Otter's Thoughts

I mean, let’s look at their two biggest games at the moment, not counting WoW: Overwatch and Hearthstone. Both of these have some serious, massive issues that other multiplayer games don’t generally have.

Let’s focus on Overwatch for a moment. There’s monstrously overpowered characters (Mercy, Junkrat) and utterly garbage ones (Orisa, Doomfist), because Blizzard has no idea how to balance a game despite having made games for decennia. There’s characters whose whole thing is basically being annoying (Mei, Genji) and one of them doubles as a character who can either solo the enemy team if you’re in the top 1% of players, or is practically useless at any other rank. That’s not good balancing. Team Fortress 2, the game that Overwatch is mostly copying, never had any these problems.

So Hearthstone then. The meta at the time of writing is basically pulling off massive combos while your enemy sits there watching you play a slot machine. (Razakus priest, Tempo rogue) Pull the right cards? You win. Pull the wrong ones? You lose. It’s not fun regardless of which side of it you’re on and skill is a distant echo. I don’t understand how a veteran game developer can be so bad at making things fun and interactive.

Back when I played WoW it always had similar problems; one or two classes dominated the meters, some others were mediocre, and a few (typically Warlocks) were borderline useless. That’s not good game design!

So, I’ve noticed that a bunch of therian wolves would seemingly be better describe as werewolf otherkin. What do I mean by that? I mean that they identify more with the cultural/psychological figure of the werewolf, rather than an actual wolves. A great example of this is the descriptions of rage. It’s a relatively human emotion. Granted, animals probably do feel rage too, but I’d doubt that it’s as characteristic of them as it is of humans.

However, rage is a very negative emotion, and as usual with negative emotions, we can’t quite accept them as part of ourselves. It plays into the concept of the Jungian shadow; our “negative” side becomes something other than ourselves and risks wresting control of ourselves if not dealt with properly. Thus, the werewolf: a creature that has nothing in common with a real wolf except superficial appearance, and instead has everything in common with our own dark side: bloodthirsty, hateful, enraged, and infectious. 

Especially teenagers might find themselves fascinated by the kind of emotions that the werewolf exemplifies. Didn’t we all have those days (or years) of hating absolutely everyone, when we were at our worst? Wolves, meanwhile, are a relatively calm animal. They rarely attack any humans, and if they do, it’s hardly out of malice. As I said, wolves have little in common with werewolves.

Which brings me to my point: those who describe their therianthropic experiences as more of the former would probably be best described as werewolf otherkin! Certainly, the creature they identify with is not encountered in nature.

I hear this sentiment occasionally. It goes along the lines of “if therianthropy is reincarnation-based, then why aren’t there more insect therians? A lot more insects die than wolves!”. Variations exist with other animals that are killed a lot of just exist in low numbers.

Well, well. I’m not exactly decided on if therianthropy is reincarnation or not (probably not) but this is not a good argument. Let’s look at insects specifically, first.

How does an insect feel? How would you know if you’re an insect? They have very little in the way of personality. Now, I’m not saying that the very few insect therians I’ve met are lying, but I’d imagine that for a majority of people it would be indistinguishable from regular human instincts. Consume, rest, reproduce. There isn’t much insects do that humans don’t. Alternatively, insect feelings might simply be too alien to really recognise. Let’s take this to the logical extreme: bacteria are probably the organisms that die the most. Do they even have souls that could transfer to something else? They certainly have no memories that could persist, or really any traits that a human could identify. It’s murky waters, but the lack of insect therians doesn’t really say much, ultimately.

But how about other animals? For example, why are therians usually regular grey wolves instead of, say, maned wolves? Again, I think it might be down to identifying the feelings. Regular wolves occupy a relatively large chunk of popular culture, and the mannerisms aren’t that different - so if you feel like a wolf, it seems more likely that you’d assume you’re a regular Canis Lupus. I’m a good example myself, I really don’t know if I’m actually an American otter, a European otter, or even a small-clawed otter. They’re all quite similar, and the feelings of therianthropy aren’t that exact for me. I only say I’m a Lutra Lutra because of geographical location, and the fact that I like my alone time.

So I’d really say it’s down to which animals actually have a place in popular consciousness. That’d be big cats, wolves, ravens, and so on. If you’re a similar animal to one of those, but don’t have extremely strong and specific sensations, then it seems more likely to me that you’d just say you’re the “default” choice, the archetype.

Being an otter, to me, feels centred around curiosity. What’s behind that tree? Oh, it’s more trees. How about behind THAT tree? Even more trees, how interesting. What happens if I push this tree? Oh, it gives a bit. I wonder if I can push it o- oh, yes I can. Neat. It’s that kind of obsessive curiosity and a desire to see what happens when you do something, even if the result might be obvious. Sometimes, things break.

That’s another part of it. It’s sometimes violent. Not against people, mind you, but objects. How much can I bend this thing before it breaks? What’s inside this thing? That thing? You just have know. You need to get into things you’re not allowed to be in, you need to know things you’re not allowed to know. It’s curiosity all the way.

Being an otter is also playful. There’s few things that you can’t turn into some form of play. You’re writing your big thesis or dissertation, and you see if you can sneak in some subtle message, like from the first letters of each sentence on a page. You find amusement in almost everything. The few things that you can’t wring any amusement out of, you forget about.

Swimming is absolutely blissful. That’s when you feel the most like yourself, when you’re floating in a lake, or diving beneath it with flippers and just enjoying the silence, the feel of water on every pore of your skin, the cool embrace, and you feel like you could stay in there forever. You love the scent of lakes in the summer, the scent of the ocean in a storm, the scent of petrichor.

It’s always trying new ways to do something, even when you already know what works. 

It’s getting along with people and loving them, but sometimes nipping them to see what happens (metaphorically!)

It’s wonderful. At least most of the time.

Ancient beats and rhythms drumming In the blood, alive and thrumming Through the body, mind and soul Single chord that binds the whole

Distant grow the drums I follow Beyond lakes and mountains hollow Lead me back to where I started Back to where I once departed

Faintly, just, I see the past Former life, for moments fast Mind of two, one side emerges One side fades, the other surges

End the joy, the fear, the sorrow That from womb the soul will borrow Throw aside the masks we’re wearing Leave behind the weights we’re bearing

Through eyes of beast I always saw And always felt my fang and claw Were hid beneath the borrowed flesh Unseen, entwined in human mesh

Well hello there, it’s time for another unnecessarily confrontational ramble!

There’s been a bit of furry discussion recently about a con (or maybe several) discouraging people from being headless in fursuits, in public.

Reasonable? Well, it’s not reasoned. Let’s see here. The supporting argument is typically that it ruins immersion.

Alright, but then why allow anyone without a fursuit? What’s the source of the immersion-breaking? It can’t be skin showing, because every con allows regular visitors. It can’t be the mixture of fur and skin, because partial suits are universally allowed, and so are tails and other similar accessories. What is the specific combination that makes this break immersion?

We’re not alone in thinking this. Look at any number of songs, for example (Savage Garden’s Animal Song comes to mind), regular-flavor humans get tired of being humans all the time, too. It’s only natural, our genetics haven’t quite caught up with modern life.

But as usual that’s not exactly what I want to talk about! As a therian, I’m sure you’re all too used to the burden of the mask, the subtle stress brought on when you have to suppress your animal side in public. I’ve written about this before, but this is somewhat of a new angle. Of course, wearing the mask is a necessity, but you don’t need to always wear it, especially as an adult. There’s something to look forward to, younglings: when you move out, nobody cares if you walk up the stairs on all fours or prefer sleeping in a pile of blankets over a bed. To co-opt a common phrase, it gets better.

That’s yet another slight detour from my point, which is this: take some time to throw off your mask now and then. There’s plenty of nature out there, so take a weekend off, wander deep into a forest (bring a map and compass!) and set up a tent. With nobody within earshot, there’s no reason to keep acting human, so don’t. Wait for the sunset and let yourself shift along, to that slightly less sentient state. Bring about the twilight of the mind, and do what you feel like. Howl at the moon, growl at a fox, chase a wild deer and eat some wild berries and go for a swim in the moon’s reflection in the water. It’s quite liberating to not have to hide anything, and it’s not really anything deviant; after all, any animal observing you wouldn’t really consider anything to be wrong.

I suspect that after one or two nights camping even your animal side will long for a warm bath and bed, and that might be the best part of it, the new appreciation for civilization and human life, and the sudden weightlessness of the mask. See, the burden isn’t a constant, just how heavy the mask is really depends on how much you get to be yourself. This applies to “normal” humans too, so if you emit the animal part, you can easily find a sympathetic ear to talk about it with. Everyone gets tired of keeping up appearances, of having to keep a square shape to fit in the square hole when they’re actually more of a peg type person. That’s my second point: even if all your friends and acquaintances are vanilla people, you’re not alone with these feelings, they might just be a little stronger than for Average Joe.

So I’ve been reading the Summa Theologica, which got me interested in seeing actual discussion about the Five Ways, i.e. Aquinas’ proof of the existence of god. What do I do? I google it. And I get thousands of random atheists glibly “disproving” them in a few sentences with Logic 101. ALL HAIL THESE BRILLIANT MINDS.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about. Surely, Aquinas’ arguments deserve more thought than “actually, this is a fallacy...”, especially if such a statement is uttered by someone who does not even understanding the original argument. Ah, well, it’s another subject for another time, let’s get to the point: While grinding my teeth at the aforementioned, I also stumbled upon statements such as “atheists don’t believe in an afterlife”.

Oh, really, now?

We already know that’s not what atheist means - it’s the lack of a belief in a god, nothing more - but disregarding that basic point, let’s get down to brass tacks. What these people mean is clearly “naturalists do not believe in an afterlife”, and that’s what I really want to ramble about. I don’t agree.

I’m going to just express a simple thought. Your consciousness arose ex nihilo* - from nothing - once, and you can prove that. You think, therefore you are. Your consciousness exists, and this is, to you, as indisputable to you as my consciousness existing is to me. Therefore, your consciousness must have come into being.

* I know your consciousness arises from your brain, but that brain could have manifested any other consciousness, as billions upon billions of other brains did. Therefore, I say ex nihilo; it’s not perfectly correct here, but it doesn’t matter.

With me so far? Your consciousness has already manifested itself once. Unless you’re saying that something can only happen once in eternity, there is no logical reason to conclude that your consciousness can’t manifest again, or that it has not manifested before. Of course, you would not remember; the memories are gone with the brain, barring the existence of a soul. You would have absolutely no relation to whoever you were before. Yet, it’d still be your consciousness - the same essence of being. It’s hard to put in words, but there is nothing metaphysical about this. Your consciousness exists now, and there is nothing metaphysical about that. It could exist again, in a timeframe of eternity. It’s unscientific to presume that your consciousness is a one-off event; anything that occurs once can occur again, given the same conditions, or even other conditions. If there never were conditions for your consciousness to exist, then it would not; if there were, they could occur again.

And that’s an afterlife. It’d be an entirely different you, presumably. Most certainly you would not remember existing before. It’s not survival after death, but it is a new existence after death. Regardless, it has to be classified as an afterlife, given that it is a life after death. As far as I can tell, this is perfectly compatible with a rationalist/naturalist view. It certainly is compatible with an atheist view, given that no god is involved at any point.

Even if everything I just said was demonstrably untrue (and it might be, I make no claims otherwise), it does not make statements such as “there is no afterlife” valid. We don’t know. You could say that “We have not proven an afterlife exists, and therefore I do not believe in one”, certainly. But you do not have the authority to dismiss the entire concept out of hand, as if you had all possible knowledge of everything. This is elementary logic; “X has not been proven, therefore X does not exist” is more than a fallacy, it is inherently illogical. 

I’m not even going to get into thought experiments such as solipsism, existence being a simulation and so on; these are thing that could theoretically be true but by necessity unobservable.  There are a number of afterlives that even the most diehard skeptic/naturalist/rationalist can believe in, without being any less of any of those things. That’s my point. We can’t even quantify consciousness yet, for god’s sake. Take it easy with the elitist attitudes.

This is one of the worst thought processes I see regurgitated by people in various IRCs, on various blogs and whatever else. The story goes, basically, “I used to be a slacker until I joined the army and it made a man out of me”. Christ almighty, you know what would help you grow up without needing to sell your body to the armed forces? Going to university, or better yet, getting a job. Or simply, perhaps, growing up.

You see, while “you” (figurative you, nobody in particular) joined the military at 18 or so, you were still growing up. Your brain wasn’t fully developed. You were still a dumb teenager. During your time there, you developed further, something that’d have happened even without that service, much like how you will reach puberty without needing to join a football team. Perhaps, one might argue, the armed forces part of the equation actually didn’t do much. Perhaps growing up is a natural process that happens regardless of what you do during that time. It’s just a thought.

Normally, when you think of furries, perhaps you don’t think of the most socially well-adjusted individuals. Worse yet, some people might use it as an excuse to not work to improve themselves, not overcome their fears and issues. Of course, most don’t do that, but I’d still like to tell a little story about the reverse; how being a furry helped me overcome social anxiety.

See, I used to be almost phobic about social situations, to the point I was afraid of using the phone, and failed two attempts at university because I just couldn’t talk with people. Eventually, I decided that I needed professional help (I had my parents book me an appointment, and I was about 21 years old!) and went to therapy for quite a while. That helped, a little bit, but it wasn’t the main breakthrough.

The most important part of me overcoming that anxiety was probably me being a furry. It wasn’t that long ago; about three or four years I believe, when I had gotten convinced to give university another go thanks to my therapist. I still dreaded actually starting it, though, because I “knew” it’d be another failure due to me lack of social skills.

Somewhere between all these events I also discovered the furry fandom and created myself a fursona; Cinos, the quite sociable and easy-going otter. Effectively, I took all the attributes I wished I had in real life and applied them to this character. Unlike me, he had an easy time talking with people and having fun in groups, no issues doing collaborative work, and so on.

So. When I first went to university (studying linguistics, now) I figured, why should i be afraid? After all, my fursona probably wouldn’t be afraid of social situations, and I had played the character online for quite a while now. So I imagined myself with all the best attributes of my fursona, imagined myself as the otter, quite simply. I managed to pull it off, somehow, by “faking” it like that. I mean, I obviously wasn’t my fursona (though I am a therianthrope, and believe I have some otter aspect in my bring) but I could fake it. That’s what I kept doing; I imagined myself as the fairly confident and playful character I played online in real life situations, and it just kept working. At some point, though, I realized that I had become that imagined character - by constantly forcing myself to act social, it had become part of me.

It’s interesting how that works. I seemingly integrated this idealized version of myself into my actual self, and in doing so I got over my phobia for social situations. Granted, I’m still not entirely at ease in every social situation, but I manage, now, and even enjoy it. The key point is I don’t even need to fake it anymore.

I’ve noticed, with the recent ruling on gay marriage in the US, that suddenly gay people are defending the new sanctity of marriage, supporting it as if it wasn’t an outdated concept. There has to be a name for this phenomena, like reverse sour grapes or something.

No, marriage is still meaningless. If you can’t resist cheating on your mate, or can’t trust them enough not to cheat on you unless you’re married, you have a completely awful relationship. If you can, then you don’t need to go to a church and have a priest speak some words about you, because your bond is already much stronger than any strange formalia that religious people can offer you.

In this post I reflect a little on the various types of slang used by subcultures. There’s no point to it; it’s just my own reflections, but you might learn something new.

Did you know that back in the days when homosexuality was illegal, the British gay community had its own cant (i.e. a jargon or slang intended to mislead outsiders)? It was called Polari, and I’d imagine it was a fairly useful way of talking about your preferred gender in public without risking concerned citizens reporting you to the police. It faded away as it was eventually rendered unimportant thanks to social progress and the long overdue legalization of homosexuality. What remains of Polari is mostly artifacts from a radio show and what old speakers remember; sadly, nobody seems to have thought to study it while it was still used.

Now, you’re probably aware that a lot of subcultures have their own terms and definitions. Some of these could be considered cants, though typically far more limited ones than Polari was; the way furries substitute words for various, ahem, activities might qualify. Paw and yiff being two examples, but then again, while they do mislead outsiders, all groups of people use euphemisms to avoid having to say words that are perceived as less socially savory. I’d probably call the furry words subculture-specific slang, since they rarely represent concepts unique to the group (jargon) and aren’t intended to hide activities from outsiders (cant).

Therians have their own terms, which I’d call a jargon, given that the therianthropic experience requires some specific terms to describe them in detail somewhat succinctly. So you have the various types of shift, as well as terms like polytherian, contherian, and suntherian. These wouldn’t be understood by outsiders, but the intention isn’t to mislead or hide; the group needs some special terminology for in-group discussion of these things. Without such terms discussion would quickly grow very unwieldy (for example, “therianthrope that does not experience shifts” for suntherian).

Really now, I like the warmth and all, but the constant burning, searing, broiling sunlight is a little bit on the rich side for me. I suppose I can deal with it for a few months, but that brings me to something else I noticed; the summer makes people dumb.

No, hear me out. It’s actually true, heat makes people act like aggressive shitheads. It’s true; look here. I can’t say I’m an exception, despite normally enjoying the pretension of superiority. Hot summer make me lash out at people much easier than normally. They make me act impulsive and wasteful. They also make me more aroused than I’d normally be. All in all, not the best effects.

On the positive side, after the temperature goes down a little and the stars come out late at night, summers are wonderful. It’s such a shame we can’t have a third season that combines the best aspects of winter and summer.

Here’s a bunch of thoughts about therianthropy that I wrote a few somethings ago. It’s all just my personal beliefs so feel feel free to get angry.

Remember that therianthropy is a state of duality; a duality that must be maintained as that balance is the only way a therian functions. There’s two of you in control of that body of yours, that’s important to remember. 

Don’t hide behind your animal; it doesn’t know how to function in human society, that’s the job of the human. Don’t try to suppress your animal either, or the constant fighting for control may cause depression or worse. Ideally, both sides should get an equal measure of control, though in different situations: be the human at work, at school, in interaction with other humans, so that half of you is satisfied. Be the animal in nature, at home, or when interacting with other therians, so that more primal aspect of you gets to express itself also. An ideal therianthrope should probably be in a constant state of flux, changing which side gets more control constantly, but never completely giving control away to either one. 

That’s the way we work, I think, and it doesn’t have to be a weakness; having two different perspectives on things is a blessing, not a curse, as long as you remember to consider both of them. Neither side is perfect, and that seems to be a common issue with therians; the animal state isn’t always ideal, and the human state isn’t always right, but they complement each other.