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This was my first year off the staff roster of Midwest FurFest, also known simply as "MFF." I don't know where to start! The Friday Night Dressup? Poor lady_curmudgeon being sick for the entire weekend? Being able to roam from area to area at whim? Visiting for hours on end with arphalia and others? Meeting steelhelix? Buying awesome art? There's just too much to process. I didn't take nearly as many pictures as I planned, coming in at just a bit over 250 frames. As I skim through I've found a number of them disappointing in that no amount of post-processing is ever going to save them; such a pity that things worked out as they did. But I'm only now engaging in a more detailed processing of them all, so maybe I shouldn't give up hope! Regardless of quality I thought I would share a few images that have already made me grin tonight.

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Toy Soldiers Recruit... the Undead? Beetlejuice made an appearance at con. I was out in my Toy Soldier uniform, so it was only fitting I try to recruit the Ghost with the Most to help spread the good word of Doctor Steel.

Toy Soldiers and Time Lords The tenth Doctor also made an appearance at con. Of course I had to get a few pictures with him. He looks dapper, I look... not so dapper.

Triple Threat Security (Datahawk on left, WyldeKyttin on the right) brackets the Artist Alley director (Genet) to become the ultimate triple threat!

Breakin' my back just to know your name

Shamelessly stolen from duncandahusky and reposted here. Dunc has already done all the formatting and legwork, I'm just making sure y'all see it...

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I was talking a bit with points after posting the previous entry and I thought I'd share this small snippet of conversation. Points, I place the blame for the repressed memory you triggered squarely upon your shoulders.

Points says, "At least it wasn't a whole line of people going 'y'know, if you let me take everything over and redo everything from scratch, I could do it better.'"

Feren says, "I had that last year."

That's when I realized I'd forgotten to mention in the previous diatribe that I actually had people recoil and fucking hiss like cornered, rabid weasels when they heard the Windows "Booting up" chime come from my laptop. Seriously people, what the fuck is your damage? Every operating system serves a niche. I am not about to use your favorite flavor of Linux just because it gives you a warm chubby one and allows you to delude yourself into thinking that you're running your operating system without all that "bloated, poorly-coded overhead." What the hell is your problem, you sacks of disease? Don't tell me you really think that window transparency and antialiased fonts shouldn't count as overhead? Get a goddamn grip!

Allow me to make this painfully clear (I even promise I won't use big words as I try to explain this to you): I use the tools that meet my needs. Some of those tools run under Windows. In the words of The Great Sage and Eminent Junkie (I speak of the character "Henry Dean," from Stephen King's Dark Tower series) you need to accept this fact and just "deal." Acting like a complete idiot who just shit his pants all because of a SOUND FILE isn't going to convince me to "convert," and it sure as hell doesn't endear me to your cause. Mostly it just reaffirms my belief that you have the personality of a wet gym sock and makes me wish I had the power to get you forcefully sterilized for the good of our species.

Seriously, I think I'll put in a line item in the budget for a tazer. First person to be "clever" in a similar manner next year gets 50,000 volts to the reproductive organs.

Well, con is over. My "weekend" started on Wednesday afternoon and didn't end until approximately 11:30PM Monday night.

Highlights include, but are not limited to:

Kicking much ass in Art Show with yotogi, moryssa, roho, hightensile, genet and chebutykin. We really outdid ourselves this year as we managed to shatter last year's sales record of $10,000 by achieving over $13,700 this year. We had about the same number of artists as last year, but we displayed about 150 more pieces than we did in 2003. All told, things went really well. I would say "Next year should go even more smoothly," but I don't want to think about next year just yet. I'm still recovering from this year.

Seeing chebutykin again. It's hard to believe it's been almost a year!

Late-night runs to CompUSA to make speaker purchases -- had to combat music from the ballroom next door!

chebutykin proving she is wickedly talented at both data entry and fashion modeling. Long live the Cheb in the shiny bodice.

New sketches in my sketchbooks.

Unseasonably good weather and light traffic on the roads whenever I had to drive.

Getting moryssa laughing so hard she nearly choked.

ashryn not calling me "Captain America."

"Christmas Sack."

Story time with yotogi.

Seeing all the other "out of town" folks again. It's been too damn long.

Meeting fiskblack in person.

Watching the video of the CONvergence 2004 opening ceremony and knowing I had a hand in its creation.

Dinner and whoopie cushions from BD's.

Meeting luminesc and lostwolf in person.

Having onceagainplease come down to experience the con first-hand. He made quite an impression with his singing.

Having the Expedition. It came in quite handy moving people and equipment. There's something wholly satisfying in being able to haul most of my materials from the house to the hotel, and from the hotel back to the house in one shot.

Not having to go in to work on Monday morning.

That's the long and the short of it for me. My plan for the remainder of the week is simple: I'm back to the grind at the office for today and most of tomorrow. After that I get another extended weekend (four days, again) because of the Thanksgiving holiday. As an added bonus both days are considered paid holidays by my employer, so I still have a few days left of vacation to use this year.

Passion or coincidence

Neil Young is playing on my entertainment system, and chebutykin is coming to MFF.

Someday you'll find everything you're lookin' for...