Eufuria, Anthro Weekend Utah, and Furrydelphia

The specific cons being discussed today:
1. Eufuria, starting tomorrow July 23-25 in Albany NY 
2. Anthro Weekend Utah, coming July 31st-Aug 2nd to Layton, UT
3. Furrydelphia, coming Aug 6-9th to Philadelphia, PA 

Want to play along? Guess the attendance figures for future cons and be featured as winners in future episodes for all the glory. 

(At time of podcast upload, Eufuria has already concluded)

You're listening to Furconnaissance! A new podcast all about furry conventions, trends, analytics, and the fandom at large, hosted by Jak and @scruffracc. Episode zero, the pilot episode if you will, delves into three upcoming conventions in the furry fandom.

Find both hosts on Tiktok, IG, and YT Shorts at the following handles:

Jak: @Jaktmfd on all platforms
Scruff: 
YT: @Scruffraccoon
Tiktok: @scruffracc
Instagram: @scruff_racc

Special thanks to @Sawdeye, consulting producer and Paws Button for the opening/closing theme of the show!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:15

Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between, welcome to the first episode of our brand new podcast, Erconnaissance. This will be hosted by myself. I'm Jack, and alongside me, the wonderful, infragable Scruff is joining us as well. How are you doing, Scruff?

SPEAKER_00 0:28

I'm doing great. How are you today?

SPEAKER_01 0:30

I'm doing fantastic. A little nervous. This is my first time doing any sort of like actual podcast setup myself. I know we both we both got a long history of going live in different contexts, but this will be kind of a new, you know, space for me here as well. Some of you are probably wondering well, there's a bajillion podcast out there. What is this even about? What kind of topics would it for connaissance even apply to? For those of you who may not know, who may not be familiar with me, maybe you're from Scruff's side of the internet, however you will, or you're just finding us for the very first time. I had a show recently called Guest the Attendance, and I kind of ran it as a sort of a pilot, had about four or five episodes, and then I ended it off. I like the concept, but I didn't like the format it was in. So I decided, you know what? Let's expand on it. Let's make it more than just raw furcon attendance, that sort of thing. But let's sort of scout out the fandom in general. You know, we can kind of see like what groups of, you know, what are the local scenes like in different areas, and then still be talking about as well upcoming cons. So we've got a couple on the docket here. Uh for our this is our episode zero, if you will, but there's still a couple on the docket that we have to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Absolutely. This is gonna be fun. Should we introduce ourselves a little bit for the audience that may not know us?

SPEAKER_01 1:32

I agree, that's a great idea. So uh why don't you start first with the background intro?

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Okay, absolutely. So again, my name is Scruff. I am a raccoon on the internet, as I always like to say. I grew up and live and still live in the general speaking the Ohio River Valley. I've got 10 years of college behind me. I have a BS in chemistry that should have only taken four years, but took me six. Uh, and then I have a pharmd, so I am a licensed pharmacist, and I still to this day work in a pharmacy and a hospital and do a lot of with a software company. I'm my main job at the software company is data analytics and also sales side support. So I spend my days going through different trends, data, doing a lot of different projections for be it pharma or other places. So it makes me kind of good at guessing, I guess you could say. My fandom history is very long. I won't go into a ton of it, but just know I started in this fandom back in 1995, and I was really kind of more on what would be known as the Tharian side of things back then. As time went on, I went ahead and kind of fell off of the fandom while you know life and school and career building and everything else happened, just kind of living on the periphery. Stepped back into the fandom kind of in late 2024, but still passively got really active around April of 24, and then been really active ever since. I have had two different channels on TikTok. The first one went away, we don't talk about that, but I'm still continuing to grow stuff now, stream a lot and everything, and you know, been friends with Jack since the beginning and very much looking forward to nerding out to some analytics about cons and talking about them.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Well said. And that is actually kind of remarkable how kind of early on in both of our, you know, I guess online side of our fandom journey has been. I come from, I'm a little bit younger than you are, but I've still got about eight years of experience as a business analyst as my day job. My educational background wasn't quite as long. I had I only have a bachelor's from a state school, but it is in business, it is in finance as a concentration business administration. So the majority of my career has been spent in and around like sell spreadsheets, trends, forecasting, predictions, that sort of thing, is kind of both of our bread and butter. Mine is more on the banking side, so it's a little less relevant to like say pharmacy in this case. So we got that little bit of difference there, but it's both the same kind of thing. You're trying to you're trying to use numbers to then figure out what future numbers are going to be. It's basically as simple as that. Add on to that, even back in my high school days, I was doing DECA as a kid. I was that, I was that kind of nerd. Uh, I was an officer in like a business fraternity, a club in college, not like not like a Greek like togatoga, but that kind of thing. So I've been around in and around organizing large groups. I mean, I've been a guild master and wow, like there's all kinds of things that I could I could touch on where I've been having to herd either a lot of data or a lot of cats, or you know, just whatever, however you will. A lot of cats filled with data. Yeah, cats, cats filled with data as well. Those are the those are the hard ones. You might be asking yourself, why does it matter what our professional backgrounds are when it comes to this? Because at the end of the day, this is the free fandom, right? We're talking about things related to people in animal costumes being anthropomorphic characters in gatherings of larger people, and whether that's a fur meat or whatever. And there really is no reason why in this uh you know, in a fandom of wins whimsy and fun like ours that we should have to prove anything to anyone, but when topics are involving accuracy, forecasting, and predictions, it's relevant to peel the curtain back a little bit and show that we're not just two dudes talking on the internet about whatever we want, you know, that we don't have a clue. But we're both analytical by trade- Oh, my mic got moved over. I don't know that excellent. That's gonna happen a lot. Outtakes are gonna be hilarious. We're both analytical by trade and come prepared with research to accurately assess where furry conventions have been and where they're going, so you can best map out your phantom journey, decide which cons strike your interests, which you'll consider traveling to, and which you might pass on this year.

SPEAKER_00 4:52

So let's go ahead and kick it off. Let's talk a little bit about Euphoria. So, as you know, I did a little bit of research on this in advance, and I find this one particularly fascinating just because of the story. This started out as a really small, like like subcon or just a meetup, if you will. It the venue it was at, it was only for six hours, and they had a max capacity due to the fire code that was very, very limiting. And so their attendance when they first kicked off was actually just 65. And that was in 2000, that was in 2024.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

That is a tiny con right there.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

It's a tiny. Well, I mean, it wasn't even really a con, I think, at that point, but they kind of got upgraded, I guess you could say, to official con status. And this is in Albany, New York, by the way, in 2025. And at that particular time, they had a or I'm sorry, no, they started in 2023. 2024, they got an official thing at the Albany Capital Center, and that was 430. And then last year, they actually really killed it, knocked it out of the park, and they ended up with 764 people. But what makes this con very special is when you think about it, back in the day, Anthropocon, you know, it's kind of like the furry Super Bowl that we just got done with. Its first iteration was actually in Albany, New York. And then they moved to Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, and then eventually they ended up in Pittsburgh, which is where we know know they now live. But with this one, you know, this one was really about bringing the sense of community and everything back to Albany. There wasn't like a bunch of people sat around in committee figuring out like where is there a gap in the furry convention space and everything else. Um it truly was that the uh innovator of it had actually just beaten cancer and really had this sense of mortality and wanting to just do a thing both for herself and for the community. And so she went ahead and formed this, and so it was kind of like formed on vibes, which is fantastic. And so it's really just been growing exponentially. But her story is just one that is just really resonates with me just because it's oh no, it's really good. She had never attended a furry conf before. And because she was in treatment and everything else, she effectively said, I wanted to bring a furcon to me. And that's just really neat. And I think it has the potential for hyper-growth risk because there's not really anything else that I know of unless you know of something, Jack, that's going on in all state in an upstate New York.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

No, this is the only one that I've that I've heard of when we were looking into it. That's an upstate New York right now. I'm actually really surprised there, I mean, at least in our research, maybe there is, but I haven't found one in Buffalo yet, and there isn't one in New York City. Well, there is a new one coming in New York City this year, but there isn't there wasn't one previous to that. For some reason, you know, these sort of types of gatherings tend to have trouble kicking off in in well in the state of New York in general. I mean, even if you look at sports teams, like most of the sports teams that are in New York are either in Buffalo or they're actually in New Jersey, down in, you know, down at MetLife Stadium, for example.

SPEAKER_00 7:31

It's true. I think New York's just too dense.

SPEAKER_01 7:32

Yeah, it it's too dense, it's too expensive as well, so in a lot of cases, which is I know we're an ex we're already kind of an expensive hobby, but like it's still a situation where you don't want it to cost you, you know, a hundred dollar Uber to get into the city to go to a convention or to go to a meetup, well, meetup or convention, either or. So I'm curious if there's any New York furs out there that can tell us of the troubles of meeting up in New York City, whether you just take the subway everywhere or whatever you do. My main concern with this one, specifically long term, is she did beat Cancer, the organizer. It was stage four. That sort of thing is really tough to shake permanently, and I don't want to speak morbidly here, that's not what I'm going for. But my question is, what is the organizational structure going to look like? Do they have a succession plan in place? Do they have something that's gonna keep that con here in Albany? Or is it something where, you know, if some god forbid something horrible happens, are they gonna then just splinter into another group? Like, because I mean, Anthem, New England's huge. Boston could easily take over a second con for the other half of the year. New York City, true, you know, Newark, New York, Newark, New Jersey, those kinds of areas could all be landing spots for a con that follows in the footsteps of Anthrocon and leaves Albany. Like that's something that could very well happen.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

That's true. I will say this, just their growth has just been huge. Some of the numbers were a little bit off as I was looking at them, especially not on this one, but on the second one we'll talk about. But like from their first time when they were in Troy and they were at just that cafe, because Firecode, like I said, they were capped at 65. It was a sold-out con. They had 11 people in their fursuit parade that first year. This one actually did report fursuit parade numbers, which is some good indicator of a lot of the things that you've talked about in your previous videos about, you know, were there underreported things, you know, how many people actually were badged versus how many people were like were actually con attendees. So you can usually get a good feel for this just based on the percentages and whatnot. So the second year when they were at the Albany Capital Center, their attendance, like I said, was 430. Their fursuit parade had 102 members in it. So this is obviously very, I mean, that's like one-fourth of attendees were basically in a in a fursuit in the parade, which that is that that is good numbers, especially for a small con. You can see the growth of the people in suit actually change a little bit uh when you get to 2025. They had 764 attendees, but only 155 in the parade, which I did find interesting.

SPEAKER_01 9:40

Yeah, I was definitely gonna add that typically when I had been looking for cons in the past, ones that I think are gonna be healthy when it comes to growth going forward, is you look at that, you look at that first suit parade as well and kind of gauge it as a fraction of the total people that are going, and you can kind of see how much kind of the affluence of that group. But the reason that matters is because where there's affluence, there's also gonna be more people able to afford hotels as they get expensive, more people able to afford Airbnbs, more people like you can make a stronger push for a larger hotel block if you're an organizer, that sort of thing. If you know, like, hey, we've got all these people walking around and big ass, you know, no, you know, and we can swear in this. I don't fucking care, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:13

So yeah, we can swear we can swear as adults, you know.

SPEAKER_01 10:16

I don't know, it's like it's like we're not on radio. What am I doing here? Anyway, exactly. But what I was getting at is that it's it's one of many signs of an like a more affluent or at least a growing affluence con. The only exception to that, I would argue, is when you can find sort of a like a collopping by a more let's let's say a more kink-friendly scene. An example would be when I was when I was talking on Ferlandia over in in Portland, Oregon. That one seems to have a really strong pup scene out of nowhere, like compared to other ones. Like their pop panel is sold out every single year, right? So, and then that one posted monster numbers from last year to this year. I think it was like a 70% growth rate or something.

SPEAKER_00 10:53

Wow, because the pups really don't have their own thing. So that's that's true. Did you find anything about any kind of specialization on this one? The one thing that I will say is really fascinating about this one. I was under the impression prior to doing research on this that the only adult-only cons were Megaplex being 18 and older and LVFC being 21 and older. I was wrong because this one is an 18 and over con. And so that too gives it some additional draw because there are a certain subset of furries who just do not want any way, shape, or form for their own safety or otherwise to be around children. And when you think about even spatially in the United States, you know, having something up in Albany, New York, when your other options for, you know, adult-only cons are over in Las Vegas and down in Orlando, Florida, this does give people from the Northeast an option to go to an adult-only con, one that does seem to be fairly heavily, you know, fursuit heavy. And so I find that that's kind of interesting. I did look at some of their policies and procedures. Their public wording is a lot, it is kind of vague. They do talk about that you need a badge for access. So I don't think you're going to have a lot of like people coming in just without the badges whatsoever. Uh they do have a lot of headroom. The venue they have is fairly large. It is a lease footprint, but it can be reconfigured. And the room, the room layout will really be what kind of like determines what everything is. I did look at the prices for the hotels as well. And based on what I've paid, because I've been to five cons this year, and only one of those have I actually driven to, but I had hotels at four of them. And the hotels are just even on the blocks, are ridiculously expensive at these. Like Anth, like Anther New England was completely broke the bank with me. But this one, it's 189 to 219 a night. That's really not that bad when you've seen it. You say ouch, but some of these cons, like I think at Anthro New England, where I was on the block, I was paying like $500 a night.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah, no, that's that's not gonna be it's not gonna be an easy spot. When I say ouch, I mean in general of just that's just more of nostalgically looking back at you know 10 years ago when prices were like half of that. Like anything over $200 was considered an absolute ripoff. If you were paying more than $250, you better be in a suite somewhere, otherwise, what are you doing? Or like in the heart of downtown New York, right? That sort of thing. You were talking about specialization. I just wanted to tack on to the fact of I'm I'm jumping ahead and jumping back at the same time a little bit here, but when we talk about Anther Weekend, Utah, what's what interests me about them is also what interested me about Nash and FurCon when I covered them. I feel like most cons at this point have decided that they either need to pick a lane, they need to pick one of two lanes when it comes to the whole are kids allowed, is kink behavior allowed? I think most of these organizers are smart enough at this point that they know that you can't have kink, you know, BDSM, all that sort of rave culture allowed openly in a scene where there's children allowed. So that's why like LBFC, they get rid of that. I know in BLFC over in Reno, what they do is they they require like a stupidly ridiculous waiver system to basically prove that yes, I'm under 18, but I'm allowed to be there, and you still have to leave the con by like eight or nine o'clock. And then you're not allowed to bring any of the more you're not allowed to wear any like kink adjacent gear until after nine o'clock or ten o'clock, whatever. I'm I'm I don't remember the exact that's the rules I've seen at most of them.

SPEAKER_00 13:50

Anthro in New England was that way. There was a cutoff or a curvy one. I want to say it was like eight or nine o'clock at night. When that time rolls around, you know, the kids have to be gone. And that's the first time, even in the lobby, even in the public spaces, the way the rules are written for that one in particular, is that you cannot be in the lobby or any public space wearing any kind of gear that could be considered risque. Let's just put it that way.

SPEAKER_01 14:10

Exactly. Because, you know, but then there's other cons like like the two I'd mentioned that are, you know, Interweekend and Nasham where they lean full into the family-friendly angle, where they're almost trying to get parents that are furries with their kids. Like I know one of the I spoke with the organizer of Nasham FurCon when they were doing their first their because they just did their first year this year and they blew my expectations out of the water. My I think my prediction was low by like 300 or something like that when I did it. What was interesting is that they were talking, like, yeah, we've had more minors in attendance at this con than I think I've seen at any other, but every single one of them was wavered and had parents visible. Like people were showing up with their parents, and it just seemed like a really bizarre you would think with Tennessee and then also with Utah being such red states, not just talking analytically, I'm not here to get super into politics, but just like when it comes to analytically speaking, you would think the culture around those states would not lean into parents getting involved in that hobby with their kids, and yet here we are, where that's very clearly not the case.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

True. And I will say this, I think it varies from con to con, but I I can say I went to Anthro, Ohio for five hours because it was close enough. Like I said, I live in the Ohio River Valley. On the last day, I bought a one-day ticket, I drove up there, parked, went into the con, hung out, went to the dealer's den, went to a couple of panels, hung out with some friends, ate lunch and everything. I will say, just from roaming around the main con space there, the number of children there, and maybe it was just because it was a smaller con in a smaller venue than I was used to, but the number of kids at Anthro, Ohio was remarkable, as was the number of partials. I had not seen that many partial fursuits in a while. So I always found that interesting about that con experience because it was just, it could have just been the compressed nature of it. It wasn't really that hot that week. It was raining, so maybe people were worried about getting their full suits wet. It was the last day as well. But the number of parents walking around with, I'm talking like small children. I had never in my life seen that. Like, because you know, I like I've been to Anthro New England. I don't think I saw, I think I saw a couple of kids maybe on Saturday, but there really was not a lot of of young children. There were some 16, 17 years old that had the minor tags, mind you. But like I'm talking like kids who are clearly toddlers, like elementary school level, like Anthro Ohio was filled with them. So that whole family-friendly angle, I get what you're saying. Um, I didn't this one being 18 plus with the euphoria, obviously is not going to have that. So I would imagine that the again with the you know pup community and other communities like that, I did not get a chance to look at their panels to see if they actually had a pup panel. I don't know if you got a chance to look at that, but I think just in general, because of location, this one has a big chance to take off. I think in the future, they might run into some problems with that Albany Center and they might have to move somewhere else. But they do have probably years and years of growth. So are we ready to make an estimate on Euphoria, you think?

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Yeah, we can do that. I realize I actually didn't say where I'm from at all. So I'll we'll get that in just a minute, right? As before we do, we move on to our second con here. But basically the way that this is gonna work is that as you can see, we just kind of went over and talked about you know everything that's going into Euphoria here over in Alberde, New York. And we'll try to make an assessment based on how, you know, similar to how I used to do with the guest attendant show, it's just gonna be basically we've got kind of an our idea, and one of us is gonna end up getting higher of a guest, one's gonna end up guessing lower, and then we're probably going to be way off because these cons like to surprise us. But you know, if you want to keep track at home, you're more than welcome to say, oh, well, you know, Jack's gotten it right five times, Scuff's gotten it right seven times or closer, however, you will. We can keep it, we can keep a little friendly regularly going. I think it's gonna depend. I think we're gonna have a pattern of like certain cons, and I'll I'll explain in a little bit, but I think certain cons I'm gonna have better luck with, and I think you're gonna have better luck with some other ones here. That's fair.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

So I will say the over the over-under on this one, like when I was looking at it, I was looking at from the low standpoint, just given historical attendance numbers, given some early projections and badge types that have sold out and everything else, I'd say on the low end, you're looking like right around a thousand. This one. On a high now, remember the venue theoretically speaking can hold 5,000. That's a theoretical maximum of that Albany Center. And so there's no way if they get anywhere near that, they're gonna be able to maintain in the future. But for this year, just based on everything, if they were knocking it out of the park and like absolutely hit every mark, I could see them hitting around 1300 or so. For this, I'm gonna go on the high end and be a little aggressive, and I'm gonna go with 1250.

SPEAKER_01 18:21

1250, you heard it, folks. That's what Scruff is guessing. I'm going a little lower on this one, and the reason for that is I'm not tracking based off one of the one of the things that's bit me in the ass a couple times is I usually try to assume that the the exponential growth percentage stays about the same. So if they go up by you know 30% last year, they go up by 30% the year before, they're they're gonna go up 30% this year. That is sometimes the case, but usually when a con is rapidly expanding, they're gonna try to control that a little bit. Like for instance, like we spoke on it's got a 5,000-person cap. They're probably capping their ticket sales somewhere between 1500 and 2,000 because they don't want to have too many more people than their staff can handle. Right. In this case, I think it's gonna be more of a linear growth kind of situation. I think they're gonna grow about the same number of people that they grew last year. And so that's why I have them at about 1150 in this case is gonna be modern. So I'll try not the prices right you two. I'm not gonna, you know, we'll try not to prices right each other too much. So we're gonna try to pick a dollar on me. One off, right? Exactly. One dollar on two. But before we go to the second con, I should probably mention that while Scruff is from the Ohio River Valley, I have moved around a lot. I've been, I was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, about 30 minutes east of Seattle, so you can kind of pick one of those five cities that are in that area and be like, okay, he's probably from there. And you know what? I'll just say you're right because it doesn't matter. They're all kind of one big suburban sprawl. I moved in the late 2010s over to the Midwest. So I lived in the great state of Iowa for a time, met my wife, divorced my wife. Long story. Not getting into that here. Following that divorce, living there for seven years, I moved back out west, and now I live in the I can just say the city in this case because it's big enough. I live in Las Vegas, in the greater Las Vegas area, uh over in Nevada.

SPEAKER_00 20:05

And Las Vegas? Nevada?

SPEAKER_01 20:08

I know, crazy. Do you know Rorschach? We're just getting that out of the way in session zero. Yes, I know him, and he teaches me how to swim. Yes, I know who Rorschach is.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

There you go. There you go. No, If I had asking the inquiring minds want to know, you know.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

If I had if I had if I had a nickel for every time I get asked the question, I'd have a pretty pile pile of nickels at this point. Well, no, I'd be like two dozen nickels at this point. And no, if I had the if I had the people who are like, can you introduce me to him? Now we're looking at, you know, a half dozen nickels, and that's still quite a few nickels.

SPEAKER_00 20:43

Do I have a nickel? No, I I already met Rochak, it's fine.

SPEAKER_01 20:48

I've been asked. I've been asked before if I met you though. I've asked I've just like, oh my god, do you know Scruff? Yes. Really? Yeah, it's happened before. Interesting. Okay. It's not it's not nearly as common.

SPEAKER_00 21:00

I'd be blushing right now.

SPEAKER_01 21:01

Yeah, I don't even have face tracking, so I'm just I'm just my tail is wagging like a doofus back there, and I'm just carrying the same blank expression this whole time. Oh my god. I I managed to cut the camera to you perfectly.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Let's go to the great salt con, or oh, which is Anthro Week in Utah. Now, before we get started on this, I just have to say the number one thing that struck me on research here, which I feel in some ways is a little invasive but also overkill, but I also appreciate what they're trying to do from a security standpoint. I have no idea if this is just because of rules in Utah or if this is just their being ultra careful. But one of the things I found with this is that with the registration, they have a very formalized kind of like identity proofing system, and you have to have like your state issued license so that they can scan it to get you in. And when you register for it, they check your name and they check your information against the registered sex offender list in like all the different states. And obviously, if you're on it, then that's an exclusionary to actually. Come there because I guess they're going for that more family-friendly angle. But I found that interesting because I don't know if you found any other cons that do that, but I've never seen anything where they're looking for anything like that.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

That's the first I've heard for that deep of a search. I know that this is gonna sound again not trying to invoke politics on the show. The only reason it matters is because the political world bleeds into world news, into culture, and it affects how people act. So sometimes it's relevant to bring up. The last time that you know Utah was known for a big get-together within the last year, a very high-profile individual was unalived. So it would not surprise me if they're going out of their way because it's only the location of that is only an hour away from this con. If they're trying to make sure, no, we are gonna be the world leaders on security at this point, need everything to be spiced and span and safe, locked down tight. Yeah, I can totally see that being the place where that would where that would work. Especially given you don't want anyone from that area or any sort of like, you know, any sort of right wing kind of counter, like any action protests, you know, people even just as as innocent as like shoving a camera on someone's face, right? Like those kinds of things can spiral out of control and can have things painted about the fandom in general online. I mean, uh hell, we even just had an article come out recently about someone at a con. And and like those types of things are completely taken out of context most of the time. Yeah, I'm not gonna say it here because it doesn't need the No, it's fine, I'll look it up later. Yeah, what I'm getting at is these types of things can be taken out of context really easily, and so it's really important to not only make sure that you know it's safe from a family-friendly standpoint, but that you don't have any sort of random dude of the camera going, like, I'm a journalist showing up and just start filming people. Like, I mean, it even makes me think of uh I think it was an anthrocon. It was what Astra, some dude walked up to Ant Astra shoved a camera's face, and yeah, he was like either unsuiting or something, I don't remember what it was, but he like got pissed at him.

SPEAKER_00 23:52

Their response, like Astra's response was phenomenal, though. I don't know. I'm assuming you saw it. I wasn't saying like they responded was amazing, yeah. But no, it it's in and it's you know the the people that want to come at the fandom, they know who to go at, right? So it's like they've done their research in advance, and of course they're going to target the people who are the most prominent in the community. So, like obviously, Astra, that could be Fen the Panther, that could be anybody else that's got a really large following, you know, and so I I'm very glad that Astra was able to basically tell them to go away. But yeah, keeping the riffraff like that out, I think is very important.

SPEAKER_01 24:24

Oh my god, you you you invoked Fen the Panther. Just made me think of Tails of the Tail app. Was it Tailspin? Tails.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Oh, a tail tag, tail tag, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

Tail tag, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 24:33

I I kept forgetting to I kept forgetting to open tail tag when I was at Anthrocon. Like it went GA and I kept forgetting to open it. And so like I was on there, and I think I got tagged by like one person, and I tagged one person. Kept forgetting. So I do want to talk about where this is just a little bit. This is being held at the date, what is known as the Davis Convention Center. It is a 70,000 square foot space, which is large. It basically their largest room is around 18,000 square feet. So this it has a lot of stuff, but they only have that one really large room. And so there have been reports from people at previous years at this one that there are significant bottlenecks that end up happening in that main room, and they've had volunteer staff issues. Now, I experienced this at Anther, New England, and some other places where it's like, where are all the volunteers at? Like, where's all the staff? And I I don't I can't really speak to that. It isn't a suburban center though, which takes the house, which takes the pricing of the hotels and makes them a little bit cheaper. So, for example, in the main block of that hotel for Anthro Week in Utah, it's only $152 for a standard room in the main room block. That's pretty amazing. The one thing though that I think kind of linchpins this in, which is already, I can tell you right now, kind of driving what my recommendation was for this, is that they have gone on record publicly as saying that they are capping attendance at 3,000. They have space for a lot more than that. They absolutely have space for potentially up to, I'd say, 5,000 people, if not more. Like the their their venue and everything else is if I go back to the venue, that the venue that they're in can hold up to 4,000 people. So they could theoretically get up to 4,000, is what the venue holds based on fire code. But they ran into so many problems last year. 2025, they had about 5% growth, I want to say, but and they went up to 2601. I think they're gonna have a pretty good year, assuming no one's driven away by like wildfire smokes or anything else. As long as people are able to travel there, I think we're going to see a good showing from this one. So in general, I you know, I'll wait until it's time for us to officially vote, but I don't think you're going to get much above that 3,000. I really don't. Because if they do that, that's gonna be pandemonium because they I just don't think that they're going to allow it.

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah, I I realized when I made my guess that uh, and I'm gonna adjust my written guess slightly because I I didn't realize about that hard cap act, which is you probably wrote it down and I didn't see it. But the one thing I will say is that I had predicted that Anthrocon was gonna cap at a hard set on 20k, and then they came out and they went 20,603, I believe it was. I'd have to look at the number again. But basically, it sounds to me like that was a situation where they did cap attendance at the door, but if pre-reg got over a certain amount, they would go off of that information and maybe there was a mismatch and something, and then you know, 600 more people were able to come in. I can see that still happening here. Obviously, it's not gonna be 600 people. I can still ignore mine on the sheet here, but it's gonna be slightly lower than that. But it is still gonna be a little higher than 3,000. I do think they are gonna let some people, you know, over that cap, even though they they might not acknowledge it until the last day. What's interesting as a as a as a general rule for me, I always assume as of late, West Coast cons are in kind of a period right now where I don't think the West is quite hurting as much as the rest of the country, economically speaking, because out west, everything's already more as like more expensive in general, other than like the East Coast, like the northeast side, obviously this doesn't apply to you as well because your cost of living is ridiculous out there too. But like the western states, like Washington, Oregon, California, you know, even Arizona, Nevada, Utah to a to a degree, they're already dealing with much higher cost of living in general than like the Midwest or the South, right? So when a downturn hits, they're not struggling as much more so than they already were. Obviously, if there's big unemployment, that's gonna matter. But outside of outside of computer science, that hasn't really been a big spike lately. True. So I don't think Anthro Weekend, Utah is gonna experience any sort of growth problems. It's literally gonna be where they get capped. The same thing happened in uh LVFC blew up really well. Forlandia blew up real well. I don't have a lot else to go on because the California cons are mostly at the beginning of the year or the end of the year, which is wonderful. Yeah, basically, if it's if you're on the West Coast, I'm gonna assume that you're probably a newer con and you're probably gonna make more explosive growth on the whole. Whereas if you're like a middle of the country East Coast, South Southern con, that can go any which way. Because that's more of a usually more established cons are gonna be out east to begin with.

SPEAKER_00 28:43

Right. And now the one thing is that part of the reason why I'm thinking about the cap, I found that on one site, but it wasn't like an official press release or anything saying that. So I want to be clear on that 3,000 mark. I think the thing for me is that their growth, they had had pretty explosive growth, and then it just sort of fell off the turnip truck. And so, because of last year, they last year they only had that 6.7% growth in in 2025. So is that meaning that they're plateauing because they're becoming more mature? Or is this kind of a temporary pause because they are reaching towards that capacity of the venue? Um, now I could say that. I mean, we went over the capacity of the venue at Anthro, New England, and it was very apparent that we went over that capacity limit. We were all on top of each other. And I mean, there's a reason why we called it line con. Like that was the joke, because you had to wait in line for everything. They didn't have enough volunteers, they didn't have enough staff. It was still a fantastic con. It was my very first one, but like the experience in general, like you it there was never a time when you were not shoulder to shoulder with another furry, like pretty much ever, unless you went outside. We don't have any numbers from the fursuit parade on this one, but I have no reason to believe that we won't have explosive growth. To me, the only thing, and I didn't write this down, but the only thing in my mind that potentially becomes a risk to this is its general proximity, the fact that this is Salt Lake City, it is a major hub of at least one airline delta. All the airline major airlines fly there. It's very easy to get to Salt Lake City. But nearby is another city that's also a major airline hub called Denver. And we know Denver is coming up. And so, because of that, you know, people don't have infinite amounts of money. So I wonder, is this pulling people away from Denver that want a smaller con experience than Denver is able to provide? Because we haven't gone to Denver yet, but when we do, like that one's growing pretty good. Or is this going, is this supplemental, or is Denver, are they indirect competitors, or are they not even on each other's radar whatsoever? Is Denver more this the large con people, or is and and the this Anther Week in Utah is more the small con, or does it really not matter? Because I don't know much about the west side of the country to know does that distance being fairly close actually make a difference in people's decision making or not?

SPEAKER_01 30:41

Well, it does and it doesn't. So if you're gonna drive from Salt Lake City to Denver, Colorado, you're still in for like a 10-hour drive because you've got there's they're much bigger states out on the west than you know, the the counties are much bigger and they're all mountainous. So if you're driving in the winter, good luck. You should not ever be driving from Salt Lake City to Denver in the winter unless you're like some long-haul trucker or something like that. But if you're going, if you're talking, you know, will those cons compete with each other because they're in kind of the same area. I haven't done enough research on Denver to know yet because we're not quite there. That's like a feature episode. But I'm as far as I'm aware, and again, it's kind of like it's kind of like invoking politics in a sense, it's like the like culture of the con. I'm pretty sure Denver is a much more adult center, like friendly centered con than the than you know, a woo is gonna be out here. So I feel like they're not really gonna compete because they're gonna be attracting from different pools of the fandom in a sense, much like you know, a red state versus blue state. So a con that's gonna be attracting from the more family-friendly side, that's gonna be a woo, and a con that's gonna be attracting more from the like fun party scene, that's gonna be Denver. And you also gotta remember, too, I don't know if you've ever flown into Denver's airport. It is it is a bizarre, bizarre experience of an airport.

SPEAKER_00 31:53

It's in the middle of nowhere. It is in the middle of nowhere, and there is nothing there except for they just built a couple years ago, they built that Gaylord Palms. And I don't know if that's where Denver is or not. If they because if Denver's in that, it's right at the airport. But there's nothing else. There's no food around the airport, there's no anything. Like it's like in no man's land, and apparently the Illuminati live in the basement.

SPEAKER_01 32:12

Allegedly, allegedly. Allegedly. Well, it's like a weird like desert mesa plateau thing, and you fly in on it, but there's mountains on one side, but like other than that, there's nothing out there. And yet all of the major flights that are that have layovers always stop in either Phoenix or in Denver. So you're gonna have situations where people might be. Well, but but like the thing too is that even if you're flying into Denver, that's not gonna mean oh, I'm not gonna go to Utah because of Denver. I get I think the bigger factor here is gonna be what con suits what what type of furry, in a sense. And I don't think the two are gonna compete that heavily, because if you were are because they've also they've also both been around for like you know 10 plus you know, five, ten plus years. So the people who knew they were gonna go to one are still gonna go to that one in the most part for the most part, in my opinion. Or there's also the type of people, you know, maybe like yourself that'll be like, well, I've been to these five sort of six cons this year, I'll go to a mostly different five or six cons next year if the travel budget works out that way. You know, I'm sure there's plenty of people that are just serial, pick different cons and go to different places. So anyway, I think we're ready to put in our guesses on this one.

SPEAKER_00 33:14

Okay. So I'm gonna guess 3,000, just flat 3,000. That is there, that is the theoretical cap. I did find that one source, which again, it's not the greatest source, but I it still it made sense to me. So I'm just gonna go with 3,000. That that shows still shows relative growth. I actually think that it may come in less than that because I mean just looking at the numbers low-wise, it could be like 2800-ish. And I'd say on the high side, maybe I was thinking maybe 3100 just from some overflow and everything else. But I'm gonna just I'm gonna say 3,000. But I have a feeling that I might still be overestimating at some.

SPEAKER_01 33:49

Yeah, I and this is gonna be one of the few areas I think where we're actually disagreeing on the forecast here. I think the West in general is going to explode as far as growth goes across the board. So you're gonna see the majority, at least for the at least for like the next 12 months, because that that's what we've seen for the last two months or so, and it's what we're gonna keep seeing for a while, in my opinion. So, like Painter Desert for a con, BLFC, well, BLFC is on a weekday, so maybe not that one, but like anything that's like Anthro Northwest, I think all of those cons are gonna be going in in the up, you know, the up and to the right direction as much as humanly possible. So in this case, like I said, regardless of the rumors if that's the proper source or not, I'm taking it at its face value, but I'm still thinking that they're gonna go a little beyond that soft cap, like anthrocon did, and I think they're gonna go at about 31, 3100 is what I have here. I know I wrote down a bigger number, but I'm gonna taper that because I forgot about that part.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

All right. So again, we're off by 100 on each other. And just I think you're projecting that it could go a little higher. I'm projecting it could go a little lower, but I think that that's still fine. For our final con, let's talk about Furydolphia. I'm gonna I you if you want to talk about the background of this one a little bit, you can't. I will say the most fascinating fact I have about this one, though, is the fact that they did something. And I don't know if this is local or how they did it, but basically the con spaces that are rented for like the panels and all these different things. So everything that you need, you know, the con space in general, it is somehow codified as private property. So because of that, you can be legitimately trespassed out of Ferry Delphia. It seems like this one is not going to run the risk of what we deemed happened at FWA. Like if you're going to be at Ferry Delphia, you're going to have a badge. So there's not going to be any of that badge list just showing up for parties or anything else, because this one has very, it seemed to have very, very strict language in their terms of service. It was very clear on their website and everything else that you get explicitly trespassed if you are trying to come in unbadged, if you try to share your badge with anybody or anything else. So again, security taking really forefront as we can see this being a theme across all three of these. But with this one in particular, and again, I knew probably the I've heard of, I had not heard of the other two. I had heard of this one, but I didn't realize just how like regimented this one was. But if you want to talk at all a little bit about the background, where this one came from and how we how we got here, go for it.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

For sure, absolutely. So Philadelphia is uh what's great about Philadelphia in general is that it's like one of the hotspots of American culture, being the whole, you know, where our it was our capital during the Revolutionary War, all that good stuff. So what that means is that Philadelphia's have got a very rich culture, and pretty much anything that's gonna go there is usually gonna come with you know a very high energy scene. So what's nice about this case is that they actually moved their venue a couple years back to the, I believe it was the Sheridan downtown in downtown Philly, so they were able to take on a much larger capacity there going forward. What's nice to you said with the they have that explicit trespass language, which is really big, because again, in in my opinion, in general, when it comes to furry cons, a lockdown type con. It's weird. Most people think in in in most other scenes that, like, you know, you give up a little liberty, the Philadelphia, give up a little liberty, get a little security, that sort of thing. I think it's the opposite in this case, in a in a in a very, like, a very different way. Because everyone's in $4,000 carpets, right? Because everyone's already in a situation where they're trying to, you know, not necessarily protect their identity, they're not trying to mask and like not be, but like they're not trying to be known to normies, they're trying to be a little insulated from like cultural repression from other people, you know, try not repression, what's the word I'm looking for? Conformity. There it is. Thank you. They're trying to be sort of insulated from cultural conformity from from that, you know, normies and people that aren't big giant bags of whimsy. So a more locked down con in this case is actually going to let the actual attendees be more free to express themselves, more free to do silly stuff, more free to record each other, put stuff on socials, that sort of thing. And again, kind of like what I was talking about with Oo, is not have to worry as much about somebody just showing up and trying to, you know, paint furries in a certain light, make someone the poster child for for mocking insults, that sort of thing. And I think in in my opinion, that's the generation or the direction that most fur cons have to do in this day and age. Last year, they posted an attendance of 3,777, which is pretty darn respectable. I want to say they're in the top 10. I forget off the top of my head uh where exactly they are on that list. Maybe they're a little bit below that. Posted a 30 34.8% growth rate, which is very healthy, very respectful, respectable. And I believe the year before they were they would have been in the 2000s up, yeah, 2802 prior to that. But it's interesting. They had a big boom when they first moved to Sheraton. They posted 46% growth that year over year, and then they kind of had two lull years, like 2023 and 2024 weren't that explosive of years for them. I can't think of any major reason why that would be in the case of Philadelphia, but they seem to have rebounded from that.

SPEAKER_00 38:26

I have a theory. And the main thing is that 2025 did jump, but it looks like 2025 jumped by about 34.8%. But there's a major there's a couple of major things here. One, we have to remember in 2026, we didn't, we haven't really talked with these cons about the dates or how long they are or anything else. This one was a three-day con. This is now in 2026, they are returning to their four-calendar day schedule. So that is going to be the same thing. Now they're in the same hotel as last year, and there are high urban costs here. Food is gonna be at a premium because you are in downtown Philadelphia. They already are visibly having some capacity pressures. By my estimates, they're already at about 92% capacity of the venue. But we're not talking about even the volunteer staff or anybody else that's gonna be there. They are approaching pretty rapidly the maximum capacity of the venue. So they are going to have, if we're having this conversation next year and they haven't moved venues, I have a feeling they're gonna be in real trouble. Now, you are correct. Like it was, you know, compared to Owoo, which only had that 6.7% growth, this, which I think had to do with that whole volunteer situation. With this one, last year they had that 34.8%. They had an absolute gain of about a thousand extra attendees, and it was like 975. But in general, they are approaching that theoretical maximum very, very quickly. So I think that's gonna get it. When you look at even things like the economics and the venue costs and the pricing, this is not the most budget-friendly con. Also, you have to take into account travel and parking, right? So if you are not flying there, you're not gonna Uber from an airport, you're you're driving in because you're a local, which I think would be a big draw of Philadelphia because of all the different mass transit options and things. There's many different ways to get to Philadelphia. But if you are parking a car, you're looking at like $50 a day to park your car. Like it's it's not like that. That that parking more show, if you remember that, that was like on one of those channels back in the day, like that was in Philadelphia. It was one of the least friendly places in the country to park. Like they have pretty significant parking issues. I don't think that's gonna be a huge thing because I think people will be taking more public transit. They do have good public transit for that. The hotels are ranging but right now between $199 and $249 a night. That is a little bit more on the expensive side, cheaper for a major urban area like this. So you got to give them credit for getting good block pricing and everything else. But when you think about just the square footage and everything, it's it's going to be, I think, a fairly congested con. However, one thing that came to mind after I made the sheet, and or after I made some of my initial projections, the heat, right? So the heat of Anthrocon, I think, despite the fact that Anthrocon was the first con to go over 20,000, right? Like record numbers, everybody's like, I'm going to Anthrocon, but I think it's because people were locked in and had paid well in advance for Anthrocon. They didn't know they were going to cancel the block party and the parade, but the heat made the con not as accessible to a lot of people. Now, we know there's a lot of people in the Pittsburgh area. We know a lot of people, I personally know a lot of furries that live all throughout the state of Pennsylvania or somewhere in and around there. And I have heard a lot of people saying, like, I like so many people said, I'll see it, Furry Delphia. Like they kept saying this. So it's like, I think a lot of people who are local, I think a lot of New Yorkers and everything are going to get pulled in to Furry Delphia that maybe either stayed away from AnthroCon or potentially were at Anthrocon and feel like they got cheated. And so they're going to go to this one as well as a way to fix in for that. So I think they're going to have some problems with capacity. Like they've got one ballroom, for example, that's 20,000 square feet. That's decent sized. But when you think about how many people might cram into a rave, that's not as big as it possibly could be. And like their reception area is only 2,200 square feet. That's small for like a ton of people that are going to be coming in and everything else. We don't have any consistent parade numbers from this, so I'm just going to kind of skip over that. I mean, trend wise, they just they had a really, really I mean, the year before that, the year-over-year growth was only 11%. Last year they went up to 34.8. Like that was like three times. It's like a 3x multiplier over where they were. And so they had that growth. If they have that growth again, we're going to be running into some problems, I think.

SPEAKER_01 42:15

And correct me if I'm wrong, because I I've lived in a lot of the country. I have not lived on the East Coast at all. Do they have a pretty decent light rail situation going from like Philadelphia up to maybe up to Boston or like New York in between? Like they do. Okay. I feel like that should be a situation where the parking situation is awful, but if you're already locked in on that, you know, on that trainway, you know, between New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, and everywhere in between, you should in theory be able to go to multiple of those cons if you're able to commute. Because like correct, you know, I did LVFC, I lived 15 minutes from the Alexis, so I can just drive there and the the con cost me almost nothing, just registration and food. Exactly. So I feel like I feel like the the costs are mitigated if it's in an area that is well connected, which isn't really that isn't gonna apply to many cons, but it is gonna apply a lot of the eastern seaboard and like the new Atlantic Coast area.

SPEAKER_00 43:03

Yep. Now we do get a little bit of ideology as to how this is gonna go, just because they do have a timed ticket program here. So they release tickets like in timed blocks as they're like looking at projections, interest, and everything else. And so that's kind of like an early pressure test to see how well this one's actually going to go. Advertised, this venue can technically speaking hold up to 4,500 people. So, like I said, last year being at, you know, last year being at 3,777, they were already getting close to that capacity. And I just think that it's going because of that growth they had last year, because of things like the transit, because of things like AC and that, and you know, we just know that there's we know there's a lot of people that won't get anywhere near AC just because they didn't like the politics of even like the poodling and everything else. With this one also be having a little bit more heightened area of security. Do you think this is going to draw more of like the adult crowd, the family crowd, or all of the above? Because there is no age restriction at this one.

SPEAKER_01 43:53

Correct me if I'm wrong. Was this one of the ones that had more of the heavy, like the more restrictive like you have to sign a waiver of all your information? For your minor, or they just kind of just like you're minor, here's a bench.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

That one, I honestly I didn't look into that on this one, so I don't know if I know that. But what I can say is is that fact would do I've heard a lot about parties at Furry Delphia. I've I just did a great find from people talking. And so I want to say this is not a party con necessarily like FWA. I think it is more centric on on community and everything else. But we every con you go to after hours is going to have, you know, I don't know how it was down in Tennessee, but like this one in particular is gonna be, I can't see it being any different, where after you get past nine or ten o'clock, you're going to have everybody in their best femboy attire or less going down and going to the rave, so or the various raves every single night.

SPEAKER_01 44:37

Yeah, and that's one thing that we forgot to mention specifically. But when it comes to like con culture as far as what's going to bring you know people who want to come back over and over, schedule matters, of course, but also more importantly, I think what matters is is the layout of the venue. And I don't just mean like the venue venue, I mean like the main hotel rooms and where most people are staying. A good example of this is I've only been to two cons, but I can definitely say there is night and day difference between what BLSC does and what LBFC does. So LBFC is in the Alexis, it's in a it's a it's a sm like a much smaller hotel block in general, but everything there is sort of like this indoor outdoor. It looks almost like it almost looks like a little apartment block party in a sense. So you do the con, it's in the middle of the day, and then when you're done, all of the room parties are all around you in all directions. So you can literally just go back to your main con space and just walk around in fursuit, and you can find, you know, you can find a cheese fondue party, you can find an ice cream party, exterior course.

SPEAKER_02 45:29

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 45:30

Oh exactly. So where that can be an issue sometimes is when a con has its main, like main hotel as also the venue, which is what BLFC does. And my one complaint about BLFC when I went there is that if you knew you were gonna try to go to a room party, it was basically the entire con itself happened on the bottom floor of the Grand Sierra Resort. So you would do all of your socialization down there for you know, like the general con activities, and then as soon as it was, you know, go to a room party, go to go out, whatever, you were up an elevator and you didn't know where in the hotel block everybody was. Right. And it was only a handful of floor, like it wasn't the whole hotel, obviously. So it was like if you were on the wrong floor, you weren't just gonna walk down a hall and find a and find a room party. And that sort of like spontaneous culture, I think, really helps with a lot of with certain cons.

SPEAKER_00 46:13

So is LVFC, just out of curiosity, is LVFC the only con that you're aware of where the entire hotel is nothing but the furry con? Because that that LVFC is that way, right? That's what you basically describe. Like they they have the entire thing is just furries. There's no pilots, there's no flight attendants, there's no just normies that happen to have made the mistake of coming to the city and picking that hotel during a furry convention. If you're at that hotel, you're at the con, right?

SPEAKER_01 46:37

Yeah, so if you're at the Or is that BLC? The no, so so the the Alexis, even though it's in the heart of Las Vegas, it isn't like a big tower hotel, which is what which is what the Gran Sierra in Reno is. Where that would be a difference maker here is if you're kind of a more smaller, mid-sized con, you're more likely gonna have all or most of your smaller venue, which is why like ones that take over, like, you know, in the brand new, I think I want to say ASE was in like a double tree or something like that his first year. Yeah. Uh that that sort of thing can happen. So if it's only like a two, three-floor hotel, you're gonna have a much easier time. The the the room party scene is gonna feel a lot stronger. Whereas if you're in a big tower hotel, you kind of have to network in ahead of time. You know, you have to know where you're going. Like I said, the spontaneity is not there, and it's not gonna feel as magical in that sense if you're like kind of on the newer end of the fandom.

SPEAKER_00 47:23

Right. And this is, you know, furry Delphia is gonna be like Jack said earlier. I believe it's in the top 10. I can't confirm or deny that right now. I don't have that window open, but it is bordering on a larger con type of environment. It is in the Sheraton downtown Philadelphia, which is, to my knowledge, a tower type situation. And again, if you don't know what floors the blocks are on, you know, you're out of luck. Now, I I mean, like I will say when I was at AE, I was on the top floor. And when you walk down my hallway, like at one point, because I was in a little bit larger room, because I had booked late, so I had to get like I got a larger room, but I was never having a room party in it. But there was always some kind of room party happening at the end of the hallway on every single floor. And so, like, there was one night where there was a room party happening there that somebody tried to card me to go into my own hotel room. And so, but I get I get what you're saying there. I really think for Adelphia, just everything in my gut after reading everything, I really think it's just going to explode. I keep thinking I can't use TikTok words. Uh I have a feeling it's going to explode in terms of overall attendance. So if we're gonna talk about you know our estimates on this, I'm gonna go with 4300. I I mean looking at this, I'd say the low side of things, you're looking at probably 3,900, which would only be a couple hundred over last year. That would be if they're that would be if their growth completely tanked out. Even going back to their previous year's growth that was like lower, it still would be more than 3,900. At the maximum level, I think around 4400 because that is the theoretical maximum of the venue. But places go over fire codes all the time. Yeah, people might come in and they might get in trouble, but as long as you're not all in the same room, they probably can actually push a little bit further than that. But I'm gonna go a little bit more on the conservative side and I'm just gonna flat out say 4,300. So it's a hundred less than the theoretical maximum.

SPEAKER_01 49:06

Yes, yeah. So I actually came in even lower on venue on this one. And part of the reason is when we were when we were talking about this con, when we were researching it, we discovered that it was founded basically with a 40 grand loan, more or less, and it only recently reached solvency after many years. So, like I'm wondering if the the margins for, you know, because I've never run a con, so I can't tell you what the actual financials are with the with the profit margin and that sort of thing. But I imagine it's gotta be pretty darn low, right? If you're if you're taking that long to pay off that kind of a loan, it makes me think that okay, now that this con is solvent officially, they're not racking in debt, they're not gonna make a lot of aggressive moves that could compromise that situation. So I feel like it's um it's not cold feet per se, but it's kind of like okay, our house is in order. Now we protect, now we play defense, now we don't try to you know swing for something that's gonna cause us to have to get a brand new venue next year, because then you run in all into all kinds of risks about having to shell out more money up front, how to you know, having to do all this other stuff. Whereas you have a working relationship with a Sheraton, you've had it for four years, everything's been on the up and up. You kind of just want to chill. So, like you you you put your cap in, you know, or maybe you go over your cap, whatever it doesn't matter, but you don't make aggressive pushes, you don't make aggressive moves, and you may you might not even put out nearly as strong a marketing as you would in a previous year because you don't want it, you don't want it to explode in growth so much. So in this case, I'm I'm going at 4175, which is a little bit lower. Not all right, so I'm I'm trying to keep us within if like if I think it's you know up spread up or down, I'm not trying to go, I'm trying to keep about one to two hundred above or below you that way.

SPEAKER_00 50:36

You mentioned you mentioned the loan. Do you know do you know the story behind the loan? Because this is actually a really good so this is a this is just for anybody out there that might be looking to actually form their own fur con, this is a great lesson and things that you don't know. Because a lot of people, when they go out, you know, this is like unless you're really well versed at starting a not-for-profit, if you're just wanting to start a con, and that's why every con tends to have a panel that's called how to start a furry con. You know, I've seen one I think at every one I've been to. And so, like this one in particular, the person who went ahead and started this, and the various groups of people, but the main person who started it, they really nobody really understood how to do contracting with hotels. And so they went ahead and they, you know, got what they thought was a good deal in the contract for the room blocks and everything else. Well, one of the things they don't tell you when you first start when when you're doing something like this, if you when you sign a contract for a block of hotel room, and there's other people who can speak a lot better to this, but a lot of times in there, there are writers and things. You have to really evaluate that either with a lawyer or you really have to read the fine print. Because if you don't end up achieving what like you have said you're gonna get in terms of overall occupancy of that room block, it's not that those, oh no, no harm, no foul, those rooms just go back to the pool for anybody else to just you know book normally. No, you're on the hook to pay for them, which is why this thing went into the red, and then the person in charge had to take out that $40,000 personal loan to basically cover the cost because they lost so much money because of the hotel room block debacle. Now, like you said, they are in the black, they have been recovering and everything else, but I think that is gonna make them be more cautious. Then again, if they don't have the same kind of analytical, you know, thought process and everything as all of us, they may not even realize just how close to their peak they are. They may, you know, it's really also gonna be determined based on the volunteers. I think people are gonna be more able to be a volunteer during the summer. I think that's one of the things that really plagued AE or the Anthro New England was it was in January. We just came off the Christmas holiday. And so, yeah, there's a lot of people that had really planned to come here and everything, but in terms of volunteering your time at this convention, I think they had a lot of volunteers not show up and everything else if like that. I think you're gonna see a lot less incidents of that at this one. So it'll be interesting to see, but this does have really high overhead costs, so it'll be interesting to see where this one goes into.

SPEAKER_01 52:46

Yeah, and and like I said, I feel like they're gonna be they're gonna be a rare occurrence, so they're gonna try to cling on to their venue as long as humanly possible. So I wouldn't actually expect this one to blow up beyond what it can handle.

SPEAKER_00 52:56

But they may even have a multi-year contract, we don't know. Because they I've seen that even in I go to a lot of conventions in my normal day-to-day job, and like one one of the conventions that I used to go to a lot, like every single year, they signed like a back in the day, they signed like a 10-year contract with the Gaylord Palms. So they were always just being told every year at the end of May which Gaylord Palms were you gonna be sent to. Um, they finally got out of that contract, but they're looking that they might actually sign one again because it does deeply discount things when you sign a multi-year agreement. So if they sign some multi-year agreement and they've now grown too big for their britches, they might be restricting more than you and I even realize. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes.

SPEAKER_01 53:31

Yeah, for sure. But you also have to remember, too, that when with a with a hotel room block contract, it's basically effectively a large-scale timeshare, is what you're asking for, more or less. Which and a timeshare is basically just a leasing agreement with the property over a period of time, right? Like all leases, like all contracts, if the growth is you know enough, if if everything is going the right direction, you can always break those contracts and you can get somewhere else. Like there's almost always cancellation fees in the fine print of every one of these major contracts, which is why, like, if you get a promotion at a job, you know, and you have six months left on your apartment, you're not just gonna sit there, you're gonna break your lease. The same thing applies here. If your con does really, really well and you suddenly need to go immediately to the next, you know, Hilton downtown of whatever town you're in that you're that you need to think of, you're just gonna shell out the money and do that if the money is there, right? Like otherwise, why would you keep cap yourself?

SPEAKER_00 54:19

If you have the business acumen to actually do that, that's the right that you're exactly the fact is that, and again, they've they've got a lot more behind their belts, so I'd like to think that they're they're that way, but we have to keep in mind that it's still being run by the same people who did make these fundamental mistakes. And I'm not knocking them whatsoever. I'm just saying that it could still be where they are still learning as they go. I would hope that they're more involved with other communities and other cons and maybe getting some advice from people and everything else. But it is possible that they may not even be thinking that because not everyone is going to have that same kind of business mindset that you and I do.

SPEAKER_01 54:52

You're absolutely right on that. But even business document alone, if there's, you know, if we were to add up how many conventions there are across the United States in all major scenes, you're still only going to come up to like fewer than 10,000 people who say they've run a convention, who said they know how to put that on across all industries. That's not a furries, anything like professional, anything that applies. There's not going to be a lot of people with that specific kind of event planning of how do you coordinate something that massive. So, like there's gonna be growing pains no matter how experienced in business acumen you are, I feel like.

SPEAKER_00 55:24

This is very true. Now, I will say, just as a note to our viewers or listeners, if we have any, is that there the one thing that we probably didn't look at that I do intend for for one or both of us to look at next time is things like the guest of honor. And I gotta give a shout out to Sodai for actually giving me some great feedback on this when I was kind of going over what our talk tracks for this podcast were gonna be. You like look at the guest of honor, and honestly, Saw, I just ran out of time. But the the thing is that a guest of honor or even any kind of political drama that could be following a guest of honor or someone canceling at the last minute and now of a sudden you don't have one and everything else. Sometimes that actually can be a draw or a detractor for some people, depending on their feeling on a certain person, or if that person was involved in some kind of scandal or otherwise. So I think we do need to take a deeper dive in that. Exactly. And so in general, let's just we don't know that for here, but in general, I think, you know, I think we've got really good projections. So just as a general recap for Euphoria, I guessed 1250, Jack guessed 1150. For Anthro Week in Utah, I guess 3,000. And Jack, you went with 3150?

SPEAKER_01 56:32

3100 on the dot.

SPEAKER_00 56:33

3100. And then for Free Delphia, I went with 4300 kind of on the high side, and Jack went with 4175. So we will find out soon enough when these actually, once these have actually played out. And if anybody out there is at these and wants to give us any kind of like boots on the ground reconnaissance, because I know neither one of us is going to be at either of these three, please feel free to reach out on Discord, Telegram, TikTok, or otherwise. Let us know just so that we can get an idea, and then we'll uh the next time we do one of these, before we start talking about the next ones, we'll go over the recap as to how well we did.

SPEAKER_01 57:03

Yep. And as a general rule, for any way that any way, shape, or form that you're allowed to give feedback on the show, whether it's on TikTok or any other form of social media, wherever you find podcasts, if there's a comment section and it's up before the date of the con, feel free to put in your guess as well and guess where you think you're gonna fall.

SPEAKER_02 57:16

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 57:17

If it if the timing works out, I will always be, you know, finding a segment here where we can have you know viewer feedback or we can answer questions, QA, that sort of thing, as well as announcing the winners across all the platforms. Now, obviously, you can't guess, you can't put your comments in after the fact, even if it's even if it's after the you know before the next episode airs, but it will always be a case of as long as it's within, let's say, six hours before the con actually happens. So if the cons opening ceremony is at you know six p.m. on a on a Friday, you have until noon that day, any answers submitted then will count. And then that way you're not even in the in the ballpark of the closing ceremony where the where the numbers are announced. So if you want to be involved, that's how you can do it. And uh scruff, other than here, where can people find you across the internet?

SPEAKER_00 58:00

Across the internet, you can find me on TikTok. You can also find me. I I am obviously on Discord, I'm also on Telegram. It's the same across all platforms, it's just scruff rack r-a-c-c. No space, no underscore, no anything else. And then, of course, if you happen to run into me in VRC, because I'm always running around in here, feel free just to talk to me about it. But I'm easiest to find on TikTok. And Jack just flipped upside down.

SPEAKER_01 58:24

My my waist track. You were so excited.

SPEAKER_00 58:26

You were so excited about getting to the end of our episode zero that you just had to do a handstand to show me.

SPEAKER_01 58:30

That's that's good, that's gonna be in the that's gonna be capped of some sort. What the heck is this thing doing? I love it. Good old, good old, I'm I'm standing on my chair now, effectively, sort of looking at. But yeah, you can find me at Jack TMFD on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Blue Sky, all of them. I don't post on those two that much, but that's where you can find us for the most part. Oh, and by the way, if you're interested in being a guest on the show in the future, you ever want to take up one of these two other chairs here uh and sort of hash it, hash it out about your local scene, about your con, that sort of thing. Uh, let us know on any of the platforms, uh especially like con organizers, staff, that sort of thing. That always interests us. Among, you know, I'm sure if there's any anyone else who's just really familiar with the area.

SPEAKER_00 59:07

Yeah, feel free.

SPEAKER_01 59:09

Yeah, absolutely. That and we we would prefer that if people with it with long time experience, if you're volunteer like long time experience with it, like not. It's my first year, like that doesn't really help us.

SPEAKER_00 59:19

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 59:20

Um but yeah, with that, thank you all so much for watching. This has been, I guess, episode zero of reconnaissance, and we will be back. Uh this will probably be an every two-week kind of show. So we'll we'll we'll play it by ear on that one. Thank you for watching. Y'all have a good one.