Every furry convention canceled forever

Thousands of speechless furs stared in shock at their blog feeds early this morning as their favorite annual events bit the dust. All furry conventions worldwide are canceled.

"We are very sorry for the inconvenience and disappointment this will undoubtedly cause to our attendees," reads the parting message from Furry Weekend Atlanta chairman/CEO Tiger Paw, who cited a declining economy as the cause of the convention going under – despite apparent success and relatively favourable media coverage of this year's event just two weeks ago.

All other events are reporting that operations will cease immediately for one reason or another.

The furry community erupted with noise and excitement in response to the news. One long-term fan expressed his frustration: "What shocks the hell out of me," tweets SilverLemur, of Detroit, "is that all conventions threw in the towel at EXACTLY the same time."

Indeed, in a downright spectacular coincidence, each con delivered the bad news at exactly 12:03:00pm GMT.

"I'm baffled. All of these events were incredible experiences for me. I wouldn't have missed them for the world," laments Herpaderp Jones, who claims to have attended every convention ever, including those which ran concurrently. "I have a lot of money and patience, so I would visit RCFM on Friday and then fly up to FA: United on Saturday."

Other conventions had their own reasons for splitting the scene: "We have been struggling with a great amount of internal strife and feel it would be best to go on a permanent hiatus," explained a Califur staffer on her LiveJournal.

One event is looking for a more profitable audience: "We're bored with the non-profit stuff. The overhead involved in running Anthrocon is massive. Hence, we're replacing the event with Qaplah'Con, which will provide a necessary income for our devoted staff. Don't ask us why, but the Star Trek fandom is where the money is."

ConFuzzled's head of convention operations Graafen Blackpaw explained the U.K. con's departure, which echoed that of RBW a few weeks earlier: "We couldn't possibly top last year's fun, so we decided to quit while we're ahead. You can't have too much of a good thing."

From Megaplex chairman YappyFox: "We couldn't possibly top Confuzzled last year, so we're just giving up. We can't compete with that level of awesome." When it was pointed out that Confuzzled is on another continent, is half the size, and had just announced its own closure, everyone just sort of shrugged and said "Meh."

In Connecticut, FurFright is closing up shop facing a lawsuit with the RIAA for playing an obscure song during a masquerade skit. In Canada, every hotel with reasonable enough prices for the target demographic has been suddenly struck by lightning or fallen into a sinkhole. And in California, Further Confusion's chairman has spontaneously combusted.

FCN, scheduled to run next weekend in Novi, Michigan, didn't state an immediate reason. When asked privately, one staffer is reported to have shrugged and stated "Everyone else was doing it."

Finally, Furtastic closed its doors before even bothering to announce that a new up-and-coming convention was was on its way. Why the team cared to register a new domain name for the nonexistent event and trouble the community with its brief "Hello-and-bye-forever" announcement is unclear — and likely to remain a mystery.

Editor's note: Every furry event closed at once? Spontaneous combustion? This story was almost rejected for being too obvious. Apparently not!