I want to draw more Skiltaire.

Skiltaire are Mark Merlino / Sy Sable’s little guys.

Osamu Tezuka and Mark Merlino / Sy Sable and some other people at an early anime or furry convention. Mark / Sy was a person very involved in the original emergence of what came to be known as furcons. Him, his husband, and Ken Coug’r, and other artists and many other people. I got to draw a sketch of him and his husband as their fursonas with him wearing the Robin Hood hat when they spoke about con organizing when they came to san jose Further Confusion.. sadly later that same year Mark died..

Con spaces are overwhelming to me personally and cost a lot of money, baseline. Anyway I’m curious how con spaces and international creative art communities can organize sideways. I’m sure in the day-to-day no one involved in organizing room parties that spun off from the main scifi cons into animation specific then furry specific spaces knew they were making a gathering place for statistically a majority queer and disabled/neurodivergent people to party and express, but retrospectively it’s pretty self evident. also there’s stats.

it’s cool that there are so many organizing skills people develop in location specific and interconnected networks of people that make the cons function. It seems like a space where many of the “terminally online” can physically gather.

This is an important kind of space for people, for different reasons than when the photo shared was taken. The interests shared are timeless I think, but the context is all changed. And like public places since forever, there is actually a lot of diversity and conflict among people who attend these spaces. I’ve personally chased down someone who decided to try and wear nazi / imperial sun flag attire at a furcon, informing con staff and getting them kicked out. there’s furries making intentional party spaces for bipoc at and or after con times. while a crackdown on pornography, queerness and basic sex ed rears up, many con spaces have intentional after dark market spaces for people to share their erotic art and celebrate sexual expression. its a messy cultural space.

I want to see more furry reporters who goes to convention spaces. Maybe not just fur cons, but. People-made spaces. To do some walking around and talking to people. Maybe some surveys, short interviews, highlight musicians, dancers, idk. Sometimes people try and infiltrate fur cons to get video content of them harassing people to reaction, and, there’ve been targeted attacks like gas attacks and other bomb threats and the like. after this OWO bulge bullets stuff I worry. I also worry about the Pride Parade(tm)-ification of furcons, the “sponsored by budwizard” of it all almost feels inevitable because furcons are massive and generate a lot of money. and yet. we’re just fucking weird and gross enough for no one to still want to grab hands force squeeze money out of us as a clear and easy to define category of consumers (bc are we??? like wtf are we even???) …yet

so i think a news show from within community it could be a beautiful thing. especially if the newscaster told people to just make up headlines about things other people would insist are imaginary. sometimes i think one of the largest draws conservatism has is the quick easy answer for what to fear, and it’s massively conditioned an impediment to the capacity people have to imagine. Proposing reparations, or implementing more social support in the US for instance, has lot of fear or “that’s impossible” response, and a lack of “here’s exactly what that would look like, actually it would be awesome, and way more simple and fun than what’s happening now”. not that interviewing furries would change that. just that, at some point in the fairly recent past, some people in a hotel lobby decided to try and translate cartoons together on a copy of a copy of a VHS of something and someone else made and wore a leather dominatrix looking version of a deer they called “The Bambioid”, and now, furcons are just. a reality. It’s so interesting.

and now, while creativity still seems to be one of the primary focuses in furry conventions, there’s a real money barrier. I know a lot of furries who barely scrape by, and seen the jokes about furries who work in aerospace engineering spending 10k on their fursuit funded by murdering children. the income disparity and role of anonymity in physical public space is one of those topics in furry fandom im very curious about. but i dont go to cons since they cost money and tbh i cant afford that.

anyway I just wanted to share this photo because I think it’s cool. here’s info about the neat space weasels Mark made.

i started drawing cartoons again after my head injury ten+ years ago. I’m so glad i did. all i want to do is animate wiggle lines. staying employed seems impossible to me. 50k sign-on bonuses for ice agents? disgusting. anyway. another world is possible. yay for people making our own art and expressions.