After living on Long Island and in New York my whole life I have finally decided to heck this and do a leave

So next month I'll be in NOLA!

What I wanna know is:
- Who's down there already to be furry with?
- Who wants to come visit? I don't care if I know you irl or anything, it's a fun city and I'm thinking of just letting furries couchsurf.

http://furrynetwork.com/xerxesqados

They have a pretty cool FA importer that syncs all the people you're watching on FA too.

Going through descriptions of art that I wrote when I was 17 is a trip down cringey memory lane.

People need to learn to just scroll on down when they see something on the internet that offends them.

Like for example.

If you see someone on the internet getting all offended by something that you're not offended by

Maybe you need to not get so offended that this person is getting so offended

I, too, experienced the trauma of being 14 years old and my mom not letting me buy Grand Theft Auto. Censorship is a big deal and a scary thing. But I don't get all triggered every time I see a trigger warning.

You need to learn you some freedom of speech and respect that there are people on the internet who have different opinions than you. If you're on the internet, you're going to run into things that aren't for you, like safe spaces. If you need a safe space from safe spaces then the internet is not the place for you to be.

Ifritx and I are trying to find people to room with at the con. Anyone else looking? Anyone know anyone else who's looking?

We're open to people who already have a room and are looking to fill spots, or other people who'd like us to book a room ourselves and room with us.

I'm gonna be there.

This is kind of a short journal.

Let us all meditate on the wisdom of modeling your website's social features after deviantART.

I like the idea of sexy RPing. The idea of meeting a guy in Second Life or on F-List and typefucking his brains out sounds like a really fun thing. Sometimes it is. But a lot of the time I find myself running into the same annoyances that bother me, and sometimes make me into That Guy who's an asshole and just kinda disconnects in the middle of it because I'm not really feeling it anymore.

It's basically the fact that having sex on the Internet takes WAY longer than having sex in real life.

If you're trying to typefuck with any degree of literacy, you're probably going to want to take turns writing whole paragraphs. It can take between two and five minutes to compose a single one, and usually not a lot happens in them. Every three or four minutes, you might get another article of clothing off. Suddenly it's been twenty minutes since you got into the bedroom and you're JUST starting to get your dick sucked. And then to make it feel substantial, you usually have to trade about two or three paragraphs each on the blowjob before you get to the anal. So you've basically been at this for 45 minutes to an hour and JUST NOW are you starting to actually have buttsex.

It can get really exhausting. Especially if you're whacking it the whole time in between your posts, because, well, why wouldn't you be? So you're edging yourself for like 90 minutes or so before your character gets to cum, and you don't really want to do that in real life until your character does because then you're not in the right mindset anymore. Except it's ALSO increasingly difficult to keep coming up with literate, imaginative posts through the whole thing because your mind is going blank from how hard your dick is and ugghghghghgh.

But it still SEEMS like a good idea, and when it works, it works.

So I'm wondering if there's some kind of way to use some kind of card game mechanics to keep the action moving along, to make quality yiff RPing easier and less exhausting. The way Storium uses cards to help facilitate forum-post RPing (which doesn't need to be real-time) is really interesting, but that doesn't work as well for banging because you kinda just want to do it when you're in the mood to do it, and keeping that going over the course of several days is really tough. (Although people have written some GREAT long-form erotica through forum posts like this, it's just really hard to make it work)

What I'm thinking is a system where everyone has a turn limit of 30 seconds or 1 minute, and a focus on single sentences rather than long paragraphs. But there are also cards which pop up with pre-written sentences (maybe with some fill-in-the-blanks), making it easier to quickly move the action along. You can also combine that with making your character say things — there's a clear distinction between actions and words, which gives you room to roleplay through dialogue while helping you out with the imagination of physical actions (which, personally, I think are more difficult to come up with on the fly). The cards also have a logical flow to them, so only the ones that make sense in context ever appear (e.g. the "fucks you harder" card won't be available if you haven't actually started fucking yet).

The question is whether seeing all the same action cards pop up every time would make it boring. I'm not sure if it would. A lot of RPing is basically rephrasing the same things you always do, so if there's enough variety in the cards and how they can be combined, it might be perfectly fine. The only way to figure out whether it works would be to play-test it.

If anyone's interested I'd like to talk this over more. The key is to break down an RP into its basic elements so we can figure out how to split it up into cards, phases, etc. It'd be interesting to look at or do a bunch of RPs (ahem, purely for research purposes) so that we can analyze the similarities in them and figure out a typical rhythm for how they usually go.

I am definitely not the only person who wants a picture of my character smiling at the camera with big glowing yellow text in front of my face while reality breaks down behind me.

Everyone else is journaling about this so

I'll be there gaiz.

I was gonna do the meme thing but some of those questions are just silly.

Except for the one about touching me. Touch me all over, baby.

 knoxin is a fantastic artist who needs to raise some money for a new tablet.

He's got 5 commission slots open. Go get sumfin: http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5390243/

FurFright is ending because apparently they didn't anticipate that Belic and K'gra might have to leave when they structured the corporation. Therefore, because reasons, the rest of the con staff will have to change the name.

Then again, part of FurFright's charm is that it's held together with duct tape and derp, so this is actually kind of fitting.

All that said, I wish Belic and K'gra well and hope they're doing okay with the personal reasons that prompted them to step down. They were always great, and I'll remember them fondly. I have no ill will towards them. I'm not mad or anything about the lack of a legal failsafe or contingency plan for this kind of thing. It's just kind of funny.

My understanding is that FurFright started out as a house party, and it's definitely maintained the feeling of "Belic Bear's Personal Party" even with almost 1500 people (which has always been one of the great things about it). But it's not just Belic and K'gra's house party anymore. FurFright has become a cultural institution. So it's no wonder that all of the rest of the staff are on board to keep it going next year.

I'm just facepalming over the name change, because it's so unnecessary. Switching con chairs probably isn't going to change the feel of the con. It'll still be FurFright. I'm probably going to insist on still calling it FurFright for at least another two years or so.

Some furs and I are trying to get a group together to for a Chanukah orgy. Including myself there are already four of us, and we're looking to get four more people involved.

Artist will be  amwulf

Post here or note me if you want in, and I'll give you the payment details.

Also, I guess you don't HAVE to be Jewish if you just want to be in an orgy, but just don't be a meshugenah and only take a slot if we can't find a nice Jewish boy to fill it.

SLOTS
1.  kravenlupei PAID
2.  morearty PAID
3.  thewolfissilver PAID
4.  mattivrenard PAID

UPDATE: Amwulf's maximum is 15 people, and he'll be starting on Monday the 2nd. If anyone else wants to get in this weekend, there are still slots available!

So there's this new joke Twitter account out there called @FurryOnePercent, which is making fun of the idea of "furry privilege." Like how fursuit makers are living in yachts from all the money they make. It's pretty funny. But seriously. Do we have a privilege problem in furry?

A lot of really quality fursuit and commission work isn't an option for furs with less money, and I often see the accusation that you're only "popufur" if you can afford a suit or a lot of art (especially porn). I've managed to get a lot of commissions over the years, and a fursuit, and I don't feel like that's the reason why I have friends, or why people hang out with me at cons. But that's how this stuff works. After all, "rich white cis male privilege" (which is a VERY REAL THING) often goes completely unnoticed by rich white cis males. So am I missing something here?

It's easy to chalk this up to the fact that people who have difficulty making friends are just looking for something to blame. "You have a suit, so you're popular" may not be true, and what's actually happening is that somebody who happens to have a fursuit is just more socially comfortable. So, are the socially awkward people really to blame? I like to think of furries as being some of the most accepting people on the planet, but are we living up to that?

Not entirely related, but there's also these disturbing stats that :usernukakitty:'s research team found. Look at the Furry Fiesta 2013 results and scroll down to the part about furries and pornography. There's a huge difference in the way that males and females perceive porn in furry culture. Are we alienating women? There's a line between being sex-positive and overdoing it, so I'm wondering if we've crossed that.

Have you experienced any of this? Is furry culture living up to its ideal of being welcoming, or are there things we need to change? Feel free to say anything you want and speak your mind. Note me if you want to say something anonymously.

Just curious. Comment and tell me.

Yes, this means you, random person reading this who I don't even know.

"Meat is murder. Tasty murder." Yes, we've all seen and laughed at the t-shirts and bumper stickers that say that, and then continued to bite into our burgers and roll our eyes at the hippie vegans with their tofu. But I think deep down, we actually, literally believe that.

See, my thing is, I don't laugh at vegans. I know they're right. I'm horrified by the idea of slaughtering an animal. There is no way to do it "humanely." Every time you eat a burger, or some chicken, or some bacon, you're eating a piece of a living, breathing, feeling creature that felt horrible pain as it died. If I had to watch the animal get murdered, I don't think I'd be able to eat the meat. I wouldn't in my wildest dreams be able to do it.

The world will be a better place once we have the technology to grow salami in a laboratory without murdering any pigs. Nobody but the most sociopathic fuck on the planet would disagree with that.

But the people who can stomach killing an animal? They're not sociopaths. Most of them are good people. They've learned to grin and bear something horrible out of necessity. Much like how, during a zombie apocalypse, the rest of us would learn to grin and bear shooting our infected friends. If the world changed tomorrow, and nobody had to kill an animal ever again, most slaughterhouse workers wouldn't miss their old jobs at all. (Other than the whole losing their job thing, but that's about wanting to have a job, not about wanting to kill animals)

Now, the other big reason to be a vegan is one that often gets ignored: the fact that something like 70 or 80 percent of all the crops grown in the industrialized world go to feed livestock, not humans. Farming animals is tremendously wasteful. So even if you are an animal-murdering sociopath, there's still a legitimate economic reason why you might want to boycott meat.

In fact, boycotting meat is the whole point of people who call themselves "meagans:" they will eat meat if it's free, but they won't buy it themselves. I'm not a meagan. I do, quite often, pay for meals that have meat in them. The reason being that I don't really think my refusal to spend money on meat is going to have any meaningful effect. I'm one person against millions, billions of people who keep buying meat. Until some critical mass of people refusing meat is reached, it's not going to make a difference.

Now, obviously, we're not going to get to that critical mass until people like me shut up and join the movement. On the one hand, I don't think we're going to reach that critical mass by spreading the word of veganism. People at large care more about economics than they do about ethics, and meat isn't prohibitively expensive enough for people to bite the bullet — and "no-kill" lab-grown meat isn't good or cheap enough yet either. On the other hand, I'm just trying to make excuses for the fact that I'm too much of a bitch to kick my meat habit. I'm a massive hypocrite pulling unproven theories of social dynamics out of my ass, in order to avoid admitting that I'm a massive hypocrite.

If I said any of this to a hardcore vegan, they'd spit in my face. I care about the rights and welfare of animals, but I'm not going to take the step and fight to protect them. And they're absolutely right to do so. History will not look kindly on me. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, and I eat bacon. In 200 years, my love of bacon will seem backwards, barbaric, and monstrous. So I completely understand why any radical animal rights activist would hate me. They're just already living in the future.

So meat is, in fact, tasty murder. No meat-lover is happy about the dead animals. No meat-lover would be sad to see the animal murder go away, so long as the meat tasted the same. Deep down, we all agree with the vegans, we're just not ready to do something about it. That time will come, either when meat becomes unsustainable, or when lab-grown meat becomes viable. Personally, I hope it's the latter. I really like bacon.

Okay so I made a video game. It's a pretentious indie art game which is deliberately not fun to make a serious point about politics. But I made it for a contest being held by the MacArthur Foundation called "Looking@Democracy." You're supposed to make a "digital media submission" that, well, looks at democracy.

There is a cash prize here. If I win some money, I will use it to fund another, larger game. And it will have fuzzy animal people in it.

Please go vote for it here: http://lookingatdemocracy.org/submi.....tive-democracy

The voting portion is to determine who gets the $5000 People's Choice Award. The rest of the prizes (up to $25,000) are picked by a panel of judges. But realistically, they're probably only going to pay attention to the ones that do well in the votes.

The current voting leader has only like 150 votes. Furries can beat that easily. Please help. Bother your friends about this. Thaaaaaanks. <3

We weren't getting enough out of corporate funny animal cartoons. So we made our own damn subculture.

We're not content to sit around and have our culture fed to us by big names. We're not all about buying identical copies of the same damn comic or print. We create our own identities, characters, and stories. When we do spend money, it's often to produce, not to consume. We commission art not to hide in a bookcase, but to share with the world. Every commission adds to the wealth of the community.

By and large we don't anoint celebrities. Our popular artists and entertainers are our friends, not our idols.

We're not afraid to love each other. We'll cuddle no problem, sometimes without even needing to know each other. In public, no less. We can spend a good portion of our convention time just turning off our brains and enjoying the raw, primal feeling of companionship with relative strangers. We never shake hands when we meet new people. It's always a hug.

We celebrate our sexuality; we're not ashamed of it. We don't think it's weird to be gay, bi, or straight; to be monogamous, open, or poly; to be reserved or to be a porn star. We know that sex is human, it's animal, it's human-animal.

We have no audience, because we're all the creators. We have no idols, because we're all on the same level. We have no inhibitions, because love is beautiful. We have no consumerism, because we're all producers.

Think about that. Furry is punk rock as fuck.

Rick Falkvinge updates us on the EU's vote to ban porn: http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/12/eur.....-voted-for-it/

So here's what happened:
- The part of the report which specifically refers to "all forms of media" (meaning the Internet) was removed. But the context was a summary of a document from 1997 which still calls for an Internet porn ban. So basically, they changed it from, "we approve this thing written in 1997 which says to ban porn online," to, "we approve this thing written in 1997." They still voted to ban porn. They just made it harder to realize that.
- You know all those emails you guys sent to the Parliament telling them not to do this? They put them into their spam filter. MEP Christian Engström discovered he was unable to send a message with the name of the porn-ban report to his own office. The Parliament gets thousands of emails about agricultural bills and stuff every day and doesn't spam-filter them. They specifically tried to shut down protest against this one bill.
- The Parliament did not release the names of who voted yes or no. They normally do this, so that voters can hold their MEPs accountable. We are not being told who voted in favor of this ban, just that it was a majority.

Now, this does not mean porn is banned in Europe. What just passed was called a legislative report, which is basically a measure that says "we should pass a bill that does this." So this means that the EU has agreed to move forward with trying to ban porn in Europe.

But the protests did have an effect. They certainly noticed. So keep fighting if you don't want this thing to pass.

Europeans: there is a legislative process beginning in the European Parliament which is attempting to ban porn.

Yes. Really. They are trying to ban porn. All of it. Even sext messages.

More details, and how to send an email to all 754 MEPs at once to tell them to fucking cut it out, are here: http://falkvinge.net/2013/03/06/nex.....ediate-action/

UPDATE: European Parliament member Christian Engström reports that in honor of International Women's Day, the Parliament's email servers appear to be blocking messages containing the phrase "gender stereotypes." As in, the "eliminating gender stereotypes in the EU" report that the porn ban is buried inside.

http://christianengstrom.wordpress......na-womens-day/

So maybe don't bother emailing them.

Where are you staying?
Westin Peachtree Plaza

What day are you getting there?
Thursday

Who will you be rooming with?
 ifritx  gadas and  -rai-

Who will you hang out with during the convention?
All of the furries. ALL OF THEM.

Will you be suiting?
Excessively

Do you do free art?
Sure! I'll draw stick figures for you.

What is your gender?
MANPENIS

How tall are you?
5'8"

Are you taken? Are you looking for a 'mate'?
I have a foxiance.

Can I talk to you?
You'd fucking better.

Can I touch you?
Probably. :3

How can I find you?
Purple. With yellow pants. Alternatively, tweet XerxesQados or OMGPurpleFox. Or note me and ask me for mah digits.

Can I visit your room?
If you seduce me well enough.

Can I buy you drinks?
Is that even a question?

Can I hug or snuggle with you?
Mmmmmmmmm...yeah.

Are you nice?
Yiz.

Do you have an artist table?
Nope

Will you be going to parties?
Ohhhhh yes.

Will you be performing?
Nope

If I see you, how should I get your attention?
"Xerxes!" "Qados!" "Purple fox!" "Purple!" "Hey slut!"

What/where will you be eating?
Uh...whatever's there, probably.

Can I come with you for food/fun/etc?
Murrhaps.

Can I draw in your sketchbook?
I don't have a book, but you can grab paper and draw things at me.

Can I take your picture?
If you don't take my picture I'll be fucking pissed.

What's your goal(s) for the con this year?
To be fantacular

What the hell, let's do it. The very first fundraiser for the Make-a-Yiff Foundation!

CURRENTLY PLEDGED: $55 of $100

We need to raise $100 to give a random lucky fur their very first art* of their fursona. And with a budget like that, it'll be some serious, premium art.

*We're using this loosely. If they have some gift art from somebody, that doesn't disqualify them. Basically it's someone who looks like they've never gotten some really nice art done like all of us with our galleries full of commissions. A high-end fursuit counts as really nice art.

Here's how it works:
- We'll compile a list of FurAffinity users who appear to be active and enthusiastic, but have no art of their character (or only have self-drawn or non-professional-quality art). Please NOTE ME suggestions for this list. We want to keep it a surprise!
- Using a random number generator, we'll select someone from the list. (Financial backers will see the result for transparency's sake)
- The lucky fur will be contacted and asked if they have a specific artist in mind, whether they want clean or adult art, etc. etc. If they don't respond within one week, we move on to someone else. But they'll be first in line for the next fundraiser.
- We commission them art and make them smile.

To contribute:
- Comment on this thread with a pledge. I'll ask everyone to PayPal/AlertPay/whatever me once we hit the $100 threshold, but no sooner.
- You can also pledge anonymously. Please note me.
- If we reach the goal, still feel free to pledge. We'll put your money towards making another new fur happy.

NOTE: Yes, this money may fund adult art if the lucky recipient wishes it. Please do not pledge if you don't like porn.

A donation pool which raises money to buy high-quality commissions for new furries who've never had their character drawn. Every month (or more often if we can afford it) we randomly select somebody and buy them some awesome art or get them in on a YCH.

Would anyone be interested in throwing money at such a thing?

I asked  ifritx to marry me tonight. He said yes.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

My sidekick ho  jack-shade did this so I yoinked it. Shy boys can note me.

1) Would you have sex with me if you could?

2) Have you thought about it before?

3) Where would we do it?

4) Top or bottom?

5) How many times?

6) Position(s)?

7) Rough or soft?

8) Lots of foreplay? Or get right to it?

9) More than one person? Or have me all to yourself?

10) What do you think it would be like if you could?

I have a lot of people watching me who I've never spoken to, talked to, met, anything like that. This makes me sad. Because I like people.

If you're watching me (or even just reading this) and we've never met offline, talked at length, or basically don't really "know" each other, please leave a comment. Say hi. Be furry at me. And I'll fox right back.