That would be Darrel Exline. Long and short of it is, best of intentions, horrible execution. He made a lot of bad decisions that he owned up to, and the whole thing left him understandably bitter. I wasn't at the last Conference, which had about 470 people. Some camera crews asked if they could come, and Darrel ok'ed two of them, but not for cash. He talks about it in this
Flayrah post.
Just how much blame or slack he gets pretty much depends on the person trying to accuse or defend him. He was once on the side of Burned Fur - big mistake. By the time he saw the crazy in the group and distanced himself, it was too late. A couple of people accused CF of being a BF convention, and then other BF people (friends of his) started saying, without his blessing, "Yeah! So don't come to our convention!" Darrel wanted to con to be for everyone, lifestylers and non-lifestylers alike, just without the out-of-control shit from Merlino's chairmanship. At the same time though, I don't think he went out of his way to get his BF buddies to shut up. Or something like that. I'm really not in the mood to search through the old Usenet flamewars. It's one of the topics the X-man has an interest in selectively editing on Wikifur.
Merlino's last year as con chair involved moving the convention to San Diego over Easter weekend. People weren't too inclined to go at that time of year, or take the extra time it took to travel that far. So the majority of them who were all in the SF Bay and Silicon-Valley area started thinking about having their own convention - Further Confusion. When? In CF's original timeslot, mid-to-late January. So Exline inherited this clusterfuck of politics, some of which he'd brought onto himself, some which had been rather nastily hurled at him. Throw in the dot-com bubble bursting and people having less money to spend, and then how Darrel signed bad hotel contracts... yeah, it didn't work out well. He also made some very heated, un-chairman-like posts to Usenet which didn't make him look like he had the greatest sense of diplomacy. In the end though, he admitted his mistakes. (This
archive link with the embedded flash document is pretty damn humble by furry standards.) But then, after all that, he let the media attend the convention - ...I mean, wtf was he thinking?
Still, despite all the shit said about him, he was trying to do something positive for everyone to enjoy, and spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to make it work. When it didn't work, half of it was it own fault, and the other half was a combination of real-life bad luck and other people in the fandom making it all worse. I bumped into him at a science-fiction convention in 2003, and he seemed to be a nice guy - had his daughter with him. Where is he now? Probably hanging out with the Californian science-fiction crowd, old furry friends, maybe gaming or comics people - dropping out of the limelight and being a run-of-the-mill science-fiction fan with a bit of furry still in there, that's my guess. Knows enough to not try running a convention again, though conceivably he might still work as a volunteer on one.
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