Multi-Track Fursuiting?!

Last month, I attended both DEFCON and Megaplex. If you’re not familiar with either event, here’s all you need to know.

DEFCON is a hacker convention with a substantial furry presence.

Megaplex is a furry convention with a substantial hacker presence.

If you’ve never attended either event, here’s a few essential things to remember:

1. You choose your own adventure. Everything is multi-track. You cannot possibly attend every event on the schedule. Choose a few must-see events, and don’t be mad at yourself if you still end up missing one.
2. The convention is irreducible to the schedule. For some people, the most memorable events won’t be found in a meetup or panel. The “hallway track” (informal meetups and encounters between friends or even kind strangers) can be incredibly rewarding.
3. Almost everyone is a volunteer. You aren’t at a theme park, you’re surrounded by people with shared interests.
4. Remember to respect consent and boundaries. For example: Don’t take photos of a fursuiter having a wardrobe malfunction. Wait until they’ve fixed it and they might even pose with you!
   1. Also, most fursuits have very poor vision, so if you think a fursuiter is ignoring you, they probably didn’t see you.

I like to spend my conventions hanging out with friends and meeting cool people. I usually dedicate several hours to simply being in fursuit and wandering around.

Sometimes, folks recognize me as the author of this blog. Rarely, someone will look at me and yell the wrong species (“Kitty!”).

Interestingly enough, despite doing two cons back-to-back, I don’t actually have many photos of myself in my fursuit.

This shouldn’t be too surprising, if you remember that I write long-form technical content rather than attention-grabbing reels on TikTok or YouTube Shorts.

Hell, I can barely dance, and that was only due to the efforts of a kind tiger and his other friends.

With the furry fandom continuing to grow at a breakneck exponential rate, this means that the probability of any given furry knowing about me (or even caring to know) approaches zero at a rate proportional to the fandom’s growth. Personal irrelevance is inevitable for this blog.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I spent all my time like this:

Influencers and Other Blights

Every once in a while, some random media influencer with a 6+ digit follower count decides to make a video about “what really goes on” at furry conventions. I won’t link any examples, but it’s a recurring topic.

But then you find gems like this:

If you haven’t watched Bekah’s video yet, and might want to, stop reading until you do. What I say after the next photo will spoil one of the more emotionally impactful parts of her video.

In their desperate search for scandalous footage, self-proclaimed influencers whose only purpose in life is to provide clickbait filler between advertisements sure do miss a lot about their actual thesis.

I was mildly astonished that Bekah actually showed the memorial wall for the members of our community that have died. She shows more authenticity in her work than I’ve come to expect from YouTubers.

I don’t think I could ever trust any of the Discount Logan Pauls running around on multimedia platforms spreading mockery and ridicule to actually give a shit about the furry fandom or its members. But if they did actually care–if they had a modicum of respect or empathy for the people they’re trying to make a spectacle out of–they would find so much more interesting drama beneath the surface.

Not all furry discourse is the usual suspects.

Two Certainties: Death and Foxes

I’m writing this with the trust that nobody that reads my blog will try to start problems or harass anyone. However, to make this expectation a bit more difficult to violate, I’m not including any names.

A few years ago, a friend of mine died. I found out when his boyfriend posted about it on Twitter and made it all about himself rather than my friend. Later, I found out that his boyfriend held a “seance” over VRChat in order to decide whether to attend a furry convention days later.

And, look, we all grieve differently, but to say that finding out that way didn’t hurt and piss me off would be a fucking lie.

This whole fucking ordeal could have unfolded right in front of one of these YouTube chucklefucks and they would be oblivious. They’d either cut the footage entirely because it doesn’t serve the “furries are sex-crazed losers” narrative they were gunning for, or make up some bullshit about it all secretly being a cult. And then jump-cut to them disrupting the dance competition or some shit.

My friend’s death was, at least in part, the result of his younger years of excessive alcohol use. In many of our private conversations, he talked about the pain of losing his ex to said ex’s drunk driving. But most of our conversations were forward-looking. After his late grandmother had died and he received an inheritance, he invested some of it into a career change and planned to use the rest of it to help other furries with their own careers and financial security. I had written Furward Momentum the year before, so we ended up talking about that sort of thing a lot.

Trying to pretend that the lives of millions of people can fit into the same mold and/or soundbite is the kind of hubris that only dysfunctional institutions can believe is normal.

A few years ago, Joaquin Baldwin shared this sketch while recalling a conversation with Roe Grayfox:

If your narrative about a community cannot encapsulate moments like this, you’re probably lying whether you realize it or not.

Much Abuzz About “Fleas”

While I was fursuiting at Megaplex, someone clipped a clothespin to my tail without my notice until I got back to my hotel room, hours later. It had the word “flea” written on it in permanent marker.

Reasonable people can have different opinions about this.

Unreasonable people will insist that, if you don’t want strangers secretly attaching foreign objects to your thousand-dollar wearable work of art as part of an activity that isn’t officially on the convention’s programming, then “don’t go to cons” (archive).

Unreasonable people will harass and generally be nasty to the person that created the “fleas”.

Ad-supported social media platforms are incentivized to amplify the unreasonable.

If you talk to a person with even a modicum of sense, you’ll get a spectrum of answers, which can be bucketed roughly like:

• Oh, yeah, it’s cute and funny and whimsical. “I got fleas at the furry con!” Haha, good show, furries! Keep it up!
• I get the humor, but I’m not personally comfortable with people touching me without my knowledge and consent.
• What if folks started clipping airtags to fursuiters without their permission? This could easily normalize stalker behavior.
• Meh, at least nobody’s being sexually harassed or assaulted.

One friend described it like taping a “kick me” sign to someone: If you’re doing it to a friend, then good fun and humor are almost certainly involved. If you’re doing it to a stranger, and then someone else actually kicks them because of it? Yikes.

Like, the goddamn sky isn’t falling either way, but we should probably as a community decide how we want to handle this conduct. None of that conversation requires anyone be nasty to anyone else. Put down the fucking beware doc.

The Renaissance Of Furry Aversion

Recently, the Maryland Renaissance Festival decided to ban fursuits. If you’re suppressing a yawn at that headline, take a look at how this was announced on social media (archive):

It’s a private event with a dress code. Not every venue has to accommodate every subculture — and “discrimination” doesn’t automatically mean someone’s rights were violated.

Hmm. What did they mean by this?

Renaissance festivals are a lot of fun, but (at least in Florida, where I live) they’re not really equipped for fursuiting. They don’t have anything like an air conditioned Headless Lounge nor adequate water available.

Trying to fursuit at an outdoor event without the infrastructure needed to make it safe for attendees is certainly a choice that only the most dedicated of nerds would consider.

But singling out furries instead of other period-inaccurate garb (e.g., Star Wars) is at least a little suspicious, since only the furry community is really noteworthy for being overwhelmingly LGBTQIA+.

But who knows? Maybe there’s a furry in Maryland that personally ruined it for everyone. Stranger things have happened.

You Can’t Spell FAIL Without AI

Speaking of renaissances, we need to talk about AI.

While I was at DEFCON, I estimate about 10% of the people that I talked to were either currently unemployed or extremely anxious about their income being displaced by management’s investments in AI.

Generative AI has never been popular among furries. Anything that harms artists isn’t going to be popular in a community of artists and their patrons. Add in the misinformation angle, juxtaposed with the baseless litterbox hoax, and you’ve got a recipe for conflict.

In the past, I’ve neglected to cover AI on this blog (aside from complaining about the lack of consent in companies’ decisionmaking), for a few distinct reasons:

1. I don’t want to accidentally help the jerks who want to harm my community, nor the people who directly benefit from hyping up and subsequently bursting a bubble.
2. Too many other people are talking about it, and I’m burned out on hearing about it all the damn time.

However, some of the anti-AI folks have taken their cause into a weird direction by engaging in what one friend described as “outright reality denial”. This observation has precipitated beyond just discussions about LLMs.

In reality (whether or not anyone finds it convenient), AI can do useful work. There isn’t really much space for opinions or beliefs; it’s a measurable, empirical observation about the world we live in today.

As I write this, OpenAI is claiming a solution to the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize Problem. This has led to statements from other mathematicians. Terrence Tao weighed in too. Even if this turns out to be a correct solution, it doesn’t change the fact that it’s also a marketing stunt.

The main competitor to OpenAI is a company called Anthropic, whose CEO writes MST3K-worthy essays with titles like Machines of Loving Grace that feel like “What if Jim Jones read LessWrong?” and whose wife (and key strategic advisor) contacted Jeffrey Epstein years after his conviction to pitch a “luxury porn” startup.

All of the other players in this space are legacy BigTech corporations whose brutal policy decisions have a body count that would make some PMCs envious if they weren’t directed at their own employees and/or customers.

Possibly the cruelest part about this whole shitshow is how much AI enthusiasm is driven by fooling oneself.

Here’s a fun exercise: Clone a random security startup’s “skill” repo off GitHub and measure how many lines of it are Markdown instructions or TOML config defining different characters for the machine to roleplay, and compare it with lines of actual code. How much of that Markdown is reminding Claude what a SQL injection vulnerability looks like, as if it wasn’t absorbed into its training data?

Then, is it any wonder that the Internet is nigh-unusable due to the prevalence of AI bots that scrape webpages over and over instead of just cloning a repo locally?

Ever since my employer mandated the use of AI last year, the key difference I’ve observed between successful projects (whether development or security scanning) is the commitment to engineering best practices.

Y’know, the boring shit? Eating your wheaties?

To put it a bit more blunt, if you’re required to use AI at work and want to get anything useful, you need at least two things:

1. A good definition of “done”
2. A tight feedback loop

AI enthusiasts could probably point an LLM at my Public Key Directory specification and get a working client in virtually any programming language due to the assurance practices I’ve been strictly adhering to. Of course, their coding agent will get all the credit if they do.

There are so many more interesting ways to be critical of this hellscape than trying to pretend that the technology is little more sophisticated than your iPhone’s “next word prediction” feature.

The biggest problem with AI is people.

Nobody reasonable is mad at linear algebra or computer science. Gradient descent, neural networks, transformer models, reinforcement learning, etc. are socially neutral concepts, inherently.

The wealthy investor class that hopes AI will displace entire industries’ workforces suck.

The CEOs and middle managers that decimate their workforce while enjoying record-breaking profits suck.

The people who use AI to spread misinformation and propaganda on social media suck.

The botlickers (sic) eager to sacrifice their neighbors and the environment for more cloud compute suck.

The grifters who use AI “art” to create profiles to try to blend in to subcultures they have no real interest in suck.

But as much as I do begrudge the people who changed the material conditions of our industry over the past few years in pursuit of their self-interest for the various harms they’ve caused, I do not extend this contempt towards junior developers or anyone at risk of losing their income tomorrow.

Just as you have to put on your own oxygen mask before you help others, do what you have to in order to survive the changing climate.

If reasonably practical, I do encourage you to find some way to maintain your independence: a way to do the basic skills that are now being automated without relying on any cloud-based service. Otherwise, those skills will almost certainly atrophy over time. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, after all.

Closing Remarks

This has been another grab-bag blog post stitched out of smaller topics that didn’t quite make the cut for a dedicated, focused writing.

I do these from time to time. A few people have complained about topic whiplash, so I’ve tried to make the transitions a bit less jarring this time around.

I’m planning to contribute to the DEFCON Furs badge puzzle for 2027. I’ve also offered to contribute cryptographic puzzles to Megaplex since their theme next year is Curse of Anubis, which has a lot of potential.

One of these days, I’m going to submit a CRYPTO rump session for a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air parody song titled Fresh Prints of Bellare. This will either force me to attend CRYPTO in fursuit, or mildly annoy the cryptography community.

Header photo was taken by yosh at Megaplex 2026.