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Sunday, February 25, 2007
This is a copy and paste of a bunch of the Fur and Loathing related text.

A couple of useful notes. Since a lot of this stuff was copy and pasted from forums and emails, it may make reference to shit that doesn't make any sense (Like "Fragmaster"). It will also refer to people by their handles for the most part.
Handles:
Cecil = me
Portal = Mariko
Vorpal = Derek
CheSera = Will
Gizmo = Rissa

This is the original write up Derek did, the night after we crashed the con.

Fur and Loathing: Post 1



It was somewhere around MoPac, in the middle of the city, when the whiskey began to take hold.

There were five of us total, traveling in two cars: Cecil's car carried Portal Star (his g/f, non-goon) and I, and CheSera and Gizmo_Gun (his g/f) had their own car.

As we approached the hotel, we saw a bunch of sirens and emergency vehicles. "Oh fuck, the party's started without us!" we exclaimed. Turned out that there was a car wreck right next door, and there were a few people with ears and tails standing around gawking at the pretty flashing lights.

We pulled into the hotel and saw a large banner for "Texas Furry Con." This was definitely the place, a fact which was verified by the crowd of a dozen or so people sitting around outside drinking Southern Comfort and making barking noises. Yeah.

Cecil, Portal and I headed inside to check things out. There was an abandoned registration table in the lobby, as well as a pair of State Troopers. Since it's common for cops to pull random security gigs off-duty (and since they have no actual powers while doing so), I wasn't concerned. We slipped past them and wandered down the hall, spying a nearly-empty conference room set aside for video games.

Much of what was going on had either ended, or was happening behind closed doors in hotel rooms, so we went back outside to meet up with the rest of the group. We stood cowering behind a red suburban for a few minutes, the non-smokers suddenly having taken up smoking. I invoked the spirit of Egon and muttered that I was terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought. But everyone else was braver than I, so I took a few long swigs from my flask and prepared to head back into the mouth of hell.

I had already passed by them undetected once, but as we headed back in, I began to really question the wisdom of wearing an SA shirt to a furry convention. Hell, I was surprised I didn't get chased off with torches and pitchforks the moment I stepped out of the car. I would later learn to trust my intuition.

We went back into the lobby, which was populated by a few street-clothed furries (there were no fursuits to be seen, although there were quite a few tails and ears) and the girls went to work. They proved to be the most valuable members of the group, as they approached a few random furries and began to establish a dialog while Cecil and I stood around, pretending to be bewildered by the features of his new MiniDV camera.

After standing around in the lobby for a bit while the girls talked to them about their drawings and how neat they were, they were invited upstairs. Jackpot. All of us piled into the elevator, and we were taken up to the inner sanctum. And by "inner sanctum" I mean "a couple of hotel rooms, one of which was marked as the "Horse-pitality Suite" where some guys were sitting around with sketch pads and a computer.

It was at this point, later reviews of the videotape would show, that we were "made." As I stood in the hallway, a furry stuck her head out and immediately set off the silent furry alarms. We wouldn't realize until later what had taken place.

Once again, I must express my amazement at how Portal and Gizmo were able to edge their way into the group. Paying a compliment to someone's sloppy pencil sketch of a two-tailed fox with enormous breasts is as good as gold in that world. The "artists" were all simultaneously proud and flabbergasted when talking about how much money they could charge for their drawings (not nearly as flabbergasted as I, though) - and one offered to do commissioned drawings for $15 each.

CheSera, who I am now convinced is the one true antichrist, decided that both Cecil and I needed to be rendered as anthropomorphic animals. So I stood there for a few minutes to "pose," very uncomfortable and very much trying to keep my shirt pressed against the wall in case of someone recognizing it.

I slipped out into the hallway, where we again stood for a few minutes, listening to a furry talk about how MTV and CSI have given their community a bad public face. He wasn't the only person to mention CSI that night, and it quickly became obvious that the CSI episode was the biggest thing to happen to furries since Disney's Robin Hood.

Talk began about bringing some beer up from somewhere downstairs (presumably another room). The girls jumped on the opportunity, and predictably the furries became very excited about the idea of getting them drunk. They decided to play it safe by carding us - however, Gizmo didn't have her ID on her. As she was rifling through the contents of her purse, I swear to God, one of the furries was saying "please have your ID" over and over again. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out in laughter.

We went downstairs to regroup, leaving Cecil in the hotel room getting drawn. Portal came down a moment later, a warm Shiner Bock in her hand. We happily shared the furry beer, then went back up to retrieve Cecil. This was the beginning of the end.

Allow me to take a moment to give a general impression of people and events up until this point. Taken individually, a few of the people we met were genuinely nice. Sure, they were obsessed with two-tailed, six-breasted cats with shitting dick-nipples, but they were good people. They were very hospitable, and eager to satisfy the curiosity of people they didn't know.

This impression would soon change.

Getting back to the story, we stepped past a growing group of furries crowded around the "Horse-pitality Suite," said our goodbyes, and headed down the back staircase, giggling all the way. No sooner had we gotten into the parking lot than we heard a voice behind us.

"Hey, come back here!"

Fuck.

We turned around to see a behemoth stalking toward us.

"I need you to come with me."

I burst out laughing. "Why?"

"That t-shirt. We checked the website, and I need you to come with me."

"No."

Looking around, I noticed that Cecil had disappeared, presumably to start the car. After another few moments of "the enforcer" trying to convince us to follow him back upstairs, I simply turned and started walking away. Of course, since the back of the shirt bore the offending grenade logo. this only served to intimidate him more.

I did my best to ignore his yells and just keep walking, hoping that Cecil would get his car started and get out of the parking space before I got there. I heard him getting closer, as he was actually running to catch up. Then I heard him call out, "guys, Something Awful is here!" as I got into the car.

You know that sinking-stomach feeling you get when you're in a situation that's gotten way out of hand? The adrenaline-surge of an instinctive fight-or-flight response. As I sat there in Cecil's car, with Mayor McCheese sitting on the hood ranting to his other fucking furry friends, that's exactly the way I felt. Or, at least, that's how I would've felt if I hadn't been drunk off my ass. Instead, I was simply pissed off.

As the crowd grew, the organizers sent over the State Troopers who had been standing in the lobby. Apparently they realized, as we did, just how stupid it was to be detaining people because we were going to talk about them on the internet. His only response was "man, I'm off duty. You guys need to call Travis County."

From there began about ninety minutes of sitting in Cecil's car while various furries came over to accuse us of various things of which we had no knowledge. We ceased to be "outsiders who showed up" and became instead the focal point of years of anti-"mundane" rage. MTV's special? Yeah, that was our fault. The CSI Episode? Yep, that was us.

But mainly they just wanted to have their moment of justice. After years of being shunned by society, they had caught some people who had wronged them, and they would make the offending parties pay. Of course, none of them had any idea what to do other than just stand in front of the car. They hadn't thought that far ahead. They seemed content to take turns standing in front of our front bumper. A few came out to take pictures of us, for unknown reasons (although I secretly hope they start an "enemies of the fur" website and post our pictures as 'known anti-furry activists'), and one small group apparently wanted Cecil's autograph, again for unknown reasons.

Again, there were a couple of them who were genuinely nice, and realized that the witch hunt had gotten way out of control. The rest, however, had gone completely batshit insane. The guards in front of the car were carrying Maglites, and wielding them the way they'd seen cops carry them on TV. We heard one group even going so far as to accuse us of "terrorism" - when detaining people against their will is doubtless closer to terrorism than what we were doing.

Meanwhile, CheSera and Gizmo had been off negotiating for our release with the furry shamans or whatever. They came over a few times, went back and forth, and finally decided that their main evidence against us was that we had supposedly posted drawings made by furry artists here on the SA forums. Since our drawings had been made, before our eyes, within the previous hour, we handed them over so they could go "verify" that they were not the ones posted by Sonata in the previous thread.

Once they saw that we had not somehow magically made SA posts from the fucking parking lot, some of them seemed satisfied to let us go. The eldest among them verified that I had nothing on my digital camera (which I had left in the car, so no pictures were taken by me), which satisfied more of them. The most overzealous among them, however, felt that this was still not enough.

They brought out a clipboard with blank paper on it, and made us write some sort of apology and promise that we would not speak of those events in a negative manner, then sign and date it. This is not legal in any sense (mainly because the "confessions" were being written and signed under duress), but we'd do whatever it took to get the fuck out of there at that point, which included scrawling an illegible signature of a made-up name on a piece of paper.

Finally, with the fat furry fucks satisfied, we left the parking lot cackling with laughter. We raced to a bar, where we spent the remaining time before 2AM repeating "I can't believe that just happened," and attempting to drink away the fact that we just actually visited a furry convention.

And now that the facts are out, I will commence with the shameless, immature name-calling, as is my first amendment right, despite what people in the furry community seem to believe:

I can't believe those fucking furry fuckrags stood in front of our car for two god damn hours. I mean, it's one thing to be so fucking unattractive that you have to pretend to be a koala in order to get a piece of ass, but after seeing the fat blubbertroll women lurking around there, I'm not at all surprised that they're going for each other instead.

Listen, just because you were flipping channels while jerking off at age 11, and accidentally came when the TV landed on The Jungle Book, THAT DOES NOT COUNT AS A SEXUAL PREFERENCE. If the only thing you can draw is exaggerated imaginary creatures, maybe it means that you simply CAN'T DRAW.

The furry movement has turned from a fucked-up, internet-enabled fetish into a full blown cult. I seriously doubt whether most of them would ever have arrived at being a furry if left on their own. It's all about wanting to belong, and it's a lot easier to join a group of people on the internet who just happen to enjoy rubbing Beanie Babies against their groins than it is to become an active member of society as a whole.

Your status as an "outcast" is completely voluntary, but you're not "being yourself" by being a furry; you're joining a community of lots of other lonely, socially inept retards who were dropped on their heads as children while visiting the zoo. It's not the furry stuff itself that people hate. Okay, part of it is. But the rest is the inexplicable zeal with which you defend your freakish animal sex cult.

Fucking furries.

This is a copy and paste of a bunch of the Fur and Loathing related text.

This is Will's first post about crashing the con.

Fur and Loathing: Post 2 Ok, so here's the battle of the minds that occured within the depths of the furry kingdom.

Gizmo and I had been walking a bit behind Vorpal, and witnessed the buttertroll chase (waddle) across the parking lot. He was screaming at the top of his sizeable lungs "Guys Guys, Something Awful is here, Something Awful is here". The truly amazing bit was how his voice cracked on the "Awful". Sounded like a Fragmaster riff.

Anyway, we briefly considered leaving our friends in the lurch, and fleeing the scene before we could be identified as potential lynchees. In the end however, I realized that 1) Vorpal, Portal, and Cecil are all good friends. 2) Vorpal probably owes me money. So we went over to try and diffuse the vile bile of the Furry Horde.

What proceded were 2 hours of agony, where we went from being accused of taking "incriminating" photos and posting them on the internet. As we had only arrived at 10:00 PM that night, and the photos in question were taken yesterday, this was obviously impossible. This did not dissuade their anger however.

In an ongoing attempt to break through the haze of illogic, we went upstairs with the angry director of the <span style="color:red;">Con</span> (Seen in Cecil's last video at the end yelling in a window). We brought up the forums, and read the thread that had lead to our caputre.

As we all know here, the photos shown were of very little entertainment value. Some drawings, and one solitary photo, of a DJ, apparently in a hallway somewhere. The director, who was apparently mis-informed by the massive buttertroll who chased Vorpal, then said that her main focus was the title of the thread, that included the actual name of the Confrence. She asked us to change that.

Alas, I, Gizmo, Cecil, Vorpal, and Portal, lack the ability to do that, especially sans computer. My cyber-telepathic abilities were not so hot that day. We continued to argue our, and our friends, case. We were winning the <span style="color:red;">Con</span> Director over bit by bit, as her case got weaker by the minute. We then proceded downstairs again, thinking that we had the issue well in hand, and would be leaving shortly.

Sadly, this was not the case. Just leaving the elevator we were accosted again by the original furry enforcer, who, having seen a bit too much CSI, had decided to garner some evidence of his own. He demanded that the Director look at his digital camera. Upon it was the single photo of the DJ we had seen not 5 seconds ago. Gizmo asked, logically, why we should care that he also had a photo of the DJ, on his personal camera. Apparently he had felt it necessary to photograph his laptop when it was displaying the image. Saving the image to his hard drive was apparently not quite good enough.

The director was equally confused at this, and said "I don't need to see this". Thinking this was a good sign we followed her down the hall. We became confused as it increasingly became obvious that we were not headed out to the parking lot, and freedom.

Instead, she wanted to go to her room, and find her Drivers License. Why you ask? Well, the plan now was to wait for the police, who had been called, to arrive. Then they planned to file a "complaint" against us for charges unspecified. She needed her ID for this.

Hoping to avoid police just in general we attempted to come to some other solution. That arrived at the famous signing of the truce at Holliday Inn. Ok, not so famous. Basically Gizmo and I wrote a few lines promising to never defame the good image of the Furries at the <span style="color:red;">texas</span> confrence of <span style="color:red;">fur</span> related activities. In addition, we were asked to appoligize on behalf of Something Awful for any offence caused to the fine community of the Furries. I can say from the depths of my heart, that I am very very sorry that I offended this group. I would be much happier if they simply ceased to exist, thus freeing me from the possiblity of offending them ever again.

We signed said paper, passed it in to the car where our waiting friends also signed. We then returned the paper to the director, who was satisifed. We were then allowed to depart without further delay.

Final Note: This entire ordeal took over 2 hours from my life. The end result was a piece of paper, which holds the legal signifigance of a cupon from wendys. Had I known this would have worked, I would have written a novel an hour ago. Oh well.

Final Final Note: Prior to this, my dislike for this particular internet fetish was an amorphous indirect distaste. After last night, it has blossemed into a fetid buring hatred of the vast majority of the group. Some were perfectly nice, all the way through. The Artist who made Vorpal into a Bunny, and Cecil into a Rhino, was nice. The IT guy was ok. The first individual Gizmo and Portal talked to was very nice, if shy and introverted. The very old Furrie who was actively trying to get us out of there was very helpful, if a little insane. Aside from those select few, the rest are a pitiful, paranoid, and honestly very very sad.

Links

Here are some links that pertain to this incident

A gallery of images from that weekend, taken by a furry.

http://www.angelfire.com/art2/shrag/TFC/index.html

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