Sunday at Motor City Fur[ry] Con we didn't get up early enough for otel breakfast. Not with the time we'd need to check out. It turns out we could have asked for late check-out, getting to 2 pm, which is something to know for next year. bunny_hugger still had to upload and do a few things for school, so she sat in the convention lobby to take care of that. Meanwhile I poked around the dealer's den and made some more attempts at getting a game together on Earthshaker. It turns out the credit card she used for the hotel seems to get her guest Internet access at any Marriott hotel, which is great for her. Turns out among the people in the video game room was someone wearing a guinea pig fursuit, first one that I've seen, so I was able to get some decent pictures and do a little more clowning around with my puppet. (We'd seen one another briefly on Friday, too.) I don't remember what we did for lunch. At some point during the day we went to Subway, but I thought that was dinner. We must have eaten something, from somewhere, but nothing in the convention's food guide looks familiar. Whatever it was we did, afterwards, we stopped in the Artists Alley to collect the badge and the sketchbook commissions bunny_hugger had gotten. I think the badge had already been done, although the artist hadn't been able to punch a hole out for the lanyard to hold, while the sketchbook needed a couple hours yet. She got everything before the end of the day, though, and it all came out great. The important thing to get to was my panel about mucks and IRC and other old-fashioned, plain-text furry. The audience was smaller than its equivalent member back in October, although compared to the heartbreak of the Raccoons SIG this year it was heartening. This has always been a chance for me and bunny_hugger to talk about how good things used to be and it always leaves some people interested in mucks but as far as I know not going to the effort of trying them. (And this year, I'd realize belatedly, we had an extra handicap: SpinDizzy Muck has had to temporarily restrict guest access because we've been dealing with a stalker who won't take the hint.) After all that there was only an hour or so left in the convention. At my suggestion we went to the Pyramid game, one of the set of game shows they've been doing at this con lately. That was fun, tough loose, with not all the categories furry-related, probably because it's rather tough to think of that many. It did put me in mind of this short-lived game show named Whew!, that's been running on Buzzr, and how that would be ... a disaster to do at a furry con, really. The format is fun --- contestants are shown a bit of trivia with a blooper, like, ``The first man on the Moon was Neil [ SEDAKA ]'', and they have to correct it by saying ``Neil Armstrong'', and do enough of these in sixty seconds, while their opponent puts up blocks that can waste their time. The original show had enough production problems (charming as it is); there's no hope getting people who have no idea what the actual game was like to play it. Password and Pyramid at least the older folks have seen. (Match Game could be a playable game, but you'd need someone who understood the rules about imperfect matches to judge.) Closing Ceremonies we got to; we'd hardly want to miss that. This all had the basic usual closing ceremony notes, although I don't remember whether they listed how much alcohol the convention drank. (It turns out there were a distressingly large number of possibly alcohol-fueled behavior problems at the con, to the point that Motor City would send an open letter to the attendees this week. Possibly they were starting to think about toning down the party-con side of things.) And they're going back to trying to do just one convention a year, so if all goes well we can reconvene in March of 2023. The startling thing was the charity fundraiser. Add up everything, including passing-the-hat, and they raised just over $25,000 for the rabbit rescue. Which is staggering by any measure, but considering the convention only had an official 1,361 attendees? It's traditional for the charity representatives to be staggered. This is the first time I'd seen them melt into puddles. After Closing Ceremonies, and helping out by stacking some chairs (everyone was asked to, so the ballroom could be set up for the Dead Dog Dance), we got dinner (I'd swear this was Subway). And bunny_hugger went to take her daily walk while I went back to the arcade for one more try at the high score table. And this time, it actually worked! For once I had a good enough game of Earthshaker to get the multiball started, and to shoot the jackpot, and at the moment that the jackpot was worth its 2.5 million point maximum. (The game rotates between values as low as 500,000 and as high as 2,500,000.) This landed me in fourth place on the high score table and practically floating. Later in the night bunny_hugger would join for a couple of games; I declined to play, choosing to go out on that high. This was the only high score set that weekend; may be different if and when Vix can get the game fixed. We caught up with the folks we most wanted to chat with before the Dead Dog Dance began. We also hung out in the con suite, hearing a terrifying story that someone had all four wheels stripped off their car in the hotel parking lot. (I've since seen a tweet purporting to show the aftermath; it's quite a bizarre thing to hear about.) bunny_hugger chose not to get her fursuit out for the Dead Dog Dance, but we did get a bunch of the glow sticks, which let me be one of those people who doesn't really move with the beat but is able to spin a glowy blue thing around until I drop the lanyard. The dance I assume started a little late, as it ended a few minutes past 10, before going to the typical soft 80s rock that bunny_hugger and I actually like better. (She used a bit of this to try teaching me some dance steps and it didn't really work. I can keep a rhythm but I lack the ability to pick what the period actually is, or to synch it up to the existing music.) And then, too soon but also at the end of a lot of day, Motor City Furry Con 2022 was over. We'd drive home and wait for symptoms, or for word of an outbreak. (So far I've heard no reports of anyone testing positive from the con, which may reflect the vaccination-and-masking policy being adequate, or may reflect testing and communication being inadequate.) We seem to have got through it without catching anything, a great relief. Now to close out Friday night at the convention. Gearing up for the dance! bunny_hugger in Cerberus form tries to get the glow sticks to glow well enough. They look better in the photo than they did in real life. In the afternoon someone was playing ``Bohemian Rhapsody'' on this, just as someone had been doing last October. These signs would appear and disappear over the weekend and I assume it's related to the actual rabbits brought in for the charity, although at the hour this photo was taken the rabbits were long gone for the day. Welcome to the dance floor! Trivia: The first Swedish colony planted in the Delaware River area settled in 1638, under the command of former New Netherlands governor Peter Minuit; the area ---- Fort Christina --- is now Wilmington. Source: New Jersey from Colony to State 1609 - 1789, Richard P McCormick. Currently Reading: Planet Terry: The Complete Collection , Lennie Herman, Stan Kay, Dave Manak, art by Warren Kremer. Collection of the mid-80s Star Comics book, and a mostly good read as Terry, a young kid who looks vaguely like Richie Rich (see the artist there) with a small party of friends searches the galaxy for his lost parents. It's got the pacing of a serial, with something in the status quo changed every book, while staying lighthearted and silly. It falls a little flat near the end of the book, as the last comics circle back to planets already visited, and I don't know how long the basic premise (Terry follows a lead to a new planet, which has some ridiculous thing ot go through, and he gets a vague clue that maybe his parents are over on that planet, continued next issue) would go, although I guess E C Tubb was able to sell, what, 1800 books in the Dumarest Saga so what do I know?