Weekend thing.

The weekend was fairly down-beat, relaxed.  Somewhat frustrating in that way but not without some fun.

Friday night was pretty quiet.  Spent it at home dorking around with the BMW and a few cans of Plasti-Dip.  The hood of my car is now bears a rubber coating.  Woot.  Or something.

Saturday I woke up early enough to drive the BMW up to Alice's for breakfast with a friend, then scooted over to the Canepa Design open house in Scott's Valley.  That was a fun walking tour of automotive history and greatness.  Very much a good thing!  After that just hung out with friends, dorked around cars and then headed home around 10pm in the evening.

A few photos from Canepa - First, some Porsche 959s.  Is you know what these are then you know why it's significant that there are four of them in this shop being worked on.  It's also significant to note that apart from these four currently being worked on there were at least four other 959s at Canepa, a not insignificant number of the 337 of these that Porsche built.

Next, a panno of one of the other large portions of the Canepa garages.  There's a lot of very expensive inventory in this room.  Race cars, cobaras, two BMW M1s, some customs, a couple of Lambos, a Bugatti Veyron...And they just let you wander around all of it, as close as you like.  Such a good day.

Sunday was spent at home cleaning.  Sweeping floors (my roommate sheds like a dog, it's a bit crazy), picking up and mopping the kitchen, laundry and picking up around my room.  I also finished off the box of shiraz that had been lurking on my kitchen counter as it was nearing the end of it's useful life.

So yeah, generally speaking, it was a pretty down beat and casual weekend.  Not great, not bad. It just was.

Biggest Little FurCon Weekend - Part 2: Motorcycles

The next thing that I want to babble on about would be motorcycling this weekend.

When I registered for BLFC I knew that I was going to be riding my motorcycle to the convention.  This wasn't even a question for me.  I'd been looking for a good long weekend ride for quite some time.  Shooting over the Sierras to Reno had been something I'd been thinking about doing any way.  Nice when the stars align just right.

I won't go into the minutia of my preparation or route planning; it's enough to say that I spent a small bit of time making sure my bike was in good shape for the trip and knew that on the way out I wanted to avoid freeways as much as was practical.  In the end I had a fairly light load out on my bike, enough clothes for the weekend and some gear I thought I'd need. (But turned out not to need.)


Geared up in one-piece leathers, Gortex lined touring boots, gloves and all the other safety kit I headed out from home on Thrusday morning with a GoPro fixed to the front of my bike snapping away a new frame every 5 seconds or so. (Yes, this is being compiled into a video I'll post later.)

My route really beyond avoiding freeways when possible my route also stipulated a fuel stop in Placerville, everything else was open game.  My route took me over to Livermore via 84, then to 99 for a bit via 580/205 before I peeled off on Main Street in Stockton and started bombing through rural towns and farm roads going from Highway 26 to 88 to 124 to 49 to 50 to I395 into Reno.

I found myself grinning like an idiot on 49.  That's an amazing stretch of road.

Going through South Lake Tahoe was about the only really tedious part of the trip and, I think, the part that I liked the least.  Temperatures up at Tahoe were still pretty chilly, I was starting to get fairly uncomfortable even with the heated grips turned on.  It was also fairly late in the ride and I was just feeling physically worn down by that point.  I didn't want to get off the bike for a rest until I'd reached Carson City, though, so I pushed on.  Once I was in Carson City I realized that I wasn't all that far from Reno so I just pushed on through the discomfort and soreness, getting a second wind for simply realizing I was so close to my destination.

At the casino I easily found parking, unloaded the bike and got checked in.  Was kinda cool bumping into somebody also at checking in the for con who asked me he how the ride had gone.  Pretty sweet.


Moto ride from San Jose to Reno, in time lapse. from SmackJackal on Vimeo.

I didn't quite realize just how wiped out I was from the ride.  Not physically wiped out, I could have kept going.  My brain was just flat out done at that point and around 9 in the evening I passed out in bed to recover.

Sunday morning I decided I wanted to spit early to avoid some incoming rain and get a little distance between myself and Reno.  Needed some time to clear my head and sort through some thoughts from the weekend so I hit the bricks before any of my roommates for the con had woken up.  Not really feeling the need to be on the bike for quite as long as the Thursday ride up I super-slabbed it most of the way: 395 -> 80 -> 5 -> 205/580 but decided to have a fun cruise through Niles Canyon at the tail end of the trip which was, remarkably, invigorating after spending four hour chewing up multi-lane freeways.

Next year I'll probably take 88 all the way out to 395 if it's open in time for BLFC.

Biggest Little FurCon Weekend - Part 1: The Convention.

I guess it's only fair to break my babble about this weekend now just wrapping up into somewhat discrete chunks of thought to keep the streams from getting crossed.  Basically, it all shakes down into two buckets that I wanna spend a little time writing about: Biggest Little FurCon and Motorcycling.

Best place to start is gonna be with Biggest Little FurCon itself.

In short, it was good.  Very good.  I could throw in the qualifier of for a first year convention but I won't.  It was simply good, regardless of how many years it has (or hasn't, as the case may be) been going.  The staff put together an interesting program around an interesting set of constraints and came up with some pretty interesting solutions.  All-in-all, pretty bad-ass.

The setup of their space was the most interesting solution to the absolute lack of social spaces for people to just chill out in.  Being a casino, there were some pretty heavy restrictions on where members of the convention could and couldn't be in costume/fursuit at the Grand Sierra Resort, most of those defined by state law more than policy of the hotel.  In fact, from what I observed, the Grand Sierra resort was extremely accommodating where they had leeway within the context of Nevada's law.  Essentially this all boiled down to one golden rule for Biggest Little FurCon: No Fursuits on the Casino Floor.  If you remembered nothing but that rule you'd be in good shape for the convention.

Map of BLFC's Space, From the BLFC site.

BLFC's space was basically entirely confined to all of the Nevada Exhibition center of the GSR.  Into that they packed a dealers room, a small art show, main stage, photo shoot area, and ample hang-out space in a fairly open-air format.  They had dedicated two break-out rooms for gaming, one break-out room for a fursuit lounge, and two additional rooms for panels/quiet space.  The space they set aside for registration/ConOps was quite large, almost obscenely so. ( They could have gotten away with 1/2 that space for those function and still been swimming in an ocean! )  The setup certainly did encourage socialization...until the dances started.

All-in-all I think the only significant complaint I have with Biggest Little FurCon is that they went to great length to make sure that there would be ample areas for people to socialize in only to have that destroyed every night by the dances.  When the lights went dim and the the music picked up everybody who's not really into the dances ( for the dancing or the music ) found themselves shit out of luck for open chill space.  This essentially pushed people who didn't want to dance off into private room parties because, lets face it, as a venue for socializing, casinos blow.


One interesting thing I noticed, BLFC's Patron level memberships way out-stripped the Sponsors.  No doubt because of the seriously cool swag that the Patrons got.  No really, the swag:price ratio for Patrons was a crazy good deal.

The Grand Sierra Resort itself was a great host to the convention.  I'd always thought of the venue as being a little skeezy when it was an MGM.  In the years since I went to college in Reno the place has changed significantly.  It's a substantially better property than I remember it having been.  The guest rooms are quite a bit larger than I was expecting, as well.  The double I'd booked was larger than any hotel room I've stayed at in the last I don't even know how long.  Massive!  The only really questionable thing about it was the bathroom door which looked as though somebody had tried to kick it in sometime recently.

Lots of things to do at the GSR as well, apart from gambling in the casion.  There are quite a few good food options at relatively good prices, bowling, second run movie theater, go-karts, mini-golf, an arcade...the list goes on.  Of course because there are a lot of things to do--and it's a pretty big hotel/casino--it's also extremely busy on the weekend.  At least it was extremely busy this weekend.  The number of people staying at the hotel really started to swell on Friday night.  It's so weird going to a furry convention at a venue where the convention isn't the biggest event going on.

I'll certainly be going to BLFC next year.  Hope they can add a bit more programming and figure out a way to keep the social spaces accessible to everybody next year.