Monday, September 9, 2013

Honesty

Part of me wants to be a completely honest person.

Another part of me looks at all of the cases where reality is too dark.

I used to look in the mirror and understand what I saw.  I could read my eyes, see my emotion.  I knew exactly what was looking back at me, and not because I was monitoring my internal mental state, but because my face was legible.  My eyes were telling.  The window to my soul was ajar.

Now, when I look in the mirror, I can't read myself.  I'm so covered up by complex experiences and emotions that the sheen over my face, especially my eyes is opaque.

It's disconcerting.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

What I Need to Eliminate

What is worth noting today...

This is just random babble, so please ignore everything contained on this blog post.

I have a habit of getting caught up on things, and letting them fester in my head for a really long time.  I keep thinking about the same small selection of things in a tiny little cycle.  I guess I keep thinking about these things because it's important that I do something about those thoughts.  But then I end up with too little time set aside to do any of those things.

So where is the fluff?  Where is the time that I'm wasting?  What am I doing to take away my productivity, my efficiency, my happiness?

Monday, September 2, 2013

Why Furries Are Good and Who They Are

This has taken me a long time to post, partly because I didn't know if I wanted to post it, partly because I was not sure about what exactly I wanted to say on the subject, and partly because I wanted to say something very particular.  Most of all, I think it's important to explain a facet of our world that is really quite foreign to many people, but is very much a developed and interesting subculture.

I'm motivated to describe it in a very clear and descriptive fashion because I think that it's easy to put the subject into a box and label it as some sort of weird novelty.

I went to FurAffinity United this summer, August 16-18.  It's a furry convention.  To properly discuss this adventure, I need to define a few terms for the layman.  And, as a student of neuroscience and linguistics, I don't play around when I'm defining terminology.  So what you hear here is as precise as it will get.

The noun 'furry' can be used in two ways.  It can be used to describe fictional characters that have the appearance of human-shaped animals, which are less colloquially called anthropomorphic animals.  Bugs Bunny is a furry.  The term 'furry' is also used as shorthand for a person who considers themselves a fan of subject matter that depicts furries.  The adjective form of furry is used to describe things that pertain to the furry fandom.  There's also the term 'fursona', a noun used to describe a nonhuman persona that a person identifies with or acts out.


Furries in art: "Harbinger", by Blotch


The term 'furry' is incredibly loaded.  It means a lot to people who are familiar with the fandom because of all of the preconceptions and stereotypes there are about the demographic of people who frequent the online hubs of the community.  It also means a lot to many people well-versed in "Internet culture", if there is such a thing.  The furry fandom is certainly a diverse community, but because most of the community frequents the same small number of hubs, it's easy to characterize the way that those hubs work and be turned off to any of the main characteristics of those particular places.