User:Sheep

Sheep (AKA DanielSan) has been in the furry community since 1996. He is not actually a "furry" per se; he is more interested in physical transformations, which can include furry.

Transformation Fandom History
Way back in the olden days, the human that would eventually be known as "Sheep" received a "Fisher Price Movie Viewer", which is essentially a video version of a ViewMaster, for Christmas. You would stick a cartridge, which had a short filmstrip of a movie clip, into the viewer. On the side of the viewer is a hand crank and you look into the viewer, which is essentially a magnifier to see the film, and you can hand crank in either direction.

One of the cartridges was Sesame Street's "The Alphabet", which featured the letters of the alphabet morphing from one to the next. For example, the arm on the lower-case "a" would grow, and rotate around, until it was the arm of the lower-case "b", whereupon the arm would then shrink and the loop would crack open, forming into a lower-case "c", and so forth.

The concept intrigued the human that would eventually be known as "Sheep" so much that he wore out the mechanism in the cartridge, moving the video back and forth through the alphabet. However, he felt this to be rather limiting because you were confined by the alphabet's order. So, instead, he went to a comic-strip style drawing of letters "morphing" from one to another. After he grew tired of the alphabet, he graduated to geometric shapes, eventually turning a triangle into a cat.

This revelation exploded in the human that would eventually be known as Sheep's mind and he began turning animals into other animals, in a comic-strip like format. From there, however, interest waned for a bit...until 1995, when the human that would eventually be known as Sheep received his first computer: An IBM PS/2 with Windows 3.1 and a 9600-baud modem.

From there, he signed onto a bulletin board system. He had to pick a username and he didn't know what to use. For hours, he pondered, when, on the television came the Karate Kid movie. The name Mr Miyagi gave the main character, "DanielSan" just laid there for a bit, and he decided to use that as his log-on name. Later, he quickly became bored by the only game on the BBS -- TradeWars -- he began to search for other stuff to do on the BBS and was introduced to something called "SLIP".

Apparently "SLIP" would allow the BBSer to log onto something unknown to "DanielSan" at the time: "The World Wide Web". He quickly grew bored with the web as well. So, one day, he typed "transformation" into Yahoo (or perhaps it was something different?) and came up with Phaedrus' Transformation Stories List, which didn't do much for him since it was essentially a bibliography and nothing else (at the time). Then, one day, after typing "transformation" into various search engines, up popped something new: "The Transformation Story Archive".

For a while, "DanielSan" read the stories. Then he saw that there was a mailing list that offered more stories. He joined the TSA-Talk mailing list, lurked for a while, then delurked with a story: "The First Day of Spring". The story was thrown onto the TSA website which he considered to be a high honor (looking back at the story today and I found it to be quite terrible. --ed)

For six months or so, he contributed stories here and there, when someone offered to open a chat room for folks to just talk in. He joined the chat room. This was in late 1996. He has been chatting on that chatroom ever since.

In late 2003, "DanielSan", after tiring of the constant references to Karate Kid, and wanting a more generic nickname, decided on the animal he connected the most with: The Sheep. Since then, he has been known as "Sheep".

In his spare time (what little there is these days) he annoys folks on IRC, surfs the web, and is teaching himself (with hopes of some professional training in the future) computer animation for films and television.