Sha's Thoughts: Ancient Furries

By Becky Shamen

In my exploration of the sims in Second Life, there have been a few which, I was sorry to discover, do not allow furries. This reporter has as many furry friends as humans and can often be found in the form of a rabbit, fox, raccoon or bat herself. As such, I join my friends in protesting such attitudes, that prohibit anthropomorphic critters from visiting these places. One cannot hope to change attitudes, without understanding the thinking behind them. It is perfectly acceptable for groups and sim owners to make their lands accurate, as regards speech, clothing and inhabitants that fit the theme being enacted there, but they sometimes, conveniently, forget to ask key questions. Are furries entirely make believe? Did they only come into existance, begining with Mickey Mouse? Do they have no ancient history? Are there no furries in real life? It might be said that ignorance is bliss, but it is equally important to remember that, those that do not study history are doomed to repeat it. Let us join Mr. Peabody (a furry), in his wayback machine and see if we can find answers to these questions. We will be looking into some mythology, but keep in mind, myths are not invented. There is always an element of truth in them.

Sentient life

Some of you may be confused by what I have to say next. Most of you have been told of only two theories of creation: Darwin and the Christian Bible. Imagine if you will another theory. Esoteric literature reveals that most planets serve the purpose of evolving sentient human beings. Before the humans come on the scene, there is a period when the sentient life forms are reptilian. The most highly evolved beings on earth are known as Kumaras. The related word, Makara, means "Dragon." Masters of ancient wisdom are called Dragons. If you want to read more, I recommend the works of Rudolf Steiner and H.P. Blavatsky.

In Genesis, we read that humans, represented by Adam and Eve, did not have knowledge of right and wrong and self-consciousness, until they ate the fruit, offered to them by a walking, talking serpent, a dragon. Amazing! We found the first, non-human, sentient being in Judeo-Christian history, within the first few pages of the Bible. To keep it simple, we will refer to all non-human, anthropomorphic animals, as "furries," from here on.

Can we go back farther and find other furries in history? Yes, indeed. Before the Jews were united in their religion and culture, they lived in Egypt. The Egyptian pantheon had many furry gods, including; Ra, Anubis, Seth, Khnum, Horus, Thoth and Sekhmet.

The ancient Hindus also had furry gods, including Hanuman (monkey) and Ganesha (elephant). In fact, if you study your ancient history, nearly all people on earth, at one time, worshiped furry gods. They can be found in the pantheons of the Greeks, Romans, Mayans, and Aztecs as well.

Keep in mind, before Mickey and Donald made the scene, there was "The Chronicles of Narnia", with it's furry residents and their chief deity, Aslan.

The next time you hear of furries being excluded anywhere in Second Life, you can, armed with the truth, show that they should be shown respect, because they were here first.

Becky "Sha" Shamen

[credits: The art was collected from the internet, the first is based on an illustration by "Flash". The second by unknown artist]

 *Editor's Note* Perri Prinz recommended the essay "Pervasive Anthropomorphic Culture" if one wants to read about the influence of anthropomorphism on human history from ancient times to the present. Plus she has her own "Furry History Project," describing the history of anthropomorphic characters in stories, and how "Furry" as a genre came to be.

Review of Skyrim

So, like many people who are interested in the Elder Scrolls series, I recently got Skyrim (the 5th in the series). It's supposed to be "cutting edge", the best thing out there graphics- wise, etc. etc. etc. However, from my experiences, it doesn't seem to live up to the hype much.

The story goes that you're captured and set to be executed, when a dragon decides to make itself known and ruin the proceedings after being sealed away for so long. Once you escape and do a little investigation, you're sent to kill another dragon, and it is there you learn you're "dragonborn," able to use the "shouts" of the dragons. From there, you're off across the realm doing quests and slaying yet MORE dragons while you uncover the richness that is Skyrim.

And rich it is. It has a LOT of realism to it, and the graphics are just beautiful. The rivers and streams are beautifully rendered, there's a lot of background ambiance in the towns, you can capture bugs with your bare hands for alchemy ingredients or snag fish out of streams, and I don't know how many times I've -slowly- edged into a cave, fearful of all the sounds and worried that something's going to jump out at me and eat my face in. Dragons can attack at random in real time, diving out of the sky and surprising you if you're not paying attention to your surroundings. If it's one thing the creators of Skyrim at Bethesda got right, it's the graphics. They also have what is known as the "Radiant" quest system, where your actions influence what quests become available. If there's a bandit group in one cavern and you clean it out before the quest can be given, then the game will just pick another cavern from a predetermined list and use THAT for the quest bait.

But they got a lot of things wrong, as well. The first thing that annoyed me was some of the physics. Sometimes if I fall off a cliff, by the time I stop bouncing off the boulders like a ragdoll, I'm three cities away. There -is- a difference between "laws of gravity" and "bouncing like a ping pong ball across the planet", which kind of annoyed me when my first horse fell and I found its corpse half the continent away. The second thing that annoyed me was the experience system; instead of getting points for killing things and advancing skills once you level up, you only advance when you advance your skills enough and on a level-up you only gain ten points of magic, hit points or carrying capacity / stamina (dishonorable mention is the fact that you can't research new spells nor put more than one enchantment on any item).

The third thing that annoyed me was the behavior of some of the dragons, but I think that was by design (I'm playing a solid melee character with no magic or ranged support, and some dragons will stay airborne and breathe on you from the air, making it very difficult to bring them down), which brings me to yet another gripe I had: the way things don't respawn all that often. If you kill a dragon, bear, or other large beast, go off questing for several game hours, days or months, and then return, the skeleton/corpse will still be there when you get back. Nice when it's a dragon you'd rather not deal with again, but not so hot if you're trying to farm bandit camps for things to sell or the odd piece of extra gear like you could in Oblivion or Morrowind (I later found they do respawn, but it takes a -long- time).

The last thing that annoyed me, and this one's the big one, was the way they handled "followers." See, every now and again you can recruit mercenaries or people who like you (never more than one at a time, which -really- is dumb... I want to see an adventuring party and interparty politics, damn it!), but if they are badly badly wounded, they don't die. They fall to the ground and slowly regenerate instead. You can kill them if you attack them yourself at that point, but enemies will ignore them if they're injured and come straight for you instead. When I saw this, I went "Really?" --- the threat of the dungeons is lowered if your characters can't die; just send in the follower to soften them up, wait for them to go down, charge in swinging, kill the bad guy, rinse and repeat until everything's dead.

On top of that, one of the followers is actually tagged as "Essential", meaning she CAN'T die. Not EVER. So if you have her as a follower, equip her with the best gear and give her a steady supply of healing, you can basically just waltz through the entire game and never have to raise a sword. That takes something away from the game.

I'm going to give Skyrim 3 Dragon Hoards out of five. It's got a lot going for it, but they got too many things wrong in my opinion. It's worth at least one playthrough, but after that, I'm not so sure.

*Update* For more information, you can check reviews by New World Notes and Paul Tassi of Forbes.

Xymbers Slade