I appreciate that John Ottiver is packing heat.

Yeah, thank you! I poke my nose in here now and again and it’s always good to see this community active!

See, I’m cool with millipedes - mainly because they fall in the camp of “not venomous”. And if they actually are venomous, I don’t want that information haha.

The basement centipedes creep me out but I’m not necessarily afraid of them.

Giant centipedes actually present a roughly equivalent danger as a venomous snake. It can be treated with antivenom (I think anyway), but left untreated can actually be fatal.

Spiders fall in a camp of genuine phobia for me. It’s a pure lizard-brain fear reaction when it comes to them and it’s really hard to overcome.

Insects are ok. Mostly. I have a thing about the combination of “too many legs” and “venomous”. Centipedes are a no-go for me, genuine visceral terror. Same with spiders - except jumping spiders, they’re bros.

I’m willing to bet they’re probably still here. I know that life has been kinda busy lately and I’ve been dealing with some difficulties so I haven’t really had a lot to post.

Thank you! Yeah, there’s a fair bit to it but it should be achievable

Thank you! Yeah, I’ll be careful with it.

The book I’m working off of is from a whole series called “Build your own machine shop from scrap”. I opted to skip book one where you build a charcoal foundry, and opted to buy a propane one instead. Mainly so I don’t make a ton of charcoal smoke that floats around the neighborhood.

I’m going to slowly build up my skills until I can follow a book on how to build your own metalworking lathe!

I’ve been doing some metal casting which is super fun! I saved up aluminum cans and foil for a few months and have some ingots to work with now.

Noodly legs and all their goodness!

I love and embrace the maned wolf stereotype, because it’s silly and relatively harmless.

We all love Cheezits. Almost without exception.

I even made it into a prop for my suit!

Oh man, I had completely forgotten about VCL. Wow that’s a throwback lol

I think one of the things that I can detect not just in your post, but in this entire thread, is just how fractured we are as a society. We’ve been separated and pushed apart in ways that make us easier to advertise to and consumerize. We are all broken people trying to cope with an increasingly frantic and atomized world. We’re anxious of socializing but we feel the void where it should or even just could be.

In some ways I find that the fandom can be incredibly helpful for meeting with and engaging with new people. Because of some of the lewder undercurrents, it’s actually very unappealing to commercial interests. If a major company thought they could make a lot of money selling branded fursuits, they would already be a thing.

But in other ways, it’s a bandaid for a chainsaw wound. Our society needs to shift, because we’re gripped with a massively unhealthy culture that is making us simultaneously more connected and more alone than ever. And that aloneness is really damaging to social creatures. It may not be the cause of what ails you, yes, you, the person reading this, but it is certainly not helping your situation.

What that change looks like, I can’t say. I have some thoughts and ideas, some of which you can probably glean from my tone and tenor here. But I’ll refrain from positing solutions. It wouldn’t do any good anyway. All I can say is that I hope that y’all can seek out those connections, make them, and hold them. They are truly one of the most valuable and precious things in the world right now. I understand your anxieties, OP, but if it helps, then one of the more revolutionary acts of today might just be making a friend. And if it doesn’t help you, then I hope it helps someone else who reads this down the line.

Sorry for the rant, this one kinda caught me at a weird moment and I really just wanted to get my loosely-related thoughts down.

Very.

I have my fursona and several characters. I also have a fursuit based on Franz and I’ve been mulling over the idea of a Franz tattoo.

This actually touches pretty closely to a project that I’d like to put together someday. I think it would be really nice to have a site where you could memorialize members of the fandom who have passed away.

There would likely be a lot of details and minutia to work out. There would be dangers of vandalism and malice and the like for sure. I don’t have the answers to that right now.

What I do have is an idea about a site where you can essentially have a picture of the character, and some information about both the character and the person behind it. Maybe a name, if appropriate.

Thank you! They actually could be either, but generally I make them by picking three colors off of a ref sheet and use them to represent your sona. This is actually one of a few that I’ve done, but I’ve never made a Franz blanket.

Here’s a couple more for you! The last one is themed off of a blue eyed snep.

It’s not too big. We organize on TG, and the couple that lives closest books the party. Usually we have 8-10 in the group.

We’ve been playing airsoft and paintball quite a bit actually. It’s been a lot of fun!