Furry Convention Drama - Because you can't have a couple thousand dog fucking enthusiasts under the same roof without shit hitting the fan

[round robin]

Didn't they pretty much explicitly state they they were going to prefer BIPOC vendors and panelists already?

I doubt it'll just be "prefer." They're almost certainly going to *require* vendors and panellists to be some brand of minority (outside of gay and maybe even trans since there's like a 50/50 chance of that now) with the most coveted being black or indigenous.

 

[Lion]

they’re going to require a 23 and Me submitted with each vendor application.

on another note with it being BIPOC, where does that leave hispanics, latinos, and asians

 

[Thistle]

they’re going to require a 23 and Me submitted with each vendor application.

on another note with it being BIPOC, where does that leave hispanics, latinos, and asians

Or anyone mixed race with any number of european lineages for that matter.

 

[Corn Flakes]

So the wife found Internet Historian's video on Rainfurrest 2015, and then asked me if I knew anything about further furcon drama. I basically read her the OP to this thread, and when she asked for more I moved on to talk about the current Harvest Moon HowlFest fiasco. After getting the name wrong a few times, the wife decided to start calling it the BIPOCalypse Furfest.

I think she may be on to something there.

 

[Pinball 2000]

So I just had a very interesting update come up in the CCFC drama. The context here is that some furry in Pennsylvania was planning on holding a small get-together with some of his friends later this month, and one of the furs invited asked if he could bring his boyfriend. Guess who that boyfriend turned out to be?

The person who sent me this requested I keep the furry anonymous (for now) but I trust this info as legitimate (and can provide further information privately if mods want verification on this). I don't think it can be considered grooming because while the fur is 19, I know Nitro was born in 1996 because of some of the court documents, making him 23/24 as of now:

TL;DR Nitro's been secretly dating one of his white knights

 

[Corn Flakes]

So I just had a very interesting update come up in the CCFC drama. The context here is that some furry in Pennsylvania was planning on holding a small get-together with some of his friends later this month, and one of the furs invited asked if he could bring his boyfriend. Guess who that boyfriend turned out to be?

The person who sent me this requested I keep the furry anonymous (for now) but I trust this info as legitimate (and can provide further information privately if mods want verification on this). I don't think it can be considered grooming because while the fur is 19, I know Nitro was born in 1996 because of some of the court documents, making him 23/24 as of now:
View attachment 1578736

TL;DR Nitro's been secretly dating one of his white knights

Are furry drama queens like Beetlejuice? You say their name three times and they materialize out of nowhere? When hasn't there been drama in that area, however small, without Nitro being involved?

 

[Pinball 2000]

Are furry drama queens like Beetlejuice? You say their name three times and they materialize out of nowhere? When hasn't there been drama in that area, however small, without Nitro being involved?

Pennsylvania has always been a bit of a furry mecca thanks to Anthrocon, but from the PA furs I'm familiar with, most of the people running small events at least make an effort to prevent undesirables from attending. I do happen to know Nitro was pre-emptively banned from this specific event beforehand, so a lot of the furs were justifiably upset he tried to sneak back into it.

 

[jayjayjay]

Pennsylvania has always been a bit of a furry mecca thanks to Anthrocon

Don't forget kero

 

[BickerLiquor]

Can't I just go to one of these in some like, Charzard onesie? Why bother spending thousands on something you probably have to get dry cleaned and weird looks from carrying it into the place?

 

[Lou’s Biggest Fan]

Can't I just go to one of these in some like, Charzard onesie? Why bother spending thousands on something you probably have to get dry cleaned and weird looks from carrying it into the place?

Same reason people spend thousands dressing up as the spitting image of their favorite video game character. And you could just go in street clothes. Most people can’t afford fursuits.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with dressing up for the fun of it, the issue is how many people do it because it makes their dicks hard and all the STD farms in that fur.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Same reason people spend thousands dressing up as the spitting image of their favorite video game character. And you could just go in street clothes. Most people can’t afford fursuits.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with dressing up for the fun of it, the issue is how many people do it because it makes their dicks hard and all the STD farms in that fur.

There's also the financial dick-swinging involved in showing up in fursuit.

Cosplayers often make their own outfits, or work with people who help them with the bits they can't make themselves. Yes, sometimes they pay quite handsome sums in total for their outfits, but there's some DIY pride in cosplay. If anything, most high-quality cosplay require a certain amount of makeup and preparation to put on the outfit that you can't really just buy premade.

Furries almost universally flash their Paypal accounts at some creep cooped up in a basement somewhere with an unreasonable amount of colorful polyester, wait between three months and three years, possibly go through some drama, and that's all they need to do to have their costume mailed to them. A custom-made fursuit is just a status symbol.

 

[BickerLiquor]

Same reason people spend thousands dressing up as the spitting image of their favorite video game character. And you could just go in street clothes. Most people can’t afford fursuits.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with dressing up for the fun of it, the issue is how many people do it because it makes their dicks hard and all the STD farms in that fur.

So basically furry cons are just an orgy or brothel in disguise for perverts. Good to know

 

[Corn Flakes]

So basically furry cons are just an orgy or brothel in disguise for perverts. Good to know

Seriously, just read the OP. It will give you a good enough idea WTF goes on. And remember: what's there is just the drama that got bad enough to be documented for posterity. That sort of shit happens damn near every con, just in less blatant amounts.

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Who is nitro exactly

 

[Corn Flakes]

Who is nitro exactly

One of the fuckups from Capital City Fur Con. There's a writeup here.

In spite of all the drama caused by problematic furries at conventions, one facet that often gets overlooked at many of these events is the sheer amount of planning and manpower needed to pull off a successful convention. If things aren’t organized properly with clear communication between everyone, things can quickly degenerate into disorganized chaos. One of the most prominent examples of this was 2014’s Dashcon, an event that went down in internet history as being run by hilariously inept Tumblr users with zero experience. So what happens when you take the poor planning of Dashcon and throw in a dash of furfaggotry? You get the first major furry drama of 2020, Capital City Furcon, CCFC for short. Unlike Rainfurrest being remembered for the degeneracy among the guests, CCFC will be remembered for the poor planning and incompetence of the chairman.

CCFC was founded by Matthew Soltys, known more commonly by his fursona name Nitro. According to a friend of Nitro’s, he came up with the idea for the convention by looking at a video of Uncle Kage (the chairman of Anthrocon) and deciding that he wanted his own event people would associate with him. Nitro’s only prior experience with running events was volunteering at a furry meetup somewhere in Ohio. It’s also worth pointing out that Nitro has an extensive public record of ignoring debts and summons to appear in court (which will be very important to know for later).


Act 1: CCFC Planning: This is how you DON’T play furcon organization
Nitro has claimed that he had been planning this event for two years prior to first announcing it around March 2019 (which is when most of the social media pages for CCFC went live), but given the lack of very basic planning, this seems debatable. Nitro then recruited a few of his friends for staff and made plans to have the event ready for January 2020. Essentially from the start, this was a convention being run by furries with little to no amount of experience running anything. From the beginning it was disorganized, messy, and communication was nonexistent. Literally no one except for Nitro knew what was going on most of the time.

CCFC had very little advertising to promote the event, Nitro’s strategy boiled down to “privately message every single moderately popular furry out there and ask if they’d be interested in being a Guest of Honor”. Nitro also allegedly had people show up at other furry conventions and hand out guest of honor applications to random furries (though he later denied doing this). It’s also worth pointing out that Nitro only offered guest applications to fursuiters, with the only exception being Uncle Kage, presumably as a chance to show off to Kage.

At one point, Nitro even managed to convince a few people who worked at BronyCon to help, but they all ultimately ended up quitting after Nitro continually ignored their advice and made decisions without consulting the rest of the staff. He also commissioned several artists to make promotional artwork for CCFC and ultimately never paid any of them despite promising otherwise.

The few staff that Nitro had hired for the event were primarily made up of his friends and random furries Nitro recruited at local furmeets in Pennsylvania, most of whom were essentially people who wanted to put on an event but had little idea on how to do it correctly. Nitro also tried to mooch off the popularity of another furmeet by holding a CCFC fundraising event literally hours before that furmeet was scheduled to happen, and at a location a mile away (spoiler, it didn’t work very well).

Surprisingly and against all odds, the event was still planned to run in early January 2020. This was in spite of the fact that the event was grossly understaffed (around 15 staff and volunteers in total), and the few staff he had were either grossly inexperienced and/or problematic furries with a history of questionable behavior. The hotel had not been properly paid in advance as was agreed in their contract. He also had the problem of promising far too many people the chance to be a guest of honor (roughly 20 furries took him up on the offer), so he cut the list down to about 7 and told the others he would cover the costs of their rooms as an apology.


Act 2: Convention time: how I learned to love the bomb (of a convention)
CCFC was originally advertised as a 4 day event (Thursday-Sunday), but they immediately hit two major snags on Thursday afternoon. First, they didn’t account that the previous event at the hotel was a political event with several important politicians and armed guards present and had to run around in a panic, telling the furries “don’t wear your fursuits yet, there are armed guards and we don’t want anyone getting hurt”, which forced them to reschedule all the thursday events at the last possible moment. Secondly, the hotel demanded the pre-payment they were promised in the contract and told Nitro that if the issue was not resolved by the end of the day, they would shut down the event. Astute readers who are familiar with Dashcon should be having a huge sense of deja vu right about now.

Nitro first tried to come up with the money by pressuring one of his younger staff members (who was a college student at the time) to give up his tuition money to cover the bill. Due to transfer limits at their bank and the staffer’s parents refusing to let him use his money on furry trash, it didn’t happen, but that didn’t stop Nitro from continually trying to push said staffer into going over their parents' heads and donating it anyways (even after they resolved the issue).

Nitro then found a friend who was attending the event, lying by saying they needed someone to put their credit card on the hotel’s “as a security measure” and they wouldn’t be charged anything, with Nitro giving some flimsy excuse saying his card was declined and he totally had the money, it was just frozen in the bank temporarily and he couldn’t get it out until after CCFC. Said friend stupidly agreed to put his credit card down, and this is the only reason the event was allowed to continue.

Surprisingly, the rest of the event went mostly smoothly, at least from the perspective of the attendees. Granted, There were issues with all the panels being rescheduled last minute and all the hotel information panels had every event listed as starting and ending at 4am, and a few panels ended up happening without the hosts showing up. But most of the attendees didn’t have much to complain about and were also completely unaware of the near-shutdown Thursday. Contrary to popular belief, Uncle Kage even showed up, hung out with some furries, did a panel or two and helped run the charity auction on Sunday.

Nitro apparently did very little in the way of managing during CCFC; former staff said he spent far too much time casually socializing with people instead of actually managing things, leaving most of the staff to fend for themselves. The head of the dealer’s den was heavily criticised for her unprofessional behavior to other dealers and allowing several known scammers to attend and sell commissions, and the head of security had a well-known reputation of associating with problematic people and ignoring legitimate emergencies to get overly drunk when he was supposed to be working. The rest of the staff generally tried their best to keep things running smoothly without any guidance.

The real drama didn’t ramp up until after the closing ceremonies on Sunday. First off, Nitro claimed they raised about $4,000 for charity, then immediately announced that he was stepping down as chairman and the new chairman was a random DJ who played at one of the dances. He also gave a (very justified) ban to the security staff, which was one of his only non-stupid management decisions. After that, he went radio silent for a few weeks and forced his new chairman to deal with the ensuing mess.

As it turns out, Nitro had promised all the guests of honor that they would have their hotel bills paid for, only for all of them to find out upon leaving that they were now stuck paying. The staff were also promised to have their badges and rooms comped, only to find out later that was not the case as well. Nitro’s friend who put his credit card on the hotel was suddenly hit with a bill for $17,000. After being bombarded with questions about money issues he had no part in, the new chairman quit within a couple days. Nitro’s friend was able to work with his credit card company to transfer the $17,000 debt back to Nitro, and everyone else ultimately ended up taking the money hit and moving on.


Act 3: Post-convention: the death of a (fur)con
The people who just attended CCFC as regular attendees had little to no idea that any of this was going on, so the drama died down for a few months. Not much discussion of CCFC happened online until about May 2020, when it was brought up in the very Kiwi Farms thread that you’re reading right now. After a few posts discussing the lack of public information surrounding the event, the thread caught the attention of a few former CCFC staff, who offered to talk with the Kiwis and share their side of the story. This culminated in a very long discussion where they were willing to do a Q&A with questions Kiwis brought up. People enjoyed the content and everyone went on with their lives for a few weeks.

Things took a dramatic and surprising turn on June 11th, when the CCFC twitter suddenly announced that “due to unforeseen circumstances, CCFC will not be having a year 2” and they would keep the social media up. Shortly after this tweet, one of the former CCFC staff asked for proof that the money that was raised for charity was properly donated, as the charity claimed they never received anything and CCFC allegedly raised somewhere between $4K-$5K. The CCFC twitter responded by tweeting a donation receipt for $217, which people quickly pointed out was not Nitro’s donation, but made by someone else who donated independently during the event (Said receipt has the person’s dox on it, so I will not be posting it here because they didn’t do anything wrong in this situation). When it was pointed out that Nitro effectively doxed someone unrelated to CCFC and trying to take credit for their donation, he responded by going into Delete Fucking Everything mode, destroying most of the CCFC social media pages as well as his own.

As of this writing, Nitro has gone in hiding again and is trying to avoid bringing more attention to himself. While it hasn’t been definitively proven yet, it’s widely believed that Nitro either pocketed the charity money, or he used it to pay off some of the outstanding CCFC debts. Several people have since come forward and revealed more information that painted a bigger picture of CCFC. Someone managed to get in contact with Nitro’s roommate and ask about the charity money, which Nitro responded to by having the roommate forward a new receipt. However, it was quickly revealed to be a photoshop of a receipt grabbed off google, which only increased the animosity towards Nitro. Multiple people are currently taking legal action against Nitro, though I don’t have any more information on those yet.

Ultimately, one of the only positives that happened from all this drama was a fundraiser that Uncle Kage started. It was raising funds for the charity to help recoup the money CCFC was supposed to donate, which ended up raising roughly $9K. Nitro has been banned for life from every furry event in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, and most of the former CCFC staff were recruited by other conventions.

@Pinball 2000, did you ever manage to add to that draft?

 

[Pinball 2000]

@Pinball 2000, did you ever manage to add to that draft?

It's still a work in progress. Long story short, I'm getting a few more things archived and reaching out to some of the people familiar with the event to clarify a few things. I'm hoping to have it done before this weekend is over.

 

[omori]

There's also the financial dick-swinging involved in showing up in fursuit.

Cosplayers often make their own outfits, or work with people who help them with the bits they can't make themselves. Yes, sometimes they pay quite handsome sums in total for their outfits, but there's some DIY pride in cosplay. If anything, most high-quality cosplay require a certain amount of makeup and preparation to put on the outfit that you can't really just buy premade.

Furries almost universally flash their Paypal accounts at some creep cooped up in a basement somewhere with an unreasonable amount of colorful polyester, wait between three months and three years, possibly go through some drama, and that's all they need to do to have their costume mailed to them. A custom-made fursuit is just a status symbol.

My favorite thing about fursuit related autism is the obsession with amount of prestige within the community when commissioning a certain maker. The unspoken assumption that you aren’t a name until you’ve forked over 4k to [popular name here]. Yet they turn their nose up at the thought of capitalism in mainstream products. They’re totally oblivious to the fact they’re all clamoring over capitalism in their own micro economy.

 

[Lou’s Biggest Fan]

My favorite thing about fursuit related autism is the obsession with amount of prestige within the community when commissioning a certain maker. The unspoken assumption that you aren’t a name until you’ve forked over 4k to [popular name here]. Yet they turn their nose up at the thought of capitalism in mainstream products. They’re totally oblivious to the fact they’re all clamoring over capitalism in their own micro economy.

I’ve curiously gone and asked a number of furries in my spare time about stuff like this and the gist of what I’ve been told consistently has been that most people don’t have an issue with the exchanging of money for goods and services and free market exchanges and the like, what they have a problem with is the greed-fueled mega-corporate ecosystem where unchecked growth results in massive income and wealth disparity where the top actively keeps the lower rungs as locked to the lower rungs as possible to consolidate power.

The idea of small local or community based businesses and artists getting paid lots of money and having prestige behind their goods isn’t an issue because you’re directly supporting that creator for their work, as opposed to supporting a CEO and shareholders that will use that money to lobby against your interests.

The trick is that, like with most furries that are actually level headed and reasonable, they stay under the radar of mostly quiet and in-offensive to avoid getting wrapped up in the drama the screaming communist radicals that want all capitalists burnt at the stake invite on themselves and everybody near them.

 

[JethroTullamore]

The trick is that, like with most furries that are actually level headed and reasonable,

Those don’t exist.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I’ve curiously gone and asked a number of furries in my spare time about stuff like this and the gist of what I’ve been told consistently has been that most people don’t have an issue with the exchanging of money for goods and services and free market exchanges and the like, what they have a problem with is the greed-fueled mega-corporate ecosystem where unchecked growth results in massive income and wealth disparity where the top actively keeps the lower rungs as locked to the lower rungs as possible to consolidate power.

The idea of small local or community based businesses and artists getting paid lots of money and having prestige behind their goods isn’t an issue because you’re directly supporting that creator for their work, as opposed to supporting a CEO and shareholders that will use that money to lobby against your interests.

The trick is that, like with most furries that are actually level headed and reasonable, they stay under the radar of mostly quiet and in-offensive to avoid getting wrapped up in the drama the screaming communist radicals that want all capitalists burnt at the stake invite on themselves and everybody near them.

While I do support the idea of buying local whenever you can, these guys display the usual lack of understanding of both logistics and the value of money. While yes, a Gucci fursuit maker will be able to make a good profit on these things, most fursuit makers are operating on a razor-thin margin once manpower costs are accounted for. If you stop to calculate how many man-hours are needed to make one of those, a lot of these makers end up working for less than minimum wage.

As for logistics... well... a large corporation made all that shag carpet material they're wearing...

Those don’t exist.

They do. They're just the degenerates who are good at keeping their degeneracy under wraps. You know, like sane people.