After I persuaded ~Sofox to go to Anthrocon, he persuaded me to go to RBW in London. What with things going badly at work at the time, I needed something to look forward to and this was it.

**EDIT**

Photos are now available here: [link]

**EDIT**

Getting there was in some ways more of a struggle than getting to Anthrocon. I hadn't been on the Underground in about 26 years, and basically, everything went wrong.

I missed the train I'd booked in advance, almost missed the following train, got lost in Paddington station for about 30 minutes, tried to use the Circle Line which then promptly shut, took the Hammersmith and City line, and then got lost following the awful map provided by the hotel.
When I got there the hotel staff didn't seem to understand that Sofox and I were sharing the room - even though he had explicitly stated there would be two people when it was booked - and it took some persuasion to get us both keycards.

Although we chose that particular hotel (out of those which were available) because it had wifi, it turned out only to have wifi in the lobby and the convention rooms, not in our room. This did not make me particularly happy, since even the Travelodge I stayed overnight in for my outward AC journey had wifi in the room.
That said, AC had wifi in the room but not in the convention rooms, which was slightly annoying for looking things up online in the middle of conversations etc.

It turns out that the RBW board lost its chairman, and as a result things were a little shaky organisationally. Many events started late, and it seems that the hotel screwed them over - the 'dealers room' being more of a 'dealers cupboard' among many other things.

It wasn't exactly Anthrocon - for me, the best part of AC is to meet people from the DMFA fandom, who are mostly in the US/Canada - but it was definitely worth attending.

Here are some of the more memorable parts:

A small but pretty good selection of artists in the dealers' room. I ended up with about six commissions.

The 'furry writing' panel. This didn't start at all... no-one could even locate the person running it. Eventually a member of the audience took over and gave a pretty good talk himself.

The consoles in the Den (hanging-out area). While it wasn't my intention to go all the way to London just to play games, Sofox persuaded me to try out a couple of multiplayer games, including Soul Calibur 4 and Brawl. With SC4 I beat him about 4/6 times, but the game felt a little pointless. With Brawl, I was so inept that the only way I could win in a 1-1 fight against Sofox was by having him place the controller on the ground and not touch it. Even when he was only playing defensively and not retaliating, I still ended up losing the game at least twice.
Left4Dead was easier to get into and I might look it up if there is a PC version.

The Extreme Fursuit championship. Sofox somehow persuaded me to enter that with him, and we ended up having to build a fursuit in one hour from paper plates, plastic cups and what appeared to be a giant towel. Fortunately someone who had actually built the things before joined our team and the resulting monstrosity ( named 'What the Fox' ) was completed on schedule. It later fetched £20 in the charity auction.

Banditails (foxbtails on FA), who roamed around the Den drawing awesome cartoon-style pictures. He seemed to be an all-round great guy.

The 'How To Design Videogames' panel. This started about 15 minutes late - the panellist apparently struggling to get out of his suit. In the meantime, one fox named 'Galdor' got up and began to play charades. I don't think we ever did work out what he was trying to mime.

The boat party was pretty cool. A bit cramped, but still pretty cool. Though I did wonder what on earth I was doing on the way back, walking through london in the rain at midnight wearing a trenchcoat and a grey wolf tail.