I come from a land down under

We were going to sleep in, because we'd been up to quite late and con-going is exhausting. Also bunny_hugger had slept poorly the night before since the air conditioner/heater unit had a maddening habit of firing up its fan to rattle for about a minute, then fall silent for two minutes, as if it were timed to keep her awake all night. Even when we turned it off, it kept firing up for a minute of rattling, although only every five minutes. We wouldn't find the plug, to just unplug the stupid thing, until we were doing our final sweep of the room before checking out the next day.

Still, we would have extra-long to sleep in because it turns out bunny_hugger's loyalty program offers not just early check-in but also late check-out, and we wouldn't have to leave the room before 2 pm, which was when the panel she was running was supposed to start anyway. Once asleep we could enjoy the warm beds until about noon. Well, except that something awesomely loud started rattling from downstairs. We weren't at the con's main hotel, so, what the heck kind of karaoke or something was going on down there? This turned out to be Sunday services. Some room was rented out to one of those ministries that celebrates the day of rest by being quite loud about it. Well, I slept fine, but that doesn't indicate much, since the evidence is that I could sleep just fine if I were presently on fire.

The panel, and one of the few panels for the day, was also the only species SIG of Motor City Furry Con: the Bunnies SIG, as run by bunny_hugger. This was meant to run as she usually does, get folks together to talk about rabbits and hares, and rabbit or hare characters people know or play, and talk about the real animals and all that. It was a modest-sized group with a couple people dropping in, mostly to explain how they were foxes or wolves or whatnot and ate rabbits. That's certainly not the exact same joke made the exact same way at every single rabbits, and for that matter rodents, SIG held at every furry con ever.

Our friend Shouta wasn't able to get away from the con suite to attend, unfortunately. The lunch service of pulled pork sandwiches had gotten complicated and needed his presence. One fellow who did come in was happy to talk, at quite some length, of how he likes to draw on particularly the less-savory aspects of real animal behavior for his furry fiction. I am hesitant to guess as to his motives, but he did seem kind of eager to point out how he knew how the behavior of real-world animals can be appalling from current contemporary human social standards. I grant it's true, but it doesn't seem like much of a revelation to me. He also tried explaining how humans just could not possibly live as vegetarians without taking a vast and complicated set of supplements, which allowed me to learn that I can go longer than I thought without actually laughing in someone's face.

The Bunnies SIG was supposed to run an hour, although all told in came in at about two hours. Fortunately nobody was schedule for after us, all day, so we didn't have that awkward collision of the oblivious old group and the impatient new group. (Such a collision had nearly sunk the carousels panel on Saturday, as the previous group --- Fursuit Horror Stories --- was running long and the host apparently had no methods of reckoning the passing of time, or awareness of a dozen people filing in, some staring right at him while tapping a watch for ten minutes.) We'd have time after this to poke into the game room again --- they had a Dance Dance Revolution machine, and a shooting gallery machine, besides the usual video game systems and people making their way through Guitar Hero --- and then to notice that right next to this, the surely loudest room in convention space, was the Artists Alley Quiet Room, dedicated for people trying to draw or craft in peace. Well, it's impossible to organize a convention perfectly logically.

Trivia: R J Reynolds Tobacco Company formally dropped the word ``tobacco'' from its name in 1969, when it acquired the Sea-Land Service shipping company and renamed itself R J Reynolds Industries. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cudahy.

Currently Reading: Finding Zero: A Mathematician's Odyssey to Uncover the Origins of Numbers, Amir D Aczel.