Urban Dictionary is not your friend.

UD may not be your friend, but it does take less time than if you went to TVTropes, and fell down the rabbit hole of following one link to another, to another, to another, to….

Back when Cracked still was cranking out really amazing articles, they had one that linked to TVTropes. I think I ended up falling asleep with, like, 25 tabs open across both sites.

To be fair nobody should know what a furry is.

No, that’s vore.
If you don’t know what that is, spare your sanity and tell your curiousity ‘no’.

Yeah, there’s worse than vore. Or maybe it was a niche of vore. At any rate after chasing down a new word I had to go back to the store twice for more mind bleach.

Sadly I’m aware of some of the subtypes.
Anything involving snuff is bad all around and may stem from *extremely* unhealthy coping mechanisms.

I am younger than 16 and know what vore is

Also, I’m a furry

Also also, it’s not a fetish

“Also also, it’s not a fetish”

Whatever helps you sleep at night.


Just because you hear of the yiffers doesn’t mean there aren’t low key furry

Seriously do you have to be a jerk

No, Animufan is technically correct.

Anyone who’s a fan of anthropomorphic character design can be considered a furry (yes, even children).

The problem is that there’s not a seperate distinct term for the subgroup of furries that are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic characters.

explain furries to them the same way they explained sex to us : birds and bees XD

Only this time, the birds and bees dress up in specifically-modified animal costumes to allow the cross-pollination to go on.

Omg ninas hair js extra floofy. Its cute

I explained that furries are like finding your spirit animal, and people play around with that in different ways. Some roleplay. Some like collecting. Some are happy with some art and knowing you share traits with an animal that’s special to you. And like any hobby, I think, some people delve into the more extreme end and dress up (which is pretty harmless, and kids often love it). I remember coming across one 50yo guy who made a suit to look like his German Shepherd that passed away, and he wrote about his outings. My favorite was an old lady who teared up, said he looked just like their childhood dog, and seeing him brought back a lot of nice memories.

I also got my book loving dad to read the webcomic Better Days by Jay Naylor, since they’re of a similar generation. After all that, even my mom, who’s not very internet savvy, could get the gist of it (she described herself as a lioness when it came to her kids).

I had to explain to my mother that “cornhole” did not just mean a game with beanbags and a board. I still don’t know if she was that slow at getting the hint or was teasing me.

I had a similar experience.
There’s an [Irish?] song, about a man. The song, that has his name for its title, is “Rosin The Bow”.
A “bow”, here, may mean an archery type of bow.

My parents asked me why he had that name.
They can be kind of sheltered + I didn’t want to tell them that “rosin the bow” may have a suggestive meaning. Go figure.

Cannot find the book That had the lyrics, but I thought the song was “Rosin the Beau” which makes for a Great double-entendre. And then I had to ask which -kind- of mischief was he up to? and to which end?

I mean to say; Rosin increases the friction of the bow stick against the strings, it’s not a lubricant.

Ah, right. I also think the song’s name is a great double-entendre.
Hm. From the info that you have said, I guess, “the bow”, at least part of the time, means a bow for a violin. *shrugs*

Rosin makes things sticky? Well, the Dr. Ruth show says- “some people like their “motions” to be sticky!”

I’m retirement age, and I never heard of “cornhole” being a beanbag game until I was over 50. I think your mom is messing with you. :D

No, it’s beanbag toss in the midwest, where she’s from.

I learned that in college, where some people were talking about going cornholing and I was giving a surprised look at them being so blatant.

Signs posted on my street here in the midwest advertising cornhole tournaments.

See, I’m from the north and Cornhole was something we heard about southerners doing, but it didn’t involve beanbags and boards. I only learned about the game last year and I’m 40. (which is not to say northerners don’t have buggery also, just that cornhole isn’t used as a term for it here, just when it happens in the south. So yeah, there’s some kinda prejudice in there too.)

“Dear mom, the intertubes are full of things you really do not want to know.”

That’s not really the worst, though. It’s that with the decline of USENET (and FidoNet and my favourite QWK boards having gone well before that) I have nobody left to talk to. No, ‘forums” are no replacement, “social media” are way worse, and no, the audience on every single last one of them is not up to my standards for serious banter. Nor is the user interface. The stupid has won. So a couple clueless oldsters are little more than a few drops in the bucket of fail we got with the endless september, to me at least. Sad and bitter, moi? You bet. But that’s not really the point, is it? You have your perspective, I have mine. I did like the ‘net a lot better before AOL opened the floodgates. We had a good thing going and it got utterly destroyed by illiterate idiots. Feeling a little put off because older relatives pop up in your social media walled garden timeline doesn’t really compare.

Some things really did get better. I do not miss my 2400 baud modem. Some things didn’t. I’ve got fifty megabits over glass coming into the building, but on the downside, you actually need all of that to fetch a single webpage and it’ll keep phoning home and beaconing fifty advertisers while you’re trying to read it, noticeably bogging down the browser, where the modem could get me a couple hours worth of fun happy reading and discussion time in a couple minutes, no strings attached.

My perspective now is that I have a browser on a not-so-very-modern machine with dual 2GHz cores and four gigabytes, and it performs about as well as the browser I had on my not-so-very-modern machine with one 200MHz core and 64 megabytes, around 2000 or so. The exact same kind of always chewing up all available memory, getting slower and slower, and crashing when it runs out. Twenty years, and the ‘web has gotten a lot shinier, but not better. Worse, in fact. And in the meantime USENET ceased to be a thing so this bucket of fail is the only game in town.

We’re in a hurry but going nowhere, and now we’re put off because mom and dad and gramma and gramps have caught up with us. Right. You do realise that “social media” doesn’t mean “my in-group only”, don’t you?

Blame big businesses for ruining everything that the internet could have been.

Not for everything. E.g. spam just took a few unscrupulous individuals. And taking over DNS, eventually saddling us with ICANN’t was the US government’s doing. But sure, lots of private interests, many commercial, did ruin much of the good that originated in the commonality underpinning the internet.

Some of it would be relatively easy to win back if enough people were willing to do what it takes. There’s more to the ‘net than just the ‘web, you know. And the various walled gardens (e.g. facebook’s “internet basics” is a very pernicious one) aren’t ubiqutous *yet*, so we’re still fairly free to build whatever we would like, for the time being. But the window of opportunity is getting smaller, so don’t wait too long.

Try Soylent News. Volunteer-run. Created when slashdot went commercial. Intended as a tech-oriented news and discussion area.
No ads. No scripts. Intelligent discussions, admittedly sometimes with trolls. But the trolls are often, but not always, clever.
And it’s user-moderated with a moderately complicated moderation system.
You can read for free. You can post anonymously (though the admins know your IP number). You can register an identity and be nonanonymous and assign moderation points to posts.
And if you choose to, you can contribute to the computer and networking costs of running the site.

Why exactly aren’t forums a replacement? When the topic is some out of the way interest, they tend to attract fairly intelligent crowds.

Forums ( at least the decent ones) exist because of the capabilities and willingness of admins/mods to toss out the trolls/idiots and not give a damn.
In this day and age of Utter Snowflakes and Twatterati, this is akin to fighting the Mongol Hordes with a pan lid and a toothpick. And there aren’t that many people that can and will do that kind of shitty, time-consuming job efficiently and without turning a forum into their *own* little echo chamber..
For free, because the Internet is Free, innit?

Some forums tend to be very hit & miss. While there are good forums where people can discuss things intelligently and there is mutual respect for one another, others are a pure toxic waste dump where members can have the freedom to troll others and the mods expect you to “grow a pair”.

I’m not willing to throw the dice anymore with forums and I find that social media pages are better discussion environments anyway.

With webforums you’re beholden to a single site’s owner, his choice in moderators and a web-based user interface. Of course you can switch forums but that typically means losing your old contacts so there is a strong incentive to behave as the moderators of your chosen hangout want you to. Social media are the big corporate version of this, with ever-growing lists of ever-changing changing rules of what you can and cannot say, and don’t upset the advertisers. So anyone with blood in their eye can call the advertisers and get you tossed out on your ear. It takes only a relatively small group of professionally hurt-and-offended people to make a habit out of that and we can see the results world-wide.

USENET requires you to bring your own client software, typically featuring “kill file” filtering, and you need to get access to one of the USENET servers. Individual servers are typically run by different organisations while still forming a single network, where messages submitted to one server end up available on every server (for a time, mostly). The server-operators could collude against you, but they historically had a very strong ethic of only disallowing abuse OF the net (e.g. spam) and leaving abuse ON the net (e.g. trolling, kookery, saying things some readers happen to dislike, etc.) for users’ kill files to deal with. This difference in having to, but moreover being able to, decide whom you want to read and whom you’ll ignore is a very big one.

So, the flavour is rather different and the assurances against getting “deplatformed” are also rather different. I say USENET is much more powerful an much more robust technically as a way of spreading text and thereby holding a discussion, but it does require a higher skill level on the part of its users. Anyway, the masses have spoken and the wish for something web-based and the ability to show silly cat pictures inline trumped everything else, so no more USENET.

USENET was also massively inefficient. Even if only one ISP’s customer subscribed to a newsgroup, the ISP’s usenet server would often duplicate and entire group. There was a huge amount of duplication happening to clone the current USENET space across many servers. Now, ignoring the fact that this redundancy was THE WHOLE FRIGGIN POINT of the internet, many ISP’s saw usenet as a storage space and bandwidth hog, espescially as compared to the consumer demand for the www. The migration of USENET to binary piracy also didn’t win it any fans amongst the corporate money bag types, because either they were allied with the RIAA or they were targetted by them for carrying usenet groups known for piracy.

I loved USENET, but it’s been dying a death of many cuts for two decades. That said, dying is not dead, just mostly dead. USENET is actually still a little bit alive and some of the great groups are still kicking. r.g.f.d is one that still has active participants. For all their flaws, thanks also goes to google for mirroring USENET into their groups structure. A lot of good content is preserved thanks to the goog.

Amazingly, the “massively inefficient” part wasn’t that bad if you include the users in your amortization. And with text you can compress the snot out of it and you’re left with a fairly small datastream, that you could use to level out traffic costs. Given that more than one ISP secretly ran transparent http proxies on their network (which I noticed because “the ‘web” stopped working but my IRC connections kept on going just fine, then confirmed by someone in one of the channels who happened to be working at that much-reviled ISP) it’s not really fair to put the blame all on USENET. These days it’s harder to do that because https, but various big companies plant server clusters at various points on the globe “near” their users so as to try and reduce traffic costs. Or hire other companies to do that for them. Funny how a little flooding can go a long way here. It’s just movies and search results and other crap instead of stuff you might actually want to read, these days.

It wasn’t unusual for providers to simply exclude the binary groups, but then again, others would specifically offer those, attracting a specific clientele. But of course running USENET servers took some doing, and with large masses of people with no clue about USENET it’s easy to see why ISPs thought it’d be better business not running a server, just sit there and collect the monthly fee to give access to webpages. And yes, the “copyright holders”‘ shtick appeals to suited types. At one point just looking at the services an ISP offered told you just who ran the company.

Never was in rec much, but good to hear it’s just resting for a bit. But no, I don’t agree that dejagoogle is doing a decent job. They keep on fucking up the interface, it gets ever more like molasses, and things I used to be able to find I can no longer find. They’re much like that other much-reviled company with a lot of fans, they just cannot leave well enough alone.

Hang on, now. Most of of you are missing the nuances here.

Namely that the whole ‘all squares are rectangles but not all rectangles are squares’ aspect.

People of any age who really like anthropomorphic character designs are considered furries. Then there’s the people who also want to fuck said character designs.

I learned the hard way to always make sure SafeSearch (or your browser of choice’s equivalent) is on before looking up fanart because of the later category.

I Agree.

In the US, a lot of people/adults go to the Society of Creative Anachronism[R]clubs to do [knights + ladies, or women knights + gentlemen], type cosplay plus acting-stuff.

Most of these people go to the “SCA” to do average fun stuff, but…[my words]- some pervs just go to the meetings just to,(ugh), leer at people, or to get one-night-stands.

The same goes for furry/furries clubs. Some F club people are “skanky hornballs”…but I think most US furries are not.

Don’t be pushing your bias against people who like sex more than you on other people.

One persons skanky hornball is another’s saint (and vice versa). Some people want to have activities that are completely free of sex, while others see sex as a part of many of their activities. You don’t have to have sex doing furry or SCA stuff, but that doesn’t imply thise who want to shouldn’t be able to, or that they should be denigrated for it. That doesn’t make them skanky hornballs any more than your preference makes you a eunuch.

One moment please, it was not my intention to say that people who like lots of sex are perverted or in any way have negative traits.

I do not remember pushing my biases on anyone, moreover, when I said, [my words], that indicates that these are my views. No one else has to take my views, and I gladly say so.

I did not mention my preference for how much, or how little sex I like to have. Did I say, anywhere, how much sex I like to have? Can I have a view on one night stands, and not be “a bias pusher”? Can I think they’re good + not be a bias pusher?

Maybe my comment was poorly worded, it happens, but- my comment was intended to point out that in nearly any group of adults, or any large group of adults, that has in it- subcultures, non-mainstream-fiction fans, and people who do role-playing and/or acting, or even golf, can attract people who 1) don’t know how to talk to people they find attractive without doing unwanted flirting, or 2) think wrongly that [all]-women…or men…or other adults, [want] to be seen as just sexual objects.
Do I think that most SCA people are decent, + don’t do unwanted flirting, + don’t leer, and [sometimes] do 1 night stands if they want to? Yes I do.

But I’ve also been to enough SCA meetings, + been to enough events with different SCA groups, to know that [in the SCA groups I’ve met], that most SCA people warn you to look out for some people that don’t understand- what behaviors the SCA people do want + don’t want.
Being eunuchs, Eh? I don’t recommend it. I hear royal gardeners get better parking spaces.

Or, a short form of that-
First you tell me not to push my opinions on people, THEN you force your opinions on me, about who is sleazy, and who is not.
So either you misunderstood what you were talking about, or you’re a kind of web troll.
Either way, it’s likely that I am done here.

That’s the first I’ve heard of anyone who did NOT want to sleep with said anthropomorphic animals being called a furry. I mean, as a joke, sure, but I’ve never heard it said that you’re a furry because you like Thundercats.

OMG Laughed my butt off for ten minutes! Really made a great start to my day. You my friend have a great talent keep it up.

Yeah, that’s always a distressing part of life, when you’re having “talks” with your parents. I’d hate to have to do the “Dad, you can’t drive any more” talk, though thankfully, they’re mostly homebodies anyway. They’ve also done a lot to keep themselves in good shape, so that’s a long shot.

They HAVE been talking a lot, and disturbingly frankly, about their own deaths, though. They’re both nudging up on 70, so that’s to be expected, but still. Doesn’t take the disturbing out of it, though.

It’s always been weird to me how even on the internet, knowledge I think is ubiquitous isn’t actually known by everyone. I can even go to one place on the internet and see something as common knowledge there and then go to another place and no one’s heard of it. It’s even weirder for me to think of the fact that that’s just on the internet, expanding the scope to the whole world and this information gap is even stronger. Though it does help to explain many of the more baffling beliefs and opinions out there.

Relevancy, attention and permanency all attribute to what you’re describing. Maybe at one point what you thought was ubiquitous was, but then something came along and stole everyone’s limited mindspace and attention, so it’s forgotten or lost. Things are lost, and it’s funny to me how what I knew was “Internet lore” ten years ago is something most young people have no idea or marginally know about. I had to explain to one group of 14 year-old Scouts what BBS means and what it was, and they were like, “Wow, that sounds so bland and simple to what we have now.”

And then my cousin who just turned 22 stumble upon tubgirl and I’m trying not to die of laughter. “JFC, just how f**ked up was the Internet back then?” he asks me.

I think you should be more worried about your parents learning about Furries on the Sesame Streets

I’ve finally reached the point where as soon as I join a new social media platform, my family seems to find my account. I was on TikTok (don’t @ me it’s fun) for less than two weeks before my mom found my account. My Granny is on my Facebook, although FB is more for boomers than millennials now anyway. I’m worried my kid is going to find my onlyfans next! (JK, I’m not on OnlyFans. I don’t even have any fans.)

Questionable Content did a very similar joke years ago:

The words “very similar” apparently have different meanings to you than my understanding of those words.

The principle is the same, although the content is not.


Questionable Content was good years ago.

Yeah. As I think of it, it was good until everyone thought it was cool, and then the writer thought it would be even better to be more edgelord, and that just literally killed it for me.

Being an edgelord does not make anything you do cooler.

The first time I played Cards Against Humanity, my 92yo Grandmother was playing.

Imagine my horror when someone played a card with Bukkake on it….

And imagine how much my horror increased when I realized my grandmother knew what it meant!

I find it endlessly amusing to see people fail at understanding why they think their predeccesors are so naive. We all seem to assume our forebears are naive because we never saw them drop the act. The truth seems to be that we think they’re naive because they raised us in a “protected” environment where it was wrong for them to share certain knowledge with us. Kids end up having to learn it from the street, and then repeat the cycle, bot telling their own kids, thus raising another generation who thinks their parents are naive.

I have played that with my (grown)kids. It is fun freaking them out by knowing what the phrases mean.

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