Pumathing

Pumathing, aka Jinxx or Twll, (born 30th March 1982 in Greenwich, London) is a fur who lives in the West Midlands of England, but grew up in North Wales. He is one half of the collaborative duo known as Footwell.

Several names
When attending Anthrocon 2006 as a volunteer, Pumathing had opted to have a blank name badge.

Jinxx has traditionally been the name used by Pumathing since he was first online. It is a variation of a contraction of his surname first given to him during primary school. This name is often used by him for gaming and as a trading name under which he provides design and photography services. Twll is a name given to him by a Welsh teacher from the age of 11 or so. The name was used affectionately as a retort to the Puma's cheekiness. Twll means 'hole', but more colloquially means 'arse-hole'.

The name Pumathing stuck and is used by preference, due to the difficulty that many non-Welsh speakers have pronouncing the double-L character in Welsh.

Real life
In his real life, Pumathing lives independently and works for a telecommunications company in his town. He is primarily employed as a graphic designer, but also chips in with unhelpful advice and makes the tea.

Since primary school, he has intermittently drawn and taken photographs. He acted on stage and for radio commercials until his mid-teens, and has involved himself in a few video projects since leaving high school. After completing a media production diploma in 2000, he briefly considered graphic design for his choice of degree, but quicky fell out with the course structure and settled into architectural technology for the 2001 academic year. He finally graduated in 2005 and worked in the field until August 2007 until being offered a position doing something more enjoyable.

Fandom life
Pumathing has been aware of the furry fandom since he was in high school, but has had an affinity towards cats and certainly a fascination towards Pumas since his earliest memories.

His first contact with the fandom was with Furcadia, where he met a few people whom he remains good friends with to this day. Since attending university, he fell at odds with Furcadia and became somewhat estranged from the furry community for a while. In late 2004 he started to edge back into furry life with an intermittent presence on Anthrochat's IRC network.

Although he had been away from the fandom for several years, he remained quite distinctly a fur, and in returning to it in earnest during the second half of 2005, he found himself comfortably settling back in. It was at this time, after a conversation with Lyctiger, that he was branded with the pseudonym of Pumathing.

After a short trip to Canada in September of 2005, where he met up with his long-time friend Kittrel and her then fiancée, he vowed that he would attend Anthrocon "come hell or high water" the following year.

Anthrocon proved to be an important step for Pumathing, giving him more confidence in his furriness and a greater sense of belonging to the community. He had a "meagre role" with Neofelis Communications on the filming of events at the convention.

Since Anthrocon 2006, Pumathing has had a slightly more visible presence online, taking up residence on The Cheetah Lawn on FurryMUCK, adding his artwork to Fur Affinity, writing a small biography of himself on WikiFur, and trying to gather other furry Xbox Live users' gamertags.

For Anthrocon 2007, Pumathing was officially on the con staff and worked as Stage Manager for Neofelis. Unfortunately, convention rules prevented him from having a blank badge as a staff member and spent much of his time coaching people to pronounce 'Twll' without spitting everywhere.

Twll is a staff member for ConFuzzled and is the Conbook editor. He will be producing the convention book again for ConFuzzled 2012.