well its all over
Day 2: First thing i went to was "Line Drawing 101", i figgured that anything '101' had to be basic enough for me. It was alot of fun and they covered the basics like wrist movement (or lack there of), propper ways to hold a pencil, how to practice getting nice smooth lines and stuff like that. all the basics you need to start off with. After that we had some spair time untill the next panel so i went back down to the dealers room and oggled over some more stuff. There was a print by Heather Burton that was absolutely amazing, but it was $25 and i wasnt sure if there was anything else i wanted more so i passed it over and continued looking. at noon i went to the Guest of Honour panel with Jenifer Seng, the artist for The Boondocks (a newspaper syndicated comic for those who havent heard of it... like me). It was alot of fun to hear what she had to say on drawing for a living. She even did a little on-the-spot drawing for us on the big flipboard and donated them to the charity auction
After that i grabed some lunch in the break then it was off to Schizophrenia 102, a pupet panel with Tool Fox and his wife Pixie Vixie. That was an absolute HOOT! they were just to funny for words. This year was a continuation to last years 101 (which i missed) that was on baics of pupetry, this years was on getting some content. We brain stormed for about 20 min, started off with Roadkill Theater and lines such as "Oh my god! you killed Kenya! you Bastards!" (the fact they had the lion and tiger pupets out at the time made this utterly priceless). Eventually we heard from the back of the room "Soilent green is PUPPETS!" seeing as how that reduced nearly everyone to tears we had to use it some how... so they had a bunch of us (myself included of course) take a puppet and go to the dealers room and go up to someone and quickly whisper "Soilent green is puppets" and move on really quickly. So we had about 8 of us do a blitz of the dealers room to much laughter and enjoyment by all.
Then it was off to the Weaponry for Artists and Costumers panel which had some of the highlites of the show. unfortionatly this clashed with the panel by Heather Burton which i also wanted to go to... but as usual, big swords and bigger guns win out. This was basicly a chance for the artists in the crowd to get to see real weapons and the way they were ment to be held as opposed to Hollywoods idea on how they should be. Lucky Dragon had several bows and even a crossbow to demonstrate. After her, Grayscripe brought out the sharp steel. He had several differnt kinds of swordsand knives ranging from a double edged broadsword to a katana to modern combat knives. But the real stuff was the guns (and i cant remember who gave this section). He had several WW1 era rifles, some modern assult rifles includeing an AK47 and the current british bullpup rifle (that i cant remember the name of) but the best 2 were saved for last... a WW2 machene gun and a authentic Thompson machene gun
I got a few good pics of this suff
After a break for supper we had the Ursa Major Awards (
http://www.ursamajorawards.org/). These awards are for anthro catagories ranging from motion picture to literature to online comics. So if you know something that should be submitted for the 2005 awards head over to the site and send it in. I was quite happy to see several of my favorite comics either nominated or recomended for 2003 or 2004.
After the awards was the Masquerade. Being a small con we only had 5 entries partly due to some confusion with the entry requirements. some were fairly basic (just ears, tail and some paws) to the extreeme (the dragon i mentioned the other day). All in all it was a great show.
Last thing on the schedule that day was the Improv Workshop. Totally non-furry related but far and away the most involving of the panels. He had us up and doing the skits with him from about the 30th second. we didnt have as big a crowd as he would have liked so we had to keep changing games fairly quickly as we would run out of ideas pritty quickly. It was slated to go from 10:00-11:30 but we were having so much fun they had to kick us out of the room at 12:30
. I had seen a poster earlier in the day about a room party that night and decided to go take a look. Of course by 12:30 it had pritty much thined out and they were just eating some chips and watching some movie i hadnt seen before. I killed some time untill about 1:00ish when i headed home. I managed to see the tail end of the #95 buss pulling away just as i got to the terminal so it once again took me forever to get back as at that time at night the busses only ran every 30 min.
Day 3: Today started with the Ask a Puppet panel. I had so much fun at the Schizophrenia 102 that i wasnt going to miss this for anything. It was sort of an advice thing where you submit an annomous question into a bin and they answer them. I was expecting fast amounts of funny and they did not disapoint! We ended up with quite a crowd by the end as people going by would hear us laughing and come in to see what was going on. This was when we started the enternce chear... when ever someone would enter the room we would all cheer, this actually continued right thru to the end of the con and got us many confused looks from those who didnt know why everyone would burst out clapping when they enterd the room.
When this had finised i went back to the dealers room to kill some time. Heather still had that print sitting there... begging me to take it... it was only $25... "ah what the heck, if you dont spend your money why are you going to work every day" i thought to myself. So now i have to get myself a frame for it because its an odd size
I cant wait to get this on my wall. (sometime i will take a picture of it, since its already in a matte i cant get it scanned even if i had a scanner)
After the puppet show i decided to try one of the RPG's called "Another Fine Mess" based off the fudge system. Unfortionatly the GM had never used this system before, i was the only player who had ever rp'ed before, and the campain was the one from the stock rule set. all thing considered the GM did a very good job, but it did feel a little more "roll" then "role".
At 4:00 was the feedback session where we gave any critques or compliments on the con. while waiting for it to start, i was ambushed by someone (i really need to get better at remembering names) who asked if i wanted a nice little tiger sculpture. I said "uh.. sure?" and he handed it to me... apparently someone had bought it in the charity auction that morning for one of the furs (Babytiger) but didnt know that he was a white tiger not an orange... so he gave it to this guy insted... and he didnt really like it so he was trying to find someone to give it a home so now its sitting on top of my computer tower
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at the feedback thing the majority of the feedback was good with the most common problem beeing scheduling conflicts. This was when the Entrence Cheer was really getting funny as most of the volinteers hadnt known about this and got most perplexed looks on their faces when they came in
After a supper break it was time for the Dead Dog party. I wasnt sure at first if i was going to stay after the feedback but i decided to stay and was glad i did. I got a chance to chat with many of the people i hadnt had a chance to yet as they were either manning a dealer table, or our paths had just failed to cross. The music wasnt so loud that you couldnt hear, but was still at sufficint volume for those who wanted to dance. I generaly milled about untill they once again kicked us out at 12:30 and then caught the busses home.
Far and away one of my better weekends this summer, i just hope i will be able to go to next years
I cant say that things will be better if we change; what I can say is that we must change for them to get better
