Tag: Perri Prinz

Today, as I watch the next round of stupid accusations being set up against The Furry Raiders, and I see them hoping I’ll be at the ready to explain why they have nothing to do with what they’re being accused of, I think there’s something else I need to write about first.

I need to write about the state of the internet at this moment in time and how the common modern mindset absorbs information and produces opinions. Because, if any of my readers are working with the logic that was standard 10, 20, 30 years ago, odds are you’re not going to believe any of the stuff I see happening is real. I find it hard to accept myself. But I can’t deny it because I’m in the middle of it, and thus not in a position to look away from it.

First of all, here is a new law to add to your internet memes. “Everyone on the internet is stupid.” Seriously, if you partake of social media in any way, you have exposed your mind to a disease that has infected your brain and impaired your rationality. It has totally exempted you from any standards of logic that are recognized in the real world, and you are now seeing everything through a filter of popular opinion generated by peers.

It’s like that old adage, if something is repeated enough, you’ll start to believe it. And even if what you’re starting to believe is the most irrational BS, for which there is not a shred of credible evidence, you will begin to see it as your reality.

These days I am constantly inundated with posts to the effect that “Trump is an idiot, Trump is going to ruin the country, Trump is going to blow up the world. Be frightened. Be very, very frightened.” Seriously, it’s a slow day if I don’t get linked at least 20 articles about some new thing Trump has done that was either stupid or dangerous. Under the circumstances, how could anyone come away from their computer not being scared to death that life as we knew it is over, and we need to blame Trump for it?

Well, in regards to that, I’ve good news and some bad news. The good news is we don’t need to blame Trump for the bad news, which is that the world as we knew it has already come to an end. We have arrived in the future, and it’s every bit as horrible as Orwell and Huxley anticipated. It just took us a little longer to get here than they expected.

But, no, Trump is not responsible for that. Trump is merely a product of it. Trump has his nose constantly in social media, and thus is just as infected with this common sense destroying virus as everyone else.

For example, we know that Trump listens to Alex Jones. In my early days on the internet, around the turn of the century, I had friends in Anime Fandom who swore by the likes of Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh. And so they had me reading all these articles about impending totalitarian takeovers of America, storm troopers marching through the streets culling the population down to desired figures. And of course there was also the global warming thing, impending race wars, and all kinds of fear inducing stuff like that driving people out of their minds with terror, even before 9/11.

Truly, the world that I knew ended with the passing of the 20th century, because it was in December of 1999 that I got my first computer and ventured into the very different world of the internet, where logic and reason were kicked to the curb, because it is opinions that rule the internet mindset, and it is fear that drives opinions.

Websites do not adhere to the concept of freedom of speech. On the internet, every site is a privately owned mini dictatorship where the opinions of the site owners are law. And if you don’t support their opinions, they kick you out, which seriously rubbed my 20th century mindset the wrong way, and still does to this day.

Free exchanges of ideas can not happen on the internet. You can not come into any one place with an alternative view to express and not be instantly hated, mocked, trolled and finally banned. And anyone who dares support your alternative view, they’re out too.

And this happens everywhere on the net, from Progressive Rock forums to Furry news sites to Atheist forums to alternative news sites on up to The White House itself. Anywhere you go there is only one opinion being listened to and acted upon, which nothing contrary is allowed to disturb.

And that is why, after 20 years of this, we have all been rendered stupid, because the inaccessibility of contrary ideas, which others make sure we either can not hear or have reason not to take seriously, has completely destroyed the logic process, which depends on being able to weigh the evidence of both sides, as well as to be able to think independently of a group.

Unfortunately, everyone now partaking of social media is in some kind of group. And that group is controlling their thinking. That group is inflicting the stupidity of the small minds that rule it on everyone, indoctrinating them to believe as the site owners believe, and being ridiculously successful at it, even if the ideas they’re impressing on you are so illogical as to assert that a group filled with infinitely diverse members of all races and disciplines of thought is a Nazi group.

See, if you are not running for the hills at the instant of hearing such nonsense, which is worthy of Louis Carroll, but instead you find yourself thinking, “Well, this person surely knows more about this stuff than I do. Maybe there is a way a Nazi could be a Furry, and gay, and in a relationship with a black man . . . Oh well, whatever. Everyone in this group is calling them Nazis, and I don’t want to support Nazis. So I’d better start hating these people, along with anyone who takes their side.” That’s a pretty good demonstration of how to be really, really stupid.

And as I look around me today, watching Deo Taz Devil and Patch Packrat set up their new gambit to reinforce hatred of The Furry Raiders, I realize that is what I’m up against; an internet brimming over with fools who will take any lies, no matter how ridiculous, into the core of their being, just because they saw it in print on some site that they can not conceive of having a reason to lie, or even a possibility of being misinformed.

Thus, in this digital world of unreality, any lie once printed and distributed becomes established fact in the minds of the majority of the populace, and to tell them that these people they’re hating on were never Nazis is about as likely to be accepted as telling a Christian Jesus never existed. And right now people are hoping that I can write up a storm that will counter this phenomenon of universal internet stupidity. Of which I’ve got about as much chance as I do of stopping Muslims from killing gays.

Of course, that brings up another interesting point, because I only have the word of some questionable people in the news industry that Muslims kill gays, abuse women, create a crime problem and any number of other things people incessantly throw at me to get me to start hating Muslims. Even for me the question of whether I should buy this hatred is a tough call. The only thing that really stops me from buying it is it’s kind of hard to picture Cat Stevens throwing a gay person off a roof.

But even so, I’m aware that this and any other hatred, or belief actively being pitched at me on the internet, is coming from snake oil salesmen with an agenda I probably don’t know anything about. Thus I make it a policy to just not buy hate, ever. I don’t care how good the salesman is. And even if they do eventually try to sell me someone who is actually worth hating, it’s better to not hate someone who deserves to be hated than to be tricked into hating somebody who doesn’t deserve it.

That, of course, is 20th century thinking. I don’t expect it will make a lot of sense to any Millennials reading this. But, if you’re a Millennial, and what I just said seemed an idea worth considering, hallelujah, there’s hope for the world yet.

Then again, I only have the word of certain groups that Millennials are as terrible as they’re made out to be. Propaganda would have me believe they’re all pretty much retarded. I’m wary of that too. I’m wary of any stereotype.

I’m even wary of Antifa stereotypes, if just to show I’m an equal opportunity distributor of benefit of the doubt. Are they all Commie anarchists, or is someone just paying them to put on a good show? It’s good to remember that I do not know these things, and anyone who tells me otherwise doesn’t know either. It’s just his opinion. And there is no law that says I have to always go with popular opinion.

Also, the group I find myself in at this point is pretty extreme in it’s contempt for Trump. In this circle, to voice support for Trump would be to apply an automatic label of stupidity to one’s self, and to invite a lot of hostilities. The same could be said of Social Justice Warriors. The people I spend most of my time with just hate their guts and don’t want to hear anything nice about them.

Not that I could tell you anything nice about Trump or Social Justice Warriors, because I’d have to venture outside of my circle to hear anything good about them, which I used to attempt to do in the early years when I didn’t know better.

I used to try sitting on the fence between the Atheists and the Christians, trying to find a place of balance between the two, because I don’t fully agree with either of them. But both sides just hate people who sit on the fence. They both feel that if you’re not completely with them, you must be against them. And if they can’t rope you in and indoctrinate you, they treat you as the enemy and persecute you with trolling until you just give up and go away, realizing that both sides are wrong, and the issue itself never held any consequence at all.

Most such disputes on the internet are equally inconsequential. If you’re able to maintain any semblance of being a free thinker through all the idiocy that’s constantly impressed upon you, you eventually begin to see that no extremist view can ever be right. It becomes a test you give yourself. “Is my view extreme? Then my view must be wrong.”

So now we have all these Alt-Right/Alt-Furry people vs. the Antifa/SJW’s, all trying to get at the absolute extremes of their right and left positions. And, of course, they’re all wrong; every last single one of them.

You would think that sensible people would realize that if the extremes of the left and right are Communism and Nazism, folks shouldn’t need a lot of encouragement to realize they don’t want to go there. But if you’re in the extreme left group, “Communism Is Good” is the only song you’ll be allowed to hear. And the big hit on the right will be “When The Nazis Come Marching Home.” And here I am again, sitting on the fence, getting this stupidity in full glorious hi-fi stereo, and not being allowed to say a word to either group of nut-bars.

Believe it or not, I’m not alone here on the fence. You know who’s sitting here with me? Foxler and The Furry Raiders, who, like Trump, get a gratuitous amount of press to the effect that they are the evil Nazis you’re supposed to hate, which is mainly coming from the extreme left, who are Communists who expect you for some reason not to hate them, while they continually try to stoke your hatred of Nazis.

Now let’s think about that for a minute. Why should we hate Nazis? The reason commonly offered is that they killed 6 million people. Boggles the mind to conceive it, doesn’t it? And yet, Communists killed 10 million people, but they’re somehow not as bad as Nazis and we shouldn’t hate them. We should want to join them, give them power over us, so they can save us from those horrible Nazis. And afterwards we can enjoy their tender mercies.

I think it was Danny Kaye who said, “That’s like giving all your food to a cat to keep a mouse out of your food.”

Meanwhile, we’re just sitting here on the fence, not wanting to be Nazis or Communists, because we’re Furries. And lets face it, nothing to the extreme left or right wants anything to do with Furries and their all inclusive ideas about freedom of expression. This “Be as nice as you possibly can to everybody” stuff just will never fly in extremist airspace.

So you might well ask, “What about those armbands? Don’t they imply identification with the extreme right?” Actually, quite the contrary. The paw print represents Furry Pride, being proud to be a Furry. And what is there to be proud of in being a Furry?

Furries are generally centerists as a community. We sit in the middle, draw people in from all sides, and do our damnedest not to judge. Because, if you’re a fellow Furry, that’s all we care about, and we want to be able to hang out with you. And when outside forces that have nothing to do with Furry are not mucking things up by encouraging rampant hatred and mistrust, we make a nice community that’s kind of worth being proud of.

But then you might say, “The paw print is all well and good. But why have it on an armband? Why not just put it on a jacket and avoid all this controversy?”

At this point, it wouldn’t make any difference. They could drop the logo all together, and the unreasoning hate would continue from all sides, because you’ve all heard it repeated so often that these people are Nazis that nothing is going to kick that cultishly indoctrinated idea from your minds. The internet has jammed it into the core of your beliefs, and the prospect of losing a core belief is terrifying. It puts you in fight for your life mode, as the scientists attest.

If you have accepted the belief that 2 Gryphon, The Furry Raiders and anyone else you’ve been told to hate is a Nazi, to lose that belief would leave you feeling a most devastated fool; the emperor in his final realization that he’s been running around naked; taken to the cleaners, if you will. And all it cost you was your freedom, your ability to live in harmony with your neighbors, a century of progress, and the last vestige of your ability to think for yourself.

Thus, giving up the armbands would serve no purpose, other than to give the Communists some illusion of a victory won over Nazis who never were Nazis. So The Raiders might as well be stuck with the armbands, but that’s ok, because you’ve got the real Nazi armband on the far right, and the Communist armband on the far left. And right smack dab in the middle you’ve got the armband of Furry Fandom giving the finger to the other two.

It makes a bold statement that we are neither Nazis or Communists, and we refuse, on pain of all the suffering you can inflict upon us, to be forced to choose to be one or the other. Both are disgusting beyond measure, and we do not need them, because we’ve build something better here.

We are Furries. We built the community were diversity, inclusiveness and freedom of expression are the norm, enabling all furs to proudly be themselves. We need no Social Justice Warriors here because we have already achieved social justice in as pure a form as anyone has ever achieved it, for in our community all furs are furs, and nothing more matters.

But then you might say, “That’s BS. The Furry Community is not utopia. All people ever do here is fight.” This is true. Indeed, we wouldn’t be in this situation now if Furries weren’t the most self justified bunch of pricks and bitches this world has ever seen.

Just like The United States, The Furry Community is a magnificent concept depending on the people to want to live by it with the good of all in mind. But nobody wants to think about anyone but themselves. So maybe it can’t work if the people don’t have enough sense in their heads even to value it.

Maybe Foxler and The Raiders are fools to be put through hell for their dream. But do you think living in a Communist or Nazi community would be any less hell? Do you think you would even dare have a dream living under such extremes?

In a world that is nothing but pain and struggle, is it not most important to preserve a place where one can dream of something better, something they’d rather be, something that gives them at least the illusion of a peaceful place to escape where they can be free to show what they hide inside, and be loved for it?

No, there are no illusions that The Furry Community is utopia. But even so, it was a pretty damn good start at one before these political interlopers tried to break it up with their Communist flags and talk of Nazis where none existed; before we fell for their spiel and bought our new set of clothes that exposed our gullibility to the world.

And if this damage can never be undone, and The Furry Community should never recover from the hatred that has been injected into it, that gives a whole other meaning to The Raiders armbands. In mourning for that which was and could have been; the dream that was never allowed a chance to prove itself.

The time has come for more self analysis. In all the talk and arguments about Furry Fandom recently, I’ve begun to wonder if I’m still a Furry fan or if my tastes have significantly changed, as it seems ages since I have felt any enthusiasm at all for watching cartoons, reading any Furry novels or even working on my own story.

Some of this I suppose could be attributed to my near suicidally depressing home life, but then my life has always been fraught with pain and difficulty. If anything living a hard life has, in the past, just fueled my need to escape into something cute and pleasant.

Yesterday I was over a friend’s place, and the friend left me alone for an hour or so with nothing to do but watch My Little Pony on his TV, which is a lot bigger than my set and gets High-Def cable. But no pony cuteness rush was forthcoming. The High-Def just made the outer lines of the characters easier to see, which was a constant reminder of what a cheap cartoon I was watching. Not only that, but it was just like solid blocks of colors everywhere, like a coloring book filled in with digital paint instead of crayons.

And I was thinking constantly, “How can adults watch this with the same enthusiasm they’d give to something like Star Trek or Doctor Who?” But what do I care why others watch it or what they see in it? It was so much easier back in the 80’s when I didn’t have to care what adults saw in MLP because I was the only adult who gave a care about it.

Now it’s a whole other ballgame because I’m connected to this whole internet full of people watching the same stuff I’m watching, seeing things in it that are different from what I see, and arguing that this is some kind of artistic breakthrough, rather than just something I watch to get my cute fix. And it didn’t help that these were Spike and Pinkie Pie episodes I was stuck watching, which didn’t have all that much gratuitous cuteness for me to get off on.

The thought has crossed my mind that I’ve just grown out of this stuff, like I grew out of Anime. Maybe what I need is something Furry that really isn’t made for kids. Something with the adult-minded sophistication I look for non-Furry works. I’m sure such stuff exists in the fandom, but I’m not really up for the challenge. I’m sure it would just put me to sleep, as everything else seems to do these days.

Anyway, what does it mean when watching animation becomes a useless dwelling on the nature of the art to the detriment of getting caught up in the illusion the art is supposed to provide? It means one has grown up to the point of becoming technical minded. Or, more likely, my mind is elsewhere, dwelling on some “Adult” BS I’m currently involved in; somebody I’m arguing with on the net about a fandom I continue to feel responsible for, even though I find it difficult to show where I’m still participating in it or getting any enjoyment at all out of it.

Always people want to argue about the fandom, what it’s for, what it’s supposed to be about, who it’s supposed to serve, and who should somehow be locked out of this thing that is supposedly based on someone’s taste in entertainment, as apposed to some kind of virtual community with theoretical rules as to what makes one belong there.

It’s all just kind of falling apart; the ideas no longer having enough logical glue to hold themselves together, leaving me with this overwhelming feeling of wasting my life on something with no reality at all.

It was different back in the days when I was all alone in these interests, when I alone cared what a Furry was, because Furry was just a word I made up to describe the genre I wrote in, which nobody else cared about, because nobody else realized there was some kind of relationship between Bambi and Watership Down, or would have thought it the most useless bit of information to point out.

Come to think of it, has “Genre classification shared by Felix Salten and Richard Adams” ever been a question on Jeopardy? And if it was, would some word I made up to describe that genre be considered an acceptable answer? Even to this day when so many people have adopted the word I chose, probably not.

Why? Probably for the same reason everyone I seem to meet through this community wants to argue with me about it. They all consider it their word to define as they will, their community to support or tear down to their heart’s content, their fantasy of some intangible non-reality where they conceive themselves as holding some kind of power over other people.

No, it isn’t any of that crap. It’s just a matter of do you care enough to see that there’s a relationship between Bambi, Watership Down, Bugs Bunny, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, My Little Pony, Spice & Wolf and Zootopia. The mundane world does not. If you even notice there’s a relationship between these things, you are not mundane. And the mundane of this world would regard that as some kind of illness one should seek treatment for.

That much hasn’t been changed by all these thousands of people who now share my original discovery. The existence of a Furry Community has not made me seem more sane. It just makes it seem like I’ve found a lot more crazy people to hang out with. And admittedly, when I was younger I thought hanging out with crazy people would probably be fun.

But you know what? It’s not. Because a lot of these people are not only genuinely crazy, they’re downright mean. They want to hurt each other, because this word “Furry” has been elevated to some sacred religion-like status. It’s something people are expected to build a lifestyle around. It’s something that’s almost achieved the status of being an alt-sexuality one has to come out of the closet about. It’s literally gotten to the point of there being so much craziness involved that I don’t even want to be bothered trying to keep up with it anymore. It’s just lost all interest for me.

As a means of describing the genre I write in, Furry was useful. As a means of YouTuber A calling out YouTuber B for saying things he never said which prove he’s a pervert trying to deny the sexual motivation of the fandom, it’s worse than useless. It does nothing to maintain my connection to the titles that fall under the Furry genre. It doesn’t keep me involved with them, having a reason to care about them, or even to remember why I thought it was worth building my life around them.

In these most essential things, Furry Fandom provides no support at all. It just runs around in circles like a crazy thing trying to convince itself it’s something of such outstanding social importance that it shouldn’t even be bothered about justifying itself as a fandom. And after 40 odd years of this insanity, I don’t even have a clear memory of what was supposed to be so all-fired great about this business of talking animals.

I do remember that it all started with Bambi, and that the moral of the Bambi novel could be interpreted as meaning, “Don’t join a fandom, because fandoms are for idiots who prattle and pontificate all day about things they don’t have the slightest understanding of. Instead, keep to yourself, in order that the purity of your perception and understanding should remain uncluttered with the insane twittering of idiots.”

Sadly that’s all we do in the internet age. We expose ourselves constantly to the tweets of the most unknowledgeable, imperceptive idiots on Earth; each in search of a following for their own peculiar idiocy. That chattering, narrow minded flock of seagulls whose life is nothing but fighting for scraps of fish, or in this case, scraps of self-validation to justify their existence. So Jonathan Livingston Seagull illustrated, leaving it’s protagonist no path to self-development but to get away from the squabbling flock.

Hmmm, let me see. What was Watership Down about? That was about starting a community, wasn’t it? Or was it about breaking away from crazy totalitarian societies to go live in seclusion from enslaving ideas on top of a big hill?

What about The Rats Of NIMH, what was that about? Oh yeah, going away from humans to live in an isolated valley because human ideas were not moral enough for enlightened rats.

One might get the impression that the concept of Furry in the days before the internet was rather anti-Twitter. I can see an over arching theme in the stories that started all this for me to the effect of, if you don’t want your life to be dominated by BS, you must get yourself far away from the major sources of BS. And unfortunately, that is what the society inspired by these stories developed into; a source of so much BS that any Furry with a capacity to think for his/her self wouldn’t come within a mile of it.

This means that anything I add to the cacophony becomes just as much BS as anything else, because what we’re talking about is an illusion; a pipe dream that exists only in our heads as we individually define it. An no description of an individual’s perception of Furry Fandom can have any relevance to anyone else’s, because everyone is dreaming it up independently.

This is why we see people like Green Reaper with such a drive to push a particular conception of Furry Fandom. Doesn’t matter whether he personally believes in it or not. It just seems good for the fandom that individual dreams of this total unreality should be unified as much as possible by imposing a narrative, a biblical list of begats that starts with Fred Patton and ends with himself begetting Wikifur and Flayrah, where he now sits enthroned as the laid-back dictator of fandom perception.

What a pity that people like me who prove that narrative is BS just by existing won’t go away and allow him to organize the perception of all these squabbling Furries into the image of his own thinking. Maybe in a few years when all the voices that can attest to Furry having some kind of presence before 1980 have been silenced, Green will become absolute dictator of Furry history. And you know what? I don’t give a damn what fantasy this fandom eventually endorses as canon, or whether it includes me or not.

I don’t think I’ve contributed anything of lasting value to the world that anyone should cry if it was lost. I don’t think the fandom has either. I think this current incarnation of the fandom will eat itself alive with intolerance, threats of violence, unreasonable infighting, and a total failure to maintain the foundation of what all this is built upon. It will all devolve into chaos and eventually just fizzle out as people find better things to do. And it will eventually be as forgotten as the Funny Animal Fandom of the 1940’s.

Maybe, in 60 years or so, old people will sit around reminiscing about their glory days on the internet, trying to recall all the long dead sub-cultures they trolled and bullied. Maybe in passing they’ll try to remember Furries. But by then all the old sites will have been deleted. Hell, even now I can’t take you back to drama sites that existed just 10 years ago. They’re wiped out without a trace.

All that will remain is the commercial media, which will still be popular, but will have passed back to the Disney and other such fandoms. And people will just be fans of it. They won’t think themselves part of some all inclusive sub-culture that couldn’t stop fighting over who to exclude. They won’t build a lifestyle around what they like. They may still FAP to it, but hopefully not in public.

Though maybe even this is wishful thinking. Some say the unique conditions that created Furries by inundating children with anthropomorphic animals during crucial times of development can never be duplicated. And who knows what hardships the future may hold that will eliminate the freedoms necessary for any fandom to exist?

Ah, yes. It could be that we are living in the golden age of BS. And it will be my posthumous satisfaction to have the world that exists now be as dead and disrespected as the world I grew up in is now.

Heck, I expect the disrespect coming to this era will be far worse than mine. The music of my time will probably still be played on radio, if it has not taken on the status of Classical Music. The music of this era may not even survive, as it was preserved mostly on perishable media with a shelf life expectancy of 20 years. Not to mention there is nothing classic to the music itself that people who weren’t inundated by it at the time of its popularity will be able to relate to. That is, assuming the world survives in such a state were people can even enjoy music, or if they don’t end up in some dictatorship that judges all music made after 1955 to be subversive, or under inaccessibly expensive copyrights; leaving The Ink Spots on the cutting edge forever after, like in Fallout.

Actually, if things go that way, Furry media will be banned as well, if for no other reason than the state will be able to point to the idiocy of Furry Fandom and determine that Furry media creates maladjustment in children. It’ll all be burned in big bond fires when the Communists take over, assuming Trump or whoever takes over for him doesn’t initiate some nuclear holocaust that will leave nothing but cockroaches alive to see whatever media we leave behind as nothing but good places to build nests in.

No matter how hard I search I can’t find a positive note to end this on. The human race is a total failure at working together as a unit towards the goal of its own survival. Everything it builds is doomed to eventually fail. And one of the things I used to like about Furry was that it pointed stuff like that out, hopefully to the end that we would realize our folly and do something about it. But no such luck.

It seems we’re fully aware that the human race is totally off the rails insane, but nobody cares, because insane people spend ridiculous amounts of money on impractical stuff that does nothing to feed or stabilize the world, giving a few of the nutters a chance to live out their lives in luxury, while the rest of us pull our hair out over totally useless politics that gets us worse than nowhere.

And nowhere is where I think I’m going to leave this, because I don’t have anymore time to try to resolve it. I’m just crazy. My needle can’t track the record humanity expects me to play. It just keeps skipping from one depressing thought to the next, never being able to find a hopeful passage. The only way to bridge the skips is to make up more totally fabricated BS that will justify everything and make the whole record sound like “The Wall,” a beautifully depressing work of art. But I’m trying to be honest here. And nothing real I can find in my pile of honest realities is in any way beautiful.

On second thought, I really do need to write something in depth on this censorship issue, if just to get the silenced perspective on it out there. So, let me put a little historical perspective on it.

From the beginning (The 80’s & 90’s) The Furry Community consisted of two factions. There was the fandom, which were non-professional people who enjoyed anthropomorphic animals, and there were professional cartoonists who drew anthropomorphic animals for a living, often for adult titles that included NSFW content; everything from the gratuitous sex scenes of Omaha The Cat Dancer to the lite risque issues of Shanda The Panda. That stuff was part of the scene from the beginning. Before the beginning, really, considering the “Underground Comix” scene the fandom grew out of. It wasn’t something the fans brought to the table.

There was, in fact . . . I don’t want to say a thriving adult oriented Funny Animal comic industry, but at least a very active one at the time, spitting out hundreds of fly by night titles of varying quality, trying to capitalize on the success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. And all these artists being considered professional, because they were getting paid for their work.

Past the mid 90’s, these Funny Animal artists where riding on the coat-tails of Anime Fandom, which was also spitting out a plethora of titles that were only moderately successful, and had the same intent of appealing to adults by any sordid means necessary, but generally through an over concentration on sex and violence. And it seemed as if they might actually be going to get somewhere with this when Pokemon came along, which kicked comic sales up to what was then an unheard of level of mass appeal. But then, just as suddenly, the comics market crashed.

Actually, there’s an eerie parallel there with how Zootopia seemed destined to blast Furry Fandom into the mainstream, and now it’s crashing. But I’m getting ahead of the story. Just remember to refer back to this.

What happens when a moderately successful market crashes is you get a lot of people who were looking forward to stable, well-paying jobs suddenly finding it difficult to stay in business. Add to this that the internet was taking over at this point, which was giving fan artists a better opportunity than those working for professional publications.

This left a number of commercial artists, who may have been unstable to begin with, pulling their hair out as they attempted to find somebody to blame for their dwindling demand. And rather than blaming comic book speculators, as everyone else was doing, these Funny Animal cartoonists thought it was the fandom that should be blamed for all their hardships.

At the time, I was an Anime convention dealer, specializing in comics, among other things. And I regularly stocked what were then just starting to become known as “Furry” comics. But there were only a handful of these titles that appealed to me as a life long Furry fan. And I can tell you for a fact why I wasn’t collecting most of them.

Try to imagine this. These comics cost a ridiculous amount of money, they weren’t cute, they were black & white line drawings, and the stories had no appeal. With the exception of rare titles like Shanda The Panda which broke that mold, there was no reason for anyone to want to spend twice the amount being charged for comics that were speculated to go up instantly in value on comics that everyone knew would be in the clearance bin forever after. It was a very cheap product that took no consideration of its target market.

But suddenly comic book sales had fallen off a cliff, comic book companies and comic stores were closing right and left. And suddenly here was the internet, providing content for Furry fans by Furry fans in full irresistible color, for free.

So a number of the unstable disenfranchised artists began a trend towards abject hatred of the Furry Fandom, because they couldn’t make a living off of it. And to them this was the most evil thing. Something just had to be done about it.

And this was how you got your Burned Fur War. Contrary to popular misinformation that has come down through the ages, The Burned Fur War was not about porn. It was about Pro vs. Amateur. And the Pros were not squeaky clean Disney artists by any stretch of the imagination. Porn was part of their stock and trade.

What they wanted was the ability to control the fandom so that they would have a market that would sustain their crap. And when the fandom had the audacity to fight back against such proposed tyranny, these lunatic artists lit the fandom’s logo on fire and became The Burned Furs.

By all historical accounts, The Burned Furs were a lot like Antifa. They were unreasonably aggressive and antagonistic, attempting to accomplish their goals through intimidation. I’ve had the misfortune of meeting some of them. I still encounter some of them to this day. And they’re still scary as all hell.

The issues that were made out of Fans vs. Lifestylers were just as much a smokescreen for what was really going on as the porn; a tactic for dividing the fandom and increasing its vulnerability. They wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the unwarranted attention that was forced on them. And in time they would have been dealt with sensibly. But The Burned Furs made sure that no form of good sense would ever be allowed to thrive in The Furry Community.

After the initial conflict was over, The Burned Furs seemed to subside without having accomplished their goal. They didn’t get control of the fandom or the anthropomorphics market. But they had managed to devastate the fandom. At the height of the conflict Furry was all over the media, and The Burned Furs made sure Furry Fandom made the absolute worst impression on the world of any fandom ever. Kind of like what Flayrah and Dogpatch Press are trying to do right now. But, again, we’ll get back to that.

History tends to record that The Burned Furs went away. That is not true. Some changed their screen names. Some fell to near invisibility. Some realized the error of their ways and joined the fandom. But those that remained filled with contempt formed sites like Crush, Yiff, Destroy and became regular contributors to sites like Something Awful and Encyclopedia Dramatica, from which they continued to attack the fandom and keep its reputation hopelessly stained.

To make matters worse, old Burned Fur fighters like Xydexx lived ever after in a state of shell shock, never being able to accept that the war was over, making damn sure that everyone who came into the community had to take a side and be prepared to be at odds with the side they didn’t choose. Thus you had people on both sides of the fabricated issues equally dedicated to seeing that the fire was never completely put out.

Meanwhile, the true issue of the conflict, Professionals vs. Amateurs, has continued to bubble beneath the smokescreen all these years, with the supposed victors of the war doing everything they can to crush any aspirations a fur might have in regard to commercial success. In other words, throughout the 2000’s, those in power in the fandom, from Green Reaper all the way up to Uncle Kage, were actively resisting the commercialization of the fandom.

This is evident in the many diatribes that remain on the net that Furry Fandom is about things made by Furries for Furries, and that if you go commercial you can’t be part of the fandom anymore. And furthermore, if you’re part of the fandom, you must accept that the world will always regard you as the scum of the Earth, and any attempt that you make to help the fandom rise above its image of scum will be crushed by the fandom.

See, that’s not The Burned Furs talking. That’s the people who supposedly beat The Burned Furs. And that is how both victors and vanquished merged into a single horrible oppression which has been eating this fandom out from the inside ever since.

However, in the current decade, it has been difficult for that miasma to maintain it’s potency. Furs have been kicking it to the curb and daring to be ambitious. They have dared to appear respectable. And the world has been responding positively to them, all the way up to the point where Disney thought it was worth marketing a movie to them. And just like with Pokemon 20 years earlier, Furry Fandom stood on the edge of it’s big mainstream breakthrough. We were finally going to prove our point to the world that we were a fandom for something everyone could embrace and see the value of.

But did you really think old timers like Patch Packrat and Green Reaper were going to let that happen? Hell no. Not when they hold absolute power over the fandom’s main news services, and can thus project whatever image they want onto the fandom, censoring or blacklisting anyone with a contrary vision, and feed the worst possible image of the fandom directly to the mainstream media.

And right at this crucial time, Antifa surfaced. Should Antifa have meant anything to Furry Fandom? Absolutely not. But it was worth it to some trouble maker to insure an article would appear tying Antifa to Furry Fandom. And Antifa is useless if there are no Nazis around. So, if there are no Nazis around, Nazis have to be created.

So we ended up with this same faction of old timers from the Burned Fur days, now in power at conventions and news sites, looking for people who would make good targets to vilify as Nazis. 2 Gryphon, easy target. Furry Raiders, also an easy target. Useful as points of division for the fandom in duplicating the same unreasoning hostilities that fueled The Burned Fur War, with one major difference.

This time the battles are not fought on Usenet where both sides have an equal chance of being heard and considered. This time all attempts for reason to be heard have to be submitted for approval to the very elitists who are out to hold this fandom down, creating a situation where absolute suppression of truth is possible, and any alternative view, such as you’re reading here, will seem so far off the commonly accepted track that most people will just dismiss it without even thinking about it, saying to themselves, “This must be another one of those Nazis. And who cares what a Nazi has to say?”

And that is where Furry Fandom stands right now, in absolute control of those who carry the infection of Burned Fur – the elitists who finally have it within their power to rule without opposition, or to ultimately destroy the fandom if it won’t knuckle under to them. And you can see the success in their endeavor by the number of conventions that are suddenly closing, and how these news outlets are determined to tell you what to believe about why they’re closing, shutting out the more obvious reasons the con people themselves are stating.

Now, this is where I have to say a word about Ahmar Wolf. You might think he’s a little rant happy at this point. And you could say his perspective and emotions are more than just a bit distorted from his head injury. But he’s not wrong that he’s being persecuted by elitists. In particular, The Furry Writers Guild.

Now, some of you who know me, and how involved with Furry writing I am, might assume I’m probably a member of The Furry Writers Guild. Care to guess why I’m not? Because you have to have physically published something to join that group. Dig it? I’m a person who provides quality anthropomorphic content, in color, for free.

Same old same old, right back where this story began. You have people in the Pro market, desperate to save a dying business model, trying to crush people experimenting with new modes of distributing their work. Plus, we see that Furry Writers Guild is supported by both Flayrah and Dogpatch Press, which both focus on commercial titles, while someone like me who has 8 novels worth of content on a free site not only can’t get a review from them, but all my comments are hidden on Flayrah, and just straight up blacklisted on Dogpatch.

There’s another obvious target for the elitists riding on Antifa’s coat-tails, and that’s The Furred Reich, who is the only one on the scene who really looks like a Nazi, and actually has something to do with Nazis. But he doesn’t get hardly any exposure at all to the hate-mongering spotlight of the elitists. Why do you suppose that is? Could it possibly have something to do with the fact that The Furred Reich is a hard copy published author? That would make him eligible to join The Furry Writers Guild, if he has not done so already. And thus he does not occupy the same position of loathsomeness in the eyes of Flayrah as we who think continuing to publish on paper is a waste of perfectly good trees.

Now, I’m not going to say that Ahmar doesn’t have some problems that impair the quality of his blog, but whoever said a blog has to be perfect? That’s no reason for these elitists to treat him like he’s so beneath them that he has no justification for existence. All of us out here in the blogesphere do our best. And maybe in time we get better at it. But the point of blogging is to provide an alternative perspective to the mainstream or dominant influences on world belief.

Sites like Flayrah and Dogpatch are unashamed in their determination to have absolute control over the way the world perceives us, and the way we perceive ourselves. And being as they seem to support the Antifa perspective, which is once again allowing them to flood this community with unreasoning hate, do we really want to have no alternative to them? Don’t we need our independent bloggers to tell us its ok to give the elitists the middle finger when they tell us to see Nazis where there obviously are none?

I have been debating with myself whether I wanted to write something about the censorship drama going on between three major Furry news outlets, or the drama I have recently been inundated by on Second Life. But the more I think about it, the more I do not dare write critically about drama for fear of offending someone involved.

Of course, everyone involved in these dramas is of adult age. Some are even older than me. And you’d think people of significant age could handle a little offense gracefully. But that is not the case. In fact, the very reason these dramas are happening at all is because none of the participants seem to have the maturity of a 10 year old.

But then, seriously, what can you expect from people who dress up as living plush animals just to run off at the face about their pet peeves on YouTube? And while doing so go so far as to say, “Such and such fur offended me because of some accessory he had on his fursuit. I therefore insist that not only must said fur get rid of his accessory, but he must kill his fursona and change his name while he’s at it. And if he doesn’t do this immediately, I will buy him a one way ticket to Auschwitz.”

And this same fur is so immature that, when he gets banned from one site on a charge of hate speech, he goes over to another site and writes a whole article about how the site that banned him is guilty of censorship. But, at the end of the day, all three of the news sites involved have some form of censorship in place, and all defend their right to their particular brand of censorship to the death. So not one of them has an inch of moral high ground to look down on the others.

Then we have another fur who likes to troll, and while doing so frequently catches his own personal information in the screenshots he posts, and then cries “Boo-hoo you bullies doxed me” when somebody makes use of that information.

Yet another fur has decided that Babyfurs are an abomination upon the Earth and must be scourged by his initiating a drama blitz at the hotel housing Califur, just like the one that killed RMFC, to the effect that they are housing a pedo con. Indeed, now that the “disenfranchised furs” contingent of the fandom has seen how easy it is to kill a con with tweets, we can expect them to be tweeting their fingers off at every hotel that houses any con.

Meanwhile, in Second Life, I kind of live on the border between two sims that are part of the Sunweavers conglomerate. And there are a couple of furs that the higher ups in one of those sims have decided they don’t like, and will inflict drama on them at the drop of a hat – if some of their reasons even amount to that. But these same people are prominent land owners in the other sim, and are reasonably well liked.

So, you’d think that these significantly aged furs who do not get along would have the sense to just stay on their respective sims and not put themselves in situations where somebody might drop a hat, or otherwise create oceans of drama by doing practically nothing but just being there. But, noooo. Every time I take a week off from SL I’m hit with the drama from all sides the instant I log in. And, I swear, it sounds for all the world like, “Mommy he’s touching me,” followed by “Tell her to stop touching me.” And back and forth ad nauseum.

And all this without adding to the mix the new contingent of Communists we have in the fandom who insist that everyone who doesn’t agree with them is a Nazi.

Are you starting to see the undeniable abundance of immaturity here? I swear I think Furry Fandom is some kind of unruly pre-school sometimes, where people of even slightly differing opinions couldn’t get along to save their lives.

Meanwhile, I don’t even bother watching cartoons and other forms of anthropomorphic entertainment anymore, because after 15 years of this, it’s pretty much sunk in that The Furry Community is all about the drama, and it’s no asset at all to people who just want to enjoy Furry entertainment. So much so that people just naturally start forgetting what drew them into this mess in the first place.

Well, I started to throw up my hands and ask the wind, “Why is this fandom so hopelessly immature?” And the wind just blew the question back in my face, as if to say, “What do you expect from a society of people who never grew out of watching cartoons?”

I want to personally thank Perri Prinz for allowing me to repost articles from her own blog which can be found here

Also allowing me to move on

I see now that I should have added something to my article for Furry Times about the continuing shameless fear mongering and yellow journalism of Dogpatch Press.

I hate to come down on them because Fred Patten is there. And I have nothing but respect for Fred. But when you look at the Dogpatch Twitter and you see how frequently the posts alternate between Patch Packrat and Deo Taz Devil, the source of the extreme bias flooding their articles becomes pretty obvious.

Currently they’re on their 4th article in a row with an extreme bent towards demonizing The Furry Raiders, 2 Gryphon, the staff of RMFC and anyone else they think they can whip up some hate against. The third article was strictly about rumors, and this latest article isn’t about anything except reinforcing myths and reminding people who they’re supposed to hate.

Seriously, if this keeps up, Dogpatch Press is going to devolve into the new Crush, Yiff, Destroy. And with people going out of their way to make the fandom look as bad as they do operating from within the fandom, we won’t even have to worry about how badly the mainstream press is going to fry us.

Sadly, I’ve no idea what we could do to get Dogpatch out of the hands of The Antifa Furs, who might just as well be called the latest Burned Fur revival.

There can be no doubt that they are out to spread hate and divide the fandom. They want us at each other’s throats to the point where the networks will be making cop shows about us killing each other again.

But I don’t think anything can be accomplished by challenging them and getting into fights with them. That would just be playing into their hands. I think the only thing a conscientious fur who cares about the fandom can do is just boycott Dogpatch. And any other site that promotes fear and hate.

Furry Fandom allegorically mirrors real life to an incredible extent, even to the point where we can’t trust our main news outlets. There’s just no respect for truth and reason out there anymore. We’re just going to have to get used to the fact that any news we see is likely calculated to deceive more than it is to inform.

It’s all calculated to force us to share somebody else’s opinion of matters that probably aren’t any of our business in the first place. But what ever you do, don’t ever let them trick you into hating people, just because they tell you you should. Don’t ever hate somebody without a damned good reason. And a long page of totally unsubstantiated opinions, glued together with a spin that all but twists your head off, is not a good reason to hate people.