I had a really positive experience of FurCon this year. I was glad to see all the games; there were at least five different vendors selling different games. I was dreading the Transhumanist Panel, but I walked away having alienated a number of older white guys while getting accolades from young people, people of color, women, poor, and disabled people. I might put this year's audio recording online somewhere after I edit it; I need to get a larger memory card for my camera or a new camera which outputs directly to my laptop because 2GBs only got around 20 minutes of footage. Definitely need to work on a more professional recording setup.

I will not be hosting a panel on Transhumanism next year. I am hoping to either host a panel on formal logic or game design.

Alien Sex and the Love - Sex - Fur panels were really quite excellent though I have to note that there were some rape jokes on the part of the panelist, Pat, during her presentation. Love - Sex - Fur on the other hand was exceedingly good; they discussed consent, communications, flirtation, relationships and boundaries, and safer sex practices in quite a bit of detail. It was intimate, entertaining, informative, engaging, and respectful of people's sensitivities. I am looking forward to going to it again.

This year's panel took on an all or nothing participation format based around pair-wise round robin rotation. It is a format common to speed dating services where people are paired up for brief periods so as to maximize the number of people meeting in a given interval of time.

The good news is that more than 30 people (there were only thirty available seats) showed up for the panel and participated. The bad news is that at the end of the panel, we only had about fourteen people left. Two groups (one group of four and one of six) formed from the remaining participants in the intended format, and one group formed from the peoole who never made it into rotation either by choice or latency. The formation of the groups halted rotation after about four to six rotations.

The main failure of the format is the asynchronicity issue. Not everyone who wanted to be at the panel was there when we began, and not everyone who was at the panel stayed to the end. This created gaps in participation and made it difficult for me as host to make sure everyone that came got included right away.

I estimate ten to twenty people showed up, never got into rotation, or didn't stay past cursory overview of what was going on. There were significant accessibility issues. At least one fursuiter who showed up and effectively couldn't participate due to handling issues of the paper articles and obvious communication and movement issues with changing seats on rotations.

The format alienated lurkers and those not looking for active participation. It seems to have worked out excellently for the few that remained to the end of the panel, and I am glad for that.

The seating arrangements were suboptimal on several accounts. For one, the hotel had arranged the tables as a dinner party setup with about four to six feet between facing chairs. We had to split the tables; otherwise, people would likely have been more inclined to interact with people to their left and right rather than across from them. Also of issue, the seating was setup lengthwise across two rooms, and the format encouraged a certain level of volume that was at odds with addressing the entire room from either end of the room. Doing the originally intended half-hour lecture was prohibitive because I would either be speaking to the back of the heads of one side of the tables or the other, or I would be yelling down the rows. Seating arrangements of this sort will need to be specified in schematics for future such specialized arrangements. Also, sound amplification would probably have been advisable.

I WILL NOT BE RUNNING THIS FORMAT NEXT YEAR FOR THIS PANEL.

This year, I asked for more time to present transhumanism and animal uplift. I am likely to split it up into two different presentations and discussions. One primarily focused on human and anthropomorphic transhumanism and the other focused on animal transhumanism. I'm going to try to have a collection of examples of technologies and a better media presentation so people can see the kinds of things which I am talking about and see that they exist in the world today.

Enjoy,
-Djinn

My abstract was accepted by the 5th World Congress on Paraconsistency. The title of my presentation is "On the General Impossibility of a Consistent Theory of Everything", and I am hoping to get to present it in person in Kolkata, India. The problem is that I am otherwise unemployed besides my independent research, and I have no income to speak of. I need to raise 3160$ at least in the next month or so to be able to make it there.

If you can't or won't donate to my fund, please share the link to my GoFundMe project page, http://www.gofundme.com/51hdvo

Thanks,
-Djinn

Starting this year, I've set out to host a transhumanism panel at FurCon to introduce people to transhumanist technologies. I was surprised to find over the years of attending that no such panels existed despite the obvious applications of transhumanist tech for the furry fandom. I am looking for co-panelists to host the panel; preferentially, I'd like people whom use prosthetics, have body art or mods, are trans*, or develop transhumanist technologies particularly with applications in fursuit designs.

This year, the crowd was fairly substantial given our Monday timespot, so I am hoping next year will be better.

There is here and now. It is temporary, suspended in a moment between before and after. Soon to become then and there in the here-after.

Beyond here and there, I see a world unlike any we dared previously imagine; we're almost there; we've almost gone no where; we've almost crossed over into the realms of the impossible and unimaginable, yet here we are struggling against today and tomorrow like they were mountains when they're like pebbles under foot on the path to divine glory.

I want to walk with you over the pebbles into the garden of divinity, and I want to eat with you the fruit of life and the fruit of knowledge.