Failing once again to write about Interesting 09

I keep trying to write up my thoughts on Interesting 09 (short version - awesome fun), but obviously the further away we are from it the less useful that is, except as a personal reminder. Also, I've been sidetracked by the Gainer Furs community.



Fur, or Furrs, or Furries, tend to get a pretty bad press on the Internet, and I can broadly see why, but I never felt it was wholly fair. Everyone has their own fixations or hobbies - most are admittedly not as visual as dressing in a fur suit or as hard to explain as actually being a wolf, but they are nonetheless idiosyncratic. When Alex mentioned that she had heard that the Dinobots were going to appear in the next Transformers film, I could not have been prevented from rattling off the litany: Swoop, Sludge, Slag, Snarl, Grimlock. We agreed that Sludge had the real name short straw, although Slag was pretty unfortunate, albeit not as bad as it would have been if he hadn't been a fire-breathing triceratops. Everyone has crimps in their wiring - if yours does not make you feel that you are in some way a horse, be grateful.



That said, I was a little surprised when somebody told me about gainer furs - people who believe that they are animals (usually wolves - not sure why, but wolves are very popular), which at this point is not very surprising, and who want to put on large amounts of weight, which still is. That link is probably not reliably safe for work, incidentally, and is also just quite odd.



Live and let live, obviously. However, a group of pro-ana (anorexia) enthusiasts did not follow this maxim and, having found the site through whatever means, arrived to ask some searching questions about the lifestyle decisions of the furry gainers. This brief battle of the anorexics and the furry gourmands did not last long, both communities being prone to tiring easily, but it did provide one of the great Internet exchanges, on the event of one of the furs posting pictures of his development for the admiration of the group.



Anorexic: I just threw up a little.
Gainer: Glad I could help.



The message? People are pretty odd, but as long as they stay in their own communities they generally don't have to deal with that as a bad thing. In the right environment, oddness is neither disruptive or destructive and, by extension, the person you have just met might be outside that environment for the first time in a long time. There's probably a lesson about the importance of sensible nutrition, but I'm having trouble grasping it.



You are a guest in a surprising number of environments, and if you're about to cut up rough then you are probably in some way a guest, because people tend not to cut up rough in their homes or home communities. Also, be it ever so recondite, almost everything that exists has a user community, and the best way to migrate them is not to tell them that the product they like to use make you throw up.