Furry Stuff

I shuffled some things around, including moving the hardware picture archive to this server. I also threw up the artwork of Zorin over the years page and added a "Furry Stuff" category.

Up next, moving the Lynxie Photo Archive to this server. Mmm, I love having lots of hard disk space.

How high can you go?

Pretty high. The problem when building these towers is no one can move; if anyone moves or disconnects, the whole thing comes crashing down, which is also quite hilarious to watch.

And of course, herding furries is like herding cats. Only not all of us are cats, so it gets complicated.

Heh, I'm in a silly mood this morning...

I realized there was no compilation of artwork of Zorin over the years, so I decided to create one. Here is all artwork I am aware of containing my character, from the most recent to the earliest. You can click most of them to embiggen.

(This page has a lot of images; if you're on a slow link, be patient...)

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This is Zorin as the Engineer in Team Fortress 2, by Lynxeh:

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Koz did this cute badge of me at MFF 2008:

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This is my current con badge (2006) and the "official" drawing of Zorin. Tani Da Real finally captured the fluffiness and playfulness of my character perfectly. I'll probably commission more work from her in the future if her backlog ever lets up. I have the original of this one.

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Though not traditional artwork, this is what Zorin looks like on Second Life. It is a Luskwood Canadian Lynx avatar with some very minor modifications.

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This 2006 drawing is by Chris Kozloski, who plays Syndra on FurryMUCK. It shows me cuddling Syndra excessively as I am bound to do when in a rambunctious mood.

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In 2000, Zorin was briefly involved with a lynx named Marion. She commissioned a picture of us together from Huskie. This picture is not "work safe", and is the closest thing to "porn" that Zorin has ever been drawn in. It's rather tame, but you still have to click the image to see the whole thing. };)

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In 1998, Milva had this painting commissioned from Eugene Arenhaus, aka Chipmunk. I have the "original" of this as a rather huge TIF file on a CD-R. The sad irony was that she and I broke up shortly after this was commissioned.

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This 1997 drawing is by Aislinn, formerly on FurryMUCK. It is the result of excessive pounceage, and the victim order is, from bottom to top, AlterSkunk, Zorin, Cuanu, and Aislinn. :)

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This 1996 drawing is by Jordan Greywolf, who has also become scarce in the fandom lately. It shows Zorin and Milva in an affectionate embrace. I'm not sure where the original for this is; perhaps Milva still has it! I should ask. :)

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This is a 1996 painting by ArtKits (aka Spino) of Zorin, Rieshal and Milva. Rieshal is a good friend of mine, and Milva is an ex-mate (thankfully mostly on good terms) You will note clever posing to keep it G-rated, as Zorin and Milva weren't known for wearing clothes very often. My only complaint is that Zorin was drawn a little too 'buff', and the eye color is incorrect, but other than that, it's cute! Spino appears to have vanished; I have not heard from him in years. Hey Spino, if you're out there, say hi will ya? I have the original of this one.

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This is the first drawing ever of Zorin, by Tygger Lia Graf, who is sadly no longer in the fandom. It was drawn in July 1995, only three months after I entered the furry fandom. He looks a bit young in this drawing, but seeing that I was only 18 at the time I commissioned it, this makes some sense. Sadly the original of this image was buried and unscanned until today, when the world can see it for the first time.

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Well, that's it! There's probably more out there that I forgot and will add as I find.

I've been a busy kitty; haven't updated too much lately. I figured I'd summarize what's been happening at least...

Went to Jacksonville the weekend before last. It was fun; I hung out with some friends there and we went bowling, goofed off in general and had a good time. On the way home I stopped in Orlando to visit someone else and we went to a Sushi bar for dinner. Spicy tuna rolls yum yum.

Last weekend I visited some friends in Chicago! It was tons of fun; especially the visit to downtown. Also got to eat dinner at the Signature Room on the 95th floor of the John Hancock tower! The view from up there is amazing; I'll be sure to post photos as soon as I get them; I took them with someone else's camera.

Now it's time to get back into the grind; my next trip will likely be MidwestFurFest in November, and that's a long way off. I'm most looking forward to my trip to California for Further Confusion in January, though; that promises to be fun since I'll be meeting some folks I've been wanting to meet in person for years now.

I've purposefully made sure that this has been a slow weekend. Have been mostly goofing off at home, DJing in Luskwood on Second Life and relaxing. After not spending a single full day at home in three weeks, I needed it!

Well, as the subject says, AC'2006 was a blast. I've never been to such a big furry event in my life, and it was absolutely amazing to see so many like-minded folks running around, so much art, and to meet folks I've talked to only online until that point.

At various points through the con, I ran into Tugrik, Posi_Cat, Taxus, Jessup, Revar, TaniDaReal (a favorite artist of mine), and many other folks I've chatted with on and off over the years. I also got to meet Misha the bunny, whom I've been RPing with for months, and found some new friends as well.

I scored some artwork; namely Winter's Beauty by XianJaguar (whom I also met), a really cool print of a lynx painted onto a feather, a print of a cute cheetah lying down from Caribou, and a few other random thingies. Sadly, my usual favorite artists didn't have anything I was particularly interested in, which is sad, because I wanted to support them. Especially Tani DaReal.

Overall, a successful con. To all of you whom I've met, it was nice meeting you! To those whom I didn't meet... there's always next time!

Up next, Further Confusion 2007, most likely. That oughta be a blast; there's a few people I'm looking forward to meeting; you know who you are.

-Zorin the Lynx, mischievous kitty at large

So, quite a few things have happened lately, and I haven't updated in a while, so I might as well.

I got back from Megaplex in Orlando, FL, and it was lots of fun. Got to meet some new people and pretty much goofed off the entire weekend. Quite a few folks liked the badge I commissioned from Tani DaReal, and getting to hang out with folks I hadn't seen in a while was a real treat.

I went insane and purchased a MacBook Pro. 2GHz Intel Core Duo, 1GB of RAM and 100GB hard drive. This is the fastest laptop I've ever seen! I'm amazed by how snappy MacOS X is on it; Apple finally redeemed the years of stagnation in their notebook line with this one. The downside is waiting for Universal binary versions of various applications to come out! Hurry up and recompile, folks!

On top of that, now that I have a fast enough machine, I went ahead and checked out Second Life. Ho-boy, I hope I don't become addicted to this. My name on there is "Zorin Frobozz" if you'd like to say hi. Sadly, there was no lynx avatar available, so I took a grey tabby-cat and added ear-tufts! Close enough for now. The game universe is entirely user created and you can create all sorts of wacky objects with this funky scripting language. I'm still learning about it, but who knows what I might come up with once I figure it all out. Whoo!

Anyway... That's all folks!

This is one of those postings only those of you who have MUCKed (or perhaps MUDded) will get. I figured I'd post it here because folks will find it through searches and such and may get a laugh out of it.

TinyMUCK (especially FurryMUCK) pet peeves:

• People who can't freakin' write - Okay, this probably applies everywhere on the net. I've noticed folks on TinyMUCKs tend to write better than the average joe on the net, but there are still folks who have serious issues with run-on sentences, spelling, punctuation, and use of capital letters. Really, typing like a moron makes you look like a moron, regardless of whether you are or not. Learn how to spell "character", for crying out loud! And if you can't write, don't bother trying to RP. Please.
• Really bad descriptions - This sort of jives with "People who can't freakin' write", but in a different way. Your description on a MUCK is your character; it's who you are. If you spend three paragraphs describing your genitals and one sentence saying that you have brown eyes, people are going to laugh at you. It doesn't make you sexy. It doesn't make you interesting, because so many people seem to do this. If your entire purpose to be on a MUCK is online sex, go to Tapestries and stay out of my personal space.
• Folks who use MPI descriptions with hard line breaks at greater than 80 characters - Not everyone has a terminal as wide as yours. The typical minimum accepted terminal width is 80 characters; stick with it if you must hard-break. A better idea is to only linebreak on paragraphs; this will allow the description to look good on any width terminal.
• Heavy IC roleplaying in light IC/OOC areas - Nobody cares that your ship is having problems and you're looking for someone to fix it in the Park on FurryMUCK. There are areas designated for pure IC roleplay, stick to those areas for this sort of thing. Light-hearted IC/OOC areas such as the Park are more suited to general conversation, amusing antics, and goofing off, not serious RP.
• Suddenly going home and disconnecting when in the middle of something - I hate it when people do this! Having a nice conversation or roleplay and suddenly they gohome and disconnect without warning. It's the equivalent of running out of a room in a real-life social situation and slamming the door. At least say "gotta go! RL." and THEN do it; it doesn't take much extra time to do this. Even just plain disconnecting is better, since it doesn't give the impression that you're pissed off when you leave.
• Zombies that hit on people - Seriously, people. It's kind of like necrophilia. Creepy. Create another character if you want to get into serious roleplays as that entity. It's not hard!
• Exits with no messages - When you build an area, and your exits have no messages, folks will only see "Name has left." or "Name has arrived." when they come in and out of the room. @succ/@osucc/@odrop your exits! It's much nicer to be able to see WHERE someone went, or WHERE they came from. Also, darking the exits is a good idea once you set the messages, to eliminate the now redundant "has arrived" and "has left" messages.
• Unclear exit names - When you're in a room whose desc says "There is a door in the back of the room leading to the galley", and you type "back" or "galley" and it doesn't work, it gets pretty annoying. Try to name your exits with as many possibilities as possible, so your guests can actually move around in your area. For instance, in that case I'd name the exit back;rear;galley;astern.
• Lack of an out path or a way to get out of an area to where you came from - If your station/ship/whatever is really complicated, set up an "out" path so that folks can get back to the main room just by typing "out" until they get there. The main room should have an "out" to a transporter room or to the street. Yes, there are situations where you'd WANT someone to get lost, but these are not common, so "out" paths can make exploration easier and less frustrating if you want folks to see your entire area. One-way exits are also extremely irritating to explorers; avoid them at all costs unless an RP demands them.

Will be sure to post more as I think of them. }:)

I've started RPing more on FurryMUCK lately. I dunno if it's that a new batch of fun and interesting players has joined the system, or what, but it seems more fun lately than it's been over the past few years. I'm glad FM is doing well; in this age of flashy web graphics and Second Life and all, text-based systems have fallen into the shadows and only the most hard-core people seem to like them anymore. It's a community with a strong history and I'm glad to have been a part of it for so long.

On the other side, though, I'm thinking of actually building... *gasp*, a Windows box. For games, of course. The thing is, when the MacBook Pro comes out in Februrary, if it can run Windows in a dual-boot configuration, that would be the ideal solution, as it would kill two cockroaches with one stomp. There's lots of games that have come out in the last few years that I'd like to try, many of them already in the bargain bins. A Windows box is a sad necessary evil to be able to play them, though.

Other than that, not much. Been dealing with lots and lots and lots of disk storage at work, backup strategies, pricing out an array of like 36 flat panels and pricing out hardware to drive it, and so on. It'd be neat if they'd buy that LCD array, that must be some sight.

A relatively uneventful weekend...

Crappy weather Saturday kept me indoors. Visited some friends and hung out watching TV and eating pizza, but nothing much exciting happened.

I picked up "Father of the Pride" on DVD. For those with short memories, this was a computer animated prime time TV show last year on NBC, about the private lives of the animals that live with Siegfried and Roy in Las Vegas. It was a really fun show, but it didn't make high enough ratings to justify the $1.5 million per-episode production cost, so it was cancelled. The quality of the DVD is astounding, though, and they even have an additional episode that was storyboarded and recorded, but never animated; it's fun to watch an episode in boarded form. I guess my inner animation geek is coming out here. }:)

I got an iPod recently. Fun toy! I don't use it with iTunes, but rather with GTKpod, which is vastly superior. It lets you do nifty things that iTunes doesn't, and is cross-platform to boot!

Didn't make it out to VSW this weekend, and I'm smacking myself for that. However, I needed to take a break from it; was neglecting too many other things I was falling behind on.

Well, right around now is my ten year getting-on-the-net anniversary. Wow, it feels like it was only yesterday, piggy-backing on the FIU-FAU LAT net and jacking into cybernet.cse.fau.edu, an open-access Internet BBS that existed at the time.

Some Internet related things that I dealt with back in the early days (1994-1996)...

• alt.tv.animaniacs (Hellooooooo Usenet!)
• alt.fan.lion-king (Hakuna Ma-what-a?)
• cybernet.cse.fau.edu, Cybernet BBS (Anyone got a WAFFLE-iron?)
• CyberGate, AIX (first UNIX system I ever use), that larry@gate.net account
• (305)348-1196 (old FIU 9600 baud dialin to a DECserver)
• TIN (who needs a GUI to read news???)
• Trying to convince my high school to get Internet access because it was "educational" (though I just wanted it so I could goof off on the net during lunch)
• wakko.gil.net (Jeff, thanks for the free access!)
• sarabi.gil.net (I had a real hostname when most people didn't even have real access!)
• FurryMUCK (still there! 10 years as of 4/7/2005!)
• Zorin the Squirrel
• CU-SeeMe (Hi Milva!)
• PointCast (How utterly useless. But I still had fun with it!)
• FurToonia (Hello Kaja, Selane, Shakeera, if you're still out there!)
• FluffMUCK (Hello Inkypaws, Rieshal, Paws, and others.. StH TinyPlot, Mban, Town Hall meetings, speaking staff, flying phonebooths, etc. etc. etc.)
• Windows 3.1 and Trumpet Winsock (shudder)
• EWAN (a telnet client for Windows... the only decent one at the time)
• Netscape 1.1N (Holy crap! HTML is COOL!)
• Linux (kernel 1.2.8 was the first I ever booted! Yeah I came in a bit late, SO WHAT? }:) )
• As a Linux newbie, figuring out how to get PPP to work under Linux (pulled an all-nighter, success was the greatest feeling in the world!)
• ICQ (5327238 -- nice small UIN!)
• My First Router (386DX/33 running Linux in 5MB of RAM off a 20MB MFM disk, fun!)
• Doing all of this at 14.4kbps
• solix.fiu.edu, serss0.fiu.edu, xlab1.fiu.edu, (305)348-3282, those darn SPARCClassics in PC-415, the cheap VT220 clones in the terminal lab, SERVAX...
• Running Linux on a Floppy on open student lab 486s so I could telnet out
• Getting a job at FIU, vixen.cs.fiu.edu, SCS, getting paid to be a geek, learning how this Internet stuff actually WORKS...
• Getting banned from the EIC lab (Engineering) at FIU for swiping an IP address so I could get on the Internet. The irony is I was hired for the SCS department only months later and ended up dismantling that lab since we took over the building. :)
• ...

Well, that's enough for now. I'll add more as I think of it over the next few days. It's been a good run, and here's hoping for another ten years of cool stuff!