This year, I’d decided to take a break from furry cons. I wanted to see the shape of the hole they left behind, and decide if I wanted to keep coming. And I wanted to expand more into comic cons.

Well. The weekend before last, I realized a major part of what I was missing. The dances. I was at SPX’s dance, which was about half of one small function room in the hotel, and some people spinning pretty poppy stuff. The people DJing mostly just played songs rather than mixing and fooling around. There were probably never more than about two or three dozen people ever dancing at once in a fairly dark room.

And I thought of the dances I’ve been to at furry cons. And I felt profoundly spoiled. To me, the dance at a con should be an event. I’m used to huge dance floors that fill up a ballroom, full of a couple hundred people in outlandish costumes ranging from full fursuits to street clothes. And a lot of those fursuits are full of blinking lights and EL wire, plus people playing with all kinds of glow toys out on the edges. And DJs who can put together a really good mix on the fly of mostly electronic music that keeps the crowd bouncing, and lots of colored lights making things exciting. In short, I’m used to raves. And comic cons just don’t deliver that.

So despite having spent the last weekend behind a table selling stuff, despite still recovering from an exhausting five-hour flight home and a cold on top of that, I went to Rainfurrest.

Amara drove up from Portland and crashed at my place; we drove to the con on Friday and Saturday afternoon and came back around 3AM both nights. It was great. I showed up on a panel, and got to dance for something like five hours total. I probably would have danced more but by a couple hours into the Saturday dance, I was feeling really exhausted from both the dancing and from my body being busy dealing with the cold. So I spent a chunk of Saturday evening lounging on a chair outside the dance; a couple friends showed up, one of whom had had Too Much Weed and was “melting”. For a while she just kinda hid in the space between the chair I was in and the pillar I was next to; I was glad to give her the social shelter of my own general taciturness. People came and went; I think at the peak of that phase of the evening there were maybe ten people loosely clustered around me, talking, trading silly drawings, and generally being social and happy. It was pretty nice and I wish I’d had enough energy to be more social myself.

Sunday, Amara and I both opted to skip the con. I knew I was tired enough that I’d probably have a bad time if I went. She’d been thinking of hitting it, but didn’t want to stay too long. So we puttered around my place a bit. She showed me what she’s been doing with the dragon costume she’s slowly working on for me, and I showed her how easy it was to set up the sewable LEDs and sewable Arduino I’d picked up. She left with those in her bag, excited to work on the head and hopefully finish it in time for Halloween. I spent the rest of the day playing Bloodborne, experimenting with a new character that’s a strength/arcane build rather than the skill/bloodtinge I’ve almost finished the game with. I killed Father Gascione in a mere six or so attempts, and went on to the Blood-Starved Beast, which I couldn’t quite kill but was doing fairly well with in general.

Last night, I think my body finally cleared out the cold. I feel a ton better now. I got up and showered, and pondered LED stuff. Stuffed that into my bag and went out for some lunch, then realized I’d left the Arduino back on the desk. Oops. Had everything else ready to sit under a tree and play with programming some LEDs to have some basic patterns that I feel would fit well with a Peganthyrus outfit, but that was not to be. So I worked on That Page of Rita instead. Did one more panel. I have two more panels to do in that row, and a handful more left around the edges, plus the ones some friends said they’d do. I think once I’ve finished this row I may just post the damn thing and create some excitement about the comic for myself again, which will hopefully help me power through the last few bits. I’m really ready to be done with that story.

Anyway. The shadow of the tree I sat under to draw has moved enough that the sun’s in my eyes; I think it’s time to move on. Maybe go home and work on the LEDs.

When I left the apartment to go get some breakfast, there was a guy on his phone outside. Instead of holding it to his face and speaking relatively softly, he had it at arm’s length from his face, and was projecting like an actor on a stage. After a moment I realized this was because he was having a video call. Probably about whatever had happened to the car he was walking around, which had a broken rear window with a trash bag taped over it. He wasn’t speaking a language I even remotely understand, so this is just conjecture.

Earlier in the morning, I’d had a health care startup’s bot reply to a tweet last night where I muttered about a sore throat. It offered a house call.

Welcome to the dark cyberpunk future. It bears no resemblance to the one anyone promised us. But it’s the one we have. 

Well. This has been a very different con from what I’m used to.

It’s a small show. Bigger than most furry cons that are not Anthrocon, but smaller than most of the comics shows I do. (And of course my standards there are skewed what with one of the five biggest comic cons in the US being my hometown con.)

But I sold like crazy. I brought twenty copies of each volume of Rita; I sold out of volume one around 2PM on Saturday. Which was three hours after the dealer’s room opened. This is a crazy outlier compared to all the other cons I do; normally I’d be bringing some of those things home with me, I sold most of the twenty copies of v2 I brought as well; I think I have like maybe eight at most sitting on my table right now. And one Tarot deck out of what I brought left.

Walking around the show during setup was interesting. Very strange to walk around a comics con and not see any walls of Marvel/DC fan art. I saw one person affixing a Spider-Man balloon to the top of their sign as an eye-grabber, and later I saw a few bits of what might have been Fifth Element fan art at one table. But largely it was people selling their own creations, and, if my sales were any guide, people buying those personal works in volume. I will probably be applying for 2016. And I will be shipping a lot more books.

Then I got to go to the Ignatz awards and see my room-mate fail to get a brick for ‘Best Online Comic’. Welcome to the club, Blue; there will probably be a few years to go until you sweep the Ignatzs, or some other award, with ‘best new creator’ and a couple other works. And then I hit the dance, about which the best thing I can really say is that it made me really realize what one of the things is that I’ll miss if I never do another furry con again – furries put on amazing raves, in big ballrooms full of people dancing in crazy light-up costumes, with fandom DJs who have a huge collection of high-energy electronic dance music and a fine sense of mixing for the crowd. This was… well, once the DJs changed it was okay, but it was smaller than some dead dog parties I’ve been to at furry cons. Furries know how to party.

I’m writing this on Sunday morning. I’ll probably hold down the table working on Rita, and maybe selling a few v2 to people who only took a chance on 1 and devoured it last night. I get one or two of those most cons. But first I need to go have breakfast and have my fifteen minute long pitch meeting with Nickelodeon, who’s actively soliciting them here. Will they be interested in my show? Who knows. The best I’m really hoping for is “holy shit this is neat but it’s so far outside of what we could ever do, sorry, good luck!”. Unless they are secretly looking for something to compete with the several continuing shows over at Cartoon Network.

…A bit later. They were interested in my pitch, but they are explicitly looking for proposals for 2-3 minute cartoons. I have a week to figure out how to fit the basics of the whole setup into that much space, and send them an outline. I went and sat out in the sun with a bagel and some water in the time between my pitch and the show floor opening; I now have a first draft of a cartoon, based on their suggestion of having the two teams compete for something, and Kin’s idea from last week of having one of the first episodes on both sides be a rescue, so as to establish them both as Good Guys. When I get home I’ll see how badly it fits into the alotted time, and decide how many optional things I have to leave out and how many essential things I have to grit my teeth and cut.

Now I am sitting in the dealer’s room for the second and last day. Not really bothering to try and pitch anyone very hard. I may get up and wander some, possibly even buy a few comics? Wish I’d brought more merch. Next time.

…Later, in the airport. Scott McCloud stopped by my table and said hi during his swing through the dealer’s room. SENPAI NOTICED MEEEEEE. Nothing much else interesting. Blue and I finally got a chance to hang out and chat before we left the hotel; our tables were nowhere near each other, and we basically saw each other as sleeping shapes in the bed for most of the con. We bonded over the game of “Who Directed This Warner Bros. Short?” as we packed, then chatted on and off as we rode the subway through a series of insanely brutalist stations to the airport.

I have several hours of airplane ahead of me now. I’m going to be so damn glad to get home.

Problem: tons of money is concentrated in the hands of about 1% of the American population, who have largely taken it out of the American economy.

Solution: Start creating money at a higher rate, deliberately designed to create inflation. At the same time, we instigate a basic income for all Americans; the size of this income is not defined as a dollar value, but rather as a percentage of all of the dollars in existence. Possibly with some kind of relationship to some kind of measure to the cost of living – renting a 1br apartment in the most expensive city to live in, for instance, if we want to be really aggressive.

So the value of the dollar drops into the ground. That’s fine, because everyone is getting a basic income guaranteed to have about the same amount of purchasing power no matter what. And the money that the 1% are sitting on rapidly becomes worthless; eventually everyone is getting the amount of money those folks are sitting on every month.

Disclaimer: I am stoned as fuck right now. Feel free to discuss exactly why this is a terrible idea and how it could be better. Take as given that I have mind-controlled the POTUS, Senate, and the Congress, or some other equally unlikely method of making it happen despite the way folks with tons of money will be fighting against this happening.