The Alphaville Herald

Tails of Betrayal? Using W-Hats to Herd Fellow Furries Could be Serious Business

by Alphaville Herald on 24/03/05 at 9:02 am

by Pat the Rat (SLH Gossip Columnist Extraordinaire)

Pat the Rat here, with another wonderful story from the depths of Secondlife Drama. If you are like me (or just *wish* you were), then there is nothing you like more than DRAMA! But then you probably also like stories about W-Hats! And stories about Furries! And stories about Romeo-and-Juliet BDSM relationships involving W-Hats and Furries! And, um, let’s see… stories about evil land barons and club failures and betrayal and… *gasp*… well! What if a story had *all* of these elements??? Well have I got a story for you…

Rumors have been sweeping through the furry ranks of a dark conspiracy – darker even than those imagined by Prokofy Neva in his darkest sleepless nights. These rumors, and they *are* just that, would have us believe that the owner of The Forrest private island is using his connections to the W-Hats to grief furries off of the mainland on onto the Forrest. Now Pat loves furries, and Pat has no quarrel with the W-Hats – especially that cutie Bakuzelus – but I do feel it my duty to dish the tastiest dishes from the rumor mill and this is definitely a Charlie Trotter special. I serve it up to you now, but I want you to know that Pat believes not a word of it.

The story:

Not too long ago, as some of us old timers can attest, Dusun sim was known as Furry HQ. Love em, hate em, or pet them, this was the place to be if you wanted to find furries. One of the remarkable things about Dusun at the time was the following lovely feature: no club! The area maintained its dwell simply through word of mouth. No events, no nothing. Remarkable, huh? Well, of course, time passed and IQ sagged and someone decided to build a club anyway – a club for furries, called (how original) “Club Fur”. Let’s call this club owner Mr. Fur, alright?

Mr. Fur spends his cash, builds his club, and…sadly (for him) .. he finds he was just pissing Lindens down a fox hole…no effect. Low traffic, no dwell. It seems the furries are happy where they are, living the carefree existence of virtual woodland creatures, without the need of a lag-inducing partybox. This, of course, is not a happy thing for Mr. Fur. SL is all about makin’ that RL dollar by cashin’ in your Linden bucks, right?

Now, faithful readers, we branch to the second line of this. Love em or hate em, W-Hat is known for its…its…”creative” actions in the SL grid. For those who don’t know, W-Hat is the in-SL group for members of the SomethingAwful forums. The Goons. Well, for reasons that would take all of the Herald’s disk space, Goons and Furries dislike each other immensely. In particular, W-Hats hate furries. But there are exceptions.

See, there are the few rare critters who are both furries and SomethingAwful goons. Lets grab our second player now – We’ll call him Furry Hat. Furry Hat is a W-Hatter, and a furry. Furry Hat is also Mr. Fur’s…hmmm…we’ll just say “his pet”. Pet in, the BDSM sense. Not that there’s anything wrong with that…

We have Mr. Fur with a failing club, but who has the connection to Furry Hat in the group that most all other furries hate with a passion. What happens next is verrrry interestink. Mr. Fur buys a private island, designates it a furry friendly, and in short order it is awash in furries – a top dwell location! Success for Mr. Fur at last! But boy did those furries get off their tails and move to the island in a hurry. Wonder why?

Shortly after Mr. Fur bought his island, furries on the mainland became targeted by an intensified W-Hat griefing campaign. At precisely the same time, associates of Mr. Fur were approaching furries and telling them they needed to move to escape harassment at the hands of the W-Hats. Here’s a quote from one of my sources: “Listen *name deleted*, you need to move to the official furry sim. The Linden’s aren’t going to protect you from the constant griefing that W-hat is doing now. Move your store over to [Mr. Fur’s] sim, and you’ll be safe.”

Loyal readers of the Herald know that Pat the Rat does not traffic in groundless speculation, but Pat cannot stand in the way of others who may be inclined to connect a dot or two. In this case, some of my furry friends who ask to remain anonymous have offered me the following speculative picture:

Mr. Fur moves his failing club to a private sim, and uses his “pet” Furry Hat to induce attacks against mainland furry landowners. The goal: to drive the landowners off the grid and onto his sim. Move the landowners and the furries will follow. Move a decent chunk of a large SL group onto your land and that Developers Incentive comes rolling in. By the numbers:

1. Buy a private island.

2. Grief those furries off their fuzzy butts, and herd them to your brand new island.

3. Profit!!!

Drama can be Serious Business, no? Or it would be if it were true. As for me, I don’t believe a word of it.