Category: Default

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Inside the Furry Fandom

Me, in fursuit as Asriel Dreemurr from Undertale.

Hey there! I first stumbled into the furry fandom in the late 90s–attending my first furry convention in 1999 and staffing my first furry convention in 2000.

I did not realize just how much of a long-term role it would play in my life.

I’ve since attended more than 130 conventions and have staffed over 90 of them across a wide range of roles. I’ve done everything from volunteering and staffing to taking on leadership roles such as Department Head and Division Lead, and have spent a total of 17 years serving on the Boards of Directors of two separate furry conventions.

In addition to staffing conventions, I also moderate a number of furry Telegram groups and help run the Anthrocon and Pennsylvania Furries Discord servers.

In 2021, I felt the time was right to get a fursuit, and began fursuiting as Asriel Dreemurr (pictured on this page).

Here are some additional web pages that highlight my involvement in the furry community:

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do you do it?

Because it’s fun. I get to chat and hang out with people who have similar interests.

Does your family know?

Yep. My parents even staffed Anthrocon in the 2010s–here a picture of us at the staff dinner from that year..

What is your day job?

I am a cybersecurity engineer. Please consider reading my cybersecurity guide.

Does your employer know?

Yep.

In Closing

Feel free to look around the content above, and if you have any questions or wanna chat, do reach out!

Fursuit Group Photo at Furry Migration 2022, held in downtown Minneapolis, MN.

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Furry Telegram Groups I Recommend

I’m on a few furry Telegram groups, and I figured I would put the list here as a resource for other furries who are looking for Telegram groups to join.

For disclosure, I mod/admin a few of these groups. That said, I can endorse joining any of them if they are relevant to your interests.

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Furry Artwork and Commissions of Giza as a Goat

I have all artwork of my fursona over here.

However, since I got a fursuit, I also have been getting art of me drawn as a goat, heavily influenced by Asriel Dreemurr from Undertale.

This page is for that art.

Giza Kidd holding coffee, by Jackaloo
Giza Kidd Barbie YCH, drawn by PineTreeLionCat
Giza Kidd Barbie YCH, drawn by PineTreeLionCat
Giza Kidd drawn by Willow The Wolf
Giza Kidd drawn by Willow The Wolf
Giza Kidd drawn by Rezzy Saber
Me as a goat, drawn by Rezzy Saber.
Giza Kidd drawn by NightlineZ
Me as a goat drawn by NightlineZ.

I will certainly be getting more art of me as a goat in the future. 🙂

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Archives

This page is simply a placeholder where I can have links to archives of past efforts I’ve been involved with, mainly from the late 90s/early 2000s, in case they come up in future conversation. And for clarification, by “archives” I really mean “links from my site that redirect to pages archived on the Wayback Machine”.

The list:

  • SPAM-L FAQ – I maintained the FAQ for the SPAM-L from the late 90s until the list was shut down in the late 2000s. The list had hundreds of members representing organizations from around the world.
  • spam.abuse.net – This was the original website that explained “what is spam”, “why is it bad”, etc. back when the Internet was much more of a “Wild Wild West”. I was a contributor to the site and my name can be found in the list of signatories at the bottom of the page.
  • CAUCE – The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. I co-founded this group back in 1998 and we grew to over 30,000 members. Our goal was to see legislation crafted to amend the Junk Fax Law (47 USC 227) to apply to email. While we were not successful, we did succeed in bringing much public attention to the spam problem.
  • Turntide – TurnTide was a startup that made an anti-spam router. It would sit in front of your mail server and process all traffic on port 25. If a particular IP address was sending spam, we wouldn’t block them, just slow them down with traffic shaping, causing queues to fill up on their end. Customers loved it, spammers hated it. 5 months in, we were bought by Symantec for $28 Million.

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“Hey Siri! Is SEPTA F*cked?”

I’m happy to announce that I’ve created shortcuts in IOS so that Siri can now tell you if SEPTA is fucked!

Before you can get started, you will need to configure IOS to allow Untrusted Shortcuts. There are more detailed instructions on Apple’s support website, but it comes down to doing these two things:

  1. Go into Settings > Shortcuts
  2. Turn on the setting that says “Allow Untrusted Shortcuts”.
“Hey Siri, Is SEPTA Fucked?”

If you don’t see the setting mentioned in Step 2), you will need to open the Shortcuts app, run at least one shortcut, and come back to that screen. (Thanks, Apple!)

If you need further help allowing Untrusted Shortcuts, this writeup is more thorough and includes screenshots.

Anyway, once you have enabled Untrusted Shortcuts, you can click on any of these links to add shortcuts to Siri that will query the website’s API and report back on the status of Regional Rail, Busses, or both:

Once a Shortcut is loaded, you can run the shortcut by either tapping on the Shortcut in the Shortscuts app, or simply by asking Siri the question mentioned above.

Feel free to try this out, and let me know in the comments how it works for you!

Special thanks to @RadioColin over on Twitter for the initial draft of the shortcut!

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The Decepticons Get Drunk on Energon

This one isn’t so much a kick in my childhood as much as it is me wondering what the writers were thinking:

The dialogue in this scene is just… so hilariously out of character for the Decepticons it’s surreal. By this point, the series made it clear that the Decepticons were evil villains, yet in this scene they’re portrayed as a bunch of silly drunks. Why? Just, why?

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The Importance of Having More Than One Backup

Many years ago, I wanted to make sure my data was secure, so I purchased a fireproof media safe from a (now defunct) company called FireCooler. I thought it would be a good idea to have a UL 125-rated safe which could keep an internal temperature of less than 125 degrees over an hour long fire. I regularly made backups to DVD and stored them in the safe.

Well, sometimes the best laid plans can go awry, and that was the case the other day when I went to put something in my safe, and found that it was flooded with water:

IMG_3372 IMG_3374

How did this happen? Did something in the safe suck in tons of moisture? Did the basement somehow flood and not cause water damage elsewhere? To this day, I am still not sure. I did not see any evidence of flooding in my storage area–nothing else was damaged.

Before I switched over to WordPress, one person pointed out that the safe my have been insulted with “water glass”, specifically from US Patent US7459190:

Outer wall composed of water glass sodium silicate solution that is 40% solids, 60% water, and having a silicon oxide:sodium oxide ratio in the range of 2:1 to 4:1, calcium chloride, and an additive chosen from calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide […] After curing, water released from the solidified insulation can migrate to and leak from pinhole defects which sometimes occur in the plastic shell.

Patent US7459190

So that’s a possibility, but I am not a chemist, so proving such a thing would be beyond me.

The takeaway here is that I had backups stored elsewhere so no actual data was lost. I recommend that everyone reading this, if they care about their data, to do the exact same thing. Here are a few resources for backups:

Happy Backups!