Patrick Lake / Dogpatch Press / Patch O' Furr / Patch Packrat - Furry journalist who got jerked off in public. Currently being sued.

[KraftEagle]

Dogpatch Press first came to my attention during The Furred Reich thread, as he continually inserts himself into the furry Nazi / Altfur / AltFurry drama.

He has also been mentioned in the Deo Tas Devil thread, the Furries thread and the Foxler Nightfire thread for the same reason. He has been spending an awful lot of time on Twitter getting involved in the Altfurry / Furry Raiders saga.

So I decided to look a bit more closely and see who this person is. Patch O' Furr is a furry 'journalist,' most well known for his 'Furry News' website Dogpatch Press, founded in 2012.
There are three main contributors to the site, one of which is a 76 year old who is considered "one of the main founders of the furry fandom", some guy called Pup Matthias, and Patch himself. The vast majority of articles are written by Patch. He is also the editor of the outlet.

Dogpatch Press is the home of hard-hitting journalism such as 'CUTE FURRY BUTTS WANTED for a hard hitting report on the fandom’s best assets' and 'Cinco De Mayo – furry fetish party in San Francisco' among other similar furry nonsense.
He also talks about Nazis a lot, just like he does on his Twitter account. His politics are certainly to the left but I'm not sure if he is an Antifa-type like Deo or Leftist Foxbutt.

Outside of journalism, Patch's achievements include being jerked off in public during a pride event (that link is to the video itself, in case you'd rather not see a man in a fursuit being jerked off.)

Furry journalism and public indecency aside, it seems he has some legal issues. He has been slapped with a lawsuit for defamation and fraud, which is still ongoing as of this post and involves the author of The Last Unicorn. (More info here, court documents are embedded here.) Not sure why this has dragged on for over two years. He is accused of forging a signature of the owner of a publisher named 'Conlan Press' after they rejected him for a book deal, and of running an anonymous libel campaign against the publishing company who then identified him as "San Francisco Bay Area animator and book dealer Patrick Lake" / Patrick D Lake / Pat Lake (sometimes misspelled in these articles as Patrick Lane). Conlan Press then made an article listing all of his aliases, including his furry aliases. The author of The Last Unicorn also has some things to say about Patch's website FansAgainstFraud, a site entirely dedicated to talking about Conlan Press. This is all apparently unrelated to the other Conlan Press lawsuit which does not involve Patch (these guys don't seem great either, great writeup of the sad situation the Unicorn guy is in over here if you're interested.)
While I totally believe that Patch would do this, Conlan being slimy as hell with The Last Unicorn author makes it difficult to know who to believe.

(Archive)

(Archive)

(Archive)
(That guy is going to be very disappointed, as far as I know you can't go to jail just from being sued.)

The lawsuit drama doesn't end there. This article claims that he was arrested for attacking his housemate who opened the door for the person who served him papers. Since there is an arrest record I assume this is true.

(Archive)

I also dug through his tweets a little and apparently he tried to get a guy fired for making fun of furries, although I couldn't find any more info on this other than these tweets. (Archive Archive Archive)

He is also listed as a writer (sorry, "writter"), on this horrible Furry show. I think this is his idea of humor?

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he is well received in the furry community. At least, that's the impression I got looking at this stuff. His articles have even been linked here as sources a couple of times. But like all furries, he just can't stay out of drama and sperging.

Spoiler: More Pictures (Non-Fursuit)

From his Couchsurfing page

Spoiler: More Pictures (Fursuit)

Accounts and websites:
Website: http://dogpatch.press/ (Archive)
Other Website: http://fansagainstfraud.com/ (Archive)
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress (Archive)
Other Twitter: https://twitter.com/fanagainstfraud (Archive)
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCypXfYWHT6ON8XAYtWY7Wvg (Archive)
Furaffinity: https://furaffinity.net/user/patchpackrat (Archive)
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/dogpatchpress (Won't archive for some reason)
Imgur: https://imgur.com/user/PatchPackrat/ (Archive)
Resume: www.reeldirectory.com/resumes/pdf10377_490.pdf (Archive)
http://5sm2vp55n6cxly6z.onion.link/fa/patchpackrat/ Onion website with lots of old images of his fursuit. No 'shutter shade' glasses back then. "fa-backup" I guess means it's a backup of FurAffinity. (Archive)
Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/user/patch_ofurr (Archive)
http://archive.md/UzwLe Archive of old 'Patch Packrat' Facebook page, which has since been deleted.
Facebook Page (Patch O'Furr) https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009199229920 (Archive)
Public Facebook page (Dogpatch Press) https://www.facebook.com/dogpatch.press/ (Archive)
Couchsurfing: https://www.couchsurfing.com/people/pat94103 (Archive)

 

[Ntwadumela]

Surprising this dude isn't a tranny.
He's so unmanly he makes Chris Chan look like Duke Nukem.

His beard slightly reduces that tho.
Slightly

 

[princess13456789]

I thought furry fandom was dead?

 

[KraftEagle]

I thought furry fandom was dead?

Sadly no, it's not.

 

[Super Collie]

God damn it, I went through the trouble of writing an OP for this guy and didn't even see that we already had a thread for him.

I've been loosely keeping abreast of what he's been up to, but apparently not good enough because I didn't know he was in the process of being sued, nor did I find his IRL name like OP did.

 

[KraftEagle]

God damn it, I went through the trouble of writing an OP for this guy and didn't even see that we already had a thread for him.

I've been loosely keeping abreast of what he's been up to, but apparently not good enough because I didn't know he was in the process of being sued, nor did I find his IRL name like OP did.

If you found anything I don't have feel free to put it here, I've probably missed a few things.

Update: Looks like this thread and a few others got a shoutout in the LeftistFurs Telegram leak (but they think Kiwi Farms is "altfurry")

 

[Dionysius]

4) Patrick is a serious piece of work. When he was served with our lawsuit he got so angry at the housemate who let the process server in that he PHYSICALLY ATTACKED the housemate, giving him a scalp wound that took three stitches to close. Shortly afterward Patrick was arrested by the Alameda County police and taken to jail. Word from the housemate is that Patrick is going to be charged with misdemeanor assault. If you don’t believe me, check out http://jailalert.com/arrest-records/patrick-lake-1865132.html.

source - http://teleread.com/connor-cochran-...s-over-conlan-press-product-delays/index.html - comment ostensibly by Connor Cochran.

Court records:
https://publicrecords.alameda.courts.ca.gov/PRS/Case/SearchByCaseNumber
Case № HG15778272

 

[seinfeldisakike]

Wait, this guy works with kids?
CAN WE KEEP FUCKING PERVS AWAY FROM KIDS, PLEASE?!?

 

[Weenus Salesman]

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he is well received in the furry community

If his biggest achievement is shouting about "DA EBIL NAZIS" on Twitter for brownie points, I'm sure the political furs are all for him. Hell, considering he got whacked off in public I'm sure the sexual deviants who think they can be taken seriously are on his side too.
"Furry Journalism" certainly isn't doing him any favors anyway

 

[AZTEC GOD OF FITNESS]

This dude is a total ratking and uses his idiot soapbox to accelerate the upcoming furry r̶a̶c̶e̶ species war.

 

[Meowthkip]

You leave Peter S. Beagle out of your shenanigans, Mr. Stunner Shades Public Flasher Dog Man, he is a very nice man and has to deal with enough crap already.

 

[CIA Nigger]

Patrick (who has a history of libel and misinfo) is now promoting Chipfoxx's blacklist (which has labeled people with nothing to do with Alt-Furry as being a part of them and is mentioned in the left wing furry general thread as well) on his website, and well the article is an interesting piece of work. However, that's not the only thing. See, Patrick also wants to make a Furaffinity blocklist and Do Not Commission list as well, to further drive a wedge between furries who are with him and not with him.

 

[Meowthkip]

Patrick (who has a history of libel and misinfo) is now promoting Chipfoxx's blacklist (which has labeled people with nothing to do with Alt-Furry as being a part of them and is mentioned in the left wing furry general thread as well) on his website, and well the article is an interesting piece of work. However, that's not the only thing. See, Patrick also wants to make a Furaffinity blocklist and Do Not Commission list as well, to further drive a wedge between furries who are with him and not with him.

View attachment 280450

View attachment 280452View attachment 280451

I mean, there's nothing wrong with blocking people who are being dicks on the internet, but I wonder about the criteria for what gets one on a block list. How do we know for sure that there aren't decent people being lumped in for expressing an unpopular opinion? It seems like taking somebody else's block list is just blindly assuming that the curator of said list is doing so in good faith, when previous block lists have included people who just had personal beef with the curator.

I am wary of adopting a block list made by somebody that's not me making my own judgments, is what I'm saying.

 

[Uncle Warren]

I mean, there's nothing wrong with blocking people who are being dicks on the internet, but I wonder about the criteria for what gets one on a block list. How do we know for sure that there aren't decent people being lumped in for expressing an unpopular opinion? It seems like taking somebody else's block list is just blindly assuming that the curator of said list is doing so in good faith, when previous block lists have included people who just had personal beef with the curator.

I am wary of adopting a block list made by somebody that's not me making my own judgments, is what I'm saying.

You are not the only one, even leftyfurfags have questioned it. But they're stupid, and will trust anything.

 

[CIA Nigger]

I mean, there's nothing wrong with blocking people who are being dicks on the internet, but I wonder about the criteria for what gets one on a block list. How do we know for sure that there aren't decent people being lumped in for expressing an unpopular opinion? It seems like taking somebody else's block list is just blindly assuming that the curator of said list is doing so in good faith, when previous block lists have included people who just had personal beef with the curator.

I am wary of adopting a block list made by somebody that's not me making my own judgments, is what I'm saying.

From what numerous people have said on Twitter and the backlash this has gotten from furries, it's fair to say that there are in fact a few names that shouldn't be on the list. At least Randi Harper's blockbot had the algorithm public (Follow users from a list and you get the block), but this list seems like a either a total crapshoot of some big alt furry names and some other random people or a copypaste of chipfoxes blocklist, considering how even some non furries are on this list.

 

[theoriginalgreaseyote]

View attachment 240699

Dogpatch Press first came to my attention during The Furred Reich thread, as he continually inserts himself into the furry Nazi / Altfur / AltFurry drama.

-cut-

I also dug through his tweets a little and apparently he tried to get a guy fired for making fun of furries, although I couldn't find any more info on this other than these tweets. (Archive Archive Archive)

View attachment 240732
View attachment 240734

He is also listed as a writer (sorry, "writter"), on this horrible Furry show. I think this is his idea of humor?

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe he is well received in the furry community. At least, that's the impression I got looking at this stuff. His articles have even been linked here as sources a couple of times. But like all furries, he just can't stay out of drama and sperging.

Grease Yote here, can verify myself too, having stumbled upon this from the current goings-on. Wow, talk about the way back machine. I had completely forgotten about all of this, my first and only interaction with Patch, as far as I know... To put some things into perspective, this was before Trump announced his plan to run for President, long before white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, before the mainstream emergence of the alt-right, alt-right-furries, or what's going on in the fandom right now with people being doxxed, and really had nothing to do with most of the stuff that's being posted on the site about him right now, which is mostly colored by current political issues, though I do think Dogpatch Press is much more about agenda than substance based on the way the site has been used to promote what I consider harassment of others under the guise of "it's ok to harass these people because they're awful."

So this started after Further Confusion in January 2015. At that convention, people who ran (and apparently still run) a blog/podcast site called "BannedCast" which seems to feature things like the music scene of the bay area along with irreverent comedy about daily life and current events, inadvertently stumbled upon the furry con, spent time checking it out and wrote a ten page story about their experiences there. The article could be described as "Howard Stern-esque" just around the time that sort of comedy started to become viewed as "problematic." It talked about the furry fandom in a wildly humorous albeit not exactly inaccurate light, covering topics they found funny about the fandom such as the sweatiness of fursuits, drug use at cons, cub art, diaper fetish furs, bad public behavior, you know, things that actually got Rainfurrest cancelled, for real, later that year.

I archived the original article, for some reason it seemed like a good idea at the time, though felt kind of silly doing it then, so you can read it all here (though I don't think it ever got deleted):

https://archive.md/1rRlh
https://archive.md/EDMTE
https://archive.md/O4o0A
https://archive.md/sgkyX
https://archive.md/9CT96
https://archive.md/bpu68
https://archive.md/PD5Gc
https://archive.md/aN2Yq
https://archive.md/y5ZiJ
https://archive.md/ZtfEq

It's all kind of the typical shock-jock comedy take on the furry fandom, and I actually found it pretty funny because they did pick up on a lot of the excesses of the furry fandom that do exist, and I don't take the fandom that seriously anyway. It's a cool way to have fun sometimes for me, not a lifestyle or identity, and if someone doesn't like it, then so be it. I'm proud to be a part of this furry thing but also think cries of fursecution are pretty fucking stupid. Furry is something you choose to participate in, and to tell people about, claiming discrimination over being a furry I feel is unfair to groups that actually face real discrimination they cannot avoid (i.e. for race, national origin, gender and sexuality).

But some furries got really upset over it, and Patch wrote an article calling out the negative coverage of furry cons though I think one of the main issues to him was the language the main author used in the article, claiming that words like "retarded" or "autistic" were used in a derogatory, pejorative manner. The article claimed he was a teacher, I guess the Banned Cast thing was really just a hobby or side job and wasn't his main source of employment, and that this was all very inappropriate conduct for someone involved in education, and suggested people contact his employer to complain, which had been located in the article (if I remember correctly, this is all a very vague memory to me). I disagreed, stating that he should have the same expectations to privacy that anyone else would expect, i.e., that while its acceptable to post an response or retort, that this man should be able to go about his career (gasp) even if he has negative opinions about certain people and the furry fandom. Possibly, people's reactions were affected by Inside Edition's infiltration of Further Confusion that same year after they aired a somewhat embarrassing video segment on the convention featuring guerrilla journalism style surreptitious coverage without a staff escort and somewhat condescending takes on the fandom.

The article no longer exists and old links to it return a 404 page (I wonder if someone was threatened legally) but it was tweeted about by himself and others and featured a byline of "Derek enjoys mocking Fur Con and autistic people. Is it OK with his employer?" Derek being the author of the original story... That part, to me, at least back then, seemed absolutely unbelievable, that someone would go to those lengths, to contact his boss at work to complain about a difference of opinion. And, the article cut right to the chase about the "go after his employer" part of the doxxing. This was really my first encounter with this sort of behavior. I was just disgusted by it. I also thought it would make us look shameful, as a community, that people outside our fandom would see furries as creepy and obsessive but that sort of thing has become normalized now I guess. The strangest part of it all, is that Derek seems to have similar political leanings to Patch and that his writing style, making fun of different people, was mostly just shtick and people were taking it too seriously. So this was really all just about fursecution and maybe calling furries"autistic" as opposed to the more politically oriented drama that's going on today.

Unknown to anyone else, I contacted Derek (though his email address listed on the BannedCast site) to basically say "look buddy, I thought your writeup of fur con was actually pretty funny, because furries can actually be that bad, but this guy is literally tying to get you fired over it" and I linked him the article.

You can read Derek's response to me below, its long, somewhat apologetic and insinuates that his tone and attitude online are mostly for comedic effect. I thought it was pretty nice to us and hope he doesn't mind me sharing it.

Spoiler

Hi Greasey,

Thank you so much for going out of your way to bring this to my attention. I discovered all of this late last night about an hour before your email and had already begun addressing it as best I could. I’m still surprised that so many people would think that it’s okay to contact my employer over what may be occasionally vulgar, sometimes offensive humor, but I maintain that in spite of that my piece was not intended to vilify or belittle my subjects.

I don't teach, but I sure don’t want my employer being bothered with any of this, and I don’t want to have to explain the site or my particular vision of my own satirical material on there. I appreciate very much your coming to my defense and articulating what I had always imagined the piece to be: an exaggerated, hyperbolic testimony of my and Hayley’s experiences at FurCon. I honestly don’t know how people could take any of what I wrote seriously, and I think what bothered me most was that people saw the piece as an attack written by some sort of vicious ex-jock or pretentious hipster—I never intended to maliciously hurt anyone with my piece. We at BannedCast sometimes go out of our way to get a reaction, it’s true, but that’s because you sometimes have to cut through the noise in order to be heard, and that sometimes requires saying shocking things, loudly, because you believe that what you have to say matters, even though it may be buried beneath the sound and the fur(r)y.

Upon reflection, I think that most of this misinterpretation is my fault. I’m realizing now that I should have written some sort of a concluding reflection that put furries and my and Hayley’s experiences into a proper context. I think I left this up to Hayley at the end of the final audio clip that is included in Part 9, but Hayley’s defense of furry fandom was perhaps too brief and came too late, and most people had either stopped reading or stopped listening by that point in the sequence. It’s been awhile since I’ve written this sort of creative nonfiction piece, and I think this reflective element would have put things into perspective and helped to draw a comparison between myself and Hayley and the furries we’d come to investigate, thereby demonstrating that I wasn’t on a mission to ridicule for the sake of ridicule something that I knew very little about. We were curious, to be sure, which is why we wanted to know about the most salacious and popularized elements of furry fandom, but we also didn’t consider ourselves inherently superior to those with whom we were communing that night.

Because that really was a takeaway from my and Hayley’s excursion: we’re both sort of outsiders, and we were attracted to attending and infiltrating a furry convention because we in some way identify with them, and we both have our own community of outsiders in our own lives to combat that isolation. For me, it tends to be comics and other artists, and don’t think I couldn’t write an equally scathing piece about amateur, small-circuit comedians. I intend to one day, and it will spare no barbs and jokes directed at that community, too. At least you guys don’t have to deal with the shitty, gossipy, and shallow competitiveness that is the amateur comedy circuit …

I find this need for identification and belonging to be especially true of the young kids we spoke with that night, and I think I could identify elements of my own high school experiences in them. My friends and I wore outrageous clothes and collected around punk rock music and skateboards (and drugs) as our own form of collective expression. This is something I articulated in my book about my experiences on the road with my friends’ band (the last creative nonfiction piece I wrote), but I now see that this is something that I neglected to include as part of this short series on furries. For that, I am culpable, and for those who read it because I linked to it on social media expecting furries to get a kick out of it (hopefully able to laugh at themselves a little bit, in spite of the barbs that are definitely in there), it may have been difficult to see what I was trying to do without that qualifying reflection at or near the end.

I’m interested in writing that now, and I think I will because I would like to make it clear to all of those others who took offense that, yes, despite some of the jokes made at furries’ expense, I’m not blind to the fact that we share some crucial elements in common and Hayley and I honestly had a great fucking time there with you all! I can and often do come across as a dickhead, but I’m also sincerely empathetic and I truly do prize outsiders and those who don’t fit the norm above all others.

Lastly, with regard to the arsenal of comments and screenshots they were planning to use against me with my employer, the autism remark is so clearly meant not to insult autistic people but intended instead to insult the commenter’s baffling misuse of the word “autistic.” I don’t quite understand how people could read our comment and think that anyone, especially us, could ever hate autistic people for being autistic—the idea of summarily hating all autistic people is absolutely insane and really the crux of the joke. With regard to the cheerleaders comment and my saying that I would wait and ask the one with an eating disorder out on a date because they’re already broken—again, making such an exaggeratedly misogynistic statement is not meant to reinforce misogyny but to repudiate it and perhaps shed some light onto how grossly objectifying women and holding them to unattainable standards of beauty produces those kinds of psychological effects (because it does). And I’m not making this up after the fact to save face—that intended meaning is why you saw women in by Facebook feed liking it and commenting on it. They got the joke, and I can’t be held responsible for people like this Dogpatch guy and others who don’t get it.

Anyways, this is a long way of saying thank you for your kind words regarding the piece—I really appreciate that because it helps to know that at least some people understood what I was trying to do, which was to paint a playful, albeit occasionally stinging portrait of a furry convention. As I said, I take the blame for most of that misinterpretation on other people’s part for not including that missing contextualizing segment, and I will take this as a lesson to improve my writing in the future. Per your comment, I also need to make sure that I’m not suggesting that a sausage fest is an inherently bad thing, too—you’re absolutely right!

Thank you as well for defending our site and my piece and for reaching out to me to alert me of this. It’s possible that your coming to my defense so quickly before things spiraled out of control may have saved my job and my resume, and for that I owe you many thanks.

All the best,

Derek B

Any way, I just wanted to clarify what this was all about, 3 years later, and don't want to participate in the drama that is currently going on with this guy, which mostly revolves around shit-flinging between far-left and far-right furries, and I am neither and wish to stay out of it, so this might be the last you see of me here.

 

[BillyGoat2]

Grease Yote here, can verify myself too, having stumbled upon this from the current goings-on. Wow, talk about the way back machine. I had completely forgotten about all of this, my first and only interaction with Patch, as far as I know... To put some things into perspective, this was before Trump announced his plan to run for President, long before white nationalists marched on Charlottesville, before the mainstream emergence of the alt-right, alt-right-furries, or what's going on in the fandom right now with people being doxxed, and really had nothing to do with most of the stuff that's being posted on the site about him right now, which is mostly colored by current political issues, though I do think Dogpatch Press is much more about agenda than substance based on the way the site has been used to promote what I consider harassment of others under the guise of "it's ok to harass these people because they're awful."

So this started after Further Confusion in January 2015. At that convention, people who ran (and apparently still run) a blog/podcast site called "BannedCast" which seems to feature things like the music scene of the bay area along with irreverent comedy about daily life and current events, inadvertently stumbled upon the furry con, spent time checking it out and wrote a ten page story about their experiences there. The article could be described as "Howard Stern-esque" just around the time that sort of comedy started to become viewed as "problematic." It talked about the furry fandom in a wildly humorous albeit not exactly inaccurate light, covering topics they found funny about the fandom such as the sweatiness of fursuits, drug use at cons, cub art, diaper fetish furs, bad public behavior, you know, things that actually got Rainfurrest cancelled, for real, later that year.

I archived the original article, for some reason it seemed like a good idea at the time, though felt kind of silly doing it then, so you can read it all here (though I don't think it ever got deleted):

https://archive.md/1rRlh
https://archive.md/EDMTE
https://archive.md/O4o0A
https://archive.md/sgkyX
https://archive.md/9CT96
https://archive.md/bpu68
https://archive.md/PD5Gc
https://archive.md/aN2Yq
https://archive.md/y5ZiJ
https://archive.md/ZtfEq

It's all kind of the typical shock-jock comedy take on the furry fandom, and I actually found it pretty funny because they did pick up on a lot of the excesses of the furry fandom that do exist, and I don't take the fandom that seriously anyway. It's a cool way to have fun sometimes for me, not a lifestyle or identity, and if someone doesn't like it, then so be it. I'm proud to be a part of this furry thing but also think cries of fursecution are pretty fucking stupid. Furry is something you choose to participate in, and to tell people about, claiming discrimination over being a furry I feel is unfair to groups that actually face real discrimination they cannot avoid (i.e. for race, national origin, gender and sexuality).

But some furries got really upset over it, and Patch wrote an article calling out the negative coverage of furry cons though I think one of the main issues to him was the language the main author used in the article, claiming that words like "exceptional" or "autistic" were used in a derogatory, pejorative manner. The article claimed he was a teacher, I guess the Banned Cast thing was really just a hobby or side job and wasn't his main source of employment, and that this was all very inappropriate conduct for someone involved in education, and suggested people contact his employer to complain, which had been located in the article (if I remember correctly, this is all a very vague memory to me). I disagreed, stating that he should have the same expectations to privacy that anyone else would expect, i.e., that while its acceptable to post an response or retort, that this man should be able to go about his career (gasp) even if he has negative opinions about certain people and the furry fandom. Possibly, people's reactions were affected by Inside Edition's infiltration of Further Confusion that same year after they aired a somewhat embarrassing video segment on the convention featuring guerrilla journalism style surreptitious coverage without a staff escort and somewhat condescending takes on the fandom.

The article no longer exists and old links to it return a 404 page (I wonder if someone was threatened legally) but it was tweeted about by himself and others and featured a byline of "Derek enjoys mocking Fur Con and autistic people. Is it OK with his employer?" Derek being the author of the original story... That part, to me, at least back then, seemed absolutely unbelievable, that someone would go to those lengths, to contact his boss at work to complain about a difference of opinion. And, the article cut right to the chase about the "go after his employer" part of the doxxing. This was really my first encounter with this sort of behavior. I was just disgusted by it. I also thought it would make us look shameful, as a community, that people outside our fandom would see furries as creepy and obsessive but that sort of thing has become normalized now I guess. The strangest part of it all, is that Derek seems to have similar political leanings to Patch and that his writing style, making fun of different people, was mostly just shtick and people were taking it too seriously. So this was really all just about fursecution and maybe calling furries"autistic" as opposed to the more politically oriented drama that's going on today.

Unknown to anyone else, I contacted Derek (though his email address listed on the BannedCast site) to basically say "look buddy, I thought your writeup of fur con was actually pretty funny, because furries can actually be that bad, but this guy is literally tying to get you fired over it" and I linked him the article.

You can read Derek's response to me below, its long, somewhat apologetic and insinuates that his tone and attitude online are mostly for comedic effect. I thought it was pretty nice to us and hope he doesn't mind me sharing it.

Spoiler

Hi Greasey,

Thank you so much for going out of your way to bring this to my attention. I discovered all of this late last night about an hour before your email and had already begun addressing it as best I could. I’m still surprised that so many people would think that it’s okay to contact my employer over what may be occasionally vulgar, sometimes offensive humor, but I maintain that in spite of that my piece was not intended to vilify or belittle my subjects.

I don't teach, but I sure don’t want my employer being bothered with any of this, and I don’t want to have to explain the site or my particular vision of my own satirical material on there. I appreciate very much your coming to my defense and articulating what I had always imagined the piece to be: an exaggerated, hyperbolic testimony of my and Hayley’s experiences at FurCon. I honestly don’t know how people could take any of what I wrote seriously, and I think what bothered me most was that people saw the piece as an attack written by some sort of vicious ex-jock or pretentious hipster—I never intended to maliciously hurt anyone with my piece. We at BannedCast sometimes go out of our way to get a reaction, it’s true, but that’s because you sometimes have to cut through the noise in order to be heard, and that sometimes requires saying shocking things, loudly, because you believe that what you have to say matters, even though it may be buried beneath the sound and the fur(r)y.

Upon reflection, I think that most of this misinterpretation is my fault. I’m realizing now that I should have written some sort of a concluding reflection that put furries and my and Hayley’s experiences into a proper context. I think I left this up to Hayley at the end of the final audio clip that is included in Part 9, but Hayley’s defense of furry fandom was perhaps too brief and came too late, and most people had either stopped reading or stopped listening by that point in the sequence. It’s been awhile since I’ve written this sort of creative nonfiction piece, and I think this reflective element would have put things into perspective and helped to draw a comparison between myself and Hayley and the furries we’d come to investigate, thereby demonstrating that I wasn’t on a mission to ridicule for the sake of ridicule something that I knew very little about. We were curious, to be sure, which is why we wanted to know about the most salacious and popularized elements of furry fandom, but we also didn’t consider ourselves inherently superior to those with whom we were communing that night.

Because that really was a takeaway from my and Hayley’s excursion: we’re both sort of outsiders, and we were attracted to attending and infiltrating a furry convention because we in some way identify with them, and we both have our own community of outsiders in our own lives to combat that isolation. For me, it tends to be comics and other artists, and don’t think I couldn’t write an equally scathing piece about amateur, small-circuit comedians. I intend to one day, and it will spare no barbs and jokes directed at that community, too. At least you guys don’t have to deal with the shitty, gossipy, and shallow competitiveness that is the amateur comedy circuit …

I find this need for identification and belonging to be especially true of the young kids we spoke with that night, and I think I could identify elements of my own high school experiences in them. My friends and I wore outrageous clothes and collected around punk rock music and skateboards (and drugs) as our own form of collective expression. This is something I articulated in my book about my experiences on the road with my friends’ band (the last creative nonfiction piece I wrote), but I now see that this is something that I neglected to include as part of this short series on furries. For that, I am culpable, and for those who read it because I linked to it on social media expecting furries to get a kick out of it (hopefully able to laugh at themselves a little bit, in spite of the barbs that are definitely in there), it may have been difficult to see what I was trying to do without that qualifying reflection at or near the end.

I’m interested in writing that now, and I think I will because I would like to make it clear to all of those others who took offense that, yes, despite some of the jokes made at furries’ expense, I’m not blind to the fact that we share some crucial elements in common and Hayley and I honestly had a great fucking time there with you all! I can and often do come across as a dickhead, but I’m also sincerely empathetic and I truly do prize outsiders and those who don’t fit the norm above all others.

Lastly, with regard to the arsenal of comments and screenshots they were planning to use against me with my employer, the autism remark is so clearly meant not to insult autistic people but intended instead to insult the commenter’s baffling misuse of the word “autistic.” I don’t quite understand how people could read our comment and think that anyone, especially us, could ever hate autistic people for being autistic—the idea of summarily hating all autistic people is absolutely insane and really the crux of the joke. With regard to the cheerleaders comment and my saying that I would wait and ask the one with an eating disorder out on a date because they’re already broken—again, making such an exaggeratedly misogynistic statement is not meant to reinforce misogyny but to repudiate it and perhaps shed some light onto how grossly objectifying women and holding them to unattainable standards of beauty produces those kinds of psychological effects (because it does). And I’m not making this up after the fact to save face—that intended meaning is why you saw women in by Facebook feed liking it and commenting on it. They got the joke, and I can’t be held responsible for people like this Dogpatch guy and others who don’t get it.

Anyways, this is a long way of saying thank you for your kind words regarding the piece—I really appreciate that because it helps to know that at least some people understood what I was trying to do, which was to paint a playful, albeit occasionally stinging portrait of a furry convention. As I said, I take the blame for most of that misinterpretation on other people’s part for not including that missing contextualizing segment, and I will take this as a lesson to improve my writing in the future. Per your comment, I also need to make sure that I’m not suggesting that a sausage fest is an inherently bad thing, too—you’re absolutely right!

Thank you as well for defending our site and my piece and for reaching out to me to alert me of this. It’s possible that your coming to my defense so quickly before things spiraled out of control may have saved my job and my resume, and for that I owe you many thanks.

All the best,

Derek B

Any way, I just wanted to clarify what this was all about, 3 years later, and don't want to participate in the drama that is currently going on with this guy, which mostly revolves around shit-flinging between far-left and far-right furries, and I am neither and wish to stay out of it, so this might be the last you see of me here.

It was quite unexpected to see you in this thread. thank you for the first hand account on the guy and your dealings with him.

 

[Uncle Warren]

I'd like verification.

 

[theoriginalgreaseyote]

I'd like verification.

 

[Uncle Warren]

Yea he's real.