Going where no Therians would dare go before...

[Baphnedia]

It may seem obvious to some that since losing my job, I might have a few screws loose. One way or another, I wound up joining Fur Affinity earlier this week for fun...

Not sure what else I was going to say... so for those who are already there, the link to find me is below:
http://www.furaffinity.net/user/baphnedia/

[JoshuaMadoc]

inb4 butthurt pack members go "WAI U DO DIS?"

[Baphnedia]

I dunno; I was feeling like the odd one out for the past several years, where it seems everybody moved over to FA. >.<

[Terastas]

"Where no therians would dare go before," huh? I think you'll be surprised. Just don't use your journal to complain about how many furries there are on FurAffinity (don't laugh, it's been done) and you'll be just fine.

[Baphnedia]

Drat, I was thinking of saving that for doing a journal entry on FA. Stole my thunder, they did! Though, its probably like folks posting "I am a real werewolf!" on the forums here...

[FoxKnight]

Looks like Louis found you there :3

[Morkulv]

"Going where no Therians would dare go before..." Reality?

BURNED!

Sorry.

[Baphnedia]

The moment I run into this 'reality' that everybody is talking about... I'll probably have a bump on my head.

[Morkulv]

Hehe sorry. I was just trolling a little bit.

[Flatline]

where is fur affinity?

[FoxKnight]

where is fur affinity?

On the internet

[PariahPoet]

Heh

Actually I was on FA a few years ago before I left. I got my fluffy tail out of there when they began to consider allowing cub on there. -_- UGH

[JoshuaMadoc]

Well, pack your bags, honey, because they opened the door for you lot again by re-banning cub just a week ago.

[PariahPoet]

Oh really? Well that is good news.

I swear, I have a love-hate relationship with the fandom. It would be so great if there was some way to split up and send all the creeps to one group and all the regular nerds to another.

[Terastas]

Oh really? Well that is good news.

I swear, I have a love-hate relationship with the fandom. It would be so great if there was some way to split up and send all the creeps to one group and all the regular nerds to another.

The problem being who gets to decide who the creeps are.

It took less than a week for the ban on cub art to erupt into a true s***-storm, not because of cub artists complaining that they couldn't share it anymore (most of them just "left in protest" actually), but because of butt-hurt burned furs trying to apply the "cub art" label to anything they could think of. Almost all Sonic fanart has been purged because the butt-hurts complained that all the characters are underage, and now we're hearing crap like "Hey, Mewtwo is only three years old in the anime. Ban all Pokemon art too!"

2 the Ranting Gryphon also released a rant once about other furs finding him detestable because of his choice of fursona species. There is no solid line between "acceptable" and "creepy," -- it's in a different place for everyone, both in the fandom, and in the world as a whole.

So would you mind not implying in the future that your line is the line?

[JoshuaMadoc]

May I also mention that FA's in a craphole of a scandal at the moment? There's been a huge security leak, and it involves notes from EVERY MEMBER being leaked, including Dragoneer's and Zaush's. Why is this important? Because apparantly some of Neer's notes include him covering for Zaush when Zaush said to him in notes not to leak the incident where he practically raped a woman he was hitting on. This is an FA lead site admin I'm talking about here, and he's covering for an alleged rapist who, up until now, has been one of the kings of popular furries. This could only get any more retarded if anyone decides to dismiss that as "doctored images/logs".

I don't care if any of you sugarcuby types are going to deny all of this as a smear campaign instigated by so-called evil anonymous scum. To me, FA has effectively turned into Mogadishu. I'm laying my a** low from this until this scandal's over, or when, hopefully, the staff gets a much needed personnel overhaul from head to toe.

[Morkulv]

I honestly can't understand why people get so worked up over what types of fetishes and sexual image-types are allowed on a gallery or not. I'm not trying to defend perverts here even though I think that being a furry is already having a fetish to begin with, but I'm personally against censorship in any shape or form and I think that its fair to state that its kind of childish to ban things that a group, albeit a small group of people have an interest in as long as its not damaging or hurting anyone. I for instance am disgusted by the thought of foot-fetish, I can't stand it and I think its disgusting and stomach-churning, but I don't think it should get banned because there are obviously people who do want to see it. Instead of shouting "PERVERTS!!" at them, just click the nice little X at the right top corner of the screen (or left if your on a Macintosh) and leave.

The internet is made for p0rn people, get over it.

Oh really? Well that is good news.

I swear, I have a love-hate relationship with the fandom. It would be so great if there was some way to split up and send all the creeps to one group and all the regular nerds to another.

The problem being who gets to decide who the creeps are.

It took less than a week for the ban on cub art to erupt into a true s***-storm, not because of cub artists complaining that they couldn't share it anymore (most of them just "left in protest" actually), but because of butt-hurt burned furs trying to apply the "cub art" label to anything they could think of. Almost all Sonic fanart has been purged because the butt-hurts complained that all the characters are underage, and now we're hearing crap like "Hey, Mewtwo is only three years old in the anime. Ban all Pokemon art too!"

2 the Ranting Gryphon also released a rant once about other furs finding him detestable because of his choice of fursona species. There is no solid line between "acceptable" and "creepy," -- it's in a different place for everyone, both in the fandom, and in the world as a whole.

So would you mind not implying in the future that your line is the line?

It certainly took some time, but I agree with you on this subject. This is basically what I was getting at. As soon as you start censoring one thing, it leads to censoring something else and in the end it ends up damaging more then it is being helpfull to the community.

[PariahPoet]

My line is my line and yes, it is the right line for me, and no, I will not refrain from mentioning it just because it makes you (perhaps rightly so) feel like the aforementioned "creep".

Cub porn is child porn within the fandom, plain and simple. And I have no use for anyone who defends it.


I would be a very, very happy 'rundi if clean furs could have an entirely separate label from all the people who have a kink for fur.

I don't care what consenting ADULTS do in private- feet, plushies, balloons, whatever. I just have no desire to be associated with that sector of the fandom.

[Terastas]

My line is my line and yes, it is the right line for me, and no, I will not refrain from mentioning it just because it makes you (perhaps rightly so) feel like the aforementioned "creep".

Pariah, if you are going to be all holier-than-thou about this and accuse anyone who says "look the other way" of being a furvert, feel free to believe I'm into whatever disturbing crap that your brain is capable of coming up with. I am not going to lose sleep over the fact that I do not have the approval of someone with such a massive stick up their tail that even the confirmed existence of people who are not as uptight as they are is too much for them to handle.

That might sound unfair, but what you've effectively said is that you would plead the opposite; that you are going to condemn 20K+ users just because you're worried about a couple of butt-hurt troller-types associating you with the adult stuff (which, since you're at a werewolf forum, they're probably going to do anyway).

What you call "clean furs," I call "trollers."

As for your desire for segregation, well, I'm sure there's a website that is strictly for furs who hate everything and do nothing but talk about how much they hate all those sub-human furverts at all those icky commoner's websites. Feel free to stay away from FA and sign up there instead.

[Vagrant]

Hm. Saw this and felt the need to toss my coins in.

The thing is is that people are flawed, all people. There are no perfect people because that goes against nature, I don't think nature actually does perfection, or whether we're even able to perceive it. I've never seen it. And frankly, we're all made from the same stuff (star stuff to say it romantically, because I love that quote), so we're all flawed in some way or another. In fact, one could say that to fetishise cleanliness might be another form of being flawed. If you're far too into anything to the point where you get off on it intellectually or perhaps physically, then that could be something you've turned into a fetish.

I don't really dislike Pariah for her opinions either though, because saying people are hypocrites is like saying people breathe. That's something else we all do. Of course, being alive means that there's a lot to be afraid of, there's the whole instinct to survive angle. This can lead people to fetishise whatever might make them feel safe. Our ancestors used numbers to survive, and that's something that sticks with us, we huddle up to share warmth and to work together to fend off the beasts of the night. If you look at normalcy and human cliques, they're just abstract concepts of that.

So whilst you're not exempt from fetishising things, you pretend that you fetishise nothing, so that you won't be perceived as fetishising those things that are taboo, that exist outside of normalcy, and in doing so you're safe. In fact, this is why a lot of us are 'Anonymous' on the Internet, because we believe it makes us safe. The whole anonymous angle is just another facet of normalcy. I doubt I could give up mine, even, I'd probably be too scared to. Not everyone can be a Julian Assange, after all. I'm not sure if the majority would even want to be, since it's not an enviable life.

There are so many elements of our nature which simply are nature. In a war, everyone is uniform so that you know which side is which. And in society, you have this group of taboos which are not 'normal', so that you can create a segregation. Then you have 'us', those that are inside of the group, those who are protected, and where each works to protect the next because all are the same, and then you have 'them', those who're outside the group, and either are not worhty of protection, or are the enemy.

This then leads to a very moralistic black & white outlook on life, us vs them, and that invites binary thinking, and with binary thinking you see everything as one and zero. The problem is is that things are more complicated than that. When you examine normalcy more closely, it falls apart, because everyone in your group has a different take on what 'normal' is. Then the group gets smaller and smaller, as new abominations are added that weren't considered before. This is why normalcy isn't examined too closely, because normalcy is the vapourware of the human psyche. It's a simplistic whitewash over life, one doesn't work too well.

The thing is though, as we become ever more sapient, as we evolve, we begin to recognise these things for what they are. And therein we begin to realise that thinking of 1 as us, 0 as them, 1 as superior, 0 as inferior, 1 as pure, 0 as corrupt, 1 as shining good, 0 as dark evil, 1 as doing no harm, 0 as doing no good, 1 as caucasian, 0 as foreigners, 1 as straight, 0 as gay, 1 as white, 0 as black, and so on... when we examine this, we begin to realise that it's as flawed as any other system. It's flawed because it can't be perfect. It can't be perfect because those ones and zeroes aren't objective, they're subjective.

Everyone has their own ones and zeroes.

I think that normalcy is one of those human gestalts that's not far away from just collapsing in on itself. You have people who'll cling to it, hang onto it, and need for it, because that's ingrained and it's believed that this is necessary to survive. But it's a new world, we're different people than our ancestors, we're more complicated, and one of these days we're going to realise that we need far more complicated systems to survive. We'll have to man up and admit that the us vs them system of normalcy and abomination just can't work any more. And that maybe it never did, that the whole thing was a massive placebo.

Me? I'm a hypnofetishist who finds deathclaws attractive, yes, there are people I'd hide information like this from in order to feel safe. I'm a hypocrite. But that just means that I'm alive, like every other person on the planet, it's a way of life. Of course, one can't help but hope that eventually we'll find a better way.Embracing normalcy to be safe just can't keep working for that much longer, and if you look at the world today, you can see it fraying around the edges already.

Terastas is right, Pariah. In today's world, we need less segregation, not more.

[Baphnedia]

To temper things a little bit...

I agree that less segregation is better, but allowing just those who you want to know your innermost desires to do so. I've found that those I can trust for the most part do keep things that would damage me on the down low (nothing illegal but knowing some folks who grew up as child-pr0n stars as children against their will can personally understand the vilification of anything related - even if its imaginary). I'm not saying that the cub art should or shouldn't be vilified, rather that there are some people that really get screwed up by the material sectors of that industry.

Somewhere I lost my point. I've learned to accept that sometimes those I trust do something other than expected (like when a former contractor in my company told everyone in the company my particular fetish earlier this year), and while what I do to feel safe isn't acceptable under the socially acceptable forms of normalcy, I learned the hard way that everyone else in my company really were not affected by the disclosure.

Suffice to say, I don't believe that there is such thing as a 'secret' anymore, its more of a matter of 'how long until word of _____ gets out?'. Besides, with things said on the internet and services like the Wayback machine, I've learned to temper how I say what I say online - most of the time, knowing that everything I say, from when its posted into perpetuity, may be the only measure some other being has of me.

Interesting direction that the conversation here has turned... Vagrant, one thought about ones and zeroes. You were doing really well with mentioning that the 'us vs them' system in our society doesn't work, that its not about who is right and who isn't, to point out who is right so far in this thread in the next paragraph. Something similar hit me recently when I was lost in my own thoughts along similar lines, when I realized that the existence of the Tea Party validates my view of the universe, and of sentience.*

*let me say now that I hold no political affiliation, and that I had more than my RDA of headdesking after the thought crossed my mind...

[Vagrant]

That was entirely the point, though.

Everyone's a hypocrite, and that's how this works, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to be better. This is the very core of what I was attempting to get at, albeit with the eloquence and subtlety of Red Dwarf's cat after he's just found a jackhammer. There's also the other side to this that just to think someone is right, it doesn't mean that another person is particularly wrong, just that they have their own way of seeing things. I hadn't intended to imply that Pariah was wrong, and I wasn't sure that I had.

See, there's the problem. A lot of assumption goes on, and you can't say that one person is right without assuming that it's some kind of battle. And that's kind of unfortunate. I'd already conceded that we do need to section off certain bits of info about ourselves for our own safety, and in that regard, the notion of normalcy has some merit. The only problem is at the same time it has no merit, its merit is perceived, it's a placebo. But it works because it's a placebo. And I thought that Terastas had correctly offered warning about such.

The thing is, the moment society has the collection realisation that normalcy is an illusion, just a comforting belief that we uphold to make ourselves feel better (like so many systems of faith and religion), and that there's no actual worth to that beyond our own desire to believe, things may very well go to s***. We need to start practising a lack of segregation for when that time comes, because if we don't, and that time will come, then we'll be found wanting. It's not going to be easy, and everyone segregates, even I do it, but what matters is that we try not to. That we make the effort to look past the monochrome filter.

So it's a very temporal situation. For the past and present, Pariah may very well be right. But if we assume that everything's going to stay the same and we never prepare for anything, then we won't be ready when things do change. It's not a change in nature, after all, it's a change in us, and we do evolve all the time. And sometimes, those evolutions can come in bloody, messy revolutions. That's the worrying part about humanity, it tends to repeat that part of history over and over, and we seem to be spiraling inward. I think McKenna was into something there, but I digress.

What I was trying to say is that I think we should be attempting to prepare ourselves for a world where segregation isn't necessary. We should be testing out systems for that and thinking on it on a daily basis. The reason for this is because segregation itself is something of an illusion, an it's becoming more transparent as time goes on. People are finding that there's less and less that they can segregate over. First it was ethnicity, then it was sexual orientation, and today it's religion and nation. We're wearing down all these options.

Eventually we're going to run out of options.

The interesting part is that I'm of the opinion that we're going to run out of options to bolster the illusion of segregation with much sooner rather than later. These past few years, it feels like the world has been on edge, getting ready to go absolutely crazy, it's a transmission, a vibe I've felt through all media outlets, and in all the people I know. I never can shake this feeling that there's something big just over that next hill. And what I'm trying to do is to tell people that the systems we use today? They might not work tomorrow. And the person who's right today might've been wrong yesterday.

And not even an objective kind of wrong either. Remember, it's all subjective. Everything is relative. I'll take my crazy somewhere else, now. :p

[FoxKnight]

FoxKnight's two cents-
Even this whole conversation has probably already been played out before and will again. Looking at things like this is going to make us all crazy eventually. And people need dirty laundry, (man, I love that Don Henley song). It'll even out eventually. Nothing in this universe will ever be settled because it's all opinion. Only the laws of nature can ever sustain.

I do believe in the theory of multiple/infinite universes. Anything that can and cannot be will be and has been, so just enjoy the ride, it's free xD

I really do want to see a world where everything is black and white. Color is what obscures vision. One can never truly see when the eyes are distracted by color. (All metaphoric by the way)

Everyone here has a point some way or another.

My opinion about the sex part of this conversation is that all of it should* remain private. I have no interest in fetishes or anything of that sort and I don't care if you do.

*Doesn't mean "must"

[alphanubilus]

I'll be honest I can't understand, and I don't understand how people can get obsessed with some of the most bizzare fetishs... balloon anyone... and the truth is, those who practice fetish sometimes can cross into areas where what is marginally acceptable becomes criminal. There are after all certian fetishes of which without check can lead to some very bad things. Jeffery Dohmer, himself, suffered from a necrophilia fetish, of which escalated from dead animals, to human corpses, to murdering young men, just to sleep with their corpse. Child pornography and child related fetishes can lead to petaphilia... And let's not cross into Zoophilia (Beastiality). So in some cases lines HAVE to be drawn, of course I don't think anybody has an argument there.

As for Furaffinity while I morally don't agree with a lot of the "art" there, the reality is it would be constitutionally wrong to force them to block all content, that isn't "suitable" to MY standards per say. This is where Freedom of Speech comes into play. Once we start deeming what is appropriate to view, listen to, or whot-knot, then we might as well toss Freedom of Speech out the window. My view is this, you KNOW what you are getting into when signing up for Furaffinity. The Admins created personal restrictions to customize your presence so that you don't have to view objectionable material. If you choose not to use those those restrictions, that is on your head.

If you are still not inclined to be "associated" with the likes of that site... then simply leave, close your account. You CAN create your own site (it isn't as hard as it use to be) and set rules and boundries as to what you allow. That would be the only way around that.

[Morkulv]

I'll be honest I can't understand, and I don't understand how people can get obsessed with some of the most bizzare fetishs... balloon anyone... and the truth is, those who practice fetish sometimes can cross into areas where what is marginally acceptable becomes criminal. There are after all certian fetishes of which without check can lead to some very bad things. Jeffery Dohmer, himself, suffered from a necrophilia fetish, of which escalated from dead animals, to human corpses, to murdering young men, just to sleep with their corpse. Child pornography and child related fetishes can lead to petaphilia... And let's not cross into Zoophilia (Beastiality). So in some cases lines HAVE to be drawn, of course I don't think anybody has an argument there.

As for Furaffinity while I morally don't agree with a lot of the "art" there, the reality is it would be constitutionally wrong to force them to block all content, that isn't "suitable" to MY standards per say. This is where Freedom of Speech comes into play. Once we start deeming what is appropriate to view, listen to, or whot-knot, then we might as well toss Freedom of Speech out the window. My view is this, you KNOW what you are getting into when signing up for Furaffinity. The Admins created personal restrictions to customize your presence so that you don't have to view objectionable material. If you choose not to use those those restrictions, that is on your head.

If you are still not inclined to be "associated" with the likes of that site... then simply leave, close your account. You CAN create your own site (it isn't as hard as it use to be) and set rules and boundries as to what you allow. That would be the only way around that.

I see what you are getting at, but you could also flip that around and say that when people have the freedom to express their fetish like that, it could prevent the 'real' disturbed people from practising it in real life. Same goes for furry and non-furry art containing bestiality; to you its sick, but there are tons of people who can relate to it. If it keeps them happy and its not hurting anyone else, I don't see any problem with it.