Good morning, fuzzies :3 I hope that you’re having a good week! It is now… …Somehow it is now December 7th already, cool, alright, that’s fine. And it’s Wednesday? Even better >.>
Anyway! I was at Midwest FurFest last weekend, which was pretty darned good, and I’m going to steal @CrimsonRuari’s idea because some Thoughts occurred to me. I dunno.
MFF is a huge con, where furry cons are concerned—at this point indisputably the largest. This year it was 13,641 attendees, which is absolutely staggering. It has “felt” at the limits of its practical size for a couple years now, between the hotel lottery and registration times. I know a number of people who have stopped going (or were on the fence this year) for that reason.
So, sort of like last year, it was this odd mix of a con that was quite large, but also where many of the people I expected to be there weren’t, which as cons go is at least good for tamping down on the FOMO thing. It always felt vibrant; I had a work call at 3AM Monday (I work German hours) and my plan to take it in one of the secluded areas off the lobby didn’t work because it was still too boisterous and loud then.
Which is neat! :3
I am going to advance a controversial opinion and say that for certain definitions of “solved” MFF has “solved” the Line Con™ registration problem, or at least I’m not sure how it gets any better. The con (reasonably) has vaccination requirements, which entails a vaccination check; my wait time to get through that Thursday was about two hours. Registration was a bit more on top of that.
That seems to have been the bottleneck, but it’s hard to know how to improve that if you’re trying to process the population of a small town in a single evening. After Thursday night the lines always seemed pretty reasonable. If furries are committed to the idea of getting badged a full 24 hours before the con starts, this is always going to happen. Like, it’s not reasonable to expect the con to staff (and pay contractors like the vaccination check folks) for 10,000/hour throughput, but only for two hours.
I decided to volunteer this con, 20% because I figured that if I was going to bitch about the con I should be doing something to help fix it and 80% because it gives me something to do and if I am left to my own devices at cons my mind idles and goes to dark places, and my roommates do not wake up before noon so I have a lot of idle time otherwise >.>
Anyway, I went straight from registration to check in with volunteer ops and then back to registration; full credit to the volunteer coordinators for being able to direct people where they seem to have been needed. I don’t think registration was understaffed and I’m not really sure how much having more people would have helped.
I will say that it was a very good experience; the Telegram chat was always full of people looking to pitch in where they could and I had the sense that everyone really wanted to do what they could to make the con a success. You should consider volunteering!
(Mostly I wound up working for the art show, helping check artists in and then also helping close the show out once bidding was done. MFF assigns bidders a unique ID, which they are required to hand-write on the bid sheets associated with pieces of artwork. After reading hundreds of these, I am now also certified in the state of Illinois for interpreting what doctors scribble on your prescription)
The rest of the con was good. I bought a cute sweater at the dealer’s den, and also commissioned a new badge from the as-ever fantastic Icecolo. This is what is at the top of the post. I am very happy with it! She has rendered coyote!Me as being appropriately Trustworthy, and maybe a little… Kohi-an, for lack of a better word. I am okay with that.
If you were at MFF and I didn’t see you, I’m sorry :( it is a big con and I didn’t meet up with everyone I could have, or planned to, and the couple of people I was directed to meet wound up being for very brief encounters that mostly involved hugs and “well, I don’t mean to keep you…” because we all had other places to be. It is a short weekend, and it was very packed, and I was happy with the amount of hanging out I did but it is always good to be able to spend more time with friends.
Also, I checked somebody’s bag at art show who had an IWW pin on their coat, and when I mentioned this to a friend they told me they’d met someone else who was also in the IWW, as distinct from the two Wobblies I spent most of the con hanging out with. So there were at least five of us, which implies that the revolution will be brought to you by people who list “Solidarity” as a fave in their F-List profiles.
I am okay with that, too.