This is only the second furry con I've been to (first one was Anthrocon back in 1999, when it first moved from Albany to Valley Forge, and before it settled into Philadelphia). I had a much better time at Furality.
I've been to plenty of other non-furry cons, though, notably ECCC and GeekGirlCon several times, and PAX one time, both as an attendee and as an exhibitor. I gotta say, for being entirely in VR and ostensibly requiring no physical effort to participate in, I sure came away from it feeling just as tired as I do from other cons.
Highlights of my time:
- The transgender meetup
- The musicians meetup
- The neurodiversity meetup
- The aroace meetup
- Noticing that all meetups were transgender meetups, except the neurodiversity meetup which was actually a transgender musicians meetup
- Hanging out with existing friends but also making craptons of new friends, seriously my friends list expanded by like 5x over the course of the con
- Almost getting votekicked out of a crowded instance because I managed to get myself onto the floating stage during a period between shows and people thinking I'd "hacked the backstage" (but really it's just that the stage has extremely unnecessary collision and nothing to protect anyone from landing on it)
- Being told that my avatar's mouth is "small... so fancy!"
Of course there were a lot of technical difficulties but, c'mon, it's a gigantic festival hosted on a platform that is very much not designed for these sorts of things to exist, and I'm amazed at the system they managed to put together and how well it worked, all things considered. Although that bug that ended up freezing everyone's clients for 15 minutes while they tried to join the aroace instances was weird.
There were some pretty loud grumblings about the schedule and I mean, yeah, a lot of it was unfortunate but they also really needed to make it accessible to people from time zones around the world, and I'm glad that all of the meetups I really cared about I was able to make it to (although it'd have been nice if I could have made it to the foodies one, but I was not going to be awake at 5 AM for that one).
Anyway. So much amazing creativity on display with peoples' avatars, and this has made me more than ever want to get some sort of visibility as a furry musician so that I might be able to get a gig at a future festival.
Also I'd love to see a future meetup for "greymuzzles" or the like. I sure felt out of place being one of the few 40-somethings there. Maybe that's something I can suggest when the next meetup list gets open for suggestions.
