Telling: Like it Is

Reply to Tateru Nino's second comment in my "RP or not RP?" post below:

I approach the concept of formalized roleplay as a writer and editor (and 5+ decade reader!) of fiction. Unfortunately, I've been pre-programmed with the discipline needed to develop: a plot with a plausible backstory; realistic (or at least, realistically described) settings; multiple, separate and distinguishable characters with more than two dimensions; all with an ending that satisfies the reader. Granted, roleplay in a virtual environment dispenses with the need to describe the scenery, and reduces the character development to one -- that is, one's own -- and there is no ending. It also brings in as many authors as there are characters! I've tried writing in collaboration, and it didn't work for me... probably because of those hide-bound habits.

Finally!  The last F4L re-post.  From now on, I'll be originating blogs here and -- if I feel it's pertinent -- re-post them to F4L.
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If you've been in Second Life for a while, you've probably encountered "pregnant" avatars.  They're hard to miss.  Even if you haven't seen them on your screen yet, they announce their presence in Local Chat with periodic text about their condition: "[avatar's] tummy is upset"; "[avatar] feels the baby kicking", "[avatar] needs to take a pre-natal vitamin", yadda yadda.

Let's get my personal reaction out of the way, first: I mute them. Spam is spam.

Continuing the re-posts from F4L (only one more after this, I promise!)... Unlike the previous ones, which are almost verbatim copies edited only for minor clarification, this combines two separate and nearly opposite reactions to the phenomenon of collaring.  First, a gut-reaction rant written in ignorance; second, a return after learning.

Continuing the re-posts from F4L... and we're up to the blogs themselves.  The original was my first entry specifically as a blog, posted 3/14/09.  It's surprisingly relevant, 6 months later -- one of my interests, which dovetails with so many others whose blogs I've since discovered and now follow, is the relation between the avatar and the person behind the keyboard.  *waves  at Botgirl*

This was the first time I experienced a clash of differences.
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Second re-post from F4L, from a Round Table group discussion of anti-furry prejudice (edited from the original)
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I'm older than most furs I know. I didn't discover the fandom, or the feelings that lie behind it, until I was about to turn 50. On the other paw, I'd always been a fan, at least of the artwork and the portrayal of animal characters with human characteristics, which I came to through comics and 'cartoons' -- the Disney, Warner Bros., and Hanna-Barbera classics everyone knows, and some maybe less well-known (Max Fleisher, for example, who created Betty Boop and also did some feature-length animated films like Gulliver and Hoppity Goes to Town.)

While I was learning about the fandom, I was also learning about roleplay online in MUCKs and MMORPGs -- but I never got involved. I didn't feel like a furry, I just enjoyed the art (yes, including the naughty stuff!). I have not been a fur until I joined Second Life -- but I did so with the express intent of being a fur there, full time. I have never worn a human form in SL, not even during Orientation.

The first re-post from F4L, from The Round Table group discussion titled "The souls in the furries". (edited from the original)
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I feel a need to get deep... we're talking soul here, after all.

I am a furry because someone I befriended online, but never met, told me I had the spirit of Fox. He was a full-blood Native American of the Kiowa nation, a man of my own age and a Vietnam vet (Marines, Special Forces). After that, he never called me anything but Fox. (About a year later, he volunteered back into uniform after 9/11. They took him back, for his 'special talents'... he was killed in action overseas in a location far from the headlines but vital to our common safety.) Another friend, the dearest I have in the real world (who also said I had "a poet's soul"), gave me the name Lalo from a character in a book we both read. I combined the two and became Lalo Fox, the name under which I wrote and edited for six years. Yes, you can Google it.

By way of introduction:

I am Lalo Telling, a Second Life "furry". My rezday was 12/05/07. (My "typist", as I have seen it termed just recently, is a single male polymath in his mid-50s.) I have been blogging sporadically in a ning.com social network, "Furry4Life", on some of the sociological phenomena to be found at the interface between the furry subculture and Second Life.

In the past few months (especially since my typist became unemployed), I have been introduced to, and joined, other 21st Century channels of communication. Someone I follow on Twitter -- I don't now remember who -- recently led me to other blogs about SL, and those convinced me that I, too, should try adding my voice to the multitudes shouting down the public well.

I'll begin by re-posting a few of the things I've written for F4L... which cannot otherwise be read unless you join that site, which is my other reason for creating this blog: bringing it to a wider potential readership.