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submitted by SamuraiDDD
[link] [43 comments]

submitted by lyssinator
[link] [11 comments]

I saw this on Twitter... this shows some interesting stuff!

http://www.citylab.com/design/2015/03/where-the-furries-are/387160/



Where the Furries Are

You might live in a hotbed of people named AssassinWulf and Keenora Fluffball and not even know it.
Furries! Perhaps you've run into these animal enthusiasts, bumbling around in bulky costumes that are half-sports mascot, half-animatronic musician from Chuck E. Cheese's band. Or maybe you are a furry, in which case I say greetings, Zume Frostpaw, Jasper Nightlynx, AssassinWulf, or whatever your "fursona" name is!

Folks wanting to spend more time with furries—or less, due to an irrational fear of cartoon foxes entering the physical world—might be happy to know there's a tool for tracking them called the "Heat Map of Furries World-Wide." Made with geolocated data on nearly 7,500 furries, the bestial atlas uncovers dense clumps of rainbow hair and giant, anime-style eyes in the United States, Mexico, South America, England, and Germany ... oh so many furries in Germany. (Guten tag, Schattenwolf, PolarbaerInu, and Keenora Fluffball!).
direwoof

But perhaps we should back up a minute and answer the question, "What's a furry"? Somebody who commented on the map explains it this way:

Furries, in a nutshell, are big fans of Anthropomorphic animal characters, usually to the point of having their own character (fursona) that they use as an avatar in the community. Furries are first and foremost a community, which is what draws most of them I suspect. It's a place where you can create an idealized or fantasy version of yourself to interact with others with. That snowballs into tons of art and interaction shared amongst the group. Conventions are huge (here in Pittsburgh we have a big one, maybe the largest in North America?) There is a big sexual element for many, but not all. Furry Porn (yiff) is common, and less-common is fursuit sex. (Fursuits, unsurprisingly, are costumes of furry characters).

How did the person who made the heat map, Reddit's direwoof—who has not responded to a request for comment—learn enough about this elusive tribe to map it? Does the government tag and track furries in the manner of whales and grizzlies? Anything is possible these days, but this map is actually based on user-submitted profiles on another "Furry Map" made by a Germany-based coder. That's caused some critics to complain it's presenting a skewed version of the world's true furry distribution.

And they do seem to have something of a case. "Yeah, one look at Japan told me how wrong this map is," notes one commenter, referencing the Land of the Rising Sun's rising furridom. Another skeptical commenter figured "there has to be at least 1" furry in a state as large as Texas. (If there is, it's gotta be Toughset the Armadillo, who "can roll up in a ball... but prefers not to, due to lack of coordination.")

But much of the map appears accurate if we can assume furries, like so many subcultures, clump up in urban areas. "I live in Orlando, FL. I can confirm there is a dense population of Furricus-Sapien," says one dude. Another person adds: "As someone who lives a ferry ride away from seattle I can unfortunately confirm."

Here are a couple closer views of earth's packed furry dens:

submitted by ant1991331
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submitted by kesherz
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submitted by TalkingRaccoon
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submitted by Wierd657
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submitted by Penny_Arts
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submitted by FreeThinkerComic
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As someone who played the first game, I was pretty exited for the second one. It really puts you in the position of the mother and can really scare you at times.

This game can be true eye opener to the unforgiving side of nature. I have just been playing it and on my first play-though and one of my cubs got taken away by wolves. Needless to say I was traumatized.

Hearing the howls for the first time really sends a chill down your body.

The artwork is gorgeous and the level design can be breathtaking.

Here is a link to the website and steam store: http://www.mightanddelight.com/index.php?page=shelter2 http://store.steampowered.com/app/275100/

submitted by Kiwinbacon
[link] [3 comments]

I can feel the mall cops descending on them.

Also! Since when do they let animals in the mall?

submitted by SomeonesBirthday
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PM me to be added to the Skype group for University of Western Furries.

London, Ontario, CANADA by the way.

I'd very much appreciate it if you could upvote this even if you don't go to western as I need as much visibility as I can get. The UWO subreddit immediately downvoted my post into oblivion, and I'd like to actually for once have a place to spring things from. Furries in London are very shy, and there seems to be absolutely no indication of any furries here, but I know there are!

submitted by Ketturen
[link] [10 comments]

So, after seeing myself post similar comments in recent days about fursona tips and such, I decided to make this a fun challenge for myself. I'm still a couple weeks away from much free time (commissions), but this gives me time to work on it at work.

I'm going to post a series of images, basically a concept process with tips and stuff in making sonas/characters. It may also focus on hybridizing, and keeping a character from looking like one species had wings slapped on.

But this is also just about me getting some fun practice in. After all, I love me some monsters.

So here's where the request comes in. I need people to comment with species. Two species is preferred, but one is okay, and three is maximum. If it is gonna be one species, just list a few things that you like: animals, colors, foods, plants, hobbies/sports.

The comment I chose will be the one I draw up and make a character out of. You'll be able to keep the character, do whatever you want with it, and get a free ref sheet of the character out of it.

submitted by Sareii
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Odd question, I know. But I am a sucker for cyberpunk where the theme of "uncanny valley" (coupled with transhumanism) is recurrent and it seemed like a good place to ask about "almost but not quite" humans.

A character plunges into the uncanny valley when it looks human-like but you unconsciously know it is not, resulting in an unsettling feeling of creepyness.

My personal pick is the entire "Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence" movie. Gynoids with partial human ghosts, humans transfered into mannekins and a 'protagonist' who has lost her humanity long time ago. It is hard to watch this movie and not feel uneasy most of the time.
Same applies to GITS as a whole but Innocence takes it to eleven.

submitted by fa_mirror
[link] [10 comments]

I could use some help from you guys, I'm trying improve myself at drawing pixel art, and if you could send me some commissions I would be glad. I can even try drawing your animal selfs for those little reddit pictures near your usernames!

submitted by PeterShakur
[link] [7 comments]

On 7 December 2014, the Midwest FurFest hotel was evacuated after an apparently intentional chemical attack. No culprit has been identified to date, but many furs reasonably assume that the attack was motivated by anti-furry hate.

We at [adjective][species], endlessly furry-positive as we are, have been the subject of quite a few impotent and easily ignorable threats since we started back in 2012. Some of them have even suggested that furries should be targeted by chemical attacks, such as in this Encyclopaedia Dramatica thread (from January 2014):

It is, of course, incredibly unlikely that there is any connection between Encyclopaedia Dramatica‘s teenage rage and the MWFF attack 11 months later. Hate is common; attacks are rare.

Internet hate, on its own, does little harm. And while it’s fair to say that perpetrators of violence are more likely to engage in hateful speech on the internet, the corollary is not true, at least not significantly. It is not fair to assume that hateful people are more likely to be responsible for a physical attack.

This reasoning is the same as the suggestion that video game violence leads to real-world violence. While violent people are more likely to enjoy violent video games, it’s wrong to suggest players of violent games are any more likely to be violent than the general population. Similarly expressions of hate cannot be assumed to lead to hateful acts.

There is a loose connection though, and it’s an important one. Expressions of hate, especially when there are many of them, create an environment that normalizes hatred. It is in this environment that real-world threats develop.

So while our teenage peanut’s intolerant ejaculation counts for nothing on its own, in combination with dozens of similar discharges it creates the impression of a genuine anti-furry community. This facade of community encourages the small fringe of people who may actually do physical harm, making them feel their acts are justifiable and righteous. Our hypothetical MWFF attacker(s) would undoubtedly lurk or contribute in such circles.

This doesn’t mean that people who perpetuate hate are responsible for the actions of a tiny majority. However they are, unwittingly, contributing – a contribution that would be easy to condemn if hate weren’t so easy and seductive.

Hate creates a sense of belonging, an illusion of fellowship. A community can coalesce over any shared interest, even something as intangible as shared hatred for some ‘other’. While hate-driven groups vary wildly (and can even be objectively right or wrong – you might consider both of the extreme ends of the vaccination ‘debate’ to be largely driven by hatred), they always have a few things in common, such as:

• Members of the group feel that they are in the right, or at least righteous.
• The group is self-reinforcing, which means that they look internally for confirmation of their thoughts and actions, rather than externally. This is sometimes referred to as an “echo chamber”, a phenomenon that occurs when you surround yourself with people who already agree with you.
• The group is primarily defined by what it is “against”.
• The focus of the hatred is thought of as a monolithic entity with a common goal, rather than a collection of individuals.

These features mean that those who disagree with the hate group will tend to be belittled and immediately discarded. Anyone who has come across hatred online will know that there is no value in trying to reason with the group.

Hate-driven groups fail when they are exposed to individuals from the target group. This destroys the collective group delusion that there is a monolithic “enemy” that must be fought.

One example of this phenomenon is the decline in homophobia in the United States. It’s a good example because there has been a pitched battle in recent years over whether same-sex couples should be denied the right to get married, and there it’s lots of data on the topic. (An objection to same-sex marriage doesn’t always equal homophobia, but it’s a close-enough correlation for my purposes.)

There has been a big shift in public opinion away from denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, a change which has created an environment where more gay people can be open about their sexuality. The correlation is no coincidence: of those people who have changed their mind about same-sex marriage, more than half have done so because of “cohort replacement”, which is researcher-speak for “I didn’t know any gay people before, and now I do”.

What’s striking about this result is that there is little indication that people have been swayed by reasoned argument. Hate-driven ideology doesn’t tend to change in the face of facts.

Counterintuitively, there is evidence that the opposite occurs: opinions tend to become entrenched and more extreme in the face of reasonable counter-argument. Research has consistently shown that when someone has a strong – but demonstrably false – belief, attempts by others to correct that fact tend to fail, and may in fact increase the confidence in the false belief.

One study on the topic looked at political beliefs. It showed that people on either end of the ideological spectrum—conservatives and liberals—would change their mind about a falsely-held belief only if the change supported their pre-existing views. Conservatives retained the belief that WMDs had been found in Iraq (they have not), and liberals retained the belief that President Bush had banned stem-sell research (he had not). Only these groups, those with an extreme ideological position facing facts contrary to their position, would fail to be corrected.

Political ideology is very different from a hate group, but the lesson is the same: there is no value in attempting to directly correct an apparently false or misguided belief. On balance, such attempts are probably counterproductive. There is no point attempting to reason with an anti-furry.

Worse, attacking or attempting to correct hate-driven groups can easily lead to the creation of new hate-driven groups. It’s easy, and reasonable, to become angered by hate, and counter-hatred hate groups can show all the internal camaraderie, righteousness, and outwards negativity of the targeted group. Predictably, all such groups do is create conflict and entrenchment of everyone’s pre-existing opinion.

I used a political example earlier because I know that there will be several readers who fall to the relative extremes of either side of the political spectrum. The rest of us will probably be able to think of a friend who are so inclined. And you can bet that many of the conservative readers will insist that WMDs were indeed found in Iraq, and that many of the liberals will insist that Bush did indeed ban stem cell research, even though both positions are provably wrong. (Perhaps members of each group will say something like “even if it’s not technically true, it’s still essentially true”.)

I make this point because hate isn’t about true and false. It doesn’t matter if your argument is correct: your facts are unlikely to make a difference.

But you can make a difference by following the example of rapid change in American attitudes towards same-sex marriage. Exposure to positive counter-examples does lead to positive change.

I would suggest: look at the way you spend your social time. Some of that time will be positive, some will be neutral, some will be negative. If you hold a strong, personally-important opinion, consider ways you can reduce the time you spend negatively, and increase the time you spend positively.

As individuals, we all have a small responsibility towards society, and we can choose to make our impression a negative or positive one.

Hating something is easy. Hate is juvenile. Hate is natural. We all feel it to some extent. It’s a product of our evolution as social beings, of members of a race collected in tribes or villages. We are driven to distrust, fear, and hate the amorphous “others”, a Darwinian survival strategy we have encoded into our DNA and social structures. But in our modern interconnected world, it’s a destructive strategy of parochialism, hate, and bullying. You can see it in action in any high school.

Liking something is difficult. You may attract haters. If you are vocal about liking furry, you may attract anti-furries. But for every vocal hater there will be people in the background, silently listening and thinking and learning and appreciating.

Simply being positive and visible, when and where you can, makes you an ambassador for your beliefs. And every idea needs positive ambassadors – the most visible ambassadors, especially in fringe communities, are rarely the best. Just look at furry.

submitted by fa_mirror
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submitted by opnast
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