Deep in ConFurEnce
Apr. 26th, 2003 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsWell, I traveled down to the last ConFurence only to be happy that this is probably the last one I shall ever attend.
I gave a lot of furrydom a hearty "goodbye" at WorldCon. I was told at the Furry sig, point blank, that I wasn't "a furry" because my avatar characters are mostly human, that any amount of good I might have done interesting others in furry was long cancelled out by the harm of my writing erotica when "Furry's not about that!" (Yeah, right), and that my writing, such as it is, rarely contains "furry" themes (whatever those might be). Whatever. If I'm not wanted, well, there are other places to go. As I observed, both the Romance and the Erotica sigs accepted that "Elf Sternberg" was one of theirs, a talented amateur. I glowed hearing that.
But Omaha's still part of the Furry experience, having put on the Cabaret several times, and since this is the last ConFurence to be held for a long, long time she decided to do the cabaret one last time. She flew out ahead of myself and Kouryou-chan and![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fallenpegasus, who attended for reasons I cannot fathom.
Which meant that he and I had to herd Kouryou-chan ourselves. Actually, she was very good all the way through the flight. She wasn't too rambunctious at the airport, or on the flight, or on the cab ride to the hotel. She was great the whole trip. I put together a CD case of her favorite music and dug up my old CD player (which I rarely use, having graduated to MP3s for the most part), and she napped on the flight. Amazingly, since she's only partially housebroken, she stayed dry for two days running without an accident. I brought a cell phone, a PDA, a laptop, a digital camera, a CD player-- but the TSA worried about my freakin' shoes. Not even the sealed metallic container of Nazi Chocolate got their attention.
This convention, to be charitable, is "a good try." It's in a space that's too big for the number of people using it-- it would be much better suited to a small hotel, not a full-scale Hilton Convention Center. The beds are tiny and solid as stone, the pillows suck, I came --><-- this close to having the toilet overflow in our room. The restaurant is insanely expensive even for your standard hotel restaurant, the service is awful.
The convention itself is okay. I'm a little nervous about there being a film crew from The Man Show here using the Furries for their own agenda. They're here to make us look bad, so my goal has been to keep both Kouryou-chan and myself off-camera. So far I think I've succeeded. Kouryou is bored; the kidkon facilities here don't take anyone less than six, but she's a trooper and she's made a few friends with some of the other kids here, and there are a ton of art supplies floating around so she's spent some time drawing and the rest of the time tearing up and down the halls, mostly harmlessly. She's had a lot of fun seeing the people in fursuits and we've been policing her pretty closely. There aren't many panels at all, much less those "worth attending." I'm spoiled by NorWesCon and its dances-- twenty people just does not cut it. Even Kouryou-chan left the dance early-- now that's an indictment!
Tiger Man is here. Tiger Man is this guy who's got upper-lip and eyebrow piercings all over to provide for more than twenty "whiskers," he's got tattoos over his face and body, he appears to have had his upper lip (crudely) surgically altered to be more feline in appearance and he always wears slitted yellow contact lenses. Okay, so he's trying to be a tiger before the technology is really good for it, but... that doesn't explain the breasts. He's obviously taken some hormones to get, well, tits. Big ones, too. Near as I can tell, that's one of those, "May as well go all the way with the weirdness" decisions.
The eye-candy quotient, both male and female, is rock-bottom. Sad, but true. The Man Show has brought a giggle-babe with the best breasts money can buy, and she's about it.
But what really makes me sad is the status of my peers. When we started in this, we were all in our early to mid twenties, our whole lives ahead of us. A decade later, I've at least solidified my career path, got the kids, the mortgage, the hobbies. Most of furrydom is still as mature, both personally and economically, as it was ten years ago. I feel surrounded by people whose souls are living in a Never-Never Land even as their bodies age about them. Or maybe it's just that all the successful ones have moved on to other, better experiences and I'm still holding out for a sense of nostalgia when I should know better.
The dealer's room is still as good as it was ten years ago-- which, in one sense, means that it has not improved any more. I'm looking for those artitsts who do more than draw smutty pictures. I want something that shows talent and uniqueness, things I'm still trying to demand out of my own writing. It's rare to find it these days. And the really funny thing is that the best artists aren't spoogey, to use the Fur term; the cheesecake and dramatic art is better than the smut. The cute gets a better rise out of me than the porn.
It's not challenging. It's a been-here,-done-this genre.
Omaha's scared to death that she's going to do poorly in the Cabaret. I doubt it. She's a professional, and she'll put on a professional show that most of these guys would never have the courage to buy from a strip joint, and she won't even have to get naked for it. The applique on her face to give her a feline appearance is sorta odd up close, but it looks right from a distance, so I suspect that as long as it doesn't fall off she'll be fine.
I feel a little guilty about doubling-up Kouryou-chan's exposure to television-- she's watched both Lilo & Stitch and The Lion King, but I suppose that since she didn't get any at all yesterday nor will she be getting much tomorrow, that's probably okay. I have to remember to buy a few kid's books; there's a used book dealer in the dealer's room and he has many kid's books for two bucks apiece.
At this point, though, I just want to go home. I want time to write, I want people to inspire me to write, I want ideas that make me feel happy and alive. I don't get that from Furry much, and I'm not getting it much from the people here. There are people I'm so glad I came down to visit, and some I would love to visit in the future, but not under these circumstances.
I hate to say it, but I'm too old for Furry an a genre worth conventioneering over. At least for conventioneering that requires a flight and a hotel room. I use Furry as an ingredient in my own work, not as an entire subgenre to dedicate my writing and efforts to. It's a convenient excuse for exploring issues like infertility, interracial relationships, losing one's virginity or any number of unique experiences. Better still, because the characters aren't "really human" they can say and do any number of things like S&M, homosexuality, and transhumanist experiences, and the readers can be safe in the knowledge that "those aren't really people." Yeah, but they're still reading the stories and getting the messages.
We have Conifur in the Pacific Northwest, and it fulfills most of my wants with respect to furry-- it lets me get a good feel for the state of the fandom without my having to lay out the bucks for flight tickets and so on-- that I can't really get from just the 'net. And we have NorWesCon and SakuraCon, which spoil me with access to both the general state of the writing life and my other interest, anime-- again, a tool, not a genre.
Looking at the clock, there's only about 23 hours until I get home. Back to my quiet life, filled with family, food, music, friends, the internet... normalcy. A life quietly prepared for more.
I gave a lot of furrydom a hearty "goodbye" at WorldCon. I was told at the Furry sig, point blank, that I wasn't "a furry" because my avatar characters are mostly human, that any amount of good I might have done interesting others in furry was long cancelled out by the harm of my writing erotica when "Furry's not about that!" (Yeah, right), and that my writing, such as it is, rarely contains "furry" themes (whatever those might be). Whatever. If I'm not wanted, well, there are other places to go. As I observed, both the Romance and the Erotica sigs accepted that "Elf Sternberg" was one of theirs, a talented amateur. I glowed hearing that.
But Omaha's still part of the Furry experience, having put on the Cabaret several times, and since this is the last ConFurence to be held for a long, long time she decided to do the cabaret one last time. She flew out ahead of myself and Kouryou-chan and
fallenpegasus, who attended for reasons I cannot fathom.Which meant that he and I had to herd Kouryou-chan ourselves. Actually, she was very good all the way through the flight. She wasn't too rambunctious at the airport, or on the flight, or on the cab ride to the hotel. She was great the whole trip. I put together a CD case of her favorite music and dug up my old CD player (which I rarely use, having graduated to MP3s for the most part), and she napped on the flight. Amazingly, since she's only partially housebroken, she stayed dry for two days running without an accident. I brought a cell phone, a PDA, a laptop, a digital camera, a CD player-- but the TSA worried about my freakin' shoes. Not even the sealed metallic container of Nazi Chocolate got their attention.
This convention, to be charitable, is "a good try." It's in a space that's too big for the number of people using it-- it would be much better suited to a small hotel, not a full-scale Hilton Convention Center. The beds are tiny and solid as stone, the pillows suck, I came --><-- this close to having the toilet overflow in our room. The restaurant is insanely expensive even for your standard hotel restaurant, the service is awful.
The convention itself is okay. I'm a little nervous about there being a film crew from The Man Show here using the Furries for their own agenda. They're here to make us look bad, so my goal has been to keep both Kouryou-chan and myself off-camera. So far I think I've succeeded. Kouryou is bored; the kidkon facilities here don't take anyone less than six, but she's a trooper and she's made a few friends with some of the other kids here, and there are a ton of art supplies floating around so she's spent some time drawing and the rest of the time tearing up and down the halls, mostly harmlessly. She's had a lot of fun seeing the people in fursuits and we've been policing her pretty closely. There aren't many panels at all, much less those "worth attending." I'm spoiled by NorWesCon and its dances-- twenty people just does not cut it. Even Kouryou-chan left the dance early-- now that's an indictment!
Tiger Man is here. Tiger Man is this guy who's got upper-lip and eyebrow piercings all over to provide for more than twenty "whiskers," he's got tattoos over his face and body, he appears to have had his upper lip (crudely) surgically altered to be more feline in appearance and he always wears slitted yellow contact lenses. Okay, so he's trying to be a tiger before the technology is really good for it, but... that doesn't explain the breasts. He's obviously taken some hormones to get, well, tits. Big ones, too. Near as I can tell, that's one of those, "May as well go all the way with the weirdness" decisions.
The eye-candy quotient, both male and female, is rock-bottom. Sad, but true. The Man Show has brought a giggle-babe with the best breasts money can buy, and she's about it.
But what really makes me sad is the status of my peers. When we started in this, we were all in our early to mid twenties, our whole lives ahead of us. A decade later, I've at least solidified my career path, got the kids, the mortgage, the hobbies. Most of furrydom is still as mature, both personally and economically, as it was ten years ago. I feel surrounded by people whose souls are living in a Never-Never Land even as their bodies age about them. Or maybe it's just that all the successful ones have moved on to other, better experiences and I'm still holding out for a sense of nostalgia when I should know better.
The dealer's room is still as good as it was ten years ago-- which, in one sense, means that it has not improved any more. I'm looking for those artitsts who do more than draw smutty pictures. I want something that shows talent and uniqueness, things I'm still trying to demand out of my own writing. It's rare to find it these days. And the really funny thing is that the best artists aren't spoogey, to use the Fur term; the cheesecake and dramatic art is better than the smut. The cute gets a better rise out of me than the porn.
It's not challenging. It's a been-here,-done-this genre.
Omaha's scared to death that she's going to do poorly in the Cabaret. I doubt it. She's a professional, and she'll put on a professional show that most of these guys would never have the courage to buy from a strip joint, and she won't even have to get naked for it. The applique on her face to give her a feline appearance is sorta odd up close, but it looks right from a distance, so I suspect that as long as it doesn't fall off she'll be fine.
I feel a little guilty about doubling-up Kouryou-chan's exposure to television-- she's watched both Lilo & Stitch and The Lion King, but I suppose that since she didn't get any at all yesterday nor will she be getting much tomorrow, that's probably okay. I have to remember to buy a few kid's books; there's a used book dealer in the dealer's room and he has many kid's books for two bucks apiece.
At this point, though, I just want to go home. I want time to write, I want people to inspire me to write, I want ideas that make me feel happy and alive. I don't get that from Furry much, and I'm not getting it much from the people here. There are people I'm so glad I came down to visit, and some I would love to visit in the future, but not under these circumstances.
I hate to say it, but I'm too old for Furry an a genre worth conventioneering over. At least for conventioneering that requires a flight and a hotel room. I use Furry as an ingredient in my own work, not as an entire subgenre to dedicate my writing and efforts to. It's a convenient excuse for exploring issues like infertility, interracial relationships, losing one's virginity or any number of unique experiences. Better still, because the characters aren't "really human" they can say and do any number of things like S&M, homosexuality, and transhumanist experiences, and the readers can be safe in the knowledge that "those aren't really people." Yeah, but they're still reading the stories and getting the messages.
We have Conifur in the Pacific Northwest, and it fulfills most of my wants with respect to furry-- it lets me get a good feel for the state of the fandom without my having to lay out the bucks for flight tickets and so on-- that I can't really get from just the 'net. And we have NorWesCon and SakuraCon, which spoil me with access to both the general state of the writing life and my other interest, anime-- again, a tool, not a genre.
Looking at the clock, there's only about 23 hours until I get home. Back to my quiet life, filled with family, food, music, friends, the internet... normalcy. A life quietly prepared for more.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2003-04-27 12:51 am (UTC)The folks you write about may have had the same sort of vision as you - to have a whole life, where furry, cons, home, family, career all are a part. But it's easy to wait, to want to figure it out first. "What's a life without examination?" "Who can tell the truth from lies?" "I've waited this long, why not longer?"
But. You've been doing your life, and you're encountering folks who've been waiting while you've been doing. Doesn't have to be a tragedy. Disconcerting, yes. Cause for friction? Maybe.
You'll be back to doing soon. 'Sallright. ;)
no subject
Date: 2003-04-27 03:04 am (UTC)But it doesn't help that my own life is heading downhill; not just the downwards crashing of an over-hyped economy, but being in an industry which seems to be being discarded by society, while I'm locked in by being cash-poor, with a considerable paper-value which seems more and more imaginary.
Yeah, maybe that locking into a sterile furry past can be pretty tempting.
Anyways, there were people who have changed from being the slightly scruffy students to the relaxed, married, professionals with kids and a career. Trouble is, I could see people I would have been happy to get entangled with, ten or even twenty years ago, and I found myself half-glad that I wasn't dragging them down with me.
And one or two Furry-types wandering the con. Some have the shape to carry off the hall costumes, some don't.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-27 07:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-27 08:58 am (UTC)I've had similar observations (in other circles).
*HUGS*
Date: 2003-04-27 10:21 am (UTC)So yeah, I can totally see where you are coming from. And yeah, I can't imagine omaha screwing up a performance, ever. Shes amazing (from experience being in one of her performances which I will never forget). ^______^
Re: *HUGS*
Date: 2003-04-28 11:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-27 12:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-04-28 11:33 am (UTC)I guess I've just grown up enough.
no subject
Date: 2003-04-27 09:18 pm (UTC)I agree with you somewhat about the folks who are perhaps obsessively furry, where it encompasses their whole lives and acts as a barrier to the outside world. I still find, for myself, that having it as a component in my life has helped to stabilize things emotionally, philosophically, and even physically. But it certainly isn't the only POV of worth in the world...it just happens to work for me for a number of reasons.
It's a pleasure to find you have a LJ. I've enjoyed your writing style for some time now, and it's quite nice to see it continued in your entries.
no subject
I hate to use the "move out of your parents' basement" cliche, but sometimes it fits.
About 'Tiger man'.
Date: 2003-04-30 10:41 am (UTC)He really does look feline. I roomed with him one night this con, so I had the opportunity to see him up close.
As for the breasts...they are not breasts, or at least, not his fault. He suffered from testicular cancer a couple of years ago and had to have 'them' removed. Without a source of testosterone, his 'breasts' have grown out to nearly female proportions.
So now you know...the rest of thre story.
-- Strega
no subject
Date: 2003-07-27 03:21 am (UTC)Oh, btw, I'm a fairly new member to the fandom. Just returned from Anthrocon, now that's a con worth attending.
Your points on the maturity of the fandom and how it works for you seem a bit depressing, hope I don't reach those conclusions. Can't say how the fandom has been going because of how little I still know, it is something I hope to stick with for a long time though because the little I've checked out has been extremely fun and enjoyable experiences. Sorry you had some bad experiences with it though, hopefully it hasn't spoiled it permanately for you.