Month: February 2016

The last 11 days to me has been beyond anything I could of have expected for me. Life has given me something I now have to deal with all my life. I now have to deal with the fact, I now have heart disease. The currently I am taking 9 different kinds of meds a day to keep my heart stable and of course to keep me alive.
To how this happened even I am unsure, and now that I think of it there were warning signs. But don’t think I let these problems go for years. I am talking about somewhere between Feb 1 and 13 when I finally went to hospital. In fact the first of these signs could have been on Feb 4, a day when I helped a friend get home from the hospital after having surgery. I just felt really off after getting to the hospital. But I been going at it like I usually do, as I was an active guy. Going around places, doing things. I have been called a “Whirlwind of Activity” by a good friend.

I guess the next warning sign was on Feb 6th when I began getting stomach cramps, minor at 1st. That was when I thought I had stomach flu. So I do like I usually do and got a bottle of Pepto and the usual.
Despite what some doubt, I really didn’t start feeling bad until that Tuesday Feb 9, when I noticed the cramps were turning into pain and I was becoming short of breath even after a very short walk.

Okay I was stupid after that as I tried to tuff it out. Fight through everything. Which despite even a good friend saying my color of was off. I just ignored until the very early morning of Feb 13, when I had trouble breathing, and the pain in my stomach was at a point I couldn’t stand it any more. So I called 911 at 1:38AM
The hospital was about to release me until the took my EKG and found my heart was racing at 169 beats a minute and I was in A Fib. Also more like likely I also had a case of pneumonia.

So after 11 days in the hospital they finally released me yesterday.

It really did happen that way and one of the reasons I being so frank about this. Is because I went from a very healthy and very active man, to someone who now have to deal with the fact I have heart disease and just plain can’t over do things any more. Oh sure my doctors tell me I will be able to walk as much as I use to….but over time.

Also it is possible despite being vaccinated against it, still to get pneumonia.
Some thing I do such as host a meet, will continue and my volunteer job. But I can’t do either while I am on a fluid restriction like I am currently. I am limited to 1.5 liters total a day. Which I hope will end soon, but that is up to my new Cardiologist. You know what it is like being limited, it’s a pain in the ass.

Also wanted everyone to know I will making my regular updates after this. My plans are to continue this blog.

Be safe everyone.

BY ROBIN WRIGHT as originally posted on newyorker.com

In “Being a Beast: Adventures Across the Species Divide,” the Oxford don Charles Foster records his attempts to live as animals do—specifically, as a badger, an otter, a fox, a red deer, and a swift. The book, published in Britain last week, has caught on. The Financial Times calls it both “brilliant” and “bonkers”—“a strange kind of masterpiece: the song of a satyr, perhaps, or nature writing as extreme sport.” To be a badger, Foster took along his eight-year-old son, Tom, to better duplicate the creatures’ highly social lifestyle. The pair slept in a dirt hole and crawled on the forest floor and ate raw earthworms.

Foster’s obsession with “the exhilarating mysteriousness” of wild creatures began in childhood. “I somehow became convinced that they knew something I needed to know, but didn’t,” he writes. When he grew up, he became a veterinarian, a barrister, a lecturer in law at Oxford, and a father of six. But he also spent hours “diving under rocks in rivers, trying to learn more about the lifestyles of otters, or curled up in back gardens in East London, rooting in bins like an urban fox.” To prepare for life as a badger, a species with poor eyesight but exceptional powers of smell, he sniffed his children’s clothes, inhaled the odors of acquaintances while bussing their cheeks, and lay on the ground outdoors for hours. Dropped off in the Black Mountains, of Wales, he and his son burrowed a den, badger-like, for shelter. They became nocturnal, slithering to a river and lapping water using only their lips. For nourishment they foraged, scraping a dead squirrel off a road and flavoring it with wood sorrel and wild garlic.

The human quest to project ourselves onto the animal world dates to antiquity—Aesop’s Fables appeared in the sixth century B.C.—but in recent years anthropomorphism seems to have assumed a new form, spawning subcultures that cross an identity threshold. The “furry” movement, a kind of trans-animalism born in the nineties, holds conventions that draw thousands. “Furries are humans who find that their personality fits better with an animal than humans, and sometimes consider themselves spiritually aligned with these animals,” according to a schedule of the movement’s twelve conventions—in California, Texas, Virginia, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Michigan, and Canada—in 2016. The largest is Anthrocon, which celebrates its twentieth con-fur-ence, in Pittsburgh, this summer. “Membership is open to any and all who like to imagine what it would be like if animals could walk and talk as we do,” its Web site explains. Attendees aren’t required to wear fursuits, but many do, along with headpieces and tails. Europe has its own version, at Eurofurence, which marks its twenty-second year this summer, in Berlin.

On the Web, a virtual wilderness of humans tweet vicariously as bears, rhinos, owls, cobras, ferrets, snow wolves, mice, pigs, pandas, sharks, squirrels, fish, and turtles—to say nothing of cats and dogs. The results reflect a mix of curiosity, empathy, humor, and, often, an ineffable longing for the primordial purity, survival skills, or simple integrity of purpose that Foster describes. As a journalist, I found that tracking down animal tweeters could be otherworldly. Two of the most popular—@BronxZoosCobra and @A_single_bear—insisted on communicating only by e-mail, in animal character. Others didn’t want their human names disclosed.

The people I happened to reach tended to be job-holding professionals, and ranged in age from twenty-seven to fifty-one. They included ministers, staff at a major Washington museum, and a health-care researcher. One has a doctorate in Russian studies.

The first major animal tweeter, in 2007, was @sockington, who is modelled on an actual gray cat with white paws rescued from a Boston subway station. A sample: “NOW WHERE DID I LEAVE MY SLEEPING SPACE can’t find it OH WAIT I FIGURED OUT it’s the entire house SILLY ME hello sleeping space FLUMP zz.” Sockington has 1.3 million followers—about the same as Bernie Sanders. Sockington’s Twitter master, Jason Scott, is an Internet archivist. Scott said that some of the tweets are from observation, “but a lot of it was building a fantasy life living inside the cat.” Scott also tweets for two other cats—@pennycat, a blind ginger, and @sockelganger, a younger cat that he and his (now) ex-wife acquired. In their tweets, the cats refer to their owners as “Fatty” and “Food Lady.” Sockington, in particular, seems to enjoy parodying human presumptions about animals.

Other trans-animals include @common_squirrel, who tweets tersely—little more than “dig dig dig dig” and “hop” and “stare” and “blink”—but has almost a hundred thousand followers. @EstherthePig has attracted more than twenty-six thousand. @A_single_bear tweets ursine philosophy to fifty-six thousand and maintains a long-form blog at helloiamabear.com.

Some accounts sprang up spontaneously from animals in the news—an injured snowy owl nesting atop the Washington Post headquarters, a black bear on the grounds of the National Institutes of Health, a cobra that broke free at the Bronx Zoo—and then survived the news cycle. The snowy owl underwent a feather transplant and rehab but was hit by a truck two years ago, after being released into the wild in Minnesota. It still tweets, however, as SpiritofDCSnowyOwl, to some fourteen hundred followers. @BronxZoosCobra hit the Internet minutes after a young female Egyptian cobra escaped in 2011. She provided venomous commentary on her supposed adventures in Manhattan. “Leaving Wall Street,” she noted. “These guys make my skin crawl.” The cobra was eventually recaptured, but the account still tweets (“Eat prey, love”) to more than a hundred and fifty thousand followers. In 2013, CNN called the cobra account one of twenty-three key events reflecting Twitter power—along with the Arab Spring, the raid on Osama bin Laden, and the first tweet from space.

I happened upon a subset of animal-tweeting Episcopal priests. Scott Gunn and Sharon Pearce, ministers and spouses, tweet for their golden Labrador, @GeorgeTDog, in Cincinnati. “When we got George, a rescue, he was so full of energy,” Father Gunn told me. “It just popped into my head that if he had a Twitter persona, it would be fun to be him.” Gunn went on, “There’s so much heavy stuff happening in the world, and we need to have hearts of compassion, but we also need to laugh and play.” Gunn is part of a trio—with Episcopal priests in New York and Kentucky—who tweet for Mimi the Ferret and Nina the Horse. “It’s all clergy silliness,” he said. Anne Lane Witt, an Episcopal priest near Richmond, Virginia, tweets as Princess Pinky, @pinkypanda0823, in the persona of the National Zoo’s female cub Bao Bao. “It’s been really wild to see the friendships and connections that have come out of this,” she said. She interacts with Mary Lee the Shark and Reece Rhino.

Zoos have tapped into the trend. In 2015, the Chicago Zoological Society, in Brookfield, Illinois, published a report called “What Happens When Animals Tweet?” It ran a fifteen-month blind study of thousands of tweets about animals—popular species, such as dolphins, giraffes, and gorillas, as well as the less appealing Burmese pythons, anteaters, and wolves. Some were tweeted in the first-person voice of the animals; a separate set was tweeted by a naturalist speaking about the beasts in the third person. First-person tweeters garnered more followers.

Anthropomorphism is now a field of serious study. “It was treated historically as a stupidity,” Nicholas Epley, a behavioral scientist at the University of Chicago, told me. Descartes, in the seventeenth century, decreed that animals were automatons with no feelings and “were driven by the biological equivalent of springs and levers,” Kurt Gray, a University of North Carolina psychologist, notes in “The Mind Club: Who Thinks, What Feels, and Why It Matters,” to be published next month. “They might cry out, but that was only because of mechanical linkages, just as your alarm clock might cry out when morning comes.” Scientific thinking has since evolved, whether from the study of elephants mourning, the discovery that whales sing to one another, or the report of Koko the gorilla ostensibly communicating her sadness in human sign language—the words for “cry,” “frown,” “sad,” and “trouble”—after the death of her adopted kitten.

“When you look at who anthropomorphizes and why, you find it is a signature of our brain’s greatest skill, and that is to be hyper-social,” Epley said. It also seems to fulfill a human need. “Each of us wants to take a break from being a rational, serious human being and be like our fun animal nature,” Gray told me. For his bachelor party Gray’s friends took him to Anthrocon, the furry-movement convention. Or, as @houseofcubs, who tweets on behalf of the National Zoo’s six-month-old panda cub, Bei Bei, told me, “It puts us in touch with our own souls.”

Or so we like to think. In “Being a Beast,” Foster, after recounting his badger experiment with his son, ultimately acknowledges that they failed to cross over to the world of the creatures. “No matter how much we convinced ourselves that we were part of their world, we remained as far away as ever,” he writes. ”I did not feel the ‘otherness,’ that sense of leaving human experience behind to which I aspired.” In the end, he had to concede his own nature as a human: “I preferred my ideas of badgers and the wild to real badgers and real wilderness.”

as originally posted on theweek.com

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki insisted that his 2013 feature, The Wind Rises, would be his last. But the mastermind behind such beloved works as My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away is, in fact, back at the drawing board.

Still, he might not exactly be doing a lot of drawing, per se.That’s because the proposed short film (only 10 minutes!) will be Miyazaki’s first ever in a 3D CG format. This despite the director having claimed in 2005, “I think CGI has the potential to equal or even surpass what the human hand can do, but it is far too late for me to try it.”

Miyazaki’s new film will star a “hairy caterpillar” as its protagonist, Variety reports. While it is so far only slated to be shown in the Ghibli Museum in Tokyo, and will take an estimated three years to complete, don’t despair — that gives you all the more time to start planning your trip to Japan now. Jeva Lange

as originally posted on The Guardian.com by Kim Wall

Furries tend to get a bad rap as perverse fetishists when in reality, the subculture is about playful escapism and a fascination with what links humans to animals

Furry fandom, an obscure subculture united in their passion for all things anthropomorphic, can be lucrative business – because artisanal fursuits are haute-couture.

A single design can require up to 200 hours of work and sell for thousands of dollars. The business follows seasonal trends as well: one year it’s neon colours, the next grumpy-looking characters. One season, everyone wanted to be a sled dog. It’s all, of course, about the fur – even sharks, reptiles and birds are adorably fuzzy – and Los Angeles’s fashion district has stores devoted exclusively to hundreds of varieties.

Sarah Dee, a master fursuit maker, flies out twice a year for sourcing, carefully handpicking $5,000 worth of furs (a single suit requires about 5.5 yards), dragging it across town in giant bin bags to the FedEx office and then stuffing 30-inch cardboard boxes addressed to Colorado, where she tailors suits to fulfill the fantasies of fur aficionados worldwide.

Menagerie Workshop, Dee’s one-woman fursuit empire, caters to the full furry spectra, from hobbyists content with a pair of ears or a tail to lifestylers who go all out with role play like “scritching” (scratching and grooming).

Ranging from SpaceX employees to artists, her average customer is in their late 20s – in the “sweet spot” where they have enough money to spend but are not too tied down by family and work – though she’s made costumes for people as young as 12 (with parents’ consent).

To this day, Dee has brought more than 300 “fursonas” (furry personas) to life – including Baltoro the Fox, realistic with taxidermy eyes, hand-molded silicon paws and muzzle and digitigrade hind legs; Zeke the Hyena, cartoonish with hand-stitched stripes and airbrushed abs; and Blaze, a vixen with flirty eyelashes and curvaceously padded chest.

“What draws people in is that they can create this character which is a better version of themselves,” she explains. “It’s fun to just be silly, to use your imagination. To not have to conform to what people think being an adult is like.”

A spirit animal of sorts, the fursona can be just about any real or mythological creature the individual feels connected to. Dogs and big cats never go out of style, though hybrids like “folves” (fox + wolf) and “drynx” (dragon + lynx) are catching on.

New costume makers enter the market every week and fursuits gets ever more advanced: at an additional cost, jaws can move, tails wag and eyes light up with LED-lights. No two creations are alike, though most can be machine-washed and kept shiny with a few strokes with a pet brush.

With more than 40 creations lined up, 2016 is already fully booked.

Stereotyped as less innocent than they look by mainstream media, furries tend to get a bad rap. A 2001 Vanity Fair article brought up both bestiality and plushophilia (sexual attraction to stuffed animals), and defined furry fandom as “sex, religion and a whole new way of life”. The show Entourage presented a pink bunny fursuit as a sexual prop, and in CSI-episode Fur and Loathing in Las Vegas, furries are portrayed as fetishists mainly in it for the “yiff” – furry porn or sex.

“We researchers are horrified by that stuff,” says Kathleen Gerbasi, a social psychologist who has researched the furry community extensively. “Because it really doesn’t represent the reality we see in the fandom.”

In her experience, people have either never heard of furries or they have a wildly distorted idea of it. As a result, fur fandom have become far more stigmatized than other similar nerd niches, such as anime and cosplay.

When Dee made her first costume – a bear, out of couch cushions – eight years ago, she was reluctant to be associated with the community, even as an artist. “Even I had some preconceived notions of like, ‘Gosh, furries are a bunch of deviants; kind of weird,’” Dee remembers, laughing. “And I still have questions.”

Even today, Dee, who quit her advertising job in Denver in 2012 for full-time fursuit making, doesn’t use her real name for business.

“I do think ‘fursectution’ is real,” says Gerbasi (who does not identify as a furry), using a portmanteau term referring to perceived persecution of the fandom from outside elements. “And I think it’s because people are afraid of things they don’t understand.”

She recalls last year’s suspected hate crime at Midwest Furfest in Chicago, which was evacuated after chlorine gas was leaked into the conference venue. Last year, she came across Facebook posts of people claiming they would bring guns to Anthrocon, the world’s largest furry convention, and personally alerted FBI.

For Samuel Conway, a professional research scientist and chairman of Anthrocon, the skewed image of the furry world is explained by its defiantly personal/introvert nature: whereas all other fandoms are consumers of properties put out by studios, authors and networks, furries invent their own idols.

“Furry fandom is unique among fan cultures in that we are not consumers, but rather creators,” Kage explains. “Star Trek fans are chasing someone else’s dream. Furries create our own fandom.“

Unfortunately, Conway explains, the public tend to be very suspicious of things they don’t understand, with an inclination to presume it’s in some way perverted.

“Furry fandom is not now – nor has it ever been – born of a sexual fetish,” Conway insists. “There are no more or fewer persons of alternative sexuality in our fandom than anywhere else.”

If anything, that cliche may be rooted in the community’s inherent tolerance and proud reputation as a safe space: furry fans may simply not feel the need to hide who they are when they’re among friends who won’t judge. He cites comic book historian Mark Evanier: “Furries are fans of each other.”

“People don’t realize it, but the whole anthropomorphism is very mainstream,” says Gerbasi, who spearheaded the multidisciplinary Anthropomorphic Research Project, which has studied about 7,000 furry fans from all continents, except Antarctica (which actually had a small furry gathering, too). While there are certain demographic trends – almost 80% are male, many work in science or tech, with a disproportionate share not identifying as heterosexual – the data, by and large, shows no indication that furries would be psychologically unhealthy.

“Cartoon animals have a universal appeal,” says Conway, who fursuits as ‘Uncle Kage’: a samurai cockroach. “A love of animals and a fascination with the idea of them acting as we do transcends most national, geographic and religious boundaries.”

While the fursuits are the most visible, they only make up only about 20% convention-goers, Conway adds: the rest are performers, writers, puppeteers, dancers, artists and “just plain old fans”.

For a minority, however, it is more than that: 46% of furry fans surveyed by Gerbasi reported identifying as less than 100% human – with 41% admitting that if they could be not human at all, they would. Twenty-nine percent of them reported experiencing being a “non-human species trapped in a human body”.

The parallels with gender identity disorder, upon which the hypothesis was modeled, were striking: much like some transgender individuals report being born the wrong sex, some furries feel a disconnect with their bodies, as if they were stuck in the wrong species. The condition, which Gerbasi et al labeled “species identity disorder”, had a physiological component too, with many reporting experiencing phantom body parts, like tails or wings.

Gerbasi still has no answers to why these individuals feel they’re not human, but stresses the importance for health providers to take them seriously, and without the ridicule that sometimes afflicts even her own research.

As the furry scene continues to grow – last year’s Anthrocon attracted 6,348 visitors – the fans hope for greater acceptance.

“I want folks to realize that we are not any special breed apart, if you’ll pardon the pun,” says Conway. “We have scientists, lawyers, physicians, firefighters, soldiers, police officers, schoolteachers, construction workers, custodians, musicians, journalists – just about anyone that is likely to pass you on a city street may well be a furry fan.”

Dee too, who remains at sidelines of the subculture but frequents conventions to advertise her business, agrees that the tendency to make furry fandom shorthand for sexual paraphilia is utterly misguided.

Throughout Menagerie’s history, only one client ever asked for a suspicious alternation – a zipper between the legs – which Dee agreed to at $1,000 extra, adding that if he ever down the road needed repairs (otherwise offered at $40/hour), she wouldn’t work on it, “because that’s gross”.

For most, Dee believes, furry fandom is more about escapism than anything else.

Slipping into a fursuit can be catharsis – allowing an otherwise shy and reserved person to transform into someone, or something, else – if only momentarily.

“People seem to find a family and a friend group there – people who like them for who they are, and for who they wanna be,” she explains. “Maybe the character is this really buff tiger guy but it doesn’t seem to matter the person is a shorter, overweight, typical nerdy-looking guy.

“They put on that costume and they just become someone completely outside themselves. It gives them anonymity to just, you know, be who they are and act how they want.”

as posted on rainfurrest.org

AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE ABOUT RAINFURREST 2016

Hello Fans!

As many of you know, RainFurrest has been in search of a new venue since October of last year. We have discussed and explored facilities in many wonderful areas, finding options with a number of excellent venues in Greater Seattle and western Washington state. Our hard-working hotel team has fought for every possible option that would suit what our fans want out of RainFurrest. Tonight, the last of those options has closed to us.

It is our sombre duty to inform you that our efforts to locate a viable convention and hotel space for 2016 have not been successful. We do not feel any additional options will present themselves in time to successfully plan and hold the event. As a result, the Rainfurrest Anthropomorphics International’s Board of Directors has voted to not host Rainfurrest in 2016.

We appreciate your support through a very challenging transition, and we extend a sincere thanks to everyone, especially our staff, who devoted their time, effort, and thoughts to us. We will continue to work on future locations and dates and we will return when we know the situation is right for our fans.

We will be issuing further details regarding refunds and other remaining issues in the near future. Please wait for more details before contacting us about this. If you have any questions or comments about the decision, please email board@rainfurrest.org or ask on their new twitter feed, @RAInAnthro.

Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to seeing you all in the near future!

as originally posted on inquisitr.com

Amsterdam has a hotel that’s dedicated to gamers. Called The Arcade Hotel, the establishment offers gaming consoles as one of the primary facilities that’s extended to the patrons.
Europe now has one of the first gamer-centric hotels located in Amsterdam. The Arcade Hotel, as its name suggests, is a hotel that has been designed specifically for gamers. Players of all ages, provided they are legally allowed to rent a room or accompanied by their parents, can find everything gaming related in the lodging. Interestingly, not just the new-age gamers, but those who grew up in the golden years of gaming too, can find something they like. This is because alongside modern games, the hotel also features classic gaming consoles.

The Arcade Hotel opened its doors to the public this past weekend, reported Slashgear. The opening ceremony included local gin tasting, street food and an outdoor FIFA tournament. The hotel is located in the De Pijp area, which is slightly away from the primary reason Amsterdam is famous as a tourist destination. Apart from the standard amenities one expects in a hotel, the lodge includes rooms that offer retro gaming console, which are included by default in the overall package.
Hotels across the world have never considered gaming consoles as a must-have addition to the rooms. If you are persistent and provided they have one lying around, they might allow you to rent a console, at an additional cost of course. Across the world, gaming consoles are considered as a luxury, which the hotels may extend to their patrons, but The Arcade Hotel has as many gaming consoles as it has rooms and then some. Moreover, the gaming consoles aren’t charged extra. Speaking about the establishment, the hotel’s owner Daniel Salmanovich had the following to say.
“I am remodeling this hotel into a special place for people who love gaming. I wanted to create a place where travelers and gamers feel like they are staying at a friend’s home.”
Besides a gaming console in each room, there’s a large lobby that allows gamers to play multi-player games and hold small tournaments. Besides a large number of handheld consoles too, the lobby hosts an impressive collection, no, library of comic books. The vast assortment of comics with an equally large genre can keep a gamer occupied in case he or she needs to take a breather from gaming and aching fingers. The library includes comics from Dark Horse, DC, and many more publishing houses.

As originally posted by Neobunny Lapine on Fb

Giraffe update: Zarafa recieved a text around 5 pm tonight, but he was stuck up in Santa Rosa at work until late, so called me.

One homeless lady we had handed the flier to last night had shownher friend the flier. Her friend had found the fursuit in an ally on sunday, and hung on to it.

They called us, and we arranged a meetup in a very public well lit space (inside DNA pizza). I got there early, so let the manager know i was meeting some unkown people with reward money, just in case anything went down.

20 minutes late, they showed up, and legit! There was the purple giraffe in a black trash bag, wet and a little musty, missing a hand and foot paw, but there (no case either). Gave them the reward the flier promised, plus 2 sleeping bags i had in my basement i hadn’t used in forever, and bought them a large pizza. Talked for about 25 minutes while the pizza baked, listened to their stories of the streets, and gave them a bunch of hugs before we parted waysz

While who knows who broke into the car, not all people living on the streets are bad. If not for these two, the fursuit would not have been recovered. Most likely it was ditched after the real theif saw it wasn’t electronic gear he could quickly sell.

The fursuit is in my bathroom now, its a little wet, so key to dry it so it doesn’t mold, before Zarafe can make it down hers after work, and the fursuit can undergo a proper cleaning and look over to see if any repairs are needed.