lounge for a bit finishing off another badge, then walked a few blocks to FedEx-Kinko’s to print the things out. They were all very well recieved. I spent the day at the table finishing badges. And took a sketchbook from one semi-regular who’d been dithering about it for half the con.
In the evening, I sat around the room working on badges and poking at the piece I’d bumped to digital a bit more. I got most of the badges I’d taken done, with only one left. So it was off to the rave again!
I danced for a solid hour. There was no small amount of rubbing my gyrating ass against a few people I know.
And there was also a Dance Miracle.
There was this little girl in a mudkip kigurumi bouncing around the floor. She was getting a decent amount of space since the dance wasn’t super packed at the moment, and nobody wanted to step on the kid by accident. She wandered towards the middle back of the floor, and then a spotlight came on, with her right in the center of its swirling purple ambience. And she started trying her best to breakdance.
Everyone around her moved back to the border of the spotlight. A dance circle had spontaneously formed, and she was owning it. Oh, sure, she was falling out of a lot of the stuff she was trying to do, but she just kept on rocking it. It was beautiful. And cute.
Later on, outside the dance floor, I saw a candy raver furry holding her hand, and rolling one of their rave bracelets from his wrist to hers. Welcome to the PLUR family, kid. Have fun!
Sunday: I tackled the last badge I had to deal with, which was pretty complicated - the person it was for handed me a photo of an old electro-mechanical telephone exchange and said “can you draw a grey mouse in front of this?”. It was super complicated but it was exactly the sort of repetitive complicated stuff Illustrator is good at doing for me, so I said yes. And he paid me a bit more than the going rate, as well. I got that one finished, then sent everything that needed printing off to FedEx again, and wandered over there to pick them up. I forgot to mention that they should be printed at 4×6, so I ended up having to do them again, and everyone got a free larger print along with their badge today.
At the table, I was just starting to settle in to work on the sketchbook I’d taken Saturday when one of the people I’d done a badge for earlier came up with a cello case and some paint pens. I’d totally forgotten that he’d asked if I wanted to do that! But there was no way in hell I was going to turn something like that down; this sort of thing is part of why I come to cons in the first place.
I tried moving stuff around on my half-table to make room, but the case was just too damn big. Ultimately I had its head sitting almost at the far edge of the table, and its bottom perched precariously on the top of my chair, while I moved around in the limited space behind my table and the folks on the other side of the block of tables, drawing from a quick sketch I’d made. I kept on being slightly afraid I’d fall over on my neighbor, or on someone’s sign. Plus of course I got to remember what a pain in the ass paint pens can be. Especially when working on a slightly concave surface - the side of the case I was working on had a big bulge down the center. The first person to draw on it had taken most of the flat side with a big drawing, so I was kinda stuck with that. It was a giant pain in the ass and it was also a ton of fun, I will gladly do that sort of thing again if someone brings their Huge Awkward Item and something to draw on it with!
Rough sketch transferred from the quickie sketchbook plan.
how do I paint pens I don’t even
The artist at work. I think Jon took this photo?
Pretty much done, I think. Getting a good photo of this was really not happening from this angle.
Happy customer!
And then I just kinda settled down with that lingering sketchbook and chilled out doing a lot more noodly detail than that person was quite expecting. They’d asked for their character in Bloodborne, since we both play it, and I delivered a two-page spread of them standing in a particular hallway in Cainhurst with a lot of scribbly hatching and noodly clothing embroidery and red ink splattered on a lovely dress and a blood-red moon hanging ominously in the sky. They were pretty happy with the results.
So am I, to be honest.
Table done, I hooked up with some friends who had a green card and got thoroughly stoned. Our quiet stoned chat on a little balcony turned into talking with an outgoing guy from FLARE (an organization that does medical support for multiple west coast cons) who sorta attempted to recruit us so he could win this year’s Ironic Joke Toaster award for best recruiter.
I ended up eating alone, because I kinda needed some Alone Time again. Went back to the room and worked on sketches for a few take-home badges I’d ended up with (one for a person who commissioned it on Saturday and wasn’t gonna be there Sunday, two for friends who asked on Sunday and got a “sure” despite my general loathing of take-home work). When I had most of this stuff sketched it was DANCE TIME again.
Things you see on the way to the dance at a furry con.
The DJ playing when I got there really didn’t do it for me; he thought it was a good idea to run the same oppressive THUNP THUNP THUNP THUNP bassline for like twenty minutes. It was completely peaking the speakers and it was not really a tempo my feet were happy with. So I wandered about for a bit and hung out at an art party some folks were having at the dealers room, got some of my last badge stuff set up and roughed out, and came back later. I then danced for an hour and a half. If I hadn’t been tapped out from fighting a cold all weekend, I probably would have gone longer. I stumbled happily to bed.
Monday: I woke up with the back of my head still full of dance music. It was a good thing. Eventually it faded as my roomies and I set about picking up all our stuff and getting ready to be gone.
Tugrik came and picked me up; we went out for lunch with Moo and a friend of hers. I was persuaded to try Ethiopian and actually enjoyed it; I may have to experiment with that in the future. Lunch conversation partially involved various bits of behind the scenes con scuttlebutt, since Moo’s friend was the only person who wasn’t involved in making it happen one way or another. I think. Then Tug and I went back to his place, and chilled out watching “How It’s Made” for like three hours, followed by “Despicable Me 2”. Which I had been vaguely intending to watch for a good while, and found to be really good - I’m gonna have to dig up the first one now, and the new film from its director just got somewhat more likely for me to actually go see it.
Tuesday: I sat in bed for a while writing everything here up to Monday morning. When I finally crawled out of the guest room in a guest bathrobe, I chatted with Revar (Tug’s housemate) about his Fallout 4 adventures. I think we may have persuaded each other to try putting a few points in the sides of the skill trees we’ve been ignoring; he’s been a realtime player, with lots of really nice toys due to putting points into the crafting skills (how can I pass up the ability to make my dress bulletproof?), while I’ve been a VATS-orienteted player who’s always got a pocket full of critical hits waiting to be used (and how can he pass up the ability to get a 100% chance of a VATS headshot by burning a crit?). Then I chilled out on the sunny back porch for a while, listening to the strange noises the chickens they’ve got out in the back yard make. Eventually Tug let them out into the yard and I fed them a few sniblets of the orange I’d pulled off the tree to eat.
I also got a couple more badges done, and uploaded all of them to FA. There’s one more left to do as of this writing and I bet I’ll end up finishing it before I go to sleep. I’ll probably post them in another post once I’ve done them all.
Tomorrow: hang out around Tug and Revar’s place some more, probably make a serious dent in that last commission, get my stuff packed for the flight the next day. I fly through Santa Ana this time, which is gonna be just as terrible as the way out except maybe with less kids breathing colds? Ugh I should see how much it’ll cost to switch to something more direct… ugh it’s not worth like $250. Well. I’ve learnt for next time. I guess Southwest restructured their flights since last time.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.