Nordic Fuzzcon 2026
Feb. 23rd, 2026 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
procyonraccoonAnother week in February, another con! As was the case last year, I would be "maxing out" my visit to Nordic Fuzzcon: flying in on Monday (two days early) and out the following Monday. My usual roommate Ethan is on staff and always arrives early and leaves late himself, and although 7 days is a lot for a single con it has actually turned out to be convenient for other reasons: Malmö is just across the bridge from Copenhagen where I used to live and work, and Tuesday (when the con is not fully up and running yet) offers a perfect opportunity to go visit my old institute and see some of the people I used to hang out with when I lived there.
My flight out from Manchester was late on Monday, and even though I had to catch a rail replacement bus to the airport this actually ended up being faster than the usual train route anyway and I made it to the airport in loads of time before my flight. I was pleased to discover that even Easyjet has now moved to the brand-new Terminal 2 and I no longer had to suffer through the overcrowded mess and long security lines of Manchester T1, so I had a weak beer and a pie at an upstairs pub while I sent a few final work e-mails, then went to board the flight. I touched down into CPH at around 10pm and was at the con shortly before midnight. I met up with Ethan in the room (extra-conveniently located this year on the lowest guest room floor of the main hotel) and went to bed shortly after.
Tuesday was my day in Copenhagen, so after an early breakfast I boarded the train back across the Oresund and made my way over to my former institute. There was no rush to get there because a student's PhD defense was on that morning and most of the staff and postdocs were - supposedly - going to be in attendance until it was completed around 11am. I arrived around then, but it turned out that attendance at the PhD defense and post PhD defense was remarkably thin (almost none of the senior staff were there) and as my postdoc hosts were feeling guilty about that I ended up mostly being roped into joining the post-defense announcement ceremony, celebratory lunch, and post-lunch tour of the instrument he worked on in his lab just to fill in the numbers (which resulted in walking back and forth between two campus buildings four or five times in the span of about two hours). At 2pm I gave a short talk (which was reasonably well-attended among the postdocs, although the senior staff were again basically entirely absent) and then had a long chat with my nominal former supervisor there, initially mostly about science although it somewhat derailed into a conversation of AI usage in astronomy (and me attempting to explain why I was largely against it on principle, which was not his opinion).
After that we went to dinner, which I had expected to just be a casual event with my postdoc friends - although unexpectedly my former supervisor came along as well, which somewhat quashed the irreverent conversations I normally have with that bunch but it was still a good time, and he even was able to pay for the meal off of his grant. He didn't join for the subsequent visit to a cocktail bar, but my other friends all came along and we were able to swap the latest gossip (there wasn't much) before the bar closed around midnight and it was time for us to disperse.
Wednesday is when the con started for real, although I didn't get up to very much in practice - unfortunately I had a bunch of e-mails to deal with (one of my students made an interesting/important discovery over the weekend and we had to secure a bunch of observations very quickly) and so I was mostly in the room (although I went over to the "Valhalla" venue later in the evening to attend the Barq panel, and had dinner there). I joined a group of friends in Karpour and Henrieke's room to watch the opening ceremonies stream on the hotel TV later in the evening - and then went to hold our place in line for the pub quiz, which started at 11pm and went well past midnight. Like last year, this was a lot of fun: the quizmaster's favourite topics were very much in line with our group's knowlege set (80s-90s music, science, geography) and we were familiar with his "patterns", so we did pretty well - although we also didn't know lots of stuff (including in particular two extremely obscure astronomy questions) and as the randomly-assigned rival team's sheet we were marking at the end was way ahead of us, we assumed we were not going to be in the top 3 this year. However, it turns out that we were marking the winning team's sheet and in fact we managed a result that arguably was better than winning: we'd previously named our team "And In Third Place" as a joke just to seed confusion in case we did end up at the top, and we actually did win third place, causing the quizmaster to crack up as he was reading out our name and position to the bewilderment of the rest of the audience. I went back to the room once the quiz ended, and was about to go to bed when Lupe and Wolfie messaged me inviting them over to their hotel for a beer (they had arrived but were too late to get a badge to enter the conspace) - which I did, joining them and one of their friends first in the bar and then up in the room for a long chat. At 3am I finally wandered back through the cold to my hotel to turn in for the night.
Thursday started off a bit slowly. After some initial fursuiting I met up with Baloki later in the afternoon though to walk around the Clarion conspace for a bit, and as we were thinking about going for a late lunch we ran into Wolfie and invited him come along as well, making our way over to the food hall. I went for a salad bowl while the others had sandwiches, and as the beer selection there was much better than at the hotel we lingered for a while before returning. Later that evening was the con's "Afterbark" event ("relaxed" dress code), which thankfully was over in the Valhalla venue which meant that I didn't have to deal with any of the crowds or queues that inevitably accompany these things (I was in the Clarion and had no interest in any Afterbark activities). I was a little worried that the big event over in the other venue would drain the energy from the Clarion space but it was still busy enough to have a good vibe about the bar and conspace - as well as at the dance later which I suited up as Cami for, and was able to stay out for quite a while as they had a powerful fan blasting the dance floor that I could station myself in front of to stay (relatively) cool even while dancing.
Friday's main event was the "open house" when they allow (indeed, invite) the broader community to come by the con and walk around the main conspaces. This is always a fursuiting highlight, because there are lots of curious children and parents milling about fascinated by the big cute fluffy animals hanging out everywhere, and it's very easy to have simple and fun interactions with lots of people - and of course it was the same this year, both inside the con and outside (where it was nice and cold!) Later on was a "ferals" (i.e., non-anthro characters) meet in the early afternoon, which I decided to drop by for since this is a meet concept I'd been hoping to see at a con for a long time but had never actually ever seen scheduled. (Amusingly, in 2007 or so I remember seeing a flyer at a con advertising a "Feral party" but figured out later that this meant Feral the Ontario camping con, not feral characters.) I dropped by that and it was fine; chatted with some interesting people although didn't really follow up and maintain that connection. Ethan had attended the panel with me and he and I were lingering at the entrance outside after it ended, and while we were standing there people kept coming up to us asking if we were managing the Game Changer queue (Ethan was wearing his staff lanyard) - which we weren't, but as I had nothing else on I decided to go ahead and attend, and it was pretty fun (it leaned much more heavily on the improv show side this year compared to the game show side). Later on (after some brief fursuiting) I went to get dinner with Slycat, Zahzu and her partner Muse - none of whom I knew super well but we all were excited to get Indian food and everyone bonded really well over that. When returned the Grimnir concert was on, and with Baloki, Wolfie, and Lupe all planning on attending that I figured I'd give it a try as well. It was a lot of fun - heavy metal is not really my style but I appreciate its energy, and the old-Norse folk style of the band was a fun and unique aesthetic even if the combination of flute and electric guitar never quite "worked" for me. They also clearly knew who they were performing for, starting off the concert with the lead the lead guitarist wearing a "wolfskin" over his head but it was a cute furry-style wolf face. After that I followed Lupe, Wolfie, and some Berlin furs they knew to have a few drinks in the open space where the Artist Alley was taking place during the afternoon and remained there for a while, and then I returned the favor from Wednesday night by having them up to my room for a few more beers I'd brought from "home" to continue the conversation, until it became time for bed.
After breakfast on Saturday I went to my usual "special interest" meetup that was unusually scheduled in the morning ths year. Last year this was kind of awkward since I didn't really know anyone, but amusingly someone I'd met the previous day was there and since I actually had someone to talk to (and pull others into conversations with) I ended up sticking around until the end this time, or indeed even later than that. I wasn't in a rush, because unfortunately - but unsurprisingly - the fursuit parade through the city was cancelled on account of the rain that was falling, turning the snow outside into slush puddles. (Even though this was forecasted it was somewhat tragic, since up until that point the con had perfect weather for outdoor suiting - cold and dry). This freed up some time for other things though, so I did a bit more suiting, and made another run through the Artist's Alley (originally to pick up Baloki's sketchbook, but I also got another sketch from Zahzu after spotting that she had got a table for that day). That evening Lupestripe had invited me and some others to a mini pub crawl around Malmö. We started at Brew Dog at 5:30pm, moved on to a British pub, then tried to get into a nearby microbrew pub but they were full so we made our way to the Ukrainian Beer Bar, which served both Ukrainian beer and food so we stayed there for dinner as well (my first time having Ukrainan food). I returned to the con and the group dispersed, but I followed Wolfie to one of the side bars in the Clarion and hung out with a different group of his friends from VRChat for a little while (which included an Icelandic furry who was dating a different fur from New Mexico - which was a funny coincidence, even if the New Mexican fur wasn't actually there at the con). I got into suit and fursuited for the rest of the evening, hitting the dance until late.
The con felt like it has been going on forever by Sunday, but also seemed to be ending far too soon! I again met up with Karpour and his group to watch the closing ceremonies from their room on the TV, and then scampered off to my room to watch the Olympic hockey final (unfortunately the TV was not working and I didn't have an HDMI cable so I had to settle for watching a stream in Swedish on my laptop). The final was something of a best/worst case scenario for me, in that the two teams/countries I support (the US and Canada) were playing for the gold. This has been a dilemma for me since at least the 2004 Olympics (my dad, the one responsible for my interest in hockey to begin with, is Canadian, but I lived in the US for almost my whole life up to 2015) but I long ago decided to "follow my emotions" and support the US when it came to it (they are at least the underdog in hockey). This year that felt particularly conflicting, but sports isn't politics (or shouldn't be!) and in any case it was a fun game to watch, close the whole way through and the US pulling out an overtime victory despite being generally outplayed for most of the second and third periods. After that I caught up with Baloki and his friends downstairs and he and I then went to get dinner near his hotel. I then returned to the Clarion, where Karpour and Henrieke were hosting what was originally a small room gathering for Jackbox games but after an hour or so became something quite different when none other than Mausie (the original NFC con mascot) showed up and stayed around for a while, posing and playing around with the rest of us (and leading to lots of silly photos). Eventually he departed and things settled down a bit, and we had a good time for the rest of the evening.
And then today it was finally time to head home. I woke up a little before 9am, met up with Baloki and his friend at the train station, and we made our way to the airport. The flight was a little late and was just two hours, enough time to write most of this entry - the chipper nature of which is very different from my emotions as of when I finally got home at 5pm or for the rest of the evening, due to some things that happened on the train ride over and when I returned home. The explanation of that will have to be in a non-public entry.
My flight out from Manchester was late on Monday, and even though I had to catch a rail replacement bus to the airport this actually ended up being faster than the usual train route anyway and I made it to the airport in loads of time before my flight. I was pleased to discover that even Easyjet has now moved to the brand-new Terminal 2 and I no longer had to suffer through the overcrowded mess and long security lines of Manchester T1, so I had a weak beer and a pie at an upstairs pub while I sent a few final work e-mails, then went to board the flight. I touched down into CPH at around 10pm and was at the con shortly before midnight. I met up with Ethan in the room (extra-conveniently located this year on the lowest guest room floor of the main hotel) and went to bed shortly after.
Tuesday was my day in Copenhagen, so after an early breakfast I boarded the train back across the Oresund and made my way over to my former institute. There was no rush to get there because a student's PhD defense was on that morning and most of the staff and postdocs were - supposedly - going to be in attendance until it was completed around 11am. I arrived around then, but it turned out that attendance at the PhD defense and post PhD defense was remarkably thin (almost none of the senior staff were there) and as my postdoc hosts were feeling guilty about that I ended up mostly being roped into joining the post-defense announcement ceremony, celebratory lunch, and post-lunch tour of the instrument he worked on in his lab just to fill in the numbers (which resulted in walking back and forth between two campus buildings four or five times in the span of about two hours). At 2pm I gave a short talk (which was reasonably well-attended among the postdocs, although the senior staff were again basically entirely absent) and then had a long chat with my nominal former supervisor there, initially mostly about science although it somewhat derailed into a conversation of AI usage in astronomy (and me attempting to explain why I was largely against it on principle, which was not his opinion).
After that we went to dinner, which I had expected to just be a casual event with my postdoc friends - although unexpectedly my former supervisor came along as well, which somewhat quashed the irreverent conversations I normally have with that bunch but it was still a good time, and he even was able to pay for the meal off of his grant. He didn't join for the subsequent visit to a cocktail bar, but my other friends all came along and we were able to swap the latest gossip (there wasn't much) before the bar closed around midnight and it was time for us to disperse.
Wednesday is when the con started for real, although I didn't get up to very much in practice - unfortunately I had a bunch of e-mails to deal with (one of my students made an interesting/important discovery over the weekend and we had to secure a bunch of observations very quickly) and so I was mostly in the room (although I went over to the "Valhalla" venue later in the evening to attend the Barq panel, and had dinner there). I joined a group of friends in Karpour and Henrieke's room to watch the opening ceremonies stream on the hotel TV later in the evening - and then went to hold our place in line for the pub quiz, which started at 11pm and went well past midnight. Like last year, this was a lot of fun: the quizmaster's favourite topics were very much in line with our group's knowlege set (80s-90s music, science, geography) and we were familiar with his "patterns", so we did pretty well - although we also didn't know lots of stuff (including in particular two extremely obscure astronomy questions) and as the randomly-assigned rival team's sheet we were marking at the end was way ahead of us, we assumed we were not going to be in the top 3 this year. However, it turns out that we were marking the winning team's sheet and in fact we managed a result that arguably was better than winning: we'd previously named our team "And In Third Place" as a joke just to seed confusion in case we did end up at the top, and we actually did win third place, causing the quizmaster to crack up as he was reading out our name and position to the bewilderment of the rest of the audience. I went back to the room once the quiz ended, and was about to go to bed when Lupe and Wolfie messaged me inviting them over to their hotel for a beer (they had arrived but were too late to get a badge to enter the conspace) - which I did, joining them and one of their friends first in the bar and then up in the room for a long chat. At 3am I finally wandered back through the cold to my hotel to turn in for the night.
Thursday started off a bit slowly. After some initial fursuiting I met up with Baloki later in the afternoon though to walk around the Clarion conspace for a bit, and as we were thinking about going for a late lunch we ran into Wolfie and invited him come along as well, making our way over to the food hall. I went for a salad bowl while the others had sandwiches, and as the beer selection there was much better than at the hotel we lingered for a while before returning. Later that evening was the con's "Afterbark" event ("relaxed" dress code), which thankfully was over in the Valhalla venue which meant that I didn't have to deal with any of the crowds or queues that inevitably accompany these things (I was in the Clarion and had no interest in any Afterbark activities). I was a little worried that the big event over in the other venue would drain the energy from the Clarion space but it was still busy enough to have a good vibe about the bar and conspace - as well as at the dance later which I suited up as Cami for, and was able to stay out for quite a while as they had a powerful fan blasting the dance floor that I could station myself in front of to stay (relatively) cool even while dancing.
Friday's main event was the "open house" when they allow (indeed, invite) the broader community to come by the con and walk around the main conspaces. This is always a fursuiting highlight, because there are lots of curious children and parents milling about fascinated by the big cute fluffy animals hanging out everywhere, and it's very easy to have simple and fun interactions with lots of people - and of course it was the same this year, both inside the con and outside (where it was nice and cold!) Later on was a "ferals" (i.e., non-anthro characters) meet in the early afternoon, which I decided to drop by for since this is a meet concept I'd been hoping to see at a con for a long time but had never actually ever seen scheduled. (Amusingly, in 2007 or so I remember seeing a flyer at a con advertising a "Feral party" but figured out later that this meant Feral the Ontario camping con, not feral characters.) I dropped by that and it was fine; chatted with some interesting people although didn't really follow up and maintain that connection. Ethan had attended the panel with me and he and I were lingering at the entrance outside after it ended, and while we were standing there people kept coming up to us asking if we were managing the Game Changer queue (Ethan was wearing his staff lanyard) - which we weren't, but as I had nothing else on I decided to go ahead and attend, and it was pretty fun (it leaned much more heavily on the improv show side this year compared to the game show side). Later on (after some brief fursuiting) I went to get dinner with Slycat, Zahzu and her partner Muse - none of whom I knew super well but we all were excited to get Indian food and everyone bonded really well over that. When returned the Grimnir concert was on, and with Baloki, Wolfie, and Lupe all planning on attending that I figured I'd give it a try as well. It was a lot of fun - heavy metal is not really my style but I appreciate its energy, and the old-Norse folk style of the band was a fun and unique aesthetic even if the combination of flute and electric guitar never quite "worked" for me. They also clearly knew who they were performing for, starting off the concert with the lead the lead guitarist wearing a "wolfskin" over his head but it was a cute furry-style wolf face. After that I followed Lupe, Wolfie, and some Berlin furs they knew to have a few drinks in the open space where the Artist Alley was taking place during the afternoon and remained there for a while, and then I returned the favor from Wednesday night by having them up to my room for a few more beers I'd brought from "home" to continue the conversation, until it became time for bed.
After breakfast on Saturday I went to my usual "special interest" meetup that was unusually scheduled in the morning ths year. Last year this was kind of awkward since I didn't really know anyone, but amusingly someone I'd met the previous day was there and since I actually had someone to talk to (and pull others into conversations with) I ended up sticking around until the end this time, or indeed even later than that. I wasn't in a rush, because unfortunately - but unsurprisingly - the fursuit parade through the city was cancelled on account of the rain that was falling, turning the snow outside into slush puddles. (Even though this was forecasted it was somewhat tragic, since up until that point the con had perfect weather for outdoor suiting - cold and dry). This freed up some time for other things though, so I did a bit more suiting, and made another run through the Artist's Alley (originally to pick up Baloki's sketchbook, but I also got another sketch from Zahzu after spotting that she had got a table for that day). That evening Lupestripe had invited me and some others to a mini pub crawl around Malmö. We started at Brew Dog at 5:30pm, moved on to a British pub, then tried to get into a nearby microbrew pub but they were full so we made our way to the Ukrainian Beer Bar, which served both Ukrainian beer and food so we stayed there for dinner as well (my first time having Ukrainan food). I returned to the con and the group dispersed, but I followed Wolfie to one of the side bars in the Clarion and hung out with a different group of his friends from VRChat for a little while (which included an Icelandic furry who was dating a different fur from New Mexico - which was a funny coincidence, even if the New Mexican fur wasn't actually there at the con). I got into suit and fursuited for the rest of the evening, hitting the dance until late.
The con felt like it has been going on forever by Sunday, but also seemed to be ending far too soon! I again met up with Karpour and his group to watch the closing ceremonies from their room on the TV, and then scampered off to my room to watch the Olympic hockey final (unfortunately the TV was not working and I didn't have an HDMI cable so I had to settle for watching a stream in Swedish on my laptop). The final was something of a best/worst case scenario for me, in that the two teams/countries I support (the US and Canada) were playing for the gold. This has been a dilemma for me since at least the 2004 Olympics (my dad, the one responsible for my interest in hockey to begin with, is Canadian, but I lived in the US for almost my whole life up to 2015) but I long ago decided to "follow my emotions" and support the US when it came to it (they are at least the underdog in hockey). This year that felt particularly conflicting, but sports isn't politics (or shouldn't be!) and in any case it was a fun game to watch, close the whole way through and the US pulling out an overtime victory despite being generally outplayed for most of the second and third periods. After that I caught up with Baloki and his friends downstairs and he and I then went to get dinner near his hotel. I then returned to the Clarion, where Karpour and Henrieke were hosting what was originally a small room gathering for Jackbox games but after an hour or so became something quite different when none other than Mausie (the original NFC con mascot) showed up and stayed around for a while, posing and playing around with the rest of us (and leading to lots of silly photos). Eventually he departed and things settled down a bit, and we had a good time for the rest of the evening.
And then today it was finally time to head home. I woke up a little before 9am, met up with Baloki and his friend at the train station, and we made our way to the airport. The flight was a little late and was just two hours, enough time to write most of this entry - the chipper nature of which is very different from my emotions as of when I finally got home at 5pm or for the rest of the evening, due to some things that happened on the train ride over and when I returned home. The explanation of that will have to be in a non-public entry.
