Furry's Sexual Schizophrenia

I went to Rainfurrest this weekend, the annual Furry convention in Seattle. I haven't been to a Furry convention in over a decade, not since the kids were born, and haven't really had much contact with the furries.

I like furries, in the abstract. They're exuberant, for one thing, gleefully exploring a weirdly transhuman idea about the shape of both the body and mind. They're willing to play with all sorts of ideas about how people would interract if we could know more, and less, about each other.

And oftentimes I like them in the real world, too. They're fun to be around, and the fursuiting part of Furry fandom is actually getting good enough to be interesting.

Rainfurrest emphasized a curious schizophrenia about Furry's past, and the sex lives of Furries, in a way that tells me the Burned Furs managed to do a lot of lasting damage before the failure of their doomed campaign. In talking with a number of furries at the convention, I got a dual impression: that furrydom remains, in general, a highly sexual community, and that furrydom is, in general, deeply ashamed of this fact.

I wanted to know how much young furries knew about Furry Fandom from 1992 through 2001: From the start of Confurence through the collapse of the Burned Furs. It turned out the answer was "Nothing, except that it was all run by a bunch of gay guys. Furry's not like that now. It's not about that." (That was a quote from one young man in the hallway.)

Except Rainfurrest had an awful lot of outness to it. Cross-gendered heavily sexualized fursuits, outright drag queens, and a popular t-shirt reading "FUR FAG" were everywhere. Leaving aside the way Furry fandom has co-opted gay language, with panels about "How to come out as a Furry to your parents and co-workers," and t-shirts that read "Furry. Deal With It." (Furries should also probably stop wearing "Furries Ruin Everything" t-shirts. Tongue-in-cheek only works when the audience understands ironic mockery.)

Furry fandom wants more respect. It wants to be something other than the bizarre, unloved step-child of SF fandom. It wants to forget that it was ever dissed by Something Awful, 4Chan, and Cruel Site, and it wants to be somewhere other than the very bottom of the geek hierarchy.

Yet it has no narrative on which to hang itself, no story predominates the Furry mindset, no striving, acheiving characters and situations. All that distances Furries from mere humans is differences in the body, and the most straightforward way to make that difference known is through sex. That's why the dealer's room is dominated by nude pin-ups, the fiction is dominated by erotica, and the one company that makes the most money off Furries sells "fantasy creature sex toys."

I don't expect this schizophrenia to ever work itself out. There will always be too much sex in Furry to mainstream the whole genre; there will always be just enough non-sexual content for the whole of Furrydom to think, "Someday, someday, we'll be legit. But I still want Bad Dragon [NSFW!] in the dealer's room."

Only erotica and George Lucas have celebration scenes

I was at an erotica writing workshop recently, and one of the women running the panel on characterization said that one of the scenes she likes to write is the "celebration" scene. That's what she called it. The whole "We've been through a terrible time and survived. Let's celebrate... by fucking!"

I asked her about that. Shouldn't every scene move the story forward? She was adamant that a celebratory scene was acceptable on its own terms, that it didn't need to advance the plot or characterization in any way.

I disagreed, and I still do. I find the "celebration" scenes at the end of Star Wars and Return of the Jedi rather boring (although My Little Pony's send-up is cute) in that they don't really wrap up anything. "The Heroes lived happily ever after" is all fine and dandy, but the throne room sequence goes on and on.

And I think it's especially true of erotica. The whole point of erotica is to get the characters to reveal something important of themselves in the bedroom, to realize their own self-knowledge or their knowledge of the other, or to advance a personal, perhaps even inimical agenda.

To paraphrase a common writer's saying, "They fucked and it was good" is just an anecdote. "They fucked and it was good when she overcame her fear of hurting him" has a plot.

Hah. Canvas experiment #10

It only took me about an hour to get the quadratic equation working. I realized I was recalculating the intercept with the inner circle twice, and removed one of the quadratic recalculations.

Then I had to handle the special case where the reference line crosses the Y-axis, because that results in an undefined slope. That did indeed require a special case handler.

It didn't help that Javascript's math isn't precise enough to actually tell you when the slope is going vertical. I had to "clamp" the number to 15 digits of precision to the right of the decimal to ensure that I got "something like zero" when I expected zero. I asked Stack Overflow for help on that one.

Then I had the case where the one of the target lines traverses the X-axis. The quadratic equations generate two intercepts on opposite points of the circle. Trying to figure out which generated "the smallest possible angle with the reference line" broke when the intercepts were on opposite sides of the X-axis. The algorithm for that turned out to be fun.

Canvas Experiment #10 The orange line is the reference line. At small angles, the blue lines form a rectangle, not a pie-slice.

Now I need to work on the easing algorithm so that the outer angle "eases" to the same angle as the inner angle the further away from the reference line the inner angle is. At some point away from the reference line, having the slopes be perfectly coincidental looks just as twonky as the pie-slice effect you get close to the reference line.

Paul Krugman is sick of your shit.

I have no idea why, but this picture made me giggle insanely for at least five minutes. It made Omaha go, "What's so funny?" It was totally worth it.

The Sexual Dynamics of the Sternberg Household

Over dinner, Omaha told me, "I'm going to be downloading Duke Nukem Forever. It's a big download, it'll take seven hours. You may not watch My Little Pony tonight."

Aww.