wolfnose.org  / fur  / whatis  / interog1.html

So you think your a wolf? Finding furry

Interviewer:

So you think you are a wolf?

Me:

Ye... hey, I resent that!

Interviewer:

Oh, when did you start to believe you were a wolf?

Me:

That isn't much better.

Interviewer:

So when did you realise you were a wolf?

Me:

The 22nd of January, 1997

Interviewer:

And how did that happen?

Me:

I was searching usenet, the internet newsgroups, for something using reference.com. They had this neat service you could use by e-mail - I had no direct usenet access and no web access at the time. It has all changed now, the domain name is owned by someone else, and the service is gone.

Interviewer:

And you were looking for stuff about wolves?

Me:

No, it was something entirely unrelated to wolves, animals, or fur. But the results that came back from reference.com included the first 50 lines of the alt.fan.furry newsgroups Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).

Interviewer:

So flakey search engine mailed you the wrong document, and you read the document and you turned into a wolf?

Me:

It might have been a bug in the search engine. It might have been, ... other things - hard to explain. Anyway, it didn't turn me into a wolf, that was a pre-existing condition.

Interviewer:

So how did these 50 lines of FAQ lead you to the wolf thing?

Me:

Well I was fascinated by the odd behaviour of the search engine and I wanted to get the whole document and search it for the keywords I had used. I got the FAQ by ftpmail but my keywords were nowhere to be found. I resubmitted my request - as I was doing all this by e-mail I could simply resend my original message. This time I got back a sane response, no mention of anything covered in fur. The FAQ that I had got referenced several other documents so I downloaded those too.

Interviewer:

And one of those other documents was the alt.lifestyle.furry newsgroup FAQ?

Me:

Yes. I read all the stuff I had downloaded, about furry fandom, artists, comics, fanzines, art techniques, confurences, but something about the alt.lifestyle.furry FAQ spoke straight to my soul. I couldn't read it without crying - and that was a real problem as I was at work.

Interviewer:

What made you cry?

Me:

Damn good question. Its certainly a document you have to read with an open mind for sure. I knew that this document meant a lot to me. It was telling me what I was but I was too frightened to admit it to myself. I mean, there were people who thought they were animal souls trapped in human bodies! I'd have put that straight into the same bag as "Elvis ate my refrigerator", "London bus found at South Pole", and "I had sex with an alien".

Interviewer:

So you entered a state of denial and tried your best to believe that you were human?

Me:

Yes.

Interviewer:

- what you call "mundane"

Me:

Yes, though I don't like the word. But in order to talk about "humans without any specific connection with animals or anthropomorphic animals" you have to have a word to express the concept. Its not meant (by me at least) to be degrading.

Interviewer:

So what did you do next?

Me:

I set up a proxy web server on the firewall at work. Our boss wanted this done anyway, and it meant I could get web access to furry resources.

Interviewer:

Why couldn't you use your demon account at home?

Me:

Due to the evolving PPP standard which was being implemented at demon and the fact that I hadn't got round to upgrading the PPP software on my machine the link had become highly unreliable. It got so bad that only short e-mail would get through.

Interviewer:

So you read the newsgroups from work using DejaNews? [Now Google groups]

Me:

I was finally able to see the whole text of an article and follow threads.

Interviewer:

And you started posting to a.l.f. ?

Me:

No. I read it a lot, but I didn't post there. I thought I'd start safe and introduce myself on a.f.f. first.

Interviewer:

Did you get toasted? The flame wars there are notorious aren't they?

Me:

No one flamed me. The people I talked with were all very pleasant and I had several ongoing conversations by e-mail. But CF8 came round and there was a lot of fallout. I kind of lost interest in reading it anymore. After all, it was the concept of furryness that attracted me, not just the art or stories.

Interviewer:

So that was when you started posting to a.l.f. ?

Me:

No *grin*. Thats when the firewall was damaged in a thunderstorm. It took out the power converter on the ethernet card and it took three weeks to get a replacement. It was a PC running SCO unix and had to have a specific board revision as a replacement.

Interviewer:

Bad luck!

Me:

Maybe. It made me realise I had to get my home account working again. Find out what was wrong with the PPP, get Netscape, get a news server. We had a truely incompetent sys-admin at work who was to personally cause a lot more downtime.

Go to next excerpt.