So, been counting calories since October 1st, and as of today, I've lost an even 100 pounds. So...yeah...just 100 more to go.

So...since October 1st, I've been counting calories and exercising. You know, the two things nobody who's trying to lose weight want to hear, even if it's the best thing for it.

Been eating those Healthy Choice Frozen Dinners, mostly cause each one is one serving, so it's easy to write down the calories each meal. Three to maybe four per day, depending on just how hungry I get, and I'll average 1500 calories a day.

Add to that at least thirty minutes of walking (fast enough to make it hard to whistle comfortably), but usually 45min to even an hour (1hr=3miles for me), and I've lost 80lbs since Oct. 1, 2009.

I'm feeling pretty good, and if I can keep this rate of weight loss consistent, I'll be at my ideal weight by my birthday.

Wish me luck!

All Trades, Inc., a national workforce conglomerate dedicated to educating and training employees for specialized labor positions successfully defended against plaintiff and former employee Jack [last name withheld].

Jack was an All Trades employee since October, 1976 and complained that All Trades, Inc. knowingly and repeatedly misled him on the grounds of accepting requests and payment for training in various fields of specialized labor, but never allowed him to complete the training process. This, according to Jack, left him perfectly suited to perform many different jobs but not able to do so without appropriate licenses and training certificates.

The court ultimately ruled in favor of All Trades, Inc. because they were able to show that it was Jack's own personally lack of commitment which prevented his advancement as well as Jacks inability to provide substantial evidence of his own besides his personal testimony.

When asked why Jack chose to represent himself instead of hiring professional lawyer, Jack responded, "I thought it'd be a good example of the company's poor training. I'm still trying to figure out the appeals process."

-- Cedric Blytheworth, Assistant Editor of The Honest Herald

GENERAL

*Are you a furry?
Yes.

*If you have a Spouse/SO - Is he/she a furry too?
Not applicable

*How long have you been in the community?
Since the 5th grade, so...(mathing)...around 14-15 years?

*How did you find furry?
My interest in the Sonic the Hedgehog Archie Comics (stopped reading after issue 60) led me to Teamartail.com and quickly to yerf.com

*What's your reason for furry (what interested you to get into the community)?
Originally, the art and stories (started reading at Miavir's Treasure Chest of Assorted Furriness). Now, it's the lulz and drama.

*What's Furry to you?
A simple affinity for anything involving anthropomorphic creatures (all furry is anthro, but not all anthro is furry. eg. Brave Little Toaster).

*If someone found out you're a furry and asked you about it how would you respond?
I'd either say the same thing I just said above, or go into an hour and a half lecture and somehow end up in front of a podium...even in the middle of the woods.

*What are your favorite aspects of our community?
The level and entire scope of the community's combined creativity.

*Do you use any furry terms? (i.e. yiff, paws, murr?)
I once caught myself saying "paw-off"...ONCE...

*What do you wish furry was NOT associated with?
Pedophilia and Bestiality/Zoophilia. As far as I'm concerned, willing participants of those should die in a fire on public television. Also, Bestiality and Zoophilia has, in many cases, grown together.

*How strongly do you feel about someone bashing the community as a whole?
Is this the face of someone who cares?

*How strongly do you feel about anyone bashing you yourself for your interest based on the media's aspect of what furry is?
I'd be willing to enter into an intellectual discussion to examine their expression of hostility towards me, specifically, and to ascertain if I'm really the one they're targeting or if I'm just a generic target for their hostility towards the community as a whole.

*We all know furries have a lot of sexual aspects in this fandom, What's your opinion on it?
People will enjoy what they enjoy. What's important is that people understand that the community means different things to different people and that not everyone focuses on the sexual aspects.

PERSONAL

*What is/are your fursona(s)?
Tuxedo Tomcat, Fuzzy Armadillo

*Do you have any fetishes that pertain to the fandom?
Specifically to the fandom, I'd have to say tails. I have a thing for curves.

*If you could magically morph into your fursona would you?
Only with the assurance that I could switch between my character(s) and myself at will.

*Do you believe you have a spirit animal?
No, but I do find many of my mannerisms and general behavior closely similar to that of the domestic house cat.

*What other fanbases/groups are you a part of?
Magic the Gathering, MST3K (Misties Unite!), Dr. Steel's Toy Soldier Army, and Middle Earth

*Anthro/Feral, Therian or Kemonomimi (Not a furry, just a human with animal ears and a tail)?
Don't quite understand this not-question. Assuming it asks what I prefer, I prefer Anthro, but cartoonish-enough feral amuses me just as well.

*Are you a fursuiter? If yes, how many do you own? If No, do you ever plan on being a suiter?
No. I have a tail I made, but I don't wear it anymore.

*How many of your friends are furry?
About half. Of the friends I associate face-to-face on a regular basis, about a third at most.

*How many pets do you own, if any?
Eight. 7 cats (Sierra, Jasmin, Sandy, Merlin, Ditto, Smudge [the only male...and he's so flaming], and Delilah. 1 Rabbit officially named Clover, but we all just call her "Rabbit"...I call her Damn Rabbit [one-eyed bitch chewed through half my electronic cords!])

*Aside from furry what other interests do you have?
Sonic games for the Genesis, Magic the Gathering, Foreign Languages (specifically the writing systems), Blacksmithing, Tensegrity Engineering (think Epcot Center), Steampunk Engineering, Philosphy, Logic, True Communism (not "those commie bastards"), and Experimental Science.

*Are you confident enough in yourself to say that you're a fur, no matter what the media says?
Yes.

MEETUPS

*Do you attend any cons? If no, would you attend any cons? If yes, which cons have you been to?
I've attended Anthrocon '04 and '05, back when I had student loan refund checks to waste.

*Do you go to local meetups(bowling, public outings...etc)?
If I have the gas to drive into town, yes.

*Have you ever attended a furry party? If no, would you attend one?
I went to Sorin's Tea Party at AC '05. That was a hoot. I also hosted a "Furry Night" at my college to educate people about what Furry is. My RA friend had to do a public event and couldn't think of anything. It would have been nice...but I put the wrong date on the fliers. (mixed up the day of the week and the date. Hardly anyone showed up, but we still had fun.)

ONLINE

*Have you ever met up with a fur you talked to online?
Four: Danruk, Os, Emerald, and a friend who doesn't have a specific character.

*What furry websites do you attend?
FA (obviously), and lulz.net/furi mostly. When I need porn, I usually go to e621.net or furpiled.com

*What non furry websites do you frequent?
DA, facebook, omniglot.com, wimp.com, instructables.com, Nostalgia Critic, and Angry Video Game Nerd.

*Has the fandom done anything for you that you're thankful for? Has it taught you anything or brought you anything you treasure greatly?
It helped me meet new and interesting friends. It's taught me that an single group of people can hold people of impressive intellect and creativity as well as people who shouldn't be allowed in public.

So, while helping my mother clean out her closet (absolutely full of stuff she NEVER wears and stuff she's completely forgotten about), I found her father's old abacus. Green marble with brass beads and rods. When I eventually had to leave for an hour to let my sinuses rest from the dust in there, I learned how to work it....as far as addition and subtraction goes.

One thing, though, keeps hanging me up. whenever I add 123,456,789 to itself, I get the correct sum of 246,913,578. As part of an exercise I found online, I went further to add the original number to the sum again...but I can't get even halfway through figuring it out.

My step is this:
1- add 1 unit bead to the 2 to get three unit beads
2 - add 1 top-bead and subtract 1 unit bead to get 6 [ x+4=x-(5-1) ]
3 - I need to add three to the 6 is row 3...I COULD just add the three unit beads in that row...but that would throw off the end result.

According to the substitution rules used with an abacus, I could add one unit bead to the previous (left) row which represents an addition of 10, then simply subtract the number of beads in the current row to get what I need (subtracting 7 from the 10 added to equal an addition of 3). But I can't...not with 6.

I have no idea how to go about solving this fairly useless problem of mine.

I'm just curious to know how many people have trouble seeing thumbnails in galleries. Cause I can't. Well...not all of them. Some I can see, but 90% don't show up and therefore don't link to the picture they should. Also...FA doesn't seem to be looking in on the problem. or at least there's nothing said about it.

A certain comic floating around the internet of Hobbes and Hobbes having sex with each other brought an intriguing question to mind: If you were to travel back in time to have sex with yourself, would that be gay intercourse or masturbation?

I spent a week straight hurting the minds of my friends at the college lunch table with this question and eventually brought everyone's expertise into the matter, one coming from a philosophical point of view, another from a physics point of view, and with me coming at it from a linguistic point of view.

A the philosophical friend finally put all his effort and current knowledge of religion and philosophy into the matter and posted his in his journal of facebook. And in response, another friend asked further that if it was gay, would it also technically be incestuously gay?

---

Burrito Philosophy: Time Travel and Related Matters
Share
12:32am Sunday, Apr 6
I have a friend who has been wondering about a serious (sic) philosophical conundrum. I'm sure it's kept him up a few nights, and allowed him to annoy the hell out of some of his friends. His conundrum is this:

If you went back in time and had sex with yourself, would that be gay or masturbation?

I realized I really didn't know, so I did what all philosophers do (or should do) in such a situation. I got a burrito and sat about working out the problem.

For the purposes of this we will assume time travel is possible and one can visit oneself in the past without inadvertently destroying the universe. It is quite possible that this is not true. On a related note, I despise time travel.

In his own reflections my unnamed friend, whom most of you reading this have already identified but I'm not naming anyway, had on his own decided that it boiled down to the definition of the word self. This makes it a reiteration of the mind-body problem, a classic problem within particularly Western philosophy. The question is whether the you from the future is the same is the you in the past/present. Hate time travel... The act is homosexual if the two entities are different, but masturbation if they are the same.

I do not intend to solve this problem here. Crucial to this is that I was raised in an Eastern philosophic tradition in which it is ok to not actually answer anything. However, what I can do is outlie several possibilities given common theories about the soul and self.

Materialist: I list this first because it is easiest. Materialism denies the existence to all non-sensory phenomena, accepting only matter as real. If we exist only as physical bodies, than two bodies means two individuals, as they share no characteristic linking them. Thus the act outlined in my friend's inquiry is homosexual.

Psychological: Psychology typically must admit the existence of non-material aspects of the human, such as thought. However, the human mind is so much a product of the experiences it has been subjected to that the same person at radically different times of their life may logically be different entities. However, other psychological theories assert that people do not change significantly over the course of a life. The verdict? So tell me about your mother...

Platonic/ Pythagorean: Pythagoras and Plato advocated belief in an eternal soul, existing at all points in time, but transitioning from one entity to another. This soul is the real, permanent self, transcending the divided line between the gross world of images and the permanent world of the forms. According to this theory, the act would be masturbation, as both bodies belong to the same eternal soul. This is the same in mainstream Western religion, with the added corollary that masturbation may be less of a sin than homosexuality, depending on interpretations.

Descartes: Descartes is one of the philosophers most responsible for the Western notion of mind as self. "I think therefore I am" necessitates that the entities performing the sexual act must be thinking beings. As they are almost definitely not given the circumstances of the experiment, neither exists. Gay or masturbation? No.

Hinduism: Too vague, try again.

Bhakti Hinduism: By this I mean Hinduism practiced as a worshiping faith, in reverence of the Hindu pantheon. In this incarnation, Hinduism is very similar to Platinsim in its concept of the soul. Masturbation.

Philosophical Hinduism: Known as the way of knowledge, this variant of Hinduism does not admit of a pantheon of deities as beings of worship. It is a monist belief system, asserting that all of the universe consists of a single substance, Brahman-Atman, or God. This system does not admit of separate individuals. Thus, not only is this act masturbation, but all sexual union can be construed as such. Enjoy that thought.

Traditional Buddhism: Traditional Buddhism also does not admit of a self, but it also does not promote the idea of Brahman-Atman. The best answer possible would be gay, as most Buddhists do not expressly deny the existence of matter.

Zen Buddhism: The traditional method of Zen instruction is the koan, a riddle given to a neophyte that has no real answer. The idea is that the student agonizes over the riddle continuously until their mind finally breaks open in an epiphany as they realize the folly of trying to reason through the riddle. This question would make an acceptable koan.

So there you have it, a perfectly good burrito irreparably damaged by this line of thought. Excuse me while I wash my mind.