My forray into furry fandom started out a long time ago… In a galaxy f- wait that is to far back. Let’s skip ahead to a couple decades ago at my grandparents. Back then they had this wonderful piece of software known as AOL… This software was magical and allowed a young kid to get his first forray of… THE INTERNET!

Granted it was dial-up internet service back then, and it was much slower than it is today. But back then if you were looking at porn, you appreciated what little you got to see. If you got to see half a nipple before you had to immediately close AOL so your parents or grandparents did not see what you were looking at, you appreciated that sight of half a nipple.

I was big into Disney Movies and the Disney afternoon block of cartoons. Maid Marion was my first childhood crush. And who could blame me? It wasn’t till a good many years later I started to appreciate Robin Hood too, but that is another story.

I was also big into a Disney cartoon series known as Chip’n Dale Rescue Rangers (which I will refer to as CDRR) and a DiC series known as Sonic the Hedgehog or SATAM as many people know it as now which was the basis for the now defunct Sonic Archie Comics, which I also owned and collected along with other Sega based merchandise…

Boy I love going on Tangents, but I promise I am done at this point with the tangents. Now where was I? Ah yes! I was at my grandparents computer on AOL looking for some fansites for CDRR. And I would soon come across a 2ch/4ch style fansite known as the acorn cafe, their I would make my presence known and meet and talk about CDRR with others. I would even develop an early wolf avatar character I like to play as, later I would learn they are called fursonas. It would be their I would discover IRC and go onto rizon.net to a channel known as #TheRRChat.

It was mostly live discussion of RR stuff, but I also learned many of those in that channel on IRC were Furries. Even met a Furry artist on their known as TeTarga. I’ve not kept up with him in years, but he was Swedish if I remember right and he quit working on art due to personal things in his own life. But he had some of the earliest known furry art I ever saw and got me going down my own rabbit hole.

I ended up Finding sites like VCL which TeTarga had a gallery their a long time ago, furryMUCKS, the now defunct Playmouse (which was run by Chipn’Death who is still around), Furnation (which went defunct years ago but was recently brought back thanks to a restoration project), the early days of deviantart, JabArchives, furcadia, yiffstar (before it was later renamed to sofurry), Sabrina Online (one of my favorite webcomics), and of course furryfans.com run by the quite infamous at the time Shawn Keller.

Shawn Keller, a furry as well, loved parodying the fandom with his website furryfans.com and a comic known as “Shawn Keller’s horrifying look into… THE FURRIES!” If you are offended easily, you would not like Shawn’s early works from back then. Heck, people then were pretty offended by it. But it was all in good fun when you treated it like it was, a parody. Shawn is still around too, he does YouTube videos now. They are much more tame in comparison to back then.

It was also back then I learned of Evilsibe aka Ross Rederick, the rather notorious furry who not only uploaded several artist CD’s online in a torrent known as ‘FXC Encyclopedia 2004’ (which I downloaded the day after my dad got us DSL.) but has been banned from several furry conventions, and was arrested due to not showing up in court for a lawsuit brought against him by rabbit valley publishing. I feel bad about downloading that now all these years later. Especially learning about Sibe’s history after that. He is now a moderator for r/yiff and r/yiffcomics on reddit.

Won’t lie, he is what made me get access to all of Dr.Comets CD’s, Karabiner’s CD’s, Ken Sample’s, and Foxxfires CD’s and appreciate the art from those artists. But if that guy finds his way here, he needs to be banned. He is nothing but trouble and will cause trouble.

God I went on more tangents, sorry about that… and yeah, that was long. But I wanted to share my journey into the fandom and reminisce about a great time in my life and the people and artists I got to know.

TL;Dr: I was young and vulnerable in the 2000’s on dial-up! I met FURRIES on IRC, and they sent me down the rabbit hole to becoming a furry by introducing me to art that I shouldn’t have been looking at but enjoyed anyway! I had my laughs, my cries, but most of all… I miss the days when so furry was known as yiffstar!