diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/boys-girls-and-the-in-betweens.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/boys-girls-and-the-in-betweens.md
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+For many, perhaps most, it's easy to envision furry as being made up in large part of gay males. Some evidence bears this out, even; results from the Furry Survey suggests that a majority of furry is indeed male, though the sexual orientation side of things suggests a different story, which is still, of course, far and above what's considered standard in western society. The point of interest comes in the way gender and sexuality are explored strictly within the context of furry, whether through art or through text, particularly on the Internet.
+
+I, admittedly, grew into the fandom with a similar mindset, expecting that it would be a warm and welcoming place for a young gay (as I identified at the time; things have since shifted) man, and I certainly wasn't disappointed. There was a very welcoming, bordering on celebratory, attitude towards non-heterosexual orientations, and there was certainly no shortage of guys around to fit into that niche. I came from a pretty standard family as far as gay kids from upper-middle class liberal America go, and even I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of acceptance and testosterone flowing around within the fandom. It definitely fit in well with my burgeoning sexuality, in that I had a lot of supportive people surrounding me and, to put it bluntly, a lot of choices for the targets of my affection. Even today, I'm surprised at how large a part sexual orientation plays in those that I meet, to an embarrassing point, in some.
+
+More surprising than the gay men, however, was the women I met. Specifically, the discrepancies in gender ratios online versus that which I heard about and encountered at conventions, meets, and in person in general. This wasn't some sort of taboo phenomenon, either. Some openly joked about how males on MUCKs were males, and females on MUCKs were probably males too. Others who were a different gender online from in person treated it as an open secret and joked about it often. Even those who didn't joke about it weren't coy about differentiating between player and character when talking online.
+
+I'm sure that there as many, if not more, reasons for someone to have a character of a different gender from their player online as their are people who actually do that. In fact, there almost certainly are a good deal more reasons for someone to do that than there are people who do that, just due to the fact that people change over time.
+
+Here now, I've been playing coy, and that's probably not a good thing for writers to do. I know that this is the case because, in eleven years of being around within the fandom now, I've done my own fair share of playing around with gender and talking with those who do similar online, and I think I definitively state that there are several reasons for doing so. They can be divided into needs and wants: those things that are biological or psychological imperatives and those things that are more desires than must haves.
+
+Topping the list of wants is likely the desire for heterosexual interaction - not necessarily just in the realm of sex, either. In a predominately male social group where sexual orientation is divided up fairly evenly, people have found a way to increase the amount of females available for this interaction through role play and art. When it comes to sex on the Internet, it's then easier for people to find partners even if they're playing the female role in the act. This has surely led to more than a few instances of relationships that have started based on this interaction and then failed due to that not actually being the case in real life.
+
+Along with this is the same concept of exploration that is almost stereotypical in society at large, where gender and sexual orientation are balanced differently. Some players who identify as primarily homosexual may spend sometime playing with or as female characters as a means of experimenting more with a new experience. For some, it's simply testing the waters, for others more of a kink type thing, something to indulge in that's not quite the norm. In line with that, the Internet has certainly engendered increased sexual liberation, and some may find themselves exploring broader and broader areas of interest as time goes on, and playing as a female character may just be another way to branch out and have fun.
+
+This ties a little into the separation between character and self. In these instances, the female character's player likely retains a fairly solid sense of male gender, as opposed to the instance where the difference between player and character sex is driven more by a need. The net has definitely brought around several benefits, and the layer of anonymity inherent in interactions provides a unique outlet for gender dysphoria; that is, some will undoubtedly play characters of a different gender from themselves because that gender will more closely match the gender that they feel.
+
+As a bit of an aside, it should be noted that there's a difference between gender and sex, in this context. Sex is fairly easily defined as the biological make-up of the body, whether male, female, or intersex. Gender is a little tougher to pin down. It can be seen as a psychological thing, as in whether or not one feels comfortable or not (dysphoric) with one's given sex. It can also be taken in a sociological context, as several feelings in regard to gender have to do with how one is perceived by others and what societal roles they fit into. While western society is heteronormative, gender can, like sexual orientation, be interpreted as a continuous scale from one extreme (totally masculine) to the other (totally feminine), meaning that these perceptions and roles can apply to portions of a person's life rather than simply the entirety.
+
+Gender identity is always a sticky issue to get around, as it doesn't have quite the recognition that sexual orientation has, and thus has less support behind it, both from medicine and psychology, as well as society at large. Many don't understand the issues surrounding gender, and it's difficult to comprehend what exactly is involved when gender and sex don't match up. Despite my own experiences with being in a relationship with a transgender person, I didn't quite understand things until only rather recently.
+
+The reason I'm writing about this at all, and still having a hard time not being coy or dancing around the issue is that it's difficult for me to speak about openly. That I have any problems at all with my own gender identity was very difficult for me to admit to myself and is harder still to admit to anyone else. This is the first time I've mentioned it to anyone besides my partner and one or two close friends, actually, and it worries me that I'm doing so in so public a fashion, but it is pertinent. As with sexual orientation and coming out, it's the type of thing one fears losing friends and family over, and with myself, it led to a period of depression earlier this year lasting several weeks.
+
+The reason I even bring it up, though, is simply to make the point even more clear on the importance of gender within furry, the fandom which is so welcoming of those within it that the answers pertaining to sexual orientation in the furry survey suggest a truly equal distribution of the sexual orientation spectrum (this in comparison to the oft-quoted 10% thrown around in reference to homosexuality in western civilization at large). The fact that one can create a character with which they strongly identify in terms of gender and sex online can be an important psychological outlet. I can say first-hand that the discomfort felt during sex when one's gender and sex don't line up is intense and, when your sexual partner is your significant other, deeply upsetting.
+
+Interactions online blur the line between the two socially accepted genders even further, as it introduces the possibility of playing out roles that even more closely match one's gender than society - or biology, for that matter - will allow. To pull some examples from recent art that's been floating around, if one identifies as mostly masculine with some female attributes, one's character could be a mostly male hermaphrodite, or, if even less masculinity feels right, a (and I feel the need to prefix this with my personal dislike of the term) 'cunt-boy'. The whole spectrum of gender can be expressed in your character with that layer of anonymity the Internet provides, including even lack of gender or inherently hermaphroditic species such as chakats.
+
+The whole idea of mixed genders within the fandom wasn't something that I ran into until I had been exploring furry for a few years. I didn't really understand them or people's reaction to them for quite a while. The whole concept seems to be fairly divisive, with people taking either a firm stance against or for the whole concept. On one hand, I've heard mixed genders of different sorts described positively as "more fun, since you can stack them so many ways" and negatively as "guys just wanting to play with boobs and dick at the same time". I certainly can't speak for everyone involved and don't care to try and change anyone's mind, but my own opinion is decidedly positive: if the character fits the gender, excellent! If it really is just about sex and playing Tetris with warm bodies, well, sex is good too.
+
+Furry is very much a sexual subculture, when taken as a whole(though not perhaps as much as peoplethink). It's not surprising, then, that gender plays so large a role within the fandom, both online and off. It is an integral part of sexuality. If the fandom is so sexually liberal as compared to the world it inhabits, yet is a subset of that world, it really makes me wonder how much of this is going on within humanity as a whole. Are we all so evenly distributed in terms of sexual orientation, and the bipolarity of western society just prevents that from being expressed? Are issues of gender versus sex more prevalent than it appears? And, with a few exceptions, are we really as on our own as it seems when it comes to mixing biological sex in one body? Hardly questions for a dumb blog on furries to answer, but interesting all the same.
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+I pulled together a few additional ideas on the concept of character versus self visited in a previous post. A lot of these rely on little ideas dropped here and there by comments either on the blog itself or on Twitter. They're all kind of neat, but none of them really warrant a full post. I pulled together these three smaller ramblings here into one larger post in the hopes that I can still get my thoughts out there on the subjects. Enjoy!
+
+Acting
+
+I was turned on to Erving Goffman by acommenterrecently and found out a little about his ideas on the presentation of one's self (mostly through secondary sources, full disclosure). Goffman describes our social interactions as "front stage" and "backstage". Each person in a social group is an actor utilizing their props and their role to present a positive image of themselves to their audience, who are, of course, actors in turn doing much the same. This is the front stage aspect, whereas the backstage aspect is more the idea of who we really are outside of the social play, where we can "deconstruct our personas". This impression management is a sort of "artificial, willed credulity" (or, more glibly, consensual hallucination, a phrase used by William Gibson, who used it when he coined the term "cyberspace").
+
+In a lot of ways this concept fits in well with furries. Of course, there is the surface aspect that our frontstage aspects are much stronger in that they differ greatly from our backstage personas - I don't have any specifics on the numbers, but I'm pretty sure that very few of us are anthropomorphic canids sitting in front of a computer. Beyond that, however, the idea still holds: speaking from personal experience, we interact with other furries very differently than how we interact with others, and that persona that we present to our cohorts is a strong one, often considered freer and more true to ourselves than our other roles, but still something different from our true selves due to the whole thing being only a portion of our personalities. It's not the whole of our self that we present to our furry companions.
+
+Whether or not the concept is strictly applicable is up for debate in my mind, however. In terms of the first impressions mentioned earlier, there seems to be this additional layer of role-playing, as if our front stage personas were acting about being actors in a play, and the line is blurred further when bits of information about ourselves, as well as aspects of our other personas, are injected into our avatars via these other layers of our channel of communication. I suppose that it's for this reason that the Internet would be considered largely a backstage environment, or at least has the potential to be such. The reality, though, is that we construct our characters just as thoroughly online as we do in real life, if not more so, with it being a conscious effort. They are our avatars, yes, but they are also constructed personas used for interacting with our environment in the context of a social structure. Goffman's idea of stage and backstage is more useful in considering that, as we interact with each other within our subculture, we're presenting ourselves in a certain way, acting a part for our audience, yet also giving them a glimpse into our backstage lives due not only to our interactions spanning the online and offline arenas, but also due to the fact that our constructed personas are blatantly not ourselves.
+
+Attention
+
+The Internet hasn't been all roses and sunshine. Since its inception and rapid growth, several problems or perceived problems have been associated, fairly or unfairly, with the liberal interconnecting of people by technology. As the web increased in importance, so these problems increased in visibility. One of the more interesting of these problems is the interestingly named Münchausen by Internet. This is when someone will feign a severe illness or disability for themselves on the Internet in order to garner attention for themselves. It's not quite hypochondria, which is a separate disorder, and it differs from regularMünchausen syndrome in my mind in that, while there's some discussion as to whether the latter is a conscious drawing of attention to one's self, the former requires much more forethought in order to keep up - it is either a gross exaggeration of reality or an outright lie.
+
+Along the same time as the Internet was coming into its own as a serious technological innovation, my own generation was reaching middle- and high-school age, and the age of the over-diagnosed psychological disorder was gaining steam. Friend after friend of mine was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, manic depression, bipolar syndrome, or some other item from the mild side of the DSM-IV (I'm speaking glibly, of course). I knew of a score of classmates on Prozac, as many on Ritalin, and a few on more extreme drugs such as Lithium.
+
+I went through my own period of depression and restlessness, but my solution was to hide it from my parents and escape the best way I knew how: get online. I know I wasn't the only one, too. When I was first getting into the Internet, I associated with many of the same age as myself on a previously mentioned forum, and when I got into furry, I wound up on FluffMUCK, again in the company of several other high-school kids around the same age as myself. I battled my depression with electronic affection and fought my restlessness with... or, well, I enabled any ADD tendencies I had with either wasting time online or thinking about wasting time online. A rough childhood, I assure you, growing up in upper-middle class Colorado with two engineers for parents.
+
+By the time I got to college, however, these three things - the ability to garner attention through lying or embellishing illness online, the over-diagnosis of youth, and the dipping mean age of the furry fandom - had coalesced into the strange amalgam that is The Furry Disorder. The Furry Disorder seems to shift as time goes on - originally, it was bipolar syndrome or manic depression, then it shifted to ADD, and now it seems to be Aspergers syndrome - but the distinguishing aspects seem to be that it is often a loosely diagnosed disorder among furs in their teens and twenties and is easily used to gain attention online. It's as if a segment of the fandom agreed that the best way to gain reinforcing attention from others was to latch onto this one disorder and capitalize on it as much as possible. SynchronizedMünchausen by Internet.
+
+It should be noted, however, that all this pales in comparison to how amusing the term 'cybermunch' is, in referring to someone partaking in or suffering from Münchausen by Internet.
+
+Self-Importance
+
+I've mentioned the Dunning-Kruger Effect before. Briefly, it's the idea that those who are less competent are more likely to overrate their competence, while the opposite is true for those who are more competent - they are more likely to underrate themselves. And boy howdy, am I prime example of this.
+
+It seems as though every fur goes through some creative phases, due in part to how much the fandom itself is centered around creativity. Which phase is most popular seems to change with time. When I first really got into it way back in high school, everyone was drawing - to be a furry, you hadto draw (while that's still popular now, it seems that the thing to do now is make your own fursuit, and a few years ago, it was making your own website). I was...not good. I was very bad, actually. It wasn't so much that I lacked a sense of proportion - though I definitely did - or that I had very little sense of light and shadow - though I had none at all - rather that I thought I was pretty awesome. This was back when Yerf! reigned supreme in the furry art world, and it was a struggle to even get on VCL. I was most definitely convinced that I could get onto Yerf! with ease. I mean, look! I could draw foxes! Foxes and foxes and foxes!
+
+Of course, I was rejected.
+
+When I say I was bad, I'm sure some of that is a bit of the old Dunning-Kruger effect, because, while I was really actually bad, I was getting better. Here's a bit of a progression from what I could find (having destroyed most of what I could find years ago): mid-2000 - late 2000 - 2002. I did draw quite a bit, and with experience, I was learning more and improving. As my skill at creating improved, so did my skill at appraising my own work, and I started to see more and more problems with what I was doing. This is a theme that's been repeated a few times in my life; nothing was more detrimental to my compositional output than my composition degree: the more skill I gained as a composer, the less competent I felt.
+
+An interesting side effect of this is how protective I felt of my work early on as I was working on it, and this is something I've noted in others, not just myself. Every one of my drawings on those early VCL accounts was marked "(c) me", which sounds pretty silly to me now. Silliness aside, though, I know that in the early stages of creative growth, whether in music or art, I was so confident in it that I was eager to copyright everything, whereas once I started to gain more skill, I was more and more willing, even eager to use less restrictive licenses such as Creative Commons licenses. I know I'm not the only one to work this way, too; I've watched several artists within the fandom change similarly over time - the better they got, the more professional their attitudes, the harsher their critiques of their own work, and the more varied (though, of course, not necessarily more liberal) their attitudes toward the licensing of their creations became. In fact, there seems to be a point in most artist's career in the fandom - lets call it the Pre-Popufur Point - some loosely defined point in time that is penultimate to their going in one of two general directions. As their skill progresses and they get better and better, the chances that they'll approach this point increase, and here they will either become a popular (to whatever extent) furry artist or head the direction I did, feeling less and less comfortable with their work until they stop, or at least slow drastically.
+
+Of course, everyone's different, and not everyone reaches this point at the same time or perhaps even at all. There are plenty who never start drawing because they're preemptivelyhard on themselves, and there are those who draw and increase and keep a positive outlook on things. There are those who invert their views on intellectual property, or those that maintain a firm grip on their art throughout their career. And, lest we forget there are those who are so relentlessly polarized in their opinions as to warrant the creation of the LiveJournal community Artists Beware. Even so, the general trend of the Dunning-Kruger effect is deeply ingrained in the fandom's art culture, and, with our unique focus on the visual representations of our characters, seemingly more visible than in society at large.
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+When I first got into furry, I was probably fourteen or fifteen. I know that it was the fall semester of my freshman year of high school, and that I started getting into it in my downtime in my first computer class at school (well, during class, too), as well as at home. I wound up finding Yerf and FluffMUCK back in their prime, and played around with IRC on YiffNet, as well. I found the whole thing from a website I was on called Puberty101- which now sounds like a pedophile's paradise; the name was later changed to GovTeen - a forum site for (supposed) kids to ask questions of other (supposed) kids about things like sex and sexuality, emotions, and all that jazz. Just so happened that I stumbled over a few posts regarding this thing called furry, one of which had this abstruse collection of letters, numbers and punctuation at the end, which was described as a 'fur code'.
+
+I had already been all about the good old furry favorites like Disney's Robin Hood, The Rescuers, Mrs.Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the Redwall books, and so on. Finding the fur code and what it meant at that time in my life led to a perfect, terrible storm of destruction for any hopes of normalcy I had planned for my life. I latched right onto it and, after spending three dumb days as a dragon, settled on a red fox with two tails as my character and dubbed myself Ranna. This was the subtle point that would take me the better part of ten years to disentangle: character creation.
+
+I sometimes wonder if people involved in LARP communities, those in the SCA, or even pencil and paper RPG players get quite as involved in their characters as furries do. I honestly don't know, as most of my knowledge is gained from an outside, media-tainted perspective, but I suspect that it might be a little different for furries for a couple of reasons. First and foremost is that our characters are intended to be a representation of ourselves. The thing that drew me in about FurCodes was the 'T' segment:If you had the chance, would you want to become a real furry. This wasn't just something fun we did or some historical accuracy westrivefor - people actually really, truly desired to become their characters. I'm sure there are folk in the SCA or in LARP groups that really do desire to be in the role they're playing, but that leads us to the second point.
+
+Furries don't necessarily role play outside themselves. Someone who gets so into renaissance festivals that they wind up working there and living the characters on weekends is casting themselves into a totally different time, where the modern conveniences of life are gone and everything is fundamentally different. Furries - and, though I'm speaking from experience here, I know it doesn't apply to everyone - are perfectly content to act out their day to day, mundane, boring-ass lives as anthropomorphic canines (statistically speaking). As I was growing up through high school, I hung out with a crowd made up of furry gamers, programmers, and computer nerds; not just the players, but the characters as well. As I grew and moved to college, I decamped from FluffMUCK and moved over to FurryMUCK to spend most of my time in The Purple Nurple, an online, text only gay bar where predominately gay furry yuppies aired their college and post-college woes. We weren't just pretending to be cat- and dog-people, and we weren't just chatting about work, we were cat- and dog-people chatting about work.
+
+Of course, I wasn't totally secluded in my world of young professional furry gay men, I hung out elsewhere online and experienced everything from multi-session, all-hours of the night role playing (usually dirty) to entire relationships enacted strictly in-character. However, while there were always 'OOC', or out-of-character moments, everyone was joined together in the fact that they weretheir character. Even when I was in college, the music department, a decidedly close-knit group, contained several people who were just in it because they happened to be good at playing, say, the oboe, and could give a shit less about music, being an instrumentalist, or even making money off their skill. In my experience, people like that in furry are rare: there's the occasional person who has no real attachment to the fandom other than they simply happen to be good at some aspect of it, but they seem to be far from the norm.
+
+All of this adds up to something that I feel is fairly unique to the fandom. It is a strange line that divides character from self, in a fur. The line is semipermeable as some would gladly view themselves as their character as a sort of whole-body dysphoria, but there's still the separation between that aspect of personality and the person as a whole. Our characters are intangible, non-spatiotemporal; they aren't something that can be touched or felt, and are closer to an idea than anything real. However, they form an integral part of our concept of self, whether or not we would actually like to be our anthropomorphic fox character in real life. They inform our view of the world around us, as well, and not just in some vaguely foxish or wolfish way.
+
+There is no denying that a good portion of the community revolves around art - visual and otherwise. As with any group of people, though, skill in one particular field is not evenly distributed, and while there are definitely a lot of amazing artists within the fandom, they are still a minority. We rely on the skills of a relatively small sub-set of our community to provide us with the more tangible representations of our characters, and here is where this blurred line between character and self can cause issues. However, the way in which furries interact with creators in the community differs greatly from the way in which a professional artist would interact with a client in a few very important ways. A client may commission an artist for a piece of artwork to appreciate or for others to appreciate - that is, something to hang in their house or something to hang in public. With music, you can branch out and say that a client may commission the artist for a piece of music to perform. In all of these cases, though, nothing works quite like it does in the fandom: with furry commission, you're not simply commissioning a piece of art to hang around the house and show others, you're commissioning a representation of your self.
+
+Several seemingly unique issues in the way that artists and clients (or 'commissioners', as they're called, leading one artist to create a "feral Commissioner Gordon") stem from this strange difference. Some of the onus of creation is moved from the artist to the client in that much of the picture is designed by the client instead, because, after all, it is the client's character and the artist's talent. This seems to work closer to standard work-for-hire relationships, except that it has strange inflections on licensing: FA notably specifies that uploads fall under a policy of 'by you/for you', where a user may upload a picture that they created or that was created for them. Rather than falling under a standard work-for-hire relationship where it is the artist's talent and the client's art, there exists a continuing tension between the two parties, the artist maintaining near full rights over their creation while the client's rights remain in shady limbo - they maintain rights over the intellectual property of their character, and have some vague sense of ownership over the picture they've received, with a shadowy idea of where they're allowed to show it.
+
+As a personal example, I was commissioned for a three-movement work for French horn and string base to be performed on my senior recital. As I had been used to the standard furry way of doing things, I insisted that the instrumentalists specify rather more than less of the work, a fact that led to much strife and pain in getting the piece actually performed. I was unable to live up to their expectations (they wanted me to write like Hindemith, and I'm not Hindemith), they were unmotivated to rehearse a piece that they felt they had a hand in creating, and my composition professor was baffled by the whole scenario. My senior recital turned out to be one of the most disappointing experiences in my life, largely in part due to the fact that I had failed to properly execute the commission that was expected of me.
+
+From the other side, an artist on FA recently wrote a journal about possibly offering prints of works that were commissioned from him, mentioning that since it was work-for-hire, he would split profit with the client who had commissioned the piece in the first place. The resultwas rather out of proportion with the original post and helped to illuminate several of the differences between the professional art world and the art world contained within the furry fandom. "My talent, not my art \[is for sale\]. A commissioner buys my talent to make their art," the artist writes, leading to a slew of comments ranging from decently positive to stunned and angry. This standard practice is in direct opposition to the way the furry art world works - limited rights to the artist's art is for sale, rather than simple access to their talent.
+
+No small amount of drama has originated from this scheme. While the artist above relinquishes their rights to the piece they've created to the client as part of standard business practice, this is not the usual within the fandom, and a client doing something such as uploading their art to be seen by a wider audience on other furry art sites such as fchan, e621, or pawsru.org can certainly lead to plenty of strife. There is the occasional artist who will upload their art to these sites on their own, but the fandom has largely set them up as their villains, several of the sites or members of the sites buying readily into that label and stirring things up on their own. This concern over use of art is doubly strange for a community so focused on appropriating heavily licensed characters such as those from Sonic the Hedgehog or anything from Disney for themselves.
+
+The concepts of character and self are rooted deep in the furry community. Making a negative comment about someone's fursuit or images of their character can lead to trouble, as the words can be seen as a slight against that person. After all, the fursuit or image is a representation of the character's owner - even if you agree that a thing is ugly, a careless phrase can cause offense if that thing is dear to you. The result is something akin to an offshoot of the Dunning-Kruger effect - unskilled people holding illusory superiority while skilled people hold illusory inferiority - in that the one who receives a representation of their character is likely to hold it to some illusory ideal higher than just any similar piece. Meaning in art is a tough subject, and it's only made more complicated within the fandom when it comes to character art.
+
+The two intertwined entities of character and self comprise a large part of furry. The fandom as it is is hard enough to pin down to any one definition, and I think that's due in large part to the myriad ways in which one interacts with one's character or characters. For some, their character is inextricably a part of themselves, closer to an anima or animus in the Jungian sense. For others, myself included, a character may carry smaller aspects of personality, and not, as a result, be as all-encompassing. Speaking for myself, I have three or four of what I would consider characters that I often interact with, and each acts differently, each more focused on a different aspect of my personality. This didn't use to be the case, though, as I previously had a single character that was more all-encompassing and close to my self.
+
+Along with the shift in character interaction came a shift in friend circles, and it left me wondering how much this internal interaction define how we build up and maintain our lives within furry. I asked around on twitterand got a few answers: the way in which we relate to our characters does seem to have some relation to the types of people we find ourselves friends with. Whether that's cause, effect, or some sort of subconscious correlation, I can't say.All of this pondering around the psychological aspects of pretending to be an animal person with a lot of other people pretending to be animal people may just be another symptom of being a firmly-entrenched member of the very same fandom. A commenter on a previous entry used the word 'avatar' instead of character, and I feel that this was an appropriate choice of words, moreso than character. A character is an entity not necessarily connected to some person in reality, but an avatar has connotations of incarnation and appearance of something outside the world in which it interacts. Thisis the idea behind our characters: they aren't just some sort of disjoint idea that relates back to us, even if we create more than one. They are aspects of us, and as such, are integral to us. No wonder we can get so touchy in regards to our interactions with them.
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+One of the things I've noticed more and more as I continue to grow up - not sure I'd call myself a grown-up, yet - is the way in which the divisions in our life become both less clear and more profuse as time goes on. I think my first intimation of this came at about the time I was finishing up middle school (8th grade, in my district), and started secretly reading up on this whole "gay" thing, on the suspicion that I might fall into that category.
+
+It wasn't a really easy thing for me to accept about myself at the time, as I suppose it rarely is for a kid in the southwest States. Colorado is a unique state in that, while much of its area is of a more conservative, Christian character and not generally accepting of homosexuality, there is a stretch that goes from about Fort Collins on down south of Denver along the front range that tends to be more socially liberal and less religiously oriented overall, and certainly more open to differences in sexual orientation than the surrounding areas. I spent a lot of time growing up in that front-range area where most of those around me likely would've been okay if I had come out, and some of them would have probably rushed to tell me justhowokay it is to be gay: Boulder, as a town, is almost intrusively cool with it. Even so, there was this sensation that if I were to leave the Denver-Boulder area, I would be immediately be set upon by both protesters and perpetrators of hate crimes both.
+
+What can I say, I was a dramatic kid.
+
+That's why I started reading about it more and more. I started to look into my preconception that there was this line drawn around my home cities in fat sharpie on the map, with the insides colored pink, and the outsides a horrible, soul-sucking blackness. That sense didn't jive with what I started to experience at school, middle school being a particularly difficult portion of life to deal with. There were kids in school would would, it seemed, readily beat me up for being gay, and there were people whom I met from outside of Boulder that seemed perfectly reasonable and nice about the whole thing. Of course, the whole concept didn't stand up to the slightest bit of scrutiny as soon as I started to look outside of my personal experience.
+
+My big breaking point, however, came when I found the Kinsey scale, which divides sexual orientation into seven degrees, from 0 - Completely Heterosexual to 6 - Completely Homosexual. Before then, bisexuals were something of a myth to me, and much of that was due to the way I originally came out when I frequented forums as a kid. One started bi as a way to test the waters, see if everything was alright, and then one jumped in with a big "ha ha oh just kidding I was gay the whole time". Anyone who stayed bisexual, I was told, just wanted to have sex with guys, whether they were male or female. Such was life in the middle of America as a pre-teen, I guess.
+
+Once I had found the Kinsey scale, though, things changed drastically. It wasn't just that the scale had been named after and promoted by a man with a 'Dr.' in front of his name, though that certainly helped, and it wasn't just that the scale was built so that there was a number in the center without having the maximum value be an odd number (as a child, I had an irrational hatred of odd numbers). Rather, it was that there was such a thing as a non-binary aspect to this portion of my existence. I had been, until then, convinced through the doxa I was immersed in and my ownlucubrationthat there really were only two choices in life: male and female, gay and straight, hamburger and cheeseburger.
+
+After that, my interest only grew. I can't honestly say that I jumped directly into the study of non-binary modes expression and identification, but as I continued on to high school and even beyond, into college, I kept finding things that were not as simple as I had previously imagined them to be. I suppose everyone goes through such a period in their life, but for me, it always seemed to come back to that original "discovery" that much of which we assume to be binary through the workings of social doxa or our own incomplete comprehension of the matter is, in fact, a gradient, a cline, a continuum.
+
+The next big stepping stone for me, in terms of comprehension, came after I started to read up more and more about gender disparity and transgender issues, for even though I dated a wonderful trans guy in high school, I still had little to go on in terms of reallytrying to understand those issues. I understood the whole concept of gender identity versus biological sex, and I even had some inkling to there being some sense of non-duality through my scant interactions (at that point), with intersex and hermaphroditic individuals; however, some portion of my mind kept catching on the snag that there really were only two sexes and two gender identities, and that transgender folk simply had a mismatch somewhere in there.
+
+The actual moment came when I found a funny looking poster of a stick figure (which I wasn't able to find, exactly, but here is the closest I came up with) which described not only biological sex and gender identity as gradients, but also gender expression, along with the familiar sexual orientation. "Whoa," I thought, "Here I was going about this all wrong, and in much the same way as before!". It wasn't so much that I had rediscovered gradients in life, as that I really started to comprehend the multidimensional nature of what is often taken for granted, if not declared outright to be the norm. Gender, when I was growing up, meant boy and girl, penis and vagina, the simplest explanation. When I started to get older, I started to understand that there was such a thing as gender separate from biological sex, but only in a psychopathological context, when they did not match up and it caused identity issues. It took a goofy stick figure poster to knock me into the sense that there were multifarious dimensions to what had previously been a relatively simple concept for me to understand, insofar as I was capable of doing so. I was A. Square finally comprehending that there was a third, possibly even a fourth dimension.
+
+In both of these instances - discovering gradients and discovering new dimension in definition - I found myself applying these new-found ways of looking at things to the world around me. I was lucky, though, in that the world around me took place largely online in the form of interacting with animal people. The benefits of interacting online so much are myriad, but the two most pertinent ones are that I was a) able to do research quickly and easily and b) able to investigate the "paper trail" that I and so many others had left behind. In short, my almost subconscious reaction to learning these new things was to immediately try to apply them to furry.
+
+Like all such slippery concepts, I wound up going down quite a few blind alleys, barking up a quite a few empty trees, and several other appropriate metaphors too numerous to list here. I tried to apply these concepts either too liberally, or not liberally enough, to the world around me and found some ways in which they were more helpful than not in explaining the ways in which I and others interacted with the fandom and with our own understandings of or identifications with anthropomorphics.
+
+In fact, in the last paragraph, I touch on at least two very important gradients and dimensions of character that have come up time and time again: anthropomorphics and, for many, identification with a subculture built off this interest in anthropomorphic art, role playing, and character creation. Within those, as within all aspects of membership and identity, are at least three different dimensions making up one's association: interest, participation, and creation. Interest, of course, is how much one is interested in such a thing, how much they read up on it, how much they take in. Participation, on the other hand, is how much that person actively integrates themselves into the thing they are interested in: creating an account on FA, browsing art, favoriting images, watching artists, leaving comments. Finally, there's the aspect of creation. Beyond simple participation, this is the means by which someone can contribute, give back, post to FA, and gain the participation of others in turn. All of these may be thought of as gradients, where the levels with which one may show interest, participate, and offer up unique creations.
+
+These are, of course, just simple examples of the varying dimensions and gradients with which one can interact with the fandom, of course, and there are just as many, if not more ways to identify with anthropomorphic animals outside of just the furry fandom. As I was writing all this, I started to think that, in at least one way, it all sounded familiar. It took me a moment to place where, but the further back I looked in my past, the closer it seemed to get until finally, I remembered. FurCodes.
+
+With how much time I spent thinking about those things, it's remarkable that I was unable to really internalize the whole concept of gradients and dimensions in so many aspects of my life (no one ever accused me of having an over-abundance of intelligence). These simple, one-line codes of letters and symbols are an accurate summary of much of what I was talking about just a few paragraphs up. For every thing in our life that we take to be black or white, true or false, totally binary, there is a good chance that it is not nearly so simple, but embodies a full spectrum of hues, saturations, and values. I plowed through the process of creating a code again and came up with the following, answering relatively truthfully:
+
+FCA3amr A- C++ D+ H+ M++ P R T W+ Z Sm+ RLCT a cl+++ d! e++ f+ h+++ iwf+++ j+ p+ sm+
+
+None of this should really be of any surprise, of course, but a few things caught my eye and offer a good example to prove my final point. It feels as though it has been a really long time since Zines and Doom have felt pertinent, and the division of age into entire decades seems almost quaint these days. Age, it seems, has not exactly treated the FurCode very well. That is the final, most important of gradients or dimensions out there to take into account: time. All of the things I have mentioned so far in this post - sexuality, gender, association with the fandom and anthropomorphics - and really most everything out there has this aspect of time tied to it that is so rarely thought about. All of the things that we hold to be solid and true in life are tied to time in one way or another (some of which seem a littlesurprising).
+
+I was dead-set, utterly convinced that I was straight, then that I was gay, and for a period after that, that I was bi. I was totally comfortable in my gender in terms of how it matched up with my biological sex, and then I was thrown into a whirlwind of confusion. I was definitely sure that I would always have a 'Zine or two pertaining to the fandom, that I would always be a wizard on a MUCK, that I would always be FCFp3dwa.
+
+Clearly, this isn't the case. Time is a tricky thing, and yet, if I take a step back and take a look at the trajectory of my membership to the fandom and my association with anthropomorphics, I have no trouble in understanding or even appreciating that time is just another dimension of character, whether literally in the sense that my character is constituted of various different aspects of myself at a particular time, or more metaphorically, that time is a part of defining my sense of character.
+
+There are so many different dimensions and gradients in character, and within association to the fandom and to one's personal character or characters. I've listed a few, such as species and time, or the means of interaction that we have with the fandom, whether it's interest, participation, or creation. What other aspects are there? Are any of these particularly pertinent in your own situation? I'd like to see some comments with some of your own stories as to what dimensions you've found important in your lives, and what things have surprised you by being a sliding scale instead of a duality.
+
+-   For those who are curious, here is my code decoded.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/eighty-twenty.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/eighty-twenty.md
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@@ -0,0 +1,57 @@
+One of the interesting things about running a blog is that you get to write about what's important to you. And one of the interesting things about running a blog with more than one contributor (hi guys!) is that rather than focusing on the whole field, you're more able to spread the labor around and focus on specific things within the field that are very important to you. Given that I've already written a more broad-picture article on gender and am now about to delve into another 2000 word essay on the same, it's safe to say that I think the whole thing's terribly interesting, and that furry itself is probably one of the more interesting subcultures in which to examine gender, sex, and sexuality.
+
+As I did in the previous article, I feel the need to provide the following information and disclaimers about myself. Firstly, I am a biological male, I do not identify as male-gendered, and in terms of sexuality, while I'd call myself pansexual, I am engaged to another man. Since that's what I've got to work with, that's the viewpoint I'll be writing from, even though I'll try to draw as much as I can from others. In addition, the title is in reference to results provided by Klisoura's Furry Survey, which will be mentioned within the article itself. Some of the thoughts in this article come from the responses to the \[adjective\]\[species\] survey on gender identity and sexual orientation in the fandom. Finally, I know that my articles are wordy, perhaps more so than they need to be, but given that this topic is especially important to me, I do hope that you'll forgive a slightly longer read.
+
+Now that we've satisfied that nagging part of me that needs to make disclaimers...
+
+Part of what got me interested in this whole topic to begin with is the way I spent most of my time in the fandom for the first five or six years of my time here. Without going into more detail than has already been covered, I spent a lot of time hanging out with mostly gay guys online, primarily on MUCKs and IRC. It was what I'd call a comfortable existence. My daily routine online consisted of connecting and immediately heading to the gay-bar-analog, whether it was an IRC channel or a room on FurryMUCK, to spend some time chatting it up, or maybe even looking for some hot, hot text-only action.
+
+And it was pretty fulfilling, too! I met some wonderful people I still love to spend time around (hi guys!), had my fair share of relationships that occupied heart and mind almost completely while they lasted, and just generally lived out my little hedonist life as a red, then an arctic fox. I explored some things that I would never do in person, and some things that aren't even possible offline, but in all, it was a young gay man's paradise; sex without consequences, a large dating pool, and a surrounding subculture that was almost fanatically accepting.
+
+There were a few little things, however, that I hardly noticed at first, but started to bug me more and more as time went on.
+
+I've noticed a trope in western gay culture, such as it is, that discovering you're gay goes through five main stages. Put glibly:
+
+Age 5-12: "ew, girls are icky!"
+
+Age 13-14: "I'm supposed to like girls now..."
+
+Age 15-25: "ew, girls are icky!"
+
+Age 26-32: Maturity
+
+Age 32+: A mystery. Some say The Gay ends, some say that this is about 102 in gay years, and some say that a few mythical couples live on...
+
+Alright, so that was put very glibly. Even so, I bring this up in continuation from last week's article, Participation Mystique, wherein I mention some of the participation mystique that gay men have with western, or at least American gay culture.
+
+There is a certainrebelliousness that we (and I say "we" freely; I identified as gay for quite a while) buy into. It starts with the rebelliousness that many teenagers go through without further prompting, continues on through liberation to college or working life where we know everything, and peters out around the time we land a job or career we aim to keep for a while. It's a rebelliousness against the heterocentrism that is inevitable in a world that, to requote and oft-quoted statistic, is 90% heterosexual. The bias is justified, sure, but we're up-and-coming young adults and there's no reason we shouldn't assert not only our existence, but our membership to the gay culture, our participation mystique.
+
+It's been successful to some extent, as well. The whole "we're here, we're queer, get used to it" scene has done much to push the culture and its members into the conscious mind of America, and change is indeed happening at both a state and national level. It's the return to the "ew, girls are icky!" stage that I find intriguing, though. A focus on marriage rights, matronly pop-stars, and men having sex with men is not the only thing that the gay culture brings with it. Of note to us is a sort of misogyny that is based within this rebelliousness, a rejection of the female body as being unappealing which seems to go hand-in-hand with the trope of straight men liking lesbian porn due to the lack of male bodies in the picture. While it's a subtle sort of misogyny that is based around the bearer of the bias' own state more so than the bearer of the brunt of the bias (that is, this particular bias is based in the fact that gay men do not like women, rather than the fact that women are perceived as fundamentally inferior in some way), it is still just that.
+
+It is what it is, though. My high school history teacher said several times that, in order for a segment of society to gain what they perceive to be equal status, they have to push a little too hard, go a little too far, in order to let things swing back toward the middle.
+
+It is what it is, I should say, except in the case where you have a population that is effectively 80% male and 20% female, rather than the standard fifty-fifty split. Here in furry, we have a predominately young male culture, anonymity provided by the Internet, a sexually liberated atmosphere, and a group that is decidedly accepting of most anything. In short, we have a perfect storm for something that smells good to gay men. While there are countless roots into the fandom, I don't doubt that several are through the exploration of homosexuality online. I don't doubt it, because that's how I got here: a combination of some people posting in a forum for gay teens and some...uh...stories on a certain niftywebsite. Needless to say, given all that, it's no surprise that there is the concentration that there is of young gay and bisexual men within the fandom.
+
+I know that this was a long, round-about way to get here, but I feel that it really is very important to understanding some of the misogyny within the fandom. The misogyny that I'm speaking of, in particular, is the reaction to sex within an adult image or story. We really are a tolerant crowd, and there's room for everyone within this fandom. That the subject matter drop-down when submitting a piece of art to FurAffinity includes such things as "paw (tame)", "pregnancy (adult)", and "abstract" (while somehow managing to leave off "crafts") is telling of just how open a community we really are.
+
+We're all welcome here, and yet still there is this strange misogyny that expresses itself almost as heterophobia in the reaction to art. What would an image depicting a straight couple having sex be on FA without the "this would be better if they were both male", "ew, grody vagina :(", and "you're cute, so I guess I'll just cover up the other side of the screen" comments? It's become pervasive on FA, respondents to the survey have mentioned it, and I've started noticing it within day-to-day interactions with those around me, as well.
+
+This is, of course, only one example of the sex and gender bias within the fandom, of course. Along with our unique brand of heterophobia, there do seem to be some unique gender roles that we've appropriated for each other here in furry. As with most gender roles, they focus on dichotomies and binary states. Men are x, women are y, and never the twain shall meet. I tried to pull together three good examples, but there are, of course, plenty more than that.
+
+Female as creator, male as consumer This, as with all of the examples I have here, is based in part off a gender role that is common in fields such as crafts or amateur art. That is, the female is seen as the one who takes the time to create, the one who would do such a thing as a profession, while the male is seen as the consumer, the one who would buy the created object. Though there are certainly a good number of male creators and female consumers within the furry fandom, it does seem that there is something of an expectation for the female furries to be the artists and fursuit makers, those who are creating, while the males are the ones browsing along the aisles of the dealers den, looking to purchase.
+
+With this, as with most gender roles, there is little danger in bucking the trend, but the pressure to go along with it remains. One will not be castigated because one is a female consumer or male creator, but there is still an expectation that things will work a certain way, and perhaps a bit of disappointment when they don't. It is interesting to see the differences in sex between those who are roaming the aisles and those who are working the tables at a convention dealers den, however, especially given the reported demographics of the fandom as a whole.
+
+Female as nonsexual, male as hypersexual A friend on twitter recently mentioned that one of his favorite things about a certain adult website was that it provided some insight into the feminine state of mind when it came to sex. "Society makes that hard to see," he said. "Since for girls, sex is some big secret for the most part, when guys are concerned." This is a codified gender role that goes way, way back; centuries, even. That a female would ever enjoy sex was something that was simply beyond the ken of many, and to this day, that remains a concern within society.
+
+Conversely, that a man might not be all about sex violates the code of machismo that, if nothing else, is codified in western media, if not society as a whole. There is a growing population of those - male and female alike - within the fandom, as noted by a respondent to the sexuality and gender survey, who identify as either asexual or non-gendered. What my friend was bemoaning was the double standard and that surrounds sexuality between the genders. This is perpetuated, to some extent, within the fandom by the western culture that surrounds so much of it. While a female bucking this trend is not likely to be called a nymphomaniac, nor is a male likely to be called a eunuch, that it's strange and new for us to see the opposite sides is telling of how gender works within the fandom and our society as a whole.
+
+Female as offline, male as online One of the interesting experiences surrounding gender that I had in college had to do with the gender differences between the majors offered by the university. I went to a school that very much bought into a lot of old-school ideas, from the way it treated the arts to the ways it expected students to act. Students and parents bought into this, as well - there was another, more liberal school in the state, and our goal seemed to be "don't be them." So, not only were female engineers and scientists more rare, but they more readily bought into certain roles such as "nerd" that males didn't necessarily need to buy into. You could be a "jock" male computer science major, it seemed, but you couldn't be anything but a "nerd" female computer science major.
+
+This is a wide-spread issue that is being focused on by many better minds than my own, but it's effects are also seen within the fandom. Along with the creator role mentioned above, it seems like the females of the fandom are not expected to be as willing to partake in MUCKs, IRC, or even forums to some extent as much as males are. Combined with the previous point about sexuality, and it is unsurprising just how much of the population of Tapestries, a sexual and BDSM MUCK, is male.
+
+I know that I've likely gone on for far too long, and probably lost readers along the way, but I feel that this is an important topic for the fandom to consider. We are an open-minded bunch, all told, but there are a few sticking points where we have our troubles, and one of the biggest problem spots has to do with gender. Even if it's not necessarily the cause for huge amounts of drama, it always seems to be riding beneath the surface of our interactions, making itself known here and there in all our myriad means of communication.
+
+Rather than end this overly long article on a simple concluding statement, thought, I want to take the more proactive approach by putting out a call for submissions. I've written this "Eighty-Twenty" article from the standpoint of a mostly-male furry in a mostly-male fandom. What I think we really need, though is the "Twenty-Eighty" article written from a female standpoint about how the fandom works from that point of view. I know that a few of you (hi guys!) have already approached me about the possibility of writing such an article; well, let this be your call to action - I don't think I'm alone in wanting to hear more sides of the issue!
+
+If you're interested in writing the companion piece to this, you may get in touch with us via email, or send us a note on twitter to \@adjspecies; we'd certainly welcome a guest post to help fulfill this need in the community.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/fantasy-and-frameworks.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/fantasy-and-frameworks.md
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+Fantasy, notably sexual fantasy, plays a vital role for us as we grow into sexual people. There's a lot to be said about Just how formative fantasies can be, as well. Even though one's first sexual experience no doubt plays a large role in one's life, the fantasies that lead up to that and the way they change afterward (and are refined throughout life, of course) figure prominently in making us who we are.
+
+However, fantasies do not occur in a vacuum. After all, they certainly wouldn't change all that much after a sexual encounter of any importance; the first being a notable example, but any particularly delightful (or particularly awful) encounter can change the way we fantasize. So it really isn't any surprise, if our fantasies don't exist in a vacuum, that if we structure our life around acertain set of ideas, a certain framework, that our fantasies will have something of that structure as well, and there's really no better example of such a framework for a website devoted to talking about love and sex in the furry fandom than the furry fandom itself.
+
+The idea of frameworks on which to hang aspects of our lives is hardly unique to fantasies, of course. Much of the mythical aspects of religion serve the same sort of purpose: if we can understand our world from creation up until now through some sort of tale or story, then we have some context, some grid in which to place our thoughts, ideas, and action. That story can be something that's meant almost entirely as an analog, such as a ladder reaching up to heaven, one side of which angels ascend and the other side of which angels descend, or it can be something to be interpreted literally such as the Israelites' travels in Exodus. Both of these offer us something: a lesson, an idea, a concept that people can use to build up a framework of reality.
+
+The example may be a bit abstruse, but in almost all aspects of life, we rely on a framework in which to fit things so that we may more easily understand them. Another way to think of the concept is a grid, or, to follow the metaphor further, a pair of glasses with a grid painted on them. We seek to find the level to which to align that grid, so that the ground lines up with the horizontals and the trees align with the verticals. It's a way of thinking about and interpreting the world around us.
+
+So what is sexual fantasy and how exactly does it rely on a framework of interpretation? It might help to first break down sexual fantasies into a few rough categories, because I think that, by understanding those categories, it will be easier to figure out the way they apply to the topic at hand.
+
+1.  **Backward-Thinking Fantasy**- these fantasies are about events that have happened in the past which have come to mean a lot to us. It could be that we experienced some wonderful time, with someone else or by ourselves, and it struck a chord. It need not have even been wonderful, it could've been awful and, instead, the fantasy takes a turn for the \"what could I have done different\"-ness. Either way, everything relies on something from the past.
+
+2.  **Forward-Thinking Fantasy**- fantasies that look forward to some event in the future, whether or not it's definite, are finding a way to project past events into what we suppose will happen to us some time down the line. Again, these can focus on either the positive or the negative; after all, revenge fantasies are hardly uncommon.
+
+3.  **What-If Fantasies**- these are the most common - for me, at least - types of fantasies: taking our current situation and either recasting it into something sexualized (what if I were receiving oral sex right now), taking our current situation and replacing it with something else (what if I were receiving oral sex on a picnic somewhere right now), or replacing our current situation with something entirely different (what if I were some anthro fox person chilling in a bar and some random wolf\...well, you know).
+
+The first one is obvious in its connection with these sorts of reticles through which we view the world. The things we've done in the past actually took place; they've happened, they've already been interpreted, and we already can look at them through the lenses that we've constructed out of the frameworks we hold dear.
+
+The second is similarly obvious. They are things we expect, want, or for some other reason need to happen. These are, of course, often not sexual - imagining the relief of graduation or what you'll do with this year's bonus are very potent (if not exactly orgasm-inducing) ways to think about the future. However, most anyone who has taken part in a long-distance relationship with a sexual aspect can assure you that these come fast and hard at times, and can even be a relatively exciting thing to share with one's partner (phone sex or type-fucking is okay, talking about fantasies is pretty neat, but putting them together is a well-tested means of testing such things out in otherwise constrained circumstances).
+
+The third one, though, is where we really should focus, as I hinted at before. Thinking of furry as a framework constructed specifically with fantasy in mind buys us quite a lot. We can take all of these things we think and dream about, sexual and otherwise, and apply this lens of anthropomorphic animals to it. Furry isn't just anthropomorphic animals, it's anthropomorphic animals told consistently and coherently. By that, I mean that these aren't just animal-shaped monstrosities existing without history or future, but these are our characters that live and grow with us, or stories set in worlds with centuries of past behind them taking place over time. The framework is loose enough to accommodate Renaissance-era worlds such as Kyell Gold's *Volle*at the same time as it accommodates Kevin Frane's future-ish universe of *Summerhill*(you'll have to read the book to see what 'future-ish' means).
+
+In short, what furry buys us is an open invitation to fantasize within its bounds. Part of the reason that sex plays the role that it does within the fandom is the combination of the previous two belabored points: if sexual fantasy plays such a large role for us, and furry is made for fantasy, then the two fit together quite nicely. All of the art, all of the role-play, even the convention sex and fursuit sex all play into that, they're all one sort of way or another of acting out fantasy within this aspect of our lives.
+
+These aren't just simple, one-off fantasies, either: they can serve the very real purpose of exploration of self. In my own case, I don't really know how else I would've felt comfortable exploring my own gender identity without having some aspect of role-play involved.
+
+There are various ways that various trans\* have found or have been made to explore this, themselves The most obvious being the Real-Life Experience or RLE, where a trans\* patient is required to live their life in their desired gender role, fulfilling a predetermined checklist of items, sometimes before their doctor will prescribe hormones, and almost always before a surgeon will perform SRS. There are good and valid reasons that this standard of care is advocated, but some criticisms have been levied against it for being a mechanism of gatekeeping.
+
+For myself, the outlet of role-play within the fantasy world was my form of experience, though, of course, hardly RLE. The fact that I had something in my life already set up to accommodate a change in form so drastic as a change in perceived sex - after all, that's relatively minor considering the whole \"look, I'm an arctic fox!\" thing - gave me a means of exploring in a relatively safe place without necessarily committing to something such as hormones or surgery. I spent a good deal of time between about 2006 and 2011 exploring the tie-ins between gender and sex as they pertained to me by exploiting this whole framework that I had to work with. I could, in other words, pass, even to the point of having sex (lots of that, actually, I was quite the hornball for awhile, but I digress).
+
+That experience, the fantasy that I had the fortune to be able to live out in at least some sense was really one of the more formative aspects of my life. What started out as a \"mere\" sexual fantasy wound up being one of those delightful self-discovery type things, helping me to figure out the ways in which I best interact with gender. It wasn't RLE, but it served many of the same purposes for me.
+
+Fantasy serves a very important role to us for reasons such as this. We gain experience interacting with the world in a social manner by finding healthy ways to harness fantasy for our own purposes. It's not that everything I did surrounding all of that was healthy, by any stretch (my grades in school and at least a few friendships and relationships suffered), but neither was it useless faffing about on the Internet. I know I'm not alone in this, either. Furry as a framework for fantasy has helped just about everyone I know within the fandom in one way or another, whether it's helping them through a tough time, such as the way my social circle pulled together after a friend's death, or the sexual release many find.
+
+I should note that I don't think this is necessarily a furry thing, of course. Similar frameworks exist in many different communities, even ones that permit and encourage sexuality. Several kink communities are notable examples of this. This is a very large part of our lives for many of us, though, and so it's notable on a personal level. I am a very big fan of it, and think it's something worth embracing, as is probably obvious, and I think that a fair number of folks out there feel the same way. There are unhealthy ways to go about such things, of course, but that does not preclude healthy ways, either; after all, the option to have something that's safe, fun, and social is something to cherish.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/gender-furry.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/gender-furry.md
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+Many people, I suspect, use the idiom, "hindsight is twenty-twenty," in a way that is better served by other, more appropriate words or phrases. The sense in which I hear it most commonly used is perhaps more adequately covered by the beautiful portmanteau, "regretrospect". That is, now that things are said and done, I regret a lot of what happened during this adventure.
+
+Also, it's my second favorite portmanteau after "congratudolences" and really ought to see wider use.
+
+No, I think "hindsight is twenty-twenty" is better reserved for cases when seemingly unrelated occurrences come together to form an outcome that seems to be greater than the sum of the parts. It fits best when you look back at your life and see disparate, unconnected events come together to make the situation you find yourself in now.
+
+I came out to myself and my (at the time) fiancé as transgender over a process of several months. It began sometime in 2010 or so, when I started to feel like I was able to put words to the things that were making me feel bad. I began by identifying as genderqueer, and although that label still fits very well, I adopted 'transgender' in 2015 as the one that I use in day-to-day life to describe myself, as it leaves the fewest questions as to why I'm a six-foot-two rectangular man-shape in feminine clothing and makeup.
+
+But we're talking about hindsight, so it's worth bringing up that one of the only things I ever stole was the book "The Boy Who Thought He Was A Girl", back in second grade. I'm guessing at the title here, as I can find no record of it through casual Googling, however, I remember that it was a trashy, essentialist book about a boy who wanted to learn how to kiss, which somehow made him girly and, thus, confused about whether he should actually be a girl. Of course, in the end, his understanding of his gender role as a boy were firmly straightened out by strict-yet-loving family.
+
+Or perhaps another step in this path of hindsight was sneaking into my step-mom's spare room when I was about twelve and trying on one of her old dresses. At that point, I had yet to become the lummox that would be my post-pubertal destiny, and so the dress fit, albeit poorly.
+
+Or, hey, skip ahead to 2006, when I had just turned twenty and realized that it felt just as good to role-play online as a vixen as it did as a tod, though I told myself at the time that it was because I wanted to experience more relationship configurations than the male homosexual relationships I'd had to that point.
+
+Each of these things, and so many more, felt like an independent, unconnected occurrence to me. It's only in hindsight that I can see that there were aspects of me straining towards some way to feel happy and comfortable. When I was growing up, they were simple oddities, but now just another way to see the present more clearly.
+
+I think that it's fairly common that one comes to terms with a portion of one's identity in this fashion. Before I came out as trans and made the question of sexual orientation at least twice as complicated, I went through the process of figuring out that, despite being born male, I was also attracted to other boys as well as girls. Those 'crushes' in elementary school make more sense, and so on.
+
+There had to be some lever that pushed each of those instances from a collection of loosely related occurrences into the formation of a strong facet of my own identity. With orientation, it was obviously the rush of hormones that came with puberty: all of the sudden, 'liking boys' took on a new tenor.
+
+With gender, it was almost entirely the furry subculture's fault.
+
+I found furry at the age of fourteen or so through the website Yerf!, and later through a FurCode generator. At the time, though gender was quite confusing for me when viewed in hindsight, I identified as a cis gay male. Furry, then, was a welcome haven from home life, where it was cool to be a teenage fox boy thinking about dating other teenage fox boys.
+
+As I grew up and continued in my development as a person, filling in bits of my concept of self as one fills in gaps in a puzzle when the pieces are found, furry helped yet again in providing a framework in exploration and comfort.
+
+Gender expression of the author's character as portrayed in visual commissions over the years.
+
+The figure above shows the ways in which the sex of my characters in art that I commissioned changed over time. On the Y axis, you can see the genders expressed in the commissions, and on the x, the date of the commission. There's a very clear trend from male to genderless, then from genderless to female over time, then from female (as an idealized form of myself) to a specifically trans fox (as I started to get comfortable with my identity as a transgender person). I'm not alone in this progression, either, as many have found the utility in having a mostly safe space in which role-play is common and accepted behavior in which to explore various aspects of their identity.
+
+There's a very good reason for this, too, but first, lets hear from other critters using furry as a lens to help in the explorations of their gender.
+
+When I think of Indi, I think of the colorful coyote/otter (read 'coyotter', or simply 'yotter') that I've gotten to know fairly well over the past few years. When I met ver for the first real time, it was at a room party at a convention, where we were tasting various types of mead. I can't remember if ve had made vis way to the room party from my invitation or at the behest of our mutual friend, Tealfox. Either way, I was glad to have the chance to meet up.
+
+Over the years, I would find myself catching up with ver again and again. At cons, sure, but also at vis house with vis owner Elanna, where I stayed for a few days in order to experience the delight that is Bandaza, a yearly celebration occurring near the end of November, which involves what must been the greatest concentration of postfurries I've ever seen.
+
+As is perhaps evident from vis pronouns, Indi's identity falls somewhere outside the realm of 'male' or 'female'. Ve describes verself as neutrois transgender, as having a sense of gender that's neither masculine nor feminine nor a combination of the two. This carries over into vis online representation; ve isn't simply a coyotter, but a synthetic one, often plush. After all, while plush toys and other synthetic beings may have a semblance of sexual characteristics, it's easy to imagine them not having an internal sense of identity along binary gender lines.
+
+Ve describes verself as having medically transitioned in order to deal with the body dysphoria (unhappiness with one's form or self) that is part and parcel of being transgender. This helps ver, along with finding modes of presentation to avoid social dysphoria, to exist in a concordant way with the world around ver.
+
+In Indi's words, "Furry helped a lot by being a place where the answers to basic questions of identity (species, gender) are almost always fill-in-the-blank." Some of the best things that furry has to offer is that these things which mean the most to someone working on their own identity are taken at their word. For example, from the point of view of an FtM person --- someone transitioning from female to male --- to say, "This is what I am, and that's all that you need to know," is huge. The validation that one gains for being taken as and interacted with as what they say they are is no small thing.
+
+Indi writes, "At its best, furry treats identity as consensual and fluid; you are what you say you are, and what you say you are may change and evolve in the future, temporarily or permanently."
+
+Although there are many ways in which this can take place, the act of creating one's own character, the means by which they interact with the rest of the subculture, is something that furry excels at. "Anthropomorphic forms also provide a rich toolkit of options for bodily self-expression," writes Indi, "With countless species, real and imaginary, and a mix-and-match approach to species signifiers and primary/secondary sexual characteristics. All this allowed me to keep tweaking, trying different ways of being me until I found the one that felt the most comfortable and accurate."
+
+That said, furry isn't the haven it might seem to be for someone exploring something as complex as gender.
+
+Indi explains: "In furry chat venues, a common expectation is that sex will happen or at least be discussed, which means many choices about presentation and identity are interpreted in sexual terms." It's easy to see the ways in which this could interact with gender, given the complex interactions between sexuality and gender. "The "what do you have in your pants" question, the archetypal inappropriate question for trans folks, is almost always on the table."
+
+This goes doubly so for non-binary genders. For those who present in a way way that lands somewhere between male and female, or outside that spectrum entirely, the issue of attraction and sex can become troubled, as Indi notes, "Further, presentations that seem difficult to interact with sexually, like those that de-emphasize both masculinity and femininity, will generally be given the side-eye or pointedly ignored."
+
+I met Lumi, on the other hand, shortly before writing this piece when someone retweeted one of her posts. She had lined up drawings of her character over the years, with short explanations, and it was easy to see a similar trend as outlined in my own graph above: her character started male, then began to shift more feminine through a process of experimentation towards the female character she is drawn as to this day, in alignment with her female identity.
+
+"Prior to coming out as female, I talked to some friends about it," she says. "I struggled a lot with the identity, even after coming out to friends, and then to everyone online. I considered myself non-binary for a while and went by they/them pronouns. This is because I don't experience much gender dysphoria so I didn't feel "Trans Enough" to consider myself female."
+
+This is a sentiment echoed by many as they work their way through figuring out their identity. Non-binary identities are, of course, just as valid as binary identities, and for many, the 'end goal' is neither masculine nor feminine, as evidenced by Indi's journey, while for others, they're a step on the path. No states of identity can be said to be purely transitional, and none can be said to be purely final.
+
+For Lumi, the non-binary portion of her journey happened to be transitional. "Finally, I settled on female but it still took me a while to "settle in" to being this gender. Since I can remember, people online have always assumed I was a girl anyways. Most people don't even know I'm trans, since I hardly ever mention it. They just assume I'm a rad cis girl."
+
+"I feel like a fursona is a reflection of yourself. I don't believe that my fursona is me, but rather she is like someone I aspire to be," Lumi writes, referring to the ways in which furry helped in solidifying identity. "Since she's a fictional character, it's always been easy to experiment with her and my gender identity was part of that experimentation. She has always had the ability to shape-shift and I always found myself drawing her as a girl even when she wasn't."
+
+On a hunch that these sentiments go far beyond just that small sector of furry, I started a small, informal poll on twitter, and got inundated with responses. The poll itself was simple:
+
+Hi.
+
+Tell me about how furry helped you with figuring out your gender identity!
+
+Thanks.
+
+--- Tweet from \@drab\_makyo on July 6, 2016
+
+The responses were overwhelmingly positive, though some had a few caveats. Many said that the opportunity to create a character as an ideal form of themself offered them the possibility to find a way to be more true to more aspects of their identity than they might have had in the first place. Furry, it seems, provides a constructive and creative place in order to explore.
+
+You'll note, however, that I didn't say 'safe place' above. Many of the caveats to furry being a good place to explore gender surround the fact that, in a lot of ways, many furries who identify as trans or non-binary (as well as intersex folks) feel fetishized more often than not. Gender, as we well know, goes far beyond just the interactions of genitalia.
+
+Another caveat that I heard was that, although the subculture provided a healthy means tobeginexploring gender, many felt that the thing that helped them mature in their identity was seeing representationoutsideof the fandom, as well. This was especially true for some of the non-binary folks that I got the chance to talk with. Some mentioned that their exploration ceased at the point where they created a character for themselves to match their perceived identity and went no further without some external representation.
+
+There's much more that I can say on the matter of why furry might be good for exploration, and I will shortly, but first, there is far more data available than just a single twitter poll! After all, as Executive Data Vix for \[adjective\]\[species\], it's my job to administer the Furry Poll, the fandom's largest market survey, and then to go for deep dives into that giant pool of data.
+
+To that end, I started pulling some numbers from the 2016 Furry Poll. There were 3194 total responses to look at which were relevant to our topic at hand. Here are the questions that we asked:
+
+What is your age in years?
+
+What best describes your gender identity?
+
+Masculine or mostly masculine
+
+Feminine or mostly feminine
+
+Other(NB: there were a series of options, including a write-in option, which, for our purposes, have been boiled down to an 'other' category.)
+
+Does your gender identity now align with your sex as assigned at birth?
+
+Yes (I am cisgender)
+
+No (I am not cisgender)
+
+It's complicated (exactly what it says on the tin)
+
+What all did we get? Well, nothing too surprising, and let me explain why.
+
+The ideas that we hold to be true without proof comprise ourdoxa. That is, the things we assume to be true, or to be the case without needing to have anything backing those assumptions up. When one looks around the furry fandom at time of writing, one is likely to find a subculture made up mostly of those presenting masculine.
+
+Gender identity of respondents in the 2016 Furry Poll.
+
+To that, the survey offers only confirmation. A bit more than 75% of the respondents --- certainly a supermajority --- responded that their gender identity was masculine or mostly masculine. Although one's expression or presentation used as a predictor has its flaws, a glance around the average convention space bears truth to this claim: we can mark that down as one point for our doxa reading things correctly.
+
+Gender alignment of respondents in the 2016 Furry.
+
+Now, how about we look at gender alignment; that is, let's take a look at the breakdown of how folks' gender identity aligns with their sex as assigned at birth. For example, a trans man who was assigned female at birth but identifies as a man now, would be someone who would fall under the umbrella term of 'transgender', while a man who was assigned male at birth would fall under the term 'cisgender'. Additionally, for the sake of completeness, the survey also offered the choice for the respondent to answer that the answer was more complicated than these two choices would allow (we did not ask for further details, and had we, we would not, of course, be able to share them while preserving anonymity).
+
+The most noticeable part of this, on the surface, is that one sees a great deal more trans-feminine (those who identify as feminine and yet whose sex as assigned at birth does not match with their identity, in this instance) than trans-masculine folks. It's understandable that the "other" category, small as it is, contain a more even distribution, but given the uneven distribution in reported gender identities, it makes it all the more striking that there are so many trans-feminine respondents.
+
+This is, perhaps, a shadow cast by society at large, making it more enticing for a trans-feminine person to seek refuge in a welcome subculture. For someone assigned feminine at birth to be into stereotypical masculine behavior is not a big deal. We even have a word for that: tomboy. It's value-neutral in many circles, and downright positive in some. But for someone assigned masculine at birth to behave feminine, well, there's a word for that, too: sissy. A welcoming environment for someone to explore along those lines --- from masculine to feminine --- is, therefore, not so difficult to foresee. It's also why the demographics of those interviewed for this piece fall more along these lines. It has little to do with minimizing the transmasculine experience, and quite a bit to do with the demographics involved.
+
+There is a certain peril to dating not one, but two wordy, genderful critters, and being married to a cisgender gay man who has stayed with me through my own transition (who, for his part, mentioned that the benefit of furry was that it exposed transgender identities to him as something more than what you'd hear from the news, adding to the personhood involved). When I began this project, not only did I have plenty of story to tell, for myself, but both partners leapt at the chance to help, whether it be through interviewing or through beta reading the final piece.
+
+Forneus and I met over Twitter back in 2011 through a mutual acquaintance, and bonded during an impromptu metal concert in one of the elevators at Further Confusion in 2012. It was loud, there were cats, I stuffed my fursuit paw in someone's mouth by accident. Good times.
+
+Forneus has been with me through most of the time I've been consciously exploring gender. They sat and listened to me complain about the lack of non-binary representation, the problems inherent in getting the requisites met for starting hormone replacement therapy, and the whole process of coming out at work.
+
+At the same time, I was there much of their own journey. While I've landed somewhere on the feminine side of neutral, they have been experiencing things differently: "I'd say I'm somewhere in genderqueer land, leaning feminine. What that means for me: I'm mostly fine with the body I was born with, but my presentation is a lot more "stereotypically" feminine based on modern American stereotypes."
+
+I had the chance to ask them if they felt comfortable expressing their identity both within and outside of furry. "Yeah, for a few reasons," they said. "The consequences that directly impact me are a lot less likely to be problems. I'm not going to lose my job or an opportunity at a job, I'm not going to have to work with the random troll every day, et cetera. It's a lot easier to disengage, I guess, as long as I keep myself honest on it."
+
+"Everyone's already primed to the concept of an ideal self," they continued. "Even straight cis\[gender\] furries, so "my ideal self is me, but with different bits" feels really easy to explain most of the time. \[Even\] from within the broader trans community, there's definitely a tendency to feel like I'm not "trans enough""
+
+Outside of furry, though, things were less comfortable. ""If I show up to this interview in a dress, it'll raise questions" is something I had to deal with a lot during my last job search, for example." The world at large rarely cares about our ideal selves, and often makes sweeping judgements based on presentation. "I'm not convinced that HRT would be right, so I'm not doing it," they mention. "The "next step" is coming out at work. I don't currently feel capable of doing that."
+
+Lexy, my other partner, expressed similar thoughts. While furry, "helped by having open and kind people to talk with, and to explore gender identity with," life outside of furry offered much more in the way of obstacles. She hasn't been able to take many steps yet largely due to family issues, and has described her path as, "Working towards finding a safe environment to transition. I currently feel fairly uncomfortable due to not being able to transition, but overall I feel like furry has helped a lot in feeling more comfortable with myself."
+
+So is furry a net win, over all, for furries? "Yeah, for sure," says Forneus. "It's definitely helped me figure out my own sexuality, if nothing else, and I know a lot of cool trans furries. So that's pretty helpful too, having good friends with both a shared interest and a nominally-similar life history."
+
+Lumi agrees: "I'm very comfortable with my identity, and I feel it fits me very well. I almost fell game to the idea of "Well you have to be really girly to be a girl," but now I'm more like a tomboy girl. Yeah, sometimes I might be rude and I'm not into dresses and makeup, but at the end of the day, I am one cool chick."
+
+Indi sums things up nicely, saying, "Even three years ago I never would have believed I would be able to go this far, to feel like I've almost entirely managed to express myself as the human-AU version of a glowy swishy neutral-gendered rave critter. It hasn't always been easy, and there's still a lot that could be done to make it smoother, but I think I'm in a good place. There's always ways to improve, always new things I think I can try, but each move seems to be smaller than the last, and I'm far more comfortable with myself than I ever could have imagined I'd be when I started trying."
+
+Given the stories of those exploring and expressing gender and identity through the framework of furry, the obvious next question that needs to be asked is "why?"
+
+Naturally, these sorts of things are not answered by any simple quip, nor even a single article like this. That said, there are some things that we can point to that might help explain just why the furry subculture plays as big a role as it does in the formation of its members' identities, gender and otherwise.
+
+There are a pair of twinned concepts within the realm of psychology that have been applied to this topic in particular. Aaron Devor, a sociologist and dean of graduate studies at the University of Victoria in Canada, described them most succinctly in their paper, "Witnessing and Mirroring: A Fourteen Stage Model of Transsexual Identity Formation."
+
+The stages themselves are interesting, of course. They describe the path that a trans person might take as they work through the process of coming out, transitioning, and so on. I'm not going to list them here, to save on ink --- the paper is free, easy to find legally online, and worth a read on its own. However, I'd like to talk about the twinned concepts mentioned in the title, as they play a much more integral role when it comes to figuring out why furry might be a good place for so many to explore identity.
+
+Witnessing is the idea that we gain something in the way of validation by having others see us as we see ourselves. For someone who is solidifying the image of themselves as they feel others ought to see it, to have someone outside themselves perceive them along those lines is incredibly validating. For trans women to called ma'am, or trans men to be able to use the men's room, or for non-binary folks to be referred to by their proper pronouns...all of these things are a form of witnessing, and help to reinforce the individual's sense that they are doing what is best for their life.
+
+To go along with that, mirroring is the idea that we gain validation by way of seeing others who are like us. For folks in the early stages of transitioning, this comes both in the form of seeing other folks in the early stages --- the "I can do it too" effect --- as well as folks later on in the process --- the "See, it can be done" effect. When we see something of ourselves reflected in others, it adds a bit of realism to something that might have once only been a fantasy.
+
+Within my circle of friends, we talk of the 'gender cascade'. Someone in our lives will come out and start exploring their own gender more openly, and we'll think to ourselves, "Oh, hm. If they can do it, so can I!" or perhaps, "Goodness, now that I'm confronted with this, I'm starting to question my own identity". For me, although there were several such people, the one I think of most immediately is Indi; watching vis explorations within the realm of gender is what got me to think seriously about all of my own internal struggle about gender identity. Ve, in turn, had vis own influences, stretching all the way back into the distant past, each of whom influenced others, creating a cascading flowchart of gender.
+
+This goes far beyond just our little in-group. Folks have often talked about the cascade, perhaps using terms such as 'transplosion', or one news source's amusing choice of 'transgender mania'. In both cases --- either constrained by the constituents of a subculture or relatively unrestricted and part of society at large --- those who are questioning their gender, or even those who are certain but unsure of beginning transition, can gain validation through witnessing and mirroring. That is, they can allow themselves to be seen as they are in safe contexts and see others who are like themselves in order to gain the confidence to move forward.
+
+Furry provides fertile soil for this sort of thing due in large part to the fact that we explicitly design the image that others think of when they think of us, through the formation of our personal characters, avatars, or fursonas, however you want to think of it.
+
+If you flip back to the graph of the sex of my characters that were represented in commissioned furry art, you can see a very definite shift away from male. At first, I shifted from masculine to explicitly genderless, because my assigned identity had become so painful to me that my instinct was to escape. From there, as I gained confidence and with validation from others, I started to incorporate more and more feminine aspects into my characters.
+
+Your character is an unspoken-yet-explicit way for a fur to say, "This is how I ought to be seen." For trans folk, it provides a useful tool in terms of exploring gender identity: although mirroring becomes mudding in many circumstances (for those role-playing as a different gender, being outed as such isn't exactly desirable), it sure as hell makes witnessing easier. I became a fox girl on the internet long before I got the letter that allowed me to start hormone replacement therapy.
+
+There's a conclusion that I draw from all of this, though it took me some time to connect the dots, pull it up, draw it all together, and many other metaphors.
+
+When I started associating with animal people on the internet, I did so as a fragile teen who could barely admit that sex was a thing that existed, much less as a being with a sexual orientation, never mind one that might not be straight, or even sexually active. Meeting and interacting with sexual, non-straight, and happy folk helped change that over the process of a few years, and a few halting relationships.
+
+Fast-forward a few years, and there I was: a mid-twenties person in the middle of an identity crisis. What was I? Was I nothing? Sex was a panic-riddled minefield of unmet expectations and awkward feelings of being built wrong. Was a I woman, with my my dreams of motherhood-but-not-fatherhood? Was I something in between, with the fact that womanhood discomfited me in a different way than manhood?
+
+Here, unlike with my orientation, I had enough experience to both look around me and see those going through something similar, as well as to take a step to be seen as who I felt that I might be. I started out haltingly, and went down a few wrong paths (looking at you, plush phase; love me some plushies, but it's notme), but I found myself a niche. It came in the form of a description and a few megabytes of graphical data culled from the minds and tablets of some artistically minded and decidedly amazing friends. It led to me confronting my therapist one day and saying, "Hey, can you write me a hormone letter?"
+
+Fast forward another year or two, and where am I?
+
+I'm putting together the pieces of the fact that this isn't a uniquely trans thing, though this is an article on the intersection between gender and furry. Neither is it a uniquely sexual thing, though the intersection between sex and furry is worth an article of its own. It's something one layer up. It's membership in a community that provides a mechanism and a place for these discoveries to take place.
+
+Is it a uniquely furry thing? Almost certainly not. There are many different subcultures out there that follow the same pattern. The My Little Pony fandom is a wonderful example, providing a similar outlet to those who claim membership. However, there's no doubt that furry played a rather large role in identity for me, just as it did for so many other folks. There's just so much to be said for the fact that we build the avatars that we use to interact with others here, beyond even what many other subcultures do.
+
+Without furry, I might just as well have come out as gay, then neutrois, then genderqueer, then trans, then all of those other wonderful labels. But would I have felt safe doing so? Would I have gotten all of the validation that I needed to feel healthy doing so? Would I have come away with countless other brothers, sisters, and non-binary siblings in whom I could confide, admire, and rejoice?
+
+I don't know. There's a lot to account for. My life has treated me well, in all, and I feel privileged to have lived it. That said, I'm not convinced that there would be an outlet that would have provided such for me.
+
+Would there be one, outside of furry? I rather think not.
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+So there I was, pretending to be a fox person (as all good stories should start), when I noticed something rather strange happening. It's probably telling that it wasn't me pretending to be a fox person that was the strange part, but I think by this point in my life I've so thoroughly integrated that aspect of myself, that avatar, that not having that at least at the back of my thoughts seems outlandish.
+
+The something strange was twofold: first, I started noticing that the way in which I interacted with others when I was doing the fox thing, down to my speech patterns, was totally different from the way in which I interacted with just about any other part of my life. Additionally, that change in style had rather profound impact on the ways in which others interacted with me, or at least with this constructed avatar. The more I thought about it, too, the more I realized that this construction of our front-stage personalities goes further than just how formally, submissively, or whateverly we act, but all the way down into the nuances of language, the subtleties of inflection, and the smallest of gestures.
+
+As to what happened, I'll need to go back a little bit, to about autumn of last year, in order to specify that I had left behind one of my old haunts - sort of taken a break from hanging out with some of the people that I'd spent so much time around previously. I'm not really sure why other than life in general was changing: I'd graduated, wound up in a new job, and was spending most of my time working or perusing a few time consuming hobbies. Jump forward to spring and summer this year, however, and I wound up back in the old online hangout that I'd spent so much of my life in the fandom.
+
+Things had changed, though, as they often do. Along with a few pretty big changes in my own life had come a few more subtle changes in the way I interacted with others within the context of furry, and especially in the language I used. Whereas before, I tended to interact in what I supposed was a grammatically correct if rather flowery manner, a lot of the changes in the intervening months had resulted in a shift in my language usage. I noticed myself using more fragments, dropping the letter s from possessives and plurals, or adding it in in other places, dropping pronouns and repeating words. For example, if I we to greet, say, my friend Scruff, it'd come out as, "Makyo cheer, Scruffs! Hug and hug and hug." Another change was that I posed quite a bit more, and posed things that I probably could've said, instead (for those who aren't into these things, on a MUCK, one may pose an action or say things "out loud").
+
+What had changed, in those months, to change the way in which I interacted with other people pretending to be animal-folk? Several things, I think. My friends group shifted, several things offline happened at once in March and after, and basically I just grew up a little, like you do. It was one of those stretches of time where life seemed to actually advance by paces rather than holding still, and I think that had a bigger effect on things like how I interacted with others than one might have expected.
+
+However, I don't think the change was all that surprising, nor restricted to furry. In the past, when I first started figuring out sexuality and how that played into my life, I bought into an expected stereotype - that is, I acted gayer because of my change inperceived sexual orientation, to the point where my husband said, at the time, that I was "too gay" for him. I had bought into that subculture, and as I drifted away from it over time, my affected interactions calmed back down into something close to what they were before, though certainly with more freedom to express myself than I'd had, the type that comes with integrating a previously rough edge into one's life. Similar things happened when I started trying to figure out gender, as well, and have similarly calmed down of late.
+
+Much of this comes down to the idea of front- and back-stage. I brought this up way back when in order to describe the fact that we don't present the whole of ourselves when interacting with fellow furries, but I feel that I glossed over it, then. The idea of a front-stage persona artfully created to interact in a social setting is certainly important with furries, even if we tend to expose more of our back-stage workings to the people we're emotionally connected to. This is why I'm sticking to using the words 'persona' and 'avatar' moreso than 'character' (which slips in every now and then to keep things interesting): they more accurately describe the idea that we are constructing this version of ourselves to present to others, whereas, although 'character' fits in with the stagecraft metaphor, it's been overloaded within the fandom to be a sort of second-hand reference to these avatars that so many of us create for ourselves.
+
+Just as interesting as the changes are the ways in which others interpret these front-stage avatars. In my case, and the thing that prompted me to think about this in the first place, this newer persona that I was presenting to others caused them to interact with me differently than they had before. Notably, the character was treated as if it was much smaller than previously - say, 5'2\" instead of 6'2\", and perhaps eighty pounds lighter - something to be hauled or pushed around rather than merely hugged or waved to. I should note that the location - a bar\* on FurryMUCK - has what I think of as a standard mix of chat and inconsequential roleplaying that shows up fairly often on MUCKs and IRC, so such things weren't necessarily out of place.
+
+What happens when we interact with those that we know more than passingly is that we tailor our actions to our interpretation of their persona. In such a case as furry, though, where that persona is often a carefully constructed avatar, that means that one is often actually guiding others' interactions with oneself. Of course, in any front-stage scenario, this is likely the case: viz. our contributors here on \[a\]\[s\]. Each of us has a different way of getting an idea across (many of which are less wandering than this), and each attracts a different sort of interaction from readership, whether in post comments, interactions on twitter, or passing comments elsewhere. It's simply that in any situation involving any sort of role-playing (and here I don't necessarily mean playing out a story or even e-hugging someone online, but assuming a role as a character and going along with it), this becomes a vastly more intentional affair.
+
+I know I've written plenty before about the whole concept of character versus self; this is the flip-side of it, the side seen from the perspective of those around us.
+
+There's a phrase that Jon Ronson uses in his recent bookThe Psychopath Test that I think we can co-opt, with some modifications for helping to describe this: being "reduced to one's maddest edges." This is most certainly applicable to the way I changed the way I interacted when I came out.
+
+Before it was removed completely from the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, the entry on homosexuality was changed to 'ego dystonic homosexuality', which was, in essence, when homosexuality caused one distress. It's now accepted that some forms of distress surrounding coming of age or the formation of identity are a healthy part of growth, but even so, during those periods of distress, one tends to focus and think quite a bit on what it means that they don't necessarily fit in society the same way they used to; one defines oneself by one's maddest edges, and when those edges aren't the roughest around, one finds that one has integrated what had been a problem into a part of one's identity.
+
+Within our subculture, within the group of folks out there that create these additional avatars, reduction to a subset of one's total edges, perhaps the fuzziest ones if not the maddest ones, is simply a part of the whole game. In the process of creating a character for ourselves, we often enhance some aspects and cover up others. We willingly reduce ourselves to some of our best, furriest edges, and we all accept that as part of the story of social interaction within the fandom. We willingly guide others' interpretation of our selves and we're all okay with that.
+
+I know ask this a lot with articles, but is this a furry thing? Probably not. I think there are a lot of instances, perhaps especially sexual orientation and gender identity as mentioned above, where membership in a community helps inform the edges used to construct that front-stage persona. However, I do think that a lot of this ties in with furry on some level or another. For one, there is the obvious connection to character creation, especially in a situation with such an obvious difference from oneself as species.
+
+Beyond that, though, the fandom does seem to attract a lot of self-aware or other inwardly oriented folks, which I think helps build a community where avatars are so important. 43% of respondents, for example, agreed or strongly agreed that they both had a tendency to over-think things and were focused on a few specific interests, which is 10% higher than an even distribution of the same (ref). Maybe I'm just over-thinking things, here, but I think it's not too surprising that a social group full of focused people would be so good at constructing personas for themselves simply in order to interact with each other. Not just constructing, but also being prepared to interact with someone who has done much the same, accepting their foxdom or wolfitude as part of their fuzziest edges.
+
+-   Of course. Makyo's first axiom: get enough furries together on the internet, and they will spontaneously generate a bar, club, tavern, or cafe in which to hang out.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/meaning-part-1.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/meaning-part-1.md
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+This is an idea that has been tumbling around in my head ever since I started this site. In fact, I suppose you could call a lot of my earlier posts a sort of fumbling around as I tried to articulate this idea. The idea that I'm talking about is the concept of what furry is. That is, not only what a makes a furry a furry, but how is furry a thing, and where did we all come from. A lot of the articles on this site have come at this idea from different angles, but usually focusing on a single aspect or in a stream-of-consciousness manner.
+
+When I write posts for \[a\]\[s\], I do so in what's called the "watercolor strategy", as named by Daniel Chandler in The Act of Writing. That is, for the most part, I start at the beginning, and when I get to the end, I stop. It's a strategy that, to my mind, would work almost solely for the introspective writer, one who internalizes a subject, then blasts it out on to paper (or screen). The idea is that one works as one does with watercolor, where there is no real way to correct a mistake or change what one has done - one must simply start at the beginning and continue until one feels that the work is done, then stop. There is no editing along the way, as there would be in the "oil painting strategy"; with oils, one has the ability to paint over the paint already in place without worrying about muddying the painting or ruining the paper. As Chandler quotes in the section on the watercolor strategy, "rewrite in process...interferes with flow and rhythm, which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material" (Plimpton, 1989, quoted in Chandler)\[1\].
+
+In a lot of posts, this has worked well. I think that I often work in short enough sections that I can hold most of the article in my head with only the barest of sketches taken down mostly as reminders to what I had already planned rather than a true outline (which would be the "architectural" or "bricklaying" strategies).
+
+My process has occasionally come back to haunt me in that I've incompletely captured an idea. It happened very early on when I wrote about the default furry, which eventually turned into the post about doxa: what I was trying to name in the "default furry" post wasn't so much trends in character creation as the fact that there is a factual basis for much of what we take for granted within the fandom.
+
+One of the big things that keeps me coming back to these subjects is the standard artist's complaint that I'm never really satisfied with the product. I can barely even call myself an artist, here - so much of what I've done with \[a\]\[s\] is rehashing ideas I've heard of or learned about in a non-furry context within the context of furry, and this piece here is no exception. Rather, I'm one with artistic habits.
+
+I was unhappy with both of my posts on "participation mystique". It's such a wonderful concept and fits so perfectly with the contiguous fandom that I couldn't get it out of my head. All the same, I couldn't seem to get down exactly what I wanted to with it. The first post turned into an idea of how members identify with the fandom, which is close to, but not exactly participation mystique. The second post veered off course and into (still related) waters of the definition of our subculture.
+
+That those posts feel as though they inadequately captured what I wanted to grates on me, so I feel that, as the person best in a position to correct my mistakes, I probably ought to. In order to do that, however, I'm going to have to start with a little bit of background that I've picked up over the last few weeks of study and years of background on the subject even if it isn't immediately applicable to this furry site, and I'm going to have to abandon the watercolor strategy and at least work toward the architectural strategy. It may be a bit of a long travel, and I'm sorry if I wind up coming off as boring, but I believe that a lot of these ideas are pertinent to figuring out what is going on with the fandom, and why the concept of membership is important. If nothing else, I find the concepts very interesting, and I think that many others will as well.
+
+A Linguistic Introduction
+
+I'd like to begin here with a basic introduction on some of the linguistics that are involved in exploring meaning in the fandom. There's a very important reason for this which I'll go into more depth on later, but for now, it will suffice to say that language is important to us because our fandom is wrapped up in it. We describe our characters, we write stories about furries, and, above all, we communicate; we are a social fandom. Language is always important to subcultures such as ours which subsist on social interaction.
+
+There is an argument to be made that language, rather than being a defined entity, is simply a collection of idiolects. Dialect is a commonly known word, of course, but language can be broken down further to the speech patterns used by an individual. Each person's pattern of language use is unique to them, just as their handwriting and fingerprints are unique. This is their idiolect. The argument here is that, despite pervailing attitudes within the United States and elsehwere, a language is made up of its mutually comprehensible dialects, which are spoken by individuals with all of their unique idiolects.
+
+I bring this up not only because it's fascinating (to me, at least), but because there is another step in there that's missing between idiolect and dialect, and that is the sociolect. A sociolect is the subset of a language that is shared among a social group. While this may have started with the difference between the language spoken by different social classes, with the growth of the middle class, particularly of skilled workers, the numnber of recognized sociolects has grown. My partner, a machinist by trade, is able to share this language within the social group of other machinists. When they go on "thou", "scrap", "tombstones", "jobshops," and "print-to-part," they can understand each other within the context of their social group.
+
+Similarly, the fandom has started to pull together its own sociolect formed of the collected idiolects of its members. That we have our own "jargon" with words like "fursona", "hybrid", and "taur"\[2\] that goes along with our membership to this nebulous group helps to define the fact that we have become a more well-defined subculture, or, to put it better, a community. A community, in this sense, is a coherent group composed of multiple actors, and that is just what we are within the fandom: we act within and upon it, both taking from and adding to it by way of our membership. It works to say it either way: our sociolect is a combination of our idiolects because we are a community composed of members, and we are a community composed of members because we have our sociolect as a combination of our idiolects - our ways of communicating made up of those who communicate with each other.
+
+Put this way, we can come up with a sort of hierarchy of language. A language is comprised of dialects and sociolects, subsets of the overall language based around social, economic, or geopolitical groups. The dialects and sociolects, in turn, are made up of the individial idiolects of their members. There, of course, some mixing due to new speakers of the language and borrowed terms, but also due to the fact that individuals often belong to more than one social group, and thus may take part in more than one sociolect or dialect - my partner is a machinist, but he is also a furry, for instance. A good example might be the apparent dichotomy between "realistic" and "toony" furry art, perhaps due to the overlap between the furry subculture and the art world (whereas "realism" isn't something I hear much at my own job as a programmer).
+
+Much of this focus on our means of communication ties into the Internet and the prominence of its role within the fandom. There's really no doubting that a good portion of the fandom "grew up" on the net. The ways in which it facilitates communication between individuals or groups regardless of geographic location fits in so well with a fandom that bases so much of its existence around social interaction. There are a few terms that become important due to this fact, namely "text", "corpus", "medium", and "modality". A "text" is a unit of communication, whether it's a journal post, an image and all of its associated discussion, such as comments, or a webpage like this. A "corpus" is a collection of related texts - this post would be a text, but \[adjective\]\[species\] would be a corpus - though it can be taken in broader terms, such as the collection of all different texts on FurAffinity - images, journals, comments, user pages - or simply the collection of all texts within our subculture: the furry corpus, if you will.
+
+"Medium" and "modality" are similarly intertwined. The "medium" is, obviously enough, the way in which a text reaches us, and the "modality" is what the text is constructed of. For instance, words and language would be the modality, whereas that can be divided into written words read off a screen on a webpage, or spoken words shared among a group of friends at a convention. The reason I'm bringing up these terms is that, taken together, they form our social interaction within the fandom, and the reason that it's /important/ is because, in particular, our choices of media and corpi are language in and of themselves: that is, that we rely on the Internet for so much of our communication, whether out of necessity or desire, and allow the idiolects that we've formed on the 'net to creep into our verbal communications with each other is something of a statement in and of itself.
+
+Put another way, our medium is important because it involves the concepts of human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer (or, more specifically, Internet) mediated communication (IMC). The first, HCI, is important because computers are not free-form entities through which we may communicate however we want. Instead, we communicate through the specific media of SecondLife, through comments on submissions on FA, through MUCKs, MUDs, IRC, and IMs. The actual means of intereaction within each is different from each other, and certainly different than other media. For instance, posing actions, and thus role-playing, are quite simple on MU\*s and IRC, and thus more common, whereas the same is not true of instant messages and the less-immediate form of comment threads and forums. The latter concept of IMC becomes particularly evident in SecondLife, where the action taken by your character on the screen is distanced from reality by necessity. Shooting a gun, turning a cartwheel, or doing a dance are all usually thought of physical activities offline, but on SecondLife, they are all the result of commands typed in by the user or accessed via the mouse on a head up display.
+
+It's an easy thing to say that communication is the basis of our subculture, but more difficult to express it in terms of the source and result of a sociolect comprised of the colliding idiolects of its members. While that is far from the only thing that furry has going for it, it's a definite signifier of our being a society in our own right, and one of the easiest to perceive, once one takes a step back. We have settled our concentration certain media for a variety of reasons - the ease of constructing an avatar on the Internet, the mediated sharing of texts through different websites and services, and the 'net's way of connecting individuals across distance. Our choice of media is a form of communication in a way, though not simply due to the benefits to be gained from it. There is more, though, to be sure.
+
+Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 1 Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 2 Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 3
+
+Read the whole article at once.
+
+I'm trying something new by splitting this post up, even though it's one coherent article. The next parts will be coming over the next two days. Comments will be disabled until the entire post is published. Thanks for your patience!
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/meaning-part-2.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/meaning-part-2.md
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+Miss the first part? Check that out here!
+
+On Semiotics
+
+When I first heard about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I rejected it immediately. It states, in brief, that the way we conceive of the world around us, the way we assign meaning to things, is shaped entirely by the language that we use to describe that meaning. I think that part of the reason that I had such a negative reaction to the idea right off the bat was that I learned about the hypothesis via the constructed language lojban. The idea behind lojban (always written with a lower-case 'l') is that, if the way we think is shaped by the language we use, than a language that is totally and completely "logical" ought to help one to think totally and completely logically.
+
+That idea really grated on me for a few reasons. First of all, I was in a Madrigal choir at the time, and while the Madrigal came from the Renaissance period, much of the words to the songs spend time evoking romantic imagery. That, and much of the songs we performed weren't exactly Madrigals in their own right, but composed later in the Romantic or Neo-romantic eras. Put simply, I was a teenager inundated in romanticism - the concept of being able to explain everything only with logical terms and without the metaphor inherent in romanticism didn't jive with me. Additionally, having been brought up by two atheist parents, I was going through my own spiritual renaissance at the time, and so I was always finding these neat, non-spatiotemporal, sometimes ineffible ideas around myself, whether it be religion or something more new-agey.
+
+I was a non-Whorfian, basically. I believed, at the time, that we fit words entirely to the meanings that exist independently of those words. There is certainly an argument to be made for that, as well. We all, in one way or another, are able to perceive what a "tree" is. There's a way for us to scientifically define it, and there isn't necessarily a way for us to claim that a tree is only a tree because we have all conceived of the language for defining what a tree is.
+
+I'm no longer fifteen, though, and things have changed. I have had my own experience with the way that meaning comes to us through language or signs of some sort, not least of all with my attempts at such things with these articles. I think that I might now call myself a believer in Moderate Whorfianism. In his book The Act of Writing, Daniel Chandler explains that many linguists would find extreme Whorfianism hard to swallow, but may accept a weak version of it as defined in the following way:
+
+the emphasis is on the poitential for thinking to be 'influenced' rather than unavoidably 'determined' by language;
+
+it is a two-way process, so that 'the kind of language we use' is also influenced by 'the way we see the world'
+
+any influence is ascribed not to 'Language' as such or to one language as compared with another, but to the use within a language of one variety rather than another (typically a sociolect - the language used primarily by members of a particular social group)
+
+emphasis is given to the social context of language use rather than to purely linguistic considerations, such as the social pressure in particular contexts to use language in one way rather than another.\[1\]
+
+This leads us to the next topic of discussion: semiotics. There is argument as to whether or not linguistics is a subset of semiotics, or vice versa. Whereas linguistics aims to tackle the use and meaning of language, semiotics aims to tackle the use and language of meaning. They are certainly closely related - given that language, written language specifically, but also speech, provides a measureable, non-objective metric to study, much of semiotics deals with the use of words within a certain context to either ascribe or convey meaning, as well as the additional meaning conveyed via word choice.
+
+Beyond that, however, semiotics also takes into account such things as the medium and modality of communication, regardless of whether it has to do with words. Semiotics is just as comfortable looking at body language and posture, meaning conveyed through the layout of a webpage, or even additional meanings conveyed through art, which most definitely has something to with our own subculture. That is, rather than focusing on language itself, semiotics focuses on the meanings conveyed between actors within a community. It is not that linguistics has nothing to do with meaning, nor that it doesn't take the social context into account, simply that that focusing specifically on those areas is the realm of semiotics, instead.
+
+The process of ascribing meaning to a sign - be it a word, a gesture, music, or some aspect of a piece of visual art - is known as semiosis. Semiosis isn't something that happens on it's own, we don't ascribe meaning to the word "tree" without having some framework in which to ascribe that meaning. Signs are parts in the whole of sign systems or "codes". A code could be a language, but using that word in particular is a poor choice, because language always takes place within some context and carries additional signifiers along with it. "Tree" said calmly, for instance, carries different connotations than "TREE!" shouted fearfully. Even in a text-only environment such as this, the punctuation and capitalization are signs in and of themselves. All of this is taking place within a cultural context, as well. With language in particular, the sign (a word) is a portion of a code that is shared among actors in a community, whether it's the community of English-speakers (a language) or the community of people interested in anthropomorphics interacting online (the sociolect of furries on the Internet).
+
+This all goes to show that semiotics goes beyond the individual. The webcomic xkcd recently performed quite a feat\[3\] by displaying a different comic to different viewers. The comic that was chosen depended not only on the viewer's choice of browser, but also on their location and even the size of their browser window. The title of the comic was "Umwelt", which is the collection of sign-relations (briefly, the pair of sign-meaning, or the triad of sign-interpretant-meaning) that make up one's perception of the world. We cannot help to do anything outside our umwelt, other than to assimilate new meanings into it through semiosis.
+
+We aren't nearly so solipsistic, though, and so every time our umwelt collides with another through interpersonal relationships, we influence each other. When umwelten group together naturally through an attractor such as a mutual interest, we wind up with a semiotic niche. That is, when a social group forms, a sociolect can form with them due to the way the group steers semiosis, the way it finds meaning.
+
+These semiotic niches work much the same way as umwelten, in that they can converge and share boundaries - they all, after all, take part in the world of meaning around them, known as the semiosphere. That is, something like furry will share its meaning not only with Internet culture, but also western culture, anime culture to some extent, and, as a whole, belongs to this whole perceived world around us. Beyond the semiosphere, "language not only does not function, it does not exist."\[4\] Without some framework for meaning, be it words, visual art, music, or anything, there is only formless thought.
+
+If we were to modify our language hierarchy to be about semiotics (helpfully done in advance), it would look something like this, then. Similar to the idea that languages are made up of sociolects and dialects, which are in turn made up of idiolects, so too is the semiosphere made up of semiotic niches, which are in turn made up of the umwelten of individual members, the combined basis for creating meaning in the world around us. This is, of course, a necessary gloss over the field of semiotics, which is quite large. The goal of this article isn't to go into commutation tests and syntactic analysis of furry works, though, just to provide a groundwork of the concepts of language and semiotics in the fandom.
+
+It is within this construct of signs and meaning that we not only form our ideas of what means "tree", what an image of a tree is and what it represents, but what abstract concepts such as our subculture are and what they're made up of. As individuals and members, or even as outsiders looking in, we build the sign-relations, we come up with the meaning of what is and is not furry, each to our own. It is where those interpretations meet and generate a coherent idea of furry within more than just the individual's point of view that we wind up with the furry fandom itself.
+
+Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 1 Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 2 Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 3
+
+Read the whole article at once.
+
+I'm trying something new by splitting this post up, even though it's one coherent article. The next parts will be coming over the next two days. Comments will be disabled until the entire post is published. Thanks for your patience!
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/meaning-part-3.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/meaning-part-3.md
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+Miss the first part? Check that out here!
+
+Tying it all together
+
+At some point, the furry fandom started to coalesce. Some would put it in the 1980s - a reader and friend posits that the fandom really got started September 1st, 1980 at Noreascon with Steve Gallacci\[5\] - some would put it much, much earlier, and some perhaps later, into the '90s when the Internet became truly accessible. For the sake of this artcle and much of this site in general, we'd probably go with some time in the mid to late '80s for the source of the fandom. This was the time when the umwelten, the spheres of meaning for individuals, began to collide in enough numbers to form that critical mass that led to the formation of a subculture rather than a collection of enthusiasts. Furries doubtless existed before, as is certainly evident even within our own readership, but the furry fandom as a culture phenomenon, the basis of study for much of this site (rather than individual furries themselves), relied upon this interest being actively shared among ur-members.
+
+It was a sort of participatory semiosis that helps to define the exploratory beginnings of any new social group. It wasn't so much that individuals hadn't come up with the idea of fox-people before, as that now they were in the process of finding meaning in the fact that there was a cultural identity to be had, and assigning it to the signs of "funny animal" and furry, to foxes and cats leading extraordinary or banal lives, to the very feeling of membership. In her book Straight, Hanne Blank makes a similar argument that the growth of heterosexuality (and its complement, homosexuality) was due in part to the process of self identificiation, the semiosis among individuals that reached a critical mass after a few influential authors such as Freud became widely read.
+
+In short, I tend to focus on what I'm calling the "contiguous fandom". That is, a fandom made of of members which share the borders of their umwelten, the meanings attached to the sign that is 'furry', in order to create a coherent whole of a fandom. This is the importance of membership; it is the act of being actors in a community that helps to define the community as an entity.
+
+Another way to think of it is that this is our participation mystique. By basing part of one's identity on one's membership to an idea or community, one helps to define both oneself and the thing of which one is a member. To put it in the terms of linguistics above, we readily adopt our sociolect. Remember here that we're taking into account all of the signs available to us. Not only are we taking in this social interaction using words in a furry context, but we're always taking in the visual aspect of furry art and the participatory aspect of conventions, fursuiting, and so on.
+
+Beyond just adopting the sociolect, however, we're continuously adding to it. We aren't just passive observers, but we are actively participating in the creation of new texts, whether it's voicing our appreciation of art, taking part in role-playing, or even running a silly meta-furry blog where one talks about the semiotics of the furry subculture.
+
+Given the contiguous fandom, I can't continue without providing some thoughs on what's "outside" that mostly coherent group of individuals that make up furry. There is also importance in not being a member, in not having that participation mystique. When it comes to signs in semiotics, there is a loose division into dyadic and triadic signs. With dyadic signs, you simply have one entity assigning the meaning of what a tree is to the sign "tree", but in triadic signs, one has the additional context of just who it is that is doing the assigning alongside what is is that is being assigned. This is the interpretant sign the one to whom "I" and "you" hold meaning as opposed to one and the other, and, although it's abstract, it becomes very important when it comes to membership.
+
+When someone says "I am a furry", they are using a dyadic sign to signify that a portion of themselves is defined as a member of the furry community. However, when someone says "that person is a furry", then the sign shifts to being triadic: the interpretant is taking an active role in specifying that a sign ("furry") signifies an object ("that person"). Someone can always construct their own sign relations at any time, but when it involves a third party, it has the tendency of muddying the waters of the semiotic niche (after all, if it were straight-forward, there wouldn't be much discussion to have).
+
+What this means is that someone can certainly contribute to the sociolect without necessarily becoming a member of the society which owns it. There are more than enough examples of this to go around: Watership Down and "Robin Hood", or perhaps Coyote or Raven or Jackal. The creators of these signs and contexts did not necessarily take up membership in the furry social group, but they certainly did add to the niche of language and meaning that has been carved out over the last thirty years or so. This is complicated even further by the fact that the niche is made up of a community of actors rather than just one: something like Coyote as trickster may seem plenty furry to one member of the community, but only tangentially so, if at all, to another.
+
+There are a few problems surrounding this concept of furry as a semiotic niche, and they have to do with the depth at which one analyzes the fandom, or the distance from it one stands. If, for example, one were to step back from furry a little ways, one can look at it a different way and see it in the context of a related field: genre theory.
+
+Furry as a genre is, on the surface, not a surprising concept. One can think of furry literature just as easily as one considers fantasy literature, or perhaps historical fiction. There is an underlying topic that lays beneath the corpi of all three genres. However, as Chandler puts it, "The classification and hierarchical taxonomy of genres is not a neutral and 'objective' procedure."\[6\] The important point here is that the difference between objective and subjective interpretation is, in the terms of semiotics, the act of subjective interpretation is a sign in and of itself. That so many furries today would consider Disney's "Robin Hood" to be a furry movie holds meaning both in regards to the object of the film and the fuzzy interpretants themselves. It is difficult even for me to interpret the movie outside of a furry context - I saw it first in Elementary school, and even then spent time drawing foxes afterwards. Needless to say, genre's a difficult thing to determine from within.
+
+This leads us to the second issue of determining a definition from within or without. If we bring back the concept of Moderate Whorfianism, this becomes more evident. In that context, language influences thinking, but if the thinking is the process of defining either one's membership within the community, or, more dangerously, defining the community as a whole as we are here, then a feedback loop is started. If our contributions to the sociolect modify the sociolect that we're in the process of studying, even individually, then it becomes even more difficult to pin down. This is quite the problem when studying the fandom from within.
+
+Studying the fandom from outside introduces other related risks, however. It's difficult to study something like this from the outside, as well, without having some concept of the use of the texts involved within their context. That is, it seems like studying a participatory corpus such as that of the output of our subculture without participating as well has the risk of coming up with an incomplete mental map of what all is going on. A good example of this (and I do mean good - the studies are well worth reading) would be the work of Kathleen Gerbasi, such as her study Furries A to Z (Anthropomoprhism to Zoomorphism)\[7\]. While the study is well conducted and provides a good, in-depth look at the fandom, entries to her livejournal page indicate an involvement with the fandom not quite at the level of membership, but perhaps above simple scientific observation.
+
+There is, it seems, a bit of indeterminacy when it comes to studying something such as a social phenomenon. By investigating or defining, we change, or at least risk changing that which is investigated or defined. It's part of the aforementioned feedback loop, as certainly the goal of the investigator is to be changed in some way by the thing being investigated. That's what gaining knowledge is all about.
+
+Finally, the furry corpus in particular is extremely difficult to analyze. This is mostly due to the proliferation of texts, media, and modalities. We produce a lot. It is to the point where it's even difficult to break the corpus down beyond lines other than simply different media. Even those lines are blurred by the profuse cross-sharing of information across media, such as the reposting on twitter of FA journals that link to one or several images, potentially hosted on other sites.
+
+There is, of course, plenty of writing to go by within the fandom. It's not simply writing for the sake of adding to the furry genre, such as it is, though, but writing in the form of image descriptions, journals, and rants on twitter. The idea is carried further to social interaction with written language, through twitter conversations, comments on images, role-playing, and instant messaging. Beyond the word, however, there is our focus on visual art; whether or not visual art is the primary draw to the fandom is certainly up for debate, but there is a reason that one of the primary social hubs online is an art website and one of the big draws at conventions is the art-show and dealers den.
+
+There are more complex forms of communication than static text and images, though, and here is where things become quite difficult to analyze in any meaningful way. Fursuits, for instance, provide communication in a visual medium similar to that as art - they are pleasing to look at and express the meaning of the character they are intended to embody - but they are also an interactive medium. A medium that can move and talk, can hug and bounce and stalk and take on a life of its own.
+
+And beyond even the concept of extending one's character into a costume one can don, there is our social interaction that happens on a more mundane basis, yet still within the boundaries of "furry interaction". There is an acceptable behavior, however ill-defined, that goes along with being a furry. It's difficult to speak of beyond tendancies and social cues, as many such social customs that come with membership in a subculture or fandom. It has been noted before, though, that one can tell the furries at a furry convention and a furmeet apart from the non-furs. There's a way that we act, which likely has much more to do with the idea of shared membership and social status than an interest in animals. JM, for instance, writes about the prevalence of geekiness and the behavioral norms that go along with it as they pertain to our fandom\[8\].
+
+There are subtle cues and portions of our sociolect all over the place, though, and it doesn't always have to do with direct communication between actors in the community. The subtler things such as structures in websites (Flickr and DeviantArt, for instance, don't have a category option specifically for species) and conventions (the previously mentioned focus on dissemination of texts through the artshow and dealers areas), or even in media already geared toward social interaction such as MUCKs (again with a species flag) and SecondLife (where one can purchase a skin not only of the species of one's character, but of the exact color required).
+
+Furry is a heady mix of a full slice of human society that somehow seems to remain topical. We have the glue of our mutual interest in anthropomorphics, but beyond that, we have spread our corpus across several different texts in our own personal ways of generating meaning within the context of our subculture. By the interaction of our own spheres of meaning we have generated our own semiotic niche, however fuzzy around the edges, and come up with this idea of "furry". There's no real easy way to pull it apart, even given as broad a topic as semiotics, but by investigating and participating, we always seem to expand it all the further.
+
+Conclusion
+
+This thing we call "furry" is clearly more difficult to pin down than one simple article or even a whole website will cover. It's something that I'd tried before in a few different ways. In fact, it seems to be something that everyone tries as part of their membership dues. Every now and then, once a month or so, I'll come across a journal post of someone else's take on the whole fandom, and the beautiful (and yes, a little frustrating) part of it is that they're all totally different.
+
+We can make at least one statement, having taken all of this into account, though. Furry is a complex interaction of actors within a social community surrounding an already complex sign-meaning relationship. Beyond that, though, the issue grows complex by our reliance on two main modalities: natural language, which is always prone to misinterpretation; and visual art, which is only barely analyzable, and limited further, anyhow, by the medium of primarily hand-drawn images. Both of these are inherently ambiguous, and often based on aesthetics and identification on a per-member basis. That is, what is furry to one is not necessarily furry to another, or even the creator. The final level of obfuscation comes through the means with which so many interact with the fandom, via a willfully constructed avatar, something which does not match the individual themselves out of necessity.
+
+This article and any like it will have it's necessary downsides. We didn't really get anywhere, all told - we defined some terms in order to help us understand the ways in which we interact with our subculture, both throught the linguistic concept of a sociolect, a language used among our co-fans, and the semiotic concept of a niche, a set of meanings and sign relations shared by the members of the niche. It's hard to get anywhere with either, though, especially in such a loose-weaved community. Semiotics and lingustics are all about statements of subtle facts made out in the open. There are concrete tests and analyses to be done (if one could port the commutation test to our visual art in order to find the "graphemes" of muzzles and tails, that could lead to interesting results), but they're difficult to really do well, and even if they were, it's not guaranteed that they would lead to any results, nor if any of the results would even be welcome.
+
+There are positives to be had as well, though. I hope that the article has provided more insight into the the linguistics and semiotics of the fandom. The ideas of sociolects and genres are a good way to think about this broad base of which we are a part, because they provide a foundation of words on which we can base our own explanations of what it means to be a furry. And, beyond the definitions, it's nice to maintain a certain sort of disputability. It allows for a greater membership through greater self identification - more people can become furry because the definition of what furry is can accomodate them. And hey, that sense of mystery about the fandom is always nice, as well. It's a hook for bringing in new members, and for keeping the old ones interested, too.
+
+I know this has been a little out of the norm, but I wanted to actually take my time to research an article and provide a more coherent look at the reasons for studying the fandom, and for this site in general. These things are important to us, too. The meanings we create determine our interactions within the fandom and how they take place. Beyond that, though, by participating in our community as members, we contribute to it. This is how we grow, explore, and find meaning,
+
+Where to go from here? Well, I hope that the cognizance of the signs around us is helpful in a way. Every word, every piece of art, and every interaction between members is a sign from which we can glean a message and to which we can attach our own individual meanings, however mundane. The meanings inherent in these relations surround us and help define our membership, and we're certainly always creating more. If nothing else, there's always more work to go when it comes to exploring the furry subculture.
+
+Citations
+
+\[1\] Chandler, Daniel. "The Act of Writing". http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/act/act.html accessed April 3, 2012.
+
+\[2\] Zik. "furry lexicon". http://pastebin.com/GR7MqsnJ accessed, April 2, 2012.
+
+\[3\] Munroe, Randall. "Umwelt". http://xkcd.com/1037/ accessed April 1, 2012.
+
+\[4\] Lotman, Yuri M. On the semiosphere. (Translated by Wilma Clark) Sign Systems Studies, 33.1 (2005). http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/sss/Lotman331.pdf accessed April 5, 2012.
+
+\[5\] Geddes, M.\" The History of the Furry Fandom, Pt 1\" (2012).
+
+\[6\] Chandler, Daniel. "An Introduction to Genre Theory". http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/intgenre/intgenre1.html accessed April 7, 2012.
+
+\[7\] Gerbasi, Kathleen. "Furries A to Z (Anthropomorphism to Zoomorphism) in"Society and Animals\", 16, 197-222. http://www2.asanet.org/sectionanimals/articles/GerbasilFurries.pdf accessed March 15, 2012.
+
+\[8\] JM. "Geeks". http://www.adjectivespecies.com/2012/04/09/geeks/ accessed April 9, 2012.
+
+Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 1 Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 2 Meaning Within a Subculture - Part 3
+
+Read the whole article at once.
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+
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+One of my classmates in college was pursuing what I believe was a double major in engineering and music composition. He was a pretty great guy, at his most helpful when it came to the discussions on sound and acoustics. He was also a huge nerd, but so were we all: we were the first class to help get the composition department at the university up and running, so we were the ones actually pushing to get the degree program started - my nerdiness took the form of running the composition lab.
+
+For his junior recital, one of the two we were required to give consisting entirely of pieces we composed, he performed an extended three-movement piece for solo French Horn titled "Journey To Arelle". It's one of those titles you have to say out loud to get the joke. The song was a tone poem about what mental processes a character left to idle on Word of Warcraft must go through when their player went off to "deal with RL".
+
+The idea of RL - "Real Life" - in opposition to things furry is, I think, an interesting and telling one. There's a lot to be said for immersion when it comes to gaming, for sure, but many furries apply it to much more than just an experience that can be had sitting at a console. We're hardly the only ones, of course, but it helps in understanding just how the fandom works to know that it occurs in a context that is not always "real life."
+
+Role-play in and of itself is usually set as an opposite to real life. The idea of something in opposition to structured activities such as role-play is not a new one; this is easily seen in the previous example, of course. One is spending the time and effort to pretend to be this character within the set bounds of the game, computer or otherwise, in which that character ultimately resides. There is a literal role to play of some other living (or perhaps undead) being, here, and to attend to daily tasks that may be wildly out of character if not outright out of period is certainly returning to "real life". There just isn't the connection tying the two lives together, there.
+
+The difference between a strict role-playing type scenario and furry, however, is that furry has no rules, no objectives, and no canon. This isn't to say that it can't, of course, as plenty of folk I know within the fandom play furry-themed RPGs such as Ironclaw or Usagi Yojimbo, or even appropriate not-strictly-furry games to their own uses, creating new species to be used in, say, Star Wars themed pencil-and-paper role-playing games.
+
+Furry lacks a central story, though: there's no canon to guide us other than the shared interest that ties us together. In our case, though we often play the roles of our created or chosen characters in various ways, from interacting with them in text-only chat rooms and MU\*s to commissioning artwork or dressing up in giant animal bags at conventions, we don't have rules or story to separate out a perfectly livable daily life as an animal person from a perfectly livable daily life as someone pretending to be an animal person.
+
+I think this shows that furry is something beyond just role-play: it's a whole separate context, a separate life lived in opposition to what a lot of people still think of as "normal". We incorporate role-play as a tool rather than as some sole form of interaction. We live our lives out as furries here and there, but for the large part, much of our interaction within the fandom remains a form of escapism. Beyond that, however, furry as a subculture is still seen by many both inside and outside the fandom as an interest that's bizarre at best, downright abnormal at worst.
+
+This isn't an opinion held by just those outside, as I've said. The fact that we maintain such a strict separation of concerns when it comes to our shared affinity for anthropomorphized animals and day-to-day interaction with those who don't share our interest shows our own willingness to accept what we consider a normal life alongside the lives we lead within our chosen subculture. It's willful and, as JM and I both point out, hardly negative and not without utility. A sense of normalcy pays off just as much as all that we gain by virtue of this transgressive subculture.
+
+This isn't the type of thing that furry is alone in creating. There are other hobbies and lifestyles - especially the latter - which readily fit into a separate context from everyday life. These are the types of things where one might find oneself being reminded, "don't cross the streams". The further something is from being regarded as a part of the main-stream (you'll forgive the mixed metaphor, here), the more likely it is to be seen as constructive when one prevents it from overlapping with day-to-day life. Philately, while definitely a bookish and stereotypically nerdy sort of hobby, is something one might freely talk about with friends and coworkers outside the stamp-collecting subculture. One's collection of firearms or bedroom proclivities rarely mix well in so-called polite company without also being some sort of transgression.
+
+This holds especially true for lifestyles. In recent years, even in this last year, being lesbian, gay, or bisexual has hardly entailed the same amount of hiding a core part of oneself at work and with friends, separating out a portion of life from what's considered normal by society at large. This wasn't always the case, though, and it's humbling to look back, as someone who grew up fitting more or less solidly into one of those categories, and see how differently the world works today in terms of "crossing the streams".
+
+The interesting thing to consider with this analogy is the level of choice involved in furry as compared to sexual orientation. I used the term "lifestyles" intentionally above, though it's fallen out of favor when referring to one's orientation, because of the fact that there exists a significant portion of the furry world that lives furry, identifies as furry, and feels that they don't necessarily have a choice about doing so, much in the same way that many live gay, identify as gay, and feel they don't have a choice in the matter. One can look at a hobby from the outside and see it as something that someone chooses to do and generally be correct about that, but not always. For some, those often called lifestylers, it truly can be seen as something more akin to an orientation or identity than a simple hobby, and thus be harder to separate from every day contexts.
+
+JM and I have both discussed the usefulness in both accepting and rejecting a separate context for furry in our lives, depending on the scenario, and I think this acceptance of our subculture as a slightly-less-than-real life when stood up next to what so many of us refer to as "RL" is worth taking a step back and looking at. It's hardly a big thing, or an exciting thing, or a new thing, but it does show the ways in which we differentiate furry from other things in our lives, and even define the boundaries of what each of us considers to be the furry fandom.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/species-selection-and-character-creation-follow-up.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/species-selection-and-character-creation-follow-up.md
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+This is just a quick follow-up with some further information about the Species Selection and Character Creationarticle posted last week. I normally post on Wednesdays and I had an article that could have been scheduled today, but with that article likely needing more space than this one and the desire not to distract from it with a simple addendum, I figured I'd swap the two days around and give tomorrow'sreal article its time as the featured post!
+
+Last Wednesday, even as the article was going live, I was packing up my laptop for an afternoon at a coffee shop (The Alley Cat, where the phone is always answered with a personable "meow!")where I would spend a few hours talking with the inimitable Klisoura about furries and data. Among other topics (some of which will show up here on \[a\]\[s\] quite soon), we poked around some of the species data a little further, and found some more interesting facts. That, combined with some input from others both on Twitter and FurAffinity, and some volunteers in private communication, got me thinking that more information is always better than less, and so here we go!
+
+Common Terms
+
+Over the process of exploring the data with Klisoura, we removed several common words such as the name of the species, articles such as 'a' or 'an', and so on. However, we left in many additional terms that showed variation between species as they do help show the differences in the ways in which people thought of their characters. A few of these words, such as 'love'/'loved' or 'personality' show up on every chart, of course, but at different rates, showing a stronger sense of, say, personality alignment with one species, but with a greater sense of, say, loving with another species.
+
+However, this tends to hide some of the differences in responses that show species perception rather than character perception due to their relative prevalence. By removing these common words as well, we find that the words associated with the stereotypes or perception of a particular species are emphasized even further, and those differences made plain. Check it out below!
+
+\[gallery ids="1480,1481,1482,1483,1484,1485,1486,1487,1488,1489" orderby="rand"\]
+
+Additional Surveys, Visualization, and Exploration
+
+The amount of data amassed is quite large. Current data sets include the Furry Survey from 2009 until present (though we will not be providing information from current data until the 2013 survey itself is finished), the 2012 \[adjective\]\[species\] Census and Survey, and all of the \[a\]\[s\] small polls and surveys, not to mention aggregated data from other sources such as the IARP and other surveys, and scrape-able data-sources which we have used in the past.
+
+As I am fond of saying in the Exploring the Fandom Through Data panel\*, exploration is a cycle of sorts: from collection of data through understanding, giving back, dialog, and back to data collection. This is a big portion of that cycle. When we pull together data from the various sources, that's a big part of the understanding stop of that cycle, just as presenting visualizations such as the word-clouds is a big part of the giving back portion. By presenting this data in a form that shows some of the story behind it, we can start a dialog between those who produce the results and those who consume them, which leads right back to the beginning: collection. This, of course, is a fancy way of saying, we invite comments and questions by posting these results freely. More than that, we love the feedback, because that's what helps drive us to ask new questions, explore new topics, and try to understand more of our subculture.
+
+We got several responses to the last post, and I think it would be good to expose some of this process to all so that we can see what goes on in this whole cycle.
+
+I'd like to see X species/Why didn't you do X? - We have data for several species, plus several write-in answers for additional species that were not available through the check-boxes. However, as the number of respondents nears one for each given species, two things can happen to the data: it can either get skewed wildly in inappropriate directions, or it can near the normal distribution of words within any given text. For example, if we were to take this here paragraph, we'd see a fairly normal distribution of words, with a slightly higher weight on 'species', but nothing out of the norm. However, if you were to respond to your choice of species of "fox" with "fox fox fox fOX FOX FOX OH MAN I LOVE FOXES", then, as you can see, the distribution is wildly skewed toward 'fox'. This was the reason for us restricting data to the more popular species responses out there: we are more likely to see trends that might, in some way, represent those who respond with a given answer.
+
+This totally jives with why I chose X/I can't understand why people would answer in such a way! - First of all, these are only general trends that express the reasons for choosing a species to represent oneself. The are hardly guides, and they often fall along social perceptions of the species in wider culture, outside of furry (thinking of wolves in a pack, speedy cheetahs, or cunning foxes is hardly out of the norm for western society). Secondly, did you take the Furry Survey? If something seems missing, it could be your response!
+
+What about fandom perceptions that make species more appealing?- I mentioned in last week's article that there were what I termed "self-reinforcing stereotypes" associated with many species. For instance, Altivo mentions those who would choose fox, husky, or horse due solely for their perceived sexual role within the fandom. This is most assuredly worth an article of its own, but in brief, that is a difficult thing to measure both in the data as explored and also in the responses to the questions asked at the Species Selection and Character Creation panel. Needless to say, we haven't forgotten about fandom-specific stereotypes as a factor in selection, simply that the point of the article was to explore selection as a more general topic.
+
+Have you tried correlating against X?/What further things can be done with the data? - This sentiment is perhaps best expressed by FA user NEXRAD in their commentson the Jackals/Coyotes post on FA. There is a lot -a lot - of data in all of the responses to the Furry Survey. In fact there are a stupefying number of data points in anyone year of the survey! We can look for trends, such as we have done with the species, or model relationships based on correlations or clustering as was suggested. All of these are possible, but they take time and we are, for the most part, lay-critters doing the best we can outside our day jobs, and checking our work before sending it out into the world. (Additionally, \[a\]\[s\] has some restrictions that prevented the topic from being explored further in last week's article: we try to keep our articles at about 2,000 words or under to help with readability and comprehension, and so the best place for such work is in future articles, posts, and visualizations!)
+
+Finally, we'd like to reiterate the sentiment that has been in place with the Furry Survey for several years now. We do our best to present a fairly solid breakdown of the information provided in the surveys, but we welcome requests for larger data sets from other researchers in the future. These aren't available for direct download currently, and will take some time to anonymize and prepare, but they do exist, and the same holds true as with "more information": more eyes on that information is always better!
+
+-   Which, if everything works out okay, I should be able to provide as an updated recording soon. We have video and audio recordings from RMFC this year, and if their quality is good enough, we'll pull them together and put them up on Vimeo as we did last year.
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+This weekend, I had the privilege of helping facilitate a panel at Rocky Mountain Fur Con 2013 surrounding the topic of species selection and character creation. The panel was a delightful discussion about the ways in which we build up the avatars we use to interact within our subculture, and why exactly it is that we choose the animal (or animals) that we become with our character (or characters).
+
+That's not all, though. I also had the privilege of sitting down with Klisoura, \[a\]\[s\] contributor of Furry Survey fame, and having not only several delightful discussions on topics as diverse as tennis balls and coyotes, but also a little impromptu hack-a-thon in the hotel lobby on the subject of species selection. This tied in well enough with the panel that some of the results of that were shown during the Q&A after the discussion, and even led to several other conversations with various different furries over dinner and the next day. The whole weekend was a blast, but I'd like to tie up some of these conversation threads and ideas into something worth showing here on \[a\]\[s\].
+
+The title of that particular panel was the same as this post, "Species Selection and Character Creation", and was intended to be something new for me, and, I felt, relatively new for the convention as well. Rather than sit behind the table at the head of the discussion room and dictate a set of ideas to an audience, my goal was to re-arrange the chairs in the room into a circle and have everyone participate evenly in a sort of Socratic-style exploration of species and avatar. However, given the hour of sleep I'd had the night before, it worked out somewhere in between. While the Socratic "asking questions to receive answers everyone already knows about themselves" part worked out pretty well, I wasn't able to make real the truly participatory experience of everyone being able to see each other. I offer this as an explanation for not simply posting the audio from the panel itself, though it was recorded. If I get around to mastering the audio well enough to make it presentable, I'll post it here and make note of it. I think it's worth a listen!
+
+I began by asking the room full of furries why they chose the animal they did for their species, and I received a lot of answers that fit in well with my experience of the fandom. Notable among the explanations were the oft-used words 'identity', 'connection', 'personality', and 'characteristics'. And this, of course makes sense. Many introductions to furry, whether they're websites (the first introductory website I found was Captain Packrat's explanation of FurCodes) or friends, explain that although furry is about being a fan of anthropomorphism in general, it often (but not always) specifically involves a personal connection with an animal that leads to the creation of a personal character: an avatar often used in interaction with other furries.
+
+We all know this, of course, but it's always interesting to see the data bear it out. A discussion with Klisoura prior to the panel led to an experiment: is such a thing visible in the answers provided by respondents to the furry survey? It turns out that it is, in its own way. On the survey, users are asked the species of their character or characters, and then given room to provide an explanation of just why they chose the species they did. Free-text answers are hard to parse down into simple one-way conclusions, and are not necessarily available to be shared as they stand. However, we can draw conclusions about the use of language itself within these answers, and in this instance, we did so by means of one of the simpler means of textual analysis: frequency counts.
+
+We've analyzed the responses for many of the most popular species represented in the responses to the 2012 Furry Survey. Breaking this down by species not only helps us spot keywords such as mentioned above, but also helps us see where additional words, especially emotionally or spiritually charged words, are used when identifying with particular species. Let's start out with one of the easier ones, for huskies, where I can point to a few of these words in particular to explain what I mean:
+
+We see our previously tagged set of words such as 'traits', 'personality', and 'always' (left in\* because it often shows up in constructs such as "I have always felt like I was a husky"). However, we can also see several emotionally charged words such as 'love'/'loved', 'loyal', 'cute', 'playful', and 'beautiful'. These figure strongly as compared to other marked words such as 'cool', 'hard', 'submissive', and 'spiritual'. Contrasting this with the cloud for wolves shows the difference in species selection:
+
+Here we see a shift in the tagged words to 'connection', 'identify', as well as 'personality', which I think shows a different attitude used to approach the problem of species selection when creating a character. Indeed, we see that 'spirituality' figures more strongly, along with 'pack', 'strong', 'spirit', and 'one'/'alone', while 'loyal' and 'social' are deemphasized.
+
+Another interesting thing to note is that, among the several species\*\* we pulled from the database, some are more strongly marked, such as the previous two, and some are not. Those who chose dragon as their species, do so for many, many different reasons than wolves or huskies.
+
+As you can see, there is less polarization around certain terms, both emotionally marked and the previously tagged words; that is, the cloud is more homogeneous. There are a few potential reasons for this. One is the possibility that dragons have cultural ties to more than just western culture. Wolves have both a strong mythology surrounding them in the west, as well as the advantage of being important in current events, given the re-homing and conservation efforts surrounding the species in North America.
+
+While dragons do have a mythology attached to them in the west, it's very different than their Eastern interpretations, which will lead to less strongly-marked words and phrases showing up in analysis due to a wider spread. Additionally, while dragons are certainly prominent now in fiction words, they are not nearly as prevalent in current events outside of that setting.
+
+These are just some examples, but I think it goes to show that there are indeed some trends, both general and specific, that go into species selection among furries. That's only part of what goes into the creation of a personal character, though, as I think we might achieve some similar results by asking ordinary people to justify their choice of their favorite animal. Thus, during the panel, we also discussed the processes of character creation, growth, and change.
+
+One exercise that I think works well is imposing artificial restrictions. This was, after all, one of the foundations for the literary group Oulipo, of A Void fame (A Void being a book written originally in French entirely without the letter 'e', and then, perhaps even more impressively, translated into English with the same restriction in place). By imposing on ourselves restrictions, we reduce the problem of unfettered, and thus directionless, creativity. In that vein, I asked participants to describe their personal characters - fursonae, if you will - in one sentence or less. The results are telling:
+
+My persona is a reflection of myself ahead in life which I can use as a goal.
+
+and
+
+My fursona is an extension of myself as I move forward in life.
+
+Some were more verbose and specific along these lines:
+
+It's a coping mechanism, a way to become someone else and not deal with tough times, or even provide an outside perspective on them.
+
+and
+
+Who I strive to become, always a step ahead of me; as I gain attributes, my character stays one step ahead of me. It is my role-model.
+
+Some people got even more creative:
+
+The person with whom I speak.
+
+or
+
+Convenient, exaggerated wish fulfillment.
+
+or simply,
+
+Me.
+
+The theme of "a better version of me" was repeated quite often when discussing both the ways in which characters are created, and the ways in which they change. I really think that this reflects well on us as a subculture. A lot of my focus, when interacting with other furries, is centered around being what I see as an ideal version of myself, as well as just a fox-person. Some of that's simple and mechanical: "I wish I were able to more clearly express my ideas" and "I wish I were more glib, quippier" are both aided by social interaction through a text-based interface such as one might find online. Beyond that, however, by being able to have this version of myself that is better than me, I, as others mentioned, have something to strive for, something to grow into.
+
+Discussion along these lines continued after the panel itself, as a few of the attendees convinced me to head out to dinner rather than straight up to bed (thanks for that, it was the first real meal of the day). While we ate, we talked about what people took away most from the panel, and also came up with a few additional ideas to help tie together the two ideas of species and character.
+
+One thing that came up was the idea that some gentle joking about species, a sort of lampshading of stereotypes, helps to reinforce species identity with regards to character. Much, if not most of this, as pointed out by Klisoura later on, is self-deprecatory. This helps to forge familiarity between people, especially among members of the same subculture, or even sub-groups within that subculture. Making fun of the chase-instinct in dogs by, as my roommate (a husky) puts it, "huffing the scent of a new can of tennis balls", or the face-first pouncing of foxes lending to the overall silliness of the species helps not only to strengthen one's identity with that species but also to provide a conversational starter among friends, or friends-to-be. This can, of course, be mis-applied or simply go too far. The idea that wolves are a dime-a-dozen, or that foxes are all "sluts" are complex and sometimes self-reinforcing stereotypes that, by virtue of their being stereotypes, can rub many the wrong way and cause no small amount of offense.
+
+We also noted another interesting conclusion from the panel. Every time I run the "Exploring the Fandom Through Data" panel, I bring up the idea of doxa - that which we accept as truth without requiring proof - and how sometimes it needs to be challenged when that which is accepted is not necessarily true. For me and several others, one aspect of doxa in particular was challenged during the convention, and it was particularly surprising that this was the case.
+
+One of the attendees at the panel brought up the fact that, during a time of crisis, epiphany, or great change in life, sometimes one's character also goes through change (in this case, a change in species from fox to rat), in a sense reflecting external events in an extreme way. Even though several of us were surprised that such things as a turning point in life would be shown in something so fundamental as one's species, it's one of those things that makes sense upon consideration. Even looking back, for myself, the one time I truly changed species surrounded a profound change in my life. Moving to college - and all that is entailed in that, such as moving away from parents, getting a job, and so on - affected me deeply. That signified a total restructuring of my life, even to the point where the old character I had inhabited, a red fox with two tails, the tips of which were dyed green, no longer applied. It was high-school-me. It was me-growing-up. It is not me now.
+
+The reactions from around the room echoed my sentiment. While most were surprised and intrigued at the concept of an external factor such as a move or an epiphany having so large an effect on someone as to cause a sudden, major restructuring of their furry identity, many, myself included, confirmed that this is not infrequent. Those who were most surprised felt that a sudden crisis such as this would not lead to a major change, but rather influence the direction in which their character grew. That is, their goals would change both for them as well as their character, though aspects such as species would remain. Unfortunately, we ran low on time before we had the chance to investigate the differences in how these two rough groups dealt with their character's identity, though it is worth investigating! That there is even the trope of the species-change-journal on FA is proof of this.
+
+As a meta-furry resource, \[adjective\]\[species\] explores a lot of topics surrounding furry, though it seems of late that the focus has been on topics that happen to be ancillary to the fandom itself. These are all dreadfully interesting, I think, but so is much of the stuff at the core of our subculture, this base layer that helps make us who we are. These are the reasons we seek to meet up together at cons such as RMFC, not simply these supplementary reasons such as being ahead of or behind the rest of the world, any skews in sexual orientation or gender, or even movies about cheetahs, though they may all help. These core facets are worth exploring, as they help to form coherence among all these different animal-folk.
+
+If you are interested in more from the panel, the notes are available here.
+
+\* The responses were cleaned of some very common words that tended to skew the word-clouds, such as articles (the, a, an), conjunctions (but, and), and the species' name and plural form of the name which, of course, show up quite often.
+
+\*\* Cats, cheetahs, coyotes, dragons, red foxes, horses, huskies, jackals, rabbits, tigers, and wolves.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/the-default-furry.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/the-default-furry.md
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+When I write a blog post - either on here or my personal blog - I tend to "stub out" the entry before I even write it, sometimes days or weeks before I get to it. It's something like outlining, though not as structured as that implies. More like jotting down ideas in the order in which they should occur in the article, though more structured than thatimplies. For this article, the first line read: "witty comment about the standard furry - fake psych exercise to envision a default furry". As an introduction, I was going to come up with some sort of goofy little quip about how one would envision the standard fur. I'm only referencing it instead, because the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it's been done before. Countless times.
+
+With any society come a whole heap of internal stereotypes. With programmers, there are the hierarchical nerds who strive for alpha status, the quiet smart people who do cool things, the loud smart people who also do cool things, the designers, architects, and engineers. In music, things generally follow the lines of instrument or voice part, but there are some ideas that cross boundaries, such as the dramatic opera singer, the crazy instrumentalist, or the lazy genius. One could, perhaps, measure the strength of a subculture by counting the amount of inside jokes contained within it. Furry is far from immune to this, and there are several recurring threads.
+
+One definite theme within the fandom is that, to quote an old page, "The Animal Kindgom is full of a plethora of amazing and interesting species, and so you'll probably be a Fox or a Wolf". Canids seem to far outstrip other species as far as representation within the fandom. An informal poll shows them making up nearly a third of all respondents. There are even stereotypes that go along with each species (though these have, admittedly, weakened over time), such as that "foxes beg for it, while huskies are just targets".
+
+Default fur so far: a wolf.
+
+Age also plays an important factor in the fandom. It could be that something about furry speaks to those just coming of age, or that the liberal nature of the subculture fits in well with the general liberal nature of youth; the oft miss-attributedquip "if you're not a liberal by 20, you have no heart..." seeming appropriate. With its widely espoused (and practiced, though perhaps to a lesser extent) values of acceptance and tolerance, it's not really much of a surprise that a good portion of furry falls into the 18-25 age group. I was pretty firmly entrenched within the fandom, myself, by sixteen or so, and here I am, twenty-five, and writing a slightly satirical blog about furry - which I still love plenty, mind!
+
+Default fur so far: a 22 year old wolf.
+
+Geekdom, particularly computer geekdom, has almost always been dominated by males. The reasons for this are many and complex, but it seems to be a nearly universal truth that the technologically literate castes for the last several hundred years have been made up primarily of men. Furry, which is made up in good part by communications taking place on the Internet, can no more escape that than it can escape certain episodes of certain television shows or, if you've been around for a while, certain articles from certain magazines. Gender in furry is a complicated enough issue to warrant several of its own posts, but for now, let's call it decidedly male.
+
+Default fur so far: a 22 year old male wolf.
+
+Now is when things start to get hairy (har har). The stereotypes still exist, but have less basis in reality. Perhaps it would be better to say that the basis is less readily apparent, though. Take sexual orientation: if one were to go by the way people act, the art that's posted, and the relationships formed online, one could pretty easily leap to the conclusion that the standard fur is a gay male. However, this doesn't quite appear to be the case. Rather than showing up as predominately homosexual, respondents seem to be fairly evenly divided among different quanta of sexual orientation. With the decidedly affirming nature of our little subculture, it's easy to see how this could lead, first of all, to the even distribution of orientations, and second of all, the more visible and vocal nature of the more homosexual portions of the population. It could possibly be construed that society as a whole is likely divided up fairly evenly along Kinsey's scale, but that, due to social, evolutionary, and personal prejudices, we're left with a more uneven seeming distribution. Even so...
+
+Default fur so far:a 22 year old gay male wolf.
+
+The waters get even muddier as we move on, and even the stereotype gets harder to pin down. Furries have a reputation of being highly sexual people. More so than their reputation from the outside, however, furries pretty strongly believe that their subculture is full of highly sexual people. Things get weird here, especially, because most respondents don't consider themselves to be very sexual people. Stranger still, most respondents believe that the majority of the general public views them as highly sexual. This is certainly a tough metric to judge, and it would be hard to rank the fandom amongst other subcultures when it comes to sexuality, but it appears that furries, by and large, assume that furries are pretty oversexed.
+
+Default fur so far: a 22 year old gay male wolf looking to get laid.
+
+And now we're getting into some pretty speculative territory. From within, it seems that most of the fandom is made up of socially awkward people who care very strongly about one thing, which is likely to be computers or games - that is, nerds. Nerds that drink. Geeks that party. People who don't communicate effectively with each other, but never stop trying. I have no graph to go along with this; it's partly based on introspection into my own outlook and partly from listening to others when they talk about the fandom. I would have left this out due to it being so hard to pin down, but considering how large it figures in all of the satires of the fandom, I'm not sure I could justify that.
+
+Default fur: a tipsy, awkward, 22 year old gay male wolf looking to get laid. Cute, huh?
+
+So, given our wolf guy here, what's right and what's wrong? Sure, he'll fit in pretty well, he's certainly welcome within the fandom, but what, in his construction, is just due to demographics and what's due to stereotypes? Judging by the few datasets we have, our RandomWolf here is probably a young adult male wolf due simply to the make up of furry itself. Given any one member of the group, and that member is likely to be a male canid somewhere in his early twenties. As for the awkward, gay, and oversexed parts, though, these aspects of our fictional character are more likely stereotypes than anything (however attractive or not you may find them).
+
+Just like any group, our nutty little fandom has its fair share of preconceptions, misconceptions, and stereotypes. We've got our in jokes and our quips (I've heard "by and large, furries are bi and large" enough to turn the study of it into this article, after all), and we've got our reactions to those. As a group, we're introspective enough to recognize trends and turn them into stereotypes. The visualization on sexuality in the fandom is most telling: there's the way we perceive ourselves, the way we perceive our fellows, and the way we imagine the world perceives us - they may not always align, but that's just the warp and woof of subcultures, and I think just adds to the fun. Me, I'm gonna go hit on this awkward wolf guy, buy him a drink, and see if I can get him to come up to my room with me.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/trends-within-trends.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/trends-within-trends.md
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+Tiny foxes: good for comforting.
+
+It started innocuously enough with a tweet. I don't remember the exact phrasing of it, but I had been having a rough day and was feeling the need for some sort of protective affection that I just couldn't quite find offline; I'm rather tall and so it's hard for me to find a way that's comfortable for all parties involved to get that sensation of being held and protected. I think I wound up tweeting something silly to the effect of "I just want to curl up in a shirt pocket where it's warm, cozy, and hidden." I suppose I've always been a bit of a sap.
+
+Like most things with far-reaching consequences, this start into the exploration of the "micro" side of the furry fandom had a seemingly inconsequential beginning. I've mentioned before that, after changing the ways in which I interacted online, several people treated me as though I were smaller than I really am (helped, no doubt, by the combination of text-only interaction and the lack of any specified height in my character description). With that trivial sentence, however, it suddenly became explicit, and before long I was interacting with those around me specifically as a tiny anthropomorphic fox.
+
+Tiny foxes: good for making hammocks in your antlers.
+
+This is one of those things that feels incredibly silly to write about in such plain terms. For me, however, it was a new twist on the ways in which I interacted in familiar surroundings. Everyday objects and friends became towering structures to scale, and media such as MUCKs and Twitter became my playground. In short, it felt like a new means of interacting with the furry community as a whole, akin to the way I felt when I first discovered the subculture.
+
+And yet, much was still the same. I was still pretending to be a foxperson on the Internet. My friends-group remained much the same. Nothing else had really changed in my life, except suddenly, I was part of a community within a community: a sub-subculture. It came with a label: micro.
+
+Furry, as a label, is really much too broad to be meaningful except in the most general of scenarios. It's like saying "Americans" when we know that, with a population of almost 320 million people, that there are bound to be, for instance, people who describe themselves as "staunch democrats" or "devout Christians", though, of course, even those labels are far too broad in some cases. "Staunch democrats" does not take into account the actual politics and core beliefs of an individual any more than "devout Christian" takes into account the denomination of Christianity of the devout.
+
+Tiny foxes: good for booping noses.
+
+So it is that we wind up with trends within the larger trend of furry, and trends within those as well. Micro, as a trend, was a new one to me, and thus the sensation of newness that reminded me so much of joining furry in the first place.
+
+I've been a part of various different groups within the larger group of furry before, of course, just as we all are. I'd identified with gay furries, then fell out of that as a means of identification as my sexuality matured. I've identified with trans\* and genderqueer furries as well, as my sense of self has grown over the last several years. The list goes on, as I'm sure it does for all of us when we boil our interests down to labels and identities. Why is that, though?
+
+Part of the reason I think that these trends within trends are as big a thing as they are is that a trend, a label, an identity, or even a kink can offer one a sense of community. It's all well and good to be a tiny fox - or genderqueer for that matter - and feel that one has found an identity that makes one feel comfortable. However, it is the sense of community, of belonging to a larger group that adds completeness to that and can help make us feel truly whole.
+
+Also, these interests or identities, when taken up by a group, help to generate interest and identity in others by the force of their own presence. That is, while I really rather liked anthropomorphic animals and playing zoomorphic games while growing up, realizing that there was a community that bases its very existence off such things led me into the fandom. Similarly, while I never felt wholly comfortable with my gender while younger, it was the resources of a community and an identity that helped me suss out my feelings on the matter.
+
+Tiny foxes: not very good for martinis.
+
+In this way, these trends act as attractors in a system: the closer one winds up to them, the more likely one is to wind up a part of them. I think this describes my journey into the furry subculture pretty accurately: by my presence online, as well as my interests in general, I wound up close to the community, and my proximity led to my eventual membership.
+
+Along similar lines, the overlap between these sub-trends within larger groups such as furry can help introduce one - and thus bring one closer to - additional groups that one might not find otherwise. For instance, given my own shared interest in exploring both gender and furry has led me to the various ways in which the two interact, from the communities surrounding gender transformation, mixed-gender characters, the gender gap within the fandom, and so on, all of which I probably would not have found myself a part of were it not for my previous interests and identities.
+
+As I alluded to earlier, this is hardly a furry-only phenomenon. After all, anything from the entirety of the human race down to the individual level can be divided up into separate trends, likes and dislikes, senses of identity, and so on. However, as I have mentioned countless times before, the fact that so much of our interaction takes place online, or is shifted online after the fact (as would be the case with convention reports and photos), we leave a vast paper-trail. All one needs to do is take a peek at someone's profile on any popular art site and see the groups they consider themselves a member of, the ways in which they identify (my profile on Weasyl, for instance, has links to my open source code repositories, which I think speaks to how exciting of a person I am not).
+
+It's worth taking a moment to step back and investigate the ways in which you interact with others and identifying the trends that tie you together. Those ties and the ways in which they interact are what makes furry so durable a fabric.
diff --git a/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/witnessing-and-mirroring.md b/writing/on-furry/character-vs-self/witnessing-and-mirroring.md
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+I don't often read Reddit - the site and I get along fine, I just can't seem to maintain interest in any subreddit for more than a few weeks - but I do occasionally find a good link or two when I wind up there. Most recently, I was trawling several different subreddits about gender and came across a set of delightful concepts that I think fit in well with the furry fandom.
+
+I talk quite a bit about identity here on \[a\]\[s\], to the point where I worry that I talk about it a little too much. Time and again, however, the importance of identity is brought home to me, and I can't help but sit back, amazed at the ways in which it changes the ways in which we think about ourselves and interact with the world around us. Time and again, I find myself reminded that I'm a part of the huge, weird, delightful subculture, and there is no small aspect of identity that plays a part in that.
+
+I've gone through something of a sea-change in the last decade or so. Over that period of time, of course, one would be expected to change a great deal, metamorphose into something new and different. However, a sea-change is one of those things that makes the most sense in retrospect. It's in looking back over the past ten years of my life that I can really say, "Goodness, I used to be a completely different person."
+
+It's not a bad thing, really. In a lot of objective ways, it's a good thing that I came to terms with being an adult. I feel a lot healthier now. I've taken steps to set my life in accord with how I wish my life was, and that means doing all sorts of things, from visiting a therapist and psychiatrist regularly, to getting that eye exam I've always known I've needed.
+
+I've also started to come to terms with being a transgender person. This was something that I've known about myself in some form or another for nearly a decade, but not had the courage to do much but hide it, often even from myself. In the last few years, though, I've come out to myself, my husband and partner, my friends, then my work, and within the last few weeks, my immediate family. It means a lot to me to have those closest to me know...well, me. It means one thing to interact with someone on a regular basis, but an entirely different thing to have that interaction be honest and open, something which I hadn't had in the eight or so years leading up to this.
+
+Another change that I've found myself going through is a shift in the company I keep. I have a lot of friends, for which I'm thankful, but I've noticed that, over the last few years, a lot more of the friendships that I've started to form and really begun to cherish have had, at some level, interaction that involves gender. I've been searching for meaningful ways to connect with the world around me and that often involves hunting down people with whom I share a common interest, goal, lifestyle, or identity. It's something I've talked about on here before, even, how furries tend to seek out the company of other furries. In the last two dozen months, I've been working, both consciously and subconsciously, to seek out the company of those going through similar journeys with gender as myself.
+
+Both of these concepts fit in neatly with a paper surrounding the concepts I mentioned at the beginning of this article. The paper, titled "Witnessing and Mirroring: A Fourteen Stage Model of Transsexual Identity Formation" by Aaron Devore (linked below) centers around the ideas of witnessing and mirroring. These two concepts, witnessing and mirroring, play fundamental roles in the interaction of a furry with the furry fandom, and why help explain why our subculture is a plural, rather than simply a solipsistic phenomenon.
+
+The paper is an interesting one, from a personal standpoint. It goes through a fourteen step process that generalizes much of the transgender process of acceptance and self-actualization. While only some of these stages fit with my interaction with furry, I'll reproduce the entire list here for completeness' sake:
+
+Abiding Anxiety - Unfocused gender and sex discomfort.
+
+Identity Confusion About Originally Assigned Gender and Sex - First doubts about suitability of originally assigned gender and sex.
+
+Identity Comparisons About Originally Assigned Gender and Sex - Seeking and weighing alternative gender identities.
+
+Discovery of Transsexualism - Learning that transsexualism or transgenderism exists.
+
+Identity Confusion About Transsexualism - First doubts about the authenticity of own transsexualism or transgenderism.
+
+Identity Comparisons About Transsexualism - Testing transsexual or transgender identity using transsexual or transgender reference group.
+
+Tolerance of Transsexual Identity - Identify as probably transsexual or transgender.
+
+Delay Before Acceptance of Transsexual Identity - Waiting for changed circumstances. Looking for confirmation of transsexual or transgender identity.
+
+Acceptance of Transsexualism Identity - Transsexual or transgender identity established.
+
+Delay Before Transition - Transsexual identity deepens. Final disidentity as original gender and sex. Anticipatory socialization.
+
+Transition - Changing genders and sexes.
+
+Acceptance of Post-Transition Gender and Sex Identities - Post-transition identity established.
+
+Integration - Transsexuality mostly invisible.
+
+Pride - Openly transsexed.
+
+Part of the reason that I wanted to post the entire list is that I really feel that a lot of my own journey through furry follows along similar lines. After seeking out fantasy worlds in which I could be myself, I learned about the furry subculture, then cautiously tested the waters before finally not only adopting the identity of being a furry as my own, but accepted it to the point of being proud of my membership, leading to articles like these. It's a good feeling, having an identity that feels comfortable and valid, having a way of life that doesn't cause friction on a base, internal level.
+
+This is where witnessing and mirroring come in. My experiences are fairly common among furries - that is, I'm hardly experiencing anything new among members of our subculture. I participate in the simple online role-play that seems part and parcel to our fandom. I've got a personal character. I occasionally get art of myself, sometimes with others. It's a good life that a lot of us have latched onto.
+
+It's this interplay between personal identity and social interaction that makes up some of the most interesting bits of furry life, however. Within Devore's article, the author brings up two concepts which "run though the lives of many people as they search for self-understanding." 'Witnessing' is simply the act of being witnessed embodying an aspect of one's identity by an outside party. 'Mirroring', in the context of this article, is sort of like the complement: it is seeing aspects of one's identity embodied in others around oneself.
+
+Both of these ideas play an important role in the formation and bolstering of identity. Witnesses to our true selves help to reinforce the ways in which validate our identity as furries. This is part of the reason behind fursuiting in public, telling loved ones about furry, and so on. As Devore puts it, "When dispassionate witnesses provide appraisals which conform to one's own sense of self, it leaves one with a feeling of having been accurately seen by others who can be assumed to be impartial." The opposite is also true, however, as is evidenced in the backlash seen within our subculture when the media represents furries in a way that is seen as unfair or inaccurate: being witnessed as something that we know we are not is damaging in inverse proportion to how validating being witnessed as we are can be.
+
+Mirroring is perhaps closer to the surface for many furries. It is precisely the act of seeing in others that portion of identity we find within ourselves that lends the greatest validation to our membership. Devore sums it up in a neat hendyatris: "Each of us needs to know that people who we think are like us also see us as like them. We need to know that we are recognized and accepted by our peers. We need to know that we are not alone." It is by seeing and interacting with others who we perceive as like us that we find reaffirmation of our identity. We're not alone, we're not crazy, we're just being ourselves together. This is so important to furry that we have elevated the convention experience to something akin to gnosis.
+
+These concepts do not simply apply to furry at the surface level, but at least once removed: furry, I would argue, provides a framework within which it is more comfortable for one to present as the identity close to the core of one's being than the world at large. That is, by being a space which we would consider safe and welcoming, one is more likely to accept and adopt an identity that might carry with it a social disadvantage outside of the subculture and find both witnesses and mirrors to help bolster the sense of self.
+
+This came up recently as a friend confided in me that it was much easier to count the furries that they knew who were not trans\* in some way than to count the furries that were. We've talked here before about how the fandom is welcoming to the underprivileged group of gay and lesbian members, but that is also true of trans\* members as well. Even the reporter from Kotaku who visited Further Confusion 2013 noticed this.
+
+I think that part of the reason comes down to something that a reader shared with us back in 2012 that is worth repeating: "Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics." That is, by virtue of having all these mirrors of our identity at the ready, we're more likely to share the weal and woe that go along with the rest of our lives and knit all the closer together. Perhaps I'm conflating, but it seems that it is more easy to share and invite witnessing with someone who mirrors oneself in another aspect of identity - that is, to come out as gay or trans\* or any other aspect of identity to someone who shares this furry identity - and several others have shared similar feelings.
+
+My sea-change over the last ten years or so has been one primarily centered around gender identity. I've subconsciously torn down aspects of the identity hammered into me in my youth and built up new ones. I've set aside relationships with work and school that were unhealthy and sought new and affirming ones. I've changed my name, changed the way I talk, changed the way I dress. It's the type of thing that is easily summed up into three sentences in spite of the ten years of progress. However, it's also the type of thing that required the social aspect to be firmly in place. I required the witnessing of my delightful husband and fantastic partner, of my parents and coworkers, just as I needed the mirrors of all of the friends I've made in the last few years who share the same path as myself.
+
+And these things hold true for furry as well. I'm indebted to all of the fantastic people I've met through the fandom and through this site for witnessing my own growth as a member of this community and for being such fantastic mirrors, things we all need in life. Thanks, as always, for following along with my own journey. If you're curious about the rest of the paper that was at the core of this article, it is available online for free here.
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+I've been tiptoeing around this subject for a while now. It's one of those topics that is both a pretty big deal and should be talked about, as well as one that is pretty divisive and some people could be tetchy about. My big worry in bringing it up I not that I'll open a discussion on the topic, because that's what I want to do. Rather, I worry that any discussion that does happen would be more inflammatory than anything. It's one of those topics that a lot of people seem to agree on, but not agree on why, and it's difficult to describe in words in any event. So I'm going to do the band-aid thing here and just say it all at once: either furries are more dramatic people than other groups, or they think they are, and either concept is fraught with implications and certainly worth exploring, given how much time and energy the fandom seems to put into its drama.
+
+There is no metric of drama. It's a hard thing to gaugeand an even harder thing to gauge objectively. To say that furry is more dramatic than other groups, or more dramatic than life in general or simply the non-furry portion is a hard statement to back up. Is the drama more intense or less? Does it happen more frequently or less frequently? Is it more or less legitimate? Or important? Rooted in reality? That there are even so many questions in the second paragraph of a write-up on the subject bodes ill for saying, definitively, whether or not furry is more dramatic. Instead of trying to determine one way or another on the issue, I think it would be best to explore why this either may be the case or at least why many of us believe it is. I asked this as a quick poll on twitter a while back, so I'm going to structure the first two parts of this article around the responses I received to the two parts of the question that I posted, starting with one of my own views, while the third portion will be more about the duration of dramatic events in the fandom, with potential future exploration down the line.
+
+Let me begin with some of the thoughts that have been going through my own mind as I work through these articles. I think that one of the biggest issues I've seen behind the drama, at least that which I've been party to or part of, is that furry is larger and more diverse than we expect it to be. We, as a community, share a strong common bond in our shared interests. We have our unique ways of interacting with each other, our unique modes of expression, and our unique concept of character. We have gotten so good at dealing with what we have and how that works within our subculture, that I think we believe our group is more self-similar than it really is. With our strong connection, it's easy for us to expect that those around us will share more than just our interests and some of our mannerisms, that they will also share our opinions and our eccentricities.
+
+Part of why I started to see this was due to the fact tht many conciliatory efforts that I saw being made publicly were posited as diplomatic ways of informing one on how to interact with others. However, many of these efforts come off more as ways to successfully interact with whichever party posited them. That is, the one who attempted to solve the problem did so by assuming the embroiled parties (even if they were one themselves) saw things the same way that they did. While it may seem like we're a collection of mostly canids and there is a lot of self-similarity in character creation and our shared interests, we're just not that much alike.
+
+In other instances, however, it appears that furry is smaller than we want to think. We want the fandom to be large enough to accommodate every aspect of ourselves, and we want that to include a group of friends who share the same experiences. Furry just isn't big enough for that, though. There are going to be clashes here and there in everything from names to interests. I ran into the name problem, myself, years go. When I started into the fandom, I went by Ranna, which was a name I had stolen from a book (and that's why I rarely go by that name anymore). Of course, the minute I tried to sign up for SPR using that name, I was rejected due to there already being one there. Same for Tapestries - a different Ranna, in fact.
+
+In the long run, I really shouldn't have been surprised that I ran into other "Ranna"s out there. We all wanted to be sure in our own little parts of the fandom, though, and so actually running into someone with the same name was a bit of a shock. The fandom just wasn't big enough to hold that, though, and so we run into all these instances of people knowing friends we thought they would never know, and we find out that those friends maybe know much mores about us and our relationships than we had previously thought - this was something that happened to be twice within the past few weeks, actually: a friend I had known for a while under a different name didn't know that I wrote for \[adjective\]\[species\].
+
+The drama, here, comes perhaps from the fact that it's easier to speak about other groups of friends within our groups of friends. It's easy for me to talk about drama at work when I get home and, with a filter in place of course, vice versa. Similarly, it's easy for me to ramble on about some of the goings on in my offline life to my online friends, but things get difficult when it turns out that someone I talk to online knows more about the relationships than I had thought. This is another downside of our heavy interaction on the Internet: it's so easy to say something to one group of friends and a different, perhaps contradictory thing to another group that could spark some strife when the information is shared between the groups. Enough from me, though, on to what others have to say.
+
+Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. In-feuds carry the implicit baggage of membership.
+
+-   krtbuni
+
+    Although is is a tough statement to unpack, I feel that it captures a lot of what may actually be going on within the fandom. By belonging to a discrete segment of society, we are all members of a "minority group". Members is too gentle of a word, even; this is something that we feel is part of ourselves. For many of us, furry is part of our identity. The downside of that, is that every interaction within or about that social context of which we are a part is also about part of ourselves. That's the force multiplier: that there is some drama that may not even be connected to us makes little different when our membership carries this implicit baggage with it.
+
+    Every interaction that happens within some circle that's important to us becomes a part of us in a way. If you are Jewish (disclaimer: I am not), antisemitism can have a very real effect on your life, whether or not you experience directly; if you are an African-American (disclaimer: I'm 1/16th black, but that means very little), the racism that our country still struggles to overcome may impact you in a very real way, even if it may not seem like it from it outside. Accordingly, if a tv show misrepresents the fandom of which you are a member, it is very easy to feel personally misrepresented, or if there is a fight between two furs in which you agree with one side, it's easy to feel as if it is your fight as well. This would explain the way in which what seems like a relatively small bit of drama snowballs out of proportion once others know about it.
+
+    Any community whose central theme revolves around crafted image has inflated drama. see: art, acting, politics, high school etc.
+
+    -   \_am3thyst
+
+        This is similar to the above quote in that it has to do with the fact that we are members of a community, and that fact is what makes us a little more dramatic. However, this touches on some of what I've mentioned before here on the blog. Specifically, our whole subculture is based on the fact that we interact not with our selves, but with constructed personas that are intentionally misrepresentative - granted, in the relatively innocuous way of being a different species, or perhaps a different gender. The downside of this, of course, is that we are not our characters.
+
+        We have the same amount as other fandoms. Ours are just in the forefront unfortunately.
+
+        -   Adonai\_Rifki
+
+            You know, it may just be due to the online nature of many of our interactions that the perceived level of drama is so high within the fandom. Having spent a good portion of my childhood years with a step-brother and two step-sisters taught me that there is, indeed, plenty of drama in the real world. I used to keep a toy on the frame of my step-brother's and my bunk bed that I would move from one end of the bed to the other as he annoyed me to sleep - my own version of "I'm going to count to three..." - which of course just caused him to act out all the more and led to fights. I was a real brat, growing up...
+
+            So really, being around drama wasn't something that's unique or new when I joined the fandom, I had been around it all the while growing up. The thing that changed instead, was the visibility of the drama, as everything was now written down and immortalized somewhere. Even if you're hanging out in a MUCK or IRC server, the text will still linger there on the screen until its pushed off the top, and even then, it resides in scrollbacks and countless logs. I found a log from years and years ago chock full of drama the other day and sent it to an acquaintance who had been involved, and everything was still fresh to the both of us. The text had endured and, along with it, the drama behind it. That is the same drama we complain about on twitter and FA: every time something happens and hundreds of people make journals about it, the drama explodes and becomes all the more visible, and often winds up outlasting even the original problem itself by quite a wide margin - "Krystal can't enjoy her sandwich", anyone?
+
+            In the next episode of The Dramagogues, we'll be looking into potential reasons why the fandom might either be more dramatic or think it's more dramatic than the world around it.
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+In the last post about drama, I wondered whether or not we, as a community, really were more dramatic than those around us, and if so, why, or if not, why we seem to think we are. Much of the content of that post came from responses to a few questions on twitter. Perhaps the best thing about our fandom is our willingness and ability to communicate, and that really is the basis of much of these articles, I had asked previously whether or not we were more dramatic and why, and gotten several very succinct answers as to why that might be the case,Beyond that, however, I also askedif our drama is in some way different than that inthe world around us, and got several additional responses to this question, which is the basis for this, the second episode of The Dramagogues.
+
+Yes. Furry drama sheds and gets all over everybody.
+
+--rustitobuck
+
+While this response may have been provided tongue-in-cheek, I think it does illustrate something that we do fairly well: appropriate. Furries are very, very good at deciding what is furry and what is not, and will do so every chance they get. There was a book published several years ago, The Architect of Sleep by Steven R. Boyett, which featured anthropomorphic raccoons as its characters. The author did not intend for them to be furry, andhad originally planned on the book being the first in a series, but the response from the fandom was so outsized and, from the author's standpoint, creepy, that he refused to continue the series with the fandom's response being the reason why (he was not so polite in his wording).
+
+We are so eager to appropriate things around us in the name of our fandom that it could be that, whether or not our drama is indeed all that different, we have made it ours. It may be just drama, but, being involved in the fandom, it becomes Furry Drama. There are, of course, some issues that may be unique to our subculture such as the intellectual property one has in a character, but it feels sometimes as though we could stick cat ears and a tail on any old problem and turn it into a furry problem. If you get short changed at the farmers market, you can complain about it,and if the artist you paid \$5 for an icon takes a few days too long, you can do much the same, but it's now possible to make it into a furry problem.
+
+not particularly. the irony of the furry fandom is that it's more human than humans are.
+
+--\_am3thyst
+
+Another way to look the same issue is to consider that our drama is simply an artifact of us being a slice of humanity as a whole. Humans have their own little dramas that are being played out all the time. However, humans aren't a small, rather tightly knit group of peoplewith many things in common. While all our problems may be relatively human,it could be that we just read more deeply into them because of our commonalities. On the other side, because we read so deeply into them, we do tend to be more focused on the day-to-day human dramas of our fellows. I think that may indeed be why we are so closely knitting the first place, at least in part.
+
+This is one of those good-for-you scenarios. Even though the drama around us is...well, drama, it's still an instance of us interacting, which is a good thing, and the fact that we are so emotionally tied to the issues at hand is evidence of our emotional investment within the fandom. I used to wonder what the fandom would be like without all of the drama at seems to come with the package, and I think I've come to the conclusion that I just wouldn't like it that much. It's not that it.s comforting by itself, so much as that it's evidence of how much we care about our hobby. If furry were something where being involved didn'tmean enough for one to get emotionally invested, really don't think that it would be something that I would've stuck with this long, nor something that would've grown as fast as it has, even if it means focusing on our all-to-human problems.
+
+Drama is drama, regardless of who says it or the content.
+
+--Adonai\_Rifki
+
+I mentioned a quote in the last post, "Minority identity acts as a force multiplier on social dynamics. In-feuds carry the implicit baggage of membership". Perhaps our drama really is just drama and has no special furry significance, and although the Internet likely has its effects on the issues involved, it could just be that our membership in the community makes us feel obligated to interpret things in a furry context. This quote does well to tie together the previous two in that it brings together the "content" being appropriated and the "who" of us just being people.
+
+Our membership in this group carries the implicit membership in the drama therein. By taking it onto ourselves and turning it into the fandom's drama, we may wind up blowing it out of proportion (or way, way out of proportion), even though it's still just a little spat between individuals, as would happen between any groups of people. Still, it's comforting to know that we can do so much together, even fighting amongourselves.
+
+I'd say any look at Facebook would say no.
+
+--mousit
+
+On the other hand, perhaps it's not our membership to the fandom that makes us so keyed into each other's drama, and our drama seems different and out of proportion because we happen to be tech-savvy people. The benefit of anonymity provided by the Internet, or at least a lack of direct consequences for our words and actions could be part of why it's so easy to turn any little thing into drama. Perhaps our reliance on such a medium in order to properly express ourselves has its downsides: both an enhanced sensitivity to the language used around us (due to its relative permanence as compared to speech) and the ability to maintain a structured, even institutionalizedfacade presented to those around us.
+
+Before I got into furry, I got into the Internet and some of its culture. I've mentioned before that I started out on some bulletin boards in about 1999, and we were no strangers to drama there, either. With communication on the Internet, it's easy and even encouraged to "write for your audience", to steal a term. Speech is very extemporaneous and it's easy to have a slip of the tongue or to say something potentially offensive without meaning to (foot-in-mouth syndrome), but it's much easier to write with a purpose, rather than extemporaneously. That is, even when you're discussing the relative merits of two different restaurants, you are writing with a very specific goal, reading and reread in what you've written, and making sure, even if only subconsciously, that you present yourself at your best. At the same time, however, you know that others are doing just the same and thus tend to pay a good amount of attention to language that's being used around you.
+
+In furry, this structured presentation of self has become institutionalized in the concept of one's character, no matter how tightly associated the individual is with it. Even on visual media such as SecondLife, our interactions take place as structured language intentionally built to deceive, in a way. We intend to show ourselves as our characters and we write carefully in order to do so. Perhaps this is a symptom of furry, but it seems as though it's built into the Internet as a whole. The ability to maintain near-real-time communication using text allows one to build up whatever facade they wish while still coming off as a real person.The drama here comes up when a bit of that facade slips or is let down in order to share an honest opinion with someone, or let loose with some previously hidden emotions. This happened nearly as often in the boards I had been a member of as it does within furry, but seeing as how we were all a bunch of hormone-saturated teenagers, I had chalked it up to that, instead. Having been around the 'net as an adult now, I can say that we're just as childish (if not moreso, sometimes) as we were when we were teenagers when presented with the opportunity for anonymity, however partial.
+
+If I were asked to give an opinion on the spot as to whether furry drama is different than regular drama, I would say no. Within the fandom, we have some very ordinary problems, and I don't think that our membership to this subculture changes the problems we have in any way. However, I would not be able to say that without a caveat: our membership does change the way in which we interpret drama. Our problems may be very similar to those among any predominately text-based culture, but our focus on our characters adds a strange twist to everything we do here, including fighting.
+
+Tune in next time as we look at the way drama changes and fluctuates over time within the fandom, as well as how that is similar and different from the world at large. The Dramagogues, only on \[adjective\]\[species\]! Wednesdays,12pm mountain! (Okay, so I wouldn't do well in TV...)
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+How many of you remember Sibe and Furry XDCC?
+
+What about the PayPal kerfuffle with FurAffinity? That was more recent.
+
+Ooh, or "Kristal can't enjoy her sandwich"? Remember that one? That was a good one. It was pretty closely related to Yiffyleaks (insert eye-roll here), banning cub porn, and not banning Sonic art. They all sort of circle around FA.
+
+Those were all pretty big deals! Remember them?
+
+Now, when was the last time you thought about them?
+
+I mentioned something like this a while back on the \[a\]\[s\] twitter account. Much to my surprise, Sibe himself responded to the first tweet. I certainly wasn't expecting what had seemed like some sort of evil boogieman from my formative years in the fandom to actually respond to me, even having a short conversation with him via twitter. A few of my friends were there with me, staying over for New Years, and we all had a good chuckle about it, reminiscing about our pasts, when we knew each other only on the Internet, and we had all these giant things to care about, like whether or not people could download furry paid and private content on an IRC channel.
+
+It really got me thinking that, in the last ten to twelve years as I've become a real person (a designation I won't grant on who I was before 2000), I've noticed the way that the collective attention span seems to move in waves. It seems like something will come onto the scene, picking up steam quickly at first, then slowly plateauing before starting to fade from our attention span:
+
+A lot of words and phrases will come readily to mind, here, and the one that will most likely leap to the forefront is 'viral' or 'going viral', or perhaps 'meme'. An idea like this will start with an individual or small group within our subculture, pick up a few more individuals, then explode in popularity until it seems like every other journal going through our FA feeds has to do with that one particular thing. After a while, you start seeing the "stop posting x" or "snarky comment about x" journals mingling in with the rest as the sheer amount of participants seems to plateau at some invisible high-water mark and slowly fade out after that. There may be a journal or two, then simply a reference or two within a few journals here and there. Finally...nothing.
+
+I was first made aware of this trend of arching ideas back in high school. The way that it was explained to me was in terms of the 'revolutions' in history, as in the agricultural or industrial revolutions. In each case, a few advances would happen near the beginning, then widespread adoption would follow, leading to a wider acceptance until it was part of the commonplace in everyone's lives. The point to be made was that, as each arch became part of the everyday, something new would start to come up, leading to a dovetailing effect, or even conflict, such as the French and American revolutions as the industrial revolution got under way, and the World Wars at just as the industrial revolution began to dovetail with the technological revolution.
+
+Similarly, within our fandom, just as an issue starts to become commonplace (such as the cub-porn ban on FA) or even fade out (such as the Kristal-can't-enjoy-sandwich meme), only a short lull follows before the next surge rockets off from obscurity into brief popularity. The concept of strife at the dovetail fits at least a little bit here, though it may be a bit of a stretch, as we're not talking about world-wide wars. Instead, an event such as rumors that PayPal will flag your account if you mention FurAffinity in the message section of your transaction will trigger the next arch, and once that diminishes, we'll switch to perhaps a tracing scandal, or maybe a rumor about Sonic art being banned.
+
+This isn't simply a furry problem, of course, and seems instead to be indicative of those who readily take part in the near-instantaneous forms of communication and new media so prevalent in western culture today. If we were to take a step back from the furry fandom, I'm sure I could ask similar questions. Remember the PayPal kerfuffle with Regretsy? Remember the debt ceiling? Remember the concerns over the Taepodong missiles? Heck, even I will admit to having not really thought about SOPA or PIPA much in the last week or two. In the revolutions graphic above, it's intentional that the arcs become narrower: the amount of time spent dwelling on each of these issues does seem to be growing shorter.
+
+In our so thoroughly connected culture, we've picked up an incredible amount of communication. It ties us together more thoroughly than any previous era, that's for sure. On the flip side, however, we have picked up this shorter attention span leading to these more frequent waves of stress and drama.
+
+I don't mean to come off as a get-off-my-lawn,curmudgeonlyLuddite. I did preface that statement with how neat our new-found interconnectedness is, and I am writing this on a website, which will be published to three separate social sites and is powered by free and open-source software - things I know that I hold dear. There is, however, a problem in focusing on the extreme near-term with some of these Terribly Important Events. SOPA started its life a few months ago, but it wasn't until the end of December into the beginning of January that it went viral, leaving it plenty of time to incubate and gain strength. Additionally, after the house dropped it further bills either cropped up or gained visibility in the mediacentric west such as the OPEN bill and ACTA. There are, however, root causes to each of these bills, as there are for most such spurts of interest within the media. Just as online privacy and piracy are the backbone of SOPA, PIPA, OPEN, and ACTA, so too are gender, sexuality, and reproductive rights seemingly the backbones of much of the United States 2012 presidential campaigns. With that, as interest in the intellectual property bills waned, did interest in online privacy fade as well? And when the 2012 campaign trail comes to an end, will issues pertaining to gender, sexuality, and reproduction fade from the collective attention span?
+
+That the furry fandom is beginning, in its own way, to exhibit the signs and symptoms shown by the larger culture of western society is indicative of at least two realities. First, this is a sign that the contiguous fandom is getting large enough to accommodate all of these issues. The furry subculture has seen a lot of growth in the area of those who identify specifically as furries in the last twenty or thirty years, but most especially in the last ten: we've grown large quickly, and we've started to encompass a variety of issues in our primarily social group.
+
+Secondly, as these issues become more prominent and more prone to "viral outbreak", it gets harder to see (and, arguably, more important to remember) that there are individuals at the heart of these Terribly Important Events. These are the people to whom the events are very important indeed, the ones who will hold onto and remember the moments that passed so quickly through the massed consciousness for a much longer period of time; the ones who care deeply. However, on the flip side, it's also important to remember that not everyone will react in the same way to what one might consider extremely important.
+
+People, in general, can't hold more than a few things close to their hearts. It may be difficult to conceive of the fact that something that is of dreadful importance to us is only worth a passing mention to those around us, but rest assured that everyone has their own Terribly Important Events to care about, things that not everyone will have room in their hearts to care about as well. I've written before about how we're often just like everyone else, and it bears repeating now: we're all just folk here.
+
+That's what so much of this so-called 'drama' centers around: caring deeply. Or failing that, caring shallowly but loudly. An individual may care strongly in either a positive or negative aspect about gender and sexuality issues, to take an example from myself. But in a community of our size, any individual will not be alone in their focus, having enough many like-minded people around to form a minority sub-community. In previous articles, as well as in comments here on the site, the concept of minority and majority membership has been brought up: such is the stuff that these arches of drama are made of. Members caring about something enough to convince others to do the same, if only briefly.
+
+This is the final planned installment of The Dramagogues. I hope that it's been enjoyable so far, and thanks for you patience on this last article!