Morton Fox's journal

This past weekend was my annual trip to the Crowne Plaza in Cromwell, CT, for Furpocalypse. I've had mixed feelings about this con, and FurFright before that, for a number of years, but still kept attending, probably out of force of habit. Furpocalypse seems to be having a tough time setting itself apart from the legacy of Furfright but I see they have made numerous small changes: making the registration line go the other way, new security, more pizza, fursuiter tags, new hosts for the quiz hour, and probably lots of other little things I didn't notice. I thought the con itself was just fine this time around and if I didn't do as much there as I'd intended, it was my problem for not pushing myself hard enough to do those things.

The problem this time was I wasn't too fond of the hotel. The Crowne Plaza has lots of problems, The first night, when I tried to check-in, the front desk staff, who seemed to be a bit lacking in training, took a long time trying to look for my reservation on the computer and had to call someone else to help. Then JBadger and I noticed that the room keys demagnetized rather rapidly by themselves. The keys didn't last two days before failing to open the door, so it was annoying having to go to the front desk multiple times during our stay to have them redo the keys. And finally, the layout of the hotel is downright confusing, although by the end of the con, I started to remember some useful shortcuts to get down to the lobby from the room. The other problem is I'm again noticing some rudeness among con attendees. Aside from the loud expletives that I heard here and there in con space, which I try to tune out anyway, I saw people rushing into the elevator before anyone inside had a chance to exit. What's the deal with that? I saw that happen a number of times, although not as much towards the end of the con. On the plus side, getting drunk-groped and drunk-clinged while I was in fursuit only happened once this time.

But enough ranting. At this con, I attended the usual events: fursuit parade, fursuit games, Saturday Morning Cartoons panel. I watched a movie (Guardians of the Galaxy), which is a change from past years when I typically ignored the movie room. And I attended the "Being a Good Social Potato" panel, which I assumed from the panel description would be a workshop on socializing better, but somehow it turned into a rant-fest on certain types of annoying people in fandom. But it was a fun panel nevertheless. I was also in two fursuit music videos by chance because I was in fursuit in the main hallway when they were asking around for participants. Aside from con stuff, I also took a few trips with JBadger outside the hotel for meals, geocaches, and Munzees. So it was a pretty full weekend with a variety of activities. Only slight regret was I fell asleep early and missed the night dances, but I certainly can't do everything.

( The caches... )