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Utlimately, my goal is to build a living, breathing world. Not by writing a bunch of 500 page books, but rather by building it almost blog like in a way. There will be larger articles that go into an event, shorter articles on different characters within the world, a bit on their history and their role within the world, and then shorter articles yet as newspapers that will come out once a month, and will get into events in, as of now, 6 plot lines running in tandem. Eventually those shorter articles will become longer and longer thus the sort of living world idea.

This will be run as a website, which will be free to read through. I plan to make no money on this, unless someone really wants to throw a donation or two at me. All the artwork that will be available will be paid for by myself (I have an artist who has done work for Marvel and a number of other comic book companies who will be doing the artwork). All the bandwidth, the hosting, the design, everything will be paid for by me.

Now, as for a bit of backstory: I am going to give you the Reader's Digest version of the beginnings of the world:

Two gods were created with the soul purpose of creating a new world. They were given the ability to visit any world in existence, and continue to have that ability despite being living beings in the world (No sky fairy here, as r/atheism might say). They travelled to hundreds of worlds, some developing, some developed, and found a deep fascination with humans, despite the fact that at the time we were crawling out of caves and just figuring out that if you stick a sharp rock on a stick you could kill something quicker with it. They saw great promise in humans, but they saw a fault: The animals around us had more strength in some ways than humans had. Thus, they combined the two, the abilities of humans with the strength of animals and the first paws walked upon the land.

The gods continued to monitor humans checking on their progress for thousands upon thousands of years. They watched the myths form, they watched the human's gods come and go. One set of myths most intrigued these two gods, and that was those of dragons, gryphons, the great beasts. Now, at this time, there was no way for long distance travel on the Crystal Islands, nor was there a great need for it as at the time the land was small and the residents were not a huge number so as to not over-burden the land. The gods brought dragons into existence, though on a smaller scale then the myths talked about, and with that gave more land to the residents, and the residents began to spread apart.

The gods then, as they began to expand the world, began to look over the Earth's many varied regions, from the deserts, to the great jungles, and began to replicate some of those as they expanded. They avoided the extremes as they did not feel it fair to have their creations end up in the frigid cold of Antarctica, nor the extreme heat of the great deserts. Thus, the population grew, and set up homes in many regions. The gods also, around this time, decided to give magic to their people. Not what Pagans practice, but magic as it was in the tales. One child was born with innate magical ability, and grew with an innate ability to teach that ability, and thus the first of the two schools was created: The massive magic school which sits upon it's very own island and takes up 30-40 acres of land.

And there I end this tale. I have given enough backstory to explain a bit about the world, yet I leave out the juicy events that occur between these events, and after these events. I have what would be the equivalent of 4 500 page novels worth of stories for this world, and the process of taking them from the notebooks, and bringing them digital is a slow one, slowed down by having to work as well. It is also a great feeling to bring them to a form that can be saved away safely. The process of building the backend to support such an idea is also a slow one, but it too is making process. TLDR: Read it.

submitted by brianbommarito
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Hello! :3 I need some help redesignig my fursona, the current one is a mix of wolf and husky, but I dont know, it doesnt look that nice, I made it some years ago and I think his colors are too dark for my preferences, so I been thinking about making a new one, I think something feline would fit me better, so I am thinking about making a canadian linx fursona, except that I would like something which has bright colors (something white... maybe a few stripes but mostly white) and with sapphire colored ear or hair (http://www.colorcodehex.com/0f52ba/), just that I dont know if that will look right, a canadian linx with blue ear (hair), or maybe someone has a better idea or something which would look better ;).
Sorry for my bad english

submitted by AnonPie
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My boyfriend agreed to let me make him a furrsona and dress him. I have a few ideas of what I could do but I would love some other ideas.

His favorite colors are blue, black, green, and white. I was thinking of a fluffy cat or fox because he loves cats. There has to be a long/longish fluffy tail, fluffy ears and a color with a bell on it(bell could be optional in some cases).

I'm really existed he's letting me do this and I want it to be perfect and what other way to get that than to ask for help.

Help would be very much so appreciated!!!

EDIT: It's not a fursona! it's just a furry look for him to try out and see how he like being furry. I just put the first thing that came to mind and it was fursona. But I still want to make it as much like him as possible.

submitted by Dlanly
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Pm me and ill add you or something.

submitted by RanninWolf
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submitted by Dopey3
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submitted by VentKazemaru
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submitted by ScorpiosAlpha
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submitted by Rentonn78
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submitted by FedoraFacedShitBeard
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Cantrip The Magic Rabbit is an on-line “anthropomorphic comedy” black & white comic created by “the popular Furrlough duo of Shon Howell and Phil Gibson” (according to the publishers). Here’s the description: “Strange things are happening in Templarsville, Oklahoma. The students at Julius Schwartz Memorial High are abuzz about the new girl, Candice Tripp. They say there’s something unusual about her, possibly unnatural. Of course, the fact that she was discovered in an abandoned house outside of town with complete amnesia lends itself well to these types of fanciful imagination. With her new friends, Candice will learn what it’s like to live in a normal town, until her very un-normal past comes back to haunt her!” Now Radio Comix are releasing the collected Cantrip The Magic Rabbit as a softcover graphic novel next month. You can find out more about it at Second Ed.

image c. 2013 Radio Comix

submitted by Riley_Coyote
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submitted by ImAYenaOnTheInternet
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submitted by XiamTheFox
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TigerTails Radio Season 7 Episode 35
TigerTails Radio Season 7 Episode 35 From: TigerTails Radio Views: 0 1 ratings Time: 02:14:35 More in Entertainment

hey guys, does anyone know if there are any furry guilds in the new game defiance?
thanks!

submitted by MercenaryZ93
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submitted by Husky117
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Hello r/furry! Recently, I have accepted myself as a furry after many years of denial, and decided to share it with my friends. While most of them understood, one of my friends asked me: "What is a furry exactly?" I sent him a link from the sidebar of this reddit but he refused to look at it. Honestly, I don't know how to explain what a furry is, while I understand the concept, I can't put it into words. Can I please get some help with this?

submitted by TandT89
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submitted by Whozjama
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Death is important to us. When a furry dies, we—as a group—react strongly.

Following the death of a furry, there is often an outpouring of grief. Much of that grief is from furries who have never met the deceased.

Here’s the first comment on Flayrah’s news post about the death of Lemonade Coyote (link), a well-regarded but not especially well-known American furry:

I don’t know the guy, but I’m sorry this happened and I’m sorry for his family.

This comment is typical of the sentiment expressed by many furries in this sort of situation. It’s heartfelt, it’s sweet, and it’s clear that the commenter has been personally affected by the death of a stranger. The only thing that our commenter and Lemonade Coyote have in common is that they are both furries.

It’s unlikely that our commenter would be similarly affected by the death of a non-furry. This is not to say he would be cold-hearted, just that he is less likely to be personally affected by the death of, say, a fellow college student (that he had also never met). As has been discussed in [a][s] in the past by Makyo (Death in the Fandom), there is something about the interconnectedness of our furry community that makes death affect so many of us so greatly.

I think that there are a couple of reasons why death is so important to us as a group.

For starters, furries are young: about 90% of us are younger than 30 (ref). And like any group of young people, furries are more inclined to spend time with peers rather than the wider community.

We live in a world where our social choices, at least outside of high school, are dominated by urbanization and the internet. We are able to socially discriminate more than at any other time in human history: we can choose to hang around with people of similar interests, similar culture, similar socio-economic background, and similar age. Most of us are not required to participate in a community dictated by proximity, such as in a 1600s village, or a tribe.

This shift in the way that humans form social groups began with the Industrial Revolution, just 200 years ago (the blink of an eyelid in evolutionary terms). It is the cause of significant challenges for many people in today’s world. We share our living space with an overwhelming number of people. Because we can only manage a limited number of social connections, we must be choosy. This process of exclusion makes it easy for someone to feel lonely despite being surrounded by people, or to be rejected from a social clique.

I’ve written previously about how society can be alienating (Furry as an Alternative to Religion). I believe that furry provides a rare social environment that is based on inclusion. It’s one of the great things about furry: everyone is welcome by default. Our culture is more in tune with the idea of community as a whole, compared to the wider world.

Our close community means that we may be personally saddened by the death of another furry, even a stranger. We have lost one of our own, and we know that the death will be felt keenly by other furries.

It doesn’t help that furry deaths tend to be sudden. This is due to our demographics: largely young, and largely male.

The leading causes of death among young men in the United States (ref) are (1) Misadventure (or ‘unintentional injuries’, perhaps from a car accident) and (2) Suicide. This is how furries die too.

Death through misadventure and death through suicide are relatable for most of us. We may have done something stupid, or otherwise been in a situation that placed ourselves at risk. And all of us—yes, all of us—have had suicidal thoughts. We can personally relate to these causes of death, and it’s natural for us to fantasize about them.

When we fantasize, when we fixate on death, we are experiencing a mortality crisis. We fantasize about how the moments before death must have felt, we fantasize about last thoughts, we imagine how we might have acted in the same situation. We find death (when it’s relatable but not so close that we’re overcome by grief) to be engaging.

We sometimes feel bad for being engaged by death. We read through last comments on FA, or Twitter, or Livejournal, and try to picture the subsequent events. And then, sometimes, we feel remorseful, as if our reaction were disrespectful. But our reaction—the mortality crisis—is normal, and normally positive.

In the non-furry world, the death of a celebrity can cause a similar outpouring of grief. Despite the celebrity being a stranger, many people feel compelled to express their personal reaction; perhaps in a comparable fashion to our commenter on Lemonade Coyote’s death, or perhaps in a more overt way. Such expressions of grief are sometimes pathologized: people assume that the griever imagines a personal connection with the celebrity. Such behaviour is sometimes compared to stalking.

FindAGrave (www.findagrave.com) is a website where people can leave comments, virtual flowers, and nauseating animated gifs by way of remembrance. As an example, the amazing screencap below is taken from James Gandolfini’s page:

In this case, it’s easy to assume that these commenters are delusional (along with many, many, many others on FindAGrave). But I don’t think that all those who feel a strong connection to Gandolfini are confused over whether there was a real relationship. It is simply that Gandolfini was well known, so it’s easy to fantasize about his death.

Gandolfini’s death provoked a minor mortality crisis in some people, just like the death of Lemonade Coyote did for some others. Public memorials like FindAGrave (or the comments sections on Flayrah) provide an avenue to express that feeling. Such comments are mostly about the writer, not the deceased.

It’s rare for us to think about the inevitability of our own death. Our innate ability to avoid thinking about death is probably an evolutionary trait. Life would simply be too stressful if we were to consider our own death when engaging in risky activities, like crossing the road. So on the rare occasions where death comes to mind, it can provoke a strong and unexpected reaction—a mortality crisis.

A friend of mine recently witnessed a pigeon’s death. He heard it crash into a second-story window, and watched as it twitched and died on the pavement below. It took around 15 minutes to die as my friend stood transfixed, unable to pull himself away from the grisly spectacle.

He told me that he felt ashamed by his compulsion to watch the pigeon’s death. He described feeling queasy and stimulated, almost excited. In hindsight, he judged those feelings as ‘wrong’, that he should have been less curious, or more respectful. But there is nothing wrong with his feelings. They are the same ones that provoke an emotional response when we read about the death of a furry, or seek out footage of fatal accidents on the internet, or watch clips of the September 11 attacks.

Oliver Burkeman, a British journalist who writes on mental wellbeing (here), argues that thinking about death is healthy. The prospect of death—that of our own or of a loved one—puts the value of life into relief, and can remind us of those things we find valuable. Burkeman suggests that we should take time to consider the inevitability of death. It’s a kind of small, planned, pre-emptive mortality crisis.

I agree that this is a healthy way of managing the spectre of death, and we can learn to live life in a more enjoyable fashion if we are able to consciously acknowledge mortality.

From a linguistic point of view, I think that the term ‘bucket list’ is aesthetically ugly. It’s a clumsy reappropriation of an anachronistic metaphor, ‘kicking the bucket’. But from a philosophical standpoint, a ‘bucket list’ is a good example of Burkeman’s principle in action. We have a limited time on Earth, and the thought processes involved in compiling a personal wishlist can help us broaden our horizons. As always, we make ourselves happy through personal improvement: physical, mental, spiritual.

Furry offers great opportunities: opportunities for travel, for personal relationships, for new experiences. A furry ‘bucket list’ might include a visit to a large convention, or a trip around the world to meet a close friend. Such goals are rarely easy, but they are often achievable for someone who is motivated. Consideration of death can add purpose to life.