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(This is a throwaway account mostly because I wanted to ask questions without fear of being known by peers just yet)

I am not relatively new to the concept of anthro animals andthings, (2006-on), but I am only now starting to poke my nose into the concepts of what being a furry is, and had some questions.

• What does it truly take to consider yourself a furry?

I draw animals, I write, but I don't dress up in those costume things and I have absolutely zero-interest in the porn-side of things, (lack of sexual interest)

• Where, (if an area exists) would I go if I wanted to be apart of the community if I didn't want to be involved with yiff and whatever else it goes by?

I assume there will be hints of it pretty much anywhere I go, but I was wondering more of suggestions and stuff.

• If I am to create an account on the furafinity site, what do I need to expect and how do I tell people I know I am using that site now?

I've told my friends about peaking interest into the site once and they old me to be careful of smut and some really freaky people, but I figure I can deal with it if there are blockers and whatnot.

• Is there any way to ease myself into the fandom?

I honestly don't want to just jump in and be thrown into a river of drama and accusation, so I was wondering if there is anyway to both ease myself to different areas of the fandom, and/or ease the idea of this to myself

• Will there be snacks?

These are the questions..

Thank you for your time, and I am sorry f I have either offended you or have just pissed you off for making a post on a throwaway, I am still myself not so comfortable about the fandom, (also mobile version, yay)

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Thinking about getting a bunch of furs together to talk because bored. so comment or pm me your email if you want me to add you.

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Bark bark!

Ardent Furvour is an upcoming Australian furry convention. Our inaugural event is set to take place just around the corner in June.

The emphasis of the con is sex-positivity. That means that we aim to create a space where people feel safe and comfortable in embracing the connection that exists between furry and sexuality. This applies irrespective of your background, whether you're a freshman furry or the greyest greymuzzle; completely comfortable with your sexuality or still learning where you stand; lesbian, gay, straight, bi, trans*, asexual, or anything in between or completely outside. We want Ardent Furvour to be a safe space for everyone, and the more diverse our crowd, the more successful it will be.

We created AF in response to a rising trend of sexual repression within the Australian furry fandom. We believe that sex and sexuality are fundamental to how we interact with and relate to one another as people, and that shame and silence around these issues is damaging and dangerous. The focus of AF is to combat that shame and silence by fostering open, honest, and safe discussion around sexual identity. Over three nights, we will realise this goal primarily through structured discussions and workshops ("confursations"). These activities will be orchestrated according to the Open Space Technology format, which describes a type of "unconference". Essentially this means that, instead of a large selection of pre-arranged panels and presentations, our talks will take place as group discussions, the topics of which will be decided and voted on at the beginning of the con itself. This helps to keep the con relevant to the interests of the attendees, and also promotes group involvement in the discussions.

Of course, we're still a furry convention, which means plenty of time bouncing around in fursuits! We've got a separate stream of recreational events ("anthrotainment") scheduled, to embrace the lighter side of the fandom. This year, we're running with a 90s theme, which means discos, retro video games, Saturday morning cartoons, a bouncy castle, and loads of contests with fantastic prizes. We've also planned a day trip to the stunning Healesville Wildlife Sanctuary, which is just a short walk from the resort motel which we have fully booked.

If this sounds like something you'd like to get involved with, great! Head over to our website, ardentfurvour.com to register. We look forward to seeing you there!

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Author: Higgs Raccoon Peanuts, the much-loved comic strip by the late Charles M. Schulz, is set to become a 3D animated movie. The movie, scheduled for release on November 6, 2015, is being made by 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios. The writer is Brian Schulz (the grandson of Charles), and the producer is […]

So as a recently new furry, What can I do to make friends and use my talents to help others in the furry universe? Whats the best way to get out there!? :D

edit: Music production and graphic design if you are wondering.

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It's me again, and I finally get to show you what I do. It's easy enough for artists and writers to explain themselves, but I'm a musician of just under a year's producing experience, and here's my House/Drum n' Bass hybrid track (I combine genres in weird ways).

It's not perfect, but I did make a one-off version for this example.
SOLAR WIND (FUR SHORTMIX)

My main influences lately are Wolfgun, Fox Stevenson, Pendulum (of course) and whatever I hear around me.

I won't paste links for everything, but if you like me and/or my style be sure to look out for my Change of Fate album coming for free this year. It will have fully mastered cool tracks like Spirit Animal, Sundown Sprinter and Given Us Wings.

Anyway, sorry if this seems long-winded or self-centred, I just think this is a good way to show my hobby and personality.

Thanks guys!

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I see almost everyone Leaving to Weasyl what's going on is there something on there i don't know about?

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I self-published my first ebook, Grounded last September. Since then, it's been getting some pretty good reviews! But I'd like to get it out and known more widely. (Particularly because I'm nigh-finished with the first draft of its sequel.) So that's why I'm giving away .pdf copies of the book for free.

Yes, there's a bit of a catch. In exchange for a free copy, I'm asking that you mention the book and share the Amazon link on the social media of your choice - twitter, facebook, myspace, google+, whatever it is that you use. I also ask that when you're done reading, you post a genuine review to the Amazon page. I'm not looking to persuade you to give me a falsely glowing review - I'd like you to rate my work based on your genuine feelings about it.

If you are interested in receiving a free copy of the book in exchange for a review and a mention on social media, please send me a private message with the email address that you would like me to send the pdf file to.

Thank you for your interest.

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Guest post by Thesis White. Thesis is a writer-artist, cognitive science student, and peachy dalmatian who loves creating their own discourse. (Thesis is on Twitter and FX.) This is their second article for [adjective][species].

“That is their [animals’] happiness: they see all life without observing it. They’re buried in it like crabs in mud. Except men, of course.” ? John Gardner, Grendel

We each cite different reasons for identifying as furs, which range from childhood exposure to cartoons to simple sex appeal. However, in a psychological, cultural sense, that doesn’t tell us much about the underlying function our fursonas serve in our lives. Why do we like putting ourselves in furry bodies and characters?

In order to answer this question, I propose we examine the phenomenon culturally, similarly to the way we would think about monsters. These creatures, having existed in culture for thousands of years, have riddled our literature and oral tales; the oldest surviving text in the English language is Beowulf which tells of the monster Grendel, depicted right. Egyptian gods and Greek monsters go even further back.

At the most basic level, furs and monsters are visually similar. Both contain distortions of human and animal bodies, and both are imaginary. Both were culturally crafted and designed, and may have features that appear frightening. However the most important similarities are what they say about the culture that created them.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, the Director of the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute at George Washington University (who can actually be found on Twitter), wrote a book of essays in 1996 called Monster Theory: Reading Culture, and in it he argues that monsters (and by extensions, furries) are reflective of the norms of different cultures. They represent the boundaries we draw around what is acceptable behavior and identity by existing outside of it, and ultimately drawing us to explore those borders of possibility. Allow me to break this down;

In his first essay within the book, which is titled Monster Culture (Seven Theses), he breaks down his theory quite eloquently. Not all of his theses are relevant, so I don’t discuss them in this article. (A short, concise explanation of the text is available here.)

His first thesis is “The Monstrous Body is Pure Culture”. By this, he means that monsters like griffons or zombies do not randomly appear, but they are reflective of the times and places they represent. Aliens are a relatively new concept that came into popularity with the rise of space exploration, and they reflect our fear of the possibility of non-human intelligent life. We humans are an advanced species, and simply being able to escape our home planet naturally leads us to question if other species on other planets also had this ability. This is a frightening concept, and thus was born aliens, green, bug-eyed entities to physically embody people’s anxieties.

His third thesis is that “The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis.” In each society exists norms and standards for identity and behaviors that each classification should enact. Monsters simply represent the distortions of those categories of personhood, “suspended between forms” (Cohen 6), having a place both in two concepts and at the same time, being neither. An easy example would be Frankenstein, who was neither fully dead or alive. He smashed the boundaries between the two by becoming reanimated, having some qualities of a human being (compassion, rage) but also close to being dead (stitched together body parts). When this happens, “[monsters] demand a radical rethinking of boundaries” (6) that forces us to come to face our conceptions of any boundaries, and not just death.

He later stipulates that the concepts that monsters border are usually “political, racial, economic, [and] sexual” (7). A political example would be in the United States’ history; colonists justified their westward expansion and settlement on Native American lands by making the Natives into monsters. They were described as irredeemable savages due to their non-European culture and their place on the land that the colonists wanted, thusly justifying their nothing short of horrible treatment. The Greeks often told the story of Queen Pasiphaë and the Cretan Bull, where the Queen slept with a bull and afterwards birthed the Minotaur, a man-monster born through the violation of borders around human sexuality.

Consider how taboo bestiality is today, which may be similarly embodied in Greek culture by satyrs. Most people wouldn’t ever imagine that sex with non-humans would become morally acceptable. I am not here to argue the merit of that taboo, but to note that there has been a real, significant impact of stories like this one. You may decide for yourselves what borders sexuality should or should not have, but know that monsters, as Cohen would say, “[Police] the Borders of the Possible.” We are limited in our conceptions of life, death, sex, race, and more by what creatures we chose to embody in our moral grey areas.

However, a peculiar thing has happened in recent history; that which bumps in the night has suddenly become friendly. For decades now, we’ve made those same monsters laughably funny, icons of brands, friendly, and even sexy. Between Young Frankenstein and Teen Wolf, we’ve gained a sudden interest in exposing what monsters mean for us. Could a werewolf be attractive, or a vampire romantic? Cohen’s sixth and seventh theses focus on the fact that, in truth, we desire to break down barriers of what we can be or not be, we enjoy questioning our assumptions about life and everything because we find more meaning by doing so.

Furries are caricatures of humanity. Our characters sprung from a long history of anthropomorphics, yes, but we learn about ourselves by fetishizing and personalizing furs. We enjoy their large, cute eyes and kind-hearted, warm personalities. Yes, they can have nicer bodies than anyone that’s ever lived, but what are we really exploring when we create fursonas – monster representations of ourselves? I have two theorized, possible borders that I feel they break down and force us to consider. Please note that these does not represent furrydom, a large spectrum of concepts and ideas, in its entirety.

The first grey area is hypersexuality. Today, with the rise of easy access pornography and the destigmatization of certain sexual practices (homosexuality, some fetishes), we are freer than ever before to explore sexual possibilities. However, there are cultural forces in place that prevent us from exploring entire areas of sexuality, like whorephobia, the taboo of beastiality and more oscure fetishes, the fear of non-monogamy, even the idea that our sexuality is non-dynamic (eg. we feel that someone is and always has been gay, straight or otherwise without acknowledging that it could change). We punish socially those who try to move outside of these confining views; the straight majority of the world stigmatized homosexuals by claiming they had started the spread of HIV, some even citing is as a plague brought down by an angry God for the violation of his strictly heterosexual ways. Furries break down this barrier by serving as non-STD bearing, attractive, and happy, blatant promiscuity, even blurring distinctions between natural conceptions of human-on-human sex.

The second and more obscure possible border is evolution. We as people who trust in scientists’ judgement are currently faced with conflicting ideas. Humans assume themselves to be above and more important than animals, but evolutionists claim that we are born from them and that the only distinction between humans and animals may be language and the complexity of our societies. What if we are acting on animal instincts, and that our modes of behavior are inherited? What does it mean if we do in fact agree that we are just evolved monkeys? (You can see this fear directly in Planet of the Apes.) Who we are and how we act varies by culture and context, but (loosely defined) scientific fact dictates that we are products of a genetic game, and that suggests that we may be no more significant than, say, our dogs. I’m not making a claim to an answer, but it’s possible that our obsession with furry creatures represents our interest in the fundamental differences between humans and the organisms around us. We quite literally embody ourselves in hybrids of humans and mammals, reptiles, and more. Our scales and tails ask us to question what it means to be distinctly human.

While these may be two of the possible borders where furries (and monsters) exist, we need to realize that there are more. Hiding underneath the veneer of pleasure we experience from our furred experience is the terror of category destruction as felt by outsiders aware of us. If we try diving into what our furry selves mean, we could discover more about ourselves and the subculture that the paleofurs began to create for us.

I am doing emergency commissions to be able to take my bearded dragon to the vet monday. She is infested with mites and needs to be checked for worms as well.

I have done 3 of 4 already taken commissions, and need to fill the other 6 slots. Thank you for taking the time to read this.

To take slots you can comment on my FA journal: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5640733/

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I think I might be a furry (well sort of. I don't feel like I'm absolutely one but I also really like the idea of it). One of my main problems is I don't feel comfortable acting a like a furry even on my own because I'm afraid that if anyone finds out, they'll be mean to me. So... how have you guys been treated?

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Hi Papabear!

First, I’m sorry for my bad English. I'll try to do my best though. So, I thing I have a really weird problem. I love furries since I was 14 (something like that), but I’m afraid of animals. I can't even approach a dog, or I have to control myself. My question is, is it normal to be like this? I'm a furry, I love artworks about it, and I can't touch any animals. Isn't it a shame for someone like me?

Thanks in advance, it's really bothering me...

Naokami

* * *

Dear Naokami,

This is a new one on me, really. One of the traits of every furry I have thus far met is that they are animal lovers. There must be something you like about animals—their fur, their tales, wings, snouts, something—that attracts you to them, otherwise you would not be a furry.

Yet the disconnect between reality and fantasy is not unique to you. For example, many a young girl falls in love with her collection of plastic horses, but get her near a real horse and she screams in terror and runs away. I love bears, but I certainly would not want to stand face to face with a real grizzly in its natural habitat. Same thing, likely, with all those wolf furries out there who, I would bet, would be most uncomfortable hiking in Montana only to come across a pack of real live timber wolves.

Those are cases, of course, of wild animals (except for the horses). You say you are afraid of all animals, including dogs, cats, pet birds, even fish? One possible explanation is that you have had a traumatic past experience with a pet. You don’t mention that, but it is also possible that it happened when you were very young and your mind is suppressing the experience. It might not even be a real-life experience that triggered the fear. For instance, a lot of people came to fear sharks because of the movie Jaws, or big dogs because of the movie Cujo, or rats from the movie Ben.

Sometimes, too, fears are just in your head for no reason. The very definition of phobia is “irrational fear.” Some pet phobias include:

• Cynophobia: fear of dogs
• Ailurophobia: fear of cats
• Ornithophobia: fear of birds
• Ichthyophobia: fear of fish
• Ophiophobia: fear of snakes
• Leporiphobia: fear of rabbits

and so on...

And, of course, there’s my favorite, Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders. I don’t exactly pee my pants at the site of the spider, and I’m fine with most of them, even tarantulas,  but I totally freak out at the sight of a black widow spider. That’s not really an irrational phobia, because I know someone who was bitten by a venomous spider, but I do understand how an animal can make your skin crawl. It’s a good thing you don’t have Maskaphobia, or, seriously, the fear of masks, because then you’d never be able to go to a furry convention.

Why people fear some specific things is not always well understood. If it is not caused by a traumatic event in the past, it could be a learned behavior from your parents or other family members, for example. There might, in some cases, even be a case for genetic memory. That is, for example, our ancestors learning that some snakes were venomous and becoming afraid of them and that fear somehow being encoded in our brains over generations. This might seem a good explanation for some fears, such as snakes, falling, wolves, etc., but not for others, such as the fear of cheese (Turophobia) or the fear of beards (Pogonophobia). If you have the latter, don’t look at me.

Your fear of cats and dogs could be a manifestation of ancestral fears of such things as wolves and lions—a stretching-it hypothesis. I would vote that, more likely, it has to do with something in your past or a learned behavior.

Like all behaviors, the good news is that you can unlearn it. The basic approach is to face your fears in a controlled, step-by-step manner, gradually exposing yourself to the thing you fear in a safe environment, and slowly increasing your exposure to it. Here’s a useful explanation of that: http://www.wikihow.com/Overcome-Phobia.

Perhaps your interest in the furry fandom is you unconsciously trying to get over that fear in your own way. You know, many furcons donate money to animal charities. You might try going to a furcon—an environment where you would feel safe and surrounded by people you like—and talk to the people at one of those charities and look at the animals they often bring with them. Tell them about your phobia and see if they might not let you touch or pet one of their animals. Doing so under the supervision of a pet handler might make it easier for you.

So that is the long-winded response to your question. While fearing animals is not a hugely unusual phobia, it is quite uncommon among furries, but the good news is that you can overcome your fear if you really wish to.

Good luck!

Papabear

Author: Papabear, I had a close friendship which ended acrimoniously. I’ve accepted that it’s over, and I just want to move on. But I can’t do that if I keep being reminded of him. We’re both part of a certain furry subculture. As such, I keep seeing his name pop up in comments, or other […]

So i'm looking for some dutch furs I can't really seem to find them though.

Skype : coliaon ( this icon https://31.media.tumblr.com/99ba91ddfad5fd416d0740ed93ed48d0/tumblr_n38218ycXq1s1gwlzo1_1280.jpg)

kik & steam : cuddlypants

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An extensive and thorough reference guide concerning mythological creatures and spiritual beliefs like otherkin.

In their words

Therianthropes.com is the expression of our love for animals and the desire we have to save our planet and unleash all the other species, existing, extinct and imaginary. It is not too late so let’s get together!

Rating

Suitable for all ages. This site has no offensive content.

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The creator of Tiny Titans is branching out in a funny animal direction now, as Art Baltazar and his friends bring us Captain Action Cat: The Timestream CATastrophe, a new full-color 4-issue comic miniseries starting this month from Dynamite Entertainment. Check out this promo from Comic Book Resources: “From the Eisner and Harvey award-winning, New York Times bestselling famous cartoonists Art Baltazar and Franco comes the crossover epic event of a lifetime! Finally, Captain Action Cat meets Action Cat and the characters from Aw Yeah Comics! Also crossing over with Dark Horse Comics characters such as Ghost, X, Captain Midnight, and The Occultist, this series promises the typical zaniness that the creators of Tiny Titans are known for. True story! In Captain Action Cat: The Timestream CATastrophe #1, there is something evil out there and Evil Cat is determined to find it… even if it means searching throughout the Silver Age to do it!”

image c. 2014 Dynamite Entertainment