Now now, be nice. I’m not into it myself, but every furry I have met in my life has been a decent person. They just have a kink. That’s cool with me. If you find pleasure in wearing a costume, wear a costume.
That’s almost universally true at the multimillionaire and above level unless you inherited it all. You don’t get that rich without stepping on everyone you can to get there.
Elon Musk has ruined a ridiculous number of people on his way to the top and he continues to do it.
I’ve had a lot of cool experiences meeting people in the sci-fi/fantasy world by working tables at sci-fi cons due to two different reasons about ten years apart, but that era of my life is over. I can only go as a regular conventioneer now. I take my daughter to them on occasion if one is nearby because she likes to look at all the cosplay.
I also got to see Gwar and The Misfits do a free double-act concert late at night at DragonCon in the 90s, which topped most of the notable people I met, even though my experience with pretty much all of them was good.
I don’t think a ‘less harmful’ con makes the con any more ethical. And I don’t want to take poor people’s money. A lot of people giving to televangelists are people living on social security and the like.
Yeah, but you’re not really conning the higher-ups, you’re conning the grannies who are going to church and giving away their social security money. And they really don’t deserve to be conned even if it would be easy to con them.
I got to spend a couple of days at a sci-fi convention at a table next to Richard Hatch of the 1970s Battlestar Galactica fame. He was a really cool guy and we spent all day joking around. Every so often, someone would come by and say, “hey! You’re uh… uh…” and I would say, “he’s Dirk Benedict.” (That was his BSG co-star). Once I told a lady that she better not call him Dirk Benedict because it makes him really mad.
If I had a photo of Dirk Benedict, I would have asked him to sign it.
Sadly, Richard Hatch is no longer with us. I really enjoyed hanging out with him. He was way into tabletop gaming and even would leave the table sometimes to host a session. I’m not a huge TTGer anymore, but I wish I could have had Richard Hatch as a GM.