Self-Reflection

Published: June 2021 - November 2022 (Twitter posts), November 27, 2022 (FurAffinity)

Word Count: 38,015

I don't think I'm going to be able to write about how this story came about without giving quite a few spoilers along the way, so please read the story first. Y'know, if giant women growing and stomping buildings and eating people interests you at all. I have a feeling it might. 

Read Self-Reflection

Self-Reflection is the result of a storytelling experiment. I wanted to see how easily I could tell a story on Twitter, adding one post of 280 characters at a time, maybe posting once a day and seeing how far I could go.

Pretty far, it turns out.

I quickly realized one post a day wouldn't be enough to have a good flow, so the output became three posts a day. I decided to set it up a bit like a newspaper comic of old, with five "strips" of three posts per week, Monday through Friday. Starting in June of 2021, those posts told the story of Dr. Samantha Shepherd and her misadventures with teleportation and artificial intelligence. And growth, of course!

The story had several inspirations. The most obvious is the 1986 Cronenberg remake of The Fly, which provided the telepods and the idea of a computer mucking about with one's DNA unasked. The growth angle came from an old roleplay session from years and years ago. What if said computer thought it was improving you by making you bigger? Artificial intelligence was making waves as I wrote this tale; web portals and APIs that allowed users to create art and prose were popular, though the novelty of it soon lead to worries of copyright theft and alarm over yet another territory of human endeavor being invaded by machines. The AI in Self-Reflection doesn't play any part past the first few pages, but I do like how its motivation to improve our protagonist turns out to be quite short-sighted.

Originally, this was intended to be a short story about a scientist who discovers she's slowly growing day by day, exploring all the problems that would create. Somewhere along the line, I thought it would be interesting if, while attempting to solve her problem, the computer decided to split her in two once she was big enough. I considered making another Twitter account to tell her double's side of the story, but I figured it was complicated enough to follow the narrative on Twitter to begin with, and I thankfully dropped the idea.

Like Samantha, the story grew. What I thought might be a month-long project turned into several months as Big Samantha had her fun. I intended to use her as the sole antagonist for the story until one Briony Titania Thakore sort of just wrote herself into it. Once she was in the story, I knew she wasn't destined to be a minor character, and she became a foil for both Small and Big Samantha.

One of my favorite parts of this experiment was taking those ideas that just came out of nowhere and running with them, unable to take them back once I'd put them out there. Titania was my favorite of those, and her inclusion grew the story still longer. I saw how it should end, and the big feline and canine made their way through the story beats that would lead them there.

Then Russia invaded Ukraine.

It was a stunning event that shocked the world, and I put the story on hold for a while. I couldn't really explain why at the time because it would have given away where I was going with the plot, but now I can.

Titania and Samantha were originally going to meet their end in an attack from the military with a nuclear weapon. After Russia's invasion, this did not seem like a good idea with which to carry on. Everyone was on edge about the Ukraine conflict boiling over into a nuclear war as well, and I had flashbacks to my childhood where the fear of such a thing happening was always buried in the back of my mind. So, I just stopped for a while.

As things became a quagmire for Russia and the panic subsided somewhat, I reworked the ending to be what it is now. I think it fits a lot better, actually, as Titania's destruction is a fitting consequence of her own greed rather than a foil from outside.

So there it is! This is my longest story to date, and I had a lot of fun writing it. The interactive nature of putting the story on Twitter, which allowed for comments, encouragement, and guesses as to where the plot was going, provided a ton of motivation for me in keeping it going. Thank you so very much to everyone who took the time to let me know how much you were enjoying it. You played a huge part in its creation.

Because of how it was written, the story and structure is rough around the edges. Sentences are often short because of the need to fit things into 280 characters. For the same reason, pronouns repeat much more than I'd like, and dialogue is a bit clunky. The military thread just sort of disappears due to the above-mentioned nuclear concerns. Wolfman-Al deserves many thanks for compiling it all into one big text document, which I then edited and cleaned up as much as I could without huge rewrites. It's big and clumsy and sprawling, but then it's a story about newly-minted giants, so I suppose that's appropriate. I'm proud of it.

I hope you enjoy it too.

Silver Anniversary: A Look Back

 This week (July 12, to be exact) marks the 25th anniversary of the creation of my first character on FurryMuck.  I've always used that as my entry date into the fandom, as that was the first time I started interacting with other furries.  The actual process of becoming a furry myself started way before that, however, so this is that story.

Growing up, I was always interested in animals. I liked books that featured them (The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling was an early favorite), and movies that featured them (I always tried to catch Dot and the Kangaroo whenever it was on cable). My imaginary friends were all animals. They were more or less the "talking animal" variety, normal-looking critters that could speak. 

When I was about 11 or 12, however, I happened to see a broadcast of Animalympics, and that was my introduction to the concept of anthropomorphic animals.  I was definitely hooked--the sorts of physical forms I saw in that movie captured my imagination and heavily influenced my thoughts and character design later on.

My macro tendencies were also starting to blossom during this time, and my interest in computer programming started up in those tween years as well.  I remember writing programs in BASIC on my old TI-99/4A, simulated competitions in which macro furry athletes all strove to see who could be the biggest of them all.  These competitions required competitors, and--along with shamelessly pulling in a lot of cartoon characters of the time that I thought would make good giants--I started creating some original anthropomorphic characters.  Portia, the panther from Strange Attractor, hails from this time.

As I went through high school and college, things didn't change much.  I kept writing those programs, and I enjoyed my little hobby that I'd invented.  I never mentioned it to anyone else; it never remotely crossed my mind that anyone else would find it all interesting as well.  

Around the time I graduated from college, I developed my interest in wolves. For some reason, there were a lot of wolf documentaries on TV in the early '90s, and I watched all the ones I could find. On one of those documentaries, I saw the story of a pack of wolves studied and photographed in a natural setting in Idaho.  One of those wolves was named Mataki. I thought she looked quite striking, and I used her coloration and name in the creation of a new character that had quite the life of her own later on.

In 1993, I got my first inkling that there were other furries out there. There was a comic shop next to the college I'd recently graduated from, and I kept seeing a comic book titled "Wild Life" among all the others on the shelf.  It stood out from the rest; there were fully anthro characters on the front in a setting and style that was closer to Fritz the Cat than Felix. I looked at it during quite a few visits, and it took a while to build the nerve to buy it (I had a bit of a crush on the woman at the register, and you don't wanna look weird, you know?), but buy it I eventually did.  When I could finally open it up at home and read it, I was amazed to find slice-of-life types of stories featuring anthro animals, but I was even more amazed to read that there was a place called FurryMuck where people pretended to be these anthro animals.  It captured my imagination, though it was a while before I got there.

Two more years went by before I got an account at my first ISP, Netcom.  I lived waaaaaay out in the sticks at that point, and access was only available to me via dialup through a 1-800 number that cost $5 an hour. This limited me to only popping on for about an hour a day max (and having a $150 bill at the end of the month), so I purposefully kept myself away from FurryMuck, knowing that I'd want to spend way more time there than my finances would allow.  I did, however, find avatar.snc.edu, an old furry art site that happened to have some work from a guy named Ken Sample.  Mind Blown In Amazement, stage two.  It turns out a few other people did find giant furries interesting.  I spent a good chunk of each daily hour downloading Ken's stuff (sometimes the entire hour, yay for 14.4Kbps speeds) and learning about all the characters he and other people had come up with.  I was no longer alone.

Then came 1996, the year I mark in celebration here.  Over that summer, a local ISP opened up in the small town where I lived, and I pounced on the opportunity to have unlimited internet access for the same price each month.  I realized I needed a character to use for FurryMuck, and I remembered enjoying a bunch of pictures I'd seen that showed a place there called the Room Temperature Banana Detective Agency.  I thought it'd be neat to be a detective, so I came up with the name Zero Wolfe, a pun on Nero Wolfe, Rex Stout's literary sleuth. He turned out to be more of an inventor than a detective, but that's another story.

Being on FurryMuck allowed me to talk to other furs for the first time, and through it I met a lot of wonderful people that I still chat with to this day.  It's been quite a ride since then.  I've tried my hand at website creation, art, and congoing in the furry world with varying degrees of satisfaction, and I've had a blast exploring things I once only vaguely dreamed about through roleplay and writing.  I am happy to have helped others find their place online, and I hope to be around to see what happens for at least another 25 years.  Thanks to you for being a part of it!

On Asexuality, Part 2

 After re-reading my last entry a few times and cringing internally, I realized I didn't do a very good job with getting some of my main ideas across.  I really don't like talking or writing about myself very much (one thing I'm trying to work on with these posts), and when doing so, I tend to be overly succinct or meander around the point without saying much.  I'd like to tie up some loose ends here.

The main thing I think I failed at was giving a general idea of my orientation all in one place, so let's do that first.  I identify as asexual.  I do find people attractive and beautiful, but I do not seek out sexual relationships in real life.  My furriness and macrophilia complicate things a bit online.  In those worlds, the feelings of attraction tend to be stronger, and I am able to indulge someone else's wishes online if I've formed an emotional bond with them and feel safe.  Sex is still not something I seek out online, but it's something I can feel comfortable doing with the right person if it makes them happy.

I think I gave the impression that I was scared of the idea of sex.  I was really afraid of having a lack of a reaction to someone's advances.  In high school, I'm sure I came off as clueless because of this, and I was, but again, "sorry, I'm asexual" just wasn't in anyone's vocabulary back then.  I felt like I had to bail on my potential partners instead of being honest, and that unfortunately carried over to when I got online.  I ghosted so, so many people before I got a handle on this, and it was always because I would just freeze up and be unable to continue when I realized where things were going.  It was never because of the act itself, but because I stressed over not being into it and coming across as broken.  I again apologize if you're one of those people.  I hope it makes a little sense now, at least.  It's still hard to just come out and say it, but I'm getting better at it.

The last post did spawn a few good conversations that I very much enjoyed, but I do want to make something clear after having them:  I did not mean for my previous post to be any sort of statement about sex in the furry fandom.  This was a hotly-debated topic back in the old days (Burned Furs!  Remember all that?), and while I think we've all calmed down about it quite a bit, I also think it's best to stick to stating personal preferences and experiences and leaving it at that.  There's a huge difference between "this is how I feel and do" and "this is how everyone should feel and do."

Lastly, I don't want anyone to feel like they have to walk on eggshells or act differently around me in public spaces.  The only way you can really make me uncomfortable online regarding sexual content is to suddenly make a private conversation or roleplay all about that.  Think about what's acceptable in public, and unless I know you pretty well already, using the same guidelines will go a long way toward making me feel comfortable and will be most appreciated.  As with anything, if you're unsure, I do not mind at all being asked!  Showing concern and consideration is a great way to build trust as well.

That's it!  This post said everything I really wanted to say, but the muddled history in the last one might still be worth a read if you're going through these in reverse chronological order and are curious.  Thanks again for indulging my efforts in self-exploration.  Even if no one ever reads them, writing these posts is therapeutic, and I hope to continue the streak!

On Asexuality

I came out as asexual with a series of tweets some time ago, and I always meant to elaborate in a longer post like this to tell the whole story.  Like I said in yesterday's post, I think it's finally time to tell it, so here goes.  I'm going to be as open as I can, and this is probably way more information than you're used to hearing from me, especially about stuff like this.

My story will be a lot simpler to tell and understand if I get one thing out of the way and out in the open.  I am male in RL.  Probably 95% of you reading this either already knew or aren't surprised in the least to find out, the furry fandom being what it is.  It's something I've never really advertised until now, but I made it my policy years ago to tell the truth if asked directly.  In my early days on the internet, however, my insecurities led me to lie about it on a couple of occasions that I still remember.  If you are one of those people, I am truly sorry.  This subject probably deserves its own post at a later date, so I'll drop it for now.

A Little History

Asexuality is described as a "sexual orientation characterized by a lack of sexual attraction."  That certainly described me growing up.  Nothing really seemed amiss until my 8th grade year, the year more and more talk with my friends was devoted to who we liked, who we wanted to go out with, and what would happen on those dates.  That was when I started to realize my idea of a fun date didn't jibe completely with everyone else's.  I thought going to an arcade or a movie with someone was a fun time in itself, but to everyone else, that seemed to just be the first act--the true objective was to see how far you could get in the infamous rounding of the bases.

I understood first base well enough.  Dates usually included a single or two as I went through high school.  Past that, however, I was lost.  I just never had the desire to go further.  It was expected, though, and for a while I just sort of went through the motions very awkwardly--quite literally "fake it 'til you make it".  It never felt right, nor did it feel like I was really doing any of it of my own volition.  I was doing it because not doing so would arouse suspicion of there being something wrong with me, and I gradually began to avoid situations and conversations that could lead me to that confrontation of suspicion.

I never had access to the term "asexual" as a means to describe myself back then.  It was newly-minted in the 1980s, and in the pre-internet age, it hadn't filtered down to the very rural West Texas town I grew up in.  Even if I'd had the word, there were really only two explanations back then for me not pursuing sex that would have been believed.  I was either closeted gay or had some sort of mental illness.  Neither one of those was a pleasant brush to be painted with in that place and time.  I didn't think I was the former, so I had to consider the latter possibility.  I think everyone else did, too.  I was never bullied or made fun of for it, at least, but I could tell word got out, and the two girlfriends I had during that time just sort of gave up on me after a while.  I can hardly blame them; I was really wasting their time in an attempt to look normal.

College came, and very few of the people I knew in high school ended up attending mine.  I just sort of dropped the charade at that point and put all my effort into my studies.  I didn't do the bar scene (it helped that the drinking age had just been raised to 21, so that wasn't really an option to begin with), and I just did my own thing.  I still thought there was probably something wrong with me, but at least it didn't really seem to matter nearly as much.

At home, my parents probably knew something was up.  They never had "the talk" with me, possibly because they didn't think I needed it.  At church, we were constantly taught that premarital sex was a sin, so I could console myself with the fact that I was being a good Christian.  Maybe it was actually a blessing that I was that way.  I had it so easy!  Whew, we'll get to religion next time.

So, I had more or less just accepted the way I was and was getting on with my life, when I found...

The Fandom

A few years after college, the Internet became a thing.  Quite soon after my first forays online, the furry fandom became a thing as well, at least for me.  Up until this time, I had no idea at all that there was a group of people that had the same sorts of thoughts about anthropomorphic animal characters running through their minds as I did.  I grew up thinking I was the only one, and I actually considered it to be the cause of my lack of feelings of sexual attraction toward people--they seemed to be directed toward these characters instead.  Needless to say, finding the furry fandom opened up a lot of possibilities, and when I found the macrofurry fandom in short order after that...oh boy.

I still remember being in the college computer lab (I borrowed a friend's ID who was still attending, as I didn't have internet access of my own just yet) and stumbling across Ken Sample's first site.  I was stunned.  This was a thing I thought I'd invented, and here was someone else visualizing it perfectly.  Sexily.  It validated all those "weird" feelings I'd thought myself broken for having, and it gave me hope that there might be even more people out there sharing the same outlook, hope that was realized when I got on FurryMuck and started meeting the first of my friends in the fandom.  All was wonderful!

Until it wasn't.  After a few conversations, I soon realized that furries were much more open about sex than just about everyone I knew in RL, and with my history, it was a bit too much to handle sometimes.  Again, I still didn't have the term "asexual" to know and describe myself, so there was a lot more awkwardness, and in my desire to explore (and be accepted), I did a few things I was not comfortable with.  It's weird to think how just reading text can turn you off and make you shut down emotionally, but perhaps you know the feeling.  I soon fell into the same methods to cope that I used in my high-school years, muddling through when I had to, avoiding the situation altogether when I was overwhelmed.  If you are one of the people I met during this time, and you were just completely perplexed as to how to interact with me because of this, I can only say that I'm sorry I didn't completely know who I was back then.  I had a few close online relationships during this time, but they all eventually grew cold and faded, and I know the reasons were complicated by my lack of desire for even online versions of sex.  I was slowly learning what I liked, wanted and needed, but I wasn't able to use it yet to find people I'd be more likely to mesh with. 

Things have been much better these past few years.  I finally discovered the term for how I felt, and again, knowing there were others did wonders for my feelings of being different and outside what seemed to be everyone else's experience.  I found more close friends that I can be comfortable around--I have found all the quirky ways I'm wired sexually and am able to explore ideas with them.

Conclusion

Wow, this post is getting long--time to wrap it up!  I've said before that I dislike labels in general; they tend to oversimplify and sometimes give false impressions.  I do, however, identify as asexual in that I do not have RL sexual desires toward others.  That's just the way it is.  I've had all sorts of tests done.  Hormones are fine, everything's working as it should.  I just don't feel like using the equipment as much as or in the same way as most people do, and that's OK.

Online is a bit more complicated.  Demisexuality, the ability to experience sexual attraction only after forming an emotional bond with someone, seems to fit much better.  I need to know someone for quite a while before I'm able to venture into sexual situations with them online, and even then, it's dependent on mood.  Trust also factors into it hugely for me.

So why did I write all this?  I wanted to get all this out in the open.  While I think I've come to the point where everything I've discussed isn't really an issue for me anymore, I also feel like it's an elephant in the room that I don't want to ignore anymore, so I'm letting it romp free.  I also hope that anyone with similar feelings might read this and know they're not alone, and they're not broken.  Just different.

I also wrote to educate.  There's a lot of debate whether asexuality should be included in the LGBTQ+ groups, and I think a lot of it centers on the idea that the lack of a certain amount or type of sexual desire disqualifies asexuals, even seeing them as a threat to or a watering down of a group where sexual orientation is a strong identity.  Others say that asexuals don't suffer persecution, and while I was never bullied or made fun of because of this aspect of myself, I cannot tell you how many times I've seen enthusiasm drop, had conversations end, and watched people avoid me because of it.  It's all low-key, but it's there, and seeing it over and over is what made me think there was something wrong with me in the first place.  Whether or not you personally believe it belongs, at least know the perspective.

Thank you for reading this.  This is probably the most personal thing I've ever written, and hitting that Publish button in a few minutes will definitely be the thing I do today that scares me.  But it will also be a relief in many ways, and I thank you again for coming with me to the end of the story.

Sources: Common questions about asexuality | Learn more on asexuals.net

The Book Opens, Coating You In Dust

 Weeeeelllllll, it's been a bit longer since my last post than I would have liked.  I had plenty of good intentions and plans last year to write on a few different topics, but the state of the world--Covid, the protests across the country over the summer, the general dread of everything going on--made it feel like the wrong time to be writing about such things.  While the world's problems still obviously matter, I think it's time to get back to the blog and use it for its other intended purpose: hosting a few essays on subjects I've been wanting to challenge myself and write about for a while, things of a more personal nature that I've kept to myself for years.  Writing about some of them will definitely fit into the "do something every day that scares you" category for me, but maybe someone else will see themselves in the words that come out, know they're not alone, and that'll be worth it.  

So, welcome back!  Let's see if I remember how all this works...

Penumbra, A Poem

Published: May 22, 2020
Word Count: 113

Penumbra is a short poem to express some imagery I had in my head today--also an exercise in trying not to describe things directly. Doing some stargazing at night, did you really see what you thought you saw?

Read Penumbra

The Website: Ten Years Later

Whenever I meet someone new in the fandom, the way they usually know my name (if they've heard of me at all) is from Mega Marco Mataki's Mighty Monstrosity of a webpage.  It's now been ten years since that was a thing, so let's reminisce:

The website started up sometime in early 2003.  My first payment to Yahoo for site hosting was in April of that year, and the first updates listed on the update page come from February, so it probably went online that month.  I'd dabbled with a few personal webpages previously; Zero had his own page in 1996 (complete with horrible textured background and animated gifs), but this was the first time I'd really had a specific purpose in making one: I wanted a site for furry macrophiles--more specifically growth-lovers--to enjoy, complete with stories, comics, and a multimedia file or two.

A few people were nice enough to write stories for me in those early days, as I hadn't written much myself yet.  Ankhari's Choice, by Blackwolfe Coyoten, and Blue Sky Green, by Scott Grildrig, were a couple of favorites of mine.  I've discovered a few more that I don't think have seen the light of day anywhere, so future blog post fodder!

The comics were, I think, one big reason why people visited.  DNA's Free Lunch and Kit's Hocus Pocus were two early growth comics that got pretty big (as they should) at one-hundred-plus pages each.  It was handy to have them all in one place, though my hand-coded navigation pages weren't the best!

The media files were also fun to display in the pre-YouTube days.  Tex Avery's King Size Canary was there, along with clips from Sonic The Hedgehog, Rocko's Modern Life, and earlier influential classics--all blatant copyright violations, of course, but meant as a retrospective of all the size-changing that goes on in cartoons.  And good grief, were they compressed to hell.  There was a RealMedia (shiver) file of a Foxbusters episode clip four minutes long...with a 1.86 Mb file size.  You can imagine the quality!  Or maybe not...think of a postage stamp that moves occasionally and makes noise.

The supercompressed files were necessary to reduce bandwidth costs, of course.  I got a certain amount of bandwidth with my plan, but going over that cost an extra $5 per gigabyte, or something similar.  I didn't mind paying at all; I still considered what I was doing a cheap and fun hobby, but I did lay out about $1500 on bandwidth and hosting costs over the website's seven-year lifespan.  Again, not a huge amount, but definitely not free, and it's why I tend to just give a (sometimes forced) smile when people complain on and on about websites they don't have to pay for.  Whoops, almost tripped over a soap box!  Who put that there...

The other reason I think a lot of people enjoyed the site was the Flash game.  Again, this was BlackWolfe Coyoten's work--a DDR-type Flash game where you tried to make Mataki (via a vectorized image of a piece of art done by Moonstalker) bigger to the beat of Daft Punk's "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger."  Who knew making a wolf grow could be such a motivator to keep playing?  This is actually the one part of the site that still exists online!  You can play it at the link below thanks to Rooth and his online presence, but hurry...Flash support ends at the close of 2020!

Play Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

The site was fun to maintain, but eventually, as FurAffinity became an easy way for artists to display their own work, and as YouTube because an easy to share videos, a dedicated site for such things (that required me coding and paying for) became less and less attractive, and I shut it down around April 2010, ten years ago now.

I am still pleasantly surprised and amazed by how many people remember it and comment that it was their first big introduction to macrofurry world.  That makes me really happy, and it makes everything that I put into the site so worth it.  Thank you, each and every one of you who have told me over the years how much it meant to you!  It's something I will always look back on fondly, and I am glad to have given back to the community that helped me find out a lot about myself.