Back in November, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart asked me to put on my ridiculous costume and be in their music video. It’s now finished and on the Internets:
I’m the one with the yellow pants.
Tag Archive for 'lol furries'
I meant to have this done within a week of the con being over. That didn’t quite happen.
Often with these videos I run into editor’s block. There’s always one point where I just can’t figure out the right clip to match the song, and it stalls me. Then I stop and decide to come back to it later. And despite how much I really want to get it done, “later” sometimes means months later.
But it’s here now, so…
You can also watch it on YouTube if you’re on an Android phone or iPhone, but only because you can’t watch Vimeo on those. Seriously, only click that link out of necessity. If I catch anyone watching this on YouTube because they actually prefer it over Vimeo, I will smack them in the face with the Internet. No joke. I will literally pick up the Internet and hit someone with it.
Well, folks, it’s that time of year again. The time of year when the entire economy of the city of Pittsburgh is sustained by about 3000 crazy people wearing tails. Once again, I will be one of them.
This, of course, will result in another musical video mashup that will draw the attention of lots of people and get an attempted takedown from YouTube by the Copyright Mafia. Like this one from last year:
I’ll hopefully be able to confuse the Content ID robots this time around, and perhaps have an even more clear-cut case of fair use, by mixing a few different songs together, altering some of their tempos and pitches at various points and resampling and inverting and slershkergerber. That’s totally a word. Shakespeare said it. In his sleep. Once.
Every day, I’ll attempt to do some kind of short writeup. It’ll probably amount to summarizing whatever I tweeted that day, though. If you’d like to keep track of my Anthrocon experience up-to-the-minute, just search for tweets from @XerxesQados tagged #AC09. Or click the link in the previous sentence if you’re lazy.
See you there, if you’re going, and reading this, and stuff.
The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports that another one of those government workers fighting for laws to protect children has actually solicited sex from a 15-year-old boy. Particularly disturbing is that he found his target in the furry community:
A legislative aide to Sen. Jane Orie, a former prosecutor who has championed state legislation to safeguard children, was fired Friday after the Attorney General’s Office charged him with sexually propositioning a child online and suggesting the two dress up as animals and have sex.
Alan David Berlin, 40, who was paid $57,340 a year to do legislative services for Orie, used the Internet screen name “alan_panda_bear” and propositioned the 15-year-old boy several times this month, Attorney General Tom Corbett said.
[...]
In profiles posted on Internet sites used for networking among furries, or people who dress as animals, Berlin identified himself as Alan The Panda with interests in baking, board games, classical music, fine dining, movies, travel, wine — and diapers. The cartoon panda on his Pounced.org page wears a diaper.
[...]
Berlin proposed traveling to the boy’s home in Harrisburg to have sex with him in the backyard while his parents slept inside, Corbett said, and requested nude photos of the teen. He suggested a meeting between the child and another adult, and offered to secure a hotel room if he could take pictures of the sex acts, Corbett said.The boy’s parents became concerned when they discovered sexually graphic messages on their son’s computer and contacted investigators with the Child Predator Unit, which began an investigation on Tuesday.
Well, this means a few things. First, the man is either sick or incredibly stupid not to know that sex with 15-year-olds is not a good idea. Probably both. Second, that kid is either sick or just incredibly desperate to not liberally apply his instant messenger’s “block” button as soon as a 40-year-old man asks him to take his pants off. Third, the requirement that Pounced members be 18 or older is obviously not doing anything, though it’s not like that wasn’t obvious to anyone with a working knowledge of teenagers on the Internet.
It hits close to my heart when I see this kind of awful thing happen to the type of kid I can relate to. I was a 15-year-old furry once, and met the most fun and awesome people on the face of the earth through the furry community. One of the aspects I enjoyed is that, in general, sexuality isn’t taboo to furries like it inexplicably is to most of America. Should someone like Mr. Berlin exploit that sex-is-not-evil-and-actually-quite-nice sort of vibe and prey on inexperienced teenagers, the result can obviously be undesirable.
Or perhaps Mr. Berlin genuinely is a furry, and isn’t just interested in anthropomorphism for sexual reasons. That does not change the fact that he asked a 15-year-old boy for sex. Whether they’d be wearing fursuits or vampire regalia or Star Trek costumes or nothing but cross pendants around their necks, the man is sick. And that kid should know better, but it’s mostly the pedophile’s fault.
Furries and the Art of Surviving in a Post-Copyright World
Let’s be realistic here: copyright is dead. At least, it’s dead in the sense of “the right to make copies.” Once a piece of media is digitized — be it textual, visual, audible, or interactive — copying it costs exactly zero dollars (or -45,000 euros at the current exchange rate). Because of this, the perception of art not as a product but as information is rapidly reentering the collective human psyche after about 100 years of technical difficulties.
So this means artists who hope to make a living will now have to rethink their business models, because basing your livelihood on the assumption that all people will pay you for the privilege of merely experiencing your work is on par with Young Earth creationism in la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you factor. But never fear, artistic community, because a ton of niche nerd fandoms have come to terms with that assumption since the heyday of Usenet (because many of them probably had a hand in inventing it). They all operate with similar conventions, but because everything is better with cartoon purple foxes, the example I will explain is the furry subculture.
Continue reading ‘Furries and the Art of Surviving in a Post-Copyright World’