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Hello Papa Bear,

Only recently have I found your advice page, and oddly I had been looking for one. Weird how that all works out....

Anyway, I’m a phoenix, but I suffer from a fairly ironic problem. I have problems getting to sleep at night. Mainly due to when nest down for the evening, I am flooded with feelings of fear and depression. My mind runs straight to "You just lost another day of your life" and "One step closer to death." I haven't been able to get it to stop and it's making my feathers fall out. When the thought of death is unavoidable when its nesting time, it scares me to death.

At one time I went for professional help. After many tests I was diagnosed with panic attacks, night terrors, and depression. They tried to medicate me, and thanks to a previous life I am not at all proud of (involving heavy drug use) I am majorly afraid of using anything that isn't natural or that forces me to do anything.

I really don’t know what to do about this, the lack of a good restful night sleep is really starting to effect me badly. my heath has been taking a turn for the worst. 

What can I possibly do?

From one tired birdy,
Dimitri

* * *

Hi, Dimitri,

Thanks for your letter. Quick question: do you drink diet sodas or anything with artificial sweeteners? 

Please get back to me and I'll write again soon.

Hugs,

Papabear

* * *

Actually I don't. I mainly drink tea and water. I never had a taste for soft drinks.

* * *

Hi, again, Dimitri,

Okay, I always like to check that first because a lot of people drink diet sodas and consume other things with aspartame, which can really mess up your neurological system.

That aside, first allow me to congratulate you for getting off the drugs. That is no small achievement and deserves recognition. I also understand that you would be hesitant to take prescription drugs, since they can have many adverse side effects (just watch any drug commercial on TV—got depression? Take this pill.... Oh, sure, it might give you thoughts of suicide and give you a tumor, but you won’t be depressed! Say what?)

There could be a lot of things going on here. You say you sought professional help (good for you) and they diagnosed you with panic attacks, night terrors, and depression. Okay, so, that’s the diagnosis, but did they try to find out the cause of all this? Or did they just reach for the pills? Treating the symptoms will not help you without finding the cause.

One possibility could go back to your drug use. Drugs, as you well know, can really mess up your brain. It could be that whatever you were ingesting or injecting or snorting has damaged your neurological system (just as aspartame does) and this has caused your current problems. If that’s the case, then the damage is done. Now, sometimes your brain can, over time, rewire itself and recover. Other times it cannot. I personally know a man who took heavy drugs when he was young and now he is a walking zombie. It’s really sad. Fortunately, it’s not quite that bad for you and maybe there is help.

Now, going even deeper, it could be that the real problem is whatever caused your drug use in the first place, such as if you had a particularly traumatic childhood or, if you were in the military, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

These are things that you really need to discuss with a professional. Go to a counselor or psychologist (not a psychiatrist), or, if you think any of the above is true, you could also seek group therapy.

What you need to do, in the meantime, is calm your body and mind. That in itself may help you gain insights into the possible causes of your issues. There are several ways to do this without drugs, including:

• Yoga
• Meditation
• Exercise
• Creating a sleep-friendly bedroom environment (using aroma therapy and soft music and making sure the room is dark and comfortable)
• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (a good drug-free therapy alternative)

There are also a number of foods, too, that you can eat that are conducive to sleep. Ever hear of drinking a warm glass of milk before bed? It’s more than just a household remedy—it can actually help. Some other foods that help you sleep are:

• Lemon Balm Tea (also helps digestion) and other herbal, decaf teas
• Cherries or cherry juice (also helps joints)
• Foods with tryptophan, including whole-grain cereals (mixed with milk!), seafood like halibut, shrimp, tuna, and cod, and, as many post-Thanksgiving diners know, turkey!

What you need is sleep. The less you sleep, the more imbalanced your brain becomes, and the more likely you are to have nightmares, depression, and so forth. In recent years, the medical community has become increasingly aware of how vital good, restful sleep is to our health. An organization that specializes in sleep research and assistance is the National Sleep Foundation (http://www.sleepfoundation.org/). I recommend you visit its website, join the online community, and perhaps seek a sleep therapist (a directory is available on the site).

You might discover that your problems stem from less shocking causes such as sleep apnea, Restless Leg Syndrome, or some other very treatable trigger.

Many doctors these days are too quick with the drugs. Try some of the approaches above and I’m confident you will get some relief! 

Happy Thanksgiving! Eat Turkey!

Grubbs

Greetings and Salutations furry redditers. I am a fairly new redditor and figured I could post my inquiry here. I am an aspiring writer and I am working on a super hero story. In all my 5 years of writing, this is the only project I have continued on a conatant yet irregular basis. I love this story I am writing ao much I was thinking about a submitting it to become a comic book series. Does anyone have any suggestions on what I will need to so in order to make this dream of mine a reality? I place this under a furry subreddit as the story does involve anthropomorphic animals with super powers. Any assistance is greatly appreciated!

submitted by GrungeFox22
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Author: Dear Papa Bear, It’s hard for me to write this, but I just really need advice on something very important in my life. Someone very important, that is. I’m only 13, but I’m going through something very hard. My best friend, let’s call her Daisy, has moved away 600 miles from me in June. […]

Nothing furry about the game but it's a really fun roguelike inspired romp. I'd love to actually play some multi-player with some folks. Anyone interested?

http://store.steampowered.com/app/248820/

submitted by TobiasAmaranth
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I've decided to treat myself and get some character art commissioned, and would like to hear from you guys who some good artists to commission for avian art are.

submitted by jhnmdn
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Link to stream

Not sure why but the program was dropping all the frames causing me to be unable to stream. it's fixed now :)

submitted by VideoHusky
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November 24th was a huge day for Shin Megami Tensei: Persona fans, as a ton of new games have been annouced, and I think it would be best to break them down one by one.

submitted by R3ddFox
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Author: Higgs Raccoon Brian Griffin, the martini-drinking anthropomorphic dog from the animated series Family Guy, has been killed off. In the episode which aired on November 24, Brian was hit by a car and subsequently died from his injuries. In the same episode (entitled Life of Brian), Stewie Griffin had dismantled his oft-used time machine, […]

Yup yup! It's our hometown con, and we put on a show for our awesome loyal fans. We were joined by Draggor and Pandez, and the con theme was pirates! Also, check out Xander's MFF stand=up when you get a chance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS4A8dsBRCI Lastly, don't forget to pre-register for Fur Squared! www.fursquared.com Ep. 86 - MFF 2013 LIVE!! - Yup yup! It's our hometown con, and we put on a show for our awesome loyal fans. We were joined...

Yup yup! It's our hometown con, and we put on a show for our awesome loyal fans. We were joined by Draggor and Pandez, and the con theme was pirates! Also, check out Xander's MFF stand=up when you get a chance! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QS4A8dsBRCI Lastly, don't forget to pre-register for Fur Squared! www.fursquared.com Ep. 86 - MFF 2013 LIVE!! - Yup yup! It's our hometown con, and we put on a show for our awesome loyal fans. We were joined...

submitted by NoahGoldFox
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submitted by happy_little_indian
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Kind of an odd question perhaps, but it's something I'm curious about. I would like to hear about when you realized you were comfortable with your furry self?

[Wall of text warning]

For me, it has been recently (who would've guessed) and talking with a good friend. I met her on XBL playing Halo and recently we had began talking a lot. I asked her if she had heard of furries and when she said no I gave her a quick run through of the basics, including showing her The Furry Experience (one of my favorite webcomics, btw).

It eventually became apparent that I considered myself one (took her long enough, my gamertag has Fox in it for goodness sake!). She began calling me Fox (fucking love that) and I began talking to her more and more about it as she asked more questions. She was the second person that I told about my love of Anthros, but the first person to show an interest in it and me in that way.

She doesn't consider herself furry or anything, although she is open to it, but when I start acting a little wild, she goes nuts.

So there you have it, that's my story. What/when/who was it that helped you realized you were comfortable with your furriness?

submitted by Incredible_Mr_Fox
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submitted by draggor
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Set in the aftermath of a "Universe Collision Event", the story revolves around a journalist trying to piece together the truth of how close the world came to ending...

Tell me what you guys think! And any criticism is accepted...

And thank you /u/IssacsoftheEEC for giving me the idea of turning my strange dream into a story!

submitted by GrayghOst123
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submitted by FERRET_TESTICLES
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Author: rodney Since 2009, artist and writer Roger Langridge has been playing in Jim Henson’s world by creating various comic book series featuring the Muppets for Boom! Studios. Titles like The Muppets, The Muppet Show, and The Muppet Show: The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson. Now, over at Marvel Comics, they’ve announced that all of these […]

A hypothetical question: you are given US$100,000, to be used for the betterment of the furry community. How do you spend it?

The first option is to simply spend the money on furry items. You’ll be contributing to the furry community by strengthening the furry economy.

I’m going to define the ‘furry economy’ as the sum of all furry-to-furry (F2F) transactions, where the good or service exchanged is a furry one. So purchasing furry art from a furry is F2F; purchasing furry art from a non-furry (perhaps a copy of the Lion King from Disney) is not. Purchasing a ticket to a furry convention is F2F; purchasing a ticket to a sci-fi convention is not.

Your $100k is a lot of money, but it’s small compared to the size of the furry economy. The money spent on furry conventions alone, assuming 100,000 annual attendees at an average cost of $200, is in the tens of millions. It’s fair to guess that the money spent on other F2F transactions is also in the millions. So your $100k is not going to make a big difference to the size of the global furry economy.

Still, your money is going to help some furry providers. This is going to make the provision of furry services marginally more profitable, and you might choose to purchase items that can gifted to the wider furry community, such as furry art.

Option 1: Buy Furry Art

Your money will help some furry artists, although it’s just a drop in the ocean and will have little benefit in the longer term. But the art will have secondary value if you allow it to be publicly shared.

You have a secondary consideration here: high art or low art?

Option 1a: Commission Furry Pornography

There is great demand for pornography within furry, a demand which isn’t easily met because the production of furry pornography is labour-intensive. Your commissioned pornography will find an audience and be appreciated, but its value will decline over time: pornography tends to lose its erotic power on repeat viewings. Your $100k worth of pornography will have a shelf life.

Option 1b: Commission High Art

High art, on the other hand, tends to last because it has greater intellectual and emotional heft. So perhaps you might commission some thoughtful pieces. Perhaps your money would allow an artist, or author, to dedicate more time to a project. You are less likely to find a mainstream audience, but you may end up with something that endures.

Here’s another way to add to the furry economy: why not invest in furry R&D?

Option 2: Buy an Experimental Fursuit

You could find a handful of fursuit creators, and spend the money pursuing risky suit ideas. Fursuit commissioners and creators will generally be risk averse, because neither party wants a bad outcome. So maybe you could spend the money in the hope of discovering a new technique or trick, which could then be adopted by suiters and creators worldwide.

Or:

Option 3: Fund a Website

Your $100k will find you developers and managers and testers. Perhaps you could build a website that provides a useful service, meets an unmet need.

Option 4: Fund a Convention

Our furry conventions are largely copycat; they’re based on iterative improvements from sci-fi conventions. Your money might be used to create something risky, unusual. You can afford for your convention to fail, and maybe you’ll create something that succeeds, and can be adopted worldwide.

But maybe you want to go a different route. By spending your $100k on the F2F economy, you’re essentially helping the community through ‘trickle down’ economics: you’re trusting that your money will indirectly help the wider furry community. Perhaps that all sounds a bit capitalist for you; perhaps you’d rather spend your money as a charity.

Most conventions have a charity event, and furries are generous givers. For an example, consider Confuzzled 2013: 872 attendees gave £11,484 to STA Ferret Rescue. Our convention charities are usually (always?) animal-themed, but why not spend your money providing charity directly to furries?

Option 5: Help Needy Furries

Okay, so the drama associated with this option would be off-the-charts. And your money wouldn’t have much of an impact on the furry community as a whole. But you would make a big difference to the lives of a small number of people.

You could always be a bit more targeted with your charity. You could, say, give the money to furries with instructions on how to spend it. There are options here:

Option 6a: Help Furries Travel

You could help furries travel; to conventions, to overseas furry groups. Send a furry group to one of our newer international outposts, perhaps Japan or Eastern Europe. Or gift dozens of furries travel and accommodation to conventions.

Option 6b: Help Furries Buy Art

Or you could help furries pay for their own art commissions.

As it turns out, this experiment is currently taking place on a smaller scale. Fur Affinity user KrisPup is currently running a raffle, where the winner gets $1111 in commissions (that are paid for by Kris).

It’s a compelling idea, and the size of his prize is interesting: it’s big enough to be valuable to those furries without any disposable income, and small enough to be affordable to most people with a full-time job. I wonder if it might be repeated by others. It has generated enough interest to have crashed FA’s creaky servers at least once as furries tried to enter en masse.

(Predictably, Kris’s offer has provoked drama: accusations that his raffle is fake, or that he’s trying to buy popularity, or simple jealousy. I wonder how he will be affected in the longer term, once the money is given and the excitement wears off. The raffle will be open until Christmas or so: see here.)

If the drama of giving charity directly to furries is all too much, you could use your money to subsidize loss-making furry enterprises. There are a few alternatives.

Option 7a: Subsidize Furry Websites

You could offer to pay for hosting and development time for non-commercial furry websites. Most furry websites are volunteer-driven, and most of them operate at a loss. [adjective][species], for example, costs Makyo about US$500 per year (including furrypoll.com). Undoubtedly the costs for larger sites are much higher.

With apologies to Makyo’s bank balance, I’m not sure that this is a good way to spend your $100k. I have no doubt that the help would be appreciated, but you’re unlikely to be helping the furry community in any way. You’ll be saving money for selfless volunteers, but they are already choosing to spend the money without dipping into your pot. So let’s look elsewhere.

Option 7b: Subsidize Conventions

Conventions sometimes lose money. It’s a double blow for an organizing committee, who spend endless hours making a convention happen only to see that they’ve underestimated attendance or, more likely, total costs. They have to make up the shortfall and, in some cases, the convention closes its doors. So why not offer a safety net?

And speaking of safety nets:

Option 7c: Subsidize Successful Artists

The life of a furry artist, even a successful one, is tough. Many artists simply quit to pursue greener pastures. A bit of extra money might keep our artists in furry, for longer.

Finally, your choice isn’t just between a furry economic stimulus or furry welfare: there is a third way. You could offer a reward.

Option 8: A Furry Art Prize

Your pot of money is large enough to create interest in a juried furry art prize. You could assemble some well-regarded furries and offer a windfall to the creator of a great work of art.

There are already furry awards out there, notably the Ursa Majors. But there is no prize for winning a UM beyond a signal boost, and this for an award judged on popularity. The outcome is that UMs are usually awarded to the best-known entrant, the one least in need of publicity. This is why Kyell Gold declined nominations for the 2012 UMs; he understands that the publicity is more valuable to others.

The Cóyotl Awards are a lower-profile award run by the Furry Writer’s Guild (disclaimer: I am a member). They are different from the UMs in that only members of the FWG are allowed to nominate and vote. There is a jury, however they only determine whether a nomination is eligible for voting. Like the UMs, there is no prize.

A juried furry art prize, perhaps $10k spread over 10 years, would be valuable to our community. It would help the winning artist, and it would shine a light on lesser-known (but high-quality) emerging artists. Your prize would be the Oscars to UM’s People’s Choice Awards.

This list of options has come from a long series of conversations with furries around the world. It’s not exhaustive.

How would you spend your $100k?

He will probably be done by tommorow

submitted by Zek-Master
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