These are the posts from the August 2026 Midway Menagerie, a monthly furry blogging carnival. This month's theme was "Where is furry?" — a question about the places, physical or otherwise, where you feel most like your furry self.

This is my first turn hosting. If you missed it, go read last month's July 2026 roundup on the theme "Fandom and Community!"

Where is furry?

» To get us started, Serveberus writes: "Three Words: Between My Tits." Difficult to argue with that one.

» Lark wrote "Where is furry?", where they locate furry not in any innate identity but in a deliberate choice. Leaning on Dr. Devon Price's idea that queerness is "a thing you do", Lark arrives at the leather collar they wear nearly everywhere. "Furry is something I carry with me—symbolically on my body, but also as a promise to be the most Lark I can be."

» Kris Critter's "South For The Winter" locates furry not in a place but in the people you keep losing as the platforms collapse under you — Twitter to Bluesky to Mastodon to scattered group chats. The more you love something, the more you risk getting hurt. I can't imagine it any other way.

» Premo's "Where is Furry? The Gym." answers the question through a thought experiment using the gym-effect. Is furry a competiton? Of course it is. Nah, what matters most is showing up.

» Orchid's "Where is Furry?" puts the answer plainly and beautifully: Cringe and Free! Furry is wherever our friends are, and community isn't the audience, it's the whole point.

» anchovie's "on the omnipresence of furry" answers by tracing the scale and scope of furry: the bigger the events get, the more the part that matters comes closer to home.

» Enii's "Launching the Furry Sticker Photo Gallery!" finds joy on utility poles. After moving to Boston, Enii started noticing furry character stickers slapped on poles and street signs around the city — proof, without any interaction at all, that "people like me lived nearby, and I felt the distant warmth of community again." We are everywhere!

» Ån has lost their laptop and you know you want to snoop. If you're on phone-only or would rather just read, the plain text version is here.

Thank you everyone. Stay weird animals! (wherever you are).

A guest submission for the August 2026 Midway Menagerie, on the theme "Where is furry?"

Where is Furry?

The Passing Lane

My car is covered in furry stickers and nearly all of them are magnets.

I tell myself I enjoy change and like swapping them out and moving them around, which is true, but if I'm being honest I also like the impermanence. I like that I can assert a possibility while moving through the world, and I like that I can fly under the radar when I want to. I like that I can make people laugh in traffic and also peel them off and choose not to get tailgated by MAGA trucks. I get to choose to make space for my fellow freaks in public but also I can choose to stash it when inconvenient.

To some extent I experience something similar with regards to my own gender and sexuality: as a polyamorous-pansexual-genderqueer person whose most visible relationship conveniently appears to be "straight", I often have the luxury of passing. Most people use he/him pronouns on me and I let that go. Many devalue my "secondary relationships" if they're even aware. Most establish the shape of something they recognize and are comfortable with and never inquire further.

I could of course assert otherwise, and in some cases I do, but most of the time it's simply easier not to engage, to slip out the side door. I tell myself the important people know and that it's often not worth the energy. I am tired and I want a beer. I might even want it in a bowl. But truly: I do not wish to explain gender (or species dysphoria) to you right now. I am not going to apologize for my friends. I am pointedly ignoring your slightly confused expression and your unasked questions. Yes, sometimes I use different names. No, I'm not upset you called me ma'am.

There are complicating factors: I'm white, my primary partner isn't. She has been mistaken as the nanny at our kid's school before. Our kiddo is non-binary and I advocate for them. Many of my friends are trans and their ability to pass (or not pass) as their chosen gender is a complex, fraught and sometimes harrowing experience. I'm dedicated to making the world as smooth as possible for them; I don't want to trip anyone up.

What right do I have to trouble the waters with my own existence?

A relative versed in formal etiquette addressed an invitation mailed to my house (intended for my partner) as "Mrs. [My Legal First Name] [My Biological Father's Last Name]" and I stared at it dumbfounded for several minutes, not recognizing who it was meant for.

Marked Territory

It always surprises me how little space the stickers take up when I peel them off, stacked neatly in the corner of the glovebox out of view.

The fact that I can do any of this is, to be sure, a privilege. The fact that I largely experience this privilege as painful changes nothing: it gives me an edge over my peers who are more visibly other. This itself can cause an anxiety loop: am I queer enough? Am I performing enough? Too much? Maybe I shouldn't wear that. Maybe I can't wear that.

Worst of all are the handful of times — small in number, deeply hurtful — I've been "called out" by peers for not understanding what it's like since I'm "so obviously a rich white straight dude." It's seared into my brain. I want to yell that I'm none of these things and yet the fact they see it that way is an advantage of sorts. I bite my tongue and nod "You're right. I'm sorry. I'll do better." We move on.

What I'm describing is navigating what Deborah Tannen describes as "markedness," which is to say the state of having a default from which "other" things depart. Defaults are useful, this is not always a moral complication. Tannen borrows this idea from linguistics: we say "visit-ed" to mean the past-tense of visit. Visit is unmarked, visited is marked. Similarly we do this with plurals: we add "s" to mark that a box of spoons contains more than one, unmarked the word is just "spoon."

We also use lexical markers: "black scientist," "white rapper," "male nurse," "female executive," "furry artist."

The trouble isn't markedness itself or the existence of a default mode, it's the unexamined choice of which language we use as default. This almost always reflects the values and features of the majority culture. Inherently we create a hierarchy, working into our language and communication the category of "other" and "not normal" even in everyday speech. This is particularly noticeable in English, which lacks grammatical gender, and yet we continually assert it anyway. Cartoon creatures are generally male unless specified otherwise, boats are female. Digital Assistants were notably all female until they became extremely valuable to certain people. Now that they've been upgraded to "AI," feminine names have been mostly replaced with masculine or harder-edged mechanical sounds: serious names for serious problems.

What this does is to constantly re-affirm that those things which are not the default are remarkable, different and perhaps strange. We say "black scientist" because we are asserting that blackness is the most notable characteristic of the scientist. We say "female executive" to draw attention to the remarkable notion that a woman could hold a position of power. We say "female gamer" to assert a category different from "gamer" although the data shows there's a fairly balanced gender split among people who play games across all ages.

With these markers come a raft of unspoken but potentially corrosive value judgments. As Tannen writes, "gender markers [in particular] pick up extra meanings that reflect common association with the female gender: not quite serious, often sexual."

On this last point, I'll posit something both personal and strange: this gendered, often sexual, extra meaning goes a long way to explaining why I almost always prefer gender neutral pronouns, but in pup headspace, I strongly prefer being referred to as "good girl" (or "good boy"). The gesture of gendering here is a type of linguistic bondage, an assertion in the context of play, but it's a role offered as an interrogative. "This is what you want, yes?" rather than "This is what I see."

The interrogative move is crucial to both the community and what's happening here: the rules of play involve mutual negotiation. Do I need to assert myself? Do I need to trouble the waters? Do I need to terraform the environment to suit my identity? Not when the invitation is extended. Nothing needs troubling here because nothing has settled.

So here we circle back to what I value most about the furry fandom: the assertion that these choices sit with each individual and that far from being an abnormal or "pre-real" state, playfulness and malleability are the natural state of things. The boundaries are porous. In this way furry flips the script.

Border Crossing

The stickers stack flat and travel with me, across miles of road, red and blue states, border crossings and rest stops and campgrounds and on into the parking garage of a con hotel. They're no different, the same set, but the context has changed.

Outside, on the highway, the stickers on my car mark an assertion against the world. An invitation to challenge. Inside the parking garage the stickers are at best a marker of inclusion for the event, but just as likely a neutral gesture. Other cars have far more, the notability is softened, the impact matters less.

Thus, while markedness is, in Tannen's description and within the broader cultural context, largely injurious, in the fandom context it's the boundary marker that makes the play possible. The apparent white 20-something 150lb dude in front of me is a 300-year-old, two-ton female dragon from space. I know because I asked and I accepted the answer.

A feral animal (previously domestic, distinct from wild) does not necessarily experience itself as feral — the label belongs to the enclosure. What is unique about furry play is that it is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere at all: it is a special weekend, an image board, a genre tag. It is also an approach to life, a way of thinking, a deliberate stance. Furry does not begin with the notion that it will be "anti-normie" but it effectively de-fangs the normalizing function of markedness by grasping the otherness and turning it into a boundary of play.

External to the fandom, furry is a marker: a descriptor of an aesthetic, a behavior or a costume. It is a modifier applied to an otherwise "normal" event. Most often it is simply synonymous with "fursuiter." Although frustrating, this shouldn't be surprising: fursuits are the most visible marker of our subculture and they operate directly on and often challenge the most basic things that we typically use as markers in "everyday" life: our skin color, height, gender presentation and body shape.

From an outside perspective, then, furry becomes synonymous with fashion, as punk did in the 70s and 80s. Unlike punk, the specificity and total "weirdness" of furry costume strongly resist commercial exploitation not because it is difficult to copy (it isn't) but because it is nearly illegible without immersion in the community. Anyone can manufacture fuzzy ears, but the fact that blue-striped ears with pink tips indicate your friend (and only your friend) encodes commitment to culture. The markers are present and visible to all, but illegible unless you know how to read them.

Punk-as-fashion entwined itself with commerce almost from day one. Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood opened their boutique Sex in 1974; McLaren was simultaneously selling the clothes and managing the bands that wore them. This is not to say punk itself was ever "merely" fashion — only that the fashion arrived early, and arrived for sale.

Both furry and punk produce an aesthetic that is "other," but punk-as-fashion selects its otherness with a curator's eye: reproducible mirror-image versions of whatever is mainstream. This is why it borrows so freely from BDSM and kink — not because it shares anything with them, but because it counts on them to upset.

Punk-as-fashion might select a dog collar — cheap, aggressive, binding — as a mockery of mainstream fashion or in a bid to upset the dominant idea of what is publicly acceptable. Kink (and furry) wears the same collar not because they want to "squick the normies," but because a collar feels exactly right.

Actual punk does something else, as do kink and furry: they rarely begin from an anti-stance at all. They assert something wholly apart and then decline to be overly concerned with the default culture's reaction. This is a gesture I'd call feral — not wild, which was never domesticated, and not tame, which never left. Feral is what happens when something previously kept in an encolsure walks off and keeps on going.

As furry gains traction in the mainstream, as we all get older, as cons explode in size and scope, it's worth noting the relationship of the subculture to commerce, and nowhere can we see the future more clearly than in the state of virtual worlds (a different "where" of furry, where many of the community gather when they are not together in real life).

The software companies that host these venues are increasingly struggling financially, imagining themselves to be the equivalent of Sex, laying claim to the subculture which just happens to mingle there. These boutiques attempt to support themselves on hyperscaled commercial sales of commodity items to a community whose economy is the collective celebration of the opposite. This will forever fail as it traces the shape of a fundamental misunderstanding: the gap between marker as boundary and marker as choice.

Someday Marriott might fund their operations by selling off-the-rack fursuits for con attendees at the door. Probably not.

Where is furry? It's everywhere. And also, in carefully marked spaces containing the like-minded. Furry is both an identity and a performance, in equal measure and with choice. Furry is both marked and unmarked: a furry weekend, a furry dance party, a furry themed drink. It's also dinner with friends who happen to have the same sensibility, home with housemates who don't mind your preoccupation with Pokémon. It's a portable stance which folds flat, can be performed, held close, shared as I wish, or not at all. Furry is wherever markedness is voluntary — wherever the invitation is extended.

What right do I have to trouble the waters with my own existence? This is the wrong question. The right one was always: "This is what you want, yes?"

Hi, my name is An. I'm always fox.

By Orchid

A guest submission for the August 2026 Midway Menagerie, on the theme "Where is furry?"

"Where are you when you feel the most comfortable as your furry self?"

The answer is quite simple. It is when I'm with/in the presence of my friends. The people I surround myself with.

The detailed answer is my friends; who I love and care about deeply, and community; that being the communities/people I associate/surround myself with daily; and, to some extent, the furry community.

My friends and my community is the place where I feel my most authentic furry self. Whether out and about in suit or just casually hanging out/around someplace or at an event, it doesn't matter to me as long as I'm surrounded by my friends or with my community. That's not to say that I am furry for my friends, but that I am able to be furry because of my friends.

My friends and community provide the safety and comfortability for me to come out authentically as myself. Never once before in my life have I felt like I had a safe place to experiment with or be myself; wearing what I want to wear, creating outfits that make me feel cute, and accessorizing like I haven't before. For years I experimented in secret because of how embarrassed I felt and how much I worried what might happen if my peers or family found out; if I painted my nails, if I wore a skirt or dress, if I liked wearing a piece of clothing perhaps a bit too "weird" or graphic.

But now? I've found a place where this is normal. A place where, as far as I'm aware, everyone has always been their authentic selves, all the while I'm still playing catch up. I am catching up though. And I am 100 meters from your location and approaching rapidly! But sincerely, I'm learning a lot of new things about myself because I have my friends and community to support me! Furries together strong!

"Where is Furry?" Furry is with my friends and community because they make me feel like myself. They provided a safe, comfortable space for me to be more open with myself and I've never been happier! I am cringe and I am free! :3

To my friends and to my community, thank you for all you've done for me in this past year. It's only been a year, but it feels so much longer with all you who I've had the greatest pleasure of hanging out with and befriending. To say what all of you have done for me is life-changing would be an understatement. The impact you all have had on me is so much greater than I can put into words. Thank you all for being an integral part of my life and entire being!

By Kris Critter

A guest submission for the August 2026 Midway Menagerie, on the theme "Where is furry?"

CW: brief mention of Suicide

I've been Online for a long time.

In any culture, sub or otherwise, it's commonplace to pepper your introductions and getting-to-know-yous with some context: how did the world bring us together, anyway? Who do we both know? What bands do we both listen to? What fandoms do we participate in? Uncovering these commonalities is like turning over stones, to reveal the wild fauna beneath. Shared language suddenly bubbles forth. One man's perspective, suddenly held in contrast to another's, mutual reflections. "I remember that." "Me too."

In the furry fandom, these conversations come with luggage: the kind that comes with not staying in any one place for too long. There are many reasons why our online spaces are transient. Some of it is just growth and change: being a kid and logging into Furcadia to roleplay is a very different experience when you're in your 30s. For some, the impetus to relocate is more violent. Take X, formerly Twitter: microblogging on twitter was ubiquitous for most furries from roughly 2010 to 2020. A decade spent on a specific website, cycling around each other, icons on a feed. I grew reliant on expecting to see the same faces and names, their life updates. I felt plugged into the lives of friends and near-strangers on a read-write basis. An entire other essay could be spent on discussing how that affects the way we relate to each other, but I digress.

Twitter was a home for many of us, for a decade or so.

And then suddenly, people just started to vanish.

Elon Musk showed his entire ass in slow motion, and we, that is the furry community, began to understand that Twitter was no longer a safe place for us. Safety is paramount to furries: being a largely queer and oppressed community of weirdos, when the Nazis show up, we flee. I'm sure I don't just speak for myself when I say that as a furry, that label, that community, comes with a bulleted list of things that make me and my friends targets for violence ahd hatred.

So we left.

But it's not so easy to leave, is it? Many of us still return to check things out, like driving past your childhood home. Some of us refuse to set foot in that place ever again. And it feels good to leave, to remove our attention and access to our selves and our communities. But when we leave, we carve out that decade or so of our lives and leave it behind. Thousands, tens of thousands of words, blogged and spoken and replied to. Conversations, flirtations, engagements, debates, arguments, callouts. Twitter is heavy with the memory and experience of so many of us living our lives in real-time, but now…

It's a ghost town.

Everytime we move, we leave that part of our lives behind. We have to endure the arduous process of finding each other again, with nothing but possible usernames, which are often changed up in these relocations. It's annoying to do that work, but also just disruptive: people I've kept tabs and and who have kept tabs on me are suddenly gone, and I might never see them again. Everytime we move, there's a very real chance of losing people along the way. I use shorthand and call them my friends, even though I've met most of them once or twice tops — Many I've never shared space with IRL. But they matter to me.

I still remember the girl with the cat who died, who suddenly vanished off twitter. I'm worried she killed herself, and I'll never know for sure. I never knew her real name.

These empty accounts exist online everywhere with a tragic energy: where did you go? Did you move? Or did you just give up?

Now we're on bluesky, some of us on mastodon. Some of us have turned to telegram group chats and discord servers. We exist as fragmented forms of ourselves across time and space, bumping into each other over and over in surprising new spaces.

But every time we run, we lose each other along the way.

I hope you all find who you're looking for.

Image by Rusty

A Movable Feast

Call for submissions:

August 2026 Midway Menagerie

Welcome to August 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, a blogging carnival loosely organized around ideas relevant to the furry fandom. Last month we considered what we mean when we talk about "the community." This month I'd like to ask where that community exists for you.

Where is furry?

Where are you when you feel the most comfortable as your furry self?

For many people this is a con, or a meet, or a bowling or dance night. Attendees commonly talk about "Post Con Depression" as the comedown from having experienced an extended fully-immersive furry event, and some furs build their lives around regular con attendance or even move into exclusively furry households. But for every con-fur there are community members have never been to an event and never intend to.

Many furries spend their social time in VR or other virtual worlds, or role-playing characters like Warrior Cats or trading their own stories or art on blogs or story archives. Some furries are creators who exclusively interact professionally as costume makers or illustrators. Some furs are highly technical, others barely use a computer. Some furries live in collective households with other furs, others don't dare display their collar or ears at home.

In his memoir of the same name, Ernest Hemingway described Paris in the 1920s, the most impactful time of his life, as a "movable feast." For him, Paris was a place and time so important that he carried it with him for the rest of his life. Maybe furry might be like that - not a place you visit but a place you carry with you, echos of which remind you of who you are. Perhaps this is something that isn't owned by any given platform, con or media franchise but something we collectively create wherever two or more are gathered? This would explain why furry seems to survives whenever its most visible incarnation shuts down: A hotel closes, a server dies, a platform shuts down and the feast moves on.

Or: I'm completely wrong and furry is the thing that you look forward to "doing" just one week a year, or only in the evenings and only in your VR headset. Or maybe it's something you are enjoying right now but don't intend to engage with once you "get serious."

• The place that isn't a place. Describe a furry "location" you love that has no physical existence — a VRChat world, a MUCK, a group chat, a shared document. What makes it a place and not just a service you log into?

• Migration. You've probably moved. Twitter to Bluesky, one Discord to the next, one platform to its replacement. Or physically: Kentucky to Boston, Boston to Iowa, California to Colorado, Amsterdam to Canada. Why did you move? What made the trip with you, and what got left behind? What did you discover you didn't actually need?

• When the room dies. Something you belonged to got shut down. Write the obituary. What was lost that can't be extracted from that platform or event? What turned out to have been somewhere else the whole time?

• Carried on the body. For many, a "fursona" is your self and travels with you into every room, physical or not. Is that where furry is located — not in any venue but in the self you bring. Does a 'sona need a community to mean anything at all? Is it what you wear?

• Marking territory Furry stickers on your car, on your baggage, on lamp-posts, signs, in venues across your city. Why do furries give each other stickers of their own faces? What do you do with them? What do they mean to you?

• Boundaries Are you a furry only inside your fursuit? Only at a con? When you're wearing your badge? Do you use a different name at home or work and with the community? How do you negotiate these boundaries? Does it ever get weird?

Ok I'm In!

Deadline: end of August 2026. Roundup goes up the first week of September — you can follow it taking shape here.

The theme is a prompt to get you started, but feel free to take it anywhere you like. Also don't feel like you need to write a lot or even write at all! Submissions can be in any form that is possible to show online: a drawing, a song, a video, game, website, photograph, etc.

Send me your submission via this form, by email to menagerie@feralresearch.org, or by messaging me on any other platform (Telegram, Discord, etc.) where you have my contact info (please remind me that it's for the Aug Menagerie)

Still not sure how this whole carnival thing works? Want to join the Telegram channel? Check out the home page for the carnival.

Happy writing!

Twenty-Four-Hour Ablative Armor

June 04, 2024
Originally published via my newsletter at Feral Research.

Shearwater - Animal Life

PART 1

ÅN ORIGIN STORY

In the early 90s, in the waning years of MTV before Kurt Cobain died, just before the World Wide Web launched and the entire planet shifted its economic axis to accommodate the Information Superhighway, I found myself crawling through various tubes via dialup. A favorite pastime: I would log into a borrowed VAX account (and later my own unix shell accounts) cutting and pasting commands gleaned from BBSes, books and magazines I found in the library. Above all: directories full of text files, the most useful repository of information outside the public library, pieced together like pirate treasure maps pointing to other maps, other accounts, servers and snippets of code and incantations I barely understood but nevertheless did things.

I'd already logged several years haunting local BBSes, and I was a fan of text-based adventure games like Planetfall, which, while extremely nerdy, had been around for about a decade. The very early internet (gopher, veronica even the web in those first years), was largely text-based. I have a lifelong love of reading and books and I was beginning to discover both the power of writing words and the power of writing code. The same interface, the same geography at a time when the atmosphere of conjouring and magic was thick. Computers, especially the early networked machines, were steeped in fantasy lore and fantasy language. University networks borrowed heavily from high-fantasy: accounts secured with Kerberos (the three headed dog guarding Hades). Even Netscape, perhaps the blandest and most corporate of the early ventures, had at its heart the Book of Mozilla:

And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days. — from The Book of Mozilla, 12:10

The lines between spell-work, programming, fiction, storytelling, body-modification, music, mind-altering drugs, religion, philosophy and the ability to type truth to power were thin then. The rules were still being written, the future seemed unclear, but nearly everything seemed possible and programmable. In the shadow of that, I sat terrified of the world: a gen-X, church-going, straight-edge closeted queer kid afraid of sex, afraid of drugs, afraid of AIDS and terrorists and the artists and punks I secretly admired. Pissed at the world but afraid to leave the nest - I devoured every issue of MONDO 2000 and Wired, I listened endlessly to every album in every genre I could find and above all else, I dove into computers, tearing them apart and putting them back together physically, learning to program (badly), reading everything I could find from manuals to the history of hacking. I read and re-read Stephen Levy's Hackers so many times I ended up at MIT for graduate school, and I knew exactly what someone meant later when they critisized that book for being written by someone who "couldn't even get the name of a text editor right" (in the first edition he misspells pico as pica).

Against this backdrop exploring the early network was something I wasn't afraid of - This felt like vast urbex adventure with nearly all the doors unlocked. Every server that answered was up and running, most were unsecured, every command brought something interesting. Three words could open a new account, two closed it, a few letters could give you clues about geography, a few more would teleport you to a personal .plan, where you might find a rumination on the nature of humanity, a recipie for lasagna or instructions on how to build a bomb.

Somehow along the way I cut and pasted the command:

telnet 74.207.243.108:8888

And fell in the middle of a community of internet weirdos known as furry.

FurryMUCK splash screen, appears unchanged since the 80s

@desc me =

For me, a shy, dorky, queer child of evangelicals who was as obsessed with animation and adventure tales of the frozen North as I was with computers and electronics, the furry community didn't seem strange at all, it felt like coming home. It felt like I'd fallen through a crack to discover a universe inhabited by beings whose indigenous habitat was the network. Here was a group of people who felt equally comfortable discussing the upsides of using ZMODEM over other protocols before segueing into group typed-"singalongs" of The Lion King soundtrack, switching comfortably into long discussions of alternate realities, phenomenology and the future of virtual worlds.

I wax poetic over childhood memories, but I'm telling you the truth: I saw The Lion King in the theatre six times. A MUCK friend also mailed me their entire set of college texts on Cognitive Science (which I devoured, and still have). One memorable night five of us chained together some long-distance three-way calls and discussed Sherry Turkle's Second Self. Years later I spent a summer working with Sherry and wrote a chapter for one of her books and was profiled in another (Look for the chapter on the purple elephant). I blame Furry for that. I blame Furry for my gravitation towards SecondLife as well, not so much because of the furry aesthetic (although as with most things, it would prove that community that took the most advantage of the medium), but simply that it was what us early MUCK folks had always talked about: the missing visual element to compliment the text we'd spun in those early days. I spent several years of my life inside SL, including two professionally after joining the IBM Collaborative User Experience Group.

But crucially, in the 90s, as a high school student at an age in an era where everything around me was asking "What are you going to do? what are you going to be? What about your test scores? How will you prove you are worthy?" These environments didn't demand a thing. Instead, they invited me (and anyone else) to spin the universe we wanted from pure text. And while not limited to the furry community, these virtual worlds were self reflective to a stunning degree. Governance and ethics were regular topics of conversation. But also, in those days if someone sent unsolicited email to your inbox you could write to the individual in charge of their mail server and expect a response. It was a different time.

I tried once or twice to explain FurryMUCK to people around me who didn't really know what a modem or a telnet was. It made zero sense and I wasn't met with derision so much as blank looks of confusion and perhaps pity. A well-meaning school counselor hinted I might have a drug problem. In 1994 Johnny Manhattan Meets the Furry Muckers hit Wired and the die was cast. In spite of the title, the article only barely touches on Furry, mostly as a punchline that the author offers "goes a long way to explain [the usenet message board] alt.sex.bestiality."

To be fair, the original magazine version of that article included a lengthier gonzo-travelogue visit to the MUCK that provided more context than has survived in the archive (I know this because I borrowed that particular issue from my highschool friend, eager to read some coverage about this universe I found on the other side of the wardrobe). I remember being mildly disappointed but not particularly miffed at the mischaracterization: the adults in my life got pretty much everything wrong, why wouldn't they misunderstand this too?

There are some circles of furry where this particular article is cited as the beginning of a long and difficult culture-war of furry vs. "the media," but if that was true I certainly didn't see it. Nobody on FurryMUCK that I knew gave a fuck, other than being annoyed at the sudden influx of sex-tourists less interested in chatting than shouting lewd things in public. The moment passed.

More critically though, a new vision of the Great Man theory was waiting in the wings: the misogynist-asshole-programmer-prince was man-splaining himself to the front of the line. The archetype of the dotcom dude-bro who would soon be directing the next few decades of our lives. That model - the Elon Musk template - was what was necessary to shift the locus of financial power from real estate and cocaine to cyberspace and ecstasy. A vision of the future was needed that mainlined power without consequence. Clinton wrote Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell into law. FurryMUCK was the first system I encountered (and the only, for nearly 30 years) that asked me what my pronouns were.

Against the burgeoning dotcom boom, furry provided a trans-humanist vision of the future that was too trans, too humanist, too queer, too quaint, too soft, too femme, too interested in play and care and mutual aid (and yes sex and parties) and the possibility of flexible identity than the network could possibly allow in its quest for growth. If computer nerds were going to go mainstream and the world was going to be digitized, the order needed quick and heavy reification along familiar lines of power. The network needed biometrics (and biomarkers) to see like a state. One identity, assigned at birth. Certainly none of this trans-species fuckery.

Photo by Etheri

I walked away from furry around this time without it ever having escaped the bounds of my computer. I didn't quit dramatically, I just got busy, and my online friends graduated and moved on with their lives. I worked on my own shit and I learned to be less afraid and I got a job in writing code for the internet so I could pay for art school. I dyed my hair purple and went to bars and live shows and I kept poking at computers, looking for a way back in to the network I remembered falling in love with, seeking out the gaps in the fence that provided the most interesting glimpse at a future that seemed so much more interesting before it became an industry.

I worked my way to MIT where in the first month of grad school the terrorists of my childhood flew planes into New York City, a place I knew by then (a bit) but by the time I got there, all the artists I'd wanted to meet had died from AIDS. I met new friends and new artists, and somewhere in that strange haze I wandered into a demo of Linden World. "Crash" was the assigned surname of testing accounts, I typed "Coyote" as my first name, not sure I wanted to claim furry but pretty firmly identifying with trickster deities. This is my preferred survival strategy to this day: a personal choice and a powerful metaphor I carry with me to own my discomfort as a strategy. There's always the feral exit. In any case my sole contribution to those early days was to map coyote-eyes into the head of my uncanny Ruth avatar. I suggested that maybe it could be interesting to support bodies that weren't so human shaped? The community took care of that eventually.

I met new online friends, described myself as "from the internet" and began a career in social software research, diving head-first into trying to share the ways that online community outlined a better tomorrow. I watched those ideas meet scale and explode, the social media golem that connected my new online community weaponized itself and turned into a propaganda machine for the highest bidder. Twitter brought Si Se Puede! to the lawn of the capital and I swear I was there (tweeting, with tears in my eyes), the inauguration of America's first black president on a campaign of hope. From that perch I watched the right exact its revenge using the same tools: 4chan manifest into a vast hyperbolic cartoon-fascist nightmare no less vicious and dangerous for being so fucking stupid. We remain in the shadow of that today and the future looks grim.

The network always paid my bills: I did time as an engineer. I got a house. I moved to industrial research. I quit IBM, I moved to Europe, started a family, tried to write and talk my way back to a place where I thought I could chain together some art, some late-night three-way-calls with queer friends to discuss the future of humanity on the network. Pandemic and academic politics and state violence intervened; I failed to make a soft landing.

Reluctantly returning (home?) at 45, my family briefly moved in with my parents while we transitioned our household. I discovered state-law required me to take driving lessons again and re-apply for permission to operate a vehicle. I found myself instantly frustrated and 16 again. Digging through the attic, I pulled open a cardboard box and found a pencil drawing.

Photo by Etheri

My FurryMUCK character in plantigrade wolf form circa 1995, mailed to me by my online friends who attended Confurence 6 and somehow convinced Steve Gallacci of Albedo Anthropomorphics fame to draw... me.

The Floor Is Lava

March 01, 2022

A not-quite-manifesto in progress. A small hope. An attempt to imagine a better future. An ode to the early web, when everything was difficult and annoying and we built it anyway (together). Unofficially kicking off a collaborative year with Jesse Kriss, where we will mostly be exploring decentralized systems and uxn.

• The Floor is Lava
• No Gods, No Master-branch.
• Push Buttons First, Ask Questions Later
• Play is a Matter of Life and Death
• It’s All Only Play

The floor is lava!

The furniture is ok, the walls are ok. Parts of the furniture are ok, you can use the pillows. You can paddle them like a boat, but they're not large enough for two. You, and your friends? You need to cross the room.

You have no additional tools. The walls are unbreakable. The room is not yours. The space was always here. Someone else built it -- Your parents or your boss -- or the management company. They don't notice the floor is lava. (Or: They don't care. It looks good in pictures.) The door is blocked. How do you escape? How quickly? And then?

The Floor Is Lava is a game about infrastructure from the perspective of the person who has inherited an environment. In fact it doesn't matter if the person playing owns the environment or not. It doesn't matter if they helped design the environment, or paid for it, or liked it in the past, or will like it in the future. The game poses a challenge: What if the previously perfectly acceptable ground we walk on no longer sustains us? What if the environment has gone toxic?

The Floor Is Lava does not invite you to tear it all down, it doesn't ask you to move to Mars, it doesn't curse the four walls, it doesn't ask you to figure out why, only to escape. Declaring the floor isn't lava is cheating. The Floor Is Lava knows what's up: A room is a prison is a game, depending on perspective.

Let's play.

Parkour Style Software Development

Parkour (abbreviated PK ,/paʁkuʁ/ ) describes a type of locomotion whose goal is to get from point A to point B as efficiently as possible using only the abilities of one's own body.

The parkour runner (French: le traceur "the one who draws a line") determines his own path through the urban or natural space - in a different way than dictated by architecture and culture. You try to overcome obstacles that stand in your way as efficiently as possible by combining different movements. The focus is on flow and control of movement. Parkour is therefore also referred to as the "art of efficient locomotion".

The Toolchain and the Network is the Infrastructure is the Floor

Modern software development, especially on the web, assumes an internet and a vast network of interdependent systems. There is nothing wrong with this per-se: networks allow us to stand on each other's shoulders, and these interdependencies are instructional: they underscore both the fragility and the power of human connection in useful ways. The networks allow for legitimate peripheral participation, and provide opportunities for collaboration across time and space.

In many ways it's great that almost no one who builds vehicles these days really needs to worry about building roads. But also: we should all be concerned with roadbuilding, because we'll really miss it when our roads fail.

Infrastructure is mostly invisible by design. We are supposed to take it for granted, but in fact we are often in danger of forgetting another world is possible outside the periphery of our own vision. It's easy to forget that not every place on earth has drinkable water on tap, cheap electricity or high speed data. Not every place needs these things (except for the water, we all need water.)

The infrastructure is not immutable, we built it, and we can change it, don't let it be a trap.

Resistence is Parkour

Remember: Everything is made of people.

...[In Parkour] If any member hurt himself during or after the execution of a movement, the movement was deemed a failure. A movement executed only once was not considered an achievement; only with repetition was the challenge complete. Every movement had to be repeated at least ten times in a row without the traceur having to push his limits or sustaining any injury. If any mistake was made by any traceur in the group everyone had to start all over again.[37]

Humility was an important principle.[39] No traceur was allowed to feel superior to someone else, for example, by executing a movement only to show off in front of someone who could not perform the movement. If any traceur in the group claimed that he had completed a difficult and dangerous challenge that should not be attempted unaided, he had to prove his claims by doing the challenge again. Anyone who lied violated the principle of humility.[37]

The Rules

• The floor is lava

• It doesn't matter how it got that way

• It's up to us to fix it

• The approach needs to be playful, specifically:

  • This is a team effort
  • Rule changes are made for the sake of extending the play
  • If any one of us doesn't make it, no one does
  • Play is the most serious practice of all

Possible Characteristics of Playful Anti-Lava Technology:

• Soft
• Quiet
• Simple
• Accessible
• Convivial
• Helpful