Eniiplace - Enii's Blog

Call for Submissions! September 2026 Midway Menagerie - "Identity and the Self"

2026-09-01T00:00:00-04:00

Hello hello! This is a call for submissions for the September 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, the furry blogging carnival! If you're unfamiliar with Midway Menagerie, see the home page here for details.

This month's theme is "identity and the self". Here are some sample prompts to get you thinking, but feel free to take the theme in whichever direction you want!

How do you relate to your fursona(s)? Is your fursona the truest representation of your inner self? Or is it more of a mascot? Does it represent how you see yourself now or how you would like to be in the future or in an ideal world? Have you changed your fursona? Do you think you will in the future?
How do you relate to humanity? Do you identify as therian or otherkin? If you had the opportunity to live in the body of your fursona, would that feel more like "you" than your human body?
How essential is "furriness" to your sense of self? Is this community one of several hobbies that you engage with, or is it a core aspect of your life? How has this relationship changed over time and how do you relate to others who may have a different relationship with furry?
What role has the furry community played in your path of self-exploration? Have you used your fursona to experiment with your gender or sexual identity? Has interacting with other furries led you to discover aspects of yourself that you otherwise wouldn't have?

While written blog posts are the typical response format, participants are encouraged to submit in whichever format they feel drawn to! (e.g., audio, video, games/interactive media, poetry, music, etc.)

Post your submission somewhere on the Internet and send me the link, either using the contact information on my home page or as a comment on this page. I'd also be happy to help with brainstorming or reviewing your submission if you'd like! And if you'd prefer for me to host your submission on my website directly, feel free to ask!

Deadline for submission is September 30, 2026! I'll post a roundup within the first few days of October with links to everyone's submissions.

Launching the Furry Sticker Photo Gallery!

2026-08-31T23:41:00-04:00

This post was written for the August 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, a furry blogging carnival.

Where is furry? For me, the natural answer is furry conventions. My first exposure to furries was vlogs of Anthrocon, most of my interactions with furries (until this year) were at conventions, and I generally feel more comfortable talking to people face-to-face than online. But furcons only last a weekend and then I have to return to normal life. It's a harsh cut from a place where I belong in the community to a place where it feels like folks barely tolerate me.

Since I moved to the city a few years ago, however, I began to spot signs of other furries who lived nearby. Some furs had slapped stickers of their sonas on utility poles and street signs across the Boston area. I found more and more stickers as I explored the streets. Each time I passed one, it lifted my spirits. Even if I didn't know who stuck them, I knew that people like me lived nearby, and I felt the distant warmth of community again.

As some stickers became landmarks to me, I felt greater and greater awareness of their temporary nature. Stickers only last so long when exposed to the elements, and at any moment someone could tear them down, whether in the name of cleaning up "vandalism" or out of distaste for furries. So I decided to document the stickers, snapping photos whenever I came across a new site.

My plan was to one day make a website where other furs would appreciate the art of public stickering. Maybe some folks would spot their own fursonas and know that someone else had seen them and known what they were looking at. And when the stickers finally fell to exposure or human activity, they would still have a place on the Internet. As a matter of fact, just today I learned that a friend's sticker, which had become a minor landmark amongst my friend group, had disappeared from its pole. So now I'll give it its new home.

My furry sticker photo gallery is now available on this website! You can find it here or on the navigation bar. Please give it a look and feel free to leave a comment! My original hope for this project was to hear others' thoughts about the stickers and this collection, so I'd love to know what y'all think. :3

This will be an ongoing art project, so please check back occasionally to see what's new!

Midway Menagerie: July 2026

2026-08-01T02:02:00-04:00

Hello! This is the first post that I've written for this blog, so welcome and enjoy as I figure this out. :3

I'm writing this post as my submission for the inaugural July 2026 edition of Midway Menagerie, a furry blog carnival organized by my friend Lark. Here is the submission announcement post for this edition.^[1]

The theme for this month's edition of the Menagerie is "fandom and community". Since this is my first post on this blog, I'll take the opportunity to discuss my introduction to the furry fandom.

It was the summer of 2012 when I first learned about furries. I was on summer vacation before entering 8th grade and bouncing around YouTube one afternoon. I don't remember what led me to it, but eventually I stumbled across a few videos of the dance competition at Anthrocon 2012. I was amazed at the dancers' skill and especially at the fact that they pulled it off in full costume! I showed some of them to my little sister (which I imagine was the act that introduced her to furry, lol).

From there, I found other videos documenting Anthrocon 2012, including recordings of fursuiters walking around the Westin and the convention center. It was magical to me. A whole society of these creatures expressing so much creativity and friendship! I was immediately enamored with the way people created these representations of themselves as cute and cool animals and as unique individuals. You can imagine the appeal that this had to a middle schooler.^[2]

I began googling "how to make a fursona" in search of guidance, and somehow ended up on a now-defunct website called "Become Your Fursona" (becomeyourfursona.com), which had—if I remember it correctly—a fursona personality quiz framed as a choose-your-own-adventure story where you were being interviewed in an underground lab by the author's bird sona. I don't remember my result, but the quiz led me to the rest of the website, which consisted of a large number of transformation-themed stories organized by species. I was obsessed for a few weeks, reading nearly every story on the website and fantasizing about turning into an animal and running away from home.

The author of that website, Tachyon Feathertail, wrote many of those stories as a way to process religious trauma. They had left the Mormon church after coming out as queer and apparently had a difficult relationship with their family. Within a few years of my discovering it, Become Your Fursona disappeared off the internet. I haven't been able to find mention of Tachyon after 2012 or so. I hope they're doing ok.

If by some chance Tachyon happens to find this post: thank you so much for serving as my introduction to this fandom. I felt deeply seen by your work and it brought me comfort during a difficult period in my life.

I continued exploring the furry side of the internet, creating a fursona—a gray cat named Sairen—and registering accounts on SoFurry and DeviantArt. Somehow my research led me to the older Web 1.0 and pre-Web roots of the fandom. I discovered FurryMUCK, a MUCK founded in 1990, years before the World Wide Web became publically available in 1993.^[3] I don't remember if I ever actually logged into FurryMUCK, but I was briefly obsessed with learning about this imaginary world where real people could socialize as their fursonas. Around this time I also discovered the "Furry Code", a system created years before I was born to concisely describe a person's fursona and personality via text.^[4] I definitely recommend checking the page out! It's a fascinating look at how similar the 1990s furry fandom is to the modern one. Do note that this code contains some endosexist language and generally assumes a more cishet-centric worldview.

Meanwhile, I'd become an avid Warrior Cats fan. I'd started the series in December 2011 and quickly became obsessed, plowing through the entire series up to that point. (This was while Omen of the Stars was the latest arc!) At the same time that I was discovering the furry fandom, I was also roleplaying on the Warrior Cats Roblox server and drawing a few Warriors OCs. Clearly I was doomed from the start to furrydom.

While I'd had a Facebook account, I didn't really use social media for fandom purposes. Mostly I followed the I Can Has Cheezburger website's sections for Pokémon, My Little Pony^[5], and such, which is a truly ridiculous way to follow a fandom but honestly may have been healthier than social media. One day on DeviantArt I discovered a Pokémon Nuzlocke comic called "Alterity"^[6] by Mewitti, who happened to have a blog on Tumblr. I signed up, found the Warrior Cats tag, and befriended Suu, who remains one of my best friends today.

Pokémon remained my primary fandom, and Tumblr re-introduced me to the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon series. My parents had given me and my sister Explorers of Time and Darkness on release day back in 2008 and I'd later finished Red Rescue Team, but I had still never beaten the Explorers games. I picked up Explorers of Sky used from GameStop (back when it was a reasonable price) and played obsessively during my April break from my freshman year of high school. I didn't understand it at the time but I'd entered my first depression episode that spring and Explorers of Sky managed to cut through the fog and make me feel emotions again. After that experience, I became a dedicated PMD fan.

Years passed and I'd still maintained my furryness in the meanwhile, though mostly I just lurked. After graduating college, in 2022, I made an impulse decision to attend Anthrocon on the Thursday of the con weekend. The story of this trip is a long one (which resulted in me being stranded in the middle of nowhere in central Pennsylvania) so I'll save the details for another time. But in short, it was a magical experience for me to attend the con I'd seen in YouTube videos ten years prior, and by the end I was genuinely overcome with emotion at finally feeling like I was in a community where I belonged.

Several years later, after attending a few more conventions, I invited one of my friends who I'd met through the Tumblr PMD fandom to come with me to Anthrocon 2025 for their first furcon. We planned to host a PMD room party and invite some of their friends who they'd met through their art online. One of the folks who they invited was DjMuffinTops, a PMD artist who I had been following for a few years by that point. DJ and I both happened to live in Boston, so we started talking about hosting a PMD panel at Anthro New England 2026. We spent some time over the next months planning the panel, which ended up being a much bigger success than we'd anticipated! (A recording of the panel is available on YouTube here!)

Furcationland was a few months after ANE and one of DJ's friends was hosting another PMD panel for it. We drove up to Portland to surprise him and spend the Sunday at the con, which ended up being one of my favorite con attendances. I'm planning to go for the full weekend in 2027! That evening, DJ introduced me to a few of his friends—Sonar, Serif, and Lima^[7]—who he'd met at PAX East. Through them, I met Lark and it introduced me to Anville, which has become the nexus of my local furry friends.

So this ended up being a much more rambly post than I was expecting, but that's basically the story of how I found my local furry community!

"Fandom" vs. "Community"

As an aside, I've recently begun to feel that describing our scene as the "furry fandom" feels inaccurate. My understanding is that furries originated as a fandom of works featuring anthropomorphic animals, but since those early years, it's become an independent subculture celebrating the original works of furry artists and furry as a means of self-expression. While we're often fans of outside works featuring anthro characters, we're at least just as often "fans" of each other's art. As a result, I've become more comfortable describing us as the "furry community". Ultimately, what makes furry special to so many of us is not just sharing a media interest with other people, but being part of a culture that celebrates our creativity and weirdness and unique ways of engaging with our world. We like characters in movies and TV and comics indeed, but we love each other and the community we built to embrace us in our entirety.

Based on the date of this post, you may notice that I technically missed the July 31 deadline, so good to know that my procrastinaton habit from school never went away. (Sorry Lark! Thank you for extending the deadline by a few days!) ↩
And—though I wouldn't be aware for another seven years—a trans kid entering the wrong puberty. ↩
MUCKs, MUDs, and other MU* servers are text-based games that allow many players to chat and interact with each other. They are the ancestors of modern MMORPGs—which were originally referred to as "graphical MUDs"! ↩
At the time, the code I generated for myself was FFS3f A-- C- D H+ M- P+ R T+++ W- Z Sm RLU a13 cn++ d-- e-- f-- h* i+++ j+ p sm--. See here for a decoder! ↩
I started following MLP in fall 2012. I considered myself a brony for maybe a year after that, but eventually drifted away as I started feeling weird about the fandom (it turned out to be the racism and misogyny). This "tfw you are a broney in 2012" meme ended up being extremely accurate and thankfully I went down the good path.^[8] ↩
Accessible on Tumblr here. ↩
I have a really difficult time remembering people I've just met, so it's possible that I misremembered this group, but I'm pretty sure it was these three. ↩
According to Know Your Meme, this was apparently the origin of the crossroads meme. Also, if we've gotten to a footnote within a footnote have we officially strayed too far off topic? ↩