What an AWESOME weekend! Lots of friendly faces! I think we met at least a dozen furries that I’d never seen before, and some of them are already sticking their noses into the Telegram chats. Whoop!
Overall, the Furry Lintspace booth seemed like a success 🙂 JasonMiller and Whines’s artwork drew some positive comments, Vulpine Media’s photos looked great (he’s been tweeting up a storm with Havencon photos!) And Bosgo really classed things up with dress and cosplay. Chocopony really filled up the space and drew a lot of interest Saturday morning. Thank you all for helping support the experiment!
Weekend in review!
We were off to a slow start Friday, some technical difficulties setting up the booth. Vulpine Media and JasonMiller came at just about the same time as we were able to finish setting up the space…traffic in Austin was, predictably, awful…so our first two artists had kind of a slow start 🙁 But the first day of the dealer’s space tends to be a little slow. The mini-panel I’d planned to run on “community-building in the furry community” turned into “booth-building!”
Saturday, Chocopony came at 11 and set up his booth-in-a-booth, his pan-fandom work drew a lot of attention. I got a photo of his time in the lintspace, but I regret that I didn’t get a shot of Bosgo’s display.
Sunday…I remember Sunday being a slow day last year, but this time around, there was a lot of activity at the booth around 1:00-3:00, when I was thinking that we’d be pretty slow. Nope! A group of four folks settled down and had fun with the free-draw art and covered one of our art boards with cartoons (mostly with a “let’s vape together!” theme), three families, and maybe three folks that were new to the ATX furry community popped by for some nice conversation.
Panels! Unfortunately, didn’t have a chance to attend Made Fur You’s crafting panels, sad sad. Buddy Gnoll’s after-dark video game discussion was a lot of fun, and I’m pretty sure Skepa’s zombies game was well-attended…zombie hunters popped into our elevator on our way home to make sure we were legit. Nope, not zombies.
Austinfurs had two panels…a silly after-dark meetup based pretty heavily on “Who’s Line Is It Anyway,” little improv games and some time for chatter, and an all-ages “howdy, announcements, photos” panel Saturday afternoon. Lots of laughs Friday night, and several new faces Saturday.
Even though there are something like 200+ furries in Austin, we’re just off the radar. Why? We’re ungoogle-able. Furries drift through the city and never meet the community, without knowing how huge and bubbly our clan is. Some of the faces from Havencon I’ve seen on and off for a year now, and they didn’t know there was any community at all. I’m so glad we had a tiny little chance to remedy this one!
Next year…a little more organization, and more volunteers!