One day recently, software engineer Tess Chu was walking through a hotel, when she stumbled into a furry con. This was a fortune-filled encounter, for while she's now a Senior Software Engineer and Analyst at Kabam, the leading Facebook strategy game developer, her previous life was at Second Life, as a Studio Director at Linden Lab. So on finding out she was an ex-Linden, the phalanx of furries were fairly friendly. For as everyone knows, furries have been among the more active subcultures in Second Life. (Though probably not as large as often assumed: A community leader estimated it to be under 20,000 during SL's 2006 hype wave.)

In any case, after Tess told them she was an ex-Linden, the furries in the hotel told her a fairly different tale: