Frosty Fur Fest, Fur The 'More 2026

at this rate i'm going to have to start batching them by year in order to get these blog posts out "in time"...

another year, another busy con schedule! i had told myself i was only gonna do, at most, one flying con a year, just to keep costs down. i was planning to be at Anthrocon this year with Lupi, with whom i went to Megaplex with last year, and quat, with whom i went to FWA last year, so that fills my one slot. everything else was going to be driving-only.

preamble

as has accidentally become a pattern in these posts, i made a bunch of stuff! one thing i really wanted to get was a comfortable collar and some dog tags -- in particular, i wanted one i could wear all day and that would make noise as i moved around. collars are more fun when they're dingly :3

the noise idea was solved by simply getting two of the exact same tag. one side says "ebu" and the other says "service Lucario", as is befitting of my position in society. the all-day problem was tricker to pin down, as i find most materials except neoprene to get uncomfortable after a couple hours. at the same time, neoprene is very thick and visible, and i wanted some thing a little subtler-stated. i took inspiration from a leather martingale i had got from Blue Wolf Collective and made my own!

aside from that, i also made a digital lanyard for myself -- basically a carousel of some ebu art. i may try to generalize this project and release it as a standalone app at some point in the future. i had a new batch of ebu stickers made, and a friend of mine even made me a lil ebu perler dangler!!

one more thing that happened this year was that right at the start of january, i got myself a camera i had been eyeing for a long while -- a Sony α7C. i had a Canon Rebel XSi from my late grandfather that i had previously used, but was quickly running into its limits (it is a camera from 2008 after all). i had been thinking of splurging and getting my "last camera", a full-frame mirrorless, for quite a while. going straight to full-frame seemed like a reasonable jump given that my grandfather had quite a few vintage Pentax and Canon lenses that i could adapt to a mirrorless body. when i saw a deal on a used one (as well as a Tamron f/2.8 28-75mm lens), i snapped it up. i have been exceptionally happy with the decision and plan to take the camera with me to shoot cons here forward :3

Frosty Fur Fest

okay! so being that this was the first con in the local area for quite a ways and that i happened to live quite conveniently close, i planned to volunteer for the con. the original plan was to do photography, but Mystic Chai, a local fur with a lot more experience behind the camera, offered their skills, and, well, they were the correct choice lol. but hey, more photographers is more coverage, and backups are important.

i showed up early to help set up dealer's den, and pop in and out with the camera in places where the main photographer was tied up elsewhere.

most of the con was... well, a bit of a blur. as expected for a first con, things were hectic behind the scenes. instead of dealer's den, i wound up bouncing back and forth between physical setup and teardown, as well as gophering (heh) and generally making myself useful wherever i could be. after the first couple hours on the first day, things slowed enough to catch my breath and i could enjoy the con as a goer and not just a volunteer.

evidently i impressed enough of the staff there that there's a decent chance i might be getting pulled onto next year's team?? which, absolutely, hell yeah. FFF was a blast and i'm excited to see what comes next :3

Fur the 'More

okay, so this one needs a bit of an intro. a non-furry couple i know and consider dear friends of mine recently moved up to Baltimore. it was bittersweet, because while it's been obvious they're much happier up there, it was a little sad too because the entire time i've known them, they've been at most five minutes away. so i and a mutual friend, t-dog, made a promise to head up each year for whatever local furry con they had, and it just so happened that Fur the 'More happened to land only about a month or so after they moved. we decided to book tickets to fly up, pretty much immediately breaking my one-flying-con-a-year rule -_-. Baltimore is a fairly cheap city to fly to, so this didn't hurt as much as it could have, but still.

regardless, i don't regret the decision, because not only was it nice to see my friends again, but Baltimore was an incredible city to explore and the con was fun too. but first, cat(s) tax!

the cats

they had two cats, Peach and Daisy.

for the entire time i've known her, Peach has not liked strangers very much at all. after a couple days there, she could tolerate sometimes being in the same room as me and t-dog, but not very long (and she was very vocal about her displeasure).

Daisy on the other hand was very sweet, nuzzling up to us and letting us pet her. whenever the four of us were in a room, she was nine times out of ten in there as well, usually perched up someplace to watch. most of that was playing the Slay the Spire board game (which, yeah, did get me hooked on the mobile game and i now have the STS2 beta in my Steam library. what can i say, good game)

the city

Baltimore was a lot of fun to explore. it was exceptionally nice to be in a place where everything was in walking distance and not only that, but also have the infrastructure in place to actually walk there. i live less than half a mile away from a grocery store, but actually attempting to walk there is a bit of a suicide mission because it involves walking on the shoulder of a stroad with no sidewalk, very-low-hanging tree branches, and five lanes of cars whizzing by at highway speeds. in contrast, the neighborhood that my friends were at had huge sidewalks, bike lanes, speed bumps, and narrow roads to actually encourage people to walk.

i'm not sure where life will ultimately wind up taking me but if i could live in a place like this i would not be disappointed.

the con

between the various events happening around the city, the fact that we were visiting friends on top of everything else, and the still quite reasonable but non-trivial walk to the con, meant that we didn't have a ton of time, all things considered, to see and do everything. we hit a couple panels that we liked, i played around with the camera a bit, but didn't take a ton of shots. still, it was fun to be there. i think i would have had more fun if i made more of an effort to make friends there, but between everything else happening that weekend, i'm not complaining.

next year i intend to make more of an effort in meeting new people so i've got people to hang with. not that t-dog isn't fun, don't get me wrong, but i think cons are the best when there's separate clusters of friends you can float between. though maybe that's the extrovert in me speaking.

i know this article is a bit on the short side. part of that is the fact that i'm writing all this more than a month out -- if i had thought ahead, i might have taken a daily journal or something. i'll have to try that at FWA this year.

oh yeah, that's the other reason this is on the short side. i'm headed back to FWA in less than a week!! i'm taking a carful of friends, meeting up with some others, and more likely than not posting about it when that happens. as soon as i get around to it...