To start, I wanted to thank all of my friends who I was able to meet and hang out with at the convention. Many of you I had met for the first time and had a lovely time spending time with.

Obligations

Transit Panel

During AC26, I was once again a panelist for the Furbanism and Transit panel alongside co-hosts Delorean, Esker, and Kezl. This time, due to extreme heat, we opted to cancel the group bus ride (the motivation for our panel being at 09:30). The panel was a great success! I chose to write about GTFS, the current open standard for encoding transit data. My approach was to write my slides about a more technical topic in a pedagogical/lecture style: I introduced the topic in the form of a series of questions and then motivated answers to these questions, incrementally building up the files in the feed definition for GTFS. I also selected some data that would be illustrative of how a feed is built.

Moving apartments

Immediately before this, I had one of the most stressful periods of time in my life recently. I had to move apartments without hiring a mover. Even though my new apartment was very close by, this involved having to move a lot of things to the new apartment by hand and it involved many, many back and forth car trips. I completed my move between apartments at 22:30 the day before the con, amassing 24,500 steps that day (more than any single day of the convention!) As if that weren’t enough, I had to complete a really time-intensive lab during the convention because I had not yet finished it due to having to move so many things. But this has finally passed and I can now relax.

Activities

Compared to previous years, I spent much more time at this convention surrounded by my friends and people with whom I could have pleasant conversation. I made new friends out of circumstance and indelible memories came from them. I attended more panels this convention than I had in previous ones. I wandered around the convention center taking in the mass of people and running into groups of friends along the way, on some occasion then grabbing food with them or visiting the Dealer’s Den and exploring together. I reached a local minimum in the amount of time I spent alone in my hotel room–an extremely positive change in my con activity. In fact, much of the time I spent in my hotel room this time around was spent engaged in conversation with my roommates, which was really pleasant and very fun! It was so different to how every other con has gone for me: I genuinely had not one issue with my rooming situation at the convention: no single unpleasant social interaction whatsoever.

Atmosphere

My sense of self and the barrier between me and others

There is something about being in an environment with people of varying backgrounds with whom you have no connection besides membership in the fandom and whose lives you are enabled to get a glimpse into at the convention due to proximity. Thousands of people I would have never seen otherwise, with undoubtedly totally disjoint life stories and trajectories from mine, nonetheless are just as real and present as I and my friends are. Many of them are considerably less hesitant to express themselves in front of others, wearing more vulnerable badges, clothing, et cetera. Exposure to this generated thoughts in my mind about my identity and how I express my desires: do I care too much about appearance? Am I trying to seem too polished or refined at the expense of self-expression at this convention? Is this a consequence of a narcissistic tendency in my behavior and how I view myself that I have noticed somewhat recently? I am not sure. But I will sit with these thoughts for a while and see if any new insights result from it.

I feel that I have consistently struggled connecting with others. I love talking about technical things, music, art, literature, et cetera, but I wonder if there is something more that I am missing: is just being around other people enough? Perhaps I care too much about trying to feel like I “deserve” to spend time with people, proving it to myself with my actions, as opposed to just seeking it out on my own through asking people. Is it worth caring so much about appearance and thinking so much about what kind of direction I should put in an effort to realize myself? Will it really make a difference in how my friends see me or even make me a different person in any way? Is any of this even worth changing? If anyone wants to spend time with me, why should I feel the need to change aspects of myself if it has already brought some people joy? I don’t know why these thoughts occupy me so often: it may be involuntary and a result of my depression. At any rate, this convention has given me more of them and has made me question whether the strong line between the sense of self and “being in a community” that I have is really worth the externalities it brings.

Change in the fandom over time

Furry also feels different now than it did when I remember starting actively participating in it in 2020. I see more truly expressive, novel, emotional art now than at any point before in my life. There seems to be more saturation and exposure to the fandom than at any previous point in time which has led to more people joining it and conventions continually growing in attendance: Anthrocon had a staggering 20,619 attendees this summer, the most by any furry convention ever. Some people mourn the death or evolution of the previous furry culture, which felt more insular and full of canonical inside jokes. But I have never seen a greater concentration of talented, special people in the fandom before now, and I think this is a wonderful trend. I don’t think that “keep furry weird” should mean that furry remains a fandom that is predominated by a set of cyclical, r/furry_irl memes and jokes and that certain people remain important: the fandom is always changing, people age, and inevitably some things fade into grey, leaving others to take their place. The cycling of voices is an important part of keeping this ecosystem healthy.

People

Reaching towards others

Throughout my life, I have wondered how people make and keep friends. I have seen people form solid and robust friend groups with which they do things together to great effect. However, in practice, I feel I have ended up in a different situation: my friends range across many different backgrounds and situations and I spend time across many of these domains. I have often wondered if this is handicapping my ability to get close with my friends, but I am coming to realize that I think it is totally fine to be this way. Being able to spend time with people I care about on my terms who have incredibly varied backgrounds is really rewarding and broadens the space of ideas I am exposed to, even if it comes at the cost of perhaps being less directly connected with many of them. Maybe this breadth is why I feel like it is easier for people to slip away from me. But then again, I did hang out with some of my friends for several hours at a time just because I ran into them at points during the convention, something I am certain would not have happened if they didn’t trust me enough to be around me.

Parting Words

I hope that my thoughts give a better sense of who I am and what kinds of things race through my mind, helping you to know me better if you are someone to whom I have spoken before. I also hope that maybe something in this post will offer a new perspective on the fandom and what it means to attend these conventions. If neither of those, I hope it at least makes you feel something.

Until next time, Aured.