#furrymuck

[199x-furry-archive]

MIKIMUCK.GIF - Art By: Lisa Sample - Found on Data Packrat's Archive, made 5/1995.

[glavilio]

do you know any good guides to get into furry muck?? ive wanted to try it for ages but find it confusing

so long as you have some familiarity with command line/terminal and the basic CLI procedures, i found the starting guide on the official site quite adequate. otherwise, first familiarize yourself with the command line interface of your computer. it takes a little getting used to, but this is how the entire MUCK will be, plus knowing how to use a CLI is a good skill to have.

you will need telnet installed on your computer. telnet is the protocol that will allow you to access furrymuck through your CLI (telnet is not secure, so don't type anything into furryMUCK you wouldn't want anyone to be able to see! this is the risk of using a legacy system, assume it has already been compromised and act accordingly). on windows telnet is preinstalled but you will need to enable it as described in this guide. on linux and macOS you can install it with a package manager. i use homebrew on mac.

once you have telnet, the official guides for connecting are here. character registration is done via email. mine took around a week and a half to come back. because your passwords are sent in plaintext over email and unsecured over telnet do not reuse another password. here in the registration guide.

once you access the MUCK, the area just outside the bandstand where you start has guides for new players and the people around there are generally willing to help new and clueless players (like me). it takes a little trial and error and exploring. i found this guide for interacting with the enviornment helpful.

furryMUCK is a very magical place when you're able to meet it at its own terms. part of the fantasy is the clunkiness of the ancient internet its idiosyncrasies. have so much fun!

[vsrobotjulie]

lets gooooo

[vsrobotjulie]

does anyone know how to connect to telnet in 2024? im on a mac running high sierra if that helps.

[pyatsfortress]

Exploring parts of FurryMuck you haven’t visited since the 1990s.

[xydexx]

My FurryMUCK character, Xydexx, is 23 years old today.

[neverwasafurry]

VERY alarmed.

I'm just posting this to quickly get something out of my system. Every few minutes or so, I always suddenly realize that I shouldn't be terrified of this whole situation, but I ***AM*** terrified. And I keep asking myself... why is this haunting me so badly? Why can't I suddenly get it off my mind? What is it about this thing that's so unhealthy that what I've seen and experienced on it is making me lose sleep at night? I made a huge mistake. I never should have tried this.

[neverwasafurry]

Introduction

I’m deliberately leaving all these posts untagged except for two simply searces so that it’s hopefully not *too* easily searchable; if anyone out there wants to find this information badly enough, I want it to be floating around so they can find it. In other words, I don’t want it to be easily found and resultingly mocked and attacked - at least for the moment - but I don’t want to keep this information secret from those who want to find out about it, either.

I’m keeping this first introductory post simple just to give a basic idea of what this blog is. I’ll add more explaining much better later:

I am a published professional artist known for switching from style to style and persona to persona from project to project, and I normally don’t like to do the same thing twice. I love to experiment with new styles and learning possibilities, and love to take risks in my material that commercially minded individuals who encounter me have always balked at and found incomprehensibly risky.

The projects I’ve always created have been fun and risky, but not fun and risky enough; I was in a rut getting bored out of my skull, and I wanted to try something different. I wanted to do something that ***really*** felt like it had a risky element to it.

Then I thought I had a genuinely unique idea; my latest persona would be unique within my personal creative history and portfolio.

I was going to portray a furry.

Yes, you read that right. A furry. One of them.

How was I going to do this? Well, I would get an account on the furries’ most revered of gathering places, FurryMUCK. I would get an account and simply log on, mingling with the furries, talking with them, and hopefully gather enough insight from the experience to base a new writing project on.

I wish to emphasize that I had absolutely no macilious intentions in doing so. I never saw it as a “prank”, a joke, or anything of the sort. I was simply going to see if I could pass myself off as just another player - maybe even have some enjoyable conversations with some friendly people on there, ones who might even get a kick later on regarding what I was doing, as in, “You’re really WHO? Wow!” ;)

It seemed like such a light and fun idea. So I gave it a try.

But I didn’t count on getting “glommed on to” by a weirdo on literally the very second I logged on to it with my brand new account before I had even had a chance to move around or even say anything who immediately began terrifying me with graphic sexual harassment and then proceeded to frighten me with more and more steadily heightened stunts in other ways despite the “wizzes” (system moderators) attempts to help me after I was forced to ask for it a mere a few days after first connecting.

And I didn’t count on getting emotionally involved.

You see, I met someone on there, someone I now consider a friend. A very good person with a lot of intelligence, personality, and an easygoing good heart - and frankly is much too good a person to be wasting his time on such a place, frankly - but who has said certain things which have touched me and given me reason to believe that said friend doesn’t have much self-respect and doesn’t seem to believe they’re worth much… and I’m seriously worried about that friend and afraid that they could accidentally get seriously hurt one way or the other on that thing.

They’re a friend I’ve grown to genuinely care about, and the one sole reason I haven’t had my account deleted - I’ve been at a violent tug-of-war with myself regarding whether to have my account nixed or keep it up. You see, furries, as I’ve learned, are notorious for keeping *everything* - including all forms of personal communication - muck-based. They will not communicate via normal email if you ask them. They will not use Skype. Everything MUST be centered obsessively entirely around their little “furry world”, for lack of a better term, as one furry willingly explained to me. So the one reason I continue to have my account on there is so that my friend can still have a way to contact me in case said friend ever gets hurt, ever gets into serious trouble on that thing, and ever needs a shoulder to lean on.

I’ll explain as much of I can regarding all of the above events when I can here.

I infiltrated FurryMUCK, often described by sources like Vanity Fair and others with such phrases as “the most bizarre cult known in recent decades”, and so far have lived to tell the tale.