Furry fandom | WagzTail 2.0

Aside

0 April 13, 2010

Transcript: WagzTail Season 2 Episode 3 [Part 2: Family-friendly Furry Sites]

	Wolvy: Topic number 1 is favorite family friendly furry sites. Now, this topic is one that I find interesting in that I’m relatively new to furry. I found furry in October, on a BBC newsfeed about furry fandom. And I looked at it and said, “You know, it’s something that I’ve been doing independently on my own.”
03:04	Sphen: I may have seen that article. Wolvy: Right! It was on the BBC RSS newsfeed. It was a pretty good article. Well, I started looking. Sphen: Hi, Madeline. Madeline: Hi. Wolvy: Hello. Is it Madeline? Madeline: Yeah. Wolvy: Welcome to the podcast, Madeline. Madeline: Thank you. Wolvy: I’m known as Wolvy, and I’m based out of Central Michigan. And we have the rest of the crew online. 2chaotic: You almost sound Canadian, Wolvy. Wolvy: Well, you know I’m from Michigan, and half the people from Michigan are from Canada. 2chaotic: You got that right accent. Madeline: I can hear that. Wolvy: And half of the spare change like in my pocket is Canadian. Because all the Canadians come over and they spend their spare change here in Michigan. So, about a quarter of the Michigan currency is Canadian, I think. But Madeline, you’re just in time as we’re talking about favorite family friendly furry sites. And it’s something that I brought up because if you get in and you look at a lot of the furry sites, it’s very easy to run into stuff that goes beyond PG 13.
04:13	Madeline: Oh, yeah. Wolvy: And I was just saying I’m somewhat new to this. 2chaotic: Yeah, I had a horrible experience with that today. Wolvy: Did you? 2chaotic: Well, last night but yeah. Scarred for life. Don’t want to talk about it. Wolvy: You know, I got to tell you guys. I got to give you a warning here. Just ran across this by mistake. That is, you have Otter Comics, you’ve probably gone and seen a lot of Oren’s stuff, right? Sphen: Yes. Wolvy: He’s located at.. Sphen: Taur.net, something like that. Wolfin: Dot US. Do not use dot org, or you’ll be redirected to sites of interest would not be to you. Wolvy: Yeah, it’s exactly what happened to me. I trid the ottercomics dot com. I think it was… Madeline: Yeah me too.
05:01	Wolvy: Don’t go there. Wolfin: He forgot to renew the domain one year and yeah… Sphen: That show bought it… Yup. Now, I get up. Wolfin: You’re not quite … yeah. Don’t go there. Wolvy: It’s definitely not worth going to because you’ll be scarred for life. Madeline: Yeah. Wolvy: So anyway, we started a thread over on the christianfurs.net website called ‘Christian Friendly Furry Sites’. 2chaotic: Must find thread… Wolfin: It’s in there somewhere. Wolvy: Yeah. And we got. One of my favorite so far for me that I really enjoyed and I’ve shown to my kids is this ‘Tales of the Questor’. 2chaotic: Oh! I love that one. For multiple reasons. Wolfin: Yeah. Wolvy: Rhjunior.com. 2chaotic: I love that one for multiple reasons. Wolvy: He’s got like 600 episodes online of that comic. And I haven’t gone through them all. I got to about 250 of them.
06:00	Wolvy: But this is probably one of my most favorite ones so far. And it’s located at rhjunior.com. Wolfin: Actually I have one of the sites pulled up here. So there. Wolvy: 2chaotic says it has Raccoons. Yeah, that’s cool. The Raccoonians. I haven’t seen any otters yet. So who else has one of their favorites? 2chaotic: ‘House Pets.’ Totally. Sphen: Well, I like ‘Annals of the Hearthstone’ but a lot of the comics are subscription only. Wolfin: Oh, that’s no fun. Wolvy: What’s the URL? Sphen: www.tektoonics.com. It’s T-E-K-T-O-O-N-I-C-S. Wolvy: N-I-C-S. Wolfin: Oh, tectonics? 2chaotic: No, tektoonics.
07:00	Wolvy: Tektoonic.com. Oh, yeah. Now, that’s cool. I have not seen that one before. 2chaotic: It’s subscription based though, so. Wolfin: Sandra and Woo [Laughter] 2chaotic: Yes, another raccoon comic, my favorite. [Laughter] Wolvy: Yes, I can see. Well, that looks funny cool. Madeline: I have one. Wolvy: What’s that? Sphen: It’s more like a social site. Wolvy: The furry 4life dot… Wolfin: Oh, I saw fliers for this site over at ‘Further Confusion’. I haven’t checked it out thought. Wolvy: Network for people who identify as furries. Oh, okay, cool. I can’t help but look at the pictures again – anthropomorphic squirrel people at furry4life. That’s cool. Now, I want to ask, has anyone tried ‘FurryMUCK’ before?
08:07	2chaotic: No. Sphen: What’s that? Madeline: No. Wolvy: That is a multi-user dungeon type of text-based adventure game for furries. And it’s been in operation since 1990. Madeline: Wow! Do you have a link for it? Wolvy: Yeah just a second, let me see if I can dig it up. Sphen: Is it good? Wolvy: I haven’t tried it yet. Here, just to go furry.com. Let me type it in, furry.com Sphen: Previously I might. I don’t know. Wolfin: Now, I have seen another one of these. Not that one, but I have seen a different muck or mud. I don’t if mud or muck are the exact thing or not. But any way. It seemed kind of Dungeons and Dragons type of convoluted complex.
09:02	Wolvy: Yeah, I’m not quite sure how family friendly it is yet. But they do claim to be PG 13 or better. Wolfin: Or better? Which direction? Wolvy: Towards the G, I’m hoping. I guess I’m officially a gray muscle. I’m not really all that big into graphics. So FurryMUCK is probably right up my alley because it’s all text based and it’s text driven. So I’m very keen on trying it out. I haven’t been there yet though. Wolfin: This comic here ‘Faux Pas.’ Sphen: ‘Faux Pas’ 2chaotic: Yes, ‘Faux Pas’ is nice too. Madeline: Right, I’ve seen that before. 2chaotic: It has Raccoons in it too. Sphen: Www…
10:01	2chaotic: So does ‘House Pets, by the way. House pets has racoons. Wolvy: Sphen is this your link you’re talking about? Wolfin: Yeah. Madeline: Oh, yeah. Sphen: But now the faux pas. Wolvy: Right. Yeah. Faux pas is right. OK. Sorry, it’s all that… I get it and everything. Wolvy: So we have… OK, I’ve seen this one. I don’t remember exactly how I ran across it but yeah, that’s another one that I’ve enjoyed reading too. Something else that I want to bring up today is a site here. This one’s a little bit heavier. Dealing with mainstream furry culture and maintaining your Christian morals. Being somewhat new to this, I had sort of mixed feelings when I first ran across furry and the next thing I found was fur affinity.
11:08	And I got to look in that just thinking. I’m not sure if this is the sort of thing that I need that I can be able to share with my kids. Sphen: Oh, yeah. There is some pretty bad stuff on that site especially if you turn off the filter. But I never actually turned off the filter. Wolvy: Right. But you know then… Wolfin: How would you know? Sphen: I just turned off the filter. Wolvy: Then the thing is though that what I discovered next was I first found it was a local site, michiganfirst.net and I’d ask the question, “Where do find family friendly furry, if you’re not into the other stuff?” I didn’t really get a really good answer there but then I found christianfurs.net.
12:00	Sphen: Yes. You can get pretty mixed responses without that kind of question because there are those that are actively hostile to are those defined, those are the adults that define condemning of the… Wolvy: I bet they are. But then also, I’ve talked to a couple of people over at my church about that, “You know, hey, I found this really cool thing,” that I said I didn’t… that really harkens back to my college days and such as this furry thing. The first I thing I heard was, “Uhhh!” “Are you sure? Are we thinking about the same thing?” Mainstream furry culture and maintaining your Christian morals because… Sphen: Oh. You have the… Wolfin: All cultures, so. Wolvy: And being able to interact in it successfully as a Christian. Wolfin: There are certain places that if you went to maintain that standing you just can’t go, and, that’s kind of obvious as you know… Remember the first time I came to CFF? I was basically there under the assumption that CFF was trying to make mainstream furry acceptable.
13:15	I was going there to basically cast down fire and brimstone upon them, which changed dramatically once I had seen what was actually going on. That it wasn’t what I heard then, I thought it was going to be for one…thing. But there are very few active places you can go to where you’re not going to end up playing with that once in a while. Now, as long as you are relatively strong, you can get around that without having to worry about it. But as far as making sure that you actively only go to those kinds of places if you want to. But if you deal with issues with that kind of thing, you want to make sure that you stay away from the things that might tempt you. There are very few… the network Foxnet.in as a whole is clean as far as online chat goes and we make sure there really strict as far as filtering and that nature. There are the Christian sites. They’re out there as far as making sure you have a Christian moral set. If you are going for a clean but not Christian, you’re pretty much out in the cold as far as furry goes sadly.
14:18	Wolvy: One of the books of the Bible I’ve recently been studying is first Corinthians and I believe the stuff in there that we can use as guidance. The Corinthians… Paul wrote the Corinthians as least three times that we know of. Two of his letters made it into the canon of the Bible. One of the letters is his reference but we don’t have that text. Some people said maybe played into second Corinthians but we just don’t know. Corinthians itself is that Corinth in terms of a city was a Greek city. It was very prosperous, had a lot going on, had a lot of culture and trade but also there is a lot of decades of immorality in Corinth. And so these Christians in the church of Corinth, every day was spent dealing with neighbors who found it perfectly acceptable to walk down to the local temple, have dinner and then hire a prostitute.
15:25	I think if we look at first Corinthians, we can kind of get some ideas about how we can interact in our world and in this case a subculture of our world and do it successfully as a Christian. Do you follow what I’m saying? Wolfin: Yeah. Yeah. 2chaotic: Yeah. Wolvy: The chapter in particular that I’m referring to is first Corinthians eight. Basically, these words that Paul talks about and back a couple of chapters earlier, he says, “I can’t ask you not to interact with the world because you’re in it and you live in it. You can’t separate yourself from the world unless you take yourself out of the world.”
16:04	He goes in and then he talks about in Corinthians eight; he talks about this issue of what’s acceptable behavior in Corinthians. Specifically, it had to do with… At the time, the issue had to do with buying and eating meat. You couldn’t go down to your local Myer or your local… what’s a local grocery store in your area. The church at Corinth; they were finding this to be a stumbling block that if they wanted to eat meat, it was meat that probably had been sacrificed in the name of some pagan. 2chaotic: Yep. Wolvy: Some of the people in Corinth found that not to be a problem. They’re like, “Hey, you know, these are pagan gods that don’t exist.” Then you other Corinthians who, most likely, were Jewish who had a very big problem with that particular source of meat.
17:06	Sphen: Yeah. Wolvy: It’s kind of a paradigm for living in a furry culture because some of you have ran across and alluded to churches here in America that find the whole very idea of furry as being sinful. Madeline: Oh well… Wolvy: Sphen, you ran across that, right? Sphen: It’s difficult to say… I thought the one who condemned me for it. Madeline: My experience was that I first revealed to some of friends at Sunday school because they are really close friends and I thought they’d understand. But what I understand is, in order to find someone who really accepts that, you have to go looking elsewhere with people who have different or unknown use of it which is basically how I found CFF.
18:04	Wolvy: OK. Madeline: Was through Matty and Ben. Wolvy: I see. Sphen: I see. Wolvy: I just wanted to get back. I think maybe I’ve diverged a little bit here but I got a text here from a fellow by the name of William Barkley. Anybody ever heard of him? 2chaotic: I’ve not. Madeline: Not so. Wolvy: William Barkley wrote up probably about 50 different books about the New Testament. He wrote this book in 1954 and he was Anglican. He wrote about this chapter in first Corinthians eight, which was also known as advice to the wise. One thing I wanted to say here, he has an article. He says here that the intent of first Corinthians eight, Paul uses a simpler argument saying that in Corinthians there were men who all their lives up until now had really believed in hidden gods.
19:00	And then he goes on to say that Paul argues that if you say that there’s no harm in eating meat to offer the idols, there’s really hurting and bewildering consciousness of these simple souls. And his final argument is that even if a thing is harmless for you, when it hurt someone else, it must be given up for a Christian must never do anything that causes his brother to stumble. This applies to more than just eating meat. It applies to a whole series of things in our lives. For instance, I grew up in a Lutheran Church and the culture of Lutheranism is such that there’s really, most Lutherans have no problem with going down the store and buying himself a really good draft beer. Occasionally in my refrigerator I have some. I do have beer. OK, as a Lutheran. But we have Baptists in our culture and in our circle of friends who find that to be bad thing. Then in those cases it’s OK. What do you think? Am I getting off track here? You know, I think we need to move on.
20:09	2chaotic: The call keeps dropping people. Wolvy: I keep dropping my point. I guess I keep dropping my point here but maybe we just need to discuss it more online on christianfurs or something. Sphen: Yes. Well, I guess it depends. In my experience, when specific people have trouble with their parents over belief, they usually believe like belief of the problem is like they already had communication problem with their parents beforehand. Wolvy: Exactly. You’re hitting on it. I know I’ve run across a couple of folks that are having that issue. They are really having struggles with their parents in their lifestyle and you’re right. That’s just a portion of it. I think we’re going to have to leave this one as an unresolved topic. How about we move to our last topic today?