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30 Years in Furry: Chapter 9: The New Normal (2020-24)
a year ago
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.
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.
And hey, I gotta say that for a while now you've been kicking my butt a fair bit too. Keep it up. 💝