A long time ago an artist who wasn’t all that great at the whole “art” portion of his line of work once said “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes”. Kind of a weird thing to have come up with in 1968 before the advent of, well, everything we use to interact with each other today. But I guess it’s fitting because in the era of the internet – and especially in that era – this happens all the time. It happened to me, even. For a very brief moment “Dracokon” was a rising star and there was a small window of time where other people in the furry fandom who were in positions of authority recognized as much and put me in the spotlight.
This is the story of the first (and only) time I attended a furry convention – Further Confusion – in 2009.
It’s 2007. It’s late in the year with Halloween and Thanksgiving right around the corner. I’m currently in college where part of my tuition pays for routine visits with the on-campus therapist and for the past several months, stretching all the way back across summer and into the tail end of the prior semester, I’ve been seeing him to talk about some personal conflicts I have regarding my sexuality (further reading: Konned, An Origin Story). One of the things he suggested I do was keep a “dream journal” as many of the feelings that were bothering me were ones that kept happening subconsciously when I was asleep. Skipping over the unimportant parts, the short of it is a friend I had at the time convinced me to take these erotic dreams and turn them into stories to post online.
My first story went up as 2007 was coming to a close and my second submission didn’t happen until several months later once New Years Day had passed. I posted one more submission during the entirety of 2008 and as luck would have it, this was my watershed moment as a writer. In the “Konned” journal entry I mentioned how almost immediately everything I posted to Yiffstar (now SoFurry) topped the website’s readership charts for views & favorites. My third submission was the first one to reach the #1 spot for the day, week, and month in which it was submitted.
People noticed. Toward the end of 2008, perhaps about a year or so after I’d submitted my very first story as “Dracokon”, one of the organizers of Further Confusion reached out to me personally to invite me to their event as a guest to come host some panels and, I guess, rub elbows. At the time I was beside myself because never in a million years did I think any of this would happen, that I’d write something so good* that an entire convention would roll out the red carpet for me. In hindsight however… I really can’t shake the feeling that perhaps this was a gesture done by someone in a position of power who saw an opportunity to “wow” me and get me ensnared further in the fandom making depraved things that maybe this person (or people) in particular enjoyed. I could also just be being overly cynical here and this was a genuine offer with no ulterior motives; I’m just so jaded and accustomed to second guessing everything I’ve been through that I sincerely don’t know what’s what anymore.
*I’m sticking an asterisk after this word because honestly after looking back on the work that hit the top of the charts I’ve realized it wasn’t even that good in the first place. I went on to write better things that in my opinion were better than this one, but I guess for what it’s worth this was the submission that turned heads. Perhaps “good enough” is a better turn of phrase to use.
Funnily enough, I almost declined the invitation. As starstruck as I was I really did not want to fly all the way across the country to go to San Jose, California and spend the weekend there. It sounded like a major hassle and just the thought of the entire process made me anxious, but I’d caught word that Athus Nadorian, someone whom I looked up to as something of a personal hero, was going to be there and that was the sole determining factor that led me to accept the convention’s invitation (further reading: I Have Complicated Feelings About Athus Nadorian).
I don’t really remember the process of getting to the convention other than the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport said he’d given rides to several people already who were going to this convention center and some of them were dressed “weird” and didn’t elaborate on what that word meant in this context. He asked me what all this was about and I was so green around the gills at the time that I couldn’t really provide him a clear answer beyond a superficial description of what “anthropomorphic art” was and clarified by adding “but I’m not an artist, I’m a writer, so forget I said anything”. I probably used the stereotypical “have you seen Robin Hood” icebreaker or something, I cannot remember.
Conventions really were not my “thing” when I was younger, and even today they still aren’t. I’ve never been to another one since. I just don’t really see the draw or value of going to these kinds of things because I personally don’t put popular people on pedestals. Then again, I’ve also really never been the super promiscuous type so I’m also not the kind of person who goes cruising for hookups at these shindigs either. I guess if you have an expensive fursuit and you need an excuse to justify your investment you can wear them around and take pictures; there were certainly people there doing exactly that. I even knew in advance not to high five, hug, or otherwise approach anyone who was wearing shorts on the outside of their suits. I know what that means.
I was there to host some panels, a handful of them actually. After posting a whole three stories, where arguably the first one shouldn’t even count, the organizers wanted me to give little lectures to others on how I do the things I do and to field questions from the audience and all that. I didn’t host the panels by myself, there was a different group of people at each one and depending on the panel it was either me and one to three other people pretending like we knew what we were talking about. I feel bad for saying this but I really can’t remember everyone I hosted the panels with. I do recall hosting one with Baphijimm, his character was a dragon and I always kind of found it weird that someone with that much facial hair would be into reptiles (and latex I think?) because I’m in the same fursona category and at no point in my four decades on this planet have I ever had facial hair because it bothers the hell out of me… and reptiles don’t have hair anyways. The panel where I recommended my favorite furry literature and how these stories influenced my own works was hosted by me and Hillary Ayer. Hillary definitely had “a few years” on me, actually more like “a few decades”, but she was a really kind soul and very pleasant to talk to. I’d never met her before nor was I familiar with her work (and vice versa of course) but I could tell she was from another era of this community even all the way back in 2009. So was I, somehow.
I remember this one guy being at most of the panels and despite my best efforts to remember his name it still escapes me. He was slightly taller than me (and I’m already kind of tall) and was also heavier too but not to the degree that you’d denigrate him for being fat. Part of his height may have been superficial though because I’m pretty sure he was wearing a top hat which obscured his exact height. Anyways, he was also a writer and he told me about this “system” he’d developed for coming up with new ideas for stories to write. He’d bought one of those packages of note cards that come in multiple colors and divided them up between characters he’d created, locations & settings, loose plotlines, and kinks. In order to make a story his “system” was just picking one (or more) card from every stack and then writing whatever the cards said. It was Mad Libs, in other words. He invented erotic Mad Libs. He kept bragging about it though and said he’d show me some of his “crazier” cards if I hit him up later at the convention. When I finally did, a couple of hours before I left to catch my flight home on the second day I was there, he ran through some of the ones he had saved on his phone and the one that has stood out to me the most was this incredibly obtuse scenario where a deer’s antlers turn into tentacles and… well, do the things tentacles usually do in these settings. He was really proud of that one for some reason.
I also bumped into a small handful of people I knew when I was out and about. I met Varka and most of the inaugural Bad Dragon crew, including Athus, though that’s an experience I’ve already talked about on this website. I also met Chris Sawyer, the dinosaur artist, extremely briefly. He would’ve been, well, my age now at the time. I cannot remember if this was pre- or post-accident though. He seemed distant when we spoke, like there was something on his mind that was bothering him. I can’t really remember much else from it.
There were a lot of people there who knew who I was, though. Comparatively speaking. The people who recognized me by name said as much but I have a feeling that a larger slice than I initially thought of the people who said “hello” to me probably did so because the furry fandom is very parasocial and walking around wearing badges that say things like GUEST and PANELIST kind of implies you might be “somebody”? For the people who said they were familiar with my works – all three of them at that point in time – it was kind of flattering to feel recognized in a way, but the attention was also foreign to me. There was this very pervasive and unshakable feeling of “these people are only fond of you because you made something they jacked off to” and there was a non-insignificant part of me that acknowledged that was not something to be proud of.
While checking out tables in the vendor room there is one experience that has stuck with me for the past 16 years. In the moment I guess you could say it was positive, but it happened in an instant faster than I could logically react and in retrospect it really wasn’t positive at all. I would go as far as to say this singular moment has haunted me since it happened and it is the one thing that has made me anxiously look over my shoulder constantly for almost as long ago as it happened. I cannot remember who owned this table but the two people manning it knew who I was and were familiar with the nature of my early works. They were selling a bunch of things like stickers and buttons and keychains, the usual convention fare. But when one of them read my name tag and realized who was standing in front of them he retrieved a plastic index card box that was under the table and told me he had some stickers he wanted to give to me that weren’t for sale in the spread I was looking at. He handed me a small stack of them, about a dozen or so, and invited me to “give them out to my friends”.
They were vinyl stickers of the zeta symbol. If you’re reading this journal and don’t know what that means, it’s the “underground” symbol that zoophiles use to identify each other on the down-low.
The story I’d written that “made me famous”? It was about a guy banging dinosaurs. The word those stickers represented was one I’d only heard in the context of describing the story I’d written, I did not know what it meant beyond that. As ridiculous as that sounds, I should reiterate that at the time I was at this convention I was not even old enough to legally drink alcohol. I was practically still fresh out of high school. I guess I should have known better, but at the time I did not. I foolishly stuck that term as a searchable tag on my stories not really understanding the ramifications of what I was doing. Looking back I’m only angry at myself and how profoundly clueless I was. Why didn’t I think to ask these guys why these specific stickers weren’t displayed on their table? Probably because you can’t have stuff like that just out in the open, duh. What else was in there that I didn’t know about? Did that gaudy “minor-attracted person” pride flag exist back then? Were there stickers of that in there? I guess I just felt “cool” or whatever, that I got to get something that was kept “behind the register” because I was one of the “in” people.
And, I actually gave some of those fucking stickers to people I knew at the convention. It wouldn’t be for a couple of years later when someone would slap some much needed sense into me and let me know how genuinely retarded I was behaving.
I spent Saturday and Sunday at Further Confusion and I really did not know what to do with my time. Outside of furry stuff I’d been to one other convention, a local-ish anime one, twice as a normal person and I only went there because my friends from school were going. This whole “networking” thing or whatever just did not click with me but despite this I apparently did an alright job with it because I spoke to a furry publisher who had a giant table in the dealer’s room (as in they must have rented four booths and combined all of them together) and the couple overseeing it certainly knew who I was. Unlike the zeta sticker guys though they weren’t going to try and groom me into doing gross shit though, they actually offered me their services; they said that they were willing to let me circumvent the usual submission process and all that and just go straight to sending them an abstract and partial manuscript to review and, potentially, publish. Sight unseen. That was a huge deal for me, and I suppose out of all the things I regret in my time with the fandom it’s failing to take these people up on their offer that stings the most. I’ve done my time in the salt mines of trying to get something published – unsuccessfully, mind you – so I know how much of a nightmare it is to deal with nonsense like trying to secure an agent to represent you and then segue that into getting a publisher’s attention. Being able to cut to the front of the line and have a guaranteed audience with the decision makers is a big deal, and I squandered it.
I hung around in the game room the convention had set up off and on throughout the weekend in between panels I was hosting or aimlessly waiting for a text from someone asking about lunch plans. They had all the usual stuff set up for 2009: Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, Rock Band, and others. I played a lot of Rock Band and since this was back in a time when I could still sing decently well I’d spend 20 or so minutes belting out “Epic” by Faith No More before getting my ass handed to me in Mario Party and then drown my sorrows by singing some more. I remember at one point in time someone else who was at the convention filmed me playing Rock Band and uploaded it to YouTube complimenting how “good” I was at the game, singing most of the songs on Expert difficulty. There was also a corner of communal consoles where people could bring in their own games and play them with friends. I hung around there and was usually second fiddle to whoever was playing a game and we’d banter back and forth like a cut rate Mystery Science Theater. It was fun, but the kind of fun that you didn’t really need to fly all the way out to California to enjoy.
During my stay at the convention I was invited to two room parties. One of them was a “vore party”. Someone whom I did not recognize handed me a paper invitation that looked like a photocopy of a drawing of an anthropomorphic fox getting a “big hug” from a sultry snake asking if he’d like to “stay for dinner”. It had a room number and a time written on it too. I feel like this person was just handing these out to anyone who had a dragon character on their con badge because, surprise surprise, I decided to go to this room party because I had nothing else better to do and most everyone there had dragon badges. I’m not even into vore. In fact, I actually don’t like it at all; it’s one of those “social contagion fetishes” that I instantly judge people for having. I just went because the idea of a vore party sounded so dumb that I had to find out what it was actually about. In my head I envisioned a bunch of people awkwardly sitting around eating animal crackers in dead silence.
When I got there… I kind of felt bad for having mocked all of these people mentally. It was just a relatively ordinary social gathering with the thread uniting everyone – except me – that they all liked vore. There were no animal crackers.
I hung around and chatted for a bit. One of the guys I spoke to had a custom plush hat that looked like a headcrab from Half-Life. He had to have been about 15 years older than me and for almost half an hour, while everyone was sharing their war stories of epic vore roleplays they’d done, he lamented this one person in an IRC chatroom who was “god-modding” and forcefully controlling the pace of the action for all of the characters involved. (For those of you reading this who aren’t familiar with the terminology or customs, “godmodding” is when one of the participants writes the actions or speech of someone else’s character for them rather than letting the player of that character do it themselves. It’s considered amateurish and extremely rude.) Anyways, whoever that was must’ve been a real asshole for this guy to remember it all these years later. A couple of people did the whole “noticing the GUEST badge and trying to parse out who I was and why I was notable” act, one of them asked me about commissions and even though I told him I wasn’t open to the idea at the time he still spoke at length about his pregnancy fetish. That’s not even something I wrote, and I told him as much, but he didn’t shut up about it.
I wound up spending at least 2 or 3 hours at the party and decided to call it quits when someone arrived with booze. Despite not being old enough to legally drink, the party host still offered me some. The gesture wasn’t why I left, it was more because I innately knew that breaking out the social lubricant is the first step in making everyone there a little more “comfortable” with each other and I wasn’t interested in that.
Anyways, the second room party I mentioned getting invited to? That was Bad Dragon’s private party. I snubbed them in favor of going to the vore party.
Really, the only overwhelmingly “positive” memory I have of my time at Further Confusion was when I stumbled into Gideon Hoss in the dealer’s den. I didn’t know he was going to be there and other than Athus he was pretty much the only other artist there whose work I was quite familiar with. When I was in high school, a very long time ago, I once had unattended access to the school’s poster printer and I took that opportunity to print out a couple of his “well endowed dragon women”. He thought that story was amusing. He was selling some art prints and whatnot and offered me a non-bootlegged poster of his work but I didn’t have enough cash on me at the time so I took one of his $1 commissions where he’d do a 60-second sketch of your fursona on a note card. In the years that followed I’ve realized that having one of those cards is kind of a fun icebreaker to identify other furs who’ve been around long enough to remember a time when the community didn’t suck. I’d always wanted a piece of art from Gideon however, and when I closed up shop in 2018 and left the fandom my final action as “Dracokon” was to privately commission him for a full-color drawing of my dragon done in his trademark style. I made right on matters in the end.
Overall, I guess my experience at Further Confusion was neutral. It’s hard for me to not feel sour about being invited out there because of stories that served a niche that I should’ve known better about making content for, and people giving me “special stickers” hush-hush because of it, but at the same time I got to meet Athus. He was literally the determining factor for me showing up in the first place. Although there’s a lot of things I certainly regret in life, if I committed to my initial refusal to the convention’s invitation I’d probably be kicking myself over it to this very day because as time went on this wound up being my only chance to meet him; he died two years later. At least I got to meet him. I have the memory of doing so, and the autograph he signed for me. My feelings on the matter are difficult, Lord knows, but it was worth it and I don’t regret it. It was important to me at the time and not long thereafter it became a hell of a lot more important than that.
I never attended another convention after this one. I guess I kind of told myself that it wasn’t really “my thing” but if I ever got invited out to another one I’d consider the invitation, but another one never came. I don’t really feel like I’ve missed out on anything meaningful though. The spotlight was not the place for me, and my hot streak in the fandom ended not long thereafter. I had one more “hit” following my convention appearance, a re-imagining of the original C-Snakes comic by Maneating Kangaroo, and then everything fell apart. My future submissions became separated by increasingly longer gaps of time (a year or more) and eventually I just tore it all down and left.
I can’t speak for all conventions because my scope of experiences applies to exactly ONE of them that I attended over a decade and a half ago, but my gut feeling of “not my thing” still applies. I’m not the partying type, and these days all my personal heroes are either retired… or deceased. I’ll be fine where I am.
Until next time.
