Foolscap 2012

Foolscap was nice and quiet this year. Given that we have teenage daughters with busy lives, Omaha, Kouryou-chan and I were only able to go on Saturday, and even then we had to wait until after K-chan's morning ballet class.

I ran into some old friends and played a good round of cutthroat Quiddler with Shaterri and two others. Omaha, the kid and I all went out to dinner with Edd Vick, Amy Thompson and their small. By coincidence, she's one grade above K-chan in the same school, so they see each other often.

Sadly, I bought nothing at the dealer's room. The few things I had come to buy, they didn't have. It looks like I'll be acquire the next issue of The Society of Steam in ePub instead, if I can find it from an independent dealer.

The Rainfurrest Convention

Like Foolscap, I could only do one day of Rainfurrest. I went alone. I hadn't intended on doing much, and didn't look at the schedule before going. I should have; according to friends of mine who were there, the writing track could have used me.

When I arrived, there was a wave of Fursuits come out and lining up for photographs. There had to be almost 300 there, and it was quite the impressive crowd. Fursuiting seems to be the one thing that really moves the Furry community. The art is so ubiquitous and yet so ordinary that it doesn't reach out much anymore, nobody cares about writers, and there wasn't a single furry-oriented game being sold or promoted anywhere. The dancing at night was about fursuits.

Fursuits and sex. There were two people selling bondage wares at the convention, as well as Bad Dragon [warning: NSFW]. I must be getting old and responsible; while I was tempted by a great many toys, I did not buy any. Maybe later.

I managed to run into Jimmy Chin, and went to dinner with him and a bunch of his friends. They pretty much confirmed my suspicions: aside from fursuiting, there really is no way to stand out in the Furry community, and now that there are so many fursuiters, even that's becoming a smear across the general haze of interests.

Furry's biggest problem remains that it has no central narrative. Its center does not hold. In the end, any single furry narrative is either using furries as placeholders for collections of personality traits, cutouts for collections of physical traits (which is fundamentally no different than fetishizing about race), or as stand-ins for some other fundamental Other. My writing is no different in this regard; I've used furries as fetish objects, and I've used them to represent Otherness to highlight issues around disability and able-bodiedness, infertility, and other compatibility narratives. (I have avoided condemning an entire species to being stand-ins for any given crippling neurosis that afflicts only some humans.) And thus far, I don't see a way out of this essential conundrum.