So what happened? Why was I at a furry con? Why was there a terrorist chemical attack? As some of you know, I write role-playing games. One of those games was Albedo, another was Usagi Yojimbo. Both of those games were comic book licenses, based on comics featuring animals with human characteristics. Usagi Yojimbo had a Nintendo game, cross-overs with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, appearances on Saturday morning cartoons, and so on. These were not fringe weirdo comic books. Some of the most hardcore fans of these games are Furries, a subset of larger SF/Fantasy/Anime fandom that enjoys media based on talking animal characters. As with any large fandom, there are poorly socialized people. There are also amazingly talented and wonderful people. There are even larger numbers of just plain old people. I will even describe myself as one, at least as a subset of everything else Im nerdy about. I blame C.S. Lewis and Wind in the Willows and Watership Down. This past weekend, I took a vacation to Chicago and the Midwest to visit a number of friends. I attended a furry convention there, using it as a base of operations for my explorations. I did not dress an an animal or pretend to be an animal or anything of that nature. I did visit friends. We did things like: 1. Watch the Star Wars Holiday Special 2. Buy old cheese in Wisconsin 3. Play board-games about the First Council of Nicaea. 4. Talk about publishing more games. 5. Visit the Super Dawg drive-through. During this event, someone spilled (accidentally or deliberately) a small amount of pool chlorine in the back stairwell of the convention hotel. The smell was noted, and the hotel was evacuated until the chlorine was identified and removed. It was about 1 AM. I was in the middle of an amusing (and long) anecdote about Upton Sinclairs description of scientific chewing in his 1906 novel, The Jungle. I entirely lost my train of thought and had to stand in the cold for a long time. No one was in any danger. There was no attack. Nineteen people (out of 4,500) were taken to hospital and immediately released. As far as I know, no one suffered anything more serious than a panic attack. The next day, an Associated Press reporter interviewed me for a few minutes as I walked by the hotel. All the quotes attributed to me were badly paraphrased versions of my actual words. One of the quotes attributed to me is, to the best of my recollection, actually something THE REPORTER said to ME. He also described me as a writer of role-playing games for animals. As an example of his general lack of a clue, he originally thought the convention had something to do with the fur industry. The resulting story has appeared in print and online around the world, as far as New Zealand. In the last 24 hours Ive received interview requests from national and international media. I have declined them all, because I got pretty darn sick of my 15 seconds of Furry Chemical Attack fame. So, that was rumour control. Share it if you like.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 02:41:36 +0000
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