austin_dern (austin_dern) wrote,
austin_dern
austin_dern

I started to cry which started the whole world laughing

We chose to skip breakfast Saturday. This gave us a couple more hours to sleep in, at the cost of requiring we find somewhere to go to lunch soon enough. But we were better off sleeping.

The con's fursuit parade started to organize about 12:30, so bunny_hugger went off to dress up while I looked for a good photographing vantage point, and then decided to take a movie instead. (I'm still getting used to the idea that my new camera takes movies with sound.) There was a nice spot near a corner, with the sunlight behind my back, so it was a great spot. At the corner someone claimed to be pointing ``the Disney style'', making a swooping motion with both arms to point with both hands. I don't know that Disney parks have an official pointing style but I wouldn't be surprised, and this was theatrical enough for me to buy it. At closing ceremonies the official count for the parade was revealed to be something like 250 fursuiters (of an attendance of about 970 people).

The group photograph was outside, and on a great day for it: the temperatures were in the mid-to-high 60s and sunny, the kind of weather we might have never figured to see again. bunny_hugger suffered the same problem as usual in vanishing in the crowd, because she's not tall, and somehow instructions for ``taller people to move to the back'' never results in taller people moving in back. She's noted that what mass photograph organizers need to do, and never do, is specify ``people shorter than 5'6 move forward, people 5'6 to 6 feet even in the middle, people above 6 feet move back'', because people have no idea whether they're ``taller'' or ``shorter'' particularly. (And yeah, fursuits can be much taller than the person wearing, but nobody knows how tall their suits are and this would at least be roughly fair at letting shorter people not be hidden.)

In the milling about afterwards we saw a guy in Chinese dragon costume clowning around for photos for Uncle Kage, who'd set his camera on the ground with, I assume, the timer set so he could get pictures of a giant stomping on the lens. This was done in the parking lot, so that people driving into the hotel had to maneuver around people in vision- and motion-limiting costumes wandering into traffic, and people leaving their cameras on the pavement. I didn't hear of any catastrophes resulting from all this but the photo sessions kind of drifted back to the sidewalks.

After this, we were starving, so we debated a bit where to eat and went back to Big Boy, which is just down the block, and where we'd had dinner the night before. This time we got the soup-and-salad buffet (the buffet had been closing down the night before). This gave us an awkward moment where we both stepped away for dessert, I believe, and someone came and cleaned away our plates and drinks and cleared the table off. This suggests a disconnection between the table-clearing and the bill-printing responsibilities at Big Boy, which surely will help someone extremely petty scam the system at some point.

Back at the con, bunny_hugger found the people she wanted to commission from for her sketchbooks, and we drifted into the Look Left concert. We weren't quite sure what to expect from this, but, we'd guessed some of the talented amateurs that you get doing stuff that's enthusiastic and a bit funny but also kind of unpracticed. We were wholly wrong. Look Left, or at least one guy from it --- Pepper Coyote --- who explained he'd had a band, but now he was here with a repeater, was a perfectly professional, pretty skillful player who sang, played instruments, fiddled with the repeater, and for some reason opened with a Bee Gees song, and a pre-Disco era Bee Gees at that. It took about one and a half songs before we were sold on him, and about three before I was confident bunny_hugger was going to buy one of his albums, and by the middle of the show, she did.

Trivia: Indiana's northern border is ten miles north of the southernmost point of Lake Michigan. Illinois' is about sixty miles north. Source: How The States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein.

Currently Reading: The U.S. Economy In World War II, Harold G Vatter.

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