This is directed to those who have been both to AC and...

Well,

FC is about the same size, and about the same tone. The difference is location, gives it a different over all feel.

MWFF is smaller, more personal, quieter. Its a great con to go and hang out with your peeps.

-----------------------------------------------
David M Stein, DI

"Not Unlike the Toaster, I Control the Darkness"
-- Abby Normal, "You Suck"

AC is to furfright what las vegas is to poker in some guy's basement.

Only more strippers.

I really don't want to sound rude when I say this, and I should also mention that I've only attended FC two times and AC five times. And I'm just going to give my honest impression about both.

AC has a lot of advantages because it is so organized and coordinated. FC runs fine...but I found the majority of people attending had no idea who the guests of honor were, what events were going on, or where anything was. And from what I saw, their forums were none too busy either. To contrast, FC is a *very* relaxed and laid-back con. While every bit as professionally-run, the people attending are a lot more relaxed and nonchalant about everything going on around them.

At AC, the guests of honor were at least known to the majority of attendees, everyone seems to know what is going on even if they have no interest in it, and the con *seems* to have a wider array of events going on. However, as FC is nonchalant, AC is kinda high-strung. There is a much more tangible air of professionalism about AC because Kage strives day and night to make the con family and public friendly. The dress code and weapons policy I'm going to highlight for this.

At FC, I noticed people costuming with prop weapons and kissing/snuggling in public. And nobody seemed to really mind. At AC, things are more strict for everyone's benefit. There's no fake weapons to prompt a false alarm and no public displays of affection to squik anyone. But that might also be due to a difference in mentality on the coasts. Frankly, I've lived on both ends of the US, and in the West (where FC takes place, CA) people are just more relaxed by nature. Plus I guess it helps that they're just that much closer to SanFran. Either way, the East coast tends to be more "urbanized" and higher-strung by nature.

However that is not to say FC was any less fun. Not at all! Although I have not yet found a panel at FC that interested me enough to attend, I logged my time by simply being social with other people and taking lots of pictures (and I might plug my FA Page here on that note). And since gatherings are supposed to be social by nature, it's a good thing! At AC, so many of the panels sound interesting that I often have to divide my time and choose what I want to attend, and what not to. Contrastly speaking, at AC I have a lot less time for randomly hanging out with people and going out to dinner with them because I'm attending more panels.

So, in conclusion, the big Pros and Cons of FC (the only other con I have attended) are the same thing; it's more relaxed. It depends more on what you want to get out of the con. But of course everyone's experiences are different, and you'd really have to attend yourself to get a full feel of what it is like. I can only tell you from what I saw and did. So if you find yourself in the position where you can attend, I'd say go for it!

I have no experience with the smaller cons/gatherings yet. I would imagine it'd be at least close to the experience of the larger cons, just that you happen to run into the same people a lot more often.

-If someone walks up to you and says they are a pathological liar, would you believe them?

While I have attended the last AC held at King of Prussia, and all but one since, I have also attended all the last ConFURences from CF9 on, all but 1 CaliFUR, And each and every one of the somewhat surreal ZonieCons, which fell into a class all by themselves, but that may simply have been due to the mix of machine guns and Minerva Mink and fermented Rootbeer and rockets and tortured Furbys. For future reference, vacationing midwestern Screen-door fastening hardware salesmen at a golf resort are easily put off by people in east-german fatigue caps, hob-nail boots, bandoliers and wearing animal tails, carrying german WWII submachine guns, pistols, ammo-belts, and a Spandau-made, water-cooled, WWI-era Maxim machine gun.

I have been privileged to attend all of the FURther CONfusions.

AC has an advantage in that it has a more or less permanent staff, made up of a core of people who have been doing this and doing it over and over until it is a well-practiced routine - and they are good enough at it so that when it ISN'T routine, they adapt and work around the trouble. Not many conventions could survive, let alone thrive, losing their hotel and event space, like AC did with the sudden loss of the AdamsMark in Philadelphia.

Now, I don't want to give the impression that it all goes together smoothly, it just LOOKS that way; and if the attendees are blissfully unaware of the madhouse coordination that starts a month before the convention and continues until the day after - and for some parts, for several weeks after (I'm thinking of PeterCat and the Art Show here), if that is all unnoticed, then the staff have done really well. And many of them are staff for OTHER conventions, either Furry or Anime or SciFi in nature, as well.

The staff of FC, on the other hand, reflects one of the core reasons for FC to exist, namely as a TRAINING GROUND for people interested in learning how to staff and run a convention. FC is sponsored by an organisation called Anthropomorphic Arts and Entertainment (AA&E), which has board members. Each year AA&E entertains bids by people who wish to run an edition of FURther CONfusion, and no 2 consecutive conventions can be run by the same chair. Traditionally, the Assistant Chairman takes over the lead roll for the following year, and appoints his or her assistant who will in turn follow the year after that - presuming that they wish to, and are otherwise judged up to the task.

This means that there is a certain variation in FC from year to year, and it is noticable; sometimes the theme clicks, sometimes it doesn't matter what the theme is. Many of the AA&E board members are not just prominent Bay Area Furry Fans, but also members of the greater Fandom, with roots in both the SciFi and literary fandoms, and with a culture tied quite tightly to the High Tech, Silicon Valley scene; a surprising number of them worked at one time or another for Apple Computers.

The Guests of Honor at FC have usually been a pair, one artistic, one literary, and the literary have of late been "REAL" writers with heavy SciFi chops, who have written stories featuring Furry Space Aliens, such as The Hoka, The Kzin. Recent guests have been Karen Anderson (her husband, Poul Anderson, died shortly before FC in his year), Larry Niven, and Last year, Jerry Pournelle. These are internationally famous writers, and older Furry Fans will have read their stories, but the younger crowds, who seem more interested in Art and computer games, did not seem to recognise them.

The comment previously posted about the FC GOH's being unknown to the attendees has been a bit of a problem - indeed, and embarrasment, because it is an axiom of Furry Fandom that it is an offshoot of and has roots in the greater world of Science Fiction, since the first convention sprung from room parties and furry "tracks" at SciFi Cons in California, Chicago, and Philadelphia.

A few years ago, Larry Niven was a GOH at FC; he was interviewed by Trendaine, a popular fixture in Furry Fandom, for FCTV. I cringe when I see that interview, because it is obvious that Trendaine knows nothing about Larry Niven, had never read anything by him, and in the course of the interview, Larry says as much with regard to the few fans who have spoken to him. Turns out that Larry knew more about classic SciFi with Furry aliens than many fans - It was he who wrote the Man/Kzin Wars series, the Kzin being essentially a race of spacefaring tigers in a warrior society. And Larry knew Fred Patten, and this is one of the things that convinced him to accept.

Two years later, Jerry Pournelle - a man with triple doctorates, advisor to NASA, the CIA, the Whitehouse, a major SciFi writer in his own right, and Larry's credited and uncredited writing collaborator (Larry thought of the Kzin, but left Jerry to develop their culture) -and another friend of Fred Patten's - is asked to be GOH at FC. Remembering that Larry had done this, Jerry asks if he should go. "Oh, Yes!" says Larry - and this is ALL that he will say on the subject to Jerry, who wonders if he's being "set up" for something...

Now - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are both usually mobbed when they go on book promotions and signing tours, they get surrounded by admirers at SciFi conventions, and their panels on virtually any aspect of science, government, military history, or writing are very well attended. So Jerry has certain expectations of what will happen when he goes to FC.

He planned to drive up Thursday, but Snow had the major North-South highway in California shut down, forcing most folks driving in to drive up the coast. The GOH liaison arranges instead for Jerry to fly into San Jose on Friday, about mid-day.

He arrives in a limousine, gets out and walks through the lobby, stands in line to register for his room, walked through the halls, went into the open atrium to eat, and not one person spoke to him, or knew who he was; he got into the convention registration line, and no one in the line or at the desk knew who he was or what he was supposed to do there; sent him up to Con-Ops, which was conducting some kind of telephone interview, and he was promptly told to shut up and wait his turn, while the desk person spoke on the phone for about 5 minutes.

Jerry thought, "Now this is a very STRANGE Science Fiction Convention".

He was finally given his GOH badge and hustled off to the "Meet the Guests of Honor" panel, in a room set up with a video camera and 150 seats, of which perhaps 18 were occupied, when I walked in; the panel moderator and the rest of the audience were asking questions of Baron Engel - Artist GOH, and Sub-Level 3, the "Band of Honor" ("what is a Furry Band?" Jerry asked later). They were sort of "hanging fire" with Jerry.

THEN he is asked, - modesty forbids my mentioning by whom - as an expert in aerospace ergonomics, just what he would expect if a cat were exposed to a weightless environment, and allowed to "freefall".

"Oh, NO, you don't want me to tell THAT old story again, do you," he said, with mock weariness. This got the attention of the whole room, especially since no one else had heard it before, and Jerry goes on to relate an incredibly funny - BUT TRUE! - Story of when he workd for Boeing, assigned to a dreary Air Force Base in Texas, and one night in the officers' club, a discussion starts at the bar about if you had a cat in a weightless environment, and held it up and let it go, what would it do? After all, cats land on their feet - but what would a cat, who isn't falling "down", do in such a predicament?

Well, this was a unit assigned to research - and one of the pilots hadn't got his 4 hour's flight time in for flight pay yet that month - and he claimed to be able to fly perfectly the parabolic flight path that yields a "freefall" condition, like NASA's "Vomit Comet" for astronaut training - and there just happens to be a cat living under the steps of the Officer's club, who is rather fond of saucers of milk - and they have an F-104 with a camera rigged to film the pilot as he undergoes various stress maneuvers - and idle hands are truly the devil's workshop, and it's on film somewhere in the Air Force Archives, and Jerry duly wrote up their "findings" in a report, and one of the lessons learned is, don't take a cat up in a fighter jet. And if you do, DON'T LET IT GO. It is truly a funny story, and Jerry Pournelle tells stories in such a manner that if you close your eyes, you could imagine him there in a white linen suit, holding a cheroot cigar in one hand and a small goblet of Brandy in the other, recounting what it used to be like, piloting a steamboat up the mississippi river.

Anyway - I digress. Jerry had fun, took lots of pictures, drank with the klingons, ate hotwings at the League of Evil Geniuses room party, twirled a lightstick at the fursuit dance (there ARE pictures), and awoke the next morning with one thought in his mind: "OTTERS"...

Would this sort of thing happen at AnthroCon? I doubt it. But the pleasures of AnthroCon are more RELIABLE. You can pretty much count on the type of fun you will have at AnthroCon. FC is never really dull, but the experience can be quite variable in mood. And this is even more so with the smaller, local region conventions. Each has its own flavor, its own weaknesses and strengths. But all in all I would have to say that AnthroCon, year in and year out, is the most consistently professional convention currently in Furry Fandom.

Well seeing as I go to FC and AC almost every year the main difference between the two cons is weather!

FC is in January in the bay area of California and the temperature usually isn't that hot and it makes it IDEAL for fursuiting either indoors or out.

Anthrocon is in June-July and the weather is hot and humid for Pittsburgh that time of year.. I was in the fursuit parade last year and some people labelled it the death march.. they were NOT kidding.. If the con center could be a bit more refrigerated.. it'd be good.