San Jose Convention Center, January 17-21, 2013. And now
over.A positive experience, it shows signs of improvement beyond last year's
fairly minor fuckups, and tacked on some 200 additional attendees. There were fursuiters. How many? Nobody but Larry cares, regardless the photoshoot was busier than years past.
Pre-registration was far improved from last year, cutting out the iMac bottleneck with (at last) pre-printed badges, though at-con registration remains unchanged: we're still forcing every registrant to sit down at one of four workstations to proceed. Do picture furries fatfingering the little Mac keyboards, four at a time, while working out their addresses and credit info. The line is short for a con this size, but it never moves.
Programming was solid, fewer rescheduling errors than the year previous. (The printed guide was invalidated only an hour before registration opened.) The spirituality track was gutted, as the experienced panelists had entirely moved away from giving them, leaving only the newbie who was still lost on his path of finding his inner mouse and was "just learning like the rest of you." Pokefurs was a good fun trainwreck of a meet and greet, led by someone with no interest in guiding it and
a sex offender in a fursuit who never spoke. The Hypnotic Beast had deep complaints about getting shuffled into a smaller room for his infomercial, only $55 for a Skype call that'll make it all better. The writing track had been largely taken over by a panel of bad furry porn writers, wherin Kyell Gold wants to tell you how to remember the most generic characters in print. Matthew Ebel was back. Matthew Ebel is in demand at conventions, because he plays music at conventions, because conventions want him, inexplicably. Old white men were complaining about the number of fursuiters who'd dare take their heads off and break the ~magic~
The Hilton experience was improved with far lighter management than before, following a
published announcement and sorta-apology after last year. Meanwhile the Marriott had some issues getting people into their rooms anywhere near check-in. Elevatorcon had a strong launch when the Marriott became horribly slammed with elevator problems, leading up to FLARE barricading the elevators. (Unconfirmed rumors suggest that the fire truck calls were elevator-related.) Mingle areas were still kinda hard to come by. We're starting to miss the free wifi offered at the previous hotels: tethering quality drops when so many furries (and teenage girls) get thrown into the same place. And yes, there was fake drama between the volleyball players and the furries.
The party floor was somewhat better, with more parties spreading the crowd around. Improved weather opened up the balcony, though very few parties were on the correct side of the building to open onto it. It's def. a party convention, the hashtag is flooded with intoxication and attendees were keeping the local EMTs busy. City police had set up checkpoints within the convention to screen for alcohol. Teenagers (in their mid and late 20s) came visibly loaded with cheap wine boxes, shit booze, and expensive ipod speakers.
The dances were abysmal. The convention
absolutely needs to stop hiring fuckwits from Second Life: with con attendance above 3200 for the first time ever, nightly peak dance floor attendance around 50 is just embarrassing. The floor is definitely less crowded than it has been in years past, and Frolic (down the street, $10 cover charge, $5 for fursuiters) is drawing better crowds than the free inside dance event. There's brostep every night, DJs are mixing Skrillex to Deadmau5 to Skrillex to Deadmau5. DJs leave full minutes of slow to no-BPM drops between dancable segments, and don't actually mix beyond throwing airhorns into inappropriate places. The floor regularly goes still. The only people who seem to be really enjoying this are the DJs, his friends, and a small child in Renamon pajamas. More attendees were having fun outside the main stage than inside. The convention really needs to dump the @furtherecord morass, pick out the few good DJs from it and from the community, let them self-promote, and go back to having themed nights. This shit peaked at the Fairmont, where floor numbers were 3-4 times better, despite having 500 fewer people at the con.
Prawst status: still not funny.
