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Furry "criticism" site Vivisector unreachable, likely done

Edited by Sonious
Your rating: None Average: 3.6 (14 votes)

vivisector.gif

Welp, you didn't find it.

Website and forum devoted to "furry criticism" Vivisector has been unreachable since late June. As of the time of this article's writing, no one involved with maintaining the site has made a public announcement explaining why the site is unreachable, or even acknowledging that it is unreachable.

Two members of the site's Discord chat site, "Infovorr" and "coyotic", confirmed that the site's future is uncertain at best. Infovorr said:

We have no idea, the former owner took everything down and deleted himself from the net.
He said he'd be putting up a tarball of the site and its contents, but no one's seen or heard anything more.

coyotic was slightly more optimistic:

If we can get the database from the the former admin we'll rehost it at the same URL, the forums may or may not be locked forever afterward.

Vivisector has been called an "anti-furry" site by some, though most of the users were themselves furries. Other would call it a "drama" or "criticism" site; the latter being the site's own favored descriptor.

It was created in 2007 as a rival of sorts to the older "furry criticism" site Crush! Yiff! Destroy! (CYD). In fact at least one of Vivisector's moderators was also at one point a CYD moderator. When Crush!Yiff!Destroy! itself folded in 2010, it's assets were "purchased" by Vivisector. These assets mostly consisting of old humor articles run on CYD. With the likely loss of Vivisector, these articles could be gone as well.

Due to the CYD connection, Vivisector can be claimed as yet another scion of early, and now defunct, "atrocity tourism" site Portal of Evil, making it essentially a spin-off of a spin-off of that website. Though primarily furry "critic" sites still exist, Vivisector was the last primarily furry spin-off of the notorious PoE forums (though less furry focused enclaves can still be found).

Though their perspective was outside the mainstream outlook of most furries in their fandom, the site did specifically have rules against trolling others or activism in the name of Vivisector. The site was at times referenced as a non-primary source for some articles on Flayrah as well.

Equivamp contributed additional reporting to this article.

Comments

Your rating: None Average: 3.5 (12 votes)

And nothing of value was lost.

Your rating: None Average: 2.3 (7 votes)

So, this is the first reply on the article here and on Twitter. Facebook will probably come around eventually.

Your rating: None Average: 2.3 (8 votes)

I guess great minds think alike?

Your rating: None Average: 5 (5 votes)

When discussing this article Cross noted that I had made an odd prediction on the CYD closing article of Vivisector closing in 2018... https://www.flayrah.com/2991/vivisector-claims-purchase-crush-yiff-destroy#comme...

Of course I had said someone else would take it up like it did with CYD... but still, random year was pretty close.

Your rating: None Average: 2 (5 votes)

Yeah, full disclosure, I was banned from Vivisector back in, like, 2012? I don't remember, but the funny thing is it was basically for defending 2 the Ranting Griffin. Things change, huh?

Not bad for Furry Digg, though, right?

Your rating: None Average: 5 (4 votes)

I thought furryne.ws was "Furry Digg"

Your rating: None Average: 2 (3 votes)

I think it was Pi who called us "Furry Digg" around the time Lamar wrote up RMFC and the tax stuff.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (4 votes)

Well Reddit is more Digg-like than we are, the pieces here are not in order of user votes.

Your rating: None Average: 4.3 (9 votes)

Vivisector (and its predecessor, Crush Yiff Destroy) have certainly gotten flak from the furry community, but for a while (towards the early 2000s) the fandom didn't like to analyse or criticise itself, and they were a rare voice with in-group, skeptical knowledge. Unfortunately their more pointed criticisms were buried in satirical and trollish insults, so unless you were familiar with whatever was being discussed, it was pretty much impossible to distinguish valid points from rumor and hyperbole. Personally I like having a fandom with both positive inspirational speakers and the occasional barbed tongue (as long as it's not spewing bullshit) -
I hope the site comes back. They'd often link to the bare-bones sources of whatever drama was getting out of hand, it was sometimes informative and there was certainly a dark sense of humor present.

Your rating: None Average: 4.8 (4 votes)

Never seen or heard of this before so...good I guess?

I'm a different furry with different opinions.

Debut Album out now go stream it plz
https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/cassidycivet/double-take

Your rating: None Average: 3 (3 votes)

Wow. Never thought that a comment on here would make me feel old.

Your rating: None Average: 2 (3 votes)

So, I linked to this article in Newsbytes; ironically, I found it on bo-news, which is linked above. It was actually submitted and "frontpaged" twice, once by the other founder of Portal of Evil, K. Thor Jensen (the founder not featured in the Newsbyte article. Like Vivisector, bo is basically a spin-off of a spin-off of Portal of Evil (via PoE News in bo's case).

I was a bit disappointed with the reaction to the article; despite the fact that Chet Faliszek is generally regarded as a racist even by the members of bo-news today, they mostly felt like the case that these kind of sites are the progenitors of things like Gamergate or the r/thedonald to be weak. Which, I mean, I was called the n-word within the first hour of posting to PoE, so, there you go.

I mean, we're like on day four of another "what's killing furry this time?" fight, and this time it's "SJWs versus Nazis", but I mean, in the past it's been the media or homosexuality or whatever; everyone's got their own "who broke furry?" pet theory. And mine is, well, we were the training wheels for all tactics we now see being used in things like GamerGate and the alt-right. I mean, it's the classic line, right? First they came for the furries, and nobody defended us, because, who cares right? And now they're coming for everyone, ha ha, jokes on you. Should've seen it coming. Meanwhile, furry kind of limps around like a beaten dog, afraid of its own shadow. I mean, we had three (four, if you count Rock Dog) wide release movies with no human, all fully anthro animal casts last year, and only one half-assedly sorta, kinda acknowledged us in their advertising at all (and even that's arguable). And the thing is, as far as I can tell, furries were just okay with this. You try to make a comic book movie without acknowledging it's a comic book movie in the advertising, you fire your advertising firm. You make a furry movie without acknowledging it's a furry movie ... not even furries are bothered. Am I the only one who thinks this is weird?

But anyway, my point is, we don't want furry to be in the non-furry spotlight, because for most of our history, that meant horrific online harassment. And the worst of it is that it seems to have been fairly arbitrary; I mean, furry's not perfect, but there's no crime committed by a furry not shared by other fandoms and subcultures. Hell, we don't even have a monopoly on bestiality. It's just we got picked, and now we still get told a catchphrase that basically amounts to "I hope you are consigned to eternal torment" followed by a homosexual slur.

Well, I called the guy who run's bo out on it. I screencapped my post and Tweeted it, since the forums are available only if you have an account (don't get an account; you probably don't want to be there, we probably don't want you there). Anyway, there's a silver lining here; I didn't get any negative "red bulbs" (it would take forever to explain why down and up votes are called bulbs there, and be boring) and got enough "bulbs" to reach "!!!" status. The point is, since I'm a furry, I'll always be a bit of an outsider there. I can see things they may not be able to. Things they may not want to admit.

Likewise, sites like Crush!Yiff!Destroy! or Vivisector or even those old-timey furry boogeymen, the Burned Furs, (or even, you know, me) because they came out of the Portal of Evil school, they are always a bit on the outside of furry. And we can see things. Example, film critic Jen Yamoto's take on Fursonas, in which she compared Uncle Kage to the guy currently running Scientology in the headline. I mean, on the face of it, that's laughable, but only because she's overestimating Kage's power. You may bristle at the idea that furry looks sort of like a cult to an outsider, but as a pseudo-outsider myself, I'd been reading some pretty creepy, culty stuff on sites like [a][s] and Ask Papabear for years.

But even most of this cultiness is just a deep-seated secrecy, which is just those old scars still acting up.

Anyway, I got this reply:

I feel guilty about a lot of the stuff I did but probably not as much as you'd like.

It's not exactly an apology, but it's not not exactly an apology, either. Oh, well.

I forgive a lot of it but probably not as much as he'd like.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (3 votes)

How I counter the "YIHFF" thing:

furfag counter.jpg

Better yet, the common counter for saying you had sex with their mom of "she's dead" really doesn't work here. Cause then you can just go: "Ah, so she got there first, hope she remembers to save a spot for me."

Your rating: None Average: 5 (4 votes)

I'm honestly surprised to even see Flayrah bothering with this "story". It was a fringe forum almost no one gave a shit about anymore. I checked very frequently because I have a morbid fascination with not just the kinds of people sites like Vivisector obsessively chronicle, but the way forums as an entire medium are dying as their remaining users seem to live in a state of denial about how much their relevance has declined. At any given time, I don't think I ever saw any more than 30-something people viewing, almost always all guests.

Just the length of time between Vivisector going offline and someone on the few remaining public furry forums (at least that I know of) caring enough to ask where it went says a lot. I think it was about a week before someone on Phoenixed (a site about as far on the fringes of the internet as Vivisector itself in terms of popularity and activity) posted a thread asking what happened, and a few days later before someone on r/furry inquired. WikiFur as per the usual was and so far still is utterly useless at providing any real information and it took them about the same amount of time just to start referring to Vivisector in the past tense.

I might as well post a link to the screencap from some sketchy imageboard (someone on Discord said it looks like 8-chan) someone posted on Phoenixed because crap like this is about as close as most of us are gonna get to answers. But just bear in mind it's cringey as hell and basically hearsay: https://phoenix.corvidae.org/uploads/monthly_2017_07/firefox_2017-07-09_02-57-20...

My gut tells me there's probably mostly if not complete truth there, though. The thing is, it takes a certain kind of mind to be that dedicated, basically obsessed with this kind of trite bullshit, digging into the personal lives of people that in most cases you have absolutely nothing to do with and are in no way personally effected by. And it's often not a very healthy mind. That's why these sites always have such a sketchy stench about them and why they never last, destroying themselves from the inside out. I say that as someone who knows he needs to get a life and stop caring about this garbage, and to be blunt, that's what 99% of it is. I actually think we really do need a serious, no frills, no censorship, free-speech zone in the fandom specifically for whistleblowers - the kind that feel it's important to tell you, for example, what went on behind the scenes of RainFurrest to allow the years of utter debauchery that led to no hotel wanting to touch it with a ten foot pole. Or, how another con chair/staffer/whatever is a sovcit lunatic who probably shouldn't be allowed to run a gas generator, let alone a convention.

But in practice, that's not what Vivisector was. It was a place for people to gossip and speculate and predict and pretend they're not also pretty big fuck-ups in their own right. And anyone who needs a site like it that badly, if you're reading this, you could always try KiwiFarms. It prances and preens around all kinds of 'tards, 'spergelords and lolcows besides furries! As long as you're okay with knowing that the guy who owns the site himself lives with his mom, who somehow lost her job because of her son's activities and, if you believe EncyclopediaDramatica and several blogs that have been written about him, has some pretty sick fantasies that by the logic of his general userbase make him a likely candidate for a sex-offender registry someplace, somewhere down the road... Yeah...

Anyway this post has gone on too long. Think I'm gonna go look at some more furry art and feel safe in the knowledge that it doesn't make me nearly as fucked up as some people in our own community would like us to think. If any of the writings (and unhinged ramblings) on sites like Vivisector, ED, POE, KiwiFarms or the multitude of imageboards and subreddits out there about us ever has you feeling insecure, please try and take this to heart: These people are massive losers, and they have doxx to prove it.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (3 votes)

WikiFur as per the usual was and so far still is utterly useless at providing any real information and it took them about the same amount of time just to start referring to Vivisector in the past tense.

That's because that was done by me too. I knew about the screenshot you posted but wasn't going to cite it as a reputable source there, so there wasn't much I could add. I'm in contact with Foxid though so maybe I'll get more answers there.

some sketchy imageboard (someone on Discord said it looks like 8-chan)

That's Lulz.net and it's essentially the same as the other sites you're talking about but with porn too.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (3 votes)

Oh right, I keep forgetting Lulz.net is still a thing. Or is it? I'm genuinely curious about just how far forums, imageboards and the like are falling as social media and YouTube become basically the only internet that matters except for mainstream (and fake) news sites. Not too often you get a front row seat to the end of an era, y'know?

Your rating: None Average: 4 (2 votes)

According to ProvincialTwit (the "former leader" referenced in this article) he actually did make a tarball with the site's files available on the server, and that it remained available until the server was deleted due to failure to renew it. There was no communication between PT and the other admins about this, though, so they probably just didn't think to look there. PT says that some of them are able to contact him and refusing to, but he also asked me to keep the profiles he used to talk with me secret, so take that how you will.

PT also gave me some background info on the site's closing. Particularly interesting to me was that Coyotic (who is apparently Kindrift) discussing repurposing the site to match furry's more recent "political climate" and be a "furry antifa"-friendly thing. According to PT, though, the ultimate reason he shut the site down was due to the site's inactivity not justifying the cost anymore, and the drama talked about in the screenshot linked above was a "last hurrah" of trolling on PT's part.

Your rating: None Average: 3 (3 votes)

Also, https://vivisector.org/ is back up stating, "NAZI FURS FUCK OFF - coming back eventually"

Your rating: None Average: 5 (5 votes)

Color me pessimistic about how that'll work out. Furry's "political climate" changes with the whims of whatever sensationalist media (and downright yellow journalism) enough furries happen to be following at the time and it changes constantly. If furry becomes more alt-right, is Vivisector going to an about face and go alt-right just to conform? of course it's ridiculous to assume that would happen at all, let alone that it would sustain itself for more than a few years. In the past we've had Burned Furs, Confurvatives, Tea-Party furs, and the alt-right is just the latest iteration of a reactionary populism that has to reinvent itself every few years. Is Vivisector going to do the same, only aping the antifa cause until that too gets played out? At the snail's pace furry sites seem to learn, adapt and change according to the times, I'll be pleasantly surprised if they even have a new site before that too runs its course.

The one redeeming quality Vivisector had was that it held nothing back in divulging the hypocrisy, sickness and banal cynicism of some of fandom's elites and "popufurs", as well as revealing backgrounds of the sketchier characters on the fandom's fringes. But it ruined whatever good will it might've had for those efforts by being an incredibly toxic atmosphere and yet another forum circle jerk that people had already begun to lose patience with years ago. And it had the same deficiency that damns most online furry communities: a very precarious relationship with truth, objectivity, honesty and informed argument.

I'd love to ask PT just why the site was so inactive and what part the site itself had in driving users away. What I'd love more is to see a site like Flayrah pick up where they left off and just do it better because really, all the parts are here: a news site with enough people on the inside to find relevant information, enough objective, rational people in the comments sections that things usually don't become a blatant circle-jerk, and a rating system that allows for a system to let it be known if you're full of shit without devolving into a juvenile shit flinging contest.

Actually, I'd be interested in knowing just how much activity Flayrah itself gets. It's only been recently that I've made it a point to try to check here frequently.

Your rating: None Average: 2 (5 votes)

You are absolutely right about a need for open dialogue about the subculture's problem areas. Unfortunately, Vivisector was probably one of the the worst possible places for it in the end.

The site tried to transition over from what was once a Portal Of Evil offsite into something less focused on socially posturing over the weak, but like so many other places it just became a way for trolls to find more socially acceptable targets for their trolling so they could keep on doing it.

Making things better involves a lot more than just screaming about people from the safety of your own little bubble, and trying to reform a site designed to bitch about people into some kind of tool for activism is not going to work.

Your rating: None Average: 3 (3 votes)

I lost contact with Foxid ever since the incident, but there were talks about winding down the site and leaving up an archive of sorts. The stories floating around about what happened and the tensions leading up to it are *mostly* accurate.

At this point, I really do not want anything to do with the site or anyone who's still on board with it anymore. Nobody made much use of the site in the last five years and it didn't help that the place was also toxic as all hell. It was even deader than Livejournal by the end, with an active userbase that could be counted on two hands.

Vivisector should take it's rightful place in the forgotten internet deep alongside Portal of Evil and ljdrama.org, both of which were also scuttled by adults who got tired of paying server bills on something that got increasingly difficult to justify as they got older.

The furry community's existing news sites, existing wikis, and (ugh) social media presence can and have made up the slack, like it or not. 99% of the subculture has no desire or use for an old-school Helldump forum of it's own, especially not when Twitter is right there.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (4 votes)

Twitter does not even come close to replacing what a forum is. It's not trying to obviously but maybe it needs to be said.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

Your rating: None Average: 2.6 (8 votes)

The fact that it is replacing "better" means of communication in spite of it's objective inferiority maybe says something about what people (i.e. the middle-class Americans who build and use these things) really and truly want in an internet social media platform. Twitter does everything to make self-aggrandizement very, very easy while doing everything to make having an actual in-depth discussion with someone very very difficult.

That is built into the most basic tenets of it's design; Twitter would no longer be Twitter if either of those issues were rectified. That in itself tells me everything I should know about the people who run it and everything I should know about the people that make extensive use of it.

Your rating: None Average: 5 (3 votes)

That's like saying cellphones are replacing PCs even though PCs are "better." They are different. Twitter is better for some things, forums are better for others. I'm not even sure I would call a forum "social media." But you're right, Twitter is not designed for in depth conversations so if people are trying to have them on Twitter then they are making a mistake. But for sharing random little bits of news and stuff (what it was for) Twitter is superior to a forum.

"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."
~John Stuart Mill~

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