Content warnings apply for discussion of sexual assault, pedophilia, and other dark topics.

Soundtrack: SOPHIE, Immaterial (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv3yIv9nwf8)

This overlaps a little with Chapter 7.

In the early 2010s, Twitter became the central nexus of my online life. I would wake up in the morning and check Twitter, and the last thing I would do before going to sleep was check Twitter. Within a few years I had multiple accounts, an After Dark/AD account for kinky thoughts and porny art, a normie politics account not even named Cargoweasel, a still MORE normie account under my real name for business purposes, a half dozen roleplay accounts for Twitterponies and Mad Men, an account for tabletop gaming, and others I’ve forgotten about.

The MUCKs were moribund dead zones by 2011, and I had drifted off of them and onto Twitter. For almost ten years I had been a heavy user of Livejournal, but I closed and deleted my account when the Russians bought LJ in 2009. Twitter stepped into the breach as my new online home. It was exactly the right place for me. Facebook was for my mom. Instagram was for posting pictures of food and ducks. Other social networks like Ello and Path had popped up but never got traction for one reason or another. I never cared about Snapchat. Furries flocked to Twitter, and a bit later Telegram, so thats where I spent most of my time, along with posting to furry sites like FA.

And then there was Tumblr.

I had a Tumblr for awhile - it wasn’t furry, just a mood board blog for hipster crap of the era: pics of old industrial equipment and the like. It was for cataloging images to inspire the decor of our Brooklyn loft. There was barely any text in it at all and you wouldn’t guess it was by a furry (or a babyfur) in a hundred years. That isn’t the Tumblr I mean.

The real Tumblr, late-millennial and the quickly growing Gen-Z Tumblr, was nurturing a very different culture. A culture of fandoms and political argument and activism. In politics there was great ferment. The optimism of the Obama election had soured and shifted to Occupy Wall Street and conversation everywhere you went was abuzz with Marxism and anarchism and feminism and all manner of -isms. Tumblr was the home of fandoms: Doctor Who, Sherlock, Harry Potter, Steven Universe and so forth. And those fandoms and shows would get evaluated and judged through a Marxist lens or a feminist lens or a queer lens or a race lens … and frequently found wanting. This gave rise to a culture of social-justice warriors, SJWs, a derogatory name for anyone who did things like point out racism or sexism in video games or pop culture. Originally “SJW” referred to people who called out minor problems with excessive zeal and inquisition-like fervor, but over time it began to be applied to anyone who gave a shit about anything even slightly on the left. In 1991 it was ‘political correctness’, in 2011 it was ‘SJWs’, and in 2021 it was ‘woke’. Same concept, different words.

Tumblr DID have a lot of zealous warriors. Callout culture is a real thing. And Tumblr exported this discourse to Twitter, where it became the locus of what began to be called “cancel culture”.

There’s two kinds of cancel culture. One is the big kind you’ve heard of, the kind that Fox News incessantly talks about: a millionaire comedian gets pushback for saying horrible shit, a billionaire transphobic children’s book author gets pushback for being a horrible transphobe, or a serial sexual harasser gets accused of serial sexual harassment or assault. With extremely rare exceptions, like Harvey Weinstein, nothing really bad happens to the targets of those “cancellations”, instead they get lots of press and Netflix specials. They are feted and lauded by the right wing, that has learned to capitalize on these celebrity “cancellations” and turn them into debutante coming-out balls for conservative stars.

The other kind of cancel culture happens to everyday unknown people, and can ruin lives. I’ve seen it happen with my own eyes.

In 2015 Undertale came out and was a big hit. It was funded on Kickstarter, and one of the funding rewards was to have your custom character in the game as a side-boss fight. A dragon fur had backed at this reward level, and had their character coded into the game: a plump dragon named So Sorry. And when the information about So Sorry’s origins came out, the backer got absolutely raked over the coals for the crime of - get this - fat-fetish art. It was solely because they liked and drew chubby furry art that they got harassed for months by Undertale fans. That was in and of itself grounds for cancellation. Seeing this happen amid the fandom of a game I adored was frankly terrifying.

There’s a macro fur I’ve known for years. He backed another Kickstarter for a kaiju-fighting video game with a custom-character option at a certain backing level. A variant of his fursona, a big green kangaroo, was coded into the game. Only the game failed to come out and was never finished, for a host of reasons, but who got the blame? Him. For no reason whatsoever aside from his being a macro furry. They just made shit up about him being excessively demanding to the game dev staff and harassed him for months for the crime of being a macro.

In 2018 a fairly well-known (in certain circles) musician I liked was outed as a little and a babyfur, and was immediately accused of the most horrible shit you could imagine, a wave of harassment and vitriol that I had never before seen. It nearly killed her. The same thing happened multiple times mostly to trans fem cartoonists and other content creators that had an existing audience of normies, who see anything relating to ageplay as inherently pedophilic and dangerous. There’s a lot of trans girl littles, because its nice to have the chance to replay the childhood you never had. Thus there’s a lot of targets for this harassment. In some cases it destroyed them, in some cases they powered through it and came back stronger. But it never should have happened.

In furry, high profile artists and furry performers stopped getting away with the kind of edgelordy shit they did routinely a few years earlier. 2Gryphon went from headlining Anthrocon to being a GOH at shitty little right wing furcons. Zaush also has a much lower profile than he once did. Cancellation works sometimes, but it’s the very definition of a double edge sword.

It doesn’t matter if you are actually innocent or guilty at this level. It only matters if you are vulnerable to attack.

Sometimes cancellation on this level is warranted, but it seems like the artists and creators that SHOULD get cancelled, rarely do, and the ones who don’t deserve it get the worst of it. Sometimes the Eye of Sauron falls upon you and you’re just persona non grata for while. If you didn’t do anything wrong, stuff will just get made up and attached to you with krazyglue. Evidence will be doctored to prove that you’re not just into Bad Stuff, but you’re a Horrible Person that deserves the worst harassment and death threats and doxxing and swatting that the internet can administer. And then it becomes a self sustaining snowball rolling down the hill when you react to something poorly and it gets worse. Their goal is to drive you to suicide, which they regard as a win.

There’s an entire website called Kiwifarms that exists solely for this purpose, of fostering harassment against vulnerable targets. The right wing took careful notes from the SJWs on Tumblr and Twitter and the left-wing cancel culture of the 2010s. They turned it into grooming panic and accusing all trans and queer people of being pedophiles. Accusing someone of pedophilia went from being a rare accusation to a constant drumbeat. At the same time Qanon was concocting wild stories of child trafficking in secret pizza restaurant tunnels, with the Epstein case providing all manner of fuel to the fire. Its moved way beyond young people on Tumblr now. But that’s where it started.

I have some theories about why this happened when it did.

In the early 2010s, the internet had been in public use for close to 20 years, and kids born from 1988-95 were the first generation that had been raised by it and were coming of age. The poorly moderated, wild west 90s-00s Internet of eyebleach and dank memes and horrifying shit was imprinted on them from childhood. I can’t imagine what it was like to see the likes of Tubgirl and goatse when you were 8. It scarred me and I was in my 20s.

On top of that, these kids were also raised in an educational system where “abstinence-only” sex-ed was the order of the day. Both these factors combined to foster a generation that was anti-sex, to be terrified of sexuality and wary of any adults that were so much as existing near them online. And there really are predators rampant online. So I can’t blame people for being wary. But that fear can be weaponized and directed like an orbital laser cannon at just about anyone. And boy is that power intoxicating.

When I was a kid we only had to worry about creepos hanging around the playground in candy vans, or the local youth pastor. For a 90s kid, the candy van was inside the house. Predators were and are rampant online. I can’t blame anyone for developing anxieties over it. And when they turned 18 they must have felt like they were being tossed to the ravening wolves, without even the legal protection of being a minor. Sexual assault had once been spoken of in hushed tones, but now every news story was full of warnings about date rape and frat boys and strange drinks and people, primarily women, began to talk more openly about rape and matters of consent. Consent was no longer assumed even to hug someone. And on top of ALL THAT, queer rights, transgender people, and LGTBQ visibility was at an all time high. Gay marriage was fully legalized in 2013. Something like a third or more of Gen-Z identifies as some flavor of queer. Sexual politics became a flashpoint in conflict between kids and their parents like never before. Trans visibility peaked and the backlash has been severe. I don’t know how it will all shake out.

By the end of the decade Axiom and I had moved from New York City back to Canada, partly to be closer to my aging parents, partly because of the hard-right-wing turn of American politics. And we were just settling in here in Halifax when we started to see news reports about a mysterious new deadly virus making the rounds in China.

Chapter 7: Everypony

Soundtrack: MLP Intro Remix, Alex S. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XmjbLs1Fxs

In 2010 I emerged from my furry shell into the larger world of kink. I began interacting with littles and ABDLs and kinksters on Fetlife, and met a whole lot of people who were not furries, but had many of the same interests as me, and others that I had always wanted to learn more about, like bondage. I had avoided BDSM and kink for years, since the very start I had preferred to stay in my little furry niche. This was because human ABDL stuff freaked me out a little, and I didn’t have any interest in BDSM play or pain. The non-furry websites and groups that dealt with diapers (like DPF) did not appeal to me, and I felt like I had very little in common with most human ABDLs. However there were individual exceptions.

One of these exceptions was a friend named Mako, who loved sharks as much as I loved weasels, but he wasn’t a fur and didn’t want to BE a shark, he just liked them. He had designed a pride symbol for ABDLs that I quite liked. We had interacted on and off over the years on various forums, and it turned out he lived down near Washington DC, where he was a member of a BDSM club called The Crucible. And every year, The Crucible held a week long kink event called Camp Crucible.

Camp appealed to me because it wasn’t a “BDSM dungeon” but summer camp for kinksters, and you slept in cabins, and there was an entire track for littles, and there’s so much more I could post about camp. But long story short, Camp Crucible changed my life. After that first Camp, I understood what kink was, why it was important, and why BDSM is held in an almost sacred reverence by its participants. You can read my much longer, detailed writeup about my first camp here: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/3975029/

I ended up going to Camp Crucible six times over the course of the 2010s, the last one in 2019, until COVID put the kibosh on it for awhile.

Also in 2010 was the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, a show that came out of nowhere to spawn a massive fandom in the space of a few months. We watched a few episodes and both Axiom and I became instant bronies. On Twitter I had been roleplaying Mad Men characters with in-character tweets, and garnering thousands of likes for what was essentially text-based fanfic. I decided to do the same for this new pony show that was only a few episodes into its first season.

In early 2011, right around the time the episode “Sonic Rainboom” aired, I set up mlp_twilight and mlp_celestia and mlp_spike accounts on Twitter and started posting IC as those characters. Others started to join in, like Rainbow Dash and Rarity and Pinkie Pie. I didn’t do any sort of control over who played what, it was freewheeling and responsive. I just roleplayed as Twilight Sparkle with anyone who seemed like fun. Axiom ran Spike and Celestia and I ran Twilight and other ancillary characters like guardponies and stewards that kept the plot running. We kept it strictly G-rated and as close to the show as possible in its tone.

In that same year, brony conventions started cropping up, and they were immediately massive. I remember being jammed in overloaded con hotel corridors swarming with three times the number of attendees than were expected. It was a genuine phenomenon those first few years.

Bronydom looked for a time like it was becoming Furry 2.0. Artists, musicians, animators, the sheer amount of creativity that exploded around ponies in 2011-2013 was something to behold. Bronydom was less queer (not totally straight, but less), there was less porn (not zero porn, but less), there weren’t as many full fursuits but lots of accessories like rainbow tails and unicorn headpieces, and most of all I noticed a LOT of old school furries coming out of the woodwork to participate. I saw names and faces of furs who had left furry fandom years ago for various reasons pop back up again in the early days of brony, like Purple Tinker and Tim Kangaroo. Many of the artists had just been biding their time while furry culture evolved and changed in the 2000s, and were ready to go to jump onto pony fandom when it came out of nowhere in 2011.

Bronydom got its start on 4chan, and that was a big part of its success but also contained the seeds of its own destruction. For a time it really looked like the show’s messages and its femininity was having an effect on the more toxic parts of chan culture. It was nice to see something that was genuinely warm-hearted and with a message of friendship and tolerance be taken up by such a place as the chans. But as time went on the 4chan-ness seeped through, and bronies began to acquire somewhat of a stigma and a reputation. The brony fandom quickly got a worse reputation than furry had, and the cons peaked in popularity and then began to decline in the mid 2010s. Some brony cons are still around, but they are not remotely as huge as they were back in the day.

Also, when a fandom is based around a single show, it seldom survives the decline of that show, and honestly after Twilight Sparkle became an alicorn princess in Season 3 it was downhill from there. The early seasons of MLP were fun, original and exciting, but as the show lost its original creative spark and slipped in quality and shoveled in character after character to shore up toy sales, the fandom started to dissipate. It’s still around, but its not even close to what it was in the first few seasons.

On Twitterponies we didn’t care about any of that. Apart from one panel at a brony con in 2012, we were just kind of doing our own thing on Twitter. We didn’t even use the word ‘brony’ much at all. At one point there were thousands of mlp_ prefixed characters all playing out scenes. mlp_Twilight had over 35,000 followers at one point. We played out elaborate, multi-day arcs and musical numbers and events like Winter Wrap-Up where everypony participated. It remains to this day the best and biggest RP I’ve ever done, with scenes that moved me to literal tears sometimes with their emotional impact. It was all improvised, with nothing more than occasional backchannel conversation and setups, not outcomes, being agreed on in advance. We didn’t know how scenes would turn out, but they frequently turned out amazingly.

I continued to play mlp_twilight until I kind of ran out of steam with it in 2014. Axiom continued with Spike and Celestia, all the way up to today, on Mastodon. Just go to ponies.social if you want to see what twitterponies still is all about.

Meanwhile, furry fandom was running in parallel to bronydom, with many members in both camps. Many furries became bronies. Many bronies, especially artists, filtered back into furry, parlaying their profile in bronydom into major popularity as furry artists - like Braeburned and Bubblepuppers. There was a little bit of rivalry I suppose, and some bronies had vestigial anti-furry bias from years on 4chan, but honestly I don’t remember much friction. Other bronies filtered into fandoms like anime. The long term effect is that furry absorbed much of bronydom into itself and just became even bigger.

Similarly to this cross pollination, I was bringing what I had learned from my sojourn into kink back into furry. At several cons I brought a set of doctor scrubs and a lab coat and conducted medical play scenes for furries - doing physical examinations for “patients” in my hotel room set up as a clinic. They even had to fill out a form with the kind of treatment they wanted and their limits - an idea I had swiped from Camp Crucible’s ‘kidnapping’ crew. I liked the detached feel of medical play and the ability to time-block the scene to 30 minutes of activity before the next patient. I had tongue depressors and reflex hammers and blood pressure cuffs, and could get really up into someone’s business but in a casual, professional manner. I did medical play scenes at a bunch of cons, including the best con of all time: Rainfurrest.

Yes, THAT Rainfurrest. It was fuckin awesome. Although stupid idiots had to blow the whole thing apart making it the most infamous furry con of all time, I maintain that I had the most fun at that con out of the 25 or so furry cons I have attended in my life. The room parties, the scenes, the vibe, all of it was so amazing - and friends like Abbey and Jeffy and others made it that way. It was one of the few cons where the feel of the room parties was close to the stories and pics I had imagined over the years. And a photo got posted of some guy in a diaper and the whole thing fell apart at the seams. Goddammit. We had a great thing going.

I know that it was a number of multi-variant reasons Rainfurrest collapsed, but everyone knows the photo of the guy in the diaper, and thats what they think of when they think of Rainfurrest. Thanks, obama.


More later.

Soundtrack: The Show Must Go On, The Real Tuesday Weld
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZNASeXGA10

By this point in my life my furriness was a part of me. I could no more stop being a furry than I could cut off a limb, but my level of participation in the fandom did wax and wane over the years.

When I started posting art, the pendulum swung back to “active” after a few years of relative quiet. This pattern reappeared over the years - I never consciously “quit” the fandom, but some years I’d go to multiple cons and be heavily involved, and some years I would be doing other things and only chatting with a few furpals online. Some years I’d post dozens of pics and full comics, while other years were fallow. It happens. My particular form of undiagnosed ADHD means that I am super into something for six months to a year, then I hit some kind of wall and bounce off in another direction, and I’m into THAT for six months or a year, and so on, until I eventually come back to the first thing and the great cycle repeats. So it was with furry art.

In 2004, while living in Boston, I drew a 13 page comic that would define my art for many years - Playtime. It was a simple story of a teen fur playing with diapers alone in his house, based heavily on my own past and real life events. Instead of wild fantasies of age regression and hyper and macro and what not, this was just a realistic portrayal of the kinds of things I liked to do IRL. I intended it as an instruction manual of sorts - you can try this at home! I hadn’t seen any babyfur/diaper-fetish comics that began in a pharmacy with the main character nervously buying diapers. I wanted to capture all of the process, not just the hot parts. I also enlisted the help of a bunch of furs I knew at the time to assist with flat colors and cleanup - it was a team effort. I distributed it for free, as this was long before Patreon and other means of being paid to draw that weren’t straight commissions.

While I took the odd commission, I resisted monetization heavily. I did NOT want paywalls of any kind, as they were counter to my entire artistic philosophy - to have as many furs as possible see my artwork, in the hopes that others with the same kinks as me wouldn’t feel alone with their interests. Every piece I posted was an advertising flyer saying “Hey! Do you like this stuff too? It’s okay if you do!” That was and is my primary objective in art. If I can pay the rent with art so much the better, but I’m still allergic to paywalls and subscriptions and such. When art turns into a job then its stress levels rise and I shut down and lock up. I made several attempts at a Patreon-like model and none of them lasted more than a few months. My artwork needs to remain free and flexible and on my terms and schedule. If I could have people just pay me with no expectations but for me to put out art at my own pace that would rule.

My burgeoning art career put me in touch with dozens of new furpals, many of whom are reading this post right now :3 most of whom were not on FurryMUCK or even Livejournal. My main means of furry socializing was becoming instant messengers - still true to this day with Telegram and Signal. I was still on the MUCKs, but beginning to feel the stagnation of those platforms. I also frequented various Yahoo Groups and other message boards where babyfurs of all stripes would gather.

For a few years I was only posting art to my own website, because you were not allowed to post adult furry work to the art sites of the day, like DeviantArt and Sheezy. That changed in 2005 when FurAffinity launched, and it quickly became the central place for furry art and fiction. And it’s had nothing but controversy and strange policy shifts and capricious moderation ever since, but it also became the beating, janky heart of of furrydom, at least the art part of it.

Around this time I hadn’t DJed a con dance in quite a few years, but I felt the itch to do another DJ event and so at a couple of ACs I pulled together a bunch of inflatable beanbag chairs and a sound system and assembled a chillout lounge called Capsule - not for dancing, that was handled elsewhere, but just for cool downtempo tunes in an environment that was more conducive to relaxation and chilling out from a stressful convention. I DJed along with Tailsy who brought his Ableton Live rig for mixing and sampling of various tunes.

In 2006 I checked out a new thing called Twitter and while it had a lot of technical problems early on, it reminded me very much of FurryMUCK’s public shout system, and I immediately took to it. In 2007 I began to write stories on my various sexy topics, in addition to the pics and comics, which further cemented my reputation for over-the-top fetishism and exaggerating certain key details about my situations and characters.

Furry fandom’s growth continued to accelerate year over year, and every con was bigger than the last. I’d go to Anthrocon and just boggle at how huge this thing was getting, how it was a 20 minute walk to the dealers room, how i would move through crowds of furries i didn’t know, and feeling like a stranger in a fandom that was quickly getting overwhelming. I began to prioritize cons based on who I knew was going so I could meet up and hang out with them - because picking a con where none of my friends were meant I’d be sitting around by myself feeling like a weirdo. Even at cons where I had lots of friends, scheduling conflicts and being at loose ends with nobody to hang out with was a frequent occurrence. Even the most popufur of popufurs has to deal with that problem, just because cons are so big. Axiom and I began to flee the con for an afternoon or an evening, eating dinners in local restaurants, using a con as an excuse to hit the sights in the city the con was in, especially during the days. I still like doing that.

At the start of the decade a big furcon had ~1200 attendees. Then it was 2500. By the end of the 2000s they were pushing 4000. Mindblowing. Even at 2000 people cons were getting too big as far as I’m concerned. I began to attend smaller regional cons like FurFright just to bring back the intimate feel of cons of the past.

Another thing happening in furry was the rise of fursuiting as the dominant activity in the fandom, eclipsing artwork. In the 90s, fursuits certainly existed, but they were somewhat crude homely affairs made with hot glue and discount fun fur. Making your own fursuit was a rite of passage for the furs who were suiters. And suiting was just one of the things furries did. Drawing was the bigger activity. The stars of furrydom were artists, and occasionally writers.

As the media published story after story about furries with pictures of fursuiters front and center, the association of furry with fursuits became stronger and stronger. Furry culture shifted from art to costuming. People started to think you HAD to have a fursuit to be a furry, or that furry fandom was only about fursuits. And commissioned fursuit makers began to appear, charging thousands of dollars for professional-level work, and quickly getting waiting lists and fan meetups of their own. You had entire furry species created with rules about their fursuits, like sergals and dutch angel dragons. Fursuiters were becoming the stars of the fandom, and having a great suit was seen as a ticket to popularity.

I have never once in three decades in this fandom ever bought, made or worn a fursuit. Its just not what I’m in the fandom for. I don’t want to wear a hot carpet for five hours. My furriness is about art and drawings and stories, and online RP. It’s about text and images. I bow in my furriness to nobody. I am no less a fur than any fursuiter in an elaborate costume.

You do not have to be a fursuiter at all to be totally furry and a full member of this fandom. Thats the most pernicious myth that really began in the 2000s that I wish I could dispel.

Axiom and I moved from southern Mass to New York City in 2007, because of our jobs. We found ourselves in Brooklyn, in the middle of hipster central, where everyone was growing long beards and making pickles and craft cocktails. While I had immediately slotted in with the local fur scene in every city we’d moved to previously, NYC didn’t have a fur scene of note. Or if it did, I didn’t really pay attention to it. We’d see someone for lunch now and then. Or out-of-towners would visit us. Or we’d travel to a con. But as the decade ended, although I was still posting art and such, our furry participation had once again dropped quite a bit. The pendulum had swung once more.

I began to look outside of furry and in 2010 I found the world of kink.

More later

Soundtrack: The Streets, “Let’s push things forward”
https://youtube.com/watch?v=QOddpk8jOtU

In 2002 my involvement with furrydom dropped while Axiom and I were on sojourn in Paris. We had vague plans about moving there and getting jobs but our high-school/restaurant level French quickly put the kibosh on that plan. It was really an extended vacation - after many years marinating in the hustle culture of Silicon Valley it was a much needed break. We spent most of the year in Europe, based in France but with extended drives through Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, and northern Italy. Airbnb did not exist, but similar short-term rentals did, and we availed ourselves of them.

While we were in Europe looking at cathedrals and art museums, furry fandom was shifting and evolving beneath our feet. We were on the MUCKs almost every night in internet cafes, or posting on Livejournal to our friends and acquaintances. So we were “involved in furry” in that respect. But furry itself was changing - the influx of the Millennials had begun, happening mostly outside of our notice until it was everywhere.

I remember the first time a fur I was chatting with was born in the 1980s, and how weird that felt. I was in HIGH SCHOOL in the 80s. Then and now the first thing I ask a new fur I’m chatting with is their real life age. I will not knowingly chat online with an underage fur, in any fashion. And when 18+ began to mean born in 1983, or 1984 - years I remembered well - it felt very strange. Today there’s furs born in the 2000s, a decade after I joined the fandom, and it still feels a bit weird.

I hit the age of 30 in 2002, and learned that what sounds like decrepit old age when you’re 21 is really not that bad. 30 is not “gay death” or “furry death”. You’re still you, with all the same interests, flaws and quirks that make you who you are. But you’re a bit older than most furs, and then later you’re much older than most furs. You get older, furs stay the same age. But you have nowhere else to go - what are you going to do? Play golf? When you turn 30, or 35, or 55, or 80, you’re still going to be a furry. I’m here for life.

Most of the new millennial furries around this time did not get on FurryMUCK or Taps as their primary means of furry socialization. Many hadn’t even HEARD of the MUCKs. FurryMUCK, once a titan of the online furry world, was becoming a backwater occupied by increasingly cranky Gen-X furs, while the 21-year-olds were hanging out on Livejournal or instant messengers or other online spaces that didn’t require a unix shell or a command line interface.

Furry was becoming younger, less nerdy, more queer, more fursuit-centric, and most of all, much, much bigger. Back in Toronto in the 90s, the local furry group was pretty small and it was possible to know all or most of the local furs. That was no longer the case by the early 2000s, and every city had scattered groups of furs that did not even know each other, only coming together at local conventions, which were popping up like weeds. CF6 had 700 attendees and was the biggest furry con in existence in 1994 - by the 2000s a big con pulled in 1500 people. And there were two or three of those per year.

As it grew too big to overlook, the mainstream media started to take notice of furry fandom: most notably a major Vanity Fair article and the infamous CSI episode that depicted furry cons as costumed sex orgies. Both those things (much like the Wired article that had introduced me to the fandom) were wildly inaccurate hack jobs, but they also introduced thousands of people to a subculture that intrigued them. And when enough articles state that furry fandom is mostly about fursuits, then that starts to become true. The number of fursuiters at cons at this time began to explode, and cons began to cater more to fursuiters.

In 2003 we came back to the States, and had a year of nomadic existence living a few months at a time with my or Axiom’s families, and crashing on the futons of various furs. Some Massachusetts furpals, Bazil and Nukroo, were very kind to us and set us up for several months with them in their apartment in suburban Boston. We hung out with Aethan and Iyu and Paf and Baker and other Boston furs. Axiom and I eventually got jobs nearby and we moved into our own place not far from Providence, RI. Think of Quahog from Family Guy and you got the vibe.

While hanging out on those furs’ couches, for the first time since those sketchbook art jams in my early furry years, I began to draw.

Sketchbooks and pencils and Micron Pigmas are cheap, and I would draw and ink a pic, scan it and clean it up on my laptop in an old copy of Photoshop, and then post it onto a website that I coded up myself - cargoweasel.com. The website was hosted by a fur named fEk on his private server so I knew there wasn’t a problem with content restrictions. I bought a cheap tablet to make coloring easier and soon had a fully functioning mobile art station up and running at a low cost. One decision remained: what I wanted to draw, for real.

I knew plenty of other furs with my fetishes, and thats kind of how social groups had begun to organize within the fandom.

Inflatable furries hang out with other inflatofurs. Vore furs become friends with other voreaphiles. Whatever odd kink they’re into, they find each other and form social groups online. And so it went with furries who liked diapers and ageplay. I noticed this tendency from early on, but it really became definitive in the early 2000s as regional or city-based furry groups got too large to be workable.

Even with this knowledge, for a couple of years I had put my kinks by the wayside, both for practical reasons while travelling, and for stupid reasons like I was trying to put all that silly fetish business behind me. I’m acutely aware of the fact that most people, even many furries, absolutely do not care for the things I enjoy sexually and need emotionally. Axiom, the love of my life, was and is not kinky in any fashion. I had resolved years earlier to seek relationships only within my fetish spheres of influence, but that failed when I fell in love with this fox. I was not willing to give him up, and perhaps out of some kind of misplaced fear of rejection I chose to suppress my own kinks.

I was certainly able to do this for a time - but I was also making myself miserable. So in 2003 that broke open and I just decided to fuckin go for it. I’d draw the stuff I want, the furry porn that I wanted to see, my deepest sexual fantasies rendered as well as I could do, regardless of who might see them and think less of me. Some old friends might not have known this side of me - I had to face they might not like it at all, and it might cost me those friendships, but it was a price I had to pay. Axiom was always, always, 1000% supportive.

A new word for the things I like had started to crop up. While I was quite happy with my diaper friends I knew from the MUCKs and Proxima’s, quietly and outside my notice an IRC channel had started up called #babyfur. Now I never liked or used IRC, I found it hostile and more likely to get myself hacked than enjoy my time on a given channel, but this one was populated by a whole bunch of furs that I didn’t know - new to furry, never touched the MUCKs, just doing their own thing somewhere else on the internet. And it wasn’t just that IRC channel. There were tons of other little groups of crinklebutt furs popping up all over. Websites. Yahoo groups. And they called themselves babyfurs. A term that I didn’t like at first, and I still don’t think it totally captures my vibe, although its popular enough that I use it.

Babyfurs had become a whole subculture, right under my nose, without my knowledge, from those dozen furs back in Proximas Nursery, now there were hundreds of babs out there that I had no idea existed, many a decade younger than me irl.

The babyfur artwork field at the time was mostly tame and depicted diapered cub furs stealing cookie jars and the like. Marci McAdam started drawing name badges a few years earlier and she had already even then become associated with babyfurs, mostly because every bab who knew Karis would get one from Marci at every con. That woman has drawn a lot of diapered furries. More than any of us will ever know. There were quite a few adult furries in diapers, but again the pics were generally just “heres a diapered furry”. What I wanted to draw was boners. And cum. And just to get way more explicit with the diaper fetishism. I gathered up my courage and hit post.

It worked out okay.

More later

Suggested music: "Right Here, Right Now", Fatboy Slim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7o5sitRf5E

In 1957 eight engineers hated their boss and left Shockley Semiconductor to start Fairchild Semiconductor, setting up shop where space was cheap in Mountain View, CA near Stanford University. The “traitorous eight” changed the nature of employment contracts in the state of California, and the nature of startup company funding, creating what we now know as Silicon Valley. As a result, thousands of nerds and geeks moved to northern California from the 1960s onwards, and the San Francisco Bay Area between San Mateo and San Jose became the epicenter of technology in the world, for good and ill.

Part of the reason Silicon Valley is what it is is because it’s very easy to job hop there. On the east coast, and elsewhere, you can be tied down by contracts with non-compete clauses that forbid you from working for a competitor for a period of years. In the Valley, such contracts are unenforceable and do not exist. As a result, nobody stays at a job for long when there’s a better offer on the table, especially in periods of tech booms where everyone is hiring.

I have seen four boom and bust cycles in the Valley in my life, and directly lived through one of them.

I first visited the Bay Area in 1996, right as a bust cycle was turning into a boom cycle with the rise of Netscape and the Internet moving into general use. Right after CF7 I traveled up with some other furries and stayed at the home of Centaur, a wizard on FurryMUCK, who at the time lived with Shaterri and Ashtoreth and Lochiel. He’s one of the first AB furries I ever knew, and still a great friend.

Staying up there for that week gave me a good look at a side of furry that I hadn’t seen before: the Bay Area furs. Where the Toronto furs I knew were pretty straightedge, these furs smoked weed constantly. They dressed like skaters, in corduroy board shorts and Stüssy shirts and Airwalk sneakers. They had T1 lines going into their houses and the Internet was always on and super fast - I boggled like a hick just off the turnip truck at their SGI and Sun UNIX workstations.

A typical Bay Area furry house of the 90s was in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, or in the East Bay. A 3 or 4 bedroom ranch house occupied at any given time by between 3 and 10 furries, in a semi-nomadic routine of visiting various houses for movie nights, LAN parties, or sex. The pot smoking in most of these houses was constant and the atmosphere was pretty much a furcon that never ended.

Every furcon needs a hotel - and that was the Furry Arms on Cabrillo in Santa Clara. A dumpy apartment complex where the landlord didn’t care about occupancy limits on its units, so anyone just arriving in town could stay with other furs in someone’s apartment for a week or a month or a year and then go to another furry house somewhere else when their jobs and income stabilized. The Furry Arms was Ellis Island for Bay Area furs. Don’t know how to program? No problem. Taos Mountain or the Sun Move Team was there for you - if you could plug and unplug a computer, and lift a CRT monitor you were good to go. Furries hired other furries. Nowadays, we are layered throughout the tech industry and “furries make the internet go” is a truism. It’s because of places like the Furry Arms that that is the case.

Even though it was a short drive away, few furries lived in San Francisco proper - even back then the rents were prohibitive and furries needed space for their hobbies and collections of arcade games and DJ rigs. Plus most of the companies were south of Redwood City. It was a suburban fandom. As rents rose furries moved further and further out, to the deep east bay, and Gilroy, as Sunnyvale and Santa Clara just got more and more pricey. Today most of the Bay Area is out of reach for all but the richest furs who bought property there in the 90s.

I’m not saying it was paradise - if you weren’t in the tech business you were out in the cold. It was very hard even then to pay rent without a solid tech job, and furries who weren’t cut out for the hedonistic lifestyle would leave to go back east or up north to Seattle. Nowadays the Bay Area is a hollow shell of its former self, and tech bros have taken over, while the furries have moved up to Portland and Seattle. God I miss Fry’s.

All the while I lived in LA, I would drive up to the Bay Area on a frequent basis and visit fur pals. Centaur, Iyu, Cinnamon, Lyon, Wombat, Guppy, Booga, Marzipan, others who have changed their names or I have forgotten or only met in passing. Not all babs, but a lot of them were. The Christmas of 1998 was a diapered sleepover where we exchanged gifts (mostly Legos) and had a AB-themed christmas morning in footy pajamas. It was fantastic.

I started to wonder why I wasn’t just living up in the Bay instead of down in SoCal. The jobs were easy to get and paid better. And I was a better cultural fit up there than in the Kingdom of the Elves, being a pudgy balding nerd awkwardly hanging out among people that didn’t give two shits about furry or computers or video games. I resolved to move up there as soon as I could.

In '98 and early '99 I frequented my friend Wombat’s place where we’d play Tetris Attack and Bubble Bobble on his SNES along with some other friends - Savant, Jude, Kveldwulf, Higgins, and a fur named Axiom - the same fur I’d seen at CF8 playing the piano. He and I began to chat on Tapestries and FurryMUCK and began a closer relationship.

In the summer of ’99 I barely posted my resume and immediately I was juggling several offers for twice what I was making in LA. It was an absolute bonanza of jobs at the time. I chose the best one at the coolest company and it was time to move. And planned to move in with Wombat, Higgins, and Axiom. We began to look for houses.

A month later Axiom and I moved in together into a groovy little midcentury Eichler house in the middle of Sunnyvale, without Wombat or Higgins. It was just me and him. We were officially a couple on Labor Day of 1999. 25 years later we are still together.

My new relationship with Axiom superseded most of my furry involvement for awhile. We still went for brunch at Original Pancake House, dropped in at the regular furry coffee meetups, and had furs over from time to time. But more often he and I were driving up to Napa Valley or out to Las Vegas or antiquing in Marin - building our house together, eating amazing meals at great restaurants, and other pursuits that didn’t involve furry fandom as much. Although we still went to cons - Further Confusion had become the largest West Coast con after Confurence had crashed and Burned in the disastrous CF10, and it was right down the street in Santa Clara.

In April of 2000 the NASDAQ crashed and the dotcom boom cycle was over. The fallout took two more years for us to lose our jobs in various acquisitions and layoff rounds. We took our severance packages in 2002 and left the Bay Area for the next chapter in our lives: Europe.

More later.

Suggested music: Moby, “We are all made of stars” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1rFAaAKpVc

I lived in Los Angeles for two years, from mid-97 to mid-99. It taught me a lot.

My job was in West Hollywood. I lived north, in the Valley, a place called Sherman Oaks. My roomies were two furs and their gigantic dog, who was an effective barrier against anyone coming to visit.

Los Angeles, the greater area comprising the Valley and Orange County, were full of furries. In Toronto at the time, we were not a large group - it was possible to know of most furs or at least friends of friends. LA was more scattered, and there were whole groups of furs that I never interacted with. Many more lived down in San Diego, and many, many, MANY more furs lived up in the bay area, about five hours north by car.

LA was everything I’d imagined based on 25 years of movies and TV shows. You couldn’t get around without a car. Famous landmarks were everywhere. The movie business was everywhere. The people, especially where I worked around Sunset and La Cienega, were supernaturally attractive. I referred to that place as the Kingdom of the Elves. It was where the most physically hot people from across the country had all coalesced into one five mile radius. Celebrity sightings were commonplace. I’d see some guy goofing around in a burrito restaurant and be like “oh, hey, Brendan Fraser”.

And the furries in LA that my roommates knew and therefore I hung out with the most were the most secretive of all:

The Industry Furries.

Furries that worked as animators, storyboard artists, theme park suiters. High and low positions throughout the animation and film business, at studios you know and obscure companies you never heard of. Their names appear in credits of hundreds of movies. The furries that designed and animated Disney characters you’ve bought plushies of. Furries that worked in special effects, and had just sitting around in their garage, screen-used stormtrooper helmets with smudges of Tunisian sand on them. Filing cabinets full of pencilled keyframes from Tiny Toons or Transformers or TLK or Balto. The cel art. The scripts. These furries worked on the movies you know of, the cartoons you have DVDs of, and the cereal commercials you saw when you were six. If there’s a cartoon character you thought was cute, chances are a furry drew it. All the way back to the 70s. Yes. Even him.

And they were generally extremely quiet about their furriness, because if your bosses at Warners or Disney found out you were too furry, it was *finger drawing across throat motion*. It wasn’t that long ago that Disney had regulations about hair length and beards. And if you were out as gay you would not work for the Mouse for long. Those regulations had fallen by the wayside by the 90s, but being too visibly furry was still a bridge too far. But even still industry furries had awesome fursuits, custom plushies, multiple aliases, didn’t post their most recognizable art, there were ways to be totally furry and yet totally on the down low. And many of these industry furs were full of anecdotes about job applicants with furry porn in their portfolios or other such dealbreakers.

Just hanging out in their houses was a fuckin’ trip. You can make pretty good money in some of those positions, and one fur I dated for a while, I’d go to his killer Bojack Horseman-ish house on Mullholland and just gawk. On one level he had the dream life. What we all think we want. But he was one of the loneliest men I ever knew. He worked at an incredible job. But at one hell of a cost.

At one of those industry furries’ houses we saw a workprint of The Iron Giant three months before it came out and I was convinced it was going to be the next Star Wars. I loved it so much and then I saw it come out and crash and burn due to horrible marketing. They didn’t know what they had. I’m still salty about it.

You might think I would try to parlay all this industry networking into a job. I had desperately wanted to get into the movie business - it was why I moved to LA in the first place. But if it felt like you were angling for a job, they’d cut you off. But more so, it quickly became apparent that I didn’t, in my heart of hearts, want to live the life of an industry fur. Mostly because there was another thing that was way easier, faster, and with way more upside: the internet. It was a time when jobs in tech were falling off of trees, and why should I bust my balls to work for scrub wages in an animation studio, assuming i could even GET one of those jobs, and at constant risk of getting laid off, when I could write some PHP and make a lot more money? And change the world in the process?

In 1999 the dotcom era was peaking, and while there were plenty of web-based companies in LA (one of which I worked for), the burning heart of the revolution was north. in Silicon Valley. Its where most of my friends were and where I wanted to be. So I started job hunting in the bay.

But before that, first we need to go back, before SoCal, to early 1997, to CF8, the convention I refer to as the Fall of Rome. My boyfriend at the time was Silfur, a bunny boi who was very friendly, very flamboyant, and very skimpily clad. He wore some outfits at that con that provoked the greyest of the greymuzzle furries, the Jim Groats of the world, into drawing highly caricatured and homophobic artwork, which can be found if you dig around. Silfur became a flashpoint at that con, his general demeanor and fashion sense was the object of countless crushes, and countless outraged “whats going ON here” posts on alt.fan.furry. The events from CF8 got spun by internet discourse wildly exaggerating what actually happened, and turned it into a festival of perversions which led directly to the great backlash: the creation of the Burned Furs, a group that ended up crashing the world’s biggest furry convention into a brick wall a couple of years later. It was a lesson in the butterfly effect - Silfur bounced through an Anaheim hotel in daisy dukes and set in motion a chain of events that shook the fandom to its core.

Also at CF8 I first saw a fur playing the piano in the hotel lobby, a cute fox named Axiom, who was surrounded by an audience of onlookers while merrily playing cartoon themes and super mario music to the crowd. “he seems like a fun guy, I should get to know him better.” I thought to myself in passing.

More later.

Suggested Soundtrack: "Set You Free (Original Mix)", N-TRANCE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z69S4CFilsk

In 1995 I was 23, had been active in furry for about a year, and I was living in Toronto’s gay district, Church and Wellesley. I lived with tree cat Slinky and bunny Silfur in a loosely defined polycule, with frequent guest visits from other Toronto-area furs and out-of-towners. It was a blast. All of us had been closeted nerds in school and when we got into our twenties we were coiled springs of horniness. It was the classic 90s furry apartment life, with parties and orgies like something out of a Lance Rund comic.

Or not really. Although there was a fair amount of playing around, it was by no means a constant orgy. Most of our daily life was pretty normal, just playing video games or hanging out watching movies - usually rented from Suspect Video, stuff like Meet the Feebles or Robot Carnival. Another popular activity was drawing - everyone with their sketchbooks having an art jam of some kind. These practice sessions getting lessons from animators like Slinky were extremely helpful in teaching me how to draw.

I had a job making websites for a corporate communications company, just basic stuff but it paid OK. On weekends we went to gay clubs and warehouse raves, where I first experimented with MDMA - now called molly, then it was E. We didn’t smoke weed, or drink much. Furry at the time was considerably more straightedge - even alcohol was uncommon, at least among the furs we hung out with. That would change later on.

In early ’95 I went to Confurence 6, my first real con. I had been to Furtasticon a few months prior in PA, but that was a hastily-assembled thing thrown together in a few weeks when Philcon ejected the “skunk fuckers” from its facilities. Furry fandom was born out of rejection by SF/F fandom - never forget that.

CF6 was different. I flew to LAX, which was the first time I’d been on a plane since I was a teenager, and my first visit to the west coast. It was at a midsize hotel called the Atrium Marquis in Orange County, and the total attendance was - brace yourself - something like 650 attendees. Wow! I couldn’t believe it. There were maybe a dozen fursuiters. The thing I need to stress here is that the furry fandom I joined was mostly about artwork, comics, and online RP. Only years later did it turn into the costuming-based fandom it is now.

At this time the main online gathering point of furry was FurryMUCK. A fur named Tigerwolf brought green-screen unix terminals to the con. You could log into the MUCK, check your pagemail, and coordinate meetups and dinners with other furs. Today Telegram would fulfill this function. But the con and the hotel was so compact that it wasn’t usually an issue - you could just happen across furs you knew in the dealers room or the lobby. I know - sounds amazing. I still like smaller cons for this reason.

Something else happened at CF6 though - the dance. It was terrible! The lighting was on the level of a middle school prom. The music was stuff like Eye of the Tiger. The DJ was “whoever happened to have some CDs and was standing nearby”. Today, furry con dances are massive affairs of lights and lasers and DJs selected from a complex and highly competitive selection process. That was not the case at CF6. I said to myself “Furry con dances need to be a lot better. And I can do it.” I had learned from going to raves what a con dance could be like. More on that later.

I hear you asking “Cargo, what about babyfurs?”

I wasn’t one at the time because they didn’t really exist as any kind of organized subgroup of furry. I certainly had all my various fetishes, firmly established since I was about 15, but I didn’t know any others into diapers and stuff even on FurryMUCK. It was in mid ’95 that I made contact with Proxima and Jaz and Centaur and other furs that formed the nucleus of what we called AB furries or diaper furries. “Babyfur” as a term was years away at this point. What there was was Proxima’s Nursery, a hidden area on FurryMUCK that you had to teleport specifically to and set a flag on your character to gain entry.

Proxima had set up all this - both the nursery on FM, and a password protected website to post art and stories. Secrecy was the order of the day - it was easier to buy E than it was to see furry diaper porn back then. Proxima was very concerned with privacy and as a result the bab community was quite small indeed - maybe a dozen furs had been willing to jump through the hoops required. The vast majority of furry was unaware of our existence.

In Proxima’s Nursery on FM there was a message board where I saw posts from Jaz (now Karis) and Centaur, among others, and they seemed like cool dudes. We started chatting, scening, and doing little diaper-centric RPs on FurryMUCK and when the next con rolled around we decided to meet.

Later that year I attended Confurence East in Elizabeth, NJ, the sequel to Furtasticon, and met up with several more furpals from FurryMUCK. I was involved with the production of a TV show that did a brief story about furrydom. I am sorry to say the video from that show is lost to time.

At CFE1 is where I first met Jaz and his then-wife Marci who was already an active artist - but I don’t think she was drawing babyfur name badges yet. It wasnt until CF7 that I got to play around padded with any other furs.

It was also at CFE1 that I brought a case of CDs with me and talked to Smash, who was running tech for the con. Literally the day of the con dance I asked if I could DJ the party and he said “sure”. He was going to do it but I had more CDs and this took the task off his plate.

Just like that I was a con DJ and the first Purple Nurple Live! was happening. In the last chapter I mentioned that the Purple Nurple was the first LGBT space on FurryMUCK - well, the Purple Nurple Live was the first real con dance. And I played techno and dance music instead of 80s and Weird Al, with sprinklings of cheese here and there. Furry con dances became what they are now, in part because of me.

I played on CDs, and while I went right from song to song and kept things rolling, i didn’t really beatmatch - my true skill was track selection. I wanted to bring the feeling of those warehouse raves to furrydom. To enable a nerdy audience of introverts to experience something they’d never been able to do before - just rip loose on the dance floor and nothing else mattering. I played stuff that was hip but accessible. And it worked. My greatest praise was finding out furries who hurt their knees or ankles from dancing too hard at PNL. Yes. I fuckin did that. I set people free from their inhibitions and their self consciousness. I brought the spirit of raves to furrydom.

I ended up DJing PNL dances at every con I attended, two or three times a year, up through FC 2000, and had a resurgence a few years later as a chillout lounge called Capsule. I'd still do it again in a second, but it's not a thing I'm likely to do again. Furry con dances are in better hands now.

Life went on like this for a couple of years. And I found myself with a wanderlust. Toronto was great - especially in this time when the rent was fairly reasonable, my job was stable, I was having a good time - but I wanted to play in the big leagues. I wanted to go to California and get into the movie business. Or the game business. I knew I could stay in Toronto, have a perfectly fine life, but always with a tinge of regret for roads not taken. At the age of 25 I decided to go after what might be, before it became what might have been.

In 1997 I got my wish, as a new internet game company in Los Angeles was hiring and brought me on with a work visa. In the summer of that year I packed all my worldly possessions into six large boxes, got on a plane, and moved to Van Nuys: right into a new furry apartment with my friends Kaysho and Kayotae.

More later.

So I'm reading about Glaze and Nightshade, two pieces of software designed to a) keep artists' images from being scraped by AI theft bots by seeding the image with unreadable data and b) to poison the AI theft bots' dataset to generate inaccurate results if the images DO get read.

more here: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

I have a few thoughts about this, as someone who played quite a bit with AI tools a few months back, was even kind of excited about them for awhile, and was on the fence about them for a long time. Also I'm an artist who doesn't want my art used without permission by corporations generating revenue off my labor.

1) i'm not sure they work, but rely on a form of theater or security for artists to feel like their work is protected. I have low confidence that the procedures glaze and nightshade use are not going to be worked around by subsequent versions of AI scrapers. this is the beginning of an arms race and the scrapers will always win, because:

2) the genie is kind of out of the bottle at this point. there's petabytes of artworks and pictures out there that do not have this procedure applied to them, and have been used to train AI bots for years now. And the AI generated images will be used to train bots further.

Assuming it does work, this needs to be a backend solution, invisible to the end user, as a standard part of the image processing flow of an art gallery or social media site where images are posted. its the kind of thing that should NOT be done by individual artists with a complicated post processing tool, where only a tiny fraction of artists will do it and many of those will mess it up rendering it inoperative. it needs to be handled at the server level by social media sites, but we're living in a world where the Musks and Zucks of the world love AI and want to promote it, not implement blocks like they would for, say, spam. so the tech billionaires are an obstacle to be worked around as well.

so the solution, as always, is removing the billionaires from the process. I trust the admins of mastodon and cohost and FA and such to implement these procedures as standard on uploaded images, far more than I trust the admins of Xitter or similar to ever do it. And this can be a value add to differentiate smaller independently run websites from the tech majors.

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.

I have given this matter a great deal of thought in recent years. This is long, but please read through it before commenting. Content warnings apply for discussions of transphobia and kink matters.

"Whatever happened to Fay Wray
That delicate satin draped frame
As it clung to her thigh
How I started to cry
Cause I wanted to be dressed just the same"
- Frank N. Furter, the Rocky Horror Picture Show

“In a thousand years, there will be no men and women, just wankers, and that's fine by me.” - Renton, Trainspotting

When I was a teenager, around 15-17, I would frequently daydream about waking up one day as the female version of myself. I'd wake up in the alternate timeline in which I was born a girl. How would my life be different? Would my friends still be my friends? Would my room look the same? Would I like the same things, tabletop RPGs, computers, SF and fantasy novels? Would I .. kiss a boy?? I knew I wasn't that interested in kissing girls, although more accurately girls were not interested in kissing me.

I would swipe my mom's pantyhose and bras and makeup and try them on. I liked it, but I liked being in diapers even more. Mostly I liked the excitement of sneaking around and breaking taboos.

At 17, in the summer of 1989, after five years of denial and attempts to force heterosexuality, I looked myself in the mirror and said "I'm gay." My cross-dressing and gender questions resolved themselves and I knew what I was: a gay male. My interest in femininity in general fell to the wayside for several years.

At the age of 21 I got on the internet and found furry. At first I treated it like other fannish pursuits, like it was Warhammer or Trek fandom - I knew how to navigate spaces dominated by heterosexuals. Just push my sexuality into a small locked box and nudge it under the bed with a toe. I quickly learned that furry was not like other fandoms, even in those early days - it was quickly becoming a queer-positive social space, the alternative to gay bars and clubs that I had longed for after coming out.

For my slutty years in 90s furrydom my gender was Male, my orientation was Gay, and even for a time saw myself as one of those "ew vaginas" kinsey-6 gays that are rather tiresome.

But the needle was moved by, of all things, Doug Winger art. It was he and other artists of the time doing gleefully hyper artwork with, I'm sorry there isn't a better term for it, but "herms" and other intersex characters with boobs and cocks and pussies and all manner of combinations of fem and masc traits and genitals. I loved this art, and the free, unashamed hedonism of the hyper-herm concept. It was sex-positive, it was deeply queer but still nerdy, and it was frequently absurd and goofy and most of all shameless. that shamelessness is what drew me to it. And as a bonus, it got me out of my narrow focus on dicks and maleness that I was constrained by. It turned out boobs were hot too. Maybe I wasn’t exclusively gay, but a little bit bi.

I also always liked macro and micro fantasies, and while its a popular niche in furry, there's terabytes of the stuff with human women involved, the "Giantess/Shrinking Women" or "GTS/SW" field, and there was so much decent-quality GTS and SW porn art and writing that it seemed a waste NOT to get into it, and that helped overcome my aversions to cis fem bodies. I actually prefer size related pics with females over males. Alright, so I guess I’m pan.

Around this time in furry, the mid to late 1990s, I began to encounter trans people. My early opinions on the matter were not great - its safe to say I was somewhat transphobic. Even with my queerness and my flexibility about gender, I viewed trans fems as people who sought to join a much cooler club that they didn't have any right to be part of - standard TERF rhetoric, aided by the fact that the only conversations I really had were angry threads on FurryMUCK's public shout system - a precursor to Twitter where we were all prone to hot takes and sweeping judgements. I wasn't against trans people in theory - if they were quiet about it, that was fine.. but I viewed most of them as gays/lesbians in denial or a kind of lifestyle cosplayers. I know, I know. I got better. But it took awhile.

Through much of the 2000s I held those negative/dismissive attitudes about trans people, and didn't think much of it. But then I became closer friends with some other trans furs that weren't my usual sparring partners on FurryMUCK. And I began to read more and learn more and really listen to those friends. When I learned of the appalling rates of suicide and saw the vicious oppression that faced trans people for daring to express their true selves I realized that I had been a massive fool for years, and I went from indifferent/dismissive to Trans Ally. Especially after same-sex marriage rights had been won, it became quickly apparent that trans issues were the next major political battleground, and I wasn't going to side with the bad guys or fold up my tent.

In the 2010s I became more involved in kink, outside furrydom but adjacent to it, and several friends there were trans, especially in the ageplay/littles/ABDL communities that were a big part of my kink journey. I remember counting the littles in Camp Crucible one year and noticing the majority were trans -- because ageplay specifically gives trans people the chance to experience the childhood that they never got the first time around, and also because wearing diapers on HRT is actually kind of common because you pee a lot. In ABDL and littles circles you frequently meet "sissies" who are all ruffles and frills and mary jane shoes and in real life they're a military officer or a truck driver or a stevedore. You'd be fuckin amazed. But I'm not a sissy, and the hyper-feminine ABDL aesthetic doesn't do a lot for me. Maybe if they’re gigantic.. but anyways. ahem

Around this time I also began to meet and become friends with more non-binary furs, and once again had to overcome my inbuilt prejudices - mostly around the grammatical oddness of singular they/them pronouns, and a persistent belief that someone who is NB or bi-gender or neutroi or whatever is just claiming an identity because its cool or trendy. In the larger world "respect my pronouns" became a punchline and still is, on the right. the belief that "there are only 2 genders, its assigned to you at birth, and thats it forever" is straight up bullshit and falls apart with a seconds reasoning, but damn if it doesn't have a stranglehold on the larger culture.

Through all this journey and encounters with different people and genders and sexualities and identities, I just thought "thats great for them, I support them, but I'm a gay dude". Its pretty great privilege to be regarded as male, ngl, especially expertly passing as I do in socially-conservative situations. My everyday clothing, affect, beard, build, clocks me as a center-right cis Gen-X dude in his forties or fifties. You'd be amazed at the kind of things I get told by other people in my age cohort because they think I'm one of them. “I’m a white male, age 18-49. Everyone listens to me!” Who’d give that up voluntarily? Its hard enough to find a job as it is.

But then a couple years ago I started drawing Cargo as a girl, and created Cargie as a variant fursona. I always thought of myself as a boy little, but the color schemes and aesthetics moved away from masc and towards the middle. I fell in love with skirtalls and tutus and fairy wings and a scruffy but girly disheveled princess look.

Sexually I still love gayness as a concept and seeing two boys or two girls kissing is hot. And I’ll be honest: I love dicks. A whole lot. I never want to give them up, mine or someone elses. And yet. My gender feelings have became considerably more turbulent than they had been for several decades.

My attitude towards gender has always been that I want the all-access pass. That gender segregation is some bullshit, that I will buy the feminine skincare products and I don’t need “Loreal for MEN” in a black tactical package. I want the good stuff. I will wear pastel colors if I so choose. Or I will wear all black if I want. I will have a beard if I want. I will do and enjoy and like what I want and not worry about it being ‘manly’ or ‘girly’. People who get really hung up on gender-appropriate activities, clothing, or behavior, irk me. Gender as a social concept is bullshit and hopefully will fade over time. “A thousand years in the future, there will be no men or women, just wankers.” - I believe that. ALL THAT SAID thats just my journey. Your mileage may vary, and if you want to be super-fem or super-masculine or get gender confirmation surgery or anything like that, you have my blessing. Just dont get into andrew tate or jordan peterson.

What I’m saying is I think I’m one of those they/thems. I’m non-binary. At my age and with my physical appearance I don’t expect anyone to not assume “he/him” is my gender. And I dont want to make every conversation about me having to explain my pronouns to people. However. I’d appreciate it if going forward you referred to me as they/them. Thank you in advance. If you slip up its not a problem and i won't get mad at you. I will slip up myself. We'll all get through this together if we are patient with each other.

Thank you for reading all this.

you see, Baldurs Gate 3 is a hell of a drug. But I'm finally nearing the end of act 3 and I'm going to have to physically restrain myself from starting another playthrough as a bard or a monk or a monk bard

A month ago I wrote this:

DeviantArt - I’m scared to post anything even slightly NSFW there because I don’t know their policies. But I do post there and it does get seen. I kind of think of DA as the place to put the normiest stuff i draw, or super tame babyfur stuff. Like maybe there's a boob in it. thats as far as i can go. Its stifling.

And even with that careful curation, of reading their policies and only posting my tamest stuff to DA, I still got an account suspension for "underage" characters, and when I asked them specifically what pics violated the policies, so I could delete them, they wouldn't give me the actual names. So it was a vague 'you're breaking the rules, but we won't tell you how to not break the rules', situation.

I had no choice but to delete my entire gallery. I will no longer post to DA.

nothing I ever posted to DA had anything racy in it beyond a few pics with characters in diapers kissing. Both characters were (over 18) girls so that probably tripped a filter.

Aside from this, Deviantart is chock full to the brim with creeptastic AI generated "artwork" that frequently depicts children and they don't give two shits. It was easier to go after someone like me.

Anyways, I'm off DA. FA has its problems but its nowhere near deviantart's crappiness

just go to cubhub.social or cohost

Since a musky husky took a huge steaming dump on my former online home, I have been wandering the wasteland of the 2023 internet like Max Rockatansky scrounging for likes and faves.

I know a lot of furries are waiting to see where we will go from Twitter, oh sorry I mean X, and are staying put until an alternative is clear. X is still very busy and its where most people are, despite all the recent bullshit. I get it. But it’s time to think about moving. The decision will be made for you eventually, as the site inevitably crashes and burns. You don’t want to be the last one posting to Livejournal.

Here is a roundup of the sites I have been active on and my experiences with each, as an artist whose frequently NSFW and whose particular fetishes are less than popular among the furry mainstream.

A TL;DR version: there's no clear obvious replacement for Twitter - except what we build ourselves. Right now I am the most optimistic about Mastodon, due to its structure and protocols making it difficult for hostile CEO attacks. But it will take time.

A small note: The only statistic I care about when it comes to posting art is raw views. That determines to me the reach of a site. Whether people LIKE the art or not depends on its quality and the audience. Sometimes a piece will go nowhere on one site and be beloved on another. But all I care about is views, because if i post something and it gets 10 views i might as well not bother. Ain’t nobody got time for 10 views.

Bluesky - I can’t get an invite, but to be honest it’ll just slide into the same dumper as Twitter did so there’s no point. I have very little interest in jumping out of Elon’s frying pan into that fire. Jack Dorsey is almost as bad as Musk, and about as trustworthy.

Telegram - it was my #2 most active communication tool after Twitter, and now it’s #1. I run an art group and a discussion group and I’m a member on dozens more. Plus all the one to one chatting. It’s my favorite place to chat. But its not great for discoverability. The most i can hope for is some bab art group post my stuff with a credit, and that always links back here anyways.

Discord - A few years ago everyone and their mom started a Discord group, and now they're mostly pretty moribund and full of lurkers. I post to some of them, but mostly out of habit. I never liked Discord's extreme siloing of content into tiny little compartments. Its not bad, but there's better options.

FurAffinity - still the most active furry gallery site. Despite its own levels of bullshit and arbitrary moderation and inconsistent policies, its the ramshackle treehouse of furry fandom. I get most commission business here and see all the porn I want here. My stuff gets seen here almost more than anywhere else.

DeviantArt - I’m scared to post anything even slightly NSFW there because I don’t know their policies. But I do post there and it does get seen. I kind of think of DA as the place to put the normiest stuff i draw, or super tame babyfur stuff. Like maybe there's a boob in it. thats as far as i can go. Its stifling.

e621 - it used to be the 4chan of furry. Now its more chill. I posted a lot of recent art there just to get it picked up by the telegram bots. Its tagging is second to none - i wish other sites tagged art as well as e621 does. its fantastic for finding stuff. There’s a fair amount of noise though. And the commenters on e621 are the fuckin worst, if the art is anywhere slightly outside the mainstream of furry porn. Its tiresome. But at least the real bad comments are gone, which is better than it used to be.

Inkbunny - Rapidly becoming much more active. It used to be about 1/10 the traffic of FA and now it’s about 80-90% of the traffic of FA. Yes they allow cub stuff. So does e621 and other places. That doesn’t affect me. I post the same art just about everywhere. There’s stuff there that kind of grosses me out, but that’s true of any website. You can cultivate a blacklist and not see stuff you don’t want to see - which is more than I can say for FA.

Pillowfort - It was founded by Tumblr refugees and has a small but active community. Unfortunately nothing i post there seems to get any traction. It’s got busy accounts, and posting groups, but it’s not somewhere that feels welcoming to me. I wasn't a Tumblrite and its not for me it seems.

Itaku - same as pillowfort. A couple of my pieces got yanked for being too close to “cub” for their tastes - stuff that passed FA’s policies and isn’t cub porn. Again thats the only notice anything I’ve posted has garnered. I feel like anything NSFW and especially anything babyfur is being squashed by their algorithms and nothing I post is getting seen by anyone but mods. Postybirb makes it easy to post there but I am not sure why I am bothering.

Cohost - I can’t yet use postybirb to post there so its a bit of a pain in the ass. However the community is quite active and fun. they seem to have a lot of babs there. I’m just waiting for postybirb support and i’ll add it to my general schedule. It’s got some technical performance issues that need resolving.

Pixiv - Extremely active. When I started it was 90% Japanese and now it’s like 60%. Lots of amazing art, but also a lot of lolisho. Its also in recent months had a tidal wave of AI art posted to it - its like almost anything you look at now is AI generated unless you turn off that search. I post stuff there and it can blow up into thousands of likes/views, 5x more than anywhere else. Pixiv also has an annoying censorship requirement where I gotta blur out genitalia - its not too hard but it means i have to maintain a seperate ‘pixiv safe’ version of every pic with a boner in it and its irksome. As a result i don’t post everything to Pixiv, but I could.

Mastodon - I’m on several instances. Meow.social is where I mostly post regular furry stuff and occasional NSFW. Cubhub.social is where I'm posting all my porny stuff you know so well. It took some time to get used to Mastodon’s quirks but I’m settling in now and it looks like the place I will be for the long haul - even if I will never get to an account size half of what i had on Twitter.

Weasyl - I haven’t posted here lately. I did for awhile but it was always a ghost town.

Threads - ahahhaha. no.

I've been in a retrospective mood, it seems, judging from what I've been drawing lately - revisiting my origins in multiple different ways. The chipmunks pic, the crib pic, and today's 1980s pic .. all of them are digging back to the very starts of All This Stuff, both to acknowledge the past and use my older, more experienced brain, to re-evaluate all that made me who I am.

And its been a longer project than just the last few pics. Over the last year or so I have gone back and watched all the movies and cartoons I remember having some kind of impact on me, at least the ones i could consciously recall, and find relevant clips for. I learned a lot - mostly how extremely subtle or minor things in those books, shows and movies are what had the deepest impact on my psyche in the long term. And how i've been subconsciously enacting some of them in my art and fantasies ever since. And maybe it was like a certain comic panel, or a throwaway line in a movie.. my brain's like "I'll be takin that! Yoink!" and its a turnon for decades to come.

I've long believed that a kink is usually instilled in childhood, especially at a particular age between 8 and 12 where your sexuality is just starting to form, where orientation is fluid and puberty hormones are just barely beginning their effect. It can be anything, good or bad, a particular scene in a cartoon or a traumatic real life event, your brain does not distinguish, but those wires get installed and you've got that kink for life. Your brain liked something about what it experienced and wants it again. If it gets reinforced enough it can turn into a fetish. its not something you can control consciously. Its your job as a conscious mind to find ways to meet that desire in a safe and consenting manner that does no harm to you or anyone else. But its gonna be there regardless.

What I've learned is that it doesn't have to happen in childhood or adolescence. It can happen ANYTIME. It can happen tomorrow. It's happened to me at age 21, at age 36, it happened a week ago when I got super into blueberry inflation. It just took the right artwork and bam.

So the task of revisiting all my early life experiences and influences is never ending, because we're always spooling out more experiences until we die, and any of them can turn into a kink even if we're long past the age where its most likely to happen. it just requires an open mind.

It's still fun to look back, though.

Fetishes and kinks are weird things. I think about them a lot, not just my own kinks, but other people's as well. They're just like, little stories or sequences of events or phrases or objects that in and of themselves are usually not sexual.. but your brain thinks they are and so when you perceive them or think about them you get rewarded with sexual arousal. And that wiring means you cannot get bored of those things. Or not for very long. Sometimes you drop them for awhile, but they will always eventually come back. And your brain will never tire of thinking about those sequences or objects over and over, concocting elaborate imaginary worlds in which they happen constantly, learning about them in ridiculous detail, and pawing off to them again and again.. And each time you do it gets a little more entrenched as something your brain associates with happy times and orgasms.

I believe that if you paw off to a piece of art depicting a kink you don't have, its because you found something in the pic that you DO have a kink for, and your brain seized upon it and focused on it. And if you do that once, it was probably just that specific art piece. And if it happens twice, well, its still possibly just a passing thing and image specific. But if you paw off to something three times.. now its starting to become a kink. And you will probably do it a few more times.

And if you paw off to something hundreds of times over the course of years, thats a fetish there buster.

Anyways, I just picked up blueberry inflation. Welcome to the team, blueberry! It wasn't even the fetish I got from willy wonka: that was mike teevee. This was from furry art.

I'm actually pretty doubtful that much about my use of the site will change, given my careful reading of the site policies.. however:

if you want to find my art, or get in touch with me on telegram or what not, i keep all my active links updated on: cargoweasel.com

I just want to get something off my chest, that's been bothering me for a long time. I feel like its something that needs to be said. I hope you don't think any less of me.. but..

years ago, when I was starting out as an artist, i would take poses from photos and sometimes anime art and use those poses in my own art, tracing them off in some cases - maybe just a leg or an arm, or two bodies intertwined in a certain way, or just the arm and leg positions, hands, that sort of thing. when i can't find a photo i would take one myself, usually of my hands. I would also use 3d model posing dummies for this purpose.

I did this when I was just starting out as an artist, and also, I did it last tuesday, and i'll probably do it again in the future, BECAUSE THAT IS CALLED USING THE TOOLS AVAILABLE TO YOU TO DRAW.

there are no rules. there are only tools that can be used or misused to create art.

I regret nothing and I will do it again and you cannot stop me. AAAAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAH

Alright well about fifty people sent me links to pawperty damage on Steam and it was quite cheap (like five bucks) so I played it and yes.. I'm macro trash enough to say that its hot. >.> Especially in sandbox mode with the growth rate turned way up. As a game its short and fairly bare bones. Its well apparent that its a five dollar game.. however it does hit that button quite nicely. Vrex is my favorite :3

I want a better photo mode, and most of all a larger procedurally generated city that has like, massive buildings so the late game has more to do. think like Katamari Damacy. But I understand its the work of one fur and as a solo project it's excellent, very polished. Pawperty Damage 2 is going to be insane.

Play it here and support the dev: https://store.steampowered.com/app/.....wperty_Damage/

I don't even know where my art stands under this new policy. Ban me, don't, i don't care anymore. Only the dead can know peace from this evil.

I'm just gonna post what I post and if the mods don't like it, then they can ban me or whatever. i'm not gonna do their work for them.

Just for the record, Cargie and all my diaper school characters are over the age of 18. You will note in my art that if a character in my art has visible genitalia in a pic or they are visibly masturbating/getting off in a diaper, they will have adult/older teen proportions. If they are a cub/babyfur they will not be doing anything sexual (but they certainly will be using their diapers). That's my policy and i'm sticking to it. If thats not good enough for FA anymore, then, well, bye

Update: after carefully reading the policy it seems that they are only changing it to include pokemon and digimon specifically, and there's already a ban on childlike bodies with adult characters. it won't really affect my art, i believe. i will post here as usual - and as always, if they ban me so be it.

If you are on Telegram, and you want to join a pretty chill discussion group where I chat and such, sort of a replacement for my old twitter: https://t.me/+seCi3Fx5beFmYTVh (link will expire in 1 week)

If you just want to see art and occasional WIPs, most of which gets posted here anyways: https://t.me/woozlearts

A year ago I was going gangbusters on art. I was drawing almost every day. I was posting the best quality work of my life, and inspiration for a new pic would just fall into my lap. I loved it. The Patreon was chugging along again, and I had all kinds of ambitious plans for animation, even a game in the planning stages (a dating-sim-like based on the My Entire School Is Going Little concept).

Then came the new year and for some reason my ambition and ability to execute just cratered. It completely dried up. I stopped drawing almost entirely, and didn't even move onto a new activity, i just didn't do anything for months. Near-total paralysis. In March I painted up a large box set of 40k miniatures to auction off for a Ukraine charity, but i didn't draw anything until late spring. I played Cyberpunk 2077 and Minecraft. Then there was some traveling and real world stuff to take care of, and during that time I ran some hard numbers.

The cold equations have stated that even if my furry art career succeeded wildly beyond my expectations, if my patreon was 5-10x what it was, even if I was doing Kircai numbers, its just not enough to supplant a full time job. At best furry art can provide beer money or pay for a new computer or even a few week's groceries - but it can't pay The Rent. And I need to pay the rent. I've been unemployed for awhile, coasting off savings and investments from my startup era a few years ago - the break from a Real Job has been great but it can't last. So this summer I faced the fact that I need to get back into the tech business. Right in time for it to crash and burn and lay off thousands of people from Facebook and Twitter who will all now be shopping their resumes around into a recessionary tech industry. And do it from Nova Scotia, famously a place people have to leave to find any work at all, where there's about three technology companies and they're not hiring. And in an environment where remote work is now rare as diamonds and a perq for super senior talent only. And where I am the age of fifty, which is 90 in technology years, and if you're not a director-level or a VC they don't want you at this age.

And on top of ALL that, I can't see myself doing UX design and web dev anymore, which I did for years prior to my semi-retirement, because all the tech stack has changed completely in the last five years and I'd have to start over from basically scratch to learn Kubernetes and Rust or whatever everyone's using these days. So I've been looking into doing infosec which is way more appealing to me rn than going back to building websites - i'd rather learn to break them. So if I have to reboot skills from scratch I might as well do something new and fun anyways. So I'm studying hacking, pen testing and red teaming, malware, intrusion, all those Mr. Robot skills. Hopefully it can turn into a job in the next 6-12 months or I'm gonna be in some serious shit.

So yeah, thats whats up with me! Best wishes to all for a happy holiday season and good luck to all of us in 2023.

so. a couple of years ago I started up a Patreon and it went pretty good for awhile but then life got in the way and I stopped it. Well the time has come to revive it and now its back.

its where I'll be posting alll my new stuff (as well as here, and twitter, and such, so don't worry)

patreon.com/woozlearts

so. a couple of years ago I started up a Patreon and it went pretty good for awhile but then life got in the way and I stopped it. Well the time has come to revive it and now its back.

its where I'll be posting alll my new stuff (as well as here, and twitter, and such, so don't worry)

patreon.com/woozlearts

Commissions are closed as all three slots are filled, however I will open again in about 10 days so try again then!