Spatter is my character on FurryMUCK and IRC. He's more or less a cartoon version of me as a wolf. Here's a typical FurryMUCK description:
Spatter is a rather small wolf, about 5' high (on average; he tends to bob up and down a little on his digitigrade legs). His coat is fairly standard for a wolf - dark in back, including his shoulder-length mane, and white on his chin, neck and limbs - except for two features. Faded but still brightly coloured stains from paint are randomly splattered all over him, especially evident on the paler areas. And viewed head-on, the colouring of his fur divides his face neatly down the middle, with the right side almost black and the left a pale smoky grey.
He's wearing a pair of dark grey shorts, and a red t-shirt with a diagram of a mechanical toy rabbit. A backpack is slung over his right shoulder. Pinned to it is a button reading "Radio Free Sillywuf".
Spatter is a personal furry - more an extension of myself than a 'character' that I play. Most of my real-life features map in some way to Spatter's. Compare and contrast:
Small: Spatter's size is a slight exaggeration of my own - 5'5 and 108 lbs.
Half-and-half face: I'm slightly darker on the right side of my face, a condition that was even more pronounced when I was a kid. The dividing line still runs right down the bridge of my nose. Alternatively, the 'Two-Face' look could be taken all symbolic-like: good / evil, active / passive, self / other, old / young, male / female, radical / conservative, sweet / sour... it's a symbol of diversity and of the union of conflicting elements.
Mixed heritage: I'm half Scottish and half Japanese. Spatter is three-quarters wolf (European and Asian) and one-quarter Japanese fox.
Social: Wolves are social critters. In the past few months, I've come to realize that I am as well, despite a certain shyness.
Paint-splattered: In Real Life I tend to draw more than paint, but paint looks cooler on fur than plain black ink.
Brightly patterned clothes: I've recently developed a taste for bold patterned shirts, which I am unable to explain. Spatter dresses more lightly, since he's already got fur, but he wears the same kinds of things.
My name's Eli, and I live in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada (about an hour's drive from all the Toronto Furries). At the moment, I'm attempting to get a crummy computer job to pay the bills. I also volunteer at my ex-university's radio station, work backstage for some amateur theatre groups, take drawing lessons at a local studio, write a bit of music (I'm a member of the Furry Music Foundation) and otherwise try to keep myself busy. You can find more dirt on my home page.
The warning signs were there from my earliest youth. As a kid, I drew far more animals than people. I read every Thornton W. Burgess book in the library. I wondered why a cat turning into a human prince was a happy ending for a fairy tale and was disappointed to find that Robin Hood wasn't really a fox in the original stories.
Natural, then, that I should fall in with a similar crowd as an adult. I found out about furries through the Net in about 1994, while in first year at university. I started drawing furries in late 1995, and have been exploring a bit to find a distinctive style since then. Around the beginning of '97, I got a decent modem and an ISP, and so finally made it onto the mucks... and since then I've never looked back. :)