Giza aka Douglas Muth's LiveJournal

FurFright was a fun convention this year! It started off with a bang in my first security shift on Friday afternoon. I got a call for "first aid in the parking lot", which cliff_husky and I responded to. Turned out that "first aid" was an understatement. We arrived on the scene of an MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident) at the entrance of the parking lot, with one person injured pretty badly. We attended to him, with Cliff taking his vitals and history and me holding his neck in the c-spine position for a good 10 minutes until an ambulance arrived and EMTs relieved us.

That was the first ever auto accident that I worked. Was a little nervous afterward, but not nearly as shaken up as I thought I'd be. And what did I learn from this? Get first aid training. You never know when you'll need it.

The rest of the shift was uneventful, other than trying to figure out the hotel's weird layout. Apparently it was added onto twice, and had been rebuilt after a fire at least once, so the layout was very... unplanned. Hallways that had multiple ramps on them, stairways that only went up 1 floor or even skipped a floor, and ramps that went in circles. It was like M.C. Escher himself designed the hotel!



Saturday afternoon had me killing time with P-Kitty and other folks, and somewhere along the line it was suggested that I borrow a fur named Manik's fursuit. He was cool with this, so I put on the head, paws, and my overcoat, and walked around the con for about half an hour. I went up to several folks I knew in personal and said hi. Poor protocollie... I think I broke his brain!

That's right: it was the first time I ever fursuited. And in a cheetah fursuit, at that. Draw your own conclusions.

On a related note, I went and registered the domain cheopard.com. Be afraid.



On Saturday night, I dropped by the Gun Furs panel, hosted by cliff_husky. It was pretty informative, and I learned quite a bit about all the different details that surround guns, and the legal aspects of them.

On Friday and Saturday nights, I went to the dances, and played around with the ISO and shutter speed settings on my camera. I got some pretty interesting pictures:





The whole set of dance photos can be found here.

My birthday was also on Halloween, and the first time I celebrated it. shortwave81, ferian, and others bought me drinks at the bar, an acceptable birthday present! chefmongoose also got me a bottle of cider called "Lucky Lion", that I hope to enjoy with some friends soon.

As the con came to a close, I realized what an awesome time I had. Between the health issues I've had the last several months, and some other personal issues I had to deal with over the summer (which I now call "the lost summer"), I'd say that FurFright was a high point over the last 6 months or so. And I hope that this uphill trend in my mood and life in general continues.

Extra special thanks to athauglas for the repeated doses of coffee. The stuff I had at 2:30 on Saturday morning was a huge help. It kept me up through 8 AM when my shift ended.





For the rest of my pictures, they can be found here.

Total attendance for the con was 1,284 attendees, as announced at closing ceremonies. The count for fursuiters in the parade was 287 coming out the ballroom, though the official count of fursuiters who actually made it to the end of the parade was about 40 lower. (don't have that number handy)

Finally, there were a few folks I was hoping to get contact info for:

- P-Kitty (Nevermind, he's pkitty1)
- The guy I did first aid on (anyone know if he was okay?)
- Manik (the gentleman who let me borrow his fursuit)
- Clementine (Nevermind, she's mixed_kitten)

If anyone knows of online contact info for these people, please let me know in the comments!

Next con for me will be Midwest FurFest. See you all then.

 
http://www.davidairey.co.uk/StaticPage.html

Yes, this has been fixed. But if you use Gmail, you should still check your filters and forwarding. There have been hacks, as documented above.

One of the things that greenreaper has beat into my skull over on WikiFur is that when dealing with new contributors, we should always Assume Good Faith. That is because someone might be well-intentioned, but may make a mistake due to being new to the wiki, making a typo, or whatever. As it turns out, this lesson carries over to real life...

So, it looks like there were two mistakes made here. First mistake was the security guard who jumped to conclusions and assumed that the subject was drunk. It would have been far more prudent to ask, "Sir are you okay?" At that point, the subject would have had the opportunity to show his Medic Alert bracelet or mention that he was diabetic.

The second mistake was the police officers who appeared to not perform any sort of medical assessment, and who also failed to notice his Medic Alert bracelet. Assuming that said bracelet goes on the wrist, I'm not sure how they could miss this piece of metal when handcuffing him.

I think it's going to suck to be that guard or the law enforcement who responded. There will probably be a lawsuit in their future.

[Edit: camstone and sr_foxley have very interesting comments regarding diabetics and insulin changes. You can read their comments here.]