I quit.
Go ahead, jump for joy, congratulate each other and slap your fellows on the back. But I tell you this, you "Loyal Opponents" of mine are not the reason I'm doing this. Frankly, the fun of beating your empty heads around like one of those inflatable punching clowns was one of the few things left in the fandom that I enjoyed. But even that isn't so much fun anymore. The fact is, none of it is fun anymore.
Don't flatter yourselves, you aren't the ones who made me quit. What has made me quit are the ghosts. It's not any person that makes me want to leave, but the empty spaces left by the people I loved, admired and respected who have left. There are VERY few people left in this fandom worthy of respect, and a hell of a lot of them who are worthy of none.
I know that for years I called after them as they left, "Don't go! You can't abandon the village to the Barbarians." But they left anyway, and now I find myself virtually alone in a village filled with barbarians, who loot and pillage and destroy, leaving nothing worth saving in their wake, but they don't mind, because they're having a great time.
I no longer love furry fandom, although I still love what furry used to be about. In the mad rush to avoid defining what furry is, you have left the job open for others to finish. Furry has now been defined. It has been defined by the press. It has been defined by Ostrich and Galen. That definition has been endorsed by every one of you who came to their defense or opposed those who were apalled. That definition has been set and reinforced after every single one of these articles that trashes the fandom. Over and over it happens, and the impact is larger and larger, and yet you idiots refuse to learn your lesson. I don't want to be anywhere in the impact zone when the Hiroshima Cluehammer that finally gets through your thick skulls hits ground zero.
I have always maintained that Furry had amazing potential. I always strove to realize that potential, but I knew I could never do it alone. I always tried to get others to either help, or at least get out of the way. I've done my best to show the way, how to run a 'zine, how to run a convention art show, how to handle a sketchbook without being a jerk about it. When *I* talked to the press, it was to do damage control, and I did it successfully. I've tried to lead the way lots of ways. But I have finally come to the conclusion that Furry Fandom's potential will never be realized with the current crop of losers and misfits who infest it and drag it down.
Today I have resigned my position as Art Show Director for ConiFur.
I will not be attending any future Furry conventions.
I have already recycled all of my Muck characters that I am able to. I'm sorry if this inconveniences any former residents of the Lyric Apartments.
After I post this, I will unsub from all but the fur.artwork newsgroups, but I will no longer post. Which means no more tally.
Oh, and watch for eBay auctions from mauser712. There will be some really choice bits from my collection going up there. (Like a full run of ASB if I can get them all together).
"But what of Gallery?" you might ask. Gallery is not dead. It is the one thing I still enjoy. I will continue to publish Gallery for the forseeable future. I have made promises, and I will do my best to keep my commitments.
However, I will no longer be going to conventions to sell it. Mail order only. I will see if I can encourage some of the artists to carry it wholesale.
There are a few other people I made promises to, and I will keep those as well. But that's it.
I'm out of here.
I've remarked before about how amusing it is, in a oogy sort of way, that Furry Fandom can't quite let go of me, even five and a half years after I quit. I was reminded of that this morning when someone posted a "Gee, I just recently heard you were dead in like, 1999" reply to something I posted in xianjaguar's LJ.
I've only had to ban one or two people from my Journal, and they're always obsessed furry fanboys who apparently feel it's a matter of Honor to go up against me. (Another interesting parallel is that they're both pretty much hated by everyone except their gay lovers.)
I know Xydexx is going to consider this some kind of personal slander, but hey, he's the one who did so much work on the wikifur entry on me, and related Ephemera. You see, back when I quit the fandom, I made a throwaway remark about how I didn't want to be there when the "Hiroshima Cluehammer" landed on the fandom, and woke people up to what idiots they've been for the things they've allowed and tolerated in the fandom. Karl turned that into his own little tiny hammer to try to beat me with (even years after I left). And the funny thing is, in a typical fit of self-aggrandizement, he saw himself as the leader of the pack of people using that term to refer to his issues with me. (And he linked to a Google groups search of the term, which showed that in fact, he was the only person who had seized upon that phrase). In the interest of accuracy, I edited the entry to refer to only him, rather than his imaginary army of supporters.
He also posted a graph that would make any statistician wince, purporting to show the growth of the fandom by charting total con attendance. He should publish in the Lancet, since he didn't correct for all the fans who attend more than one convention (which is what, 70-80% of them?). Someone else nailed him on that in the discussion of the article.
Of course, ignoring the source material, he didn't see that there was an Out. "But I have finally come to the conclusion that Furry Fandom's potential will never be realized with the current crop of losers and misfits who infest it and drag it down." And the fact is, as bad as it got, there were still some other people who stepped up and did a lot of the things that needed to be done.
The leadership of some of the major cons changed. Conventions diverged from the old "any publicity is good publicity" theory and instituted policies to control exploitive media crews. Standards of behavior were enforced. Really bad cases have begun to be banned from conventions, and they've been taking security more seriously. I'm sure there are other changes that people who are still in the fandom can bring up.
And what do you know, Con attendance HAS gone up, although not as dramatically as Jorgenson's graph would have you believe.
Even the impact of the CSI episode was blunted somewhat by a few people who cared, consulting and doing what they could to try to minimize the damage. It was still bad, but appears to have pretty much capped the media's interest in the Furry Meme.
In short, some people finally stepped up and did some of the things I was arguing for all along, and things got better. Or as Karl liked to put it, more people are simply enjoying the fandom, but not because of the policies of "anything goes" he favored, but because the leaders instituted some rules.
I'd feel validated, if I still gave a shit.