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30 years in Furry: Chapter 1: Meet The Furrymuckers
2 years ago
General
In 1994 a magazine article changed the course of my life forever.
Since I was a small child I loved toons and anthro animals. I pretended to be a fox Robin Hood in the woods at the age of 7. I liked Chip and Dale, Talespin, the Ninja Turtles, Skaven, any RPG or video game with aliens resembling cats or wolves, if it had talking animals I was on board. I drew furry characters in my school notebooks and watched them on TV and played them in video games.
In the early 90s while attending college I worked in a comic shop - yes, I was the Comic Book Guy. In long hours in that store I had spent weeks pawing through the 25 cent bins reading all the fallout of the 80s B&W indie comic boom, mostly variants and parodies of TMNT, like “Fission Chicken” and “Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters”, but also coming across stuff like Steve Gallacci’s “Albedo”, a hard-SF space comic with anthro animals.
I was also, naturally, into tech. I had a 486 gaming PC that I played Privateer and Doom on. I read the psychedelic hacker mag Mondo 2000 and its more corporate successor WIRED with fervor every month.
I did not have internet access, few did in those pre-Netscape days. The Internet was only generally available to CS majors and government employees. Access at the time involved having a Unix shell login on a distant telnet server and using command line software to read newsgroups or email. Netscape and the Web were a solid 6 months to a year away from widespread use. My friend at Waterloo University’s engineering department had access to MUDs and told me about how they’d ruined the academic careers of several of his classmates. My PC did not have a modem and I had no way to get it online.
In the March 1994 issue WIRED published this article: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/muds-3/
Despite the snarky tone of the journalist’s writing I knew instantly I had found my people. I had to get on FurryMUCK.
I immediately scraped together money to purchase a 14.4 kbaud modem card. I then went to a dismal office full of servers in some cheap industrial building near the waterfront and paid some guy $20 to give me a unix shell login, a company called io.org that no longer exists. Inside of a year it would be possible to get internet access MUCH more easily, but then it was extremely jank.
I also found a listing for a BBS called Trap Line, a local furry BBS, and dialed into it with my modem and set up an account. This put me in touch with the local furry scene in Toronto, and through Trap Line I met and began a relationship with my first real boyfriend, Slinky. Within weeks I was a local fur, hanging out at Taral Wayne’s house to watch anime, or at Kratsminsch’s house to draw in each others sketchbooks and play with Krats’ pet skunk.
Through friends on Trap Line I got an account on FurryMUCK and created Cargo in April of 1994. However it took me awhile to become a daily user of FM and for the longest time I just read alt.fan.furry and various cartoon groups on USENET. In the summer of that year Slinky created the Purple Nurple, the first expressly LGBT space on FurryMUCK, and I ran it for awhile and it got me hanging out on FurryMUCK a lot more.
By the end of that same year I attended Furtasticon in New Jersey, and was living in a furry apartment with three other furs, and in a relationship with two of them. My entrance into furry coincided with my young adulthood - 22 years old, moving out from my parents house into downtown Toronto, with a pretty decent tech job, just out of college, and horny and slutty and gay.
Through FurryMUCK and USENet I got in touch with the rest of larger fandom - i learned that the aforementioned Wired article had a pretty bad reputation in furry circles, was regarded as a hack job full of misquotes and fursona descs used without permission. And while all that may be true, it was still my entry point into this thing of ours. It revealed the existence of kindred spirits with whom I would spend the rest of my life.
Furry fandom brought me from being a shy, introverted nerd who painted Warhammer figures and played Doom and Privateer on a 486, into a gayer, freer and more outgoing version of myself. And it was all because of that magazine article.
Since I was a small child I loved toons and anthro animals. I pretended to be a fox Robin Hood in the woods at the age of 7. I liked Chip and Dale, Talespin, the Ninja Turtles, Skaven, any RPG or video game with aliens resembling cats or wolves, if it had talking animals I was on board. I drew furry characters in my school notebooks and watched them on TV and played them in video games.
In the early 90s while attending college I worked in a comic shop - yes, I was the Comic Book Guy. In long hours in that store I had spent weeks pawing through the 25 cent bins reading all the fallout of the 80s B&W indie comic boom, mostly variants and parodies of TMNT, like “Fission Chicken” and “Adolescent Radioactive Blackbelt Hamsters”, but also coming across stuff like Steve Gallacci’s “Albedo”, a hard-SF space comic with anthro animals.
I was also, naturally, into tech. I had a 486 gaming PC that I played Privateer and Doom on. I read the psychedelic hacker mag Mondo 2000 and its more corporate successor WIRED with fervor every month.
I did not have internet access, few did in those pre-Netscape days. The Internet was only generally available to CS majors and government employees. Access at the time involved having a Unix shell login on a distant telnet server and using command line software to read newsgroups or email. Netscape and the Web were a solid 6 months to a year away from widespread use. My friend at Waterloo University’s engineering department had access to MUDs and told me about how they’d ruined the academic careers of several of his classmates. My PC did not have a modem and I had no way to get it online.
In the March 1994 issue WIRED published this article: https://www.wired.com/1994/03/muds-3/
Despite the snarky tone of the journalist’s writing I knew instantly I had found my people. I had to get on FurryMUCK.
I immediately scraped together money to purchase a 14.4 kbaud modem card. I then went to a dismal office full of servers in some cheap industrial building near the waterfront and paid some guy $20 to give me a unix shell login, a company called io.org that no longer exists. Inside of a year it would be possible to get internet access MUCH more easily, but then it was extremely jank.
I also found a listing for a BBS called Trap Line, a local furry BBS, and dialed into it with my modem and set up an account. This put me in touch with the local furry scene in Toronto, and through Trap Line I met and began a relationship with my first real boyfriend, Slinky. Within weeks I was a local fur, hanging out at Taral Wayne’s house to watch anime, or at Kratsminsch’s house to draw in each others sketchbooks and play with Krats’ pet skunk.
Through friends on Trap Line I got an account on FurryMUCK and created Cargo in April of 1994. However it took me awhile to become a daily user of FM and for the longest time I just read alt.fan.furry and various cartoon groups on USENET. In the summer of that year Slinky created the Purple Nurple, the first expressly LGBT space on FurryMUCK, and I ran it for awhile and it got me hanging out on FurryMUCK a lot more.
By the end of that same year I attended Furtasticon in New Jersey, and was living in a furry apartment with three other furs, and in a relationship with two of them. My entrance into furry coincided with my young adulthood - 22 years old, moving out from my parents house into downtown Toronto, with a pretty decent tech job, just out of college, and horny and slutty and gay.
Through FurryMUCK and USENet I got in touch with the rest of larger fandom - i learned that the aforementioned Wired article had a pretty bad reputation in furry circles, was regarded as a hack job full of misquotes and fursona descs used without permission. And while all that may be true, it was still my entry point into this thing of ours. It revealed the existence of kindred spirits with whom I would spend the rest of my life.
Furry fandom brought me from being a shy, introverted nerd who painted Warhammer figures and played Doom and Privateer on a 486, into a gayer, freer and more outgoing version of myself. And it was all because of that magazine article.
I'd say mine was late 1995, so almost 30 years here. <3
It's nice to not be the oldest one in the room again. Keep livin' grandma. :P
Mine, I was a late bloomer, but after becoming an artist in 2007, and in 2010, that was when I announced myself as a full fledged furry! During college, I've found other furries who share my interest and those I've even looked up to. X3 You were one of the ones that helped me find some fun content revolving around my curiosity with ABDL/Babyfur!
Though I'm still curious on what got you into the Babyfur/ABDL community?
Back when the web was mainly text and UseNET was a staple.
I hope you still played Doom and Privateer on a 486, but as a furry! I loved Privateer. Maybe too much? I got one of the early-bird crowdfunding slots for Star Citizen. Wanted to say thanks, since I think all my games were pirate, but on reflection I think I actually had a legit copy of Privateer. I also got Shroud of the Avatar. Didn't care for it. :P
I hear you about bad stuff still leading to good places. Kids today (and by that I mean adults today too) don't know how big a thing bad trans representation was for so many people. Makes sense it would go for us furries too. One of the first furry groups I joined was basically a support group after the Vanity Fair article messed with Foxwolfie Galen so much. Basically taking quotes out of context or making stuff up wholesale.
At the same time, I wonder if furs today can even imagine that "Plushophiles" used to get looked down on, even more than babyfurs are today. And gosh, babyfurs back then...