2026-06-10 - entropy and the ultravox prism

Getting sappy about a furry convention, who would have thought.

We've... lost a lot of friends over the years. A handful due to health issues taking them long before their time, but most simply due to drift. Someday we stop talking and we just. Never start again. I don't know where they are now, what they're doing. If they're even still alive.

While we're vulnerable to "speak when you're spoken to", many of those cases involve platform closures. The scars of snouts[.]online ^[1] imploding still impacts the critters who put their trust in this Fediverse thing one of the first times Twitter truly got too bad to bear, ^[2] and they got burned hard for it. Tumblr's NSFW ban. Cohost's closure. Twitter's takeover and the understanding that - even if the new owner were somehow arrested or deposed - it will never be the same again. Whatever the fuck new moderation policy Bluesky has implemented this week seemingly by dartboard. Each of these scatters critters to the winds, again and again. We've found many of them, in some way, since - but we cannot know how many are just... gone from our lives now.

We spent this past weekend facing the spectre of that once more, in simulated form.

This is a post mostly about Furality Ultra. But it is also a post not about Furality Ultra.

furality ultra

For those who do not know, Furality Ultra was an online furry convention held in VRChat from June 4th - 9th, 2026 - themed around a fictional video game console released in 2006, relying heavy on Frutiger Aero style aesthetics and the use of holograms; the present's view of the past's view of the future.

hype and hyperbole

We've attended every Furality since Feb 2023's Luma Festival. It is fair to say that for multiple reasons, Ultra was the one we were least hyped about after the theme was revealed.

18+ age verification was made mandatory, immediately locking a lot of critters out who were unwilling to submit to having their ID or selfies be processed by a shady third party. ^[3]

Part of what we enjoyed about previous cons was the experiences created were like very little else in VRChat - but there are a lot of Frutiger Aero themed worlds that we've ended up having hang outs in, as well as game themed worlds (both original and of questionable legality).

While we likened the aesthetics to if Sega had continued making consoles into the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, there was also something a bit... Fisher-Price about them. ^[4] The clothing suggestions caused consternation too - again, past cons featured styles that would be basically never seen on avatars at any other time, while it feels like most VRChat avatar outfits for sale on platforms like Jinxxy are already techwear themed, just now they'd need brighter colours and more emissions. And also, these are just video game avatars, without the pretense of dressing like the residents of somewhere.

But the biggest theme-specific issue for us was simple - a lack of emotional connection. At IRL cons, our connection to the theme is generally minimal - we don't read the lore in the conbook and when 80+% of attendees are just in t-shirts, we don't feel the need to do much differently. But for Furality, the ratio is flipped; the majority of attendees (that we've met) do make some kind of effort, even if it's as simple as grabbing a public avatar from the extensive Dealer's Den - and that in turn does make us think "ok, what's our role in the story being told here?". ^[5]

I'll admit, I'm the one mostly driving on this.

2006's view of the future is an aesthetic, not a story. It banks on nostalgia for a world that did not end up happening - nostalgia that many attendees do not have and without the full separation of time granted to something like Fallout's 1950's retro-futurism - and that is only one aspect of Fallout.

i just want to start a flame in your heart

Perhaps it had been outright said before elsewhere, but this marketing skit/skeet was the realization of what we'd missed. The connection was in the sudden loss of connection; the final hours of Halo 2 as no one wanted to be the one to log off or have their console crash. The same conundrum that we now know faces friends who play Destiny 2.

With that, our role was set; Null Patch rebranded as a cracking group that had done some work during the console's earlier life and was coming back one last time to preserve what they could. It's a little cringe! But it lets us be free. No one else had to know the specifics.

Because we suspect this may be read by at least one VRChat employee, we must stress that this was for role play purposes only when designing avatars; there was no interaction with the platform outside of the official VRChat client and Furality's interaction with the API.

And the con happens. And it was wonderful. And we got to do things we've never done before - like being part of a pack of critters petting the DJ as the credits roll on their set. A friend requested we take part in a documentary, although I don't know if we'll make the final edit. We saw things that can never be done at any IRL club we know of like watching a giant monster fight a holographic UFO.

Some personal disasters meant we weren't in as often as we might have liked - and at the wrong times for some of the critters we care about most. But that was a reason to forge new connections.

We must offer our thanks again to everyone that makes Furality what is is, every staff member, everyone who has ever volunteered their time, effort and energy, all the DJs (particularly the ones we didn't get to thank in person or were too shy to say hi to), everyone that's used their knowledge of IRL stage lighting, drone shows and more to replicate those experiences (with similar if not the same software in most cases - sometimes with modifications to allow for the physically impossible). We can only hope that there's less crunch and less day 1 patches next year.

And of course, then everything ends.

connection terminated

In some way we thought that our lack of hype would result in less emotional devastation once things were all over.

But one by one, more reminders that This Is It; that this fake console we didn't know or care about the name of a few months ago and it's mascot we'd learned about less than a week before was dying.

We teared up at a lot of these, but started bawling at the final one, the moment when it was truly over.

attachments (in the stoic sense, not ILOVEYOU.EXE)

There is no better reminder of what you have than to think as if it were suddenly gone. And entropy makes it inevitable that everything will die eventually; the messaging platforms we see as ubiquitous today will someday go the way of MSN Messenger and AIM. We have seen how easy it is for social media platforms to be purchased and for every ounce of goodness to be sucked out until only a husk is left. Furality, VRChat, even Steam itself, in the fullness of time will all be abandoned. Hopefully that is many, many years away, and there will be good alternatives to all of these when that happens - but they will not and cannot be the same.

And of course, someday the people and critters we love will all leave us too, by one method or another.

This weekend was an important reminder of that. A simulacrum of the hardships we've all faced before and will inevitably face again, and to cherish the fuck out of what we have while it is still here.

If you've made it this far, take a moment and send a message to someone important to you. Someone you maybe haven't spoken to recently, but would miss. No platform can live forever, but a properly maintained bond can at least potentially last a lifetime.

Rest in peace, Ultravox Prism. You've done the job you needed to do.

further reading

• frostywoofs - the fragility of virtual spaces

footnotes

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1. I have no idea what's at that URL now and do not advise visiting it. ↩︎

2. This far on we've forgotten the context and we're writing this one from the heart, not the head, so we're not looking it up. I think it may have been when Twitter's cryptobro owners started pushing Non-Fungible Tokens back when that was the big environmental disaster to be worried about. ↩︎

3. Living in the UK, I've already had to verify so many times that I'm just assuming our passport has been stolen repeatedly at this point, what's one more time? ↩︎

4. I suppose this is appropriate given how many friends have been more willing to let their inner child out recently. ↩︎

5. To the extent of writing personal lore documents/fanfiction for 2024's Umbra. Some of these were posted on Cohost and so now fairly inaccessible unless you know where to look; the after-con one was never posted. ↩︎