(NOTE: This journal was carried over from the previous iteration of SoFurry as the updated version of the website no longer offers support for user journals. As such, some verbiage may seem out of place.)

So, Dragoneer is dead. I think we've all heard the news by now.

It's kind of strange that this happened so soon because in the submission notes of my first story from six months ago (Kink Crew) I stated my disliking of FurAffinity and mentioned that I had no plans to upload that story there because it wasn't worth the trouble. FurAffinity was designed in 2005 to be an art-centric website and never in the history of that ramshackle crap heap has it ever catered to writers. I have very distinct memories of how awful and broken the website's submission for written content was and how poorly it rendered that content on its pages. I haven't checked, because between now and when I posted Kink Crew I actually just straight up deleted my "Viscosisaurus" FurAffinity account, but I am 100% certain the story submission process is still "upload a text document in a very specific format that usually strips all text formatting out of it and hope for the best". The file submission process was such utter shit that I remember multiple people who would just dump the entire contents of their story into the description field because it was less hassle than putting up with the website's arbitrary rules on what file types it accepted because at least you could enter plain text there and whoever coded the website was dumb enough to just not cap the character limit. Also whenever I'd submit a story to FurAffinity I always had to run a special Find/Replace script I'd written to punch out the Unicode quotation marks, apostrophes, ellipses, and commas and replace them with ASCII versions because if you didn't do that then your entire story would be peppered with a bunch of "?" marks when the website tried to make sense of the contents of the file you uploaded. God, it sucked. So bad.

FurAffinity has been around for just shy of two whole decades and none of this crap works. In my first journal from a couple months ago I tangentially griped about how FurAffinity still doesn't have a tag blacklisting system. After 19 years. Insane. It probably never will.

Anyways, Dragoneer. I never really liked the guy. It's really not worth it to me to dredge up the litany of questionable bullshit he involved himself with but it's very strange to see this groundswelling of support for him in death as if every single one of these people forgot all the various reasons why they absolutely hated this guy when he was alive. Given the demographics of the fandom today I'm assuming that most of the people mourning Neer are too young to actually know anything about him and all the scummy things he'd routinely get up to and then kick under the rug. But I'm not young. I'm fucking old now, older than Dragoneer. I bore witness to all this stuff and that's why after several years of it I just checked out from FurAffinity and maintained a presence there only out of convenience. The furs I've stayed in touch with from the days of yore pretty much feel the same way I do. We're not grave dancing or anything like that, it's unfortunate when anybody dies, but we're also not exactly mourning his passing. It has zero impact on our lives and if this is what kills FurAffinity for good then so be it. FurAffinity was a solid art site in 2005 but it was designed like crap by people who perhaps didn't know the significance of their undertaking and bringing that website up to today's standards and expected functionality would be extremely cost prohibitive. If only the person steering the ship didn't routinely hold community fundraisers, do nothing, and then suspiciously post a bunch of commissioned porn several weeks later.

Look, no one is a saint in this godforsaken fandom. Not you, not me, not Dragoneer, and especially not the grifters attempting to inject themselves into the matter and profit off of his death. This whole thing is very fucked up and honestly it just goes to show you how broken and dysfunctional this community is. Neer absolutely did not take care of himself in his living years, so why should any of us care enough to take care of him in death? The guy hosted what amounted to the fandom's porn-riddled equivalent of DeviantArt. There were others before him, and there will be others after.

When I die, just throw me in the trash.