It’s been so many years since we last visited Craigmillar Castle in Edinburgh. So when Jade Tatsuko arranged another trip we jumped at the chance for cute photos with friends in an amazing location.
With Convoluted, Xelphie, Sammi, Alisairie, Peachiepig
Photos by Jade and anonymous friends
In 2019 @PeachyPig made me a furry moose Yui. A few years later I was able to show her off at Glasgow ScotiaCon 2022, then ScotiaCon 2023. So I was really looking forward to Confuzzled in 2024 and it was so much fun.
We had discos, an inflatable room, a hoofers meet, and much more!
Photo credits on each photo.
The year started out with my second trip to a Furry convention, ScotiaCon in my hometown of Glasgow. Furry Yui had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to going again in 2025. After some easter pics at home we headed out to Mach2 for some fun photos with my disco LED ears. For RaiCon we took Coconut and Maple from Nekopara who are always recognised and well loved.
A trip to Canada to play with a super large amazing train set, then a long drive down to San Francisco to take part in the Folsom street fair. Among all the black leather I really stood out in a cute pink latex dress.
The year ended with the UK Christmas Meet with some great photos in the snow and swimsuit photos inside.
Thanks to all my friends, helpers, photographers, for making this a memorable year.
I love LED sound reactive things. And by that I mean properly sound reactive, not randomly flashing like a wedding DJ sound rig, but reacting to the bass beat. I previously made a skirt that did this, and a bag, and even updated a pair of cat ear headphones. For GFB I wanted to make it more seamless by making cat ears for Yui that attach and don’t need a headphone band.
I’ve been using a hardware spectrum analyser in the past because it just works great and doesn’t need any complex microprocessor to do real time audio capture and FFT. To be fair these days the ESP32 is more than capable of fast DMA audio capturing and FFT (WLED has some interesting sound reactive code but it would need a little tweaking), so it was just quicker just to use one of the boards I had previously designed and had made and already built for the cat ear headphones and just update my existing code.
The first step of the project was to design a suitable sized cat ear in Fusion 360, this took much longer than imagined as that software has a bit of a learning curve, especially when wanting to make more organic shapes, fit over a curved kigu head, and have covers that clip over the electronics. The final design has an inner part we can stick the LEDs to and an outer cover with a 1cm air gap to give some reasonable diffusion. (For even better diffusion, wow_elec_tron does some amazing work on figuring out the best LED diffusion using 3d printed channels).
I had some addressable LED strips left over and cut up to give 13 LEDs per ear. Adding more LEDs, using 35mm ones instead of 50mm, would give a better density and allow more fancy animations, but this was a deliberate trade-off: in a dark environment you want the ears to be noticable, but not so bright they are annoying to others. And I wanted to make sure I could get at least 3 hours of run-time including running a cooling fan for the mask from a small rechargable battery. I use a good quality phone-bank style battery based internally on a 18650 cell to minimise the risk of issues having a rechargable battery close to your head (I’ve had enough LIPO problems not to want those anywhere near my head).
The final setup for GFB is shown above, with a small switched fan for mask cooling. The battery power splits to the right ear which has all the electronics, and the left ear which just has LEDs. A third (yellow) wire links the two ears to pass on the control to the LEDs in left ear. Threaded inserts allow the inside section to attach with M4 screws through holes in the mask, and the cables run through the wig. A small switch pokes out the side of the right ear allowing mode changes. The covers clip on and were painted to match brown hair. Originally the plan was to glue the covers onto the inserts, but it’s easier to attach the ears without the covers, and we can always change the covers later to add furry ones or even latex ones. Finally a small clip (not shown) was hot-glued into the mask to take the battery.
The code is just updated version of the one used for the skirt (will update the github code in the future), with the switch allowing cycling between off, a photo mode (which just slowly changes colours without flashing), and several beat mode animations.
Photo: Heinrich v. Schimmer, www.schimmerandsisca.de
Its hard to take video at an event without getting other people in the background, and you also get copyright music. See the start of this post for a demo with my own music.
In May 2023 we went to the German Fetish Ball week in Berlin. It was so much fun doing it in 2019 so I kigged at two events, the river cruise and the main ball on Saturday night, and it was a lot of fun. Before it got too busy I was able to get in some dancing on the dance floor, then watched the fashion show before heading outside for some cool river air.
It was amazing to spend time with old and new kigurumi friends!
Photo credits on each picture. Original Dress by Black Sheep Latex.
In 2019 @PeachyPig made me a furry moose Yui. A few years later I was able to show her off at Glasgow ScotiaCon 2022. So I was really looking forward to going back to ScotiaCon 2023 and it was so much fun.
We had a disco, an inflatable panel, a hoofers meet and much more!
Looking forward to ScotiaCon 2023!
Photo credits on each photo.
The year started out with my first trip to a Furry convention, ScotiaCon in my hometown of Glasgow. Furry Yui had a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to going again in 2023. After some easter pics at home we headed out to Mach2 for a dance party and to help with tea service. Redflare500 (twitter) made some amazing art from the event.
Next came MCM London with a small stage performance as Bang Dream! with friends. This was a lot of fun. We also went to MCM Birmingham later in the year and did a Sailor Scout group cosplay, with e being Sailor Jupiter. Also in the year a windy trip to Whitby for the Goth Weekend, a summer meet and wrapping off the year with a Christmas meet.
Thanks to all my friends, helpers, photographers for making this a memorable year. Photos in this set by Jade Tatsuko, Mermaid Fenicia, Cloud Tied, Amity DeWolf, Jackie Izumi, and Grimly.
We rented a house near to Whitby so we could attend the Whitby Goth Weekend in October 2022. It was a lot of fun to be Darkness Yui. After getting lots of pics around town we went to the steam train station nearby and got some great pics with the trains.
Photos: Jade and Grimley
In May 2022 we went to MCM ComicCon in London and met up with some Kigurumi friends. My first outfit was a pink cosplay from BanG Dream! Pastel*Palettes. Next I did my original IF from Hyperdimension Neptunia. It’s always fun cosplaying Iffy as she has a lot of pockets to store my phone and wallet. On the Sunday another BanG Dream cosplay as Maya, this time with Jade and Helenako as matching band members and where we did a little performance.
In 2019 @PeachyPig made me a furry moose Yui. A few years later I was able to show her off at Glasgow ScotiaCon 2022. It was my first fursuit convention and it was so much fun.
On the first day I wore my steampunk/gothic map dress and corset belt and took pictures of the squinty-bridge and Clyde crane. I tried being a concierge, but it’s hard when you can’t speak. The best part was meeting so many cute floofy fursuiters.
That night was the disco and wore a cute sparkly lycra outfit and holographic shoes and had a little dance.
Saturday I wore my orange-red maid outfit and had fun in the rain, inside the hotel, and in a room full of inflatable toys.
Looking forward to ScotiaCon 2023!
