From: "Dennis Carr" Organization: Chez Vrolet Secret Labs Subject: I am furry, hear me purr Date: Sat, 11 Jan 2003 19:41:38 -0800 Newsgroups: alt.lifestyle.furry I have a confession to make. I am furry. And a Christian. I guess it couldn't be helped. After my wife and I have been owned by MoreThanOne(TM) cats, we've both learned to understand their language. But that I'm a Christian and a fur...well, whether you follow the judeo-christian God or not, I figure that God created every person the way they are for a reason - the simpler version of this is that He didn't want a horde of automatons, which is totally contrary to what many man-made religions would have you believe. But enough of my personal problems. I looked at the Furvey, it's probably the best way to come out of the...well, is closet the right word under the circumstances? =^_^= v3.01 Yourself ======== 1. What is your name? Dennis Carr 2. What is your email address? ke6isf@spamcop.net or any number of other address with my ham radio callsign in it 3. Are you male or female? Male 4. How old are you? / What is your date of birth? 07Aug1974 5. Where do you live? Garden Grove, CA, right down the road from Crystal Cathedral. 6. What are your interests/hobbies? In no particular order: Ham radio, anime, photography, web design, ballet (not just watching, but dancing), conceiving costumes (I don't yet know how to sew) and Linux system administration (go fig) pretty much cover hobbies. As for interests...well, I'm interested in pyrotechnics, but Disneyland has the monopoly on that right now. =^_^= 7. What do you do for a living? Hard to tell, but I do sort of a cross between office management and database administration for a tax firm in Anaheim. 8. How would you describe your personality? Geeky. Because Geek is Chic. Actually, when it comes down to doing my job, give me a task and try and let me do it without trying to supervise me. It'll get done before the deadline you imposed. As far as personal life, I'm fairly social, and will try to push my wife into going places she doesn't really want to go (gatherings and such). Sometimes this last bit works out OK, sometimes however it puts her in a pretty nasty mood. I'm also fairly lazy about my mundane life, but tend to keep things of more digital nature very nicely ordered. My HTML generator scripts will put out beautiful code, even if my desk is buried in 3 feet of crap! =^_^= In the end, though, I've been described as eccentric. 9. Do you believe in ESP? Do you consider yourself to be psychic? I believe in psychic energy, but I tend to try and avoid it when possible. I stubbornly believe that while psychic energy is unto itself neutral, the majority of what's out there on the "airwaves", as it were, is kinda like what's on broadcast AM, FM, and television - a lotta crap that I don't *really* want to sort through. I suppose I could exercise it if I want to get better at that, but I'm also kinda lazy. 10. Are you a meat eater? Oh yeah. I want my chicken fried or cooked upright on a beer can, and I want my steaks to moo when they hit the plate! Furry media =========== 11. Who are your favourite furry characters? It's probably easier to ask which ones I dislike, but if I really had to pick a favorite, it would have to be the Warner Bros. set. 12. What type of furry artwork do you enjoy viewing/collecting? Any is fine with me, as long as it's not downright pornographic. The romantic/inferred (infurred?) stuff is fine, but spare me the details. =O.o= 13. What type of furry literature do you enjoy reading? I've never really read any furry literature, but Brian Jacques' stuff looked somewhat interesting. 14. What are your favourite furry films/cartoons? Warner Bros stuff - particularly Animaniacs. (And I still don't know just what they are.) 15. What are your favourite furry computer games? Never played one, but the char design on Starfox looks pretty decent. 16. What are your favourite furry comic books? Never really read them. 17. What are your favourite furry comic strips? The regretfully retired Class Menagerie, Suburban Jungle, Gene Catlow, Over The Hedge, that one with Mooch the Cat (Yesh!), and for a long shot, Sluggy Freelance and User Friendly (Dust Puppy Cometh!) 18. What types of furry media do you create? I don't. I never really was much of an artist. 19. Who are your favourite furry artists? N/A 20. Who are your favourite furry writers? N/A 21. Who are your favourite furry musicians? Furry *Musicians*?! Plushies ======== 22. What types of plushies do you own? We rescued a koala from my mom's father's place when we cleaned the place out. (He's not dead, he's just resting - he never cleaned house. It was bad. But enough of my personal problems.) We don't have a name for it, but he sits on our dresser. We also have a crushed velvet teddy bear my wife bought for me (OK, with my money) as a sort of late valentines day present. 23. What are your favourite species of plushie? Tigers. 24. What attributes do you look for when buying a plushie? Well, I've never gone plushie shopping recently... 25. Describe your ideal plushie. Well, you know those white tiger plushies with the blue eyes that came out a few years ago? I'd really like one of those.... Fursuits & Accessories ====================== 26. What type of fursuits do you own? I don't... yet. Currently on the concept board as it were is a Cats-style moomba (those oddly fox-like creatures from Final Fantasy 8), and I'll probably do a tiger sometime in the near future. 27. Do you enjoy wearing furry accessories? Well, I'll try most anything once. =^_^= 28. Do you feel 'furrier' when wearing a fursuit/collar/tail etc? Absolutely. See 37 for more details. 29. Do you wear your fursuits in public? I likely will wear the above fursuit at Anime Central this year. 30. Describe your favourite/ideal 'furry' appearance. Well, you've probably guessed I have this thing for tigers by now. Furriness ========= 31. What are your phenotype(s)? Feline. 32. Describe your ideal physical form. Ideally, a few feline attributes wouldn't be so bad - ears, fur, tail, claws, fangs.... 33. How much would you like to actually become an animal/furry? Given the first opportunity, I'd pounce on it. 34. Would you like to be transformed into an animal/furry, if you could _not_ change back? Well, sure. I mean, what are They Who Know Best going to do about it if I walk into work one day and I now have orange and black fur, fangs, a tail, ears atop my head, and claws after I've been zapped with some furry ray or something? 35. What kind of furry, non-sexual fantasies do you have? Despite my affinity for tigers, I occasionally fantasize about being an eagle. The idea of flying without the aid of a 737 is rather wonderous. 36. What conditions help you to enjoy/express your furriness? Not being at work. Conventions are a major help. External furriness ================== 37. How and when was your furriness first evident? I think it was when I was in fourth grade. I would purr, and rather enjoyed it. To wit, though, I didn't really identify it as a "purr" until recently. More recently though, while looking for halloween stuff a few years ago, on a whim I decided to try on a tiger costume a local rental shop had available for rent - it was a tiger print unitard with various accessories. While it was highly enjoyable and habituating (might I even say exhilirating), what I felt when I put on the unitard was largely indescribeable, but the best I can come up with was that I had felt like I became a cat for those few moments I wore that costume, and I simply didn't want to remove it and return to my mundane clothes - it was partly because it felt like the fursuit belonged on me, but more that it felt like the stripes belonged on me. The sensation as I described it hung on for about a week, and I never did completely recover from this rather unique and liberating experience. 38. How does your furriness influence your lifestyle, personality, appearance, emotions or thoughts? - Vocalization: I'll occasionally meow at people. - Physical: Nothing really evident, but my wife and I will nuzzle each other. - Online play: Largely the modified "anime-style" furry smiley. =^_^= 39. How much control do you have over your furriness?; Every now and again I'll find myself meowing at people at work in response to "Dennis?", or just meowing to myself at bus stops while I'm waiting to be picked up by a bus. Of course, the latter is quickly dismissed by other passengers because you just get a lot of "strange" (read: mentally disabled) people on the bus. (No, that's not dissing mentally disabled people. I have good friends like that. But to play devil's advocate, a lot of people are scared of them because they do things that aren't perceived as "normal" - and for those in outlying areas, Orange County is particularly conservative.) 40. Do you act furry in public? Well, I meow a lot, and flirt with my wife as described above. We're cat toys to each other - we'll bat at each other, pounce, glomp, lick, etc., but we save the licks for when people aren't looking - or can't see.... 41. How does your furriness influence the way you interact with people? "Meow?" 42. Do you act more/less furry in the company of furry friends? We have very few furry friends actually - I'm only recently exploring the community. I have one friend who plays an otter on a M*, and a mutual acquaintance of ours (and his wife) work conventions in the area. 43. What are other people's attitudes towards your furriness? I think they see it as more or less another "quirk" I have, but it doesn't manifest itself to a large scale, so the occasional "meow" is tolerated. 44. What types of furry themed decorations/accessories adorn your living space? We don't decorate a whole lot. The closest we have is a wall calendar featuring cats, and since cats (the live ones) themselves are always wandering about, that works well for "decoration". Internal furriness ================== 45. What factors influence your furriness? I think it was just the fact that, once I got married, we were adopted by several cats, and that just kind of helped bring it out into the open. 46. How much of your furriness is 'instinct' vs 'learnt'? Hard to tell yet. 47. The full moon: How does it affect you? Why do you think that it affects you? Do you think that it affects non-furries in the same way that it affects furries? Does the moon hold any spiritual significance for you? The only real significance a full moon holds for me are the classic stereotypes actually proving themselves - people forget how to drive, crazy people on public transit in higher concentrations, the local ER is overbooked and understaffed again, Jehovah's Witnesses are drawn to my bus stop like moths to a flame (instead of the usual once per day bit), that sort of thing. Personally, I just get a little more wary when I'm aware of the moon being full, but I have to be aware of the phase - so for me it's little more than a neurosys. (OK, people in southern CA don't know how to drive period. There's just more of them.) Animals ======== 48. What animals are you most/least comfortable with? I'm most comfortable around cats, but can deal with pretty much any domestic animal. As far as least comfortable, I'd rather be in a room that doesn't have a very hungry leopard in it. 49. What pets do you own? We are owned by six cats. (C'mon, you should know that you can't own a cat!) Amongst our cats we have four purebred bengals (the dam, an older daughter, the one kitten of a litter of three who survived, and another kitten from a different litter (our alpha male) that we traded for one of the litter before the one that got traded went to be with God), and two mixed breed brothers who are neutered - although one thinks he's not and tries to mount our girls. 50. Do you have the opportunity to watch animals in the wild? Not really. I see the occasional possum, saw a racoon once, and nearly flattened a skunk with my bicycle a few years ago, but that's it. OC is so populated now that if a moose wandered down the road people would complain about home values plummeting 20%. 51. Do you have a greater-than-average empathy with animals? I suppose so - to a large extent, housecats take right to me, and dogs have no problem with me - but I think this last bit came from learning how to deal with dogs during my short-lived tenure as a boy scout. 52. Do you believe that animals have ESP? Hard to say, but wouldn't put it past them. I know they know how we feel and can pick up on impending disasters, but that's not ESP. 53. Have you ever communicated with an animal via telepathy? Nope. 54. Do you think it is acceptable to hunt/raise animals for food? Yes. It's where we get meat. I suppose it's not the fact that animals don't have emotions (they clearly do, and that's evident even in the flavor of hunted versus farmed meat), I've pretty much grown up eating meat. I won't eat some parts (IE, tripe and such), and I don't care for the flavor of veal or rabbit, but I mind less knowing that most if not all of the animal is going into food. But see also 55. 55. Do you think it is acceptable to hunt/raise animals for fur/leather? Not if that's all you're using it for. If you kill it, find a way to use it all. Cook the meat, make soup with or compost the bones, make sausage with the intestinal lining, make a haggis or a menudo with the stomach, feed the organ meats to the cat, but for crying out loud, don't waste that animal just because your wife wants that fur stole. 56. Do you think it is acceptable to hunt animals for sport? No. See 55. If you're just killing the animal for target practice, you're better off going to a nearby target range. Internet ======== 57. What are your favourite animal/furry websites? Yerf, although I've not explored any others 58. What are your favourite furry MUCKs/MUDs? I used to hang out on fluffmuck, but stopped for a while. I kind of lost interest in the text RPG facilities after a while. 59. What are your favourite animal/furry newsgroups/mailing lists? Never really paid *too* much attention, but ALF seems to be a good place to start. 60. How did you discover alt.lifestyle.furry? My usenet client listed it when I searched for '*.furry' 61. What were your very first impressions of alt.lifestyle.furry? It's not your typical newsgroup. People seem relatively congenial here. 62. What do you like the most/least about alt.lifestyle.furry? See 61. 63. What would you like to see more/less of in alt.lifestyle.furry? Hard to say. Sexuality/Relationships ======================= 64. Are you straight, gay or bisexual? Straight. 65. What are your favourite sexual activities, with other people? Vanilla sex 66. What are your 'furry fetishes'? Fursuit sex sounds intriguing... 67. Describe your ideal partner. My wife. We'll leave it at that for now. 69. Has your gender preference changed since discovering the furry community? Nope. And since the rest is optional, there it goes. =^_^=