Desteredra and myself ended up catching a ride with Delphanaeous and Thea down to Delaware earlier this evening to have dinner at a Red Lobster in honor of Del's birthday.

Moon Mochi, Mortonfox, and Kitt3ns were also there, along with a few other folks who I didn't get contact info for.

I took a few pictures (the whole set is here):

It was nice to get out of the apartment for a bit and go to reasonably sized furry social activity since Anthrocon. Helped my overall mood somewhat.

I think it's also the first time I did any sort of social activity in Delaware. :-P

There has been some increased activity on Pennsylvania Furries website recently, so I decided it justified finally biting the bullet and upgrading the site from Drupal 4.7 to Drupal 6.16. That upgrade was fun and... interesting. But now that I have a much more recent version of Drupal installed, I've been able to add some features such as these:

- Event Calendar. Want to know when upcoming furmeets, gathers, etc. are? We now have a calendar that anyone may post events to.

- Buddy lists. Yes, they are what you think they are. Users can now have an actual "friends" list on this site. Go to any user's page and click the link towards the bottom to become their buddy. (Here's an example)

- Private messages. Just what the name implies. Users on the site can now send each other private messages. When you're logged into the site, just click the "Messages" link to get started.

- Searching. I reindexed the entire site (and set up crontabs to keep that happening) so now the search engine works again, and posts (and users) on this site are fully searchable.

- Tagging posts. All posts can now be tagged. Even posts made by others. Go ahead. Give it a try. There is also a tag cloud that lists the most popular tags on the site.

- User profiles that don't suck. All user profiles now have links to a number of social networks, along with support for forum signatures, private messaging, and buddy lists.

And the URL for the Pennsylvania Furries website?

http://pa-furry.claws-and-paws.com/

Check it out, and let me know what you all think!

Let it never be said that JetBlue doesn't have a sense of humor:

From http://twitter.com/xenijardin/status/1023637372:

And JetBlue's response, from http://twitter.com/JetBlue/status/1023680195:

I guess that means we'll need to check our fursuits?

I drove down to Virginia for KainCon this past weekend and made a few side trips along the way.

On Friday night, I met up with Loki for dinner. It was the first time I really got to hang out with him since he got out of the military.

I made it down to Kain's place late Friday night and hung out through early Sunday afternoon. I got to see Creature, Davin, and Drakien again. Bill Cosby Stahi was around, too. Talyn was also there.

There was something about a pretty crazy game of Wii Tennis with Sir Kain, who totally stomped me in a Best 3 of 5 match.

On Saturday evening, we took a trip to the Todai sushi buffet, and I saw this on the way out:

More pictures from KainCon:

The full archive of pics is at http://flickr.com/photos/dmuth/sets/72157607568251631/, for anyone who is interested. I also created a Flickr group for KainCon photos at http://flickr.com/groups/kaincon/.

On Sunday, I went a little out of my way to visit Reuven in Maryland. It was the first time I saw him in uh, about 3 years or so. We grabbed a late lunch and got to play catchup on recent events in our lives.

I finally got home just after 9 PM that night. It was a fun and busy weekend.

Public service announcement time, folks.

If you keep shouting about negative stereotypes of furry fandom and "that's not what we're all about", well... all you're doing is bringing attention to those stereotypes. They'll still be associated with furry, regardless of what you as an individual do. Right now, we are doing a better job at promoting negative stereotypes about ourselves than any troll could ever hope to do.

Wanna do something productive? Try talking about positive aspects of the furry fandom. Mention how nearly every convention is a non-profit, how furry conventions have raised tens of thousands of dollars for charity, talk about some of the cool fursuits, or some other positive way that furry has impacted your life.

We can't control the trolls. But we can control ourselves, and what we say. Let's make the most of it.

Furries: How you react to them says more about you than it does about them.

The poster is a screen grab from this video, which was later revealed to be a hoax.

The poster was made by Xydexx

Tail building instructions

A poem by Croc O'Dile of TigerMUCK which captures a bit of what it is to be furry.

If the true meaning of furry you wish to understand
You must think in terms of paw and not hand
You must release your mentality from society's cage
For furry prefurs no race, sex, persuasion or age

You must sort through the hype and the exploitation
Because to be furry needs no justification
It is to reach out and embrace the unknown
To be surrounded by friends and yet still be alone

It is not a gimmick or a political movement
It's nothing so

The Code of the Furries

Version 1.3

Ross Smith (alien@netlink.co.nz) 7-Feb-98

Contents

• Introduction
• General modifiers
• Part 1: Your furry side
  • F -- Furry species
  • A -- Art
  • C -- Conventions
  • D -- Dressing up
  • H -- Hugs
  • M -- Mucking and mudding
  • P -- Plush critters
  • R -- Realism vs tooniness
  • T -- Transformation
  • W -- Writing
  • Z -- Zines
  • S -- Furry sex
• Part 2: Your human side
  • RL -- What you do in Real Life
  • a -- Age
  • c -- Computers
  • d -- Doom, Quake, etc.
  • e -- Education
  • f -- Real life furriness factor
  • h -- Housing
  • i -- Internet
  • j -- Anime (Japanese animation)
  • p -- Pets
  • s -- Human sex
• Example

Introduction

In the spirit of Robert Hayden's Geek Code, Peter Caffin's Goth Code, Jayne Alexander and Dave Ratcliffe's Cat Code, and other similar codes that have cropped up all over Usenet, I thought it was time us furries had a code of our own. (Or, to put it another way, it was Sunday afternoon, I'd read all my Usenet news, it was too wet to go to the zoo, and I had nothing intelligent to do.)