Its a common truism to say "Furries keep the internet going" and "if the plane to Anthrocon went down then the internet would collapse" and its not quite as true as it used to be.

But it IS true in the case of a big blue monoceros named Tugrik. He passed away very recently, after a long struggle with illness and poor health. You might not know his name, but all of furrydom owes him a debt. Quietly, behind the scenes, he was instrumental in the modern fandom's origins.

Tugrik was one of those furs who kept the Internet going. He was FurryMUCK's hardware admin back in the day, and was one of the smartest furs I ever met. In a fandom that has a lot of technical experts in it, Tugrik was on another level. His knowledge of computer networking, his ability to build and invent, was absolutely genius-level. The guy built a mobile wifi hotspot before anyone else, ffs. He built an FPV drone from scratch - a decade before they existed. He came up with a kind of GPS antenna that revolutionized all kinds of navigation. If he had wanted to he could have easily been a billionaire. He was not interested in that, although he did make a good living. He built stuff because it was fun and because he wanted to experiment and play around. He was a true geek, a real maker. He raised chickens and grew his own hot peppers. He learned stuff and messed around with that stuff for his whole life, and I can't imagine a better way to live.

And he was a brilliant cook, and a good friend, and generous almost to a fault, and just all around a warm, friendly person that I will miss greatly. We lost a good one. Goodbye, Tug.

Welp one day back in 2021 on a whim I drew a girl version of Cargo for a joke pic in response to a Kircai pic of a teencub Zhayde. That set in motion a chain of events where I am now undergoing a gender transition in real life. "girl Cargo" became Cargie and now I'm moving my primary fursona identity to Cargie. I am keeping Cargo around - will certainly still draw him from time to time, and I'll keep cargoweasel.com set up as a website and such, and signing my pics "cw" will still be the same, but.. Cargie is now my main fursona and Cargo is the secondary. pronouns are she/her or they/them. Please update your records :3

A little over a year ago I posted this: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10768936/

In which I mentioned my decision to adopt non-binary they/them pronouns and move my gender presentation, such as it was, to the middle rather than all the way on the "dude" side as it had been for many years prior. As time has gone on this has seemed more and more like the right call for myself personally. While I am still "a guy" to most casual observers, i know how i feel about myself and friends and family (within furry, anyways) have been champs about acceptance. I also began to interrogate things about myself, aspects of my personality that turned out to be some kind of gender dysphoria, that was so entrenched I didn't even realize it until I began to think deeply about the matter. I can certainly post about all those things in another journal.

And in the year since I came out as non binary a lot of things happened, both politically in the larger world and personally. While the situation in the US for trans people has gotten increasingly dire, it is quite straightforward to obtain gender-related healthcare at least here in Nova Scotia, Canada and shortly after BFC I made the decision I wanted to start on HRT, at a low dose of estrogen, just to see what happened. I decided to get while the gettin's good, I suppose, as this opportunity might easily vanish if the vicious backlash to trans rights happens in Canada as it has in the last few months in the USA. If you are not trans yourself, you might want to ask trans friends how they are feeling right now in America: my guess would be Not Great. Instead of hiding back in the closet in this atmosphere, I felt it better to go for it, in a spirit of rebellion and solidarity, as well as a sense that if I don't do it now, I might never get another chance. I am 53 years old - pretty late for a gender transition but I'm certainly not dead yet.

After some consultations and forms, I was prescribed Spiro and Estradiol in January 4 2025. I have now been taking HRT for about two months, and I've noticed quite a few changes. I feel quite good. And I've started to move things in a direction that I wanted them to go.

As I said to the doctor at the gender clinic, I don't yet know if I am going to go all the way fem. I may or may not adopt a new name and full time female presentation. Even if I do I will be "boymoding" for some time. ask me again in a year. However I'm starting to experiment with wardrobe and makeup and so forth. I have a lot to learn.

It's a great adventure and it's just beginning.

here is the story. From the top.

Okay so Ash Coyote is a YouTuber who has made some excellent videos - including the documentary The Fandom which i highly recommend.

She made a video about ABDL/Babyfurs, demystifying many misconceptions about us and presenting a very fair and honest picture of what we're all about.

This video was copyright struck by Catamara, who is a fursuit maker, pooltoy fan, and anti-babyfur crusader, attempting to position herself in the fandom as the LibsOfTiktok for babyfurs. she's doxxed the hotel for BFC and tried to gin up multiple harassment campaigns. she was probably behind at least some of the recent mass-reports that led to the 2.7 debacle around here in recent weeks. she's on some moralistic crusade to call us all pedophiles, and basically she's a fuckin asshole who needs to be reined in before someone gets hurt. The video uses a brief shot of her artwork, which was later blurred out, but catamara still copyright struck it and had the video taken down.

Ash went to a copyright lawyer, and will probably appeal the ruling and get the video back up, but that costs money, so she put up a gofundme with a $1000 target to raise money for it.

SCIGGLES PAID THE WHOLE THING.

the amount raised is now over $2k, last i checked, probably more. plenty of money to pay the lawyer.

I was skeptical about Sciggles really being on our side, but this. this is tangible, concrete action on her part that I will DEFINITELY approve of and give credit where its due. It goes a long way to showing she is serious about gaining back our trust. THANK YOU SCIGGLES.

And fuck you Catamara, take your temu chaiya raichik act somewhere outside our fandom

Welp, the worst happened. I was optimistic about this election, thinking there was absolutely no way that doddering rapist would win again after the shit he pulled last time. Yet here we are.

Every immigrant and every queer person in America is in great danger. Project 2025 has a lot of scary shit in it, thats now gonna happen, and some of the worst is what they plan to do with queers and trans folks.

We will need to fight, but first and foremost we will need to survive. I want all of you to survive. And know that someone cares about you, even if the country has shown that it does not.

Oh, and if you voted for trump, or if youre gonna come in with some "it won't be that bad" shit, please, do not bother, I am very much not in the mood.

I keep thinking of this south park bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15HTd4Um1m4

Look, I sympathize. I do. This entire fucking clusterfuck around here the past couple of months could have been avoided. instead it blew up in everyones faces. And now FA is trying to clean up the mess. I believe Sciggles when she says she's sorry. I'd be sorry too in her position.

as a user, who has seen this fucking dance go around in a big circle more times than I care to remember, I just think of the old saying: fool me once, shame on you. Fool me six hundred times, shame on me.

I'm still goin to Weasyl. I think you folks will really like what we did with the new policy documents there. I may still post here, but it will never be "home base" again. the damage has been done.

"oh, I dont like ABDL art or babyfurs.. in fact they're a little gross. I'm kind of glad FA is cracking down tbh."

I see that sentiment around a fair amount. But here's the thing. You might not be into the same things I am, and thats fine. But if youre here and a furry you probably ARE into something thats a little off the beaten path. Maybe you like ferals, or knots, or equine cocks. Maybe hyper scat, or hypnosis, or incest, or dubious-consent. Maybe you like fat furs and weight gain. All of those things are at risk when we start redlining out images based not on the content of the pic, but their potential for influencing real world actions, or for implications of fictional characters mental states, or other things that aren't ACTUALLY IN THE ART but are subjective opinions in the minds of observers, that vary wildly from person to person.

Who can say if something is "fetishized" or "sexual" to me, but not to you, or vice versa? Can you see that this leads to a situation where EVERYTHING can be read one way or another, and can always be interpreted in the most harmful bad-faith possible way, and thus HAS to be banned? That there's no way off this slippery slope when you start banning adult characters in artwork from doing something BECAUSE it might get misinterpreted?

Furaffinity banned actual cub porn, as in naked cubs doing sexual things, many many years ago. But they didn't stop there. Now they are banning fully adult characters from doing sexual things on the vague grounds of their mental states. If they ban "mental regression" hypno is next. And then something else will irk them. and then something else and something else. Until none of us are left here.

FA mods defined EGGS as minors for this new policy. EGGS. So if you like oviposition youre liking literal CSAM according to them. Its madness.

Please, please, listen to me on this.

after a lot of thought I'm not going to do the mods' jobs for them. if any of my art violates their nebulous policies (as in, "mental regression" being just as bad as CSAM) they can delete it themselves. suspend me. do whatever they gotta do. my gallery's right there. if its not allowed now, after DECADES, then fuckin delete it yourselves

FA has updated their policies, and they've come right out and said that full/wet diapers on babyfurs are no longer permitted on the site. This means that a good chunk of my gallery is no longer allowed per the AUP.

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10983144/

Even my adult characters (such as the Diaper School pics) are often mentally regressed, which makes them "minors" according to this asinine rule.

I started posting to FA in 2005. And ever since then its been one headache after another about content.

I'm just so tired of this shit. Its been decades and it just keeps getting worse. I'm just done, fucking done with fur affinity's bullshit. I have given these people chance after chance, the benefit of the doubt long after it was worthwhile. I've jumped through all the hoops they demanded, and yet they always want more. I've given this site hundreds of dollars in donations over the years, including to Dragoneers gofundme. And they choose to do this.

Well, fuck you Furaffinity. I'm out. Maybe someone will finally buy you and give you the exit you want.

Over the next few weeks I will be deleting my art from this gallery. So save what you want to keep.

As always you can check Cargoweasel.com for a list of my active galleries and socials.

I've posted my long BFC writeup here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/58368126/

But there's a few little notes and observations that I forgot to include in it that I think are important.

- I was aware of some drama around BFC online, mostly driven by a couple of individuals from outside the community who are deeply misinformed about what babyfur is, who is attending BFC, and what goes on at this convention. The location of the hotel and its name was confidential, revealed only to paid con attendees, but of course this information leaked online. One individual, a MAGA-supporting furry, attempted to start a LibsOfTiktok-style harassment campaign against the hotel for hosting us, and made posts to this effect on Instagram and other social media. I didn’t confirm this, but I heard she may have even showed up to the hotel, but the security did not let them in (if they even attempted to enter). Another anti, ironically an ABDL streamer herself, posted false reviews on the hotel’s Yelp page claiming “a man in a diaper exposed himself to her in the hotel parking lot”. A blatantly false report, and was quickly deleted, however, she had been posting strident critiques of BFC constantly for months leading up to the con, based a few decade-old tweets. Neither of these two harassment campaigns had much traction whatsoever. In this chaotic election season I guess people have other things to worry about. I have reason to suspect the recent FA purges of babyfur content were related to the first individual’s actions though.

- BFC had a strict no-cameras policy, and you had to keep a special sticker over your phone cameras at all times in con space. If you were caught taking even an innocuous picture inside the hotel, you would be ejected from the convention. Only authorized photographers were permitted to take pictures, with badge verification and consent of anyone in the frame. I did personally see a couple of furries fall afoul of this strict rule and they did lose their con badges. They take privacy very seriously.

- As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an old greymuzzle in the fandom, and I was a little nervous about being considerably older than most attendees. And yet when I got there, those apprehensions disappeared and I was just a little among all the other littles. Also, babyfur ironically enough skews a little bit older than mainstream furrydom - for whatever reason, it seemed like the average age of BFC attendees was around 30 and up. Maybe because this con in particular is expensive and in a city thats hard to get to, maybe because babyfur is something you get into when you’ve been into the fandom a few years, but BFC was a slightly more veteran furry crowd. There were furs there older than me, by a good few years, and nobody gave them any static. Your physical age does not matter at a place like this: only what you are on the inside.

BFC 24 was, without a shadow of a doubt, the greatest fur con experience of my life. It was lovely to see so so so many furs, some of which I haven't seen in years or even decades, and to have the years melt away and be little together. I met many new friends as well. I DJed the Littlespace rave. I signed Little Troubles cards. I played in the ball pit. I gave and received so many stickers and pins.

It was amazing to be in that world where being a diaperbutt babyfur was accepted and loved instead of barely tolerated or harassed.

I'll be doing a full write up soon, like my Camp Crucible writeups, so stay tuned for that

welp in 24 hours i'll be on a plane to BFC in Santa Cruz and i'll be on a journey to an alternate universe where babyfurs and ABDLs are accepted and loved instead of barely tolerated and harassed off websites

it should be fun

if youre there LMK! And come to my dance on Saturday night! It'll be the cubtripping rave experience of your dreams

There's been no update to the ToS or content policies about this latest wave of ban hammers that FA staff have been giving out to any page with a diaper on it.

Its completely arbitrary and unpredictable.

If I am gone from the site one day, just go to cargoweasel.com for a list of my actively updated galleries and socials.

And if I am gone from the site one day, its not because I wanted to leave, but because FA decided I was no longer welcome.

jeez, whoever's running FA now, youre really making me feel good about donating to your gofundme, so what, you can purge every ABDL off the site? dragoneer was holding you back and now that he's gone its open season?

I haven't had anything pulled.. this time, but I suspect its just a matter of time before someone gets a wild hair up their ass

i'm so fuckin tired of this shit

well, that was a wild ride. I'm glad the staff here got everything straightened out. Word of advise: change your password (just to be on the safe side)

I'm very sorry to hear about Dragoneer passing away so suddenly.

I was following Neer's health crisis closely on Bsky and this still came as a shock.

He built this place, and a huge piece of the furry fandom wouldn't exist without FA. He will be sorely missed.

I'm sad to report the passing of Taral Wayne,  saara

He was one of the original furries - ever since the 1970s as it splintered off from SF/Fantasy fandom. He was pivotal in the early development of furry. He was one of the Secret Masters of Fandom. He was nominated for a Hugo Award. He was a hell of an artist. He was an irascible guy who lived in a tiny apartment in Toronto full of geeky wonders. I visited him quite a few times back in my earliest involvement in furrydom, we'd go over to his place and watch old cartoons and anime. Its where I saw Totoro for the first time, on his couch. We lost contact over the years, but I made a special effort to visit him when I went back to Toronto in 2022, and he was quite surprised to see me - we hadn't spoken in over two decades. But I'm glad I did, and had a chance to see him one last time.

A true legend of the old school. May his name never be forgotten.

Welp on Monday I went to the doctor for the results of my first checkup in awhile, and turns out I have type 2 diabetes, so I got that goin for me. It explains a lot about why I was thirsty and peeing a lot and getting weird pains/cramps in my legs and feet.

The next few days were a whirlwind of being bombarded with information from all sides, how to glucose monitor, ozempic, metformin, insurance forms, finger prick tests, a complete overhaul of my eating habits and grocery shopping, and through it all a low level sense of panic and shame. how did i let this get to this point. I knew I was 'prediabetic' but didn't really see that as a problem. I have apparently had diabetic level blood glucose for several years without knowing it.

Only now am I starting to get some kind of handle on the situation. Its a little scary to think that i have this condition now and its just going to be like this forever. I can lose a bunch of weight (and will) but I'm going to be a Diabetic for the rest of my life. I will not be able to be casual about food from here on in. Its manageable, my mom's had it for 20 years, but .. eat healthy, kids. dont be like me.

Camp Crucible is coming up, although I'm not going this year, i'm thinking about it. its safe to say that the 7 times i went to Camp changed my life. it brought me out of my furry shell into the larger world of kink, and taught me a great deal about who I am and what kink is or can be.

Furry fandom is organized socially along kink lines. Inflation furs hang out with other inflatophiles. Babs are friends with other babs. vore furs are friends with vore furs. you can move among the groups, but its generally how it shakes out. You won't be friends with everyone who shares your kink, but its at least one point of common ground. The thing is, its mostly fantasy-based, in RP, and art.

A lot of furry kinks are impossible in real life. We come close as we can in some areas, but there ain't no shrink rays IRL. This is fun but often makes things very conceptual and intellectual. Kink, as in BDSM culture, is VERY physical and far more concerned about "Real Life" actions with our human bodies.

For example, a fur might fantasize about being shrunk and stepped on by a giant paw. They might commission a drawing or write a story or RP a scene about it. At camp you would build a giant paw or find a mattress and have three friends jump on you with it. You'd learn a lot. Not to say that furries never build giant paws IRL (i know at least one!) but it's less common.

When I started going to camp I had to mentally shift from "this is a hot fantasy / fun concept" to "these are the RL things / environments / actions that can make this happen safely" - it provides certain strictures, because a lot of my fantasies are impossible, but when you nail it.. its great.

What camp taught me was that I can trust others to participate in these scenes with me and that if I extend that trust, it will be paid back to me in spades. Also the rewards for going outside my comfort zones into things I never thought I would like, were incredible.

The lines between kink and furry are more blurry than they used to be, and also between human ABDL and babyfurs, and I want to think i played a role in that. At least, I was willing to take a chance on kink camp and brought furries over with me, and brought the lessons kink taught me back to furry.

these are the facts.

It is becoming quite clear that the Christian right is attempting to remove all NSFW content from the internet by controlling payment processors, with some success as of late. We will soon be unable to sell commissions, comics, etc. with adult content of any kind over the internet. I have seen this in the wind since around 2010, and now that wind has become a hurricane. When KOSA passes, and onerous ID requirements will be forced onto all adult website providers, this business will become even more difficult still.

SubscribeStar, Itch.io, and other services like it that currently allow NSFW artworks will inevitably bow to this pressure the way Gumroad, Stripe, and Patreon already have. You probably have a year or two, tops, depending if Trump wins in November.

I do not believe the petitions being circulated against Mastercard, etc, will have any noticeable effect. the politicians of both parties are keen to see KOSA signed into law and neither of them will ever go to bat for sex workers or furry porn artists. We are on our own.

I have done a lot of research into alternative payment methods that are not vulnerable to this censorship.

I will be accepting Monero for commissions going forwards. I'll still take PayPal and such, as long as I am allowed to do so, but Monero will be there when the other methods are closed to me.

Before you jump down my throat, I know you dont like crypto, but it's literally the only viable longterm solution to buy and sell the things Visa, MasterCard and PayPal don't want us to see.

Monero is a cryptocurrency, one designed from the ground up for anonymity and privacy. It is extremely difficult to track. it tends to not wildly vary in price the way other cryptos do, although it does rise and fall somewhat with the market. While it is a "proof of work" algorithm, it does not rely on massive power hungry ASIC driven mining rigs the way Bitcoin does. you can run a monero wallet on your phone or desktop, secured with a long passphrase only you know. You can acquire monero via various exchanges such as Coinbase. I recommend reading up on it at getmonero.org and the wikipedia page.

A good place to use Monero to try out if your system is working, is to get an anonymous account on the Mullvad VPN service.

There is currently no patreon-like monthly payment systems that use monero, but hopefully that will change soon.

I wish it were otherwise, but this is the reality we find ourselves in.

Mark Merlino's passing and my own 30-year furryversary has got me digging through the fandom vaults lately. Old Flickr archives from 90s furcons, dusty old websites and forgotten file directories. And my spelunking led me to alt.fan.furry, the USENET group (what today would be a subreddit). A.F.F. was for many years the locus of furry debate about Whats To Be Done With The Fandom. And I was gonna find hilarious old posts from the gang of dipshits that posted their nuclear-hot takes there from ~96-06.. but then I said.. no. I'm not.

I'm not gonna dip a ladle into that dusty old tureen of shit. Just take my word for it: there was a lot of hateful, homophobic assholes who made that group their club for years. and they fuckin hated Mark Merlino, and furry, and each other, and they just flamed each other for years on end.

The "debates" raged endlessly, pointlessly, looping over the same topics and personal attacks and threats for years. years, it went on. The most pointless goddamn bullshit you can imagine. These fuckin guys, vomiting toxic waste into their keyboards without end. They were burned furs, until that failed, so they hated the burned furs. They just hated everything and everyone.

I envy their stamina. I have no idea how the likes of hirtes and random managed to keep from bursting a blood vessel. These boomers did not stop.

But they railed against the tide. They could not stop us. We were the younger, queerer furs and we took over. We pushed them out in a great replacement. Age and demographics did the rest. They expelled their hate into text on a screen, futilely raging against the future.

Furry did not become the queer-friendly place it is now by happenstance. They fought every inch of it.. but we fuckin won, by numbers, by energy, by just ignoring these fossils. alt.fan.furry now is a graffiti-smeared wall in an old ruined building. Nobody cares what they have to say.

We knew it was coming but it still hits hard. Thank you, Sy Sable, for everything you did. Furry fandom wouldn't exist without your efforts. and fuck cancer.

This is a hard one. Vehement content warnings apply about suicide and hate groups.

A fur I knew named not_coyotic, aka Downspin, aka Raiya, aka Railfoxen, aka Kindrift, aka many many other names, apparently killed themself recently. We were not friends, to say the least, but I am pretty gutted all the same. I don't want anyone to kill themselves, whether I am personally friends with them or not. I'm gonna use Kindrift as their name because thats how i knew them best back in the day. I'm using they pronouns because I literally do not know their gender identity.

People think of the Burned Furs as the only "anti furry" movement that happened within furry, but the BFs were the tip of the iceberg. there were many many small anti-furry groups, forums and websites, both before and well after the BFs heyday in 1998-2002. After the BFs fell apart with infighting, there was a website called Crush Yiff Destroy, where Kindrift was a mod, until it fell apart in infighting, and then later another forum called Vivisector, where Kindrift was a mod, until it fell apart in infighting.

Over the years of furry fandom, anti-furry sites run by ex-furries cropped up, alongside non-furry hate sites like Encyclopedia Dramatica. These sites focus on drama hounding and posting about the very worst people they could find in the fandom, holding them up as caricatured examples of all of the fandom. The logic went, for example "this fur is a zoo, therefore, all furries are zoos, and therefore furry fandom is a corrupt group of zoophiles, and let's hate them all and harass furries, dox dox, boooo", and similar statements, both from furries and ex-furs who had grown disenchanted with the fandom from within and non-furries who liked to blanket their homophobia in anti-furry language. They often say they do this for "the lulz", but its a particularly bitter, hateful form of fun that ultimately poisons you, like repeated exposure to lead or mercury. Its not healthy to spend all your time hating things or people, even if you find it amusing for a time, that laughter quickly becomes toxic. And you can marinate in that toxicity for years, and it can be lethal. Just ask Lowtax.

I do not know what Kindrift's life situation was like recently. I hadn't paid attention to them for many years. I don't even know if they were involved in furry or anti-furry anymore. I do know that when I started drawing, they posted my art on various anti-furry image boards and chan boards and tried to make my stuff into a meme (a la the famous "Bawww!" that drove poor Dougie Bunny off the internet). It didn't take. Nobody cared to make my art into a meme. If I recall they were a regular on a FurryMUCK gathering spot called Calumny Tavern, and they had problems with the Purple Nurple in general and with me in particular for some reason. Maybe I said some bonehead off the cuff thing on public shout one day - that wouldn't be at all unlikely. Whatever it was, they had it out for me for awhile, not just me but other furs, but I did my best to ignore it. I moved on with my life because life is too short to deal with toxic people. Kindrift's harassment of other furs like Xydexx, for whom they had something of a vendetta, was far in excess of any conflict with me.

Years later I had forgotten all about Kindrift and they would occasionally pop up on Twitter and needle me. I blocked them and went about my day.

One thing Kindrift liked to joke about, which a lot of us did, was death. Morbid gallows jokes about killing yourself and jokes about plane crashes and accidents and murders and wanting to die was common with them. Which I didn't even really notice as unusual, because it was so frequent. But looking back now.. they were someone who had a lot of very dark sensibilities.

I wish this didn't happen. I wish there was some way to help them or stop them. I wish they didn't spend their entire lives in a hateful miasma that perhaps played a role in killing them.

It fuckin sucks. I don't want anyone to die, whether we were friends or not. Other furs I know were good friends with Kindrift, which makes me think there was an entire side of them that I never knew or saw, and I'm sorry for their loss.

Soundtrack: Forever Young, Rod Stewart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwG6g5boyF4

Content warnings apply for discussion of suicide.

When I was growing up, in my extended family I was the youngest of all my cousins. Also I was the youngest in my school classes by virtue of having skipped a grade in elementary school. I was used to being “the kid” in a given situation. Almost imperceptibly that changed one day and I began to be “the grownup” in a given social circle, especially in furry, and now I’m verging on being “the old man”. I was a bit sensitive about my age for the longest time, and a sure way to hit me in a sore spot was to make a crack about my real life age. But I’ve decided to own it and be up front about it. I turn 52 in a couple of months. I have been a furry for well over half my life and I have no plans to quit anytime soon. As long as my fingers are able to type and hold a stylus I can be an active furry. And I will be a furry for the rest of my life, regardless of the demographics of the fandom as a whole. I really have nowhere else I want to go. Furry is my home.

What have I learned in this time?

You can always find out new things about yourself. You can pick up kinks at any age. You can learn new things about your gender and sexuality at any age. You are always in a process of becoming something new. None of us are truly static, but we do evolve and change at different speeds. That is true even if you try to fight it or ignore it. It’s more fun to roll with it.

“Be curious, not judgmental.” - it’s a quote from Ted Lasso that sums up much of my life philosophy. I always try to understand where someone is coming from and why they might feel a certain way about something. I try to empathize even with my enemies, because knowing your enemies’ weak spots is key to defeating them.

Friendship is a wonderful thing, but sometimes friendships end, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It can hurt to lose a friend as much as it hurts to lose a romantic partner, and the wounds can sting for years.

I try very hard to never close a door completely on a friendship, unless their actions were so deeply wrong that I can’t trust or respect them anymore.

I do not judge people based on their thoughts or fantasies, only on real world actions.

I try very hard to live my life in such a way that people will not post crab rave upon my death.

I help where I am able, and that includes buying “commissions” where we both know its more of a donation, and I never expect an actual drawing to show up. As my financial situation permits I support my fellow furries as much as possible, with no strings attached.

The hardest lesson I had to learn was that sometimes when someone is walking a dark path in life you can’t help them. You can give them advice, love, support, long chats, you can be there as much as possible for someone, but ultimately all you can do is watch them walk that path, and you are powerless to stop them. And it is a hard, hard thing to watch.

Not all the furs I have known, made it to now.

I remember Rabbitboy. I remember Ashentaine. I remember Singe. I remember StarsPyre. I remember Furp. I remember Stellos. I remember Vawlkee. I remember Doug Winger. I remember Carmine Koala. I remember PebblePup. I remember Shon. I remember Jace. I remember Fringe. I remember HakuPamfer. I remember Rebecca Dragon.

Most of all I remember Kimba.

Some were well known in the fandom, some were not. Some were babyfurs, some were not. Some died from disease or accident, others by their own hands.

The Black Rabbit of Inlé has taken them all.

I remember them even if our lives only touched briefly, and I miss them.

Thank you for being here with me for however many more years we have together.

Cargo Weasel
January 29, 2024

Soundtrack: New Romantics, Taylor Swift (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-BcH7KowGE)

On March 4 of 2020 I posted a question about Coronavirus to the Camp Crucible discussion group on Fetlife. This was very early on in the pandemic, and little was known about it. The general response I got was “It’s overblown” “It’s media hype” and “it’s just the flu” and “I hope camp doesn’t get cancelled! I’m sure goin!”

A week later on March 11 of 2020 I posted about my heartbroken decision to not attend camp that year because of COVID. I said “not being able to go to fetish camp is probably going to be the least of our worries pretty soon”. The general response was “Sorry we won’t see you!” and “Yeah, this looks bad, but it’ll probably clear up by May” and some “it’s the 5g antennas! wake up sheeple!”

By the end of March, when lockdowns were starting to kick in, it was apparent Camp wasn’t going to happen. It came back in an abbreviated form in 2021, and was fully back with a vaccine requirement in 2022.

I haven’t been to Camp Crucible since 2019, for various reasons of expense and other travelling, but partly because of the attitudes I saw among my fellow campers in those weeks in 2020. The net effect was that COVID drove a wedge between me and some of my kink friends. I guess I didn’t know those people as well as I’d thought. I dropped off Fetlife just because I really didn’t want to get into those debates (which later blew up into the entire mask/vaccine controversies we all know). It was immensely disheartening to see BDSM people, so often heavily concerned with safety and consent, throw caution to the wind when it really mattered.

They went from people I would trust with my life to people I didn’t know if I could trust at all.

It’s important to note that my closest friends in kink, like Dirtypaws and Mako and others, along with the main staff and chair of Camp itself, were on the rational side of the issue, and they ran camp as safely as anyone could ask for. I wouldn’t have a problem going back now. But it was still disappointing to see the attitudes among people I had previously respected.

So I kind of retreated back to furry. In those pandemic times it was a moot point anyways as nobody was going anywhere. But I haven’t been back to Fetlife since those initial pandemic days. I really didn’t want to hear what anyone there had to say about, say, Black Lives Matter protests.

In the summer of 2020 I started drawing again after a year-long break, and began what I now think of as the modern era of Cargoweasel art.

A little earlier, back in 2018, I got laid off from my job and for the first time I made a go at being a full time furry artist. I started up a Patreon, did some commissions and began work on a long form comic - a ten-years-later sequel to Playtime, with the lead character now in his late twenties living in a furry house with a bunch of other littles. I did about 25 pages of it but, as often happens with me, ran out of steam and real life intervened. I still like Big Kid Pants though and I want to finish it someday.

What that comic and Patreon taught me is that my drawing skills needed work. I’ve always considered them “good enough to depict what I had in mind”. But I lacked a lot of technical fundamentals and needed to improve my expressions, my anatomy, my lighting and shading, just, a lot of stuff needed work. When I started drawing I was decently average as far as drawing quality goes, but now as furry had grown there were much more skilled artists drawing the stuff I was doing. The Coltens and Chocosunes and Kircais and Pakuns of the world were kicking my butt artistically and I was starting to feel the competition. My stuff was looking dated and clunky by comparison.

For years I had been drawing on an iPad, and it actually was quite bad for my art and bad for my back - hunching over a little iPad was wreaking havoc on my posture, and my impatience while drawing meant my art had a scribbly, rough quality, and certain distortions based on my viewing angles would appear in the finished work. I would be happy with something that looked OK in the art app on the iPad and then when I saw it posted later on the web I’d be like, “jeeze, this looks terrible”. Like most artists I am my own harshest critic, but I knew I could do better.

So in 2020 I went back to basics and started learning to draw all over again. I switched from an iPad to a drawing tablet and started drawing on a desktop computer, in a more upright position with a high-quality chair. As you get into your middle age, stuff like the chair you sit in becomes a lot more critical to your daily life than you might think.

I made a list of the artists I liked - both in and out of furry, anime and manga, classical art, just anyone who drew the way I wanted my art to feel. I would break down and analyze the pics I liked to capture just what it was that worked about them, and bring that into my own art. I took photos as reference to really study light values, and I learned from an online course how to render lighting and shadows in a far better way than I was doing before - it was cheap too, only $15, but had more effect on my art than any other course or tutorial i’ve ever looked at. It is in photoshop but the principles are software agnostic and I did the whole thing in Clip Studio. I recommend it highly: https://www.domestika.org/en/course.....gital-painting

On Discord I ran a little drawing school - just a free course to teach furries to draw and in the process work on my own fundamentals. The 20 or so furries in that course taught me more than I taught them.

I started doing digital paintings. And I changed up my subject matter - sure, I still did fetishy material and diapers and macro and what not, but I also did pics of teenage romances that never happened, pics of general hazy nostalgia and littlespace, POV shots of being fed in a highchair or lying in a crib. I did commissions and YCHs when I felt like it, and stopped when it started to feel stressful and like a job. Some months I would do almost a pic per day, other months were fallow.

Another thing that happened around then was I started to draw Cargo. A LOT of Cargo. You see, while I was Cargo Weasel for many years I rarely drew myself. Only a few times, mostly as the subject of getting shrunk. He didn’t even have a strongly defined fur color for years, and the color scheme he DID have came from a commission from another artist (Jonas) who drew what I considered the definitive Cargo pic in 2009. I would commission other artists to draw Cargo in various situations, but seldom drew him myself. That changed in 2020 and 2021 and now I draw him all the time, as well as a particular variant.

In the fall of 2021 on a whim, after a conversation on Twitter, I drew a girl version of my fursona, who soon gained the name Cargie. Cargie is just the female Cargo, with blond pigtails and an adorkable personality. I quickly generated a world for her to live in and characters for her to interact with, at Diaper School, a weird nebulous pocket reality for a storyline entitled “My Entire School is Going Little!” It could become a VN game or a light novel. One of these days.

After 2021 the pandemic receded somewhat and events and travel began to come back. In 2022 Axiom and I visited furpals in Portland, and then had a big trip to Toronto. It was wild to see how much of my home city had changed, how huge it was now, how much like New York, and how my life might have turned out had I not decamped to California 25 years earlier. Weed shops were everywhere, and I thought of the bay area furs with their near-constant weed consumption back in the 90s and how that had now filtered back to my hometown. Toronto furrydom is splintered into dozens of varying groups, much like any other big city. I got to catch up on that trip with a lot of the furs I knew from way back in the day, many of whom are doing fine, others not so much, all with different levels of involvement with furry fandom as it exists now. We’re getting older, we 90s furs, and most of us aren’t that involved in it anymore. Some have withdrawn from furry entirely, like Slinky, others just keep it to a core group of close friends. And I understand that impulse, because its not the same fandom we knew back then and we’re not the same people we were back then. But I don’t want to be one of those greymuzzles. I want to stay here. I still want to meet new people and try new things. I’m not going anywhere.

Furry cons are bigger than ever but I haven’t been to one in a few years now. MFF and Anthrocon get 13-15,000 attendees now, an amount I can’t even picture in my head. I have heard great things about BabyfurCon in Santa Cruz, and I plan to attend this year instead of Camp. Babyfurdom is now becoming its own distinct fandom and not just a subsection of furry or even a subsection of ABDL and kink. We have our own events, our own artists, our own culture and it’s been amazing to see it grow into what it is now from a dozen furs in a hidden room on FurryMUCK so many decades ago. You don’t have to buy diapers in a pharmacy anymore like my comic showed - now you can buy babyfur-specific diapers from actual real companies run by babyfurs. Unbelievable.

Another thing about my art that I consciously changed recently was I started drawing more girls. My furry kinks had been a boys club forever and it was high time to address the gender imbalances. In real life I consider myself pansexual, but in my art and online RP it was all or mostly gay male. That began to shift and by 2023 i was drawing as many girls and fem characters as masc characters. And I loved drawing Cargie. Given this newfound artistic direction and the huge numbers of trans people I was friends with I began to ask questions of my own gender that I hadn’t asked since I was a teenager: was I an egg? Was I trans myself?

After much thought, I realized I was non-binary. Both Cargo and Cargie are me, I’m somewhere in the middle. It was only quite recently that I came out as one of those they/thems, although I still look masc and it hasn’t really changed how I present myself. But the future is not yet written.

A bit more later.