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Didn’t make it to Further Confusion this year? Made it, but missed our talk?  Don’t worry!  I actually remembered to turn on the camera this time!  Click through for a video of the panel portion of our presentation, “Exploring the Fandom Through Data”.

As always, the slides and data for the presentation itself are available on github.

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Hey PapaBear,

I have really enjoyed your advice columns they have let me think about other people' problems and how I would respond to them, and they have also helped me in some of my question area's. (Notably, the creative writer's one!) They really let me think and help me with some of my fandom-ish problems*. 

Now I'd like to leave my cards on the table.

I live in a small town, middle of nowhere, so I can't be drawn into a city-type environment, so maybe that affects me more than I think, but I feel at a loose disconnect with the fandom. I've done many thinks a beginner furry might do: I've built my own tail (best thing I've made out of art class, hehe), and I've written stories (sadly, not one of them are truly completed, drifted off them.) My cousin is also a furry, and I enjoy doing little fursona for my friends. I just have the problem of not really be able to connect to my thoughts (my cousin live a nice time away). I love to read a books, once I'm in it I just can't it it down. I consider myself a teacher pet (Ha Pun), but no one really thinks like I do, well, fandom related, I guess.

Sorry for trailing off a bit.

Thanks,

Failaria Talerum FT (age 15)

*Being accepted by the ones around me because I'm a furry.

* * *

Hi, Failaria,

It sounds like you’re asking how to better connect to furries. Unfortunately, you don’t provide your location, so I can’t research your area to see if there are furry groups close to you or not. Yours is a pretty common problem that I have seen before: furries living in rural or other remote areas who have a hard time getting to furcons or furmeets. Also, since you are only 15, you can’t drive anywhere yourself—although if you could hook up with some nearby furries you might carpool somewhere.

While it is always preferred in social interactions to have real-life contact, in those situations where that is not possible we are fortunate enough to live in a technological age where we can connect online. I would recommend you search on Facebook for furries with your interests and see if you can make some friends there. Also, Furry4Life is great because they have interest groups all set up for you. For example, I belong to Greymuzzle, Bear, and Fursuiting groups on F4L. You say you made a tail and, I suppose, you might be interested in doing more than that? Join a fursuiting and fursuit makers groups, which would be a super way for you to get tips about making fursuits and accessories and making new friends.

But the king of furtual reality is Second Life. Yes, there are other virtual communities (InWorldz at http://inworldz.com/ is very similar, I understand), but I think SL is probably the best known and most popular virtual reality hang out for furries. Here, you can buy and customize furry avatars, go to furry clubs, even buy real estate and set up a business using the Linden Dollars currency. I used to hang out in SL a lot, but haven’t in years because my RL became so busy, but if you are desperately seeking some social connection with furries and have the time and a computer with a decent Internet connection, then Second Life might be just the thing for you.

Good luck!

Papabear

Author: rodney Mandi Tremblay (also known as the artist Mitti, creator of Peachy Keen) has a new on-line graphic story in full color, Lucky August Carson. It goes like this: “On his first day as a small town sheriff, August Carson’s got caught in the snare of Freddie, the legendary Bandit Queen, who kidnaps him […]

I’ve long been fascinated by the art of communication. While writing is my forte, I’m also fascinated by radio—I was a teen-aged disc jockey for a time at an educational station—and just about all other forms of gasbaggery. One of the things that has struck me most profoundly over the years is how much all the various means of exchanging thoughts and ideas have in common with each other at the basic level.

Over the years I’ve chosen a very few favorite literary passages and other odds and ends of communication and thought long and hard about what makes them work so well. One is an excerpt from Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, more specifically the arrival of the Midnight Circus Train. Another is the last few paragraphs of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which never leaves me dry-eyed. A third is a lesser-known but still famous scene from book five of the Horatio Hornblower series (Beat to Quarters was the American title) by C.S. Forester in which the protagonist, half-mad from noise and terror and the strain of command in the most brutal sort of combat struggles to maintain his sanity as he (largely by pure force of will) stands for hour after hour in the hot sun with the corpses of his friends and shipmates piling up ever deeper all around him. These are all three of them brilliant gems of the literary art, and each achieved much of their impact using very different techniques. Indeed, they share only a single thing in common.

Not one of them is one syllable longer than they absolutely must be in order to achieve the effect intended. Indeed, each is remarkably short compared to the power they command in the reader’s mind. Not a shred of “non-essential” or “second-rate” material is present to water down the impact of the rest.

It wasn’t literature that first caused me to notice this phenomenon—like many children my age I was required to memorize the Gettysburg Address. The Address was only a few words long, yet if ever a national leader has delivered a more powerful or timeless message I’m unaware of it. According to my history teacher, during that era speeches—and American political speeches in particular—tended to drone on for hours and be filled with highfaluting twenty dollar words, impressive gesticulations, eyerolling, appeals to heaven and seventy-four other sorts of tommyrot nonsense audiences would never tolerate today. By contrast, Lincoln’s speech was over before some of the audience were even aware he’d truly begun. Again we see the same pattern, in this case expressed so powerfully that eventually it redefined the art of speechifying in America if not worldwide—brevity, brevity, brevity. Let not the second-rate water down the Really Good stuff. After all, if it’s not on-point then it’s not what your audience came to hear about/paid to read.

Which leads me to the real point of this piece…

[adjective][species], as I understand it (and correct me if I’m wrong here), wants to be seen as the “literary” or “intellectual” news source of the fandom. There’s nothing wrong with that—this world has plenty of room for both The New Yorker and Mad Magazine, after all. No one enjoys a good “thought piece” more than I do, and I’ve even been honored to write a couple-three of the things myself in this venue and others. But there are dangers here, some of which are less obvious than others. When one sets out to intellectualize about the fandom, for example, it’s first essential to have something valid, on-topic and interesting to say. Such articles are in very short supply for a “furry New Yorker”, I’d imagine, so it’s understandable that the focus may have to widen sometimes merely in order to obtain new material. The demand for quality, on-topic articles is bound to exceed the supply, especially considering what the authors are being paid. The danger is, however, is that if you water things down enough pretty soon you’re really not running an intellectual magazine about furries and the furry fandom anymore. Don’t get me wrong—if I were to attempt to force myself to write at least one “deep” or “introspective” furry article a month for [a][s], well… I have the self-discipline to crank something out, were I foolish enough to make such a commitment. But would it really be up to snuff or invariably of interest to the average fur?

No. Not a chance. I just don’t have that many good ideas. And that’s why I believe that [a][s] should be about the really good stuff and only the really good stuff. It is of this that true greatness is made. If the cost is a shorter magazine or fewer issues per year, then let it be so. After all, there are only so many genuinely profound things one can say about a given fandom. This is the lesson of the masters of communication—not a syllable should wasted, nor should a sentence (or an article) be off-topic. Instead let there be laser-like focus on what is truly of interest to the fandom and creating excellence in how this material is presented. Most of all, let not the editors worry themselves excessively over rejecting (or heavily editing) that which does not belong.

I congratulate [a][s] for attempting something incredibly difficult in terms of what they aspire to be, and I’m also very proud to be associated with them. (Or at least I hope that I’m still associated with them after posting this article!) I’ve always been all about high aspirations and reaching for the very top, and I think that [a][s] is doing exactly that. Let Flayrah—a publication equally high in my regard, for various reasons—deal with the “what” and “when” and “where” of the fandom; that’s their forte. [a][s], in my own opinion, should be where a reader seeks the “how” and (even more importantly) the “why”. These are far tougher questions, requiring a different mindset and format to deal with properly, and…

Oh, my.

I’ve gone on a bit too long. Haven’t I?

http://pyz.socialgamer.net/index.php falcon with a box on its head. fudgefaces game password:redditfurry 8 players 5 spectators

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Author: GreenReaper So how did Flayrah do compared to 2012? At first glance, activity fell, with 536 stories from 33 contributors. But the year’s 914 Newsbytes replaced many short stories, especially after auto-posting to Twitter and Facebook began. High ratings accrued to a profile of horse-worshipping Turkmenistan, news of the proposed feline mayor of Xalapa, […]

So, for reason's i still don't know, my parents did heavy research on me on the internet for " no reason ". To actually find my stuff like uploaded pictures and other things, they went trough my stuff to find one of my usernames. So then they found my online profile ( like yo rp, the kinks i'm into, etc ) and they confronted me about it. They were super scared of seeing in my fetish list stuff like " rape " or " cubs ". I don't know you but trying to explain the internet and what's on there to parents that are 50 years old, that almost never use the internet and don't know how it works is pretty much impossible even tough i repeated over and over that kinks that most of the stuff i wrote is fantasysies and not something i would do for real. Now they want me to go see a psychiatrist because they think i'm sick and have mental problems.

I created this account just to let you know that if you still live with your parents ( i'm 20, starting university ) do everything possible to not let them find a username that could bring them to see the " you " on the internet.

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direct link: http://draggetshow.podomatic.com/entry/2014-01-23T21_59_41-08_00

web page link: www.draggetshow.com

Don't Panic, this is a Dragget Show bonus! Xander interviews Pandez for Real/Reddit Furry Interviews! We had a great talk discussing his standup, improv, introduction to furry, involvement in the Star Trek community, and more! Here are some links of interest mentioned, where Pandez wooed some Trekkies and Redditors to the furry side:

http://www.reddit.com/r/startrek/comments/1e9qaz/wil_wheaton_wasnt_sure_what_to_make_of_lt_pandez/

http://aceofgeeks.blogspot.ca/2013/05/lieutenant-pandez-or-how-i-learned-to.html

And as always, don't forget to preregister for Fur Squared! (www.fursquared.com). Oh, and IFC & MCFC, Pandez is involved in those too!)

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Don't Panic, this is a Dragget Show bonus! Xander interviews Pandez for Real/Reddit Furry Interviews! We had a great talk discussing his standup, improv, introduction to furry, involvement in the Star Trek community, and more! Here are some links of interest mentioned, where Pandez wooed some Trekkies and Redditors to the furry side: http://goo.gl/VN4oZk http://goo.gl/2hcGnT And as always, don't forget to preregister for Fur Squared! (www.fursquared.com). Oh, and IFC & MCFC, Pandez is involved in those too!) RFI (Real Furry Interviews) - Pandez - Don't Panic, this is a Dragget Show bonus! Xander interviews Pandez for Real/Reddit Furry Interv...

I just want to talk to some other furries. I've only just accepted who I am, and I don't know anyone. I don't want to Skype, and I'm not ready to meet anyone IRL.

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