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livestream: watch me draw!
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yo fools! im bored so i got livestrem happening while i draw things! come along and join the party
www.livestream.com/marcsandroi…
www.livestream.com/marcsandroi…
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amirite?
just a little journal for me to share my detestment of this stupid system and how it makes it completely fucking impossible to open the journals/devs i want in new tabs and nuke them all at once.
TRIPLING THE AMOUNT OF KEYSTROKES I NEED TO DO TO CHECK MY MESSAGES IS NOT A GOOD THING!!
[/RANT]
just a little journal for me to share my detestment of this stupid system and how it makes it completely fucking impossible to open the journals/devs i want in new tabs and nuke them all at once.
TRIPLING THE AMOUNT OF KEYSTROKES I NEED TO DO TO CHECK MY MESSAGES IS NOT A GOOD THING!!
[/RANT]
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well here it is, my intensely long con report, modified to protect the innocent or not so innocent. be ye warned - i havent edited out the potty mouth.
to everyone i met/spent time with over the weekend - you are the people who made this!! if you recognise yourself in any of these situations, let me know! even within the 8000-odd words of my story, i didnt get everything in there.
pm me or comment if you want the full, unabridged, unedited version.
Wednesday night
Caught the bus from Adelaide to Melbourne on some budget as fuck $45 return ticket which pretty clearly states that I'm only allowed 2 bags of checked luggage weighing no more than 20 kg total. I happened to have a giant plastic tub with my fursuit and all my crochet stuff inside, a duffle bag with my kigurumi and some other shit and my 55l backpack with all my clothes inside
Thankfully the guy at the desk was cool and said he can check it in and to tell the driver it was all worked out.
The driver however happened to be slightly ethnic. Slightly dodgy ethnic. Upon seeing my mountain of shit he said I couldn't take the tub because it counted as freight, I told him the guy at the desk said it was ok but he was being a shit about it. Trin, Mr Customer service, went to talk to the desk guy and while he was away mr old dodgy fat fuck wog bus driver said 'just give me $20 and ill put it on' I'm like, wtf? And thinking 'fuck it I cant be arsed dealing with this dickheads shit anymore', I'm about to pull my wallet out when Trin and the other bus driver (who at the time had been checking tickets) came over and he said the tub was fine to go on – the luggage compartment was only half full anyway.
It was at this point that I gave Trin the biggest 'wow what the fuck' look and mr sketchy-fuck some seriously powerful hate rays >.<
But in the end my tub got into the half-empty luggage compartment and I got into the completely full bus :/
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun
I think I ended up sleeping about 3 hours in total before waking up in deer park in Melbourne (apparently some butt-fuck suburb) where the bus had stopped to drop off the bogans from the sticks, when they decided it'd be a great idea to have a nice little domestic while they were getting their bags off the bus and hold everyone up for about 20 minutes.
THURSDAY
Bus arrives in Melbourne, at Spencer st, at about 7am. I haul all my shit off the bus and act exceptionally nice for the bus driver in a dual-wielded attempt to not get him shitty and a subversive 'fuck you'.
So, I've been on a bus for 10 hours, slept 3, tops - and now I need to lug all my shit to the Bourke st tram stop, about 2 or so blocks away. I get to the stop, its about a minute before a tram comes then I need to quickly chuck my stuff onto the tram and organise it in a way that it wont fall everywhere and not get in anyone's way. By the next stop I was pretty much organized and could finally just have a good sit.
I have about 3 stops to myself before a couple of ticket checking people came on and I'm like 'oh shit I don't have a ticket', so I get up to go to the machine when this bitch immediately asks me for my ticket, I explain that I was just about to get one cos I just got on. My story of a 10 hour bus ride and having all my shit with me apparently wasn't good enough to not get a ticket the exact microsecond I got on the tram and she proceeded to write out a ticket and ask me for id and shit. I'm like "wtf" and I'm talking to the guy, who doesn't have a rod up his arse, he asks what bus I came in on, I said it was a firefly from Adelaide, why? And he's like "oh if it was a v-line then that includes Melbourne metro stuff"
So I go "oh snap!" – I had a v-line ticket – my super budget $45 return stingy student special
So I dive for my bag as the tram pulls up to the stop I need to get off at, miss that stop, find the ticket, show it to the dude, he's like "yep that's fine", the lady tears up the fine, I throw all my shit off the tram and bail out.
Now I'm about a block uphill from the apartment building and I just need to gadunk-a-dunk it all down there.
Plonk myself into the apartment lobby and I'm greeted by what turns out to be a pretty cool Asian dude. I give him all my check-in details and he asks why I have such a heaving amount of luggage for a 4 day holiday – I say there's an "anime" con at the ridges, but after a little while he puts 2 & 2 together, I'm like 'well yeah it's a fur-con' but he seems pretty down with it. Its now about 8 in the morning, I cant check in until 2 so I go for a wander over to the ridges to see if there's anyone there I know that I can annoy for a bit.
As soon as I walk in to the ridges foyer, there's a group of Qantas stewardesses and stuff, and they give me the biggest 1950s housewife disapproval grumpy look in the world. At this point I wasn't even in any furry shit, just the jeans and Mario t-shirt I wore on the bus. This did not give an overly confidence-inspiring first impression of the hotel.
After initially completely not recognizing him, I see darken waiting in line for the front desk so I bother him for a bit while he's waiting to get his parking validated so he can go pick up Fala and some other people from the airport.
When he goes, I'm once again faced with having nobody to annoy and not much to do. What I did have to do was finish off making the head hair for my fursuit – at this point he looked like slash from guns & roses and I needed to overcome the super fun task of turning big 80s glam-fro into dreadlocks, which involved picking up groups of hair, braiding them and then rubbing them back and forth in my hands to make them mat up; which I did in the paramount lobby for about 4 hours :/ let me just say: best arm work-out ever
Around midday I manage to get a hold of Mel and she comes over to share her squishy fuzziness and help me with this m'fing hair.
An hour or 2 of hair-do'ing, chitchat and generally insulting people pass before Ari and Fala show up and our room's ready, so more lugging happens and we enjoy the space, comfort and balcony of our big fat 2-bedroom apartment for a bit.
Cruise over to the Rydges later to get our passes and showbags and stuff, not a lot's happening so we check out the dealers den for a minute before returning to the apartment for some more loaf before the evenings "entertainment" begins.
Tim Albee was supposed to be a guest of honour this year, which would have included a screening of his movie on the Thursday night, unfortunately he fell victim to swine flu, the memey-est disease ever conceived, and therefore couldn't come.
A certain someone decided the best way to make up for this gap in the schedule would be to stage someone stealing the poster that everyone signed and subsequently got incredibly moist over at last years charity auction and covering the "nobody can come in to the con space for a couple of hours while we faff around" delay with some flimsy story about police dusting for prints or some shit. I figure, "I'm already here sitting around the footpath and front entrance to the Rydges, so I might as well socialize and get progressively sandier at the prospect of sitting here for the next hour and a half"
Which is exactly what I did
As the time went on, I got progressively more passionate and vocal on such pressing topics as timetabling, the insanity of getting all sandy on people wearing ears and tails in the lobby as dozens of furfags clog up the footpath and taking a pool of how long it'll take someone to do something exceptionally stupid that'll get us kicked out of the hotel – turns out I was channelling a fuckton of repressed attention-whoring this weekend, but hey – it makes life interesting.
By the time 9 o'clock comes around, they finally open the doors to us plebs – the gold class people had their cocktail party or some other assorted faggotry for the past hour – and we get treated to the general 'welcome to etc' deal and a moderately entertaining little thingy involving Zane & Allen (very hurriedly apparently) getting made up like the people on the furry Indiana Jones poster someone made. You know, all good, kinda gay, but what do you expect?
Then the tragedy begins.
Initially, Trin was supposed to play the opening and closing nights, but Pete decided it'd be a great idea to get some random arbitrary dj he found on myspace to play. Over the course of the weekend, we usually referred to him as dj dickhead, dj generic-shit or dj ipod, and boy howdy did he live up to expectations. Picture year 10 social levels of tragedy – shitty music featuring such floor-fillers as my sharona, abba and Michael Jackson mixed together with the care and grace of dialling up 10 seconds of cross-fade on winamp. Calls of "this is gayer than a giant pile of dudes having sex with each other" began almost immediately but the mass exodus happened when the motherfucking Macarena came on. That was my cue for an almighty "fuck this shit" and organizations for a room party started happening – a group of about a dozen furs descended on the bottle shop across the way, then the 7-11 then back to the bottle-o
Thus began the nightly tradition of a group of rather strange looking people crossing the lobby of the paramount and getting questionable looks from the staff. However, we're good little children. I swear to god we made the least noise out of any 15-20 people crammed into a hotel room ever. Any time we had a thing in our room it basically consisted of people just hanging out and chatting.
Tonight was also the first time I ever got to wear my suit in its entirety. First impression – THIS IS SOME HOT, STUFFY AND GENERALLY UNPLEASANT SHIT! I managed to hang in there for a grand total of about 20 minutes before getting changed again.
The rest of the night consisted of some people getting progressively more lush, good conversation and the fantastic planet – a deliciously fucked 1970's French animation about some strange f'n aliens and generally fucked up shit. Needless to say many a mind was broken
FUH-RIDAY
_In theory_ I was totally going to be up and raring to go at 10 to go to the "your 1st fur con" deal, but that plan kinda died, leaving me still rushing to make the 11:00 photo shoot with the age where all us fursuiters were directed to dance around to non-existent music and make non-existent conversation at the bar while the photographer did his thing. Somehow this took like, 45 minutes and ate into the "making a fur suit" panel pretty solidly.
We had to go to woolies to get food and stuff that we were totally going to cook in our kitchen-equipped apartment and this was also when the destruction began. You see, I wear my kigu pretty much constantly providing its under about 25 degrees outside. This means around Adelaide I'd be a dragon going to the shops, Chinatown, on the bus, down the park, at home, in town etc etc etc. aside from the occasional puzzled look and queries/comments often along the lines of "the fuck is that shit?" nobody in Adelaide was really all that confronted by a Rastafarian dragon.
Not the same story in Melbourne, no. apparently things that weren't in the latest vogue or the cover of ministry of sound confuse and/or enrage melbournites.
Thus, massive mind and face destruction occurred all weekend as I went into "fuck you I'm a dragon" mode, which basically entails wearing a kigu and doing nothing else. Simply existing and _not_ being a total freak completely breaks way too many people. Anyway, woolies – it was about 3 blocks from our hotel so me, Kaz, Mel, Hallward and Ronyo walk down there in varying states of furfaggotry and do our shopping to a background of puzzled looks and straight-out retard faces.
We had to get back quickly to catch the beginners' art panel, then spent the rest of the afternoon basically loafing in some form or another.
Friday night wild was pretty fun, of course there was the usual faff with people not being allowed in when the event was clearly supposed to have already started, but hey, you get that
We got to find out who the super special secret guest of honour was – uncle Kage! Wooooot. Yeah it was cool having 2 & Kage last year, but that happened to be _last_ year. Having the same guys 2 years in a row is fantastic, especially when one of them is supposed to be some fantastic special person. Lets just say it was unexpected, I really thought it was going to be the guy who directed saw or repo or something honestly.
So they did their thing for a couple of hours and everyone had some lulz at jokes that were pleasantly not the same as the ones from last year (mostly) and all was good.
At 10 the show stopped and the bar opened. This is seriously what they should have done on opening night – people were flittering from group to group and actually socialising and getting to know each-other. There was some pleasant jazzy loungey music playing over the speakers at a volume you could actually talk over O.o
People were dooping around in their fursuits while others were getting rather drunk and molestey. This was also good and about as hilarious as the evenings official entertainment. There was a pack conglomerating around the bar where a couple of people were essentially raping pretty much anyone in a suit and anyone out of one who got dragged in by them. They also happened to be feeding us vodka and orange juice through a straw, which was endlessly amusing and super effective – you get fucked up real fast when you're dehydrated
At midnight, our time with the con space is up and everyone starts getting herded out, I need to take all my suit shit back to the apartment and a few people come with and basically crash. Nobody else in my room really felt like doing anything so I'm like "fuck this shit I'm kicking on" – a couple phone calls later and there's a room party on level 5 at the Rydges with the Perth people, so I hook down the lifts, scoot across the road and bump into Aslan and Dustan outside; apparently there's another room party happening at the other end of level 5. I collect Aslan and head up to the Perth room to discover drinking games and general merriment. An hour or 2 and half a bottle of southern comfort later, the rightful occupants want their room back so me, Mel and Aslan migrate down the hall to keep the night going in one of the Sydneysiders rooms.
Here we are met with a bunch of people sprawled all over a rather tiny hotel room at various states of inebriation and one absolute fucking trooper in the way of vixen still in her fucking fursuit. That honestly broke me at this point and I had a pretty massive moment of envy at her … something? Stamina I guess. In retrospect I would have been wearing my suit waaaaay more than I was, but hey, that's what my kigu is for and apparently its just as effective at completely ruining peoples shit, as I was about to find out.
I was halfway toasted at this point in the evening and a smoke had been an increasingly excellent idea for the previous hour or so, so I corral Aslan to come downstairs with me as this entire f'n hotel didn't have a single bloody balcony :/
Outside the hotel was a solid group of 30-50 drunk Melbournians so I figure walking around the block would deal with that problem. We walk along exhibition st to the corner with Bourke, turn the corner and not 5 seconds later I hear "holy shit it's a fucking dinosaur!!!!"
And I'm like "auh I'S A DRAGINZ!!!!!" – Seriously, people don't know their goddamned mythical creatures. You'd have no idea how many people call me a dinosaur or Dorothy or some shit.
And one of the guys goes "oh hey where are you from?"
So I say "I'm from Adelaide but the dragon's from Sweden"
And then this drunk chick starts giving us shit from being from Adelaide, I kindly remind them where they get all their pot and good beer from and turn the corner into the alley that runs behind the Rydges as drunk chick's brother reassures us that she's just a drunk dickhead and that we're ok
Halfway down this sketchy as fuck alley there's 4 or 5 guys hanging out, and I get a slightly more positively toned "the fuck is that shit??" – They're totally into it and ask where I got it and stuff like that, those guys were cool.
Come out of the sketchy-ass alley back on to little Bourke, and along the side of the hotel that's not littered with drunk people. As we come up to the corner, I plan to just plow between everyone, head down, and see what happened.
Turns out nothing much. What did happen when we got back to the main entrance was there was a group of 4 or 5 middle aged people that I assume just had a rather long dinner. From this group comes a shrieking "ohhhhh what a cute dinosaur!!"
"I'm a bloody dragon, jeeeeeez!! Look! Wings! Horns! Bloody dragon! I'm imaginary, not extinct!!"
at this point she asks me to do a little turn before she starts groping the shit outta me O_o no, not touching my no-no parts but grabbing and pulling at all the spikes and wings and stuff going "oooooooooooh can I touch it?"
I'm like "yeah but don't rip it" at which point she starts patting me down in an effort to repair the damage she hasn't yet inflicted. Another member of the party (wearing a sailor's hat) goes "you're a dragon? Well I'm a captain"
I go "yeah that's super" and give the shittest, limpest salute ever.
We're about to turn to go inside when I hear behind me, "what. Is. That."
Coulda sworn it was that fitzy dickhead from those "C" coffee ads and big brother and whatever the fuck he's whored himself to since, but this guy looks, and more importantly sounds, just like him.
I immediately reply "I'm a motherfucking dragon"
This apparently destroyed his feeble mind, because he was stuck in a loop of going "not all the money in the world. Not allllllllll the money. In. the. World."
So I'm like "$400. Bam."
It was at this point mr bogan wankstain thought he was running things. After some processing time, his best crack was "yeah, how much did it cost you to lose your virginity?"
Then the following words fell out of my mouth. I blame the dragon.
"Well I got it for free but I hear your mum's offering"
He had nothing. Once again he was stuck in a loop, going "no shame at all. No. shame. At. All"
… I decided to run with it – "yeah your mum had no shame when she took it in the arse"
It was now officially time to GTFO. Shithead bogan was dumbfounded and our conversation was over, so we turn and make a bee-line through the lobby to the lift, totally straight faced. It wasn't until the lift doors closed that we both had the instant, single frame anime fall to the floor pissing ourselves laughing.
Get back to the room, regale everyone with the events of the previous 5 minutes then we go back to the general drinking and loafing status quo. In the meantime I realize I left my key in the other room, the occupants of which are now well asleep. At about 3:30 everyone bails, but I'm still left with the problem of not having access to my apartment.
Let me say this. I love Fala, he's fucking excellent. He's the kind of friend who'll bail you out at 3:30am when you've done something intensely stupid; which is exactly what he did :3
I had planned to see if anyone was going to conveniently come in to the lobby which I could then go in with. This would mean that all I needed was someone to let me in to the actual room, so I call Fala in the meekest and most apologetic way possible and explain the plan. After sitting around the front door of the building for about 15 minutes, watching a couple attempt to suck each others face off and some intensely hammered Asian chick saying she was waiting for someone from her room to let her in before she flumped on a bench up the street, I send Fala a text: "ur gonna hate me with the intensity of 1000 burning suns, but can you pls come down and let me in?"
"Will be there in a few" – awwwwwww what a sweet little pumpkin
"Thanks hunny :3 <3 u"
So the poor thing comes down, lets me in and I spend the rest of the lift ride grovelling
I get to the apartment, face hits pillow.
Thus endeth Friday.
It wasn't until Sunday that we discover THE MOTHERFUCKING INTERCOM PANEL ON THE FRONT DOOR.
Whelp, I'm an idiot.
SAT-DEE!!!
Managed to roll out of bed just in time for the photo shoot… again >.>
More pictures, posing etc etc – huge amounts of failure by me, I somehow forgot you were supposed to stay still for photos so the few "official" ones of me are kinda blurry and retarded, but hey, the shit – it happens.
So after a nice 2 hour pose-down, its time for some lunchables so we round up some people to go to hungry jacks and kill some time over some noms and stupidity.
Head back to the Rydges for the actfur panel, the one that had been left off the schedule completely until Mel textad it in on Saturday morning. Twas rather amusing, with the hosts basing most of their material on the con and getting some audience participation too. Then came the "so who's been wearing their ears and tails out and around the city?"
Once again, I blame the dragon (cos there's nothing mentally unhinged about blaming all your ill-conceived actions on a figment of your own imagination)
"I've been wearing this all weekend, hell, I went down to woolies yesterday like this"
Then they gave me the mic. I basically derailed the show for the next 5 minutes with what we get up to in Adelaide (or more accurately, the Kurralta Park Coles) and another recount of the previous evening shenanigans.
Guest of honour (aka 2 & Kage talking shit) panel was straight after, the most entertaining part of which was Pete trying to stop them "performing together" cos that was supposed to be saved for Sundays charity performance. Thankfully, he had to duck out a couple of times, at which point 2 & Kage would immediately start insulting each other as fast as possible. Now THAT'S entertainment
After a short break to re-hash the con rooms and generally get their shit together, it was time for the talent show. All year I had planned to go up on that stage, rant about crap and generally insult/ruin everyone. About 2 weeks before the con I decided such a thing might not be the most appropriate thing to do before 9 at night to a large audience. Instead I thought I'd pay homage to the unstoppable pap machine of Hollywood and mime along to a couple of songs from death to smoochy. Unfortunately I was a smidge disorganized and the best recording I could do on the day I was leaving was a hideously brickwalled, low bandwidth hunk of shit that I recorded straight on to my mp3 player. It was at this point I realized I had about as much production quality as an under 8 jazz ballet recital and suiting naturally lends itself to a complete absence of dignity, so I decided to roll with it.
I went for tragedy and nailed the shit out of it.
Picture cassette-quality audio and a fursuiter miming along to some of the most innuendo-filled and just plain wrong children's songs to ever grace the silver screen. I had 5 minutes to throw together some choreography and I went full-blown panto style.
Kage gave me a score of infinity for my lack of talent. Fuck yeah.
Best part of the talent show was definitely anthrax's stand-up bit. He was fucking brutal and set the bar for future shows. After his performance, I wholeheartedly guarantee I will perform my "special" version of "if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands", along with some other stuff I've got brewing, the next time I go to Midfur. >:3
After the (no) talent show, all the suiters bustle back to the headless lounge to see that they're preparing a nice 5 star dinner for the kids who couldn't actually go into bobby magees for the nightly entertainment, making for an interesting scene. In the foreground was a classy looking dinner setting with all the faff and folded napkins and stuff, in the background were a whole pile of hot, dishevelled, half-naked fursuiters getting changed. I took a video of this but I don't know if posting it would be a good idea as I'm pretty sure taking photos/videos in the headless lounge is generally frowned upon.
While the gold classies were having their (reportedly shithouse) meal, we all headed down to grill'd, where apparently lots of people had congregated. When we got there, it was just down to 2 or 3.
So we had our burgers – seriously, Adelaide needs at least one grill'd. Best hamburger and chips ever.
After tea we trundled back to the Rydges to go to the regular cheapwad part of the "gala ball". Some part of me decided to wear normal people clothes tonight. This was the first piece of the puzzle that put me in a sandy mood and generally led to the next couple of hours being a bad time. As soon as I walked in I got hit by a huge wave of BAH IMMENSE FURSUIT ENVY GO!! … Yeah. I like being a dragon or a kitty, being people is no fun
Trying not to be a sandypants, I get down to hangin, chillin, little bit of illin… dj genericface had gone from the balls-out tragedy of Thursday to garden variety club crap, still mixed with the delicate poise, dignity and timing of Quasimodo in a hurricane during an earthquake – between each song there was this awkward 10-20 second pile of off-beat, off tempo noise, before the previous song would cut out and the new song was suddenly 1/3 of the way through.
I got down to what I'd been doing every other night – talking shit to anyone who'd listen. Unfortunately trying to do so over blaring music is an exercise in futility. By this point I wanted to bail. I start gathering people who want to do something and get a deal rolling for Mel's room. Unfortunately, by this time Kaz was on the decks, meaning there was a pretty even distribution between stayers and goers, leaving me in this horrible tense limbo for about half an hour.
Somehow we manage to bundle enough people upstairs and hang out. I'm still edgy and I'm putting a chunk of that blame on my current attire. I was desperate for some more "fuck you I'm a dragon" time, so I head back to the apartment with Trin & Lycan.
Get back to the apartment, change my attire and headspace slightly and immediately my night starts getting better. On the way down the lift we surprise an old lady and melt a kid's face. He had the biggest wide eyed, gaping mouth "what is this I don't even" look I've ever seen >:3
In an effort to burn off my remaining tension I come along with them to the Victoria hotel – it's a downhill run and they were cruising along on their heelys; which happen to be another little thing that completely destroy Melbournians minds.
Unfortunately there happens to be a lot of speed freak wankstains in Melbourne, 3 of which decide to chase Trin and Lycan down the street going "ooooo you've got wheels ooo wheels eeeeeeerrrrrrrr" before running alongside Trin and shoving him over with enough force to collect Lycan on his way through. Thankfully they managed to bail out before eating incredible amounts of shit, but I'm like "what the fuck is wrong with you you fucking wankers??" and the 3rd guy who didn't run along was like "ooh sorry we're offending you gerrrrr"
I go, "you're not fucking offending me dickwad, your fucktard friends just went and tried to hurt my friends." at this point I was still slightly irate from earlier and was secretly out for blood. I don't know what I would have done if they stopped and turned around, cos I can't fight for shit, but I was betting on retard strength taking over and the next mornings headline reading:
LOCAL FUCKWITS BEATEN TO DEATH BY DRAGON IN PAJAMAS
More on page 3
During the rest of our journey we somehow manage to collect Aslan and Shiro kitsune, who turns out to be rather cool, make it to the Victoria without further dramas, Trin & Lycan go to their room to get changed or something, I don't remember; and we all head back to the Rydges for further merriment.
SUHN-DAE
For the 3rd consecutive day I manage to roll out of bed just in time to make an 11:00 fursuiting deal, this time a parade/doop around through the city. The turn out and associated hare Krishna feel of having a giant throng of obnoxious freaks marching through downtown Melbourne was slightly missing this year, there were about the same number of fursuiters, but only about ¼ as many randoms coming along for the ride. Either way we cruised across the road to a neat little Chinese courtyard where we assed around and took pictures and stuff for about ½ an hour-45 minutes. Rob Wolven was busting out his parkour on all the statues and rocks and stuff around the place, including a 10 foot-odd tall rock spire thing. There was an interesting moment of role reversal with a couple of cats feebly jumping and clawing at a wolf up a rock >.>
After all the photos and stuff, people were a bit stuck for what to do with themselves – this was supposed to be a fursuit parade after all, not a fursuit "walk across the street and take photos then go straight back" so Flix and I start heading in the opposite direction to the hotel in a hope that everyone else would come flocking behind us. Thankfully furries are a predictable bunch and strongly adhere to the "if a couple of people start walking in some direction I'm going to blindly follow them" rule, so pretty soon everyone was on a trip around the block. Not too much happened on our brief journey, although we did pass a porno shop and apparently a couple of suiters went inside, which would have been pretty damn funny. There were also impromptu invasions of a 7-11 and the virgin gym.
By the time we got around the block, everyone decided to be soft and go back to the hotel. I was kinda disappointed, I was raring for a trip down to either fed square or that neat plaza near the Victoria hotel where we took photos last year, which was only really 3 blocks away.
Came back to the con space, got changed and headed out to get essential raving accoutrements for this evening's entertainment. There were these sweet oldschool purple suede boots shy wanted to get and I wanted to get some trashy raver crap, so we went to jay-jays. There I found the sunglasses stand and a pair of all white kanye west louvre shades (you know the ones that either make you look like a complete fucktard or a coke fiend). They were PERFECT. With my head down under my kigu's hood they looked like more shiny teeth and otherwise made me look like some sort of horrible coked-out wigga eurotrash hunk of shit. They see me rollin'…
We continue our tour to foot locker for Shy's boots, the reject shop for glow sticks and another jay-jays where shy also picks up this excellent all white gay cowboy hat. Once again the hilarious tragedy train was steaming out of the station.
We had to get back to the con space to make the "talk to the board" panel - I had a couple of things I wanted to mention.
The panel itself was actually surprisingly well behaved – people aired their concerns and they were heard and addressed in a well considered and professional manner, despite the best efforts of some to nitpick every little thing that got them sandy about a con that a couple of them had never actually attended.
Lol furries and their dramas.
It came time for me to air my concerns – namely the sloppy scheduling and a lack of loaf space, the single greatest element (as far as I'm concerned) of Midfur X.
I also had some positive feedback. I said directly to Pete "I'm genuinely surprised and pleased to see just how well behaved and SOBER you've been this weekend" I totally meant it too, the drooling, slurring alcho of last year was nowhere to be seen and this really did make my time that bit more stress-free.
Then came the 2 & Kage charity show and the auction. Nothing all too special really. The auction didn't go retarded like last year, I think it was missing the genuine community atmosphere of last years, but we still managed to collectively beat the previous mark and raised something stupid like $5000 or so.
It's Sunday night. Trinn's playing his set at 9:30… no wait 10… no wait, 10:30…
Anyway, I was out to rock my shit and I had a plan. For the start of the evening I would wear my suit head and paws with my kigu, then when I got entirely too hot, the head and paws would go off and the kanye shades would replace them. There's a reasonable gaggle of people in our apartment getting ready to go, I've got my kigu and footpaws on, all the rest of the stuff I'd be needing for the night was in my duffle bag and I was feeling nice and safe and organised. I'm pregaming rather solidly too – I'm well toasted by now.
Come back inside, put on my head and paws and I'm ready to go. Nobody else really is, they need a few minutes to get their last little bits & pieces together so I float around, try and get some air on the balcony and try to hurry people up. By this point I needed to get out of that apartment, so I manage to get Hallward and shy to help me across the road to the Rydges.
By the time I get to the front door of the Rydges I'm in a bit of a state, and Hallward, my pack mule, had managed to forget his con pass. There is a big-ass staircase and a nightclub full of people between me and the headless lounge where I had planned to dump my bag and I was in no condition to make the journey myself. Thankfully there was a group of 5 or 10 furs hanging out outside and the (closed) hotel bar was playing some acid jazz. There was a pleasant breeze outside and I f'n love acid jazz (picture 3 piece lounge music mixed with instrumental hiphop). I'm in a really good place right now so I start just generally bouncing along to the music which gradually morphs into crip-walking and doing the robot at about 50bpm. I was in my own little world inside the suit and just generally grooving along with my eyes closed.
After a few minutes I stop and return to reality for a bit, when the people hanging around outside are like "wow that was mesmerising."
Lol, I'm like a lava lamp
I manage to wrangle this group of people inside and one of them to take me and my bag to the fursuit lounge where I have a much needed drink and compose myself to go out on the floor. On the way a slightly tipsy Pete pulls me in to a group photo with the guy from the charity we were donating to. I have to say there's something deliciously subversive about standing between 2 very proper (or at least proper-looking) people for a photo for some classy publication while slightly off your tits and they have no idea >:3
I pull myself away from that group to make it back to the party, where Mr Ipod pants is still playing his mashy club tunes, I have shitloads of energy to get rid of and I spend about half my time dancing and half sitting on the sidelines pouring Gatorade into my face.
Things change with the first few bars of (the song formerly known as) ! – the first song of Trinn's set; it's such a fucking perfect opening song that drove itself into me and I seriously spent the rest of the night at bobby's floating in and out of brainland. I stay suited up for the first 6 or 7 songs until the metallica remix comes on, when I make my move to go get changed.
I make my way to the headless lounge to find it rather full of random arbitrary people, including someone who's decided that losing a single fucking book is worth totally losing his shit over and he also appears to be under the impression that everyone within earshot gives a flying fuck about his pointless arbitrary problem.
I make my way back into Bobbys, pop my bag under the desk at the DJ booth and continue to have the most f'n fun ever. At about 11:30 a now rather merry Pete comes up to announce that the bar will be open til 1 instead of 12 – very good news. This gives Trinn time to extend the latter part of his set to include a few more songs, one of which is thousand – a crazy little break that goes from 0 to 1000 bpm in the space of a minute and a half; I've never felt such a positive energy, and I may have kinda lost control for that song, bashing my whole body up and down as hard and as fast as I could as the song built to its climax.
Anyway, the rest of the set was epic, all the way through to "I remember" when the ugly lights came on. It was at this point that Pete was being Pete; the convention was technically over so he wasn't the chairman anymore He swaggered onto the dance floor and started hugging everyone in between "ah lahv youse guys". I start to make tracks with the other 20 or so people still there, and once we get outside the hotel, Monday has officially begun.
MON MON MON-DAY
Following some light mincing outside the Rydges, me and about 10 other people cross the road and wait outside the paramount – we had only 2 keys and they both happened to be with people in the room. Most of this group consists of the Adelaide crowd and some other people. Thankfully, I was feeling sharp as a tack right now and somehow managed to herd all the random arbitrary drunk people out of the way so we could get back to our apartment without shitting off security again.
Back upstairs everyone's still feeling good after the party, with some people wanting to wind down somewhat wile others were looking for the next hot spot to float to. In the meantime, we opt for a balcony-side meeting; an excellent excuse to stop and rest for 20 minutes or so without feeling like we're wasting valuable party time.
A little while later I get a phone call. "Come down to our room, theres heaps of people here and we have a spa"
"Oh ok then"
Looks like we have a party on our hands.
Once again we make the journey across the road to the Rydges and up to a big-ass suite, with at least 20 people inside. The claim of underwear clad hot-tubbers proved true.
I find myself a comfy spot in their lounge room type area and the next 3 hours or so whooshed by in a blur. Basically, Trinn, Lycan, miss pixie (the other Mel), Ronyo and I are still up and kicking as dawn begins to break, the roof pool is open at 6am and we couldn't think of a better way to end the weekend.
Ronyo and miss pixie need to go to their room to get changed and Trinn, Lycan and I need to go down to the lobby to go back up to the pool. Its first thing Monday morning, we're all dishevelled, smelly, we've been up all night and I'm still in my kigu. Of course someone else had to come into the lift with us. She goes "oh wow what have you guys been up to?"
My response proves my subconscious brain loves me. I reply, perfectly coherently "oh we've been at this convention all weekend, last night was the closing night party and we've been keeping ourselves going with redbull & no-doz"
We get to the 20-something floor, then up the dodgy-ass stairs to the rooftop pool, but no people. We wait there for a few minutes becoming progressively more aware of the fact that we're loitering by an obviously locked door and slowly becoming resigned to the progressively more likely event that the other 2 got to their room and promptly passed out. Thankfully, literally less than a minute before we were going to give up, they come up the stairs and all of us can enjoy the early morning rooftop pool deck.
That couple of hours on the roof was fucking fantastic, it was the best goddamn comedown to such an intense weekend. Just after the sun rose, there was a really strong ion front, the wind went completely calm and all the birds went silent for a couple of seconds and I felt this change in energy really strongly within myself. Once again, the best times were just spent talking and stuff, Mel decided to be insane and go for a swim while the rest of us elected to stay dry.
At about 8:30 the pool cleaner shows up and it's now time to go home. I still had to check out of the apartment at 10.
Getting our shit out of the apartment was the hardest thing ever, every single movement was a goddamned ordeal :/ but, we managed to get ourselves out by 10:30 and the only casualty I recorded was my phone charger. Pretty good outcome if you ask me
I shamble over to the Rydges foyer one last time in a desperate attempt to claw every last ounce I could out of the weekend. The furries had sequestered a corner of the foyer and so I spent my time mooching hugs and stuff off of everyone.
Eventually I had to face the inevitable and leave. After all, I did still have a nice bit of bed waiting for me at the Victoria and the Rydges was quickly emptying itself of people.
While archon and Ari were out having fun at eureka tower and the museum and stuff, I slept. That was basically Monday for me. Shitty, broken, fever-dream sleep. Yay. At about 6:30 I had to drag myself out of their room to go get my stuff from the paramount, then take a taxi to Southern Cross station to get on a train to Bendigo.
Getting on a long-ass train and bus ride by yourself after the best few days of your life is fucking depressing I've gotta say. I don't care if I can't be a massive tight-arse again, I'm travelling with a friend next time I go to a con. Reading the con-book and the couple of comic books you've bought just doesn't cut it.
In Bendigo I need to get off the train to get on the bus to Adelaide which left Melbourne at the same time as the train I was on. Once again, the bus was completely full, but luckily I didn't get a whole lot of shit about my luggage. The only interesting thing was the homeless smackhead who tried to get on the coach and look inconspicuous. It made me wonder what the hell he'd do once he arrived in Adelaide had he not been kicked off.
Around midnight we have our ½ hour break, in which I have a pie and a smoke. Since leaving Melbourne I had been listening to hard house and jungle, trying to keep Sunday night's vibe going, so I find myself at a truck stop in butt-fuck Victoria, dancing with my eyes closed in front of the bus and I didn't care.
My head hit the pillow once I got back on the bus and I was out. I only woke up when the bus driver had his "welcome to Adelaide" announcement over the loudspeaker.
CHEWS-DAY
Ash picked my up from the bus station, not before I randomly ran into Loki, who was on his way to bumfuck Victoria to see some family. Ash and I went to McDonalds for breakfast then promptly home. I enjoyed the cool air on my face on the recliner outside, had an in-depth conversation regarding just how morally reprehensible advent calendars were, then we went in and watched bender's game. After the movie finished, Midfur was officially over for me.
to everyone i met/spent time with over the weekend - you are the people who made this!! if you recognise yourself in any of these situations, let me know! even within the 8000-odd words of my story, i didnt get everything in there.
pm me or comment if you want the full, unabridged, unedited version.
Wednesday night
Caught the bus from Adelaide to Melbourne on some budget as fuck $45 return ticket which pretty clearly states that I'm only allowed 2 bags of checked luggage weighing no more than 20 kg total. I happened to have a giant plastic tub with my fursuit and all my crochet stuff inside, a duffle bag with my kigurumi and some other shit and my 55l backpack with all my clothes inside
Thankfully the guy at the desk was cool and said he can check it in and to tell the driver it was all worked out.
The driver however happened to be slightly ethnic. Slightly dodgy ethnic. Upon seeing my mountain of shit he said I couldn't take the tub because it counted as freight, I told him the guy at the desk said it was ok but he was being a shit about it. Trin, Mr Customer service, went to talk to the desk guy and while he was away mr old dodgy fat fuck wog bus driver said 'just give me $20 and ill put it on' I'm like, wtf? And thinking 'fuck it I cant be arsed dealing with this dickheads shit anymore', I'm about to pull my wallet out when Trin and the other bus driver (who at the time had been checking tickets) came over and he said the tub was fine to go on – the luggage compartment was only half full anyway.
It was at this point that I gave Trin the biggest 'wow what the fuck' look and mr sketchy-fuck some seriously powerful hate rays >.<
But in the end my tub got into the half-empty luggage compartment and I got into the completely full bus :/
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun
I think I ended up sleeping about 3 hours in total before waking up in deer park in Melbourne (apparently some butt-fuck suburb) where the bus had stopped to drop off the bogans from the sticks, when they decided it'd be a great idea to have a nice little domestic while they were getting their bags off the bus and hold everyone up for about 20 minutes.
THURSDAY
Bus arrives in Melbourne, at Spencer st, at about 7am. I haul all my shit off the bus and act exceptionally nice for the bus driver in a dual-wielded attempt to not get him shitty and a subversive 'fuck you'.
So, I've been on a bus for 10 hours, slept 3, tops - and now I need to lug all my shit to the Bourke st tram stop, about 2 or so blocks away. I get to the stop, its about a minute before a tram comes then I need to quickly chuck my stuff onto the tram and organise it in a way that it wont fall everywhere and not get in anyone's way. By the next stop I was pretty much organized and could finally just have a good sit.
I have about 3 stops to myself before a couple of ticket checking people came on and I'm like 'oh shit I don't have a ticket', so I get up to go to the machine when this bitch immediately asks me for my ticket, I explain that I was just about to get one cos I just got on. My story of a 10 hour bus ride and having all my shit with me apparently wasn't good enough to not get a ticket the exact microsecond I got on the tram and she proceeded to write out a ticket and ask me for id and shit. I'm like "wtf" and I'm talking to the guy, who doesn't have a rod up his arse, he asks what bus I came in on, I said it was a firefly from Adelaide, why? And he's like "oh if it was a v-line then that includes Melbourne metro stuff"
So I go "oh snap!" – I had a v-line ticket – my super budget $45 return stingy student special
So I dive for my bag as the tram pulls up to the stop I need to get off at, miss that stop, find the ticket, show it to the dude, he's like "yep that's fine", the lady tears up the fine, I throw all my shit off the tram and bail out.
Now I'm about a block uphill from the apartment building and I just need to gadunk-a-dunk it all down there.
Plonk myself into the apartment lobby and I'm greeted by what turns out to be a pretty cool Asian dude. I give him all my check-in details and he asks why I have such a heaving amount of luggage for a 4 day holiday – I say there's an "anime" con at the ridges, but after a little while he puts 2 & 2 together, I'm like 'well yeah it's a fur-con' but he seems pretty down with it. Its now about 8 in the morning, I cant check in until 2 so I go for a wander over to the ridges to see if there's anyone there I know that I can annoy for a bit.
As soon as I walk in to the ridges foyer, there's a group of Qantas stewardesses and stuff, and they give me the biggest 1950s housewife disapproval grumpy look in the world. At this point I wasn't even in any furry shit, just the jeans and Mario t-shirt I wore on the bus. This did not give an overly confidence-inspiring first impression of the hotel.
After initially completely not recognizing him, I see darken waiting in line for the front desk so I bother him for a bit while he's waiting to get his parking validated so he can go pick up Fala and some other people from the airport.
When he goes, I'm once again faced with having nobody to annoy and not much to do. What I did have to do was finish off making the head hair for my fursuit – at this point he looked like slash from guns & roses and I needed to overcome the super fun task of turning big 80s glam-fro into dreadlocks, which involved picking up groups of hair, braiding them and then rubbing them back and forth in my hands to make them mat up; which I did in the paramount lobby for about 4 hours :/ let me just say: best arm work-out ever
Around midday I manage to get a hold of Mel and she comes over to share her squishy fuzziness and help me with this m'fing hair.
An hour or 2 of hair-do'ing, chitchat and generally insulting people pass before Ari and Fala show up and our room's ready, so more lugging happens and we enjoy the space, comfort and balcony of our big fat 2-bedroom apartment for a bit.
Cruise over to the Rydges later to get our passes and showbags and stuff, not a lot's happening so we check out the dealers den for a minute before returning to the apartment for some more loaf before the evenings "entertainment" begins.
Tim Albee was supposed to be a guest of honour this year, which would have included a screening of his movie on the Thursday night, unfortunately he fell victim to swine flu, the memey-est disease ever conceived, and therefore couldn't come.
A certain someone decided the best way to make up for this gap in the schedule would be to stage someone stealing the poster that everyone signed and subsequently got incredibly moist over at last years charity auction and covering the "nobody can come in to the con space for a couple of hours while we faff around" delay with some flimsy story about police dusting for prints or some shit. I figure, "I'm already here sitting around the footpath and front entrance to the Rydges, so I might as well socialize and get progressively sandier at the prospect of sitting here for the next hour and a half"
Which is exactly what I did
As the time went on, I got progressively more passionate and vocal on such pressing topics as timetabling, the insanity of getting all sandy on people wearing ears and tails in the lobby as dozens of furfags clog up the footpath and taking a pool of how long it'll take someone to do something exceptionally stupid that'll get us kicked out of the hotel – turns out I was channelling a fuckton of repressed attention-whoring this weekend, but hey – it makes life interesting.
By the time 9 o'clock comes around, they finally open the doors to us plebs – the gold class people had their cocktail party or some other assorted faggotry for the past hour – and we get treated to the general 'welcome to etc' deal and a moderately entertaining little thingy involving Zane & Allen (very hurriedly apparently) getting made up like the people on the furry Indiana Jones poster someone made. You know, all good, kinda gay, but what do you expect?
Then the tragedy begins.
Initially, Trin was supposed to play the opening and closing nights, but Pete decided it'd be a great idea to get some random arbitrary dj he found on myspace to play. Over the course of the weekend, we usually referred to him as dj dickhead, dj generic-shit or dj ipod, and boy howdy did he live up to expectations. Picture year 10 social levels of tragedy – shitty music featuring such floor-fillers as my sharona, abba and Michael Jackson mixed together with the care and grace of dialling up 10 seconds of cross-fade on winamp. Calls of "this is gayer than a giant pile of dudes having sex with each other" began almost immediately but the mass exodus happened when the motherfucking Macarena came on. That was my cue for an almighty "fuck this shit" and organizations for a room party started happening – a group of about a dozen furs descended on the bottle shop across the way, then the 7-11 then back to the bottle-o
Thus began the nightly tradition of a group of rather strange looking people crossing the lobby of the paramount and getting questionable looks from the staff. However, we're good little children. I swear to god we made the least noise out of any 15-20 people crammed into a hotel room ever. Any time we had a thing in our room it basically consisted of people just hanging out and chatting.
Tonight was also the first time I ever got to wear my suit in its entirety. First impression – THIS IS SOME HOT, STUFFY AND GENERALLY UNPLEASANT SHIT! I managed to hang in there for a grand total of about 20 minutes before getting changed again.
The rest of the night consisted of some people getting progressively more lush, good conversation and the fantastic planet – a deliciously fucked 1970's French animation about some strange f'n aliens and generally fucked up shit. Needless to say many a mind was broken
FUH-RIDAY
_In theory_ I was totally going to be up and raring to go at 10 to go to the "your 1st fur con" deal, but that plan kinda died, leaving me still rushing to make the 11:00 photo shoot with the age where all us fursuiters were directed to dance around to non-existent music and make non-existent conversation at the bar while the photographer did his thing. Somehow this took like, 45 minutes and ate into the "making a fur suit" panel pretty solidly.
We had to go to woolies to get food and stuff that we were totally going to cook in our kitchen-equipped apartment and this was also when the destruction began. You see, I wear my kigu pretty much constantly providing its under about 25 degrees outside. This means around Adelaide I'd be a dragon going to the shops, Chinatown, on the bus, down the park, at home, in town etc etc etc. aside from the occasional puzzled look and queries/comments often along the lines of "the fuck is that shit?" nobody in Adelaide was really all that confronted by a Rastafarian dragon.
Not the same story in Melbourne, no. apparently things that weren't in the latest vogue or the cover of ministry of sound confuse and/or enrage melbournites.
Thus, massive mind and face destruction occurred all weekend as I went into "fuck you I'm a dragon" mode, which basically entails wearing a kigu and doing nothing else. Simply existing and _not_ being a total freak completely breaks way too many people. Anyway, woolies – it was about 3 blocks from our hotel so me, Kaz, Mel, Hallward and Ronyo walk down there in varying states of furfaggotry and do our shopping to a background of puzzled looks and straight-out retard faces.
We had to get back quickly to catch the beginners' art panel, then spent the rest of the afternoon basically loafing in some form or another.
Friday night wild was pretty fun, of course there was the usual faff with people not being allowed in when the event was clearly supposed to have already started, but hey, you get that
We got to find out who the super special secret guest of honour was – uncle Kage! Wooooot. Yeah it was cool having 2 & Kage last year, but that happened to be _last_ year. Having the same guys 2 years in a row is fantastic, especially when one of them is supposed to be some fantastic special person. Lets just say it was unexpected, I really thought it was going to be the guy who directed saw or repo or something honestly.
So they did their thing for a couple of hours and everyone had some lulz at jokes that were pleasantly not the same as the ones from last year (mostly) and all was good.
At 10 the show stopped and the bar opened. This is seriously what they should have done on opening night – people were flittering from group to group and actually socialising and getting to know each-other. There was some pleasant jazzy loungey music playing over the speakers at a volume you could actually talk over O.o
People were dooping around in their fursuits while others were getting rather drunk and molestey. This was also good and about as hilarious as the evenings official entertainment. There was a pack conglomerating around the bar where a couple of people were essentially raping pretty much anyone in a suit and anyone out of one who got dragged in by them. They also happened to be feeding us vodka and orange juice through a straw, which was endlessly amusing and super effective – you get fucked up real fast when you're dehydrated
At midnight, our time with the con space is up and everyone starts getting herded out, I need to take all my suit shit back to the apartment and a few people come with and basically crash. Nobody else in my room really felt like doing anything so I'm like "fuck this shit I'm kicking on" – a couple phone calls later and there's a room party on level 5 at the Rydges with the Perth people, so I hook down the lifts, scoot across the road and bump into Aslan and Dustan outside; apparently there's another room party happening at the other end of level 5. I collect Aslan and head up to the Perth room to discover drinking games and general merriment. An hour or 2 and half a bottle of southern comfort later, the rightful occupants want their room back so me, Mel and Aslan migrate down the hall to keep the night going in one of the Sydneysiders rooms.
Here we are met with a bunch of people sprawled all over a rather tiny hotel room at various states of inebriation and one absolute fucking trooper in the way of vixen still in her fucking fursuit. That honestly broke me at this point and I had a pretty massive moment of envy at her … something? Stamina I guess. In retrospect I would have been wearing my suit waaaaay more than I was, but hey, that's what my kigu is for and apparently its just as effective at completely ruining peoples shit, as I was about to find out.
I was halfway toasted at this point in the evening and a smoke had been an increasingly excellent idea for the previous hour or so, so I corral Aslan to come downstairs with me as this entire f'n hotel didn't have a single bloody balcony :/
Outside the hotel was a solid group of 30-50 drunk Melbournians so I figure walking around the block would deal with that problem. We walk along exhibition st to the corner with Bourke, turn the corner and not 5 seconds later I hear "holy shit it's a fucking dinosaur!!!!"
And I'm like "auh I'S A DRAGINZ!!!!!" – Seriously, people don't know their goddamned mythical creatures. You'd have no idea how many people call me a dinosaur or Dorothy or some shit.
And one of the guys goes "oh hey where are you from?"
So I say "I'm from Adelaide but the dragon's from Sweden"
And then this drunk chick starts giving us shit from being from Adelaide, I kindly remind them where they get all their pot and good beer from and turn the corner into the alley that runs behind the Rydges as drunk chick's brother reassures us that she's just a drunk dickhead and that we're ok
Halfway down this sketchy as fuck alley there's 4 or 5 guys hanging out, and I get a slightly more positively toned "the fuck is that shit??" – They're totally into it and ask where I got it and stuff like that, those guys were cool.
Come out of the sketchy-ass alley back on to little Bourke, and along the side of the hotel that's not littered with drunk people. As we come up to the corner, I plan to just plow between everyone, head down, and see what happened.
Turns out nothing much. What did happen when we got back to the main entrance was there was a group of 4 or 5 middle aged people that I assume just had a rather long dinner. From this group comes a shrieking "ohhhhh what a cute dinosaur!!"
"I'm a bloody dragon, jeeeeeez!! Look! Wings! Horns! Bloody dragon! I'm imaginary, not extinct!!"
at this point she asks me to do a little turn before she starts groping the shit outta me O_o no, not touching my no-no parts but grabbing and pulling at all the spikes and wings and stuff going "oooooooooooh can I touch it?"
I'm like "yeah but don't rip it" at which point she starts patting me down in an effort to repair the damage she hasn't yet inflicted. Another member of the party (wearing a sailor's hat) goes "you're a dragon? Well I'm a captain"
I go "yeah that's super" and give the shittest, limpest salute ever.
We're about to turn to go inside when I hear behind me, "what. Is. That."
Coulda sworn it was that fitzy dickhead from those "C" coffee ads and big brother and whatever the fuck he's whored himself to since, but this guy looks, and more importantly sounds, just like him.
I immediately reply "I'm a motherfucking dragon"
This apparently destroyed his feeble mind, because he was stuck in a loop of going "not all the money in the world. Not allllllllll the money. In. the. World."
So I'm like "$400. Bam."
It was at this point mr bogan wankstain thought he was running things. After some processing time, his best crack was "yeah, how much did it cost you to lose your virginity?"
Then the following words fell out of my mouth. I blame the dragon.
"Well I got it for free but I hear your mum's offering"
He had nothing. Once again he was stuck in a loop, going "no shame at all. No. shame. At. All"
… I decided to run with it – "yeah your mum had no shame when she took it in the arse"
It was now officially time to GTFO. Shithead bogan was dumbfounded and our conversation was over, so we turn and make a bee-line through the lobby to the lift, totally straight faced. It wasn't until the lift doors closed that we both had the instant, single frame anime fall to the floor pissing ourselves laughing.
Get back to the room, regale everyone with the events of the previous 5 minutes then we go back to the general drinking and loafing status quo. In the meantime I realize I left my key in the other room, the occupants of which are now well asleep. At about 3:30 everyone bails, but I'm still left with the problem of not having access to my apartment.
Let me say this. I love Fala, he's fucking excellent. He's the kind of friend who'll bail you out at 3:30am when you've done something intensely stupid; which is exactly what he did :3
I had planned to see if anyone was going to conveniently come in to the lobby which I could then go in with. This would mean that all I needed was someone to let me in to the actual room, so I call Fala in the meekest and most apologetic way possible and explain the plan. After sitting around the front door of the building for about 15 minutes, watching a couple attempt to suck each others face off and some intensely hammered Asian chick saying she was waiting for someone from her room to let her in before she flumped on a bench up the street, I send Fala a text: "ur gonna hate me with the intensity of 1000 burning suns, but can you pls come down and let me in?"
"Will be there in a few" – awwwwwww what a sweet little pumpkin
"Thanks hunny :3 <3 u"
So the poor thing comes down, lets me in and I spend the rest of the lift ride grovelling
I get to the apartment, face hits pillow.
Thus endeth Friday.
It wasn't until Sunday that we discover THE MOTHERFUCKING INTERCOM PANEL ON THE FRONT DOOR.
Whelp, I'm an idiot.
SAT-DEE!!!
Managed to roll out of bed just in time for the photo shoot… again >.>
More pictures, posing etc etc – huge amounts of failure by me, I somehow forgot you were supposed to stay still for photos so the few "official" ones of me are kinda blurry and retarded, but hey, the shit – it happens.
So after a nice 2 hour pose-down, its time for some lunchables so we round up some people to go to hungry jacks and kill some time over some noms and stupidity.
Head back to the Rydges for the actfur panel, the one that had been left off the schedule completely until Mel textad it in on Saturday morning. Twas rather amusing, with the hosts basing most of their material on the con and getting some audience participation too. Then came the "so who's been wearing their ears and tails out and around the city?"
Once again, I blame the dragon (cos there's nothing mentally unhinged about blaming all your ill-conceived actions on a figment of your own imagination)
"I've been wearing this all weekend, hell, I went down to woolies yesterday like this"
Then they gave me the mic. I basically derailed the show for the next 5 minutes with what we get up to in Adelaide (or more accurately, the Kurralta Park Coles) and another recount of the previous evening shenanigans.
Guest of honour (aka 2 & Kage talking shit) panel was straight after, the most entertaining part of which was Pete trying to stop them "performing together" cos that was supposed to be saved for Sundays charity performance. Thankfully, he had to duck out a couple of times, at which point 2 & Kage would immediately start insulting each other as fast as possible. Now THAT'S entertainment
After a short break to re-hash the con rooms and generally get their shit together, it was time for the talent show. All year I had planned to go up on that stage, rant about crap and generally insult/ruin everyone. About 2 weeks before the con I decided such a thing might not be the most appropriate thing to do before 9 at night to a large audience. Instead I thought I'd pay homage to the unstoppable pap machine of Hollywood and mime along to a couple of songs from death to smoochy. Unfortunately I was a smidge disorganized and the best recording I could do on the day I was leaving was a hideously brickwalled, low bandwidth hunk of shit that I recorded straight on to my mp3 player. It was at this point I realized I had about as much production quality as an under 8 jazz ballet recital and suiting naturally lends itself to a complete absence of dignity, so I decided to roll with it.
I went for tragedy and nailed the shit out of it.
Picture cassette-quality audio and a fursuiter miming along to some of the most innuendo-filled and just plain wrong children's songs to ever grace the silver screen. I had 5 minutes to throw together some choreography and I went full-blown panto style.
Kage gave me a score of infinity for my lack of talent. Fuck yeah.
Best part of the talent show was definitely anthrax's stand-up bit. He was fucking brutal and set the bar for future shows. After his performance, I wholeheartedly guarantee I will perform my "special" version of "if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands", along with some other stuff I've got brewing, the next time I go to Midfur. >:3
After the (no) talent show, all the suiters bustle back to the headless lounge to see that they're preparing a nice 5 star dinner for the kids who couldn't actually go into bobby magees for the nightly entertainment, making for an interesting scene. In the foreground was a classy looking dinner setting with all the faff and folded napkins and stuff, in the background were a whole pile of hot, dishevelled, half-naked fursuiters getting changed. I took a video of this but I don't know if posting it would be a good idea as I'm pretty sure taking photos/videos in the headless lounge is generally frowned upon.
While the gold classies were having their (reportedly shithouse) meal, we all headed down to grill'd, where apparently lots of people had congregated. When we got there, it was just down to 2 or 3.
So we had our burgers – seriously, Adelaide needs at least one grill'd. Best hamburger and chips ever.
After tea we trundled back to the Rydges to go to the regular cheapwad part of the "gala ball". Some part of me decided to wear normal people clothes tonight. This was the first piece of the puzzle that put me in a sandy mood and generally led to the next couple of hours being a bad time. As soon as I walked in I got hit by a huge wave of BAH IMMENSE FURSUIT ENVY GO!! … Yeah. I like being a dragon or a kitty, being people is no fun
Trying not to be a sandypants, I get down to hangin, chillin, little bit of illin… dj genericface had gone from the balls-out tragedy of Thursday to garden variety club crap, still mixed with the delicate poise, dignity and timing of Quasimodo in a hurricane during an earthquake – between each song there was this awkward 10-20 second pile of off-beat, off tempo noise, before the previous song would cut out and the new song was suddenly 1/3 of the way through.
I got down to what I'd been doing every other night – talking shit to anyone who'd listen. Unfortunately trying to do so over blaring music is an exercise in futility. By this point I wanted to bail. I start gathering people who want to do something and get a deal rolling for Mel's room. Unfortunately, by this time Kaz was on the decks, meaning there was a pretty even distribution between stayers and goers, leaving me in this horrible tense limbo for about half an hour.
Somehow we manage to bundle enough people upstairs and hang out. I'm still edgy and I'm putting a chunk of that blame on my current attire. I was desperate for some more "fuck you I'm a dragon" time, so I head back to the apartment with Trin & Lycan.
Get back to the apartment, change my attire and headspace slightly and immediately my night starts getting better. On the way down the lift we surprise an old lady and melt a kid's face. He had the biggest wide eyed, gaping mouth "what is this I don't even" look I've ever seen >:3
In an effort to burn off my remaining tension I come along with them to the Victoria hotel – it's a downhill run and they were cruising along on their heelys; which happen to be another little thing that completely destroy Melbournians minds.
Unfortunately there happens to be a lot of speed freak wankstains in Melbourne, 3 of which decide to chase Trin and Lycan down the street going "ooooo you've got wheels ooo wheels eeeeeeerrrrrrrr" before running alongside Trin and shoving him over with enough force to collect Lycan on his way through. Thankfully they managed to bail out before eating incredible amounts of shit, but I'm like "what the fuck is wrong with you you fucking wankers??" and the 3rd guy who didn't run along was like "ooh sorry we're offending you gerrrrr"
I go, "you're not fucking offending me dickwad, your fucktard friends just went and tried to hurt my friends." at this point I was still slightly irate from earlier and was secretly out for blood. I don't know what I would have done if they stopped and turned around, cos I can't fight for shit, but I was betting on retard strength taking over and the next mornings headline reading:
LOCAL FUCKWITS BEATEN TO DEATH BY DRAGON IN PAJAMAS
More on page 3
During the rest of our journey we somehow manage to collect Aslan and Shiro kitsune, who turns out to be rather cool, make it to the Victoria without further dramas, Trin & Lycan go to their room to get changed or something, I don't remember; and we all head back to the Rydges for further merriment.
SUHN-DAE
For the 3rd consecutive day I manage to roll out of bed just in time to make an 11:00 fursuiting deal, this time a parade/doop around through the city. The turn out and associated hare Krishna feel of having a giant throng of obnoxious freaks marching through downtown Melbourne was slightly missing this year, there were about the same number of fursuiters, but only about ¼ as many randoms coming along for the ride. Either way we cruised across the road to a neat little Chinese courtyard where we assed around and took pictures and stuff for about ½ an hour-45 minutes. Rob Wolven was busting out his parkour on all the statues and rocks and stuff around the place, including a 10 foot-odd tall rock spire thing. There was an interesting moment of role reversal with a couple of cats feebly jumping and clawing at a wolf up a rock >.>
After all the photos and stuff, people were a bit stuck for what to do with themselves – this was supposed to be a fursuit parade after all, not a fursuit "walk across the street and take photos then go straight back" so Flix and I start heading in the opposite direction to the hotel in a hope that everyone else would come flocking behind us. Thankfully furries are a predictable bunch and strongly adhere to the "if a couple of people start walking in some direction I'm going to blindly follow them" rule, so pretty soon everyone was on a trip around the block. Not too much happened on our brief journey, although we did pass a porno shop and apparently a couple of suiters went inside, which would have been pretty damn funny. There were also impromptu invasions of a 7-11 and the virgin gym.
By the time we got around the block, everyone decided to be soft and go back to the hotel. I was kinda disappointed, I was raring for a trip down to either fed square or that neat plaza near the Victoria hotel where we took photos last year, which was only really 3 blocks away.
Came back to the con space, got changed and headed out to get essential raving accoutrements for this evening's entertainment. There were these sweet oldschool purple suede boots shy wanted to get and I wanted to get some trashy raver crap, so we went to jay-jays. There I found the sunglasses stand and a pair of all white kanye west louvre shades (you know the ones that either make you look like a complete fucktard or a coke fiend). They were PERFECT. With my head down under my kigu's hood they looked like more shiny teeth and otherwise made me look like some sort of horrible coked-out wigga eurotrash hunk of shit. They see me rollin'…
We continue our tour to foot locker for Shy's boots, the reject shop for glow sticks and another jay-jays where shy also picks up this excellent all white gay cowboy hat. Once again the hilarious tragedy train was steaming out of the station.
We had to get back to the con space to make the "talk to the board" panel - I had a couple of things I wanted to mention.
The panel itself was actually surprisingly well behaved – people aired their concerns and they were heard and addressed in a well considered and professional manner, despite the best efforts of some to nitpick every little thing that got them sandy about a con that a couple of them had never actually attended.
Lol furries and their dramas.
It came time for me to air my concerns – namely the sloppy scheduling and a lack of loaf space, the single greatest element (as far as I'm concerned) of Midfur X.
I also had some positive feedback. I said directly to Pete "I'm genuinely surprised and pleased to see just how well behaved and SOBER you've been this weekend" I totally meant it too, the drooling, slurring alcho of last year was nowhere to be seen and this really did make my time that bit more stress-free.
Then came the 2 & Kage charity show and the auction. Nothing all too special really. The auction didn't go retarded like last year, I think it was missing the genuine community atmosphere of last years, but we still managed to collectively beat the previous mark and raised something stupid like $5000 or so.
It's Sunday night. Trinn's playing his set at 9:30… no wait 10… no wait, 10:30…
Anyway, I was out to rock my shit and I had a plan. For the start of the evening I would wear my suit head and paws with my kigu, then when I got entirely too hot, the head and paws would go off and the kanye shades would replace them. There's a reasonable gaggle of people in our apartment getting ready to go, I've got my kigu and footpaws on, all the rest of the stuff I'd be needing for the night was in my duffle bag and I was feeling nice and safe and organised. I'm pregaming rather solidly too – I'm well toasted by now.
Come back inside, put on my head and paws and I'm ready to go. Nobody else really is, they need a few minutes to get their last little bits & pieces together so I float around, try and get some air on the balcony and try to hurry people up. By this point I needed to get out of that apartment, so I manage to get Hallward and shy to help me across the road to the Rydges.
By the time I get to the front door of the Rydges I'm in a bit of a state, and Hallward, my pack mule, had managed to forget his con pass. There is a big-ass staircase and a nightclub full of people between me and the headless lounge where I had planned to dump my bag and I was in no condition to make the journey myself. Thankfully there was a group of 5 or 10 furs hanging out outside and the (closed) hotel bar was playing some acid jazz. There was a pleasant breeze outside and I f'n love acid jazz (picture 3 piece lounge music mixed with instrumental hiphop). I'm in a really good place right now so I start just generally bouncing along to the music which gradually morphs into crip-walking and doing the robot at about 50bpm. I was in my own little world inside the suit and just generally grooving along with my eyes closed.
After a few minutes I stop and return to reality for a bit, when the people hanging around outside are like "wow that was mesmerising."
Lol, I'm like a lava lamp
I manage to wrangle this group of people inside and one of them to take me and my bag to the fursuit lounge where I have a much needed drink and compose myself to go out on the floor. On the way a slightly tipsy Pete pulls me in to a group photo with the guy from the charity we were donating to. I have to say there's something deliciously subversive about standing between 2 very proper (or at least proper-looking) people for a photo for some classy publication while slightly off your tits and they have no idea >:3
I pull myself away from that group to make it back to the party, where Mr Ipod pants is still playing his mashy club tunes, I have shitloads of energy to get rid of and I spend about half my time dancing and half sitting on the sidelines pouring Gatorade into my face.
Things change with the first few bars of (the song formerly known as) ! – the first song of Trinn's set; it's such a fucking perfect opening song that drove itself into me and I seriously spent the rest of the night at bobby's floating in and out of brainland. I stay suited up for the first 6 or 7 songs until the metallica remix comes on, when I make my move to go get changed.
I make my way to the headless lounge to find it rather full of random arbitrary people, including someone who's decided that losing a single fucking book is worth totally losing his shit over and he also appears to be under the impression that everyone within earshot gives a flying fuck about his pointless arbitrary problem.
I make my way back into Bobbys, pop my bag under the desk at the DJ booth and continue to have the most f'n fun ever. At about 11:30 a now rather merry Pete comes up to announce that the bar will be open til 1 instead of 12 – very good news. This gives Trinn time to extend the latter part of his set to include a few more songs, one of which is thousand – a crazy little break that goes from 0 to 1000 bpm in the space of a minute and a half; I've never felt such a positive energy, and I may have kinda lost control for that song, bashing my whole body up and down as hard and as fast as I could as the song built to its climax.
Anyway, the rest of the set was epic, all the way through to "I remember" when the ugly lights came on. It was at this point that Pete was being Pete; the convention was technically over so he wasn't the chairman anymore
He swaggered onto the dance floor and started hugging everyone in between "ah lahv youse guys". I start to make tracks with the other 20 or so people still there, and once we get outside the hotel, Monday has officially begun.MON MON MON-DAY
Following some light mincing outside the Rydges, me and about 10 other people cross the road and wait outside the paramount – we had only 2 keys and they both happened to be with people in the room. Most of this group consists of the Adelaide crowd and some other people. Thankfully, I was feeling sharp as a tack right now and somehow managed to herd all the random arbitrary drunk people out of the way so we could get back to our apartment without shitting off security again.
Back upstairs everyone's still feeling good after the party, with some people wanting to wind down somewhat wile others were looking for the next hot spot to float to. In the meantime, we opt for a balcony-side meeting; an excellent excuse to stop and rest for 20 minutes or so without feeling like we're wasting valuable party time.
A little while later I get a phone call. "Come down to our room, theres heaps of people here and we have a spa"
"Oh ok then"
Looks like we have a party on our hands.
Once again we make the journey across the road to the Rydges and up to a big-ass suite, with at least 20 people inside. The claim of underwear clad hot-tubbers proved true.
I find myself a comfy spot in their lounge room type area and the next 3 hours or so whooshed by in a blur. Basically, Trinn, Lycan, miss pixie (the other Mel), Ronyo and I are still up and kicking as dawn begins to break, the roof pool is open at 6am and we couldn't think of a better way to end the weekend.
Ronyo and miss pixie need to go to their room to get changed and Trinn, Lycan and I need to go down to the lobby to go back up to the pool. Its first thing Monday morning, we're all dishevelled, smelly, we've been up all night and I'm still in my kigu. Of course someone else had to come into the lift with us. She goes "oh wow what have you guys been up to?"
My response proves my subconscious brain loves me. I reply, perfectly coherently "oh we've been at this convention all weekend, last night was the closing night party and we've been keeping ourselves going with redbull & no-doz"
We get to the 20-something floor, then up the dodgy-ass stairs to the rooftop pool, but no people. We wait there for a few minutes becoming progressively more aware of the fact that we're loitering by an obviously locked door and slowly becoming resigned to the progressively more likely event that the other 2 got to their room and promptly passed out. Thankfully, literally less than a minute before we were going to give up, they come up the stairs and all of us can enjoy the early morning rooftop pool deck.
That couple of hours on the roof was fucking fantastic, it was the best goddamn comedown to such an intense weekend. Just after the sun rose, there was a really strong ion front, the wind went completely calm and all the birds went silent for a couple of seconds and I felt this change in energy really strongly within myself. Once again, the best times were just spent talking and stuff, Mel decided to be insane and go for a swim while the rest of us elected to stay dry.
At about 8:30 the pool cleaner shows up and it's now time to go home. I still had to check out of the apartment at 10.
Getting our shit out of the apartment was the hardest thing ever, every single movement was a goddamned ordeal :/ but, we managed to get ourselves out by 10:30 and the only casualty I recorded was my phone charger. Pretty good outcome if you ask me
I shamble over to the Rydges foyer one last time in a desperate attempt to claw every last ounce I could out of the weekend. The furries had sequestered a corner of the foyer and so I spent my time mooching hugs and stuff off of everyone.
Eventually I had to face the inevitable and leave. After all, I did still have a nice bit of bed waiting for me at the Victoria and the Rydges was quickly emptying itself of people.
While archon and Ari were out having fun at eureka tower and the museum and stuff, I slept. That was basically Monday for me. Shitty, broken, fever-dream sleep. Yay. At about 6:30 I had to drag myself out of their room to go get my stuff from the paramount, then take a taxi to Southern Cross station to get on a train to Bendigo.
Getting on a long-ass train and bus ride by yourself after the best few days of your life is fucking depressing I've gotta say. I don't care if I can't be a massive tight-arse again, I'm travelling with a friend next time I go to a con. Reading the con-book and the couple of comic books you've bought just doesn't cut it.
In Bendigo I need to get off the train to get on the bus to Adelaide which left Melbourne at the same time as the train I was on. Once again, the bus was completely full, but luckily I didn't get a whole lot of shit about my luggage. The only interesting thing was the homeless smackhead who tried to get on the coach and look inconspicuous. It made me wonder what the hell he'd do once he arrived in Adelaide had he not been kicked off.
Around midnight we have our ½ hour break, in which I have a pie and a smoke. Since leaving Melbourne I had been listening to hard house and jungle, trying to keep Sunday night's vibe going, so I find myself at a truck stop in butt-fuck Victoria, dancing with my eyes closed in front of the bus and I didn't care.
My head hit the pillow once I got back on the bus and I was out. I only woke up when the bus driver had his "welcome to Adelaide" announcement over the loudspeaker.
CHEWS-DAY
Ash picked my up from the bus station, not before I randomly ran into Loki, who was on his way to bumfuck Victoria to see some family. Ash and I went to McDonalds for breakfast then promptly home. I enjoyed the cool air on my face on the recliner outside, had an in-depth conversation regarding just how morally reprehensible advent calendars were, then we went in and watched bender's game. After the movie finished, Midfur was officially over for me.
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MIDFUH!!
1 min read
so its like a week away now. who's going?
im arriving at like 7am on the thursday - pm me if you want my ph# :3
im arriving at like 7am on the thursday - pm me if you want my ph# :3
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wanted: art memes
1 min read
ahoy!
you know those memes that pop up all the time where theres a bunch of stupid things they make you draw?
send them to me.
ALL OF THEM!
i will do every single meme linked in this journal, guaranteed.
even if you make up a retarded meme on the spot, like the "draw a forest of penises meme" or some other shit like that, ill do it.
you know those memes that pop up all the time where theres a bunch of stupid things they make you draw?
send them to me.
ALL OF THEM!
i will do every single meme linked in this journal, guaranteed.
even if you make up a retarded meme on the spot, like the "draw a forest of penises meme" or some other shit like that, ill do it.
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