As everyone knows, Elon Musk is now running Twitter directly into the ground. Who knows? Maybe he needed some inspiration for the Boring Company.

Art: Chai Lynx

This has, as many predicated, been a complete clusterfuck.

https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/1589396945830813700

We should assume that Twitter is on its way out the door. Elon Musk is not a good CEO, as evidenced by the immediate mass lay-offs of Twitter employees.

Or his immediate pause of content moderation (which let some really dumb homophobes run wild).

https://twitter.com/lucashoal/status/1587443643735908353

You get the point.

Art: Chai Lynx

Rather than continue to ruminate on the current mess, I’d like to instead take a moment of everyone’s present to look into the future, because we’re actually in a unique position to make a lot of good changes to the world; or, at least, to make something hilarious out of a bad situation.

This matters for everyone, but especially for furries, sex workers, and porn artists.

Art: Chai Lynx

I’m going to break this post into three parts:

1. How to Make a Larger Impact Than Deleting Your Account
2. An Opinionated Summary of Alternate Platforms
3. How to Architect the Porn-Friendly Social Media of Tomorrow

It should go without saying, but my standard disclaimer applies:

The contents of this blog post are the sole opinions of a 30-something gay furry who presents as an anthropomorphic dhole on the Internet. Do not confuse the opinion or satire contained within for either a) fact, b) professional advice, or c) the opinions of any company or entity; especially the author’s current or past employers.

How to Make a Larger Impact Than Deleting Your Account

Art: Chai Lynx

If you’re considering deleting your Twitter account and moving to an alternative platform, I encourage you to move but not delete your account. There’s something much cooler you can do with your existing account than delete it.

Twitter’s operations costs are currently fairly predictable. Well, predictable enough to lay off a lot of the workers necessary to keep the lights on, anyway.

Wouldn’t it be great if, instead of deleting their accounts in protest, we decided to make our accounts cost more in storage and compute costs?

I posed a similar question to Twitter the other day.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1587807410944630790

Here are some of the more fun and interesting ideas that were shared with me:

Block and Search with Wild Abandon

(I can’t find a record of who suggested this idea. Maybe I imagine someone suggesting it, and it was actually my own idea, but I’m misremembering. Who even knows anymore?)

Filtering blocked/muted accounts from your timeline requires a small amount of server-side CPU.

Searching for trending topics and common words in your native language will likely hit many thousands of accounts.

If you ask Twitter’s search engine for all tweets that contain certain common words or phrases, and then the application has to filter out hundreds of thousands of blocked and/or muted accounts, this is going to become computationally expensive.

Especially if you systematically mute or block every single account that promotes a tweet.

Especially if you’re already using an adblocker, such as uBlock Origin (which you can install in Firefox for Android, by the way).

To be clear: The goal of this idea is NOT to degrade the platform or perform a Denial of Service attack. It’s simply to make Musk pay more for useless processing that won’t increase Twitter’s ad revenue.

Art: Chai Lynx

Use Twitter Like TikTok

Instead of typing a reply, record a short video instead. The queerer and less marketable the contents of your video, the better.

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1587810839620378628

If you don’t have a fursuit (most furries actually don’t), consider using rigged 3D models (or Live2D avatars; e.g. FaceRig) instead.

Just make sure you include a transcript or alt text for people with disabilities.

Everyone else can participate simply by diligently playing every single one of these videos (even if on mute).

Let’s run up Elon’s storage and bandwidth bills. There’s lots of fun that we can have with this idea.

Upload Lots of Compression-Unfriendly Images

For example:

https://twitter.com/yourcompanionAI/status/1587815968700600321

Bonus points if you somehow manage to work this into the video reply idea, and it actually inflates their storage costs significantly.

Bad Suggestion: Reply to Brands with Yiff

There were a few people who suggested posting adult furry art in reply to brand tweets. The idea being that this will make Twitter less marketable for advertisers.

This is a terrible idea for two reasons:

1. Optics. Regardless of your goals, you’re going to expose a lot of unsuspecting users to unsolicited pornographic art. This is not how you make friends. This will make a lot of undecided people form a negative opinion of the furry fandom.
2. Underage users. The minimum age to sign up for Twitter is 13. Parents who might be comfortable with their young teenager following a household name Twitter account will not want their child being exposed to hardcore pornography.

Too often, I see some furries reach for this tactic. You should consider it the nuclear option, because the small tactical gain is largely outsized by collateral damage.

The only thing you’ll accomplish is giving ammo to right-wingers who loudly proclaim all LGBT people are groomers (meanwhile they vote down laws that would stop child marriage; how so very curious of them).

Art: Chai Lynx

Wrap-Up

https://twitter.com/charlotteirene8/status/1585700642626191360

With any luck, we can make Twitter the most expensive $44 Billion that Elon Musk will ever spend.

An Opinionated Summary of Alternate Platforms

Where should we go when Twitter dies? There are a lot of opinions to be had.

Rumors of Tumblr’s Sex Positivity Are Wildly Exaggerated

Shortly after Elon Musk purchased Twitter, Tumblr had announced updated Community Guidelines that, allegedly, permit the naked human form to appear in Tumblr content.

This apparently doesn’t include cartoon nudity. To wit:

https://twitter.com/LeafDubois/status/1589026084640940032

We can do better than Tumblr.

Cohost

Cohost is a somewhat new platform for posting. I have an account there (@soatok).

You can think of Cohost as the best parts of Twitter’s user experience, with the best parts of Tumblr, without any ads, tracking, or recommendation system (The Algorithm).

The premise of Cohost is to build around users, not profit.

Cohost is brought to you by a group calling themselves the Anti Software Software Club–a software company that hates the software industry:

we are a group of three developers and designers—and maybe more soon!—with very strong opinions about how to operate a software company. we’ve all left jobs at conventional tech companies to build cohost and we’re thrilled we finally get to share it with the world. you can read more about us, including our manifesto, on our main website. ASSC is not-for-profit and 100% worker owned.

According to the Cohost website

It’s worth emphasizing that “not-for-profit” is most likely an aspiration and a tenet, not a legal designation. Cohost is an LLC. It would be an error to mistake it for a non-profit organization. The legal term “non-profit” almost always refers to 501(c)(3) organizations.

Personally, I don’t care at all about these distinctions. Some people do. I’m not a lawyer, and I actually find legal topics exhausting to the point of being physically painful. That’s not at an exaggeration.

It’s a neat project. If you want a centralized replacement for Twitter, Cohost is probably your best bet.

Mastodon

Mastodon is federated software, which feels in some ways more like Email or RSS than Twitter does. Moderation is local to your instance, rather than top-down like a centralized platform. Discovery is based on which instances peer with which instances.

There’s a lot to like about Mastodon. However, if you’re an artist that’s looking for a centralized watering hole where all your customers already are, Mastodon… is not that.

That being said, a lot of people are moving to Mastodon already. Now’s probably the best time to join.

Personally, I used to have a Mastodon account, but I didn’t really use it much, and then the instance that hosted my account shut down and I lost all my data. That experience killed my interest in Mastodon.

Telegram Channels

Pro: Furries already use Telegram, extensively.

Con: They’re now selling “collectible usernames” as NFTs

Art: Chai Lynx

Wrap-Up

There are probably other platforms that are worth considering, but there are only so many hours in a day, and I have a day job.

If you find yourself deeply dissatisfied with the options presented, please feel free to explore others. Alternatively, you may wish to build a new platform in line with your own vision.

If you lack the skills to build your vision, grab a few friends and read through Furward Momentum together.

How to Architect the Porn-Friendly Social Media of Tomorrow

What do sex workers, porn artists, and fantasy sex toy companies have in common?

Mastercard doesn’t want to provide them services. Neither do PayPal nor Venmo.

Sex workers and artists are two of the groups most likely to be negatively impacted by Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter.

https://twitter.com/woot_master/status/1518689141763936259

What would it take to build a social media platform that actually supports sex workers and NSFW artists? Well, a lot. But I’d like to at least provide a sketch for how such a platform might be architected.

Art: Chai Lynx

Require Hardware Security Keys For All Users

Your platform should use WebAuthn instead of password authentication.

I recognize that this makes onboarding users difficult (due to a lack of availability of FIDO2-compatible hardware keys), but the security benefits are immensely worthwhile.

The best thing about WebAuthn is, when implemented correctly, your users become extremely phishing-resistant without requiring any diligence on their part.

Use End-to-End Encryption for Private Messages

Further reading: Going Bark: A Furry’s Guide to End-to-End Encryption.

We don’t need more surveillance capitalism. The less you know about your users, the better.

Consider An Invite-Only Design

Lobste.rs requires new users be invited by an existing user.

This is a great way to reduce the blast radius of platform abusers and their subsequent attempts at ban evasion: If the same person keeps inviting bad people, take away their invite privileges.

I chose a similar approach when I designed FAQ Off.

Don’t Mix Payments With Platforms

Simply put: The platform that users interact with should be mostly independent from the component that processes payments for the users of the platform.

By “mostly independent”, I mean they should be distinct legal entities, with no overlap in ownership, that operate in different countries. The only things that should be exchanged between the two are HTTP messages (over TLS) and API keys.

The payment gateway should accept multiple options (credit cards, PayPal, etc.), but never provide a custom “memo” field. Where possible, the invoice feature should be used (with the possibility of tipping left open).

If you permit users to fill in custom memos, they will inevitably leave a remark that flags the recipient’s account as porn/sex related.

This payment gateway will not just process payments and subscriptions; it will also act as a payment escrow service and amortize the risk of chargeback fraud over multiple content creators. (To that end, it should have a name that isn’t embarrassing on a bank statement.)

The incumbent payment gateways used by the porn industry should be avoided, for multiple reasons:

1. They’re expensive
2. The transactions they process get flagged a lot as fraud
3. They’re often used by spammers, scammers, computer criminals, and deplatformed hate groups

Instead, you’d want your value proposition to be more about social media and payments between friends. The fact that you allow porn and sex work on your platform (which should be one of many platforms that use this payment gateway) needs to be a mere footnote.

Finally, consider very carefully whether or not to support cryptocurrency in your payments (or payouts) platform.

This List is Non-Exhaustive

These are just some considerations I can think of off-hand when imagining what a sex-positive social media platform would look like, if it were built in 2022.

The biggest challenges any platform faces will not be legal or technical; they will be social.

Twitter exploded in popularity after a few celebrities started using it. I don’t know how to replicate their success with a greenfield project, and I doubt anyone else does either.

In Summary

Elon Musk is probably going to kill Twitter. It would be really funny if we made this cataclysmically expensive for Elon Musk, personally.

There are a handful of alternative platforms that folks are already migrating to in anticipation of Twitter’s demise, but none is a clear winner.

Twitter’s death will put a lot of artists (especially porn artists) and sex workers in peril, so I sketched some ideas that would enable a Twitter alternative to better serve them.

Ultimately, the future remains uncertain. I don’t pretend to have answers, just ideas. If you think you know, or can do, better, I wish you the best of luck.

https://soatok.blog/2022/11/07/contemplating-the-future/

#ElonMusk #furries #furry #FurryFandom #Society #Twitter

Dhole Moments

2020-08-10 07:00:50

Some of you may be surprised to learn that my fursona is not a fox, nor a wolf; nor is it a fictitious fox-wolf hybrid popular within the furry fandom (which is usually called a “folf”).

No, my fursona is a dhole, which is a real species of endangered wild dogs from Southeast Asia.

The word “dhole” is only one syllable, with a silent H.

https://twitter.com/canemckeyton/status/1024198407429054469

The Furry Fandom needs more dhole fursonas.

Dholes Are Amazing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifcCNERGUZU

Dholes are very social creatures that live and hunt in large packs. But how they hunt is needlessly awesome: Where other canids (e.g. wolves) try to chase and then surround their prey, dholes spread out and use high-pitched whistles to coordinate their strikes over large distances.

Some other interesting notes from animal conservationalists over the years: Dholes have very low sexual dimorphism (so you generally cannot tell whether a dhole selected at random is male or female at a glance), and they’re known to do a handstand when they’re urinating.

https://twitter.com/Tikrekins/status/1176953841385951233

You can learn more about dholes and dhole conservation efforts here.

The Symbolism of Dhole Fursonas

If you’re trying to pick a species for your fursona, how do you know if a dhole is right for you?
Art by SkiaSkai
Here’s a short list of values and traits you can derive from dholes and dhole behavior in the wild:

1. Do you value and understand friendship in its purest form?
2. Do you value cooperation (n.b. without power structures and hierarchies)?
3. Do you enjoy communal living (with a chosen family of close friends and/or a polycule)?
4. Are you clued into dog whistles? (Okay, this one’s kind of a dumb joke because dholes are called “whistling dogs”, but a lot of dhole furries I know are very clueful about the alt-right’s bullshit, so it’s fitting.)
5. Do traditional notions of sex and gender not interest you in the slightest?

If you said yes to any of those questions, or if you simply can’t decide between fox or wolf and don’t feel like phoning it in with a fictitious hybrid, a dhole may be a good fursona choice for you.

Are Dhole Fursuits Beautiful?

Yes. Very yes.

https://twitter.com/SparkleKreation/status/1039539876121608193

https://twitter.com/Millitrix01/status/1175111740473991168

https://twitter.com/RustiDhole/status/1276399918240931840

https://twitter.com/DamnitKnightly/status/1290751428206587904

Coming soon (probably 2021) to this section of the blog post: My fursuit.

https://soatok.blog/2020/08/10/all-about-dholes-and-dhole-fursonas/

#CuonAlpinus #dhole #dholes #furry #FurryFandom #fursona

Recently, there has been a lot of misinformation and propaganda flying around the American news media about the furry fandom. Unfortunately, this seems to be increasing with time.

Art: LvJ

Consequently, there are a lot of blanket statements and hot takes floating around social media right now about whether or not furries should talk with journalists.

That is to say, a lot of people are screaming, “Don’t ever talk to the press!”

I thought I’d offer my perspective, seeing as I did talk to journalists during the whole Ridgeland library incident.

But to explain my nuanced position, I need to explain a bit of background.

Never Say Never

My blog talks a lot about cryptography. You don’t need to understand anything about cryptography to get the point I’m going to make today, however.

Most information security professionals have hammered into their own minds to “never roll your own crypto”.

Taken to the logical extreme, this kind of advice would prevent the development of cryptography and make everyone’s communications vulnerable. This is obviously a bad outcome.

So why do professionals keep saying it?

99.99% of the time, the rule applies. If you’re building a line-of-business CRUD app, you don’t need to invent a new block cipher. Even if your cipher turns out to be very good, by whatever coincidence, it’s better to leave that to the experts.

In the minority of cases where someone needs to break the rule, they must do so knowing that they’re violating a norm. And the impetus is on them to justify this breakage; lest they suffer the consequences.

Usually, in cryptography, this just means “you aren’t taken seriously,” which is a pretty bad outcome.

In other areas of life, breaking a norm can mean ostracization or legal peril.

Back to Furries and the Media

When I see furries screaming, “Don’t talk to the press!” I’m reminded of how “Don’t roll your own crypto!” is practiced by the cryptography community.

Most of the time, it’s obviously a bad idea for furries to talk to the press, for a few obvious reasons:

1. Random furries probably have no special training for dealing with the media, which means they’re easy to manipulate into spreading a false narrative
2. Public communication is a skill that most of us don’t practice
3. If you suffer from any kind of anxiety, the previous two reasons are exacerbated

Even if you’re a popular streamer or content creator, the kinds of questions they ask and how they present your answers to their audience is a different class from your fans and friends.

But should the rule for furries and the media be, “Never?”

Uncle Kage from AnthroCon says yes (with some nuance, in so many drunken words):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHZX0IvavEo

Meanwhile, Xydexx says no (with some nuance):

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1666111194531332098

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1666111788448923650

https://twitter.com/XydexxUnicorn/status/1666112045719203840

How you answer this question broadly depends on how much you trust your community.

Do you assume malice or incompetence from fellow furries? “Don’t ever talk to the press” likely sounds like sage advice to you.

Conversely, if you hold your community members in higher esteem, you’re more likely to encourage some conversations with some media outlets.

Regardless, there is one rule that must never be broken, but recently was.

Furries Must Never Contribute to Right-Wing Extremist Media like FOX News

Unfortunately…

…they already have.

Don’t do this. FOX News isn’t actually news; they argue as much in court.

Furry Press Checklist

If you’re going to talk to the press, you need to (at bare minimum) know the following:

1. Which outlet, and what is their reputation?
2. Who within that outlet are you talking with?
3. What are you talking about?
4. What questions or concerns do they believe their viewers have?

The most egregious incidents can be prevented by asking the first question and researching the outlet.

You should also know who you’re talking to, and whether or not they try to appeal to violent right-wing stochastic terrorists.

Many local news stations are okay, but specific journalists aren’t trustworthy. That’s why question 2 matters.

Regardless of the yellowness of the journalism you’re exposing yourself and all of the furry fandom to, you need to have a clear understanding of what’s being asked of you before you agree to any interviews.

Art: Scruff Kerfluff

This is a lot of homework and responsibility. If you’re not willing to do it, then don’t talk to the media.

There are better ways to get your thirty pieces of silver fifteen minutes of fame.

Epilogue

Of course, the person who went on FOX News is also a horrible person across every axis.

Not just this:

Citing your IQ in an online discussion means you lose whatever argument.

…but also this:

https://twitter.com/videah_/status/1667490374909149187

FOX News. Not even once.

https://soatok.blog/2023/06/06/on-furries-and-the-media/

#FOXNews #furries #furry #FurryFandom #media #Society

Dhole Moments

2022-04-06 10:30:32

You’ve probably heard the rumors by now. It’s cropped up in Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and even Australia.

The rumor is: Parents around the country are expressing “concerns” over schools allegedly permitting students that identify as cats use litter boxes in public schools.

You can hear this idea being parroted by Nebraska State Senator Bruce Bostelman, without an ounce of irony or self-awareness:

https://twitter.com/jonnykip21/status/1508485363177861124

Of course, it doesn’t matter how often or how thoroughly these allegations are debunked (and, make no mistake, they are debunked), that doesn’t stop people from spreading this false and damnable rumor on Facebook Groups like “Protect Nebraska Children”.

As a member of the furry community who also strongly opposes misinformation on the Internet, I feel it’s necessary and appropriate for me to expose the dark truths about this litter box story once and for all.

Who and What Are Furries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSQVRJuDTs

Furries are members of the Furry Fandom, an art-centric participatory online community (with real-world conventions and events) consisting of people who enjoy anthropomorphic characters.

Characters like this!
(Art: LvJ)

For one reason or another, furries are also a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community. If you took a large random sample of people, you’d expect at least 90% to be heterosexual and cisgender. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. But if you took a random sample of furries, that figure is now only 20%.

For this reason, furry hate was often used as a dog-whistle for homophobia in forums where overt homophobia was not permitted.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

If you’d like to learn more about the furry fandom, I highly recommend the appropriately named 2020 documentary The Fandom by Ash Coyote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

Are Furries in K-12 Public Schools?

Overwhelmingly, no. The average age of the furry fandom varies from survey to survey, but 26 years old seems like a good estimate for the median age for survey participants (as of 2020).

Source: FurScience, 2020 survey results

Interestingly, the median age of furries was only 20 in the year 2011, which suggests that the furry fandom is consistently getting older.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any furries under the age of 18. We just don’t have any data on them today.

Second, due to ethical restrictions, the IARP is unable to study minors (as parental consent would be required, something we cannot reasonably expect to obtain if a person has not “come out” to their family as a furry).

Furscience

This is the only scientific data we have, and it’s not perfect, but you can actually extrapolate a reasonable heuristic for the magnitude of underage furs based on the change in adult median age over time.

Since the adults of the furry fandom are consistently getting older (median 20 in 2011, median 26 in 2020, which is a 6 year increase over 9 years), the proportion of people under 18 was likely at most 33% of the total furry population in a given year during this interval.

This upper limit assumes most underage furries continue to be furries in adulthood, a negligible mortality rate, and people are discovering the fandom younger than 18.

If a lot of furries discover the fandom after they turn 18, then 33% is probably unreasonably high.

If this proportion still holds true, then the median age for furries is still squarely in the realm of young adulthood, not childhood.

Do Furries Identify as Animals?

No, furries do not identify as animals in the way that these very dumb rumors would imply.

People that identify as a non-human animal are called therians (or more broadly, otherkin). Most furries are not therians, but some are.

Do Furries That Identify as Cats Use Litter Boxes?

No, this is a damned lie with no basis in reality. Even Snopes debunked it.

If you’re interested in the origins of this dumb rumor, Dogpatch Press has a deep dive into the history of it going all the way back to the 1990’s.

---

The Dark Truth About These Rumors

If it’s not true, why are Facebook Groups and GOP politicians spreading lies about furries and public school students all of the sudden?

Unfortunately, the answer is transphobia.

https://twitter.com/KandissTaylor/status/1506603753008472064

There is an emerging generational culture war about transgender people.

To many older Americans, the idea that a person could be anything other than male or female seems absurd, and the notion that anyone could change their gender is uncomfortable (but science is consistently on trans people’s sides here).

Most younger people don’t carry the same prejudices as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

This litter box rumor is both a dog whistle for generalized queerphobia (as the majority of furry hate always has been) and a weak satire of non-binary gender identities. “If they can decide they’re neither male or female, what’s stopping them from identifying as a cat?” is the premise of this bigoted reasoning.

Before gay marriage was legal in America, there were a lot of online arguments put forth by evangelical Christians and Republicans that, “If you make gay marriage legal, soon you’ll have people wanting to marry their pets and we’ll have to legalize bestiality.”

Which, yes, is a very dumb slippery slope fallacy, but the current furry panic certainly echoes their same delusional beliefs about alternative lifestyles.

In short, the entire premise of the “furry litter-box in public schools” rumor is to bully nonbinary and/or transgender students through a dog-whistle, so they can evade being cancelled for overt bigotry.

These people are showing their whole ass when they spread these lies.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1506931766837321731

Also, it’s interesting that the people spreading these lies are Republicans, who claim to want to “protect children”, but are also in favor of child marriage.

What Can We Do About These Lies?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify anyone in your life who believes these rumors (especially if they’re sharing lies from Facebook Groups that peddle misinformation), and then link them to this blog post.

I don’t expect it to persuade everyone, but it can save you the effort of having to argue further with them. Just copy+paste the URL and move on with your day, knowing you did your part to tell them, “You’re wrong, shut the fuck up.”

Where Did This Hoax Originate?

Allegedly, this entire hoax about “furries being permitted to use litter boxes in public schools” was started as a prank by a user named Tracing Woodgrains, a contributor to the anti-trans podcast Blocked and Reported, hosted by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog (alternative mirror).

(Art: LvJ)

So—what does it take to persuade Libs of TikTok to tilt at windmills, to spread a moral panic over a falsehood? How can hoaxers break past her fact-checking, with nary a red flag to be seen?

A nonexistent man passed on a false tip on the basis of paper-thin evidence, then squirmed away at any attempts to nail down the concrete before finishing things off with a broken link to a Facebook group that did not exist.

— How I Convinced Libs of TikTok to Publish a False Story

So there you have it. This entire thing is not only unbelievable, but fabricated for the sake of trolls’ amusement.

https://soatok.blog/2022/04/06/the-dark-truth-about-the-furry-protocol/

#demographics #falsehoods #furries #furry #FurryFandom #lies #litterBoxRumor #misinformation #Politics #rumors #Society

You’ve probably heard the rumors by now. It’s cropped up in Michigan, Kentucky, Nebraska, North Dakota, Wisconsin, and even Australia.

The rumor is: Parents around the country are expressing “concerns” over schools allegedly permitting students that identify as cats use litter boxes in public schools.

You can hear this idea being parroted by Nebraska State Senator Bruce Bostelman, without an ounce of irony or self-awareness:

https://twitter.com/jonnykip21/status/1508485363177861124

Of course, it doesn’t matter how often or how thoroughly these allegations are debunked (and, make no mistake, they are debunked), that doesn’t stop people from spreading this false and damnable rumor on Facebook Groups like “Protect Nebraska Children”.

As a member of the furry community who also strongly opposes misinformation on the Internet, I feel it’s necessary and appropriate for me to expose the dark truths about this litter box story once and for all.

Who and What Are Furries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPSQVRJuDTs

Furries are members of the Furry Fandom, an art-centric participatory online community (with real-world conventions and events) consisting of people who enjoy anthropomorphic characters.

Characters like this!
(Art: LvJ)

For one reason or another, furries are also a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community. If you took a large random sample of people, you’d expect at least 90% to be heterosexual and cisgender. This shouldn’t surprise anyone. But if you took a random sample of furries, that figure is now only 20%.

For this reason, furry hate was often used as a dog-whistle for homophobia in forums where overt homophobia was not permitted.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

If you’d like to learn more about the furry fandom, I highly recommend the appropriately named 2020 documentary The Fandom by Ash Coyote.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

Are Furries in K-12 Public Schools?

Overwhelmingly, no. The average age of the furry fandom varies from survey to survey, but 26 years old seems like a good estimate for the median age for survey participants (as of 2020).

Source: FurScience, 2020 survey results

Interestingly, the median age of furries was only 20 in the year 2011, which suggests that the furry fandom is consistently getting older.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t any furries under the age of 18. We just don’t have any data on them today.

Second, due to ethical restrictions, the IARP is unable to study minors (as parental consent would be required, something we cannot reasonably expect to obtain if a person has not “come out” to their family as a furry).

Furscience

This is the only scientific data we have, and it’s not perfect, but you can actually extrapolate a reasonable heuristic for the magnitude of underage furs based on the change in adult median age over time.

Since the adults of the furry fandom are consistently getting older (median 20 in 2011, median 26 in 2020, which is a 6 year increase over 9 years), the proportion of people under 18 was likely at most 33% of the total furry population in a given year during this interval.

This upper limit assumes most underage furries continue to be furries in adulthood, a negligible mortality rate, and people are discovering the fandom younger than 18.

If a lot of furries discover the fandom after they turn 18, then 33% is probably unreasonably high.

If this proportion still holds true, then the median age for furries is still squarely in the realm of young adulthood, not childhood.

Do Furries Identify as Animals?

No, furries do not identify as animals in the way that these very dumb rumors would imply.

People that identify as a non-human animal are called therians (or more broadly, otherkin). Most furries are not therians, but some are.

Do Furries That Identify as Cats Use Litter Boxes?

No, this is a damned lie with no basis in reality. Even Snopes debunked it.

If you’re interested in the origins of this dumb rumor, Dogpatch Press has a deep dive into the history of it going all the way back to the 1990’s.

The Dark Truth About These Rumors

If it’s not true, why are Facebook Groups and GOP politicians spreading lies about furries and public school students all of the sudden?

Unfortunately, the answer is transphobia.

https://twitter.com/KandissTaylor/status/1506603753008472064

There is an emerging generational culture war about transgender people.

To many older Americans, the idea that a person could be anything other than male or female seems absurd, and the notion that anyone could change their gender is uncomfortable (but science is consistently on trans people’s sides here).

Most younger people don’t carry the same prejudices as their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

This litter box rumor is both a dog whistle for generalized queerphobia (as the majority of furry hate always has been) and a weak satire of non-binary gender identities. “If they can decide they’re neither male or female, what’s stopping them from identifying as a cat?” is the premise of this bigoted reasoning.

Before gay marriage was legal in America, there were a lot of online arguments put forth by evangelical Christians and Republicans that, “If you make gay marriage legal, soon you’ll have people wanting to marry their pets and we’ll have to legalize bestiality.”

Which, yes, is a very dumb slippery slope fallacy, but the current furry panic certainly echoes their same delusional beliefs about alternative lifestyles.

In short, the entire premise of the “furry litter-box in public schools” rumor is to bully nonbinary and/or transgender students through a dog-whistle, so they can evade being cancelled for overt bigotry.

These people are showing their whole ass when they spread these lies.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1506931766837321731

Also, it’s interesting that the people spreading these lies are Republicans, who claim to want to “protect children”, but are also in favor of child marriage.

What Can We Do About These Lies?

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to identify anyone in your life who believes these rumors (especially if they’re sharing lies from Facebook Groups that peddle misinformation), and then link them to this blog post.

I don’t expect it to persuade everyone, but it can save you the effort of having to argue further with them. Just copy+paste the URL and move on with your day, knowing you did your part to tell them, “You’re wrong, shut the fuck up.”

Where Did This Hoax Originate?

Allegedly, this entire hoax about “furries being permitted to use litter boxes in public schools” was started as a prank by a user named Tracing Woodgrains, a contributor to the anti-trans podcast Blocked and Reported, hosted by Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog (alternative mirror).

(Art: LvJ)

So—what does it take to persuade Libs of TikTok to tilt at windmills, to spread a moral panic over a falsehood? How can hoaxers break past her fact-checking, with nary a red flag to be seen?

A nonexistent man passed on a false tip on the basis of paper-thin evidence, then squirmed away at any attempts to nail down the concrete before finishing things off with a broken link to a Facebook group that did not exist.

— How I Convinced Libs of TikTok to Publish a False Story

So there you have it. This entire thing is not only unbelievable, but fabricated for the sake of trolls’ amusement.

https://soatok.blog/2022/04/06/the-dark-truth-about-the-furry-protocol/

#demographics #falsehoods #furries #furry #FurryFandom #lies #litterBoxRumor #misinformation #Politics #rumors #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

It all started with an article in the Mississippi Free Press by Nick Judin.

Ridgeland Mayor Gene McGee is withholding $110,000 of funding from the Madison County Library System allegedly on the basis of his personal religious beliefs, with library officials stating that he has demanded that the system initiate a purge of LGBTQ+ books before his office releases the money.

Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding

The mayor goes on to tell the reporter, in response to being asked if he even has the legal authority to withhold the money from the library system, “I don’t know that I do or do not. But right now we’re holding the money.”

The executive director of the Madison County Library System made it clear that withholding these funds (roughly 5% of their annual budget) would negatively impact the library, the services they provide their community, and whether or not their staff members would lose their jobs.

In short, Mayor Gene McGee was illegally withholding funds that had already been approved from the budget, and thereby holding library employees’ livelihoods hostage, unless they complied with his demands to purge the public library of “homosexual materials” that were incompatible with his private religious beliefs.

The director then explained to the mayor that the library system, as a public entity, was not a religious institution. “I explained that we are a public library and we serve the entire community. I told him our collection reflects the diversity of our community,” Johnson said.

Apparently, the mayor was unmoved. “He told me that the library can serve whoever we wanted, but that he only serves the great Lord above,” she finished.

Ridgeland Mayor Demands LGBTQ+ Book Purge, Threatens Library Funding

Art: LvJ

Enter, the Furry Fandom

I was first made aware of this news story because of its inclusion in a viral Twitter thread about Maus being banned in Tennessee.

https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1486470195036270600

Everything in that Twitter thread is terrible. Banning books about the Holocaust is suspiciously aligned with the Holocaust denial playbook used by neo-Nazis and the alt-right. (It’s almost like alt-right recruitment tactics are effectively neutered by prior education, and they feel threatened by the public being informed.)

But the addendum to the thread about the Ridgeland mayor stood out to me as an egregious violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The blatant homophobia couched in terms of religious faith only made it more personally vexing, but my eye was more drawn to the amount of money being withheld from the library.

$110,000? Sure, that’s not nothing to sneeze at, but the furry fandom has raised more in a weekend before. If we put our minds to it, surely we could match the deficit for this library and effectively tell Mayor Gene McGee to fuck off with his outdated prejudiced worldview.

So, with that in mind, I looked at the library’s website for a means to donate. I ended up on this page, which included a form to print out and mail in with a check. This was a bit of a nonstarter because, like most young tech workers, I don’t actually own a checkbook. So I decided to contact the library asking for an electronic means to contribute.

I’d like to donate money (i.e. as part of the Friends of the Ridgeland Library program), but I don’t have a checkbook. Is there any way to donate electronically?

Their response (available with full headers, for establishing authenticity):

Thank you so much for reaching out. We are overwhelmed by the public support.

Funding donations for the Ridgeland Public Library may be made payable to Friends of the Ridgeland Public Library with “Ridgeland Funding” on the memo line. Send to Friends of the Ridgeland Public Library / 397 Highway 51 / Ridgeland, MS 39157. Funds may be donated online at https://www.fundlibraries.org/ridgelandbookbanning or via Paypal to paypal@mcls.ms Please indicate the gift is for “Ridgeland Funding”.

Thank you for your interest in our story and for standing with us against censorship. Your support is appreciated beyond measure.

Tonja Johnson, Executive Director, Madison County Library System

Overwhelmed? You haven’t seen nothing yet.

Art: LvJ

Equipped with an electronic means to contribute to funding the Ridgeland Library to offset the amount of money Mayor McGee was illegally withholding, I turned to a bastion of Chaotic Good energy: Furry Twitter.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486708632041443330

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486708634688106496

The non-profit collecting the funds (Friends of the Ridgeland Library) had set an initial fund-raising goal at $2,500. I decided to start strong with a $500 donation, and shared a link to my tweet with a few friends with larger audiences than me.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1486710991203098632

I’m not very good at social media marketing, so I have a modest Twitter following. However, some of my friends are somewhat influential in the furry fandom, and gladly shared it with their friends and followers.

Within an hour of my tweet, the fundraiser already looked like this:

However, things were quickly about to accelerate beyond even my expectations.

The Fundraiser Reaches Escape Velocity on Day One

After less that one day from my inaugural tweet, the fundraiser had reached Over 9000 dollars.

Additionally, when I was looking through the backers’ comments, I noticed someone remarkably not a furry had already contributed.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1487000926237954048

Ray Mabus (Governor of Mississippi, 1988-1992) wasn’t the only Mississippi politician to notice the fundraising effort.

Over that weekend, infamous homophobic mayor Gene McGee also noticed us (remember him?), and decided to respond in the only manner appropriate for American politicians.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1487882614824488963

More Than a Furry or LGBTQ+ Issue

Although the fundraising effort was largely popularized by the furry community (which is significantly LGBTQ+), and although the stated motive for the Mayor’s actions were deeply prejudiced against LGBTQ+ people, it would be incorrect to say that the fundraiser was limited to being merely a furry issue, or even an LGBTQ+ issue.

What Mayor McGee aimed to accomplish was an attack on everyone.

An elected official trying to selectively ban queer materials from a public library solely because of his private religious beliefs is both abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press and an establishment of religion in one fell swoop. This is a double-whammy of a violation of the First Amendment.

A lot of furries donated, especially in the beginning. And a lot of LGBTQ+ folks donated, of course.

But so too did a lot of straight people. And so, too, did many self-identified conservative Americans.

Because regardless of demographic labels, or the party affiliation on your voter identification, a public official extorting a public library to purge books you dislike or else suffer the consequences of having approved funding illegally withheld is such deeply contemptible behavior that most of us can agree that it must not be tolerated.

It’s important to recognize that the reason this issue resonated with so many people outside of our communities is because it’s abundantly clear to everyone what Gene McGee is doing is wrong. Violating the First Amendment is among the most un-American things an elected official can do. Furries just got the ball rolling.

An International Perspective

Some of the people who donated to the Ridgeland Library fundraiser live abroad. It may be worth exploring the question, “If the core problem was that McGee’s attempt to ban queer literature is un-American, why would people outside America contribute too?”

The right to free speech isn’t a uniquely American ideal. Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948

It turns out, freedom is a damn good idea, and good ideas are infectious.

The Fundraiser Get Noticed By the Media

Art: LvJ

Shortly after I noticed that Gene McGee had blocked me on Twitter, Dexter Thomas from VICE sent me a Twitter DM to set up an interview. We talked for over an hour about the mayor, the library, the furry fandom (and our past fundraising activities), and how this story had unfolded.

Quick aside:
There has been a tense relationship over the years between furries and the press. A lot of people in our community are hesitant to talk to journalists because of poor treatments in the early 2000’s that treated furries as scandalous (rather than a vibrant, participatory online community).

This hesitance was likely exacerbated by the “Furries and the Media” panels at Anthrocon by the Anthrocon chairman, which basically told everyone, “Don’t talk to the press” in response to this history of yellow journalism. It’s a sensible defensive move, given the atmosphere at the time.

That being said: I don’t follow orders from anyone.

VICE in particular has historically been respectful in their coverage of our community. (Every linked word goes to a different news story.)

VICE published Dexter’s story the following Wednesday: Furries Are Leading the War Against a Book-Banning Mississippi Mayor.

And then this happened:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1488938921425838082

Shortly after talking with Dexter Thomas from VICE, I was interviewed by Keisha Rowe of Mississippi’s Clarion Ledger, who wrote an article titled Furries raise money for libraries after mayor threatens to withhold funds due to LGBTQ+ books.

Keisha’s article subsequently earned a score of over 50,000 points on the r/nottheonion subreddit and made the front page of Reddit.

Some variation of this meme was independently invoked by dozens.

Somewhere along the way, the story of furries leading the charge to raise money for a library being extorted by the local mayor was covered by LGBTQ Nation, AV Club, Boing Boing, PinkNews, QNews, and The Saturday Paper (postscript). The latter two are Australian; this story had gone International.

Not included in the above list are the news outlets that decided not to mention furries in their coverage of the fundraiser: Mississippi’s WJTV, The Hill, Los Angeles Blade, etc.

Was the Campaign Successful?

Art: LvJ

Update (2022-02-12):

We successfully raised the $110,000 that Mayor Gene McGee was withholding from the Ridgeland Library with 3 days to spare. The final donation that put it over the goal was a doozy too:

Original text follows (struckthrough):

As I write this, the fundraiser is 92% funded, with over $100,000 raised from over 2,300 backers, and there are still 5 days left (out of the original 18 day runtime) to cover the rest.

Even if we don’t manage to raise the last several thousand dollars in time, we’ve already contributed enough to make a difference. This will ensure the Ridgeland Library in Madison County, Mississippi can offset the funding deficit caused by Mayor McGee.

At the very minimum, we’re certainly already far more successful than the libraries professed to hoping for when the fundraiser when live:

Update on Sunday 2/6 – We did not think it would be possible, but because of all the support coming in from folks around the country we are raising the goal to $110,000 for the library. It is so important that the library can fight this threat without worrying about operating funds. Thanks for making a difference.

Campaign Description

If you’d like to donate to the Friends of the Ridgeland Library to help them reach 100% of their goal in anticipation of February 14, the link to the fundraiser is:

https://www.fundlibraries.org/ridgelandbookbanning

Clarifications

A few misconceptions have cropped up throughout this fundraising campaign, so I wanted to take a moment to briefly address each of them.

What the Fundraiser Buys

The mayor of Ridgeland almost certainly does not have the authority to withhold money without approval from the board of aldermen. What he’s doing is extremely illegal, and everyone expects him to eventually have to surrender the money.

However, it may take some time for a decision to be reached.

What the fundraiser does is allow the library to keep operating, and providing vital services to the community, while the mayor’s extralegal behavior is being debated with the board of aldermen, or in the courts.

Until the appropriated funds are disbursed, without community support, the library would be forced to reduce their services and lay off staff. If this happened, everyone would lose.

Libraries are the backbones of communities: Beyond the obvious benefits they provide, libraries are one of the first stops many people make to escape poverty because they provide critical Internet access and job skills trainings for the people in the area they service.

Ergo, the long tail of consequences for McGee’s bigotry is difficult to estimate, but he’d almost certainly use DARVO tactics and blame any negative effects on the librarians for not complying with his unconstitutional demands.

If Mayor Gene McGee was planning on a war of attrition against the librarians of his city, up to his inevitable loss in court, donating to the fundraiser effectively denies him this tactic. It also saves a lot of innocent people from suffering, including (but not limited to) the library staff.

When the funds are disbursed, the extra infusion of cash from thousands of people will only allow the library to better serve the community. There’s no downside to supporting a public library.

Art: LvJ

On Game Theory and Interdimensional Chess

Several commentators on Reddit and Twitter have objected to this fundraising initiative because it might lead to perverse incentives wherein local politicians use outrage-fueled fundraising to justify slashing budgets, so they could spin it as a new cost-saving measure in line with conservative talking points.

I can understand why people think that (see: life insurance companies recommending people start GoFundMe campaigns when they need life-saving treatments), but it’s a relatively low risk. See above.

What would be a cause for concern is if McGee somehow loopholes his way into being permitted to egregiously violate the First Amendment. On this matter, should it go that far, we simply have to trust the competence and commitment of the courts to make the right call.

The Origins and Authenticity of the Fundraiser

Early on, some Twitter users raised concerns that the fundraiser was illegitimate, or a fraudulent cash grab. I anticipated this sort of reaction, which is why I published the full headers of the email I received from Tonja Johnson.

This is a computer forensic argument for authenticity. In order to falsify a DMARC header, I would need to have privileged access to their mail server (which would be a different, and possibly more severe, felony).

Beyond that, several journalists independently verified that the fundraiser was legitimate by contacting the Madison County Library System and inquiring about it. Mississippi Residents have a clear and simple way to verify this information without having to trust their mail servers: They can simply ask about the fundraiser in person.

The fundraiser itself was set up by EveryLibrary, a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization registered in the State of Illinois. I had no hand in the fundraiser’s creation; nor did any other furry (to my knowledge).

Aftermath

Note: This section was added on 2022-03-28.

Earlier this month, the Madison County Journal published a braindead editorial in the opinion section, authored by “The Editorial Board” (which consists of only two people: James E. Prince III and Michael Simmons), which claims that Mayor Gene McGee wasn’t trying to push his personal religious beliefs onto the Madison County Library System through withholding funding to the Ridgeland Library.

I was perfectly content ignoring this opinion piece (bad takes are a dime a dozen in the Opinion section of any newspaper, after all) until they parroted the same idiotic narrative in their coverage of a new library contract being agreed upon at Ridgeland City Hall.

Art: LvJ

I could take the time to analyze their narrative in order to expose its lies and deceptions, but the fatal flaw in their Public Relations strategy is this:

If Mayor Gene McGee wasn’t guilty of the homophobic agenda he’s accused of, why did he decided to block me on Twitter after I started raising awareness of the library fundraiser?

After all, an Appeals Court previously ruled that it’s Unconstitutional for politicians to block critics on social media accounts used for official purposes. And since McGee’s campaign website links directly to his Twitter account in the footer, establishing that it’s used for official purposes isn’t exactly difficult.

Not only does the Madison County Journal‘s false narrative about Mayor Gene McGee fall apart in the face of this evidence, but it’s pretty clear that the Mayor violated my Constitutional rights as an American citizen.

Actions speak louder than words.

The only reason I haven’t pursued legal action against the Mayor is that doing so would effectively dox myself through the courts. McGee really isn’t worth sacrificing the pseudonymity I enjoy as a blogger or as a queer furry on the Internet.

The lies and omissions of tabloid publications notwithstanding, the plan to save the library was an overwhelming success.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1507351230603010048

In Closing

I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone that donated to the fundraiser, shared links on social media, or covered this story. Without each and every one of you, we wouldn’t have come so far.

This will probably not be the last time a library needs financial help from the community (but hopefully the others won’t be under duress of a theocratic bully in the municipal government). If you’d like to go above and beyond the effort discussed here today, visit your local library and find out how you can help.

Disclaimer

Everything on this webpage is the sole opinion of the author, and should not be confused for statements of fact. It should also not be confused for a representative opinion of anyone else (employers, communities, demographic sectors of the human population, etc.) unless other parties externally concur with what is written here.

Header is a collage of art from @FlashWhite_, @MrJimmyDaFloof, and @JohisArt.

https://soatok.blog/2022/02/09/that-one-time-furries-saved-a-library/

#furry #FurryFandom #homophobia #LGBTQIA_ #Mississippi #Politics #publicLibraries #Ridgeland

Dhole Moments

2020-06-09 13:00:00

I rarely think about the labels that describe me.

That isn’t because of privilege (I spent many years painfully aware of them), but because my friends are incredibly supportive and we’ve been able to cultivate an environment where I’m not constantly reminded of why I don’t “belong”. (It took many grueling years to achieve that, and I’m still reminded of my weirdness if I leave home for any appreciable length of time. Fortunately, I’m a bit of a homebody.)

The majority of people don’t think about their labels either, but for privileged reasons, until a minority calls it to their attention. Then you get almost-comical indignant hot takes of the “don’t call me cis, that’s a slur!” variety.

At least, they would be comical if they weren’t so stupid and dangerous.

Identity

Identity is a funny thing. I actually find rather insulting the proposition that you can take the vast diversity of the lived experiences of billions of people and compress it into one bit of information.

“Are you a YES or a NO?” “Are you X or Y?” “Are you good or evil?”

Labels are a lossy compression algorithm. They’re meant to simplify and convey ideas so they’re more broadly accessible and easily understood. In practice, people are overly reliant on them, and they become a crutch.

Sure, you can think of me as an androsexual, demisexual, cisgender male with a dhole fursona, but do most of us even know what that means?

Most of us just simplify our identities to, “I’m gay”. Art by LindseyVi.

Pride

Pride is a protest against unjust systems. Pride started with a riot in response to police violence and discrimination. You probably didn’t learn about Pride in great detail in history class (if at all).

Pride parades in recent years have been co-opted by what some call “rainbow capitalism”.

I wish I knew the original source for this meme.

And this obviously feels really gross, but at the same time, it’s often somehow forgivable that companies use Pride Month (June) to show active support for their LGBTQIA+ employees. (If nothing else, it assures us that we won’t suddenly become unemployed if someone accuses us of falling in love with a person with the “wrong” phenotype, etc.)

There are currently a lot of hard conversations taking place about a different target of police violence and discrimination.

I hope that the protests happening today will result in the change our world needs, so that everyone can live equally without fear or shame for who they are.

This will almost certainly require dismantling racist systems and rebuilding them without the tainted legacy they originated from.

That being said, I’ve never really been fond of the emotion, pride. It feels inherently reckless to me. At the same time, I acknowledge it’s a great foil for the emotions that bigots want us to feel (fear, shame, despair, self-loathing, etc.). If that works for you, I’m happy. Keep on keeping on.

Rather than pride, I’ve always sought contentment and joy in my life.

Authenticity means a lot to me, and being fearlessly and shamelessly me is something I shouldn’t have to work for or feel proud about; nor should anyone else.

Contentment and joy… there used to be another word folks used to encapsulate that genre of emotion: Gay.

It always comes full-circle, doesn’t it?

A Dream To Seek

Art by Khia.

Society has numerous institutions and systems that are designed and implemented to ensure discrimination and injustice against people who are different than their architects.

As long as bigoted institutions and systems exist, society will always need movements like Pride and Black Lives Matter to resist atrocity and inspire loud authenticity, in equal measure.

So it might sound odd to say without the above context, but as a strong proponent of human rights and equality, I dream of the day when these movements no longer need to exist; for the day when their job is done and we have moved past the specter of hate that continues to haunt each generation that survives its direct violent influence. I say this knowing that this day will probably never come (at least in my lifetime).

Until bigotry is abolished, and bigotry’s apologists recognize that they’re little more than asymptomatic carriers of that vile psychic pathogen, I will continue to strive to enable everyone I can reach to enjoy the same peace that my friends and I have built at home.

No matter your sex. No matter your gender. No matter the gender(s) you’re attracted to (if any). No matter your race or ethnicity.

The labels people use to describe us shouldn’t condemn anyone to a life of misery and injustice.

The day we cultivate a society that is absent of, and resistant to, the kind of hate and discrimination we’ve seen for centuries will be a day worthy of pride.

And the only way to get there is to acknowledge a simple truth: Black Lives have to Matter in order for the superset (“All Lives”) to Matter.

What Do Your Labels Mean?

This will probably be my only Pride Month post on this blog, so I suppose it makes sense to explain them.

I’m a guy, who’s attracted to guys (thus, androsexual)… but I don’t exactly have a “type”. I have to genuinely like a person to find them attractive. That’s the demisexual part.

Most people understand being gay, conceptually. Asexuality might also click readily without a lot of exposition.

Being demi is weird: You spend a lot of time wondering if you’re asexual or not, until you actually develop feelings for someone else for the first time.

Cisgender just means “not transgender”; that is to say, I identify as the same gender I was assigned at birth.

If that’s helpful to know, cool. But you don’t have to think of me in those terms. I’m just Soatok.

https://soatok.blog/2020/06/09/pridemonth/

A common narrative on discussion boards like Hacker News is that my inclusion of my fursona on my technical blog posts somehow makes them unsuitable for consumption in a business setting. (This claim is made despite the fact that I’ve never posted pornographic art on this blog.)

Well, Internet marketers must have missed that memo!

They keep contacting me through various channels to try to pay me to publish something that promotes some business.

CMYKat

A few years ago, I briefly humored one of these outreach requests just to see if they’d attempt to write it in my distinct style, complete with furry stickers. In the end, I declined payment and fully disclosed their draft blog post and the emails.

If the recent deluge of emails from marketing agencies are indicative of a trend, neither the furry art nor shenanigans have made me enough of a pariah to the advertising industry for them to leave me alone.

A word on emails and incentives

I generally don’t want to make a habit of publishing emails I’ve received, no matter how hilarious they would be to dunk on. This is especially true of hate emails I received over the years.

Part of the reason for my stance here is that it creates perverse incentives: Some people will enhance their negativity in the hopes that their email gets published next. This can lead the blogger to experience more negative feedback from their audience, which can lead to all sorts of toxic outcomes. Even if you avoid those, you still generally feel shittier about your own blog and interacting with people.

Conversely, I receive a lot of positive and thoughtful letters and comments from folks across the world. It’s a delight to hear from most of you.

I even occasionally hear from technical recruiters (and one investor) that are interested in working with cryptography or privacy experts. When this happens, I’ll funnel recruiters towards excellent people I know that are on the market for new jobs, and refer investors to companies staffed by people I’ve worked with before and know to be capable of delivering incredible work.

I actually don’t mind hearing from recruiters or investors in this way because there’s no editorial pressure on my blog’s contents. Connecting people on both sides of a potentially mutually beneficial business transaction is called being part of society and not a burden, nor something I hope to personally extract value from.

The problem is when people think they can pay me to publish their words as my own.

I’m not interested

CMYKat

I’d like to believe that explanation is sufficient and satisfactory, but we clearly don’t live in the ideal world.

So here’s some more reasons why I’m not going to entertain any offers from advertisers.

Your brand sucks

There’s no gentle way to put this, so I’m not going to mince words.

If you’re so desperate to try to get eyeballs on a product or service that you’ll ask furry bloggers that have explicitly made it a point to be hostile towards Advertising as an industry, your product or service is probably (at best) utter shit. In all likelihood, it’s even more likely to be a scam or a grift than merely “not valuable” to potential buyers.

If you’re that desperate, why would I subject my readers to your product or service at all, let alone endorse it?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_F5GxCwizc

Your offer sucks

The dollar amount attached to these offers is, in practice, irrelevant. I wouldn’t sell out for any price, after all.

Having said that, the fact that these unsolicited offers are as cheap as they are also makes me feel kind of insulted.

You advertising parasites really think $100 (or less) is going to compel me to sell out? I’m not a middle school kid arguing for a bigger allowance. I have a career and pay a mortgage.

Give me some credit for fucks sake.

$100 wouldn’t even cover my hosting costs for this blog for half a year. Did someone in your network veer into the creepy realm of pick-up artists and suggest negging as an outreach strategy?
Credit: XKCD; explainer

Your writing style is uninteresting

I am, much to the chagrin of pedants everywhere, a proponent of conversational English writing.

Every attempt at native advertising copywriting I’ve seen has been painfully corporate and dull. (Maybe the pedants would like it, though?)

You might think you’re being conversational, but you’re about as authentic as the “sugar baby” scammers on Telegram.

You missed the point entirely

Have anyone in the advertising or marketing space ever wondered, “Why would anyone write technical deep dives under their furry fandom persona when all that could instead be written under their professional name to advance their own career?”

It’s not much of a mystery: I’m sufficiently established in my career that writing something that other engineers could use to bolster their career as my fursona isn’t a significant loss to me.

This is aside from the fact that most cryptography experts, and companies that hire cryptography experts, don’t give half a shit about anyone’s hobbies or participation in Internet subcultures, no matter how weird they may seem to Reddit users.

“You’re a gay furry? There’s a private Slack channel if you want to join it. Talk to [person] for an invite.” — every major tech company

In practice, the most of the people who would hold such a thing against you aren’t the sort of people you’d want to work for anyway.

The entire point of writing furry blogs is to have fun; not to make money.

If people want to throw a few bucks my way for a coffee, as a way of showing their appreciation, that’s wonderful. But I don’t expect it, and I don’t take it for granted.

I don’t have a content strategy.

I don’t have monetization goals.

My livelihood doesn’t depend on how well my blog posts are received by strangers on the Internet.

I don’t fit the vague “content creator” box. There is no today’s sponsor. This message isn’t brought to you by anyone but me.

And that’s the way I like things.

I’d be willing to bet, that’s how most of my regular readers like things, too.

I don’t have anything to sell. I don’t want to have anything to sell.

If I ever recommend a piece of technology, it’s always for technical reasons and it’s usually free.

The only thing I do that could be considered mildly promotional is crediting the artists that drew stuff for me when I use it in my blog. (The furry sticker I used in the header image was made by AJ, by the way.)

Why do I do that? Because I want to see people in my community thrive. I don’t want anything in return.

A few years ago, at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I wrote a detailed series about getting into the tech industry for as close to $0 and zero experience as possible, aimed at furry audiences. Between the money I paid to artists to create the illustrations for that series, and the time and expertise that went into writing it, it’s probably worth something like $6,000 to someone in a three-piece suit.

To me, its worth is that a half dozen or so furries (that I know of) have successfully followed the advice given therein to change careers. This is priceless. But it also probably injected damn near half a million dollars into the economy, due to these folks’ increased purchasing power.

If each of them pay it forward and help at least one other person attain their career goals, based on the strategy and guidance I gave away for free, the sky’s the limit on how beneficial it could be.

Me selling out wouldn’t help anyone.

Furries aren’t a marketable demographic

I know that, partly due to the breakneck exponential growth of the furry fandom, it’s inevitable that some marketer would view us as an untapped market.

But every time a major brand has tried to establish themselves in the furry community, they usually get shouted at with lots of porn. This tactic is controversial (especially when the brand in question is one that a lot of kids might follow on social media) yet effective.

Porn is mainly an anathema to marketers because of influences from the likes of MasterCard, who are in bed with “Christian” anti-sex movements like “Exodus Cry”; not because there’s any falsehood to the idea that sex sells.

If I thought it would scare marketers away, and not just cause myself a different kind of headache, I would consider including furry porn on every blog post I ever wrote.

MarleyTanuki

TL;DR

My final answer to any online marketer looking to publish anything on this blog is, “No.”

If anyone is really has money burning a hole in their pocket that they want to send me, you’re certainly free to do so, but you won’t get anything in return.

If it still doesn’t click, I don’t know what to tell you. Maybe my writing isn’t that good after all, and your brand would be better served by a blog that’s easier to understand? Tell yourself whatever keeps your unsolicited marketing emails from being sent.

https://soatok.blog/2024/07/02/my-furry-blog-is-not-an-opportunity-to-develop-your-brand/

#advertising #furry #Internet #marketing #nativeMarketing #rant

Dhole Moments

2023-11-17 18:21:17

The people afraid to show their peers or bosses my technical writing because it also contains furry art are some of the dumbest cowards in technology.

Considering the recent events at ApeFest, a competitive level of stupidity is quite impressive.

To be clear, the exhibited stupidity in question is their tendency to project their own sexual connotations onto furry art–even if said art isn’t sexual in nature in any meaningful sense of the word.

But then again, poetry can be sexual, so who knows?

Scandalous furry,
Why are you glitching like that?
Haiku are lewd too!
Art: AJ

The cowardice comes in with the fear of their peers or bosses judging them for *checks notes* the content and presentation that I wrote, and not them.

Which (if you think about it for any significant length of time) implies that they’re generally eager to take credit for other people’s work, but their selfishness was thwarted by a cute cartoon dhole doing something totally innocent.

Even sillier, there’s a small contingent on technical forums that are “concerned” about the growing prevalence of queer and furry identities in technical spaces (archived).

MarleyTanuki

MarleyTanuki

Even some old school hackers conveniently forget that alt.fan.furry was a thing before the Internet.

As frustratingly incompetent as these hot takes are, they pale in comparison to, by far, the biggest source of bad opinions about the furry fandom.

Credit: Tirrelous

The call is coming from inside the house.

Like Cats and Dogs

Last month, I wrote a blog post about Aural Alliance, which caused a menace in the furry music space to accuse me of “bad journalism” for not verbally crucifying the label’s creator (a good friend of mine) for having a failed business venture in the past, or taking credit for donating to their cause early on.

Twitter DM conversation.
Everyone I’ve talked to that has dealt with this particular person before responded with, “Yeah, this is typical Cassidy behavior.”

To which one must wonder, “Since when am I a journalist?”

I’ve never called myself a journalist. I’m a blogger and I don’t pretend to be anything more than that. I especially would never besmirch the work of real journalists by comparing it with my musings.

At times, I also wear the security researcher hat, but you’ll only hear about it when I’m publishing a vulnerability.

This is a personal blog. I will neither be censored nor subject to compelled speech. I have no moral or professional obligations to “both sides” of what amounts to a nontroversy.

Nobody has ever paid me to write anything here, and I will never accept any compensation for my writing.

Sure, I contributed to covering Aural Alliance’s up-front infrastructure costs when it was just an idea in Finn’s head. I’m not going to apologize for supporting artists. The Furry Fandom wouldn’t exist without artists.

This kind of behavior isn’t an isolated incident, unfortunately. A handful of furries have rage-quit tech groups I’m in because they found out I generously tipped artists that were under-charging for their work.

It bewilders me every time someone reacts this way. Do you not know the community you’re in?

The most intelligible pushback I’ve seen over the years is, “Well if everyone raises their prices, low-income furries will be pushed out of the market!”

Setting aside that art is a luxury, not a need for a moment, that’s not actually true.

There are so many artists, and they’re so decentralized, that no coherent price coordination effort is even possible. It’s worse than herding cats. Some may raise their prices by $5, others by $500. If furries were organized enough to coordinate something like this, then we’d have a tough time explaining why there are still abusers in the fandom.

Also, it costs very little to learn to draw, yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeoQx9hphBw

Oh, but I’m not done.

The demand for low-priced digital art incentivizes people to reach for theft enabled by large-scale computing (a.k.a. “AI” by its proponents).

A similar demand for cheap, high-quality fursuits (usually at the maker’s expense) will lead to a walmartization of the furry community.

If you listen to these hot takes long enough, you start to notice a pattern of short-sighted selfishness.

When you demand something of the furry community, and don’t think of the long-term consequences of your demands, you’re probably being an idiot. This is true even if it’s actually a good idea.

If me supporting artists somehow prices you out of commissioning your favorite artist, you still have other options: Learning to make your own, finding new artists, saving money, etc.

On the flipside, the artists you admire will suffer less due to money troubles. Fewer artists starving makes the world a more beautiful place.

Center of the Fediverse

If flame war and retoot count relieved desire
In the comment thread someone must have known
That the hottest takes truly leave us tired
‘Cause in the center of the fediverse
We are all alone

With apologies to Kamelot

If you’re on the Fediverse (e.g., Mastodon), and your instance uses a blocklist like TheBadSpace (TBS), you probably cannot see my posts on furry.engineer anymore.

This is because the people running TBS have erroneously decided that any criticism of its curators is anti-blackness.

If you want a biased but detailed (with receipts!) account of the conflicts that led up to furry.engineer‘s erroneous inclusion on their blocklist, Silver Eagle wrote about their experience with TBS, blocklist criticism, and receiving death threats from the friends of TBS curators.

(Spoiler: It was largely prompted by another predominantly LGBTQIA+ instance, tech.lgbt, being erroneously added to the same blocklist, which resulted in criticism of said blocklist curators.)

Be forewarned, though: Linking to Silver Eagle’s blog post was enough for TBS supporters to harass me and directly accuse me, personally, of anti-blackness, so don’t expect any degree of level-headed discussion from that crowd.

Art: CMYKat

What Can We Do About This?

If you cannot see my Fediverse posts anymore, and actually want to see them, message your instance moderators and suggest unsubscribing from TheBadSpace’s blocklist.

If they refuse, your only real recourse is to move to another instance. The great thing about the Fediverse is, you can just do that, and nobody can lock you in.

Personally, I plan on sticking on furry.engineer. I trust its moderators to not tolerate racist and/or fascist bullshit.

The baseless accusations of anti-blackness are, unsurprisingly, false.

Burnout Isn’t Inevitable

A few months ago, I quit a great job with an amazing team because the CEO decided that everyone has to return to working in the office, including people that were hired fully remote before the pandemic. This meant being forced to move more than 3,000 miles, or resigning. I’ve been told the legal term for such a move is “constructive dismissal.”

In hindsight, I was starting to burn out anyway, so leaving when I did was a great move for my mental health and life satisfaction.

Art: CMYKat

I’m an introvert. I have a finite social battery. Because my work was split across three different teams at the same company, I was a necessary participant in a lot of meetings.

More than 5 hours per day of meetings, as an individual contributor. Sometimes as many as 7 hours/day of them. I almost never had a quiet day, even after blocking one day every week so nobody would schedule any meetings and I could get productive work done.

If you’re interested in being a people manager, or have an extroverted personality, you’re probably unperturbed by this account. But I was absolutely miserable. My close friends started to worry if I was suffering from depression, because of how socially exhausted I was all the time.

I took a few weeks off between jobs. My new role doesn’t pointlessly encumber me with unnecessary meetings.

Every day, I feel the burnout symptoms leaving my mind. I feel challenged and stimulated in a good way. I’m learning new technologies and being productive. I’ve never spent more than 3 hours of any given day in a meeting.

Different people burn out in many different ways, for many different reasons.

In my experience, the consequences appear to be reversible if caught early enough. I don’t know if they would be if I held onto my old job for much longer.

The job market’s tough right now, but if you’re deeply unsatisfied with an aspect of your current job, prioritize yourself and make whatever change is necessary.

This doesn’t mean you have to switch jobs like I did, of course. It was a good move for me. Your mileage may vary.

Where’s The Cryptography?

https://youtu.be/4KNzdlc7ZcA?t=59

Somedays I feel like writing about technical topics. Other days, I feel like writing about unimportant or personal topics.

If you’re disappointed in this post, perhaps you also expect everything on this blog to be professionally useful?

Well, worry not, for you’re eligible for a full refund for the amount you paid to read it.

Art: CMYKat

---

Logging Off

This post has been a collection of unrelated topics on my mind over the past few months. There is one other thing, but I was unsure if it warranted a separate post of its own, or an addendum on this one. Since you’re reading this, you’ll know I ultimately settled on the latter.

I started this blog in 2020 because I thought having a personal blog where I talk about things that interest me (mainly the furry fandom and software security) would be fun. And I wanted to do it in a way that was fun for me.

“Having fun with it” has been the guiding principle of this blog for over 3 years. I never intended to do anything important or meaningful, that sort of happened by accident. I didn’t care about others being able to use my writing in a professional setting (hence, my scoffing at the very notion above).

Lately, posts have slowed to a crawl, because it’s not fun for me anymore. I have a lot of ideas I’d love to write about, but when it comes time to turn an idea into something tangible, I lose all inspiration.

So I’m not going to force it.

This will be the last post on this blog for a while. I recently tried to pick up fiction writing, but I’m not happy with anything I’ve been able to produce yet, so I won’t bore anyone with that garbage.

There are a lot of brilliant people that read my writing. Most of you are more than capable of picking up where I left off and starting your own blogs.

I encourage you to do so.

Have fun with it, too. Just remember, when it’s time to put the pen down and take a rest, don’t be stubborn and burn yourself out.

Happy hacking.

---

Header is a collage of art from AJ, CMYKat, Kyume, WeaselDumb, and a DEFCON Furs 2023 photo from Chevron.

https://soatok.blog/2023/11/17/this-would-be-more-professionally-useful-if-not-for-the-furry-art/

#fediverse #furries #furry #FurryFandom #furryMusic

Many of the most annoying and pervasive problems with the furry fandom–from the cyclical nature of Twitter discourse to the increasingly frustrating issue of furry convention main hotel registrations selling out immediately after opening–are entirely predictable if you know even a little bit of mathematics.

And it’s going to get worse. If you don’t believe me, read on.

“But Soatok, my whole thing is being a dumb animal online. Why would I know any mathematics?”

This video from Colorado professor Albert Bartlett is a must-watch:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4

Gimme the Numbers

WikiFur has historical data on furry convention attendance. Let’s start with the list of furry conventions with the highest attendance in their most recent year.

A sample of the top attended furry conventions.
Note: We can make a similar analysis for most furry conventions that have historical data available.

For ease, I’m going to focus on the more popular events.

Additionally, I’m going to take the average of percentages just to smooth out the variability Year-over-Year and make simpler statements.

Using averages like this is normally a risky move, especially if a statistician might one day read your work and get cross with you. I’ve provided more granular data in a Google Sheet.

• Anthrocon saw an average of 14.2% growth year-over-year since 2000. If you only focus on the past decade (which includes a dip during the pandemic), their growth rate was 12.6%.
• Midwest FurFest grew by an average of 17.9% since 2000 and 17.8% since 2014 (omitting the cancelled year).
• Furry Weekend Atlanta grew by an average of 26.3%, or 25.9% if you only look at 2015-2024.
• Texas Furry Fiesta saw an overall growth rate of 31.8% since its first year (2009), and a growth rate of 17.4% over the past decade.
• Megaplex was grew 24.6% each convention, with a 25.2% growth since 2014.

Okay, if you haven’t watched the video and aren’t good a math, that maybe sounds like sustainable, healthy growth for a community, right?

Well, let’s use the past 10 year average growth rate to make some predictions.

• AnthroCon attendance grows by 12.6%, which corresponds to an attendance doubling in 5.5 years.
• Midwest FurFest? Doubles in 3.9 years.
• Furry Weekend Atlanta? 2.7 years!
• Texas Furry Fiesta? 4 years.
• Megaplex? 2.7 years!

If the growth rate keeps up, for example, we can expect Furry Weekend Atlanta to have approximately 60,000 attendees by 2035 (11 conventions in the future).

If you think the FWA elevator wait times were long this year, just let the current growth rate keep up. Especially if their staff are short-sighted enough to sign a multi-year contract with the current convention hotel.

What About Furries That Don’t Go to Conventions?

We see exponential growth in the furry fandom outside of convention attendance, too.

https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1766121415156146610

I’m sure there are many other data sources we can consider, but the conclusion is likely to be the same elsewhere.

What Do The Numbers Mean?

Simply put: The furry community is growing at a break-neck exponential speed.

Art: AJ_LovesDinos

We are seeing year-over-year growth rates exceeding 10% (a benchmark which represents a doubling time of 7 years, as that video up above was fond of pointing out).

Given that the world population is growing at 0.8%, it may be tempting to assume that, in a few short decades, the entire world will be furry. That is not the case.

Exponential growth cannot continue forever. You will always run headfirst into some sort of carrying capacity or limiting factor that impedes growth. Every exponential curve eventually becomes an S-curve.

Where Are We Headed?

Based on the numbers presented above, let’s think about what risks the furry community could be aimlessly blundering into right now.

I must stress that this is not a realistic threat model of the future, but an examination at what could go wrong.

Awareness of the risks could be sufficient to actually mitigate them before they manifest.

Or perhaps these words will fall upon deaf ears, and things could go more-or-less exactly as I will describe in this section.

Or maybe I’m entirely too optimistic and things will get much, much worse than I can imagine.

This is all to say: The future isn’t written yet, so who the fuck knows?

Credit: Harubaki

But we can make a somewhat educated guess on the trajectory we’re on. So let’s do that.

Know Your Limits

What limiting factors could the furry fandom’s explosive growth encounter in the near future?

That’s a broad question to ponder, but one possibility that comes to mind is that while there is an exponential growth in furry participation (i.e., convention attendance), there is not an accompanying exponential growth in the quantity of conventions themselves.

(Nor of convention staff, for that matter!)

The demand for convention attendance is a bull market, but the supply is more-or-less static.

THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE.

If things continue at the same pace they’re currently marching, conventions will become increasingly overcrowded. But the problems will not stop with just that.

Rooms at the main convention hotel will become accessible only for the wealthier and/or more technically savvy, rather than for all furries.

Convention registration costs will rise, to little benefit for attendees. Some of that money will be spent on big, non-fandom performances from celebrity headliners, which will drive some non-furries to attend as well, further exacerbating the crowds.

All kinds of systemic, structural issues in society at large will become more pronounced within our community.

Registration, elevators, the dealers den and artist alley, and even the fucking stairwells will have unreasonable lines of people waiting to use them.

When confronted with this stress, people will take out their anger–which is caused by a complex mess of factors stemming from this relatively simple mathematical observation–on comparatively simpler targets. Slightly more literal than usual scape goats, if you will.

A lot of ageist, classist, ableist discourse will emerge from the fault lines of our ever-expanding community.

There will be calls for more gatekeeping, rooted in nostalgia for simpler times when there were fewer of us to try to accommodate.

Convention staff will eventually buckle under an exponentially rising amount of pressure. People will burn out. It won’t be pretty.

Meanwhile, Drama YouTubers (or whatever platform or vestige they adopt in the future) will be collectively increasing Orville Redenbacher’s quarterly sales with the content they can farm from this discontent.

CMYKat

“That sounds bad; surely other furries are aware of this explosive growth?”

Of course, but they mostly think it’s a good thing. For example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JumV2UQf43A

What Can We Do About It?

I don’t know.

I agonized for a long time about how to write this section, and I don’t have any good answers.

I mean, sure, I have some ideas that might help in some way. A couple of them are:

1. Embrace Virtual Reality. It’s much easier to scale up VR servers on the fly than it is to just accommodate thousands more furries. No reg line to deal with, either.
2. Focus On Smaller, Local Events. While it’s kind of cool that tens of thousands of furries will descend on the same city for a weekend to attend the same convention, it would also be cool if there were more local events. Not just weekly or monthly meet-ups, either. I’m thinking of picnics, barbecues, etc. “Think global, act local,” as it were.

However, neither idea does anything to alleviate the fear of missing out that can accompany large conventions.

Additionally, artists may depend on large conventions as a way to network and grow their audience, which is necessary to make their commission income sustainable. These ideas wouldn’t really help them at all.

CMYKat

Solving this problem is outside my wheelhouse. I’m not a social scientist, by any means, and this feels like the sort of problem they would be more successful at tackling than a computer security and math nerd.

Who knows? Maybe to an expert in another field, the solution is more obvious and known to be effective.

Or maybe nobody really knows, and we’ll have to make something up as we go.
Internet meme; source unknown
Regardless, being aware of the problem is the first step towards solving it. So if I can do nothing else, I hope to ensure that the folks that enjoy my blog are made aware.

Beyond that. my plan is to let people more qualified think about what (if anything) to actually do about this potential mess.

Until next time.

AJ_LovesDinos

More Coverage of This Topic

Woofles, cited above, wants to help solve some of these problems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKW0qdJJbTA

Beta Eta Delota read the original version of this blog post and added his commentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu2xQQBp_Lo

Finn the Panther has ideas (some specific to Midwest FurFest):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eI_2lDrGq4&t=476s

https://soatok.blog/2024/05/30/furries-are-losing-the-battle-against-scale/

#doublingTime #exponentialEquations #furry #FurryFandom #Mathematics #population #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-06-24 10:12:49

While the furry fandom can be a wonderful place and a force for good in the world, the topics that tend to circulate on Furry Twitter are somewhat seasonal: They repeat every so often–usually sparked by someone saying or doing something shitty–and never actually lead to a productive result.

Let’s look at a few of these reoccurring topics and suggest actual solutions, rather than reactionary hot takes that only add fuel to an already out-of-control fire.

Safe Spaces for Underage Furries

https://twitter.com/BoozyBadger/status/1275443221624057856

Once upon a time, there was a movement called Burned Furs: A right-wing puritanical effort to rid the early furry fandom of its adult side. If you take the time to read about these clowns, you’ll hear a lot of the same arguments that alt-right trolls make today, except now they use the word “degenerate” to describe anything vaguely LGBTQ+.

As a result, most adult furries are generally wary of the creation of a “safe space” for strictly-SFW furry content, because it always gets co-opted by homophobes and the “sex is evil” variety of bigot. There’s also the concern that if you put all of the minors in one place, it will inevitably become a flytrap for creeps looking for their next victim.

There absolutely should be room for furries–of any age (asexual folks are valid too)–that only serves work-safe (i.e. non-sexualized) content. However, these spaces should be curated by people with a generally sex-positive mindset.

Why Should Sex-Positive Adults Moderate Non-Sexualized Spaces?

Let’s learn from history, please, so as to not repeat its follies.

If the horror known as conversion therapy has proven nothing else, it’s that telling LGBTQ+ kids that sex is evil is only going to lead to misery and suicide.

(No, I’m not pulling punches on this one. Religious nuts just love to drive queer people to suicide, and only 20% to 25% of furries are heterosexual.)

Nature abhors a vacuum. If you don’t step in, someone else will. If someone else is incentivized to do so, they probably won’t have the kids’ best interests in mind. Neither anti-sex puritans nor would-be sexual predators should be given access, let alone influence.

Neither should right-wing extremists, such as “alt-furry” (a movement of imbeciles who follow someone’s fursona named “Foxler”–literally “Fox Hitler”–yet try to insist they aren’t Nazis; yeah right).

What Should Be Done?

Art by circuitslime.

First, accept that a lot of furries are underage and shouldn’t be exposed to adult content–even if for no other reason than legal risk. (If anyone objects to that, you should feel very concerned about being alone with them.) Furthermore, there are some adults that don’t want to be exposed to NSFW content either.

Being sex-positive isn’t the same thing as being horny. Sex-positivity requires an understanding and respect for consent and boundaries. If someone doesn’t want to see your lewd art or photos, don’t go out of your way to make sure they see it (i.e. sending it to them directly).

Have an After Dark social media account for 18+ users? Block minors that try to follow you (and consider making your account private then screening your follow requests to filter out minors).

However, I don’t think we necessarily need a separate “label” for SFW furry content. Labels make you more susceptible to being coopted by perverse motives.

Worksafe furry groups on Signal/WhatsApp/Telegram/Discord/etc. are all valid.

If you’re underage and yearn for a SFW space for your furry fandom participation, talking to Moms of Furries is probably the best way to get started. Unlike random furries, their entire schtick is “make the fandom easier for parents to understand, and safer for their kids to play in”.

The threat model is complicated, the lines are blurred, and there’s a lot of shades of gray, but ultimately just letting people have worksafe spaces in the fandom is a good thing.

Just don’t let anyone try to convince the folks in those spaces that people who do enjoy the adult side of the fandom are bad and deserve to be shunned. That’s the anti-sex puritan bullshit I’ve talked about.

Murrsuits / Pup Hoods / etc.

Like clockwork, a pocket of furries (usually the same agitators mentioned in the previous section) will surface with some sort of hatred/shaming towards murrsuits, pup hoods, and other harmless sources of fun and self-expression.

(A murrsuit, by the way, is a fursuit that’s specifically intended for use in sexual encounters, and usually has extra zippers for the wearer’s privates.)

The exact nature of their outrage changes with the season. Some folks (like the dumb narcissistic troll who once created a database of murrsuit owners) make unsubstantiated claims about health/cleanliness with sexual fluids and murrsuits.

Others are lazy, and make general hand-wavy statements that strike a moral chord with most people, but don’t actually make sense when you think about them for very long. Their structure looks like this:

• If some people have sex in their fursuits, then fursuits are sex toys.
• You shouldn’t have sex toys around kids!

This is a lazy attempt to manipulate the listener, for two reasons:

1. If some people have sex in their fursuits, that doesn’t actually make fursuits sex toys– and even if it somehow did, it still doesn’t make it so for people who don’t have sex in their fursuits.
2. Lots of people have sex while wearing clothing. Wouldn’t the same logic applied to fursuits apply here too? And if so, are you arguing for everyone being naked around children? I sure fucking hope not.

Similar arguments are often raised about pup hoods, because of their apparent BDSM/kink connotations.

If they’re being worn in a non-lewd, tasteful manner (i.e. nobody’s genitals are being exposed, there’s no visible “bondage”, etc.), there’s nothing special about the anti-pup hood arguments. Same shit, different day.

What Should Be Done?

Simple: People really need to get over their fear of sex.

When you see someone trying to shame another adult for having a sexuality, tell them to fuck off and leave the other person alone.

People with healthy sex lives don’t owe you anything, except a baseline for hygiene that literally every murrsuiter I know already exceeds without ever having to be told. There’s no action item here.

Sexual Abusers

They aren’t welcome; get the fuck out! I don’t care how their victims are classified: You aren’t allowed to be a part of our fandom if you perpetrate or support sexual abuse.

Underage, non-human, whatever. Leave.

Begone! (Art by Khia)

Sexual abuse isn’t actually part of the Discourse we’re examining. Call those fuckers out and don’t let them back in. You’re doing good work by cleaning house.

Sometimes, you’ll come across a furry who decries the fact that their sexual abuser friends got “cancelled” by “cancel culture” and “social justice warriors”. These putzes ought to be loaded into a rocket and fired into the sun too.

Also: Kero the Wolf is guilty and people who still believe his innocence, or attempt to downplay the severity of his heinous acts, are doing a disservice to the entire fandom. (Or they’re also animal abusers, in which case, they can get yeeted too.)

Babyfurs

There is a very stark difference between babyfurs (people who mix AB/DL with furry) and pedophiles.

The former is a harmless kink that involves adults roleplaying.

The latter is a sexual disorder that leads to the victimization of children.

Whenever babyfurs come up in the Furry Twitter Discourse, what’s really happening is the anti-sex crowd is trying to hope you won’t realize these are two very different ideas, and that your well-deserved disgust for one will automatically translate into hatred for the other.

Don’t be fooled.

(Hey, it’s not my thing either, but if it’s safe and between consenting adults, who the fuck are either of us to judge?)

A Word on “Just Fantasy”

Apologists for artistic depictions of pedophilic and zoophilic acts will often try to defend themselves by insisting it’s “just fantasy” and isn’t hurting anyone because no one’s consent was violated.

While it’s true that research currently indicates that these kinds of pornography may not be correlated at all with sex crimes, and only the minority of sexual abuse is committed by a stranger, this is not an article discussing what should or should not be legal.

Take that up with the Justice system. I’m not interested in debating what the law “should” be.

The fact that this type of content is usually illegal, and taken very seriously by authorities (to the point of threatening our right to encrypt), is a premise for this discussion, not a conclusion.

And because it often is illegal (see: the Miller test), the furry fandom should not embrace it. Full stop.

I frankly don’t care what a therapist might advise someone with these attractions. That’s between them and their patients. Sexual abuse must not be tolerated, and possessing materials that depict sexual abuse (whether against animals or children) are legally perilous.

It’s also not the furry fandom’s job to be the forerunners of the debate about the social acceptability of art depicting child or animal exploitation fantasies. If that’s your cause, go find a new shield.

It’s not appropriate for anyone to expect a community that already struggles with unfair assumptions and connotations of sexuality to move before the rest of society on any issue even vaguely related to sex crimes.

Feral Art and Characters

Some artists have feral art styles (i.e. standing on four legs rather than two; no thumbs).

Feral characters with human sentience are still furry, even if you can superficially relate feral furry art to the kind of content that animal abusers might seek.

As always, there’s a reasonable litmus test available for judging this kind of content:

The Harkness test, made by BeakieHelmet.

Note: The Harkness Test wasn’t created by an academic institution and there is no peer-reviewed pedigree behind it, but it’s sufficient for our purposes. If you don’t like it, design a better one and get it peer-reviewed. Until then, we can continue to phone it in with the Harkness Test and not make perfect the enemy of good.

Neither pedophile (“cub”) nor bestiality/zoophilia art are okay, because they normalize sexual abuse. Cub art in particular is bad, because it has used by perpetrators to groom people into participating (usually as a victim, but sometimes as a co-conspirator).

Ban cub art. Ban artistic depictions of zoophilia.

But don’t extend the bans to encompass babyfur art (which is AB/DL, not underage characters) nor feral art (which is an art style, not actual animals being portrayed).

If you cannot distinguish cub from babyfur, you shouldn’t be leading any moral crusades on social media or cancelling people, because you’re going to inevitably harm a lot of innocent people if you do.

Same goes for feral/zoo.

What About Pokemon Fursonas (Pokesonas)?

Some furries argue that Pokemon-based fursonas–and any art thereof–is inherently non-furry and therefore any lewd art of their characters is gross and problematic. This warrants a closer look.

Many Pokemon are clearly at, or above, human intelligence (i.e. the psychic types). Furthermore, the fact that Meowth from the anime learned human speech and can directly translate what other Pokemon are saying implies that it is possible to communicate affirmative consent, in the framework of established lore.

Speaking of which: the canon lore for the Pokemon franchise confirms the existence of human-Pokemon marriage (source).

When you combine these observations, it’s pretty clear that Pokemon are generally capable the Harkness test, so these “Pokemon yiff is zoophilia” takes are either arguing for a special case (i.e. either a specific species of Pokemon lacks the sentience that the rest seem to, or the characters involved are violating boundaries), or they’re intentionally engaging in social manipulation to push an agenda.

Also, they’re fictitious creatures. Splitting hairs over this is really petty compared to the harm real people inflict on real animals.

The NSFW Feral Art Acceptability Matrix

If you’re in doubt about whether a piece of NSFW art passes the Harkness test, consult the following table (while being pessimistic; if you can’t tell whether a character is a feral fursona or a dumb animal, always assume the worst):

	Human	Anthro	Feral	Animal
Human	✔️	✔️	Ehhh*	❌
Anthro	✔️	✔️	✔️	❌
Feral	Ehhh*	✔️	✔️	❌
Animal	❌	❌	❌	Ehhh*

This table assumes informed, enthusiastic consent, between adults.
* It might pass the test but it’s still kinda weird for humans to be depicting it in art. Be very careful that you’re not producing material that inadvertently promotes sexual abuse and/or aids groomers.

Update (2020-06-28)

I’ve actually gotten a lot of grief from two camps over this section of the post.

One camp wants all feral art to be banned because of a “slippery slope” fallacy, and they believe my argument here doesn’t go far enough.

The other wants all feral art to be allowed because they believe “people can distinguish between fantasy and reality”, and believes my argument goes too far.

People who dig their heels in on extreme, opposite positions will never be made to agree. Neither this blog post nor a painstakingly-researched scientific study will sway their minds, and I have no desire to even try.

I am neither a puritanical moral crusader nor an apologist for sexual abuse. If you are, know now that I will not amend this post to further your agenda.

Consent is what ultimately matters, and since animals and children cannot consent, all art portraying either sexually is harmful.

But if the art doesn’t portray animals or children, it’s fair game (even if you or I personally dislike it). There are much bigger fish to fry than a (largely) harmless fantasy; what are your priorities?

Popufurs

Before I started this blog, I used to write articles on Medium. My most popular one tackled the topic of “popufurs” directly. Go read it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEJ3usS7bb4

Furries Over the Age of 30

One of the dumbest talking points that recurs on Furry Twitter is the “gay death” discourse, cheaply repackaged for furries. So you get a lot of dumb takes like this:

https://twitter.com/JamesCerulo/status/1349071850265972737

The entire concept of Gay Death is stupid, and has roots in the kind of vain heteronormativity that produces dumb memes like this one:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1371862131117801480

Here’s the simple solution to this age discourse whenever it comes up:

• You can be a furry at any age and it doesn’t fucking matter
• Underage furries shouldn’t be in adult spaces (but can certainly claim their own spaces, and that’s totally fine as long as it’s not being used solely to perpetuate the kind of puritanical bullshit that often drives LGBT youth to suicide; see above)
• The greater the gap between your age and another person’s, the more conscientious you should be about leading them on or taking advantage of them in any way

Let’s be real: We’re all nerdy weirdos and anyone who tries to treat the fandom like a high school popularity contest is totally missing the point of a fandom full of nerdy weirdos. Just stop.

---

If you’ve read this far, consider yourself fully briefed on the recurring topics in Furry Twitter discourse.

If another topic starts rearing its head often enough, I’ll either update this page or write a sequel article to cover the new badness.

https://twitter.com/ArcticSkyWolf/status/1349372061198778368

https://soatok.blog/2020/06/24/resolving-the-reoccurring-discourse-on-furry-twitter/

#antiFurryBullying #furry #FurryFandom #recurringTopics #SocialMedia #Twitter

The people afraid to show their peers or bosses my technical writing because it also contains furry art are some of the dumbest cowards in technology.

Considering the recent events at ApeFest, a competitive level of stupidity is quite impressive.

To be clear, the exhibited stupidity in question is their tendency to project their own sexual connotations onto furry art–even if said art isn’t sexual in nature in any meaningful sense of the word.

But then again, poetry can be sexual, so who knows?

Scandalous furry,
Why are you glitching like that?
Haiku are lewd too!
Art: AJ

The cowardice comes in with the fear of their peers or bosses judging them for *checks notes* the content and presentation that I wrote, and not them.

Which (if you think about it for any significant length of time) implies that they’re generally eager to take credit for other people’s work, but their selfishness was thwarted by a cute cartoon dhole doing something totally innocent.

Even sillier, there’s a small contingent on technical forums that are “concerned” about the growing prevalence of queer and furry identities in technical spaces (archived).

MarleyTanuki

MarleyTanuki

Even some old school hackers conveniently forget that alt.fan.furry was a thing before the Internet.

As frustratingly incompetent as these hot takes are, they pale in comparison to, by far, the biggest source of bad opinions about the furry fandom.

Credit: Tirrelous

The call is coming from inside the house.

Like Cats and Dogs

Last month, I wrote a blog post about Aural Alliance, which caused a menace in the furry music space to accuse me of “bad journalism” for not verbally crucifying the label’s creator (a good friend of mine) for having a failed business venture in the past, or taking credit for donating to their cause early on.

Twitter DM conversation.
Everyone I’ve talked to that has dealt with this particular person before responded with, “Yeah, this is typical Cassidy behavior.”

To which one must wonder, “Since when am I a journalist?”

I’ve never called myself a journalist. I’m a blogger and I don’t pretend to be anything more than that. I especially would never besmirch the work of real journalists by comparing it with my musings.

At times, I also wear the security researcher hat, but you’ll only hear about it when I’m publishing a vulnerability.

This is a personal blog. I will neither be censored nor subject to compelled speech. I have no moral or professional obligations to “both sides” of what amounts to a nontroversy.

Nobody has ever paid me to write anything here, and I will never accept any compensation for my writing.

Sure, I contributed to covering Aural Alliance’s up-front infrastructure costs when it was just an idea in Finn’s head. I’m not going to apologize for supporting artists. The Furry Fandom wouldn’t exist without artists.

This kind of behavior isn’t an isolated incident, unfortunately. A handful of furries have rage-quit tech groups I’m in because they found out I generously tipped artists that were under-charging for their work.

It bewilders me every time someone reacts this way. Do you not know the community you’re in?

The most intelligible pushback I’ve seen over the years is, “Well if everyone raises their prices, low-income furries will be pushed out of the market!”

Setting aside that art is a luxury, not a need for a moment, that’s not actually true.

There are so many artists, and they’re so decentralized, that no coherent price coordination effort is even possible. It’s worse than herding cats. Some may raise their prices by $5, others by $500. If furries were organized enough to coordinate something like this, then we’d have a tough time explaining why there are still abusers in the fandom.

Also, it costs very little to learn to draw, yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeoQx9hphBw

Oh, but I’m not done.

The demand for low-priced digital art incentivizes people to reach for theft enabled by large-scale computing (a.k.a. “AI” by its proponents).

A similar demand for cheap, high-quality fursuits (usually at the maker’s expense) will lead to a walmartization of the furry community.

If you listen to these hot takes long enough, you start to notice a pattern of short-sighted selfishness.

When you demand something of the furry community, and don’t think of the long-term consequences of your demands, you’re probably being an idiot. This is true even if it’s actually a good idea.

If me supporting artists somehow prices you out of commissioning your favorite artist, you still have other options: Learning to make your own, finding new artists, saving money, etc.

On the flipside, the artists you admire will suffer less due to money troubles. Fewer artists starving makes the world a more beautiful place.

Center of the Fediverse

If flame war and retoot count relieved desire
In the comment thread someone must have known
That the hottest takes truly leave us tired
‘Cause in the center of the fediverse
We are all alone

With apologies to Kamelot

If you’re on the Fediverse (e.g., Mastodon), and your instance uses a blocklist like TheBadSpace (TBS), you probably cannot see my posts on furry.engineer anymore.

This is because the people running TBS have erroneously decided that any criticism of its curators is anti-blackness.

If you want a biased but detailed (with receipts!) account of the conflicts that led up to furry.engineer‘s erroneous inclusion on their blocklist, Silver Eagle wrote about their experience with TBS, blocklist criticism, and receiving death threats from the friends of TBS curators.

(Spoiler: It was largely prompted by another predominantly LGBTQIA+ instance, tech.lgbt, being erroneously added to the same blocklist, which resulted in criticism of said blocklist curators.)

Be forewarned, though: Linking to Silver Eagle’s blog post was enough for TBS supporters to harass me and directly accuse me, personally, of anti-blackness, so don’t expect any degree of level-headed discussion from that crowd.

Art: CMYKat

What Can We Do About This?

If you cannot see my Fediverse posts anymore, and actually want to see them, message your instance moderators and suggest unsubscribing from TheBadSpace’s blocklist.

If they refuse, your only real recourse is to move to another instance. The great thing about the Fediverse is, you can just do that, and nobody can lock you in.

Personally, I plan on sticking on furry.engineer. I trust its moderators to not tolerate racist and/or fascist bullshit.

The baseless accusations of anti-blackness are, unsurprisingly, false.

Burnout Isn’t Inevitable

A few months ago, I quit a great job with an amazing team because the CEO decided that everyone has to return to working in the office, including people that were hired fully remote before the pandemic. This meant being forced to move more than 3,000 miles, or resigning. I’ve been told the legal term for such a move is “constructive dismissal.”

In hindsight, I was starting to burn out anyway, so leaving when I did was a great move for my mental health and life satisfaction.

Art: CMYKat

I’m an introvert. I have a finite social battery. Because my work was split across three different teams at the same company, I was a necessary participant in a lot of meetings.

More than 5 hours per day of meetings, as an individual contributor. Sometimes as many as 7 hours/day of them. I almost never had a quiet day, even after blocking one day every week so nobody would schedule any meetings and I could get productive work done.

If you’re interested in being a people manager, or have an extroverted personality, you’re probably unperturbed by this account. But I was absolutely miserable. My close friends started to worry if I was suffering from depression, because of how socially exhausted I was all the time.

I took a few weeks off between jobs. My new role doesn’t pointlessly encumber me with unnecessary meetings.

Every day, I feel the burnout symptoms leaving my mind. I feel challenged and stimulated in a good way. I’m learning new technologies and being productive. I’ve never spent more than 3 hours of any given day in a meeting.

Different people burn out in many different ways, for many different reasons.

In my experience, the consequences appear to be reversible if caught early enough. I don’t know if they would be if I held onto my old job for much longer.

The job market’s tough right now, but if you’re deeply unsatisfied with an aspect of your current job, prioritize yourself and make whatever change is necessary.

This doesn’t mean you have to switch jobs like I did, of course. It was a good move for me. Your mileage may vary.

Where’s The Cryptography?

https://youtu.be/4KNzdlc7ZcA?t=59

Somedays I feel like writing about technical topics. Other days, I feel like writing about unimportant or personal topics.

If you’re disappointed in this post, perhaps you also expect everything on this blog to be professionally useful?

Well, worry not, for you’re eligible for a full refund for the amount you paid to read it.

Art: CMYKat

Logging Off

This post has been a collection of unrelated topics on my mind over the past few months. There is one other thing, but I was unsure if it warranted a separate post of its own, or an addendum on this one. Since you’re reading this, you’ll know I ultimately settled on the latter.

I started this blog in 2020 because I thought having a personal blog where I talk about things that interest me (mainly the furry fandom and software security) would be fun. And I wanted to do it in a way that was fun for me.

“Having fun with it” has been the guiding principle of this blog for over 3 years. I never intended to do anything important or meaningful, that sort of happened by accident. I didn’t care about others being able to use my writing in a professional setting (hence, my scoffing at the very notion above).

Lately, posts have slowed to a crawl, because it’s not fun for me anymore. I have a lot of ideas I’d love to write about, but when it comes time to turn an idea into something tangible, I lose all inspiration.

So I’m not going to force it.

This will be the last post on this blog for a while. I recently tried to pick up fiction writing, but I’m not happy with anything I’ve been able to produce yet, so I won’t bore anyone with that garbage.

There are a lot of brilliant people that read my writing. Most of you are more than capable of picking up where I left off and starting your own blogs.

I encourage you to do so.

Have fun with it, too. Just remember, when it’s time to put the pen down and take a rest, don’t be stubborn and burn yourself out.

Happy hacking.

Header is a collage of art from AJ, CMYKat, Kyume, WeaselDumb, and a DEFCON Furs 2023 photo from Chevron.

https://soatok.blog/2023/11/17/this-would-be-more-professionally-useful-if-not-for-the-furry-art/

#fediverse #furries #furry #FurryFandom #furryMusic

Dhole Moments

2021-04-02 11:30:22

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

A few days ago, I wrote a personal blurb about my experience with Return-to-Office, Forced Relocation, and top-down Corporate Bullshit. This was a departure from my usual fare in two ways:

1. I talked about myself rather than focusing on other people or ideas I find neat.
2. I didn’t bother to edit it for clarity before pressing Publish.

I had figured that quick write-up would fill the void while I work on the more ambitious technical blog posts I have planned for the rest of 2023 (although realistically some will spill over into 2024).

And then it made the front page of Hacker News. It ended up on the top of several subreddits soon after.

Credit: AJ

Since then, I’ve probably read about 2,000 comments across both websites. If you follow me on the fediverse, you’ve probably seen some of my commentary about the particularly bad takes I’ve encountered.

And while I’m not going to address each and every thing that came up in that mess, I did notice a few themes and trends that I find worthy of further examination. Hence, this post.

My Blog is a Furry Blog First

This blog, Dhole Moments, is a blog where I write about things for the furry fandom, as my fursona.

Yes, I do have other interests and hobbies besides just being a furry. I have a modicum of expertise in some areas within cryptography and information security.

Too many people saw fit to complain about the furry art. Some of the reasons cited were:

• “It won’t be taken seriously by anyone with any authority to change RTO policy at any serious org [because of the furry art].”
• Falsely insisting that furry is inherently sexual.
• Claiming that furry art is “distracting”.

So let’s be clear about something:

I wrote a personal blog post on a furry blog for my predominantly furry audience in my usual furry style.

Someone else saw fit to submit it to news aggregator websites. Thousands of other people upvoted it, which placed it across your feed.

Then a bunch of uninvited guests get upset at the furry art and decided it was appropriate to tell me how I should write my own blog posts in order for them to be able to share them with their boss? Get fucked.

Art: Sophie

Like, how is that even supposed to make a lick of sense?

If I was at all concerned with being taken “seriously” by a tech company’s management, maybe I wouldn’t have written it here. I probably would’ve dropped it as an open letter under my human name and solicited signatures from my former coworkers or something.

Half the fucking point of doing what I do is to not take anything too seriously. Especially myself.

You’re not reading a programming blog that has furry art. You’re reading a furry blog that has programming on it.

Every time a rando complains, I’m simply going to make it gayer.

Made by MarleyTanuki

What Do You Even Do Here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4OvQIGDg4I

Most of the comments I read about my previous blog post can be sorted into two categories:

1. They never read past the title, and are therefore helpless
2. They fundamentally don’t understand what my job was

Normally, I’d be like, “OK cool, you don’t need to know what I even do for work”. Most of the time, everyone’s happier not knowing because they have their own problems to deal with.

The comments that spawned from this ignorance seemed to think I was just an easily replaceable cog soon to be obviated by “new grads”, or at risk of being obsoleted by the dreaded specter of “outsourcing”.

I can’t speak to a lot of the jobs the folks in the programming subreddit hold, but if anyone can do my job as well as I can, then they frankly deserve it–in part, because I was effectively on 3 different teams; each needing access to my cryptography and security expertise for different reasons.

Believe me when I say this: I hate bragging. I hate it because I can’t do it without writing about myself, which I also find grueling to do. I’ve missed out on speaking opportunities before because I blanked out on what to put down for the speaker bio. “I’m just me,” is the most I can eek out of my brain in most circumstances.

You cannot replace me with semgrep, or a small pizza party of haphazardly selected CompSci undergrads. I’ve looked at projects on the heels of major crypto/security consultancies and immediately found severe bugs they missed (although I usually just assume that’s due to timeboxing rather than skill). I have definite blind spots, even with cryptography, but the subjects I know, I’m damn good at.

When I was pushed out of my previous role by the RTO mandate, it caused visible pain for the teams I worked with, which rippled across the entire department. So many of my most senior colleagues told me they were thinking of leaving because of how I was treated.

And if it wasn’t clear from my previous post, I’m not happy with this outcome. These were people I respected and enjoyed working with. Everyone up to the vice president I reported through was excellent and tried everything to protect their remote employees.

Other Remarks

I had other things to talk about, but I already added an addendum to the original blog post to address the other misconceptions and weird reactions people had.

Header art by AJ.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/04/i-dont-care-if-strangers-can-take-me-seriously/

#furry #FurryFandom #HackerNews #InternetCulture #meta #Reddit

Dhole Moments

2023-10-02 07:31:48

I quit my job towards the end of last month.

When I started this blog, I told myself, “Don’t talk about work.” Since my employment is in the rear view mirror, I’m going to bend that rule for once. And most likely, only this one time.

Why? Since I wrote a whole series about how to get into tech for as close to $0 as possible without prior experience, I feel that omitting my feelings would be, on some level, dishonest.

Refusing Forced Relocation

I had been hired in 2019 for the cryptography team at a large tech company. I was hired as a 100% remote employee, with the understanding that I would work from my home in Florida.

Then a pandemic started to happen (which continues to be a mass-disabling event despite what many politicians proclaim).

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a lot of people who preferred to work in an office setting to sink-or-swim in a remote work environment.

In early 2020, you could be forgiven for imagining that this new arrangement was a temporary safety measure that we would adopt for a time, and then one day return to normal. By mid 2022, only people that cannot let go of their habits and traditions continued to believe that we’d ever return to the “normal” they knew in 2019.

As someone who had been working remote since 2014, as soon as the shift happened, many of my peers reached out to me for advice on how to be productive at home. This was an uncomfortable experience for many of them, and as someone who was comfortable in a fully virtual environment, I was happy to help.

By early 2021, I was considered to not only be a top performer, but also a critical expert for the cryptography organization. My time ended up split across three different teams, and I was still knocking my projects out of the park. But more importantly, junior employees felt comfortable approaching me with questions and our most distinguished engineers sought my insight on security and cryptography topics.

It became an inside joke of the cryptography organization, not to let me ever look at someone else’s source code on a Friday, because I would inevitably find at least one security issue, which would inevitably ruin someone’s weekend. I suppose the reasoning was that, if the source code in question belonged to a foundational software package, it carried the risk of paging the entire company as we tried to figure out how to mitigate the issue and upstream the fix.

(I never once got earnestly reprimanded for finding security bugs, of course.)

I can’t really go into detail about the sort of work I did. I don’t really want to name names, either. But I will say that I woke up every day excited and motivated. The problems were interesting, the people were wonderful, and there was an atmosphere of respect and collaboration.

Despite the sudden change in working environment for most of the cryptography organization in response to COVID-19, we were doing great work and cultivating the same healthy and productive work environment that everyone fondly remembered pre-pandemic.

Art: CMYKat

And then the company’s CEO decided to make an unceremonious, unilateral, top-down decision (based entirely on vibes from talking to other CEOs, rather than anything resembling facts, data, or logic):

Everyone must return to the office, and virtual employees must relocate. Exceptions would be few, far between, and required a C-level to sign off on it. Good luck getting an exception before your relocation decision deadline.

Hey, tech workers, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

To the credit of my former managers, they sprung this dilemma on me literally the day before I went to a hacker conference–a venue full of hiring managers and technical founders.

On Ultimatums

If I had to give only one bit of advice to anyone ever faced with an ultimatum from someone with power over them (be it an employer or abusive romantic partner), it would be:

Ultimately, never choose the one giving you an ultimatum.

Art: AJ_LovesDinos

If your employer tells you, “Move to an expensive city or resign,” your best move will be, in the end, to quit. Notice that I said, in the end.

It’s perfectly okay to pretend to comply to buy time while you line up a new gig somewhere else.

That’s what I did. Just don’t start selling your family home or looking at real estate listings, and definitely don’t accept any relocation assistance (since you’ll have to return it when you split).

Conversely, if you let these assholes exert their power over you, you dehumanize yourself in submission.

(Yes, you did just read those words on a blog written by a furry.)

If you take nothing else away from this post, always keep this in mind.

Art: MarleyTanuki

From Whence Was This Idiocy Inspired?

Nothing happens in a vacuum.

When more tech workers opted to earn their tech company salaries while living in cheaper cost-of-living houses, less tech worker money circulated to big city businesses.

This outflow of money does hurt the local economies of said cities, including the ones that big tech companies are headquartered in. In some cases, this pain has jeopardized a lot of the tax incentives that said companies enjoy.

That’s why we keep hearing about politicians praising the draconian way that the return-to-office policies are being enforced.

At the end of the day, incentives rule everything around us.

Companies have to kowtow to the government in order to reduce their tax bill (and continue pocketing record profits–which drive inflation–while their workers’ wages stagnate).

This outcome was incredibly obvious to everyone that was paying attention; it was just a matter of when, not if.

Signs of Things to Come

Do you know who was really paying attention? The top talent at most tech companies.

After I turned in my resignation, I received a much larger outpour of support from other very senior tech workers than I ever imagined.

Many of them admitted that they were actively looking for new roles; some of them for the first time in over a decade.

Many of them already have new gigs lined up, and were preparing to resign too. Some of those already have.

Others are preparing to refuse to comply with either demand, countering the companies’ ultimatums with one of their own: Shut up or fire me.

What I took from these messages is this: What tech companies are doing is complete bullshit, and everyone knows it, and nobody is happy about it.

With all this in mind, I’d like to issue a prediction for how this return-to-office with forced relocation will play out, should companies’ leaders double down on their draconian nature.

My Prediction

Every company that issued forced relocation ultimatums to their pre-pandemic remote workers will not only lose most (if not all) their top talent in the next year, but they will struggle to hire for at least the coming decade.

The bridge has been burnt, and the well has been poisoned.

Trust arrives on foot, but leaves on horseback.

Dutch proverb

The companies that issued these ultimatums are not stupid. They had to know that some percentage of their core staff would leave over their forced relocation mandates. Many described it as a “soft layoff” tactic.

But I don’t think they appreciate the breadth or depth of the burn they’ve inflicted. Even if they can keep their ships from sinking, the wound will fester and their culture will not easily recover. This will lead to even more brain drain.

Who could blame anyone for leaving when that happens?

Unfortunately, there is a class of people that work in tech that will bear the brunt of the ensuing corporate abuse: H-1B visa employees, whose immigration status is predicated on their ongoing employment. Their ability to hop from abusive companies onto lifeboats is, on the best of days, limited.

And that? Well, that’s going to get ugly.

There’s still time for these companies to slam the brakes on their unmitigated disaster of failed leadership before it collapses the whole enterprise.

If I were a betting dhole, I wouldn’t bet money on most of them doing that.

Their incentives aren’t aligned that way yet, and when they finally are, it will be far too late.

Toward New Opportunities

As for me, I’m enjoying some well-earned downtime before I start my new remote job.

I wasn’t foolish enough to uproot my life and everyone I love at some distant corporate asshole’s whims, but I also wasn’t impulsive enough to jump ship without a plan.

That’s as much as I feel comfortable saying about myself on here.

If you’re facing a similar dilemma, just know that you’re not alone. Savvy companies will be taking advantage of your current employer’s weakness to pan for gold, so to speak.

You are not trapped. Your life is your own to live. Choose wisely.

Addendum

After I posted this, it made the front page of Hacker News and was subsequently posted in quite a few places. After reading some of the comments, I realize a few subtleties in my word choice didn’t come across, so I’d like to clarify them.

When I say “RTO is bullshit”, I don’t mean “office work is bullshit” or anything negative about people that prefer in-person office work. I mean “the forced relocation implementation of transitioning a whole company to never-remote (a.k.a. RTO) is bullshit”.

If working in an office is better for you, rock on. I don’t have any issue with that. The bullshit is the actions taken by company’s leadership teams in absence of (or often in spite of) hard data on remote work versus in-person work. The bullshit is changing remote worker’s employment agreements without their consent and threatening “voluntary resignation” as the only alternative (even though that’s pretty obviously constructive dismissal).

When I discussed ultimatums above, I’m specifically referring to actual ultimatums, not colloquial understandings of the word. If you can talk with the person and negotiate with them, it’s not a goddamn ultimatum. What I was faced with was an actual ultimatum: Comply or suffer. I chose freedom.

Hope that helps.

CMYKat made this, I edited the text

Regarding some of the other comments, I come from the “I work to live” mindset, not the “I live to work” mindset. My opinions won’t resonate with everyone. That’s okay!

Update: I wrote a follow-up to this post to address a lot of bad comments I saw on HN and Reddit.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/02/return-to-office-is-bullshit-and-everyone-knows-it/

#business #businessEthics #forcedRelocation #returnToOffice #Society #techIndustry #Technology #ultimatums #work

A frequent source of confusion in the furry fandom is about commission pricing for furry art.

This confusion is often driven by (usually younger) furries demanding free or severely cheap art from artists, and the aftermath of such exchanges. There’s a reason @SpicyFurryTakes posts so frequently.

In the interest of not adding to the confusion, I’d like to offer a simple algorithm for artists to use for their standard commission prices, and then some guidelines for artists and commissioners to make the art commissioning experience better for everyone.

As my goal here is to simplify, I will be taking liberties and eschewing a lot of the economic details. If you feel that I made a mistake but aren’t sure because I’m not showing my work, feel free to leave a comment.

Original art by Khia, poorly edited by myself.

Commission Pricing For Artists

If you’re an artist reading this, you should almost certainly raise your rates.

Furry artists in particular are notorious for undercharging for all their time and hard work. We’re talking single-digit percentages of what industry professionals charge for roughly equivalent quality.

And then when one encounters a financial emergency, they desperately scramble to take on a lot more work just to pay for whatever life event happened. If the artist hadn’t been leaving so much money on the table with their commissioners, they probably wouldn’t need to do emergency commissions in the first place–let alone endure the mental toll of delivering on them.

It’s tragic.

If you’re not sure how much you should charge at all, I recommend the following algorithm:

1. Calculate your floor.
2. Increase your rates.
3. Are you able to consistently fill your commission slots?
   
   • Yes -> Go to step 2 above.
   • No -> Be patient.

   
   

Calculating Your Floor

Art by Swizz.

First, benchmark how long it takes you to complete a typical item on your price list. For example, a sketch of one character might take N hours to complete on average (with variance granted for complex character details).

Next, decide on a fair hourly rate for your work as a professional.

Don’t undersell yourself! For example, your hourly rate should never be less than $24 per hour (in 2020 dollars), in the United States. This number is based on what the federal minimum wage should be, if it was pinned to productivity. If that seems too high for you, don’t go below $15.

Whatever number you landed on, immediately double it. Roughly half of your income will be eaten by taxes (income taxes–including state income taxes if applicable–plus payroll taxes since you’re self-employed as an artist), unless your tax accountant tells you otherwise.

Now that you have a number in mind, you’re going to want to go through the rest of your price list and make a mental note of how many hours each item will take you to complete.

For example: If a complete illustration of one character with a detailed background takes you 8 hours, and each additional character takes an additional 2 hours, you can setup your pricing as follows:

where is the number of additional characters beyond the first one, is your minimum hourly rate, and is the price of a commission.

If you decided , then your price list entry for this type of commission might look like this:

• $400 + $100 per additional character

You should do this for every item on your commission price list.

Increase Your Rates

Once you have a price list figured out, you will want to occasionally increase your prices.

Art by Khia.

When To Increase Your Commission Prices

Generally: If you’re utilizing 100% of your allocated time for art, it’s time to increase your rates. This means you have sufficient demand to justify a price increase.

If you’ve allocated 40 hours of your time per week for commission work, and you’re consistently allocating all 40 of those hours, it’s time to increase your rates.

(This logic also applies to commission “slots”, but not all slots are equal. Use your best judgment here.)

How to Increase Your Prices

There are different schools of thought on pricing strategies. As a computer programmer, my generally recommended strategy is similar to a git bisect:

1. Double your prices.
2. Are you able to fill at least 50% of your commission time allocation at the new prices? (Let’s call your old price N, and your new price 2N.)
   
   • No: Go exactly halfway between the old prices and the new prices (1.5N).
   • Yes: Are you able to consistently fill 100%?
     
     • Yes: Go back to step 1. You haven’t doubled them enough.
     • No: You may have found your prices, but don’t bail out just yet.
       You know that 2N yields between 50% and 100% utilization. If you dropped down to 1.5N, you’d very likely see 100% utilization, so your ideal rate is probably somewhere between 1.5N and 2N.

       So try 1.75N.

       If you’re below 50%, you need to go down (1.625N). If you hit 100%, you know you need to go up (1.875N).

       Recursively iterate this process, increasing half as much as the previous step.

       Keep this up until the difference between this step and the next step is smaller than some threshold (e.g. $5) or you’re at a comfortable utilization between 50% and 99%.

     
     

   
   

Working Through An Example

Let’s say you were charging $50 for sketches, $150 for lined art, and $300 for full colored illustrations, and your commission queue is always filled.

First, double your prices (sketches: $50 -> $100, line art: $150 -> $300, full colored illustrations: $300 -> $600).

If your next batch of commissions gets filled to 100%: double them again (sketches are $200, line art is $600, full illustrations are $1200). Keep doing this until you’re not at 100% utilization.

If, after you’ve finished a cycle of doubling, your next batch of commissions is between 50% and 100% utilization, sit tight at your current rate. Demand for your art will increase as you grow your audience, and you’ll find yourself needing to start the process over with again.

However, if you’re at below 50% utilization, it’s time to step halfway between the old and the new. If going from the initial ($50, $150, $300) to the new ($100, $300, $600) dropped demand to below 50%, your new prices would be ($75, $225, $450). If you’re still below 50%, you can keep decreasing it further.

(Feel free to round these numbers, but err on rounding them up.)

If you started at 100% utilization, this process will end up at some price greater than your starting point.

Note:

Every time I’ve said “your prices” above, what I’m talking about are your standard rates, not what you’re offering on a particular day.

You should absolutely feel entitled to offer discounts, sales, and special deals whenever it suits you.

Deeper Analysis

Computer science majors will recognize this strategy as approximately a binary search algorithm.

A true binary search would zero in on your 100% utilization prices if you were capable of going above 100% utilization, but I wrote this with the assumption that 100% utilization is a market signal that you need to raise your rates. This is the guideline we’re using, because I’m assuming you cannot go above 100%. (That’s how you get burn-out!)

If you replace 100% utilization in the “true” binary search algorithm with another target percentage (say: 75%, and you bail out when you’re within 2.5% of this value), you will zero in on prices that meet your threshold.

The reason we’re increasing/decreasing by powers of 2 with each recursive iteration is that it’s the most efficient algorithm available.

A more naive approach would be to, instead of going from 2N down to 1.5N, decreasing by 0.1N until you hit your goal.

If you’re going from $100 and trying to hit a 90% utilization, and the magic number that hits that number is $147, the comparative strategies might look like this:

• $100 -> $200, 60%
• $200 -> $150, 88%
• $150 -> $125, 100%
• $125 -> $137, 100%
• $137 -> $144, 100%
• $144 -> $147, 90%

• $100 -> $200, 60%
• $200 -> $190, 65%
• $190 -> $180, 70%
• $180 -> $170, 76%
• $170 -> $160, 82%
• $160 -> $150, 88%
• $150 -> $140, 94%
  backtrack, smaller increments
• $140 -> $149, 88%
• $149 -> $148, 89%
• $148 -> $147, 90%

The efficiency here is important: More price changes in a short time interval can make customers nervous.

In the example above, if 88% was acceptable, you could have stopped at $150. That would have been two total operations for the binary search and six for the gradual step-down approach.

In all but the most contrived scenarios, you want to use a binary search strategy.

Consider Hourly Commission Rates

Price lists have a tendency to get complicated, especially when complex character details (your fursona is a wolf, but with wings!) enter the mix.

One alternative to this is, after applying the price algorithm above, simply express your prices in terms of how much time a piece of art typically takes and advertise your standard rate.

Then your commissioners will know they’re hiring you for e.g. $50/hour for a project that typically takes N hours.

Improving the Furry Art Commission Experience

Guidelines for Artists

Communicate with your commissioners. If you’re not using something like Trello to track your projects, you should send them updates more than you’d normally feel comfortable. The more complex the work, the more updates you should send.

Dates Rule Everything Around Me. We understand that you have multiple projects–often running in parallel–that need to be completed to keep your clients happy. We know we’re not the only iron in your fire. Give estimate completion dates as soon as you can. If you can’t give a completion date, give an estimated date for a date. (I’m serious. This will virtually eliminate commissioner anxiety.)

Be transparent. If you need more time to get a piece done, tell your commissioners as soon as you can. Shit happens. We all get sick. We all have unproductive days/weeks. Anyone who doesn’t understand this is someone you probably want to decline accepting work from in the future.

Guidelines for Commissioners

Be polite. It’s difficult to understate how important basic manners are, even moreso when nobody seems to practice them.

https://twitter.com/silvixenart/status/1316459489076211712

Don’t bitch about prices. If you can’t afford their rates, you have three choices: Save up money for this luxury expense, move onto another artist, or learn to make it yourself.

n.b. This includes telling artists they should charge more! If you’re going to do that, your words must be accompanied by a generous tip. If they aren’t, you’re an asshole.

Updates are your opportunity to request changes. If you just say, “It’s coming along great, thanks for the update!” then you’re agreeing with the current direction of their work.

If the artist forgot an important detail (e.g. a marking on your fursona), the sooner you tell them, the sooner they can correct it. You aren’t being rude by informing them (unless you word it rudely; use good judgment!).

Credit your artists. Always. Link to their account too, if reasonably practical.

A lot of an artists’ income is the consequence of their previous commissioners showcasing their work. Word of mouth is the best form of advertising most can afford.

If you credit your artists, you’ll be helping them stay afloat until you decide to commission them again in the future.

Questions and Answers

Art by Khia.

I’ve received a bit of feedback since I first published this article from various sources (Reddit, forum posts in other languages that I can only hope Google Translate got right, etc.) and I thought I’d address some of your questions and concerns here.

“It takes me forever to get art done. Should I bill for my egregiously slow time?”

There are three reasons I’m aware of that could lead an artist to have a glacial work pace.

1. They have insufficient art practice
2. Their techniques and strategies aren’t time-efficient
3. They live with some sort of disability

For the first two reasons, the solution is simply to practice more, try different techniques, and learn from other artists so you can get your work pace fast enough to earn a living from art. It’s okay if you’re still somewhat slower than your peers, but until you’re able to consistently produce art at a reasonable rate, you’re probably not ready to do art professionally (and that’s okay, not everyone has to be).

For the last one, I don’t have any useful advice. I don’t know your disability and am unqualified to advise you on what to do to overcome the challenges you face as an artist because of it. The advice on this page is intentionally very generalized and I’m sorry it won’t help you.

“My clientele only make poverty wages. How can I raise my rates without betraying them?”

I mean this in the gentlest way possible: If you’re in this situation, you do not have clients, you have friends. Friends are an incredibly good thing to have. Humanity overall severely underestimates the importance of good friendships, especially in America.

But if you’re trying to earn your living through art, you have to distinguish between the two. Clients are people who–whether through income or saving up–can afford to pay you a livable wage for your time as an artist.

That isn’t to say that you can’t continue to give your friends a discount, or even free art. They’re your friends, it’s your time. Do what you will. I mentioned this above. But if you’re doing real work, you should be getting paid a real livable wage.

Your friends might even be able to help you find clients that are able and willing to pay for your time. Don’t write them off or treat them as second-class.

“This advice doesn’t apply to me because my customer base is small, or nonexistent. What now?”

There are a lot of things you can do to change this fact, but I’m not qualified to speak competently to them. (If I knew the secret to a larger social media following, don’t you think I’d have used it for myself?)

Ask artists in your community for help and advice. Some might even help increase your follower counts so you can acquire more business.

“How do I find furries with sufficient disposable income to pay a livable wage?”

The truer but non-helpful answer is, “You don’t, they’ll find you.”

A lot of furries that work in tech fit the bill, but not all of them. Additionally, some well-off furries are righteous assholes and you really don’t want to deal with their bullshit.

The best advice I can offer here is:

1. Be active on social media.
2. Be kind to people on social media.
3. Don’t be afraid of self-promotion on your own feed.

Everything else boils down to patience and luck.

“I’m not an American, so what should I do differently?”

There are two schools of thought here.

• On one paw, you can localize your prices to the cost of living for your area. This will ensure your needs are met and you can comfortably continue to work as an artist in relative comfort.
• On the other paw, you could recognize that the Internet is an international marketplace and you are, at least in part, competing globally for clients. Many clients will come from wealthy countries and have the income or savings to facilitate large commissions, and therefore you can earn more money for the same work.

Use which ever you like better as your guiding light. I’m not a dictator, and even if I was, I have no mechanism to force you either way.

“What if I don’t want to make a livable wage as a furry artist, and just want to make art for other furries as a hobby?”

Why’d you click the link to this article?

“What would an increased bill rate look like for an artist that followed this advice?”

See this post for a detailed breakdown of furry fandom art spending, accompanied by an analysis based on an arbitrary rate at $50/hour and utilization at 30 hours per week. (Spoiler: It ends up at about $80,000/year.)

“This pricing advice isn’t specific to furry artists, it’s general pricing advice for freelancers in any industry!”

Ding ding ding!
(Art by Khia)

It’s true, I didn’t invent these tactics or pull them out of a magic hat. If you’re trying to make it in the world as a professional, price your work like a professional.

From what I can gather: Roughly half of the people that read this blog post picked up on this nuance immediately. Y’all are pretty sharp.

https://soatok.blog/2020/10/16/commission-prices-for-furries-and-artists/

#artists #commissions #furry #furryArtists #FurryFandom #pricing

Dhole Moments

2020-10-22 14:13:15

If living through the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything–and it surely hasn’t–it would be the importance of friendship and community to our physical and emotional well-being.

For more on the subject of People Who Ought to Know Better Not Learning the Obvious Lessons from Misfortune, one needs look no further than social media.

Popularity

One of the reoccurring topics of the Discourse on Furry Twitter is those gosh-darned popufurs–loosely defined as “anyone with a higher follower account than you”.

I’ve written an analysis post back when I posted on Medium that covered friendship and popufurs, which inspired Stormi to create a YouTube video about the topic:

https://youtu.be/sEJ3usS7bb4

I’ve never experienced popularity, but I’ve been close personal friends with a few people who do, and I’ve witnessed the fallout of parasocial relationships. Archantael did a really good video on that subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXGyKaOEz8I

Loneliness

One of the most dangerous falsehoods that too many furries believe about popularity is that you can’t be popular and lonely at the same time.

Loneliness was already an epidemic before COVID-19, and the prolonged social isolation has led to a lot of relationship strain, to say the least.

In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of long-term, loving relationships end abruptly. We’ve seen people who were coping with mental health issues suddenly succumb to them. Tempers hasten. Patience shorten. It’s been a royal clusterfuck, and at least in America, there’s no end to it in sight.

Friendship

I think a big problem that rarely gets talked about is that our society is plagued by weird beliefs about what friendship is or ought to be.

The “Friend Zone” Myth

One of the most deplorable myths about friendship is the so-called “friend zone”. The story goes something like this:

• When you meet someone, they’re a stranger. No arguments there.
• Once you and them start to gain familiarity, they become an acquaintance.
• After you’ve spent some time as an acquaintance, they become a friend.
• At this point, if your gender identities and sexual orientations are compatible, you’re expected to move onto some sort of romantic interest–be it a friendship “with benefits”, romantic partner, or something in-between.
• Once you’ve courted a number of flings, you progress towards a higher caliber of relationship. Namely: Marriage.

The reasoning goes: If you befriend a potential romantic partner, and remain friends, you’re somehow stuck on a less valuable step than what you should desire, and therefore should feel bad about it.

That’s what people say when they accuse someone of being in the “friend zone” by another person.

This mental model of viewing relationships is just dripping with the sort of hetero-normative patriarchy that feminists famously oppose, but not enough people actually listen to long enough to realize they also have your best interests in heart when they levy their critiques.

The belief in the Friend Zone leads to the cheapening of friendships in pursuit of sexual and romantic fulfillment. It’s inherently exclusionary to platonic expressions of love, asexuality, and polyamory.

Just say “no” to the entire concept of a Friend Zone.

Toxic Positivity

Life sometimes sucks.

Sometimes, the only way to cope with the suckage of life is to commiserate to your friends.

A good friend will listen, empathize with your experiences, and maybe even share their own. Friendship is rooted in shared vulnerability and appreciation.

But sometimes you encounter one of the Toxic Positivity proponents. “You’re bringing me down.” “Why are you depressed all the time?” We’ve heard it all before.

But toxic positivity is often more subtle than that. I’ll give you an example:

A good friend will tell you when you’re being an asshole, and try to talk you down from making foolish mistakes that will only hurt your future happiness.

Sometimes these conversations are tense and stressful. Sometimes you have to seem cruel to be kind. People are complicated.

And while I can understand not wanting to deal with high levels of stress all the damn time, there comes a time when you have to deal with the problems in front of you. Negative peace leads to a net negative.

Social Climbing and Disposable Friends

This one’s straight out of the “Actions Speak Louder Than Words” genre, and often follows from toxic positivity.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see where that goes. (Art by Khia.)

Some people try to walk the social graph in order to position themselves near popular members of the community so they might benefit from others’ popularity.

Some people treat their friends as disposable and temporary, moving from group to group over the years, rather than face accountability for their own terrible behavior.

Some people do both of those things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI0lfO9_BAc

Happiness

Friendship and community are essential for humans to be happy. This is the conclusion of The Happiness Hypothesis.

Happiness does not come from within. It’s not something that you can summon into existence through sheer force of will.

Happiness does not come from without. It’s not a lost treasure that you have to go forth and dig up somewhere.

Happiness comes from in-between; from the strong and weak bonds in our lives. It’s our sense of closeness and vulnerability to others within our close friendships and broader communities that lead to happiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q1dgn_C0AU

Asking Ourselves “Why?”

Why do people pursue romance at the expense of friendships?

Why do people construct filter bubbles based on superficial positivity?

Why do people try to use others as stepping stones towards their ambitions or treat their friendships as disposable and temporary?

Why do we as a social species do all of this when we need friendships and communal bonds to be happy?

I think a lot of the time, the answer boils down to “ego”.

Ego

We as a species pay lip-service to friendship when it serves our self-interest, but discard its importance the second friendship becomes inconvenient.

Our ego–especially if we practice monogamous relationships–dictate that the only way to be “successful” in sex and love is to be in a committed relationship and friendship is just a stepping stone on the way to the real goal.

Our ego gets bruised when our friends show us tough love by speaking the truth.

Our ego drives us to strive for bigger numbers and stronger dopamine hits, even if it means using and abusing people along the way.

That’s what I take it to mean when Buddhists say that desire and ignorance lie at the root of suffering.

We want things, and we don’t know why we want them, but we do. And we will destroy ourselves and everyone we profess to love in pursuit of it. We’ll even destroy the habitability of our only planet in service to these desires.

Or we could, simply, not do that. If there’s one thing our ego loves, it’s to be reminded that we have a choice. That we’re in control.

As a hacker, exploiting a mechanism to undermine its normal goals is something I find a lot of beauty in. Hijacking the self-destructive nature of your own ego in service of your better nature is a masterpiece.

Choice

You are the protagonist of your own story. You can’t control what the universe throws as you, but you do get to decide what it means for you. Why not choose a better lesson?

And that’s usually enough to lead us to making better decisions, showing greater affection and appreciation for the people in our lives, and being more capable at coping with the endless hellscape that is other, often shitty, people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSM3Uml4Xpo

Soatok’s Friends

I’m fortunate to know a lot of excellent people, both within and without the furry fandom. Most of my closest friends don’t have enormous social media followings. Some of my friends do!

I believe it’s important for friendships to be genuine and not transactional.

Belmont / Doomalorian

My oldest friend recently made a fursona, so he can be more involved with my participation in the furry fandom.

Most of you don’t know him yet, but if you think I’m cool, you’ll almost certainly like him too. We’ve been friends for over 12 years and live together.

His furry account is @BelmontLion.

Art by INIGO.

He also has a non-fandom account, @Doomalorian, which is also his Twitch.tv channel.

https://twitter.com/Doomalorian

In the future, I’ll be picking up Twitch streaming again. I’ll probably play a bunch of games with my friends and generally just have a lot of fun with it. If that sort of thing interests you, stop by his streams and maybe give him a follow.

https://soatok.blog/2020/10/22/nearly-everyone-underestimates-the-importance-of-good-friendships/

#friends #friendship #furries #furry #FurryFandom #Society

Update (2020-04-29): Twitter has fixed their oversight.

{ "errors": [{ "code": 356, "message": "preferences.gender_preferences.gender_override: Must provide a non-empty custom value 30 characters or less in length." }]}

Anyone who set their custom gender to a long volume of text, should still have it set to a long volume of text.

The original article follows after the separator.

I was recently made aware of a change to Twitter, which exposes a new Gender field. If you’ve never specified your gender before, they guessed what it was (which is a really shitty thing to do, especially towards trans folks!).

https://twitter.com/leemandelo/status/1254179716451438592

Slightly annoyed, I went to go see what Twitter thinks my gender is.

Curses! They know I’m a guy. This won’t do at all.

But what’s this? An “Add your gender” option?

That’s at least, something, I guess? Defaulting to [whatever the algorithm guesses] is sucky, but at least nonbinary folks can still self-identify however they want.

But 30 characters isn’t a lot. What if I want to drop in, say, 68 characters? Do I need to do some crazy Unicode fuckery to pull that off?

Nope, Inspect Element + set maxlength="255" and now Twitter thinks my gender is the EICAR test file. Wonderful!

Which means: If someone downloads my Twitter data without my consent onto a workstation running antivirus software, the file will delete itself and all will be right in the marketing world.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1254635753319079937

(Okay but seriously, a lot of downstream systemic failures would have to exist for any damage to occur from me deciding to self-identify to marketers this way.)

Lessons to Learn

Twitter enforced a maxlength of 30 in the HTML element of the “Add your gender” text input, but they didn’t enforce this requirement server-side. The takeaway here is pretty obvious.

Also, don’t try to automatically[b] guess people’s gender at scale[/b]. It’s insulting when you get it wrong, and it’s creepy when you get it right.

(This sticker is tongue-in-cheek.)

What’s the Upper Limit for the Field?

I don’t know, but this indicates it has a larger upper bound than a tweet.

https://twitter.com/txlon5/status/1254648412261228545

If anyone has success dropping an entire thesis on gender identity and culture in the Gender field, let me know.

Update: The Best Genders

Everyone is having a lot of fun with the Gender field. Here’s some of the best tweets I’ve seen since publishing this stupid bug.

https://twitter.com/TecraFox/status/1254653500887310337

https://twitter.com/everlasting1der/status/1254652388713082880

https://twitter.com/hedgehog_emoji/status/1254650551473594368

https://twitter.com/Neybulot/status/1254659048886210563

A fox in Furry Technologists suggested building genderfs, which is a lot like redditfs but hoists the entire filesystem into the Gender field.

While I have your attention, trans rights are human rights and biology disagrees with the simple notion of “two sexes”. Thank you and good night.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/27/why-server-side-input-validation-matters/

#furry #infosec #inputValidation #LGBTQIA_ #security #softwareDevelopment #Twitter

Dhole Moments

2020-04-27 05:22:30

Update (2020-04-29): Twitter has fixed their oversight.

{ "errors": [{ "code": 356, "message": "preferences.gender_preferences.gender_override: Must provide a non-empty custom value 30 characters or less in length." }]}

Anyone who set their custom gender to a long volume of text, should still have it set to a long volume of text.

The original article follows after the separator.

---

I was recently made aware of a change to Twitter, which exposes a new Gender field. If you’ve never specified your gender before, they guessed what it was (which is a really shitty thing to do, especially towards trans folks!).

https://twitter.com/leemandelo/status/1254179716451438592

Slightly annoyed, I went to go see what Twitter thinks my gender is.

Curses! They know I’m a guy. This won’t do at all.

But what’s this? An “Add your gender” option?

That’s at least, something, I guess? Defaulting to [whatever the algorithm guesses] is sucky, but at least nonbinary folks can still self-identify however they want.

But 30 characters isn’t a lot. What if I want to drop in, say, 68 characters? Do I need to do some crazy Unicode fuckery to pull that off?

Nope, Inspect Element + set maxlength="255" and now Twitter thinks my gender is the EICAR test file. Wonderful!

Which means: If someone downloads my Twitter data without my consent onto a workstation running antivirus software, the file will delete itself and all will be right in the marketing world.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1254635753319079937

(Okay but seriously, a lot of downstream systemic failures would have to exist for any damage to occur from me deciding to self-identify to marketers this way.)

Lessons to Learn

Twitter enforced a maxlength of 30 in the HTML element of the “Add your gender” text input, but they didn’t enforce this requirement server-side. The takeaway here is pretty obvious.

Also, don’t try to automatically[b] guess people’s gender at scale[/b]. It’s insulting when you get it wrong, and it’s creepy when you get it right.

(This sticker is tongue-in-cheek.)

What’s the Upper Limit for the Field?

I don’t know, but this indicates it has a larger upper bound than a tweet.

https://twitter.com/txlon5/status/1254648412261228545

If anyone has success dropping an entire thesis on gender identity and culture in the Gender field, let me know.

Update: The Best Genders

Everyone is having a lot of fun with the Gender field. Here’s some of the best tweets I’ve seen since publishing this stupid bug.

https://twitter.com/TecraFox/status/1254653500887310337

https://twitter.com/everlasting1der/status/1254652388713082880

https://twitter.com/hedgehog_emoji/status/1254650551473594368

https://twitter.com/Neybulot/status/1254659048886210563

A fox in Furry Technologists suggested building genderfs, which is a lot like redditfs but hoists the entire filesystem into the Gender field.

While I have your attention, trans rights are human rights and biology disagrees with the simple notion of “two sexes”. Thank you and good night.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/27/why-server-side-input-validation-matters/

#furry #infosec #inputValidation #LGBTQIA_ #security #softwareDevelopment #Twitter

Dhole Moments is not a music blog. I will not pretend to be an expert on music, music theory, or music appreciation.

But it goes even further than that: I am so untalented at music that I exert a vacuum pressure on musicians who cross my path at furry conventions.

The end result of this vacuum force looks like this, naturally.
Art: CMYKat

Regular readers of my blog would expect that, should I ever discuss any topic that intersects with computer audio, it would probably involve leaking the contents of encrypted voice chats through, like, compression oracles or something.

Not today, though.

Instead, I’d like to introduce everyone to the Aural Alliance, a furry music label that aims to disrupt the perverted economics of the music industry.

What is the Aural Alliance?

To answer this question, you first need to have a vague sense of how traditional music labels and music industry contracts work: The music industry uses predatory “advances” and crooked accounting to keep artists in debt.

This predatory behavior isn’t exclusively weaponized against black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPoC) artists; it’s used against queer and disabled artists too.

Unless you have star power, you’ll take what you can get, because there are dozens of hungry upstarts ready to seize your opportunity if you hesitate to take it. Chase the carrot, mind the stick.

The Aural Alliance is a rejection of this traditional dynamic.

The Aural Alliance funding pipeline (source)

Traditional music labels will lend you money to cover the production costs of a musical work. Music sales will then be used to pay off your loan before you ever see a dime.

Aural Alliance straight up distributes 60% of its income to all artists, equally, and uses the remaining 40% to cover operations.

https://twitter.com/AuralAlliance/status/1698822020660617217

Why You Should Care About This

Unlike many bloggers, it’s difficult for me to classify my regular audience with one simple label or categorization.

Dhole Moments is a furry blog, sure, but not everyone who reads my writing is a furry. I write about computers, security, and cryptography, yes, but not everyone who reads my blog is particularly interested in those topics either.

It might be tempting to read about a furry music label built on socialist principles, shrug, and say, “So what? I’m not a fan of furry musicians or socialism. Where’s your post about key management you promised, dhole?!”

To understand the impact and significance of the Aural Alliance, some knowledge on current events and technology culture is needed.

AJ

The Enshittification of Music Sales

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe a phenomenon that happens to online platforms. The cycle goes like this:

A new platform is operated at a loss, to gain users. This is usually the Venture Capital funding stage of a “start-up”.

Then once they have enough critical mass to exploit the Network Effect, they sell the startup to the public stock market.

This sale is eventually followed by a shift in priority, where they take away the parts of the platform that users loved (usually following the boiling frog strategy), in order to make it a better deal for their new owners.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Cory Doctorow

That’s not the only trick up the sleeves of wealthy business interests.

Enter, Bandcamp

Last year, Epic Games acquired Bandcamp: The only music distribution platform that was fair to indie artists.

Last month, Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing service that basically acts as a vampiric middleman: Squeezing money from sellers and buyers alike while providing nothing of value. Songtradr is the outcome of an economist thought experiment, “What if landlords existed for our ear drums?”

Yesterday, Songtradr laid off a significant amount of Bandcamp’s staff.

https://twitter.com/deerhoof/status/1713978947468505133

Songtradr’s business model is the end goal of every Silicon Valley start-up that receives VC funding: Capture near-monopoly power through technology and the network effect, then become a middleman that only exists to add a transaction fee while a tangled web of contractors that compete with each other actually fulfill the services rendered. And they want to do this while driving positive exponential year-over-year growth, to keep investors happy.

Time and again, this happens to industries that affect millions of peoples’ lives, and we’re all the worse for it.

Any company that calls themselves “Uber for ___” is confessing to this business model. Art by AJ.

Exit, Bandcamp

The enshittification of Bandcamp is well underway by its new masters. Independent musicians the world over would benefit greatly from a good alternative.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recommendation to offer today.

Bandcamp had too much goodwill with its community for a serious competitor to emerge from the noise floor. The Internet got complacent.

In another business vertical, Itch.io currently has a similar vibe with the indie game dev community: It has fostered tremendous goodwill and treats creators fairly.

In 2021, itch.io properties were added to the Epic Games Store launcher. Thus far, it has remained undisturbed. Who knows how long this will hold out?

(Especially considering the abundance of LGBTQIA+ content hosted on itch.io.)

Credit: CMYKat

Opposition and Hope

Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification, has proposed what he calls an audacious plan to halt it, and throw its effects in reverse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

Cryptography luminary Phil Rogaway was asked to deliver a keynote at NIST’s Third Workshop on Block Cipher Modes of Operation. (Slides available now, recording to be available soon. I will share it here when I have a link to it.)

Rather than focus too much on OCB or his other contributions to computer science, he chose to talk about what he called Radical CS: A rejection of the Standard Technological Narrative (STN) that technology is an apolitical tool that only improves things for everyone.

(TODO: Add video here when it’s public.)

PhilosophyTube recently tackled the topic of Ethical AI, which is way more interesting than you may suspect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M

Many of the people behind the hype of large-scale computing (which is what we should be calling it, not AI), whom are trying to influence public opinion and legislation in order to maximize their own profit, are the exact same people that are driving the enshittification of platforms.

They’re also largely the same people that hyped blockchain too. And you best believe I got a video for that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Enter, Aural Alliance?

Hackers, queers, and queer hackers have always been part of the resistance to enshittification.

The Aural Alliance isn’t building a new Bandcamp today, they’re merely building a better record label.

If you had to describe your mission in one sentence, what would it be?

Me, to Finn (Founder of the Aural Alliance)

Fostering collective success through respect and collaboration would be the fancy answer I guess haha

Finn

However, sometimes all you need is enough activation energy to get a movement going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxFt1BZiMTw

Silver Eagle is the lead developer of Internet radio software, AzuraCast. They have been working with the Aural Alliance on a furry music database project.

If the Aural Alliance is successful in their goals, it will serve as direct, living proof that a better business model is possible; that artists and musicians can get a fair deal from their craft.

If their projects like the furry music database take off, this may also plant the seed from which tomorrow’s Bandcamp alternative will sprout.

And even if that doesn’t happen, at least some artists will suffer less as a result of the Aural Alliance’s work. That’s a win-win to me.

How You Can Help

A non-exhaustive list of ideas:

• Follow the Aural Alliance on various platforms (yes, including Bandcamp, for now)
• Donate to the Aural Alliance, which benefits all its artists
• Write about the Aural Alliance (especially if you have a blog)
• If you’re interested in the furry music database project, consider donating to Silver Eagle
• Regularly check out the Aural Alliance’s Releases calendar for new songs, albums, etc.
• Request your favorite Aural Alliance artists at your favorite furry convention

Finally, I’d like to close with sharing an excellent work from one of the Aural Alliance musicians, Tonya Song, that every LGBTQIA+ person can definitely relate to.

If none of my words can sell you on the value of what the Aural Alliance is doing, this is sure to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSi4lkSAPtQ

Header art by AJLovesDinos.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/17/aural-alliance-furry-music-to-wag-pounce-to/

#AuralAlliance #enshittification #furries #furry #FurryFandom #music

Dhole Moments

2023-10-17 09:27:43

Dhole Moments is not a music blog. I will not pretend to be an expert on music, music theory, or music appreciation.

But it goes even further than that: I am so untalented at music that I exert a vacuum pressure on musicians who cross my path at furry conventions.

The end result of this vacuum force looks like this, naturally.
Art: CMYKat

Regular readers of my blog would expect that, should I ever discuss any topic that intersects with computer audio, it would probably involve leaking the contents of encrypted voice chats through, like, compression oracles or something.

Not today, though.

Instead, I’d like to introduce everyone to the Aural Alliance, a furry music label that aims to disrupt the perverted economics of the music industry.

What is the Aural Alliance?

To answer this question, you first need to have a vague sense of how traditional music labels and music industry contracts work: The music industry uses predatory “advances” and crooked accounting to keep artists in debt.

This predatory behavior isn’t exclusively weaponized against black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPoC) artists; it’s used against queer and disabled artists too.

Unless you have star power, you’ll take what you can get, because there are dozens of hungry upstarts ready to seize your opportunity if you hesitate to take it. Chase the carrot, mind the stick.

The Aural Alliance is a rejection of this traditional dynamic.

The Aural Alliance funding pipeline (source)

Traditional music labels will lend you money to cover the production costs of a musical work. Music sales will then be used to pay off your loan before you ever see a dime.

Aural Alliance straight up distributes 60% of its income to all artists, equally, and uses the remaining 40% to cover operations.

https://twitter.com/AuralAlliance/status/1698822020660617217

Why You Should Care About This

Unlike many bloggers, it’s difficult for me to classify my regular audience with one simple label or categorization.

Dhole Moments is a furry blog, sure, but not everyone who reads my writing is a furry. I write about computers, security, and cryptography, yes, but not everyone who reads my blog is particularly interested in those topics either.

It might be tempting to read about a furry music label built on socialist principles, shrug, and say, “So what? I’m not a fan of furry musicians or socialism. Where’s your post about key management you promised, dhole?!”

To understand the impact and significance of the Aural Alliance, some knowledge on current events and technology culture is needed.

AJ

The Enshittification of Music Sales

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe a phenomenon that happens to online platforms. The cycle goes like this:

A new platform is operated at a loss, to gain users. This is usually the Venture Capital funding stage of a “start-up”.

Then once they have enough critical mass to exploit the Network Effect, they sell the startup to the public stock market.

This sale is eventually followed by a shift in priority, where they take away the parts of the platform that users loved (usually following the boiling frog strategy), in order to make it a better deal for their new owners.

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

Cory Doctorow

That’s not the only trick up the sleeves of wealthy business interests.

Enter, Bandcamp

Last year, Epic Games acquired Bandcamp: The only music distribution platform that was fair to indie artists.

Last month, Epic sold Bandcamp to Songtradr, a music licensing service that basically acts as a vampiric middleman: Squeezing money from sellers and buyers alike while providing nothing of value. Songtradr is the outcome of an economist thought experiment, “What if landlords existed for our ear drums?”

Yesterday, Songtradr laid off a significant amount of Bandcamp’s staff.

https://twitter.com/deerhoof/status/1713978947468505133

Songtradr’s business model is the end goal of every Silicon Valley start-up that receives VC funding: Capture near-monopoly power through technology and the network effect, then become a middleman that only exists to add a transaction fee while a tangled web of contractors that compete with each other actually fulfill the services rendered. And they want to do this while driving positive exponential year-over-year growth, to keep investors happy.

Time and again, this happens to industries that affect millions of peoples’ lives, and we’re all the worse for it.

Any company that calls themselves “Uber for ___” is confessing to this business model. Art by AJ.

Exit, Bandcamp

The enshittification of Bandcamp is well underway by its new masters. Independent musicians the world over would benefit greatly from a good alternative.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a recommendation to offer today.

Bandcamp had too much goodwill with its community for a serious competitor to emerge from the noise floor. The Internet got complacent.

In another business vertical, Itch.io currently has a similar vibe with the indie game dev community: It has fostered tremendous goodwill and treats creators fairly.

In 2021, itch.io properties were added to the Epic Games Store launcher. Thus far, it has remained undisturbed. Who knows how long this will hold out?

(Especially considering the abundance of LGBTQIA+ content hosted on itch.io.)

Credit: CMYKat

Opposition and Hope

Cory Doctorow, who coined the term enshittification, has proposed what he calls an audacious plan to halt it, and throw its effects in reverse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

Cryptography luminary Phil Rogaway was asked to deliver a keynote at NIST’s Third Workshop on Block Cipher Modes of Operation. (Slides available now, recording to be available soon. I will share it here when I have a link to it.)

Rather than focus too much on OCB or his other contributions to computer science, he chose to talk about what he called Radical CS: A rejection of the Standard Technological Narrative (STN) that technology is an apolitical tool that only improves things for everyone.

(TODO: Add video here when it’s public.)

PhilosophyTube recently tackled the topic of Ethical AI, which is way more interesting than you may suspect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaU6tI2pb3M

Many of the people behind the hype of large-scale computing (which is what we should be calling it, not AI), whom are trying to influence public opinion and legislation in order to maximize their own profit, are the exact same people that are driving the enshittification of platforms.

They’re also largely the same people that hyped blockchain too. And you best believe I got a video for that one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

Enter, Aural Alliance?

Hackers, queers, and queer hackers have always been part of the resistance to enshittification.

The Aural Alliance isn’t building a new Bandcamp today, they’re merely building a better record label.

If you had to describe your mission in one sentence, what would it be?

Me, to Finn (Founder of the Aural Alliance)

Fostering collective success through respect and collaboration would be the fancy answer I guess haha

Finn

However, sometimes all you need is enough activation energy to get a movement going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxFt1BZiMTw

Silver Eagle is the lead developer of Internet radio software, AzuraCast. They have been working with the Aural Alliance on a furry music database project.

If the Aural Alliance is successful in their goals, it will serve as direct, living proof that a better business model is possible; that artists and musicians can get a fair deal from their craft.

If their projects like the furry music database take off, this may also plant the seed from which tomorrow’s Bandcamp alternative will sprout.

And even if that doesn’t happen, at least some artists will suffer less as a result of the Aural Alliance’s work. That’s a win-win to me.

How You Can Help

A non-exhaustive list of ideas:

• Follow the Aural Alliance on various platforms (yes, including Bandcamp, for now)
• Donate to the Aural Alliance, which benefits all its artists
• Write about the Aural Alliance (especially if you have a blog)
• If you’re interested in the furry music database project, consider donating to Silver Eagle
• Regularly check out the Aural Alliance’s Releases calendar for new songs, albums, etc.
• Request your favorite Aural Alliance artists at your favorite furry convention

Finally, I’d like to close with sharing an excellent work from one of the Aural Alliance musicians, Tonya Song, that every LGBTQIA+ person can definitely relate to.

If none of my words can sell you on the value of what the Aural Alliance is doing, this is sure to do it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSi4lkSAPtQ

---

Header art by AJLovesDinos.

https://soatok.blog/2023/10/17/aural-alliance-furry-music-to-wag-pounce-to/

#AuralAlliance #enshittification #furries #furry #FurryFandom #music

Normally when you see an article that talks about cryptocurrency come across your timeline, you can safely sort it squarely into two camps: For and Against. If you’re like me, you might even make a game out of trying to classify it into one bucket or the other from the first paragraph–sort of like how people treat biological sex–and then reading to see if you were right or not. Most of the time, you don’t even have to read past the headline to know where the author stands.

Unfortunately, the topic of cryptocurrency is complicated in ways only nerds could envision. And I’m not even talking about the cryptography involved when I say that.

(Art by Khia.)

Cryptocurrency is one of those cans I keep kicking down the road, lest all of its worms escape. I’m neither an enthusiast who wants to pump dogecoin to the moon, nor a detractor who thinks that the idea of digital cash is inherently stupid.

https://twitter.com/FiloSottile/status/1380576100888281094

The “crypto means cryptography” trope exists because, after Bitcoin’s first price hike, a shitload of speculative investors flooded cryptography forums and drowned out the usual participants’ discussions. I’ve previously said that some gatekeeping is necessary for the maintenance group identity, and that the excess of this minimum amount is what creates toxicity. Unfortunately, this trope has far exceeded the LD50 for healthy discourse.

Some of my friends make their living working on cryptocurrency projects–as researchers, mathematicians, programmers, security engineers, and so on. A lot of the interesting cryptography breakthroughs we’ll see in the next 10-15 years will be, at least in part, the result of cryptographers working in the cryptocurrency space. It’s difficult to talk about zero-knowledge proofs without acknowledging some of the kick-ass research the Electric Coin Company has done in order to launch their privacy-preserving cryptocurrency, and that’s only one example.

Here’s cryptographer Jean-Phillipe Aumasson, whose employer is launching a regulated cryptocurrency marketplace:

https://twitter.com/veorq/status/1384045994413678598

If you’re not familiar with JP’s work, he wrote several cryptography books (including Serious Cryptography), contributed to several hash functions (SipHash, BLAKE2, and BLAKE3), and initiated the Password Hashing Competition that resulted in Argon2.

However, there’s also a lot of bullshit in the cryptocurrency space.

• Years of securities fraud enabled by “Initial Coin Offerings” (ICOs) on the Ethereum blockchain. Most famously: Bitcoiin (yes, with two I’s) whose spokesman was bad movie star, Steven Seagal.
• The plague of hacked Twitter accounts pretending to be Elon Musk, perpetuating a “give me some $ and I’ll give you more back” scam that’s sadly effective.
• The whole cryptoart / NFT debacle.
• Litanies of startups trying to “use blockchain to solve X problem” without ever asking if the problem warrants a blockchain in the first place.
• Every microgram of drama related to John McAfee.

And those are just the items I can list off, off the top of my head. The awfulness surrounding cryptocurrency is like a fractal: The deeper you look at it, the more shit you see.

Cryptocurrency Subculture: A Tale of Too Shitty

The world’s most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin, was created in 2008 by an anonymous cryptographer who liked to be known as Satoshi Nakamoto and distributed on metzdowd.com, a mailing list created by a group of cryptoanarchists that called themselves “cypherpunks”.

At the risk of being overly reductive, cryptoanarchists are people who believe strongly in a right to privacy and therefore the right to use cryptography to protect communications from others–be it governments, corporations, or jealous ex-lovers. The cypherpunks were a group of cryptoanarchists that also wrote code. It’s a wordplay on “cyberpunk”.

It’s difficult to speculate about the intentions or politics of Satoshi Nakamoto, considering they said very little of substance about their private beliefs, and no longer answer emails from random strangers. However, given their presence on metzdowd, it’s reasonable to propose they were at least sympathetic to the cypherpunks’ cause.

Most outspoken cryptocurrency enthusiasts today are not like Satoshi Nakamoto. They don’t understand or frankly give a shit about complex, nuanced points about privacy and the government machinations underpinning public safety–let alone how that intersects with the racist history of the institutions charged with keeping the public safe. They’re largely anarcho-capitalists who want to make as much money as they can and, in turn, pay as little as possible in taxes.

How do you make money in cryptocurrency?
By obtaining some amount of a coin, then convincing other people to buy it to drive up the demand, and therefore the price, and then sell at a later date. Then you can sell your coins at a higher price than you paid (either directly, or through energy costs from “mining”) and pocket your profits.

Don’t let the name fool you: anarcho-capitalists (a.k.a. ancaps) aren’t anarchists (and furthermore, cryptocurrency-manic ancaps aren’t cryptoanarchists). Here’s a helpful video to disambiguate the terms involved:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOTlxsn8tWc

If I said that large swaths of the cryptocurrency community was generally shitty, I would not be the first to make this observation. The earliest Bitcoin events were caricatures of the kind of toxic sexist excess that dominates chauvinistic power fantasies. (“When lambo?”)

It’s not just the bad politics or the stark contrast between cryptocurrency in practice and cryptocurrency as envisioned by the earliest architects on the metzdowd cryptography mailing list.

Last year I wrote about a dumb attack against the second hash function used by the cryptocurrency, IOTA. After I wrote this story, my Twitter mentions and DMs were flooded with astroturfing attempts by IOTA enthusiasts. Nearly a year later, most of those have been deleted–presumably because of an account suspension.

https://twitter.com/HapaRekk/status/1283485380004597760

Before IOTA, Monero enthusiasts used to engage in bad faith with anyone that dared criticize their favorite cryptocurrency project on Reddit or Hacker News.

To be clear: I don’t think that cryptocurrency projects or their developers are ever necessarily responsible for the behavior of their users. Sometimes you find toxic assholes like Sergey Ivancheglo (the IOTA developer that threatened security researchers) at the helm, and then immediately jettison it until they leave (to great fanfare of the non-toxic part of their community).

I don’t want to overstate my case here. A lot of blockchainiacs are just downright awful people. The absolute worst. But I’ve found over the years that, the less a person talks about cryptocurrency as a financial endeavor (e.g. speculative trading), the less likely they are to be shitty. It’s not a law of the universe, but it’s a useful measuring stick.

But with all that in mind, an obvious question emerges.

If there’s so much awful shit surrounding cryptocurrency, why would furries (a subculture that constantly receives endless helpings of flak from society at large) ever venture near cryptocurrency?

The Politics Inherent to Furry Identity

Art by Swizz.

A lot of Americans like to think of themselves as “Free Speech” proponents. Some of them get all sweaty over whether or not they should be allowed to broadcast, and profit from, bigoted or hateful content laden with slurs.

And yet, the most censored people in American society are, without a doubt, sex workers. And you rarely hear any so-called “Free Speech” proponents give an iota of shit about the plight of sex workers. They can’t even freely engage in commerce here.

Sex work is explicitly banned by most financial service providers, such as PayPal. It’s exceedingly difficult for sex workers to make ends meet without constantly having to worry about their accounts being frozen and funds inaccessible.

There are a lot of reasons why the plight of sex workers is so bad in America. At the top of the list is the intersection of conservative politics and evangelical Christianity, which overall condemns healthy and consensual expressions of human sexuality. (Ever noticed how the only people who think they have a “sex addiction” are religious or right-wing? Not a coincidence.)

Do you know who else is a target of evangelicals and conservatives?

Furries, as you might know, are widely considered an LGBTQIA+ subculture (although not all of us are LGBTQIA+; only about 80%). But we’re more than just an LGBTQIA+ subculture. We’re also a vibrant community filled with skilled artists. Some of this art is pornographic in nature. It turns out, when queer people aren’t forced into the closet, they tend to embrace shameless authenticity and celebrate their romantic and sexual attractions with pride.

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/992819169593716737

A few years ago, the Death Eaters in Congress passed two bills (FOSTA and SESTA) that were advertised as an attempt to crack down on “sex trafficking”.

In practice, these laws killed Pounced.org–the only furry “dating” site at the time that wasn’t a sketchy cash grab (FurryMate, FurFling, etc.). Pounced.org died because the cost to avoid being criminally prosecuted under these laws was so exorbitant that they couldn’t sustain the website anymore, and it probably wasn’t the only small dating site to be killed by poor legislation. Only the big players could really have front-loaded these costs.

Which leads to the meat of this issue…

Why Furries Might Be Interested in Cryptocurrency

Cryptocurrency can be very attractive to members of the furry fandom because of the bullshit baked into the societies and cultures we exist in.

Cryptocurrency promises to be permissionless and decentralized; to bank the unbanked. If you make your living filling up someone else’s spank bank, the idea of creepy rich white men not being able to exercise targeted censorship against you or your family is, frankly, irresistible.

“Can’t use PayPal for your trade? Just setup a cryptocurrency wallet and give a different address to each of your clients, and instructions on how to access some vaguely reputable cryptocurrency exchange.”

Granted, most furries aren’t sex workers or porn artists, but some of our friends are, and we want to see them protected. But there’s another threat that cryptocurrency promises to alleviate: Chargeback fraud.

The prevalence of chargeback fraud is why I always tip artists. It helps to offset some of the harm caused by shitty behavior.
(Art by Khia)

This is the usual story (although exceptions do exist) I heard from my artist friends:

Someone under 18 decides they want to commission an artist they cannot personally afford, so they steal their parent’s credit card and use it to pay for a commission. Later–often after the work has been completed and delivered to the client–their parent notices the unauthorized charge on their credit card, and issues a chargeback.

Not only does this steal from the artist, but it incurs a $35 fee and increases the risk of their account being permanently suspended by their payment provider–thereby preventing them from accessing the funds paid to them by legitimate customers.

“Thanks for the free art! Now you’re at least $35 poorer and maybe lost your only lifeline out of perpetual poverty.”

— Assholes

And thus, the Siren Song repeats once again!

Cryptocurrency doesn’t prevent chargeback fraud, but it does shift the risk from independent artists that have no capital or political power and onto billion dollar financial institutions like Coinbase.

Once the cryptocurrency has been transferred from the Coinbase wallet to the furry artist, it cannot be unspent. Bad faith behavior might still happen, but the artist doesn’t risk their livelihood because of it.

And that’s why, when furry auction site The Dealer’s Den announced a plan to rebuild with “Blockchain Technology”, I didn’t even bat an eye. It seems like an obvious solution to a pervasive unsolved problem to me.

Sure, it’d be great if we could solve this problem with sensible civil policy. But when is that going to finally happen? After all, we’re talking about the same governments that bungled COVID-19 last year, and the AIDS crisis last century, and so on…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJtvKSUPICA

However, and this bears emphasizing, the CryptoArt / NFT trend is not a valid reason to get involved in cryptocurency! As I said on Twitter:

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370045499122843654

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370046285798064128

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370047071949033472

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1370047509314297862

So, super long preamble aside, what I thought I’d do today is talk a bit about cryptocurrency and how to engage with the topic responsibly, especially if you’re trying to mitigate the damage of the systems we inherited.

Cryptocurrency For Furries

I’m going to be very light on technical jargon, in the interests of accessibility, but at the risk of being imprecise.

No two cryptocurrencies are created equal. If you’re hoping to use one to mitigate systemic harms to our community, I implore you to learn the technical details in depth.

Decentralized Consensus

Cryptocurrencies can be classified by something called their consensus mechanism, which is how they can maintain a consistent ledger without being centralized. It doesn’t really matter, for the purpose of this article, how any of them work. I’m happy to dive into that in a future blog post, should anyone want it.

What you need to know is that Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithms are designed to maximize energy waste across the entire cryptocurrency network. That’s how it maintains its security against different kinds of esoteric-sounding attacks.

When you “mine” a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency, what you’re doing is solving a computationally hard puzzle (e.g. find a number that, when combined with the previous block’s hash and your address and hashed, produces a specific number of leading 0 bits determined by an algorithm to ensure this happens at a set average frequency of time), which results in the entire network agreeing that your address gets the “block reward” (a fixed amount of whatever currency) plus transaction fees.

Cryptocurrency discussions frequently invite conversations about the environmental impact of mining. Proof-of-Work is the cause for this excess energy use which certainly contributes to global climate change.

So, if you’re going to get involved with cryptocurrency without contributing to global climate disaster, you’re going to want to avoid Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. There are several other options to choose from.

Proof-of-Stake is popular among my cryptocurrency nerd friends, although it receives a fair bit of criticism from experts (especially the “nothing at stake” problem). Ask your cryptographer. It’s probably not me.

On-Chain Privacy

The vaunted “blockchain” is a public, transparent record of all transactions.

When you use a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, it’s sort of like tweeting your financial activities for the world to see.

“But nobody knows who owns this address,” Bitcoin maximalists might argue. To which I point out: Nobody is supposed to know your sockpuppet Twitter accounts either, but when you use them to harass someone right after they block your main account, we know it’s you.

The people whom this applies to know who they are, and should stop.
(Art by Khia)

Some cryptocurrencies, like Zcash, try to provide something like TLS for your transactions. When you use shielded Zcash addresses, the transaction amounts and recipients are encrypted, and this ciphertext is accompanied by a zero-knowledge proof to ensure the total amount in the shielded and unshielded pools remains consistent.

I highly implore you to choose a cryptocurrency that has on-chain privacy, especially if your target audience includes queer people and/or sex workers.

Mainstream Appeal

Finding a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency that doesn’t equate to Global Warming Bucks is a tall order, but if you want people to actually use a cryptocurrency, it needs to be accessible.

By accessible, I mean available on all the mainstream cryptocurrency exchange platforms (Coinbase, Binance, Bitfinex, etc.).

This might sound like pointless gatekeeping, but remember: They have the money and lawyers to negotiate with the economic powerhouses of the world, while sex workers and furry artists do not.

Cryptographic Security

Any regular reader of Dhole Moments probably saw this section coming a mile away, but an important consideration for a cryptocurrency to build upon is whether or not it’s actually secure.

This is where things get tricky. Weird or poor choices in cryptographic algorithm don’t seem to matter much.

Bitcoin uses ECDSA over Koblitz curves. IOTA shipped two broken hash functions, threatened researchers, and then tried to claim the first broken hash function was backdoored for “copy protection”. The CryptoNote currencies (n.b. Monero) tried to build on EdDSA but introduced a double spend attack.

I’m certainly not qualified to audit an entire cryptocurrency and say “yes/no” on its security. But any cryptocurrency you consider should at least pass a smoke test from your cryptographer.

Which Cryptocurrency Should I Choose?

If you’re looking for a cryptocurrency that’s secure, accessible, privacy-preserving, and doesn’t waste a fuck ton of energy all the time, the short answer is that there is none. You’re going to have to make a trade-off.

Shocking, I know.
(Art by Khia)

I’m sure there are cryptocurrency projects that use privacy-preserving technologies without a Proof-of-Work algorithm, and their design and implementation might even be secure! But, to date, I’m not aware of any such projects that also have mainstream accessibility on large exchange platforms.

You’ll notice that I didn’t mention price volatility in my list above. There’s two reasons for that:

1. I’m not a financial expert. For all I know, price volatility might be something you want out of your cryptocurrency, especially if you’re LARPing a day trader.
2. It’s hard enough to make this choice without adding more complications to the formula.

If Zcash ever adopted a consensus algorithm that wasn’t Proof-of-Work, it’d be a shoe-in for me to recommend. It checks all the other boxes neatly and is one of the most interesting cryptography projects on the Internet, after all.

In the meantime, maybe some other project will fill this niche and become widely accessible for everyone. There’s a lot of exciting and/or scary things happening with cryptocurrency research.

If you’re stuck with a hard decision, honestly, just do the best you can and be very transparent about the trade-offs you’re making and why you’re making them. Then ask a friend or expert to check your reasoning before you commit to it. “Do nothing” also needs to be publicly considered, no matter how absurd it might seem.

Disclaimers and Other Remarks

I do not work with cryptocurrency in my dayjob. I’d like to say that, consequently, I don’t have a conflict of interest, but all humans have subconscious biases, and a lot of my favorite people in cryptography do work in or with cryptocurrency. I want my friends to be able to continue to do awesome work without feeling ashamed.

https://twitter.com/cryptolexicon/status/1331712883403722752

Thus, I don’t care if you invest in Bitcoin or Dogecoin or whatever. Shoot for the moon while you awoo at the moon. Just be careful; for every winner, there’s at least one loser.

Fact: Dholes are also known as “Whistling Dogs”
(Art by Khia)

I’m a fan of transparency logs–which are often compared to blockchains, but without the currency aspect. If you’re not familiar, read up on Trillian and Chronicle. Notably, Trillian is the backbone of Certificate Transparency, which helps keep the CA infrastructure honest and consequently makes HTTPS safer for everyone.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/19/a-furrys-guide-to-cryptocurrency/

#Cryptocurrency #furries #furry #furryArtists #FurryFandom #Politics #Society

Dhole Moments

2021-04-02 11:30:22

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

Can’t get enough of blog posts written by furries?

This post aims to curate some of the other blogs written by furries that are worth sharing with my regular readers.

Many (but not all) of these furry blogs are focused on technology in some way.

Background Information

Many years ago, I wrote a post titled The World Needs More Furry Bloggers. In that post, I suggested I would write a blog post to promote other furry bloggers, so that people that enjoy my work might discover theirs too.

And then life got really busy, so I haven’t kept up with it since 2020. Oops.

CMYKat

So, instead of one post per furry blogger, I thought I would consolidate my effort into a single post that covers multiple. That way, if I don’t update this category for another 4 years, I don’t feel so weird later.

Featured Furry Blogs

This list is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.

Each header contains a link to the blog in question. The order is somewhat random (but certainly not cryptographically random).

Fang, Feather, & Fin

Fang, Feather, & Fin, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to tracing and archiving the history of the furry fandom. While furries have been around for a long time, understanding our history means capturing the diverse spaces and media we’ve romped around in through the years: zines, journals, magazines, newspapers, websites, conventions spaces (and on and on). Our goal is to capture that history through interviews, blog posts on specific subjects, and an ever-growing archive of furry materials.

Fang, Feather, & Fin is a project by Chipper Wolf, Gale Frostbane, and Tofte Alpaca. They dive deep into a lot of furry history topics, so it’s definitely worth a read if you’re interested in that at all.

Indigo’s den

Soblow Xaselgio is an indog dragoness that blogs about various topics that interest her.

She also has a rich collection of links (including 88×31 buttons!) to various critters’ web presences.

If you were curious, mine looks like this:

S-Config

S-Config has been blogging for over a decade about hardware and other technology topics.

Amazingly, they also publish their blog directly to the Tor and I2P networks.

• http://xjfbpuj56rdazx4iolylxplbvyft2onuerjeimlcqwaihp3s6r4xebqd.onion
• http://atlkfvuwwpgvnw24dkwyyxf5psrueozxb3i6zgebymjuquuquvqq.b32.i2p

This is a badass move and I’d love to see more bloggers do the same (if reasonably practical).

Insane Rambles About Technology

Nocoffei mostly writes about technology topics, but has a few posts about furry topics:

• Commercial Grade Robotic Prehensile Limbs
• Modern Cosplay Design from Scratch

Arcana Labs

Patch Arcana is an embedded/software developer, hacker, author, and Twitch streamer. His main hub for writing is Arcana Labs.

Colourful Words and Phrases

Maff is a Scotish furry blogger and sysadmin.

Gabriel Simmer a.k.a. Arch

Arch is a good dog. You should absolutely read his blog (which he promises to make more overtly furry in the future).

Logo Pending by Kawa

Kawa has two blogs: Logo Pending and a Tumblr blog.

Skyler’s Cove

Skyler Stardrift has been blogging longer than I have. He covers various topics from furry conventions to streaming to YouTube vlogging.

He also uses a cute protogen in some of his blog posts, like I do with my dhole:

Base by @FelisRandomis. Recoloured by @CasperClawell.

If that’s not incentive enough to check his work out (or anyone’s on this list, really), then I don’t actually know why you read my blog either.

Steffo.dev Blog

Steffo blogs in multiple languages about multiple topics.

Yet Another Tech Gemlog

Nytpu isn’t just a winged furry with a deep technical background. He’s also a notable Geminaut (link requires a Gemini client to read).

The Abyssal Sea

Lina is an agender queer furry that currently works in the video game industry.

Lotte’s Attic

Lotte is a raccoon therian from Germany. It blogs about system administration, software development, and hardware design.

Wren Mouse

Wren is involved in a lot of creative outlets: DJing, photography, VRChat, electronics, and programming are some of his hobbies.

He also blogs about said hobbies, hence the inclusion on this page.

Finnley’s Audio Adventures

Journey through the ocean of sound, finding forgotten records and their hidden secrets. Dive into a nostalgic adventure of discovery!

Are you interested in audio preservation? Finnley Dolfin has a blog (and accompanying YouTube channel) for you.

Loebas personal weblog

Loebas hails from the Netherlands and works in refurbishing discarded computers.

GothPanda’s Devlog

GothPanda is a panda, on the Internet.

Ky Bean

An upcoming furry blogger with a RoboYeen fursona.

Inconsistent Software

Foxis The Cookie Dragon writes about inconsistent software and how to improve it. He also takes part in an event called Blaugust.

(I briefly considered making this link the only one not set to open in a new tab, as a joke on the blog’s name, but ultimately decided against it.)

Uvoks Blog

Uvok is a snow cheetah furry that writes in both English and German about technology (and also publishes his blog on Tor).

Regalia’s blog

Regalia is a puppygirl who rants about, among other things, the problems with today’s implementations of federated technology (especially if you’re a minor trying to respect people’s boundaries with their 18+ accounts).

yosh@unix.dog

Yosh writes about a lot of technical topics. This website is a wealth of information and has one of the coolest designs I’ve seen on the Internet in a long time.

Anpuankhses’ Art

Anpuankhses is a digital artist and graphic designer.

Wow, that’s a lot of furry blogs

There could be even more, should more furries choose to pick up blogging.

I highly recommend reading through some of the blogs linked above. Some will give you inspiration. On the flipside, others may irritate you into writing rebuttals.

Blogging at scale is a highly chaotic matter, really.

I will be adding to this post over time.

However, I will not be keeping a detailed changelog, because that’s a lot of needless overhead for something very few people will care about.

CMYKat

“How can I get my blog listed here?”

Just let me know it exists! Email, comment, Fediverse mention. I can’t promise I’ll get to it on a timely manner, of course.

Note: I will probably not link to any “company blogs”.

This is meant to celebrate the work of individual furries, not furry[-adjacent] businesses.

https://soatok.blog/2024/07/21/featured-furries/

#blogs #featured #furries #furry #FurryFandom

Dhole Moments

2020-06-15 08:26:54

Despite the awesomeness and diversity that the furry fandom offers the world, there is a very narrow subset of furry content creation that has attained popular appeal within our community.

If you want to create and share furry art, there are at least a half dozen furry websites dedicated to furry art (including FurAffinity). If you want to watch people perform skits in fursuit, you have the Furry YouTube scene. If you want to watch furries play video games live, you have the Furry Twitch community (main hub: Furry Watch). There’s a thriving network of furries on social media websites like Twitter (which is where I’m most active). Hell, we even have successful authors who have published multiple books in our community (i.e. Kyell Gold).

But what we don’t see a lot of are furry bloggers. And I think that’s a mistake we should seek to correct.

Why Bother?

Social media companies are pretty terrible, and having your entire community centralized and dependent on companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter is at best a fragile equilibrium.

Ask yourself this: When was the last time someone attacked furries–in a thinly-veiled attempt to attack LGBTQIA+ people but using furries as a dog-whistle so their queerphobia can fly under the radar–on one of these platforms, and never faced any consequences (account suspension, content removal, etc.)?

How many times have your queer friends had their accounts suspended for telling bigots to fuck off, but the bigots’ accounts remain privileged?

Hell, I have friends who work for those companies, and even they can’t stem the flow of hate speech or neutralize harassment campaigns. (Art by Khia.)

The sad truth is that, when it comes to social media, we are not their customers. We are the product being sold to advertisers.

To put it bluntly: If hate speech is ever proven to make ad campaigns more successful, social media companies will explicitly allow it. But even more than that: You can expect these companies to punish us instead.

This is as true for Furry Twitter as it is for Furry YouTube, Furry Twitch, Furry TikTok, Furry Amino, Furry Facebook, and even Furry LinkedIn. (No, I’m not kidding.)

That’s why furries should consider starting, and maintaining, their own blog. Yes, even you!

Why Blogs Are a Game-Changer

Starting a blog gives you control over your own message, without being subject to the whims of a soulless corporation (and/or venture capitalists).

You can absolutely use social media to share and promote the content you would otherwise be sharing exclusively with those social media companies. But those apps and platforms will cease to be the primary source for the work you pour your time and heart into.

If Jack Dorsey ever went full fascist and decided to ban all queer folks from Twitter, approximately 75% of the furry fandom would disappear from their platform overnight–including the most popular furries in each niche.

But if you had your content hosted on your own blog, your online presence would survive his Thanos snap.

Furry Blogs Provide Clearer Self-Expression

Furry Twitter users: Raise your paw if you’ve never had a tweet get taken out of context or misread by another person, and had to deal with the consequences of said miscommunication.

Short bursts of information are not always a reliable means to communicate an idea. Some things require a lot of framing, context, and nuance to express clearly.

Sometimes Twitter users like to work around this by writing a series of tweets (sometimes called “tweetstorms”). But this is a brittle strategy at best: What if one of the tweets in your thread fails to load, or gets taken down by malicious users sending false reports?

Either way, if your audience is presented with your words without the intended context, who can blame them for thinking you’re a terrible person who supports something terrible?

Blog posts don’t carry this risk: Long-form articles are very all-or-nothing.

Yes, you can still write carelessly. Yes, your audience can still misinterpret something. But this is always a risk with communication. Platforms like Twitter exacerbate the inherent risk with technical failures.

Without Furry Bloggers, We’re Left Out of the Conversation

There are a lot of bloggers and citizen journalists in the world. Every once in a while, one of them covers our community in a one-off article.

Not all bloggers are well-intentioned.

If we want the general public to stop acting shitty towards us (and especially towards younger furs), letting those bloggers have complete control over the public perception of our community is a huge fail.

Is There Already a Furry Blog Community?

Yes, but it’s not very large (yet).

The only furry blogs I’ve seen in the past few months (n.b. since I started Dhole Moments in April 2020) include:

• Dogpatch Press
• Eduardo Soliz
• Furry Times
• Furry Writers’ Guild
• Fuzzballstorytime.com
• Radicoon Register
• Rune’s Furry Blog
• The Productive Wuff
• Tiger Tales
• YellowZebra Sports

The furry fandom has a population easily in excess of 1 million worldwide, yet only about a dozen of us are actively blogging in 2020.

But My Interests Are Too Niche, Nobody Will Ever Want to Read About Them!

You have no way of knowing that unless you try!

I mostly write about cryptography, which isn’t exactly the most popular topic to read about on the Internet. And yet:

There is nothing intrinsically better about Dhole Moments than the blog you could be starting right now.

Regardless of how boring you might think your interests are to other people, writing about them is a win-win because:

1. Blogging is an excellent way to express your passion for your interests.
2. Writing is a skill that tends to improve with experience and deliberate practice.
3. You will eventually find other people who share your interests, especially if one of your blog posts ranks high on search engines for oddly-specific search queries.

There’s almost no reason not to blog.

(Laziness isn’t a valid reason; they’re extremely easy to set up and most of you were already sharing content on social media websites to begin with.)

How Dhole Moments Will Help

Whether you’ve been convinced to start a blog by this article, or already had one and have been neglecting it, I want to help you get started.

I recently created a category called Featured Furries in order to feature a post on Fuzzballstorytime.com.

If you’re a furry who wants to blog, let me know your blog exists and I will feature one article from your blog in that category.

Disclaimer: If you support racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. you are not welcome to be featured on Dhole Moments, and can in fact go fuck yourself.

Don’t think for a second that I’ll ever support hate speech! (Art by Swizz.)

---

Header art was made by me! Isn’t it terrible? Now you know why I commission artists instead of trying to draw stuff myself.

But I chose to use my own sketches to illustrate a point with this article: It doesn’t matter very much if you’re not presently very good at something. Sure, if you do it, you’ll certainly improve your skills, but more importantly:

Impostor syndrome sucks, and we do everyone a service by resisting it within ourselves. It’s okay if your earliest blog posts are a little shitty.

If you want to make an impact on the world, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to consistently show up.

https://soatok.blog/2020/06/15/the-world-needs-more-furry-bloggers/

If you’ve somehow never encountered an Internet meme before, you may be surprised to learn that the number 69 is often associated with sex (and, more specifically, a particular sex act).

This happens to be the 69th blog post published on Dhole Moments, since I started the blog in April 2020.

You could even go as far as to say it’s the 4/20 +69th post, for maximum meme potential.

42069, get it? (Art by Khia)

However! I make a concerted effort to keep my blog safe-for-work, so if you’re worried about this post being flooded with furry porn (a.k.a. yiff art), or cropped yiff memes, or any other such lascivious nonsense, you won’t find any of that on this blog. (Sorry to disappoint.)

Instead, I’d like to take the opportunity to correct some public misconceptions about human sexuality, identity, and how these topics relate to the furry fandom.

Is Furry a Sex Thing?

I find it difficult to overstate how often people assume the “furry is a sex thing” premise. Especially on technical forums.

But let’s backtrack for a second. What isn’t a sex thing?

Art by Khia.

This turns out to be a difficult question to answer. Even Wikipedia’s somewhat concise list of paraphilias doesn’t leave a lot of topics off the table.

Are shoes a sex thing? Are cigarettes? Poetry?

Comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal.

Hell, one might be tempted to cry foul on the header image used in this blog post for including tentacles, hypnotic eyes, and footpaws in the same image. (Scandalous!) But if you look at the uncropped versions of these images, you’ll quickly realize they aren’t yiffy.

Top Art by AtlasInu.
Bottom: Created by FlashWhite_. Fox is Kiit Lock.
The more you read about this topic, the more you’ll realize this question is inert. Anything can be a sex thing. Humans are largely a sexual species, and sex is deeply ingrained in our culture (which can make life awkward for asexual people).

Instead, the question of whether or not the furry fandom is sexual becomes a bit of a Rorschach test for one’s cognitive biases.

If you’re chiefly concerned with public image–especially when fursuiting in public, where kids can see–you’re incentivized to double down on the fact that the furry fandom is no more inherently sexual than anything else can be. And this is true.

If you’re concerned with cultivating a sex-positive environment where people can live out their sexual fantasies in a safe, sane, and consensual manner, you’re incentivized to insist that furry is a sexual thing. “We have murrsuits for crying out loud! Stop kink-shaming! Down with puritan ideologies on sex!” And this is also true.

Humans are largely sexual, so any activity humans engage in will inevitably involve people sexualizing it. Even tupperware parties, for fuck’s sake! Anyone who believes there is a “Rule 34 of the Internet” tacitly acknowledges this fact, even if it’s inconvenient for a narrative they’re trying to spin.

So while this might be a meaningless question, one has to wonder…

Why Does Everyone Care So Much If Being a Furry (In Particular) Is Sexual or Not?

To understand what’s really happening here, you need to know a few things about the furry fandom.

1. Approximately 80% of furries are LGBTQIA+ (source).
2. Early anti-furry sentiments were motivated by queerphobia, especially on forums like Something Awful–and the influence of early hateful memes can still be seen to this day.

https://twitter.com/spacetwinks/status/728349066178998274

One of the Something Awful staff eventually acknowledged and apologized for this.

Archived from here. To corroborate, an Internet author named Maddox once parodied SomethingAwful’s hateful obsession with furries.

There was even a movement within the furry fandom history (the “Burned Furs“) that aimed to excise queerness and sex-positivity from the community. It’s no coincidence that a lot of the former Burned Furs joined with the alt-right movement within the furry fandom.

The alt-right is explicitly queerphobic; especially against trans people. But it’s not just queerphobic; it’s also an ableist and racist movement.

Regardless of sexual orientation, a lot of furries are neurodivergent, too.

Simply put: The reason that most people care whether or not furries are sexual is rooted in the propensity of anti-furry rhetoric in Internet culture, which was motivated at its inception by mostly queerphobia with a dash of ableism.

Art by Khia.

The notion that furries are “too sexual” originated as a dog-whistle for “too gay”, and caught on with people who didn’t know the hidden meaning of the idea. Now a lot of people repeat these ideas without intending or even knowing their roots, and many more have internalized shame about the whole situation.

Unfortunately, this even precipitates into the furry fandom itself, which leads to an unfortunate cyclical discourse that takes place largely on Furry Twitter.

Original tweet unavailable

Furry Isn’t a Sexuality. There is no F in LGBT!

If you publicly state “anti-furry rhetoric is largely queerphobic dog-whistles”, you will inevitably hear someone try to retort this way. So let’s be very clear about it.

Furry isn’t its own sexual identity, and I would never claim otherwise.

Unlike transgender people, furries do not experience anything like “species dysphoria” (although therians/otherkin do report experiencing this; don’t conflate the two).

What’s happening here is: Most furries (about 80% of us) have separate sexual/gender identities that deviate from the heteronormative. A lot of queerphobia is easier to sell when you convey it through dog-whistles. So that’s what bigots did.

Polite company that wouldn’t partake in queer-bashing is often willing to laugh at the notion of “Beat A Furry Day“.

Anyone who tries to twist this acknowledgement to mean something ridiculous like an LGBTF movement is either being irrational or a 4chan troll.

Art by Khia.

For related reasons, you shouldn’t ever feel the need to “come out” as a furry.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG2DRLimBSM

It’s okay to just really like Beastars, Zootopia, or even the Furry aspects of the Minecraft and Roblox communities. It doesn’t make you a sex-freak.

What’s the Take-Away?

It doesn’t really matter if the furry fandom has a sexual side to it. Everything does! The people who proclaim to care very much about this care for all the wrong reasons. Don’t be one of them.

Art by Swizz.

And remember: Lewd furries aren’t furry trash; we’re yiff-raff!

Sex Isn’t Well-Defined Either

While we’re talking about sex, did you know that biological sex isn’t neatly divided into “male” and “female”? This isn’t an ideological position; it’s a scientific one. Just ask a biologist!

https://twitter.com/JUNIUS_64/status/1054387892624285699

Trans and nonbinary people change gender (which is about your role within society) from what they were assigned at birth, but even sex itself isn’t so concrete.

The next time someone tries to appeal to “science” when talking about trans rights and then vomits up some unenlightened K-12 explanation of human reproduction and biological sex, remind them that science disagrees with their oversimplified and outdated mental model–and they might know this if they kept up with scientists.

Where Can I Learn More About the Sexual Side of the Furry Fandom?

Important: If you’re under the age of 18, you should stay out of adult spaces until you’re old enough to participate. No excuses.

If you’re looking for pornographic furry art (also called “yiff”), most furry art sites (FurryLife, FurAffinity, etc.) have adult content filters that you can turn off when you register an account.

If you’re looking for something more interactive, there’s a swath of furries that develop private VR experiences for 18+ audiences. One of the most well-funded Patreon artists makes adult furry games.

If you’re curious about why and how people express their sexuality when fursuiting (also called “murrsuiting”), there’s a subreddit for that.

It’s really not hard to find. This is one of the advantages of furry being a largely sex-positive community.

Furry YouTuber Ragehound even has a series about Furries After Dark if you want to learn more about these topics.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGOlQJDO5no

Finally, similar to how 69 is a meme number for sex, furries have an additional meme number (621) that comes from the name of an adult furry website (e621.net).

You now have enough knowledge to navigate the adult side of the fandom. Just don’t come crying to me when you develop the uncanny knack for recognizing which r/furry_irl posts are actually cropped yiff versus wholly worksafe art.

https://soatok.blog/2021/04/02/the-furry-sexuality-blog-post/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #LGBTQIA_ #Society

Dhole Moments

2020-04-21 10:46:39

Dhole Moments

Writings about information security, cryptography, software, and humanity, from a member of the furry fandom.

About This Blog

From the Furry Fandom…

Featured Furries

Can’t get enough of blog posts written by furries? This post aims to curate some of the other blogs written by furries that are worth sharing with my regular readers. Many (but not all) of these furry blogs are focused on technology in some way. Background Information Many years ago, I wrote a post titled…

July 21, 2024August 15, 2024

Soa Talks (Latest Posts)

Ambition, The Fediverse, and Technology Freedom

If you’re new to reading this blog, you might not already be aware of my efforts to develop end-to-end encryption for ActivityPub-based software. It’s worth being aware of before you continue to read this blog post. To be very, very clear, this is work I’m doing independent of the W3C or any other standards organization…

October 12, 2024October 12, 2024

Why are furry conventions offering HIV testing to attendees?

Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play out several times. The people that post this photo usually don’t elaborate on why they think this photo is meaningful, they just let it…

September 30, 2024October 3, 2024

Cryptographic Innuendos

Neil Madden recently wrote a blog post titled, Digital Signatures and How to Avoid Them. One of the major points he raised is: Another way that signatures cause issues is that they are too powerful for the job they are used for. You just wanted to authenticate that an email came from a legitimate server, but now…

September 20, 2024September 20, 2024

@soatok@furry.engineer

https://soatok.blog/

Sometimes my blog posts end up on social link-sharing websites with a technology focus, such as Lobste.rs or Hacker News.

On a good day, this presents an opportunity to share one’s writing with a larger audience and, more importantly, solicit a wider variety of feedback from one’s peers.

However, sometimes you end up with feedback like this, or this:

Apparently my fursona is ugly, and therefore I’m supposed to respect some random person’s preferences and suppress my identity online.

I’m no stranger to gatekeeping in online communities, internet trolls, or bullying in general. This isn’t my first rodeo, and it won’t be my last.

These kinds of comments exist to send a message not just to me, but to anyone else who’s furry or overtly LGBTQIA+: You’re weird and therefore not welcome here.

Of course, the moderators rarely share their views.

https://twitter.com/pushcx/status/1281207233020379137

Because of their toxic nature, there is only one appropriate response to these kinds of comments: Loud and persistent spite.

So here’s some more art I’ve commissioned or been gifted of my fursona over the years that I haven’t yet worked into a blog post:

Art by kazetheblaze
Art by leeohfox
Art by Diffuse Moose

If you hate furries so much, you will be appalled to learn that factoids about my fursona species have landed in LibreSSL’s source code (decoded).

Never underestimate furries, because we make the Internets go.

I will never let these kind of comments discourage me from being open about my hobbies, interests, or personality. And neither should anyone else.

If you don’t like my blog posts because I’m a furry but still find the technical content interesting, know now and forever more that, when you try to push me or anyone else out for being different, I will only increase the fucking thing.

Header art created by @loviesophiee and inspired by floccinaucinihilipilification.

https://soatok.blog/2020/07/09/a-word-on-anti-furry-sentiments-in-the-tech-community/

#antiFurryBullying #cyberculture #furry #HackerNews #LobsteRs #Reddit

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

Art by Kyume.

Search engines have this feature where if you start to type a question, it will attempt to predict your question based on what other people have asked.

This has some hilarious consequences.
The PDF file format is apparently the world’s one of the world’s four most popular religions, or so the meme goes.
Sometimes this feature gets gamed by large hordes of shitty people (read: 4chan) typing provocative questions into search engines.

Let’s take a look at some of the questions that real people and/or astroturfing trolls have asked Google about the furry fandom and its members.

Questions in This Page

• Do Furries Have Rights?
• Do Furries Say UwU?
• Do Furries Deserve Rights?
• Do Furries Talk?
• Do Furries Want to Be Animals?
• Do Furries Go to Comic Con?
• Do Furries Go to the Vet?
• Why Do Furries Matter?
• Why Do Furries Use Telegram?
• Why Do Furries Like Foxes?
• Why Do Furries Like Wolves?
• Why Do Furries Wear Fursuits?
• Why Do Furries Say OwO?
• How Do Furries Talk?
• How Do Furries Work?
• How Do Furries Feel About Cats?
• How Do Furries Make Money?
• How Do Furries Go to the Bathroom?
• Can I Hunt Furries?
• Are Furries Legal?
• Are Furries Into Animals?
• Are Furries a Gender?
• Are Furries a LGBTQIA+ Identity?

Answers to Questions People Asked Google About Furries

Note: This is just a subset of all the questions that showed up in Google’s autocomplete for various questions about furries. A lot of the questions are inappropriate or are framed so poorly that they’re not worth answering in the first place.

Soatok is here to answer your burning curiosity.

Do Furries Have Rights?

Yes. Specifically: The same rights as anyone else in the country they live in.

Do Furries Say UwU?

UwU

Do Furries Deserve Rights?

Yes.

I’m glad that matter’s settled, aren’t you?

Do Furries Talk?

If we didn’t, people wouldn’t be so desperate to shut us up, now would they?

But some fursuiters do choose to remain silent in fursuit.

Do Furries Want to Be Animals?

We already are animals: Humans are animals.

I mean, really, the only other options are vegetable, mineral, fungus, or microbe.

Do Furries Want to Be Non-Human Animals?

Much better question!

Generally, no.

The people who believe they are (spiritually or otherwise) a non-human animal are called otherkin or therian, not furries.

Do Furries Go to Comic Con?

Yes.

https://twitter.com/Zarafagiraffe/status/1161033643860455424

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone. Furries are nerds. Nerds go to cons.

Do Furries Go to the Vet?

No.

Not only do we not go to the vet, but we’ve historically done a poor job of vetting the people who rise in popularity in our community… which usually resulted in completely avoidable PR disasters that trolls happily abuse, to this day, to try to astroturf the general public into thinking we’re horribly depraved people.

See what I did there? :3

Why Do Furries Matter?

That’s a rather nihilistic question to ask, and it was the most popular “why?” question, to boot.

Why, indeed, do any of us matter?

Art by circuitslime

In a societal sense, I would argue that furries matter because of all the reasons I outlined in this blog post.

Namely, the furry fandom saves lives, provides a support system for a lot of LGBTQIA+ people, and is home to some of the best humans you’ll ever meet (including many that are absolutely vital to modern telecommunications infrastructure, i.e. the Internet).

But at the end of the day, this is a deeply personal question and will ultimately boil down to individual opinion and thus is unanswerable.

Why Do Furries Use Telegram?

Counter-question: Have you ever heard of the network effect?

Telegram supported custom stickers before any other major communication medium, so they’ve been accumulating furries for many years before the other platforms caught up.

What other platform makes it easy to respond with this image when socially appropriate? Sticker by Khia, Telegram sticker pack here.

The main reasons furries choose Telegram today are:

1. Their friends are already using it
2. They can effectively reply to messages with custom stickers of their fursona, rather than just plaintext or emoji

That being said, many furries these days use Discord too. Main reasons: Gaming and streaming.

If you’d like to learn more about furries and Telegram, and furries using Telegram, and how to make Telegram bearable, check out A Furry’s Guide to Telegram.

Why Do Furries Like Foxes?

Oh contrare!

Just kidding! This sticker’s meaning is “I’m not a fox!” not “Down with foxes!”

There really isn’t a good answer to this question.

The best approximation you’ll find is that: Foxes used to be an extremely popular choice in cartoon animal character design (Disney’s Robin Hood, Star Fox 64, Sajin Komamura from Bleach, etc.).

Also: Wolves are actually more popular than foxes by a significant margin.

Why Do Furries Like Wolves?

Have you ever read a Jack London novel?

Enough said.

Why Do Furries Wear Fursuits?

Answers to this question will vary depending on who you ask. Some common responses:

1. Because it’s fun to physically present to other people as a character you personally identify with.
2. Because it brings genuine joy to other people.
3. Because it helps the fursuiter cope with social anxiety and shyness.
4. Because some people think they look cool.
5. Because they’re literally a piece of art you can (and are encouraged to) wear to parties.
6. Because it’s a hobby and looking further into it is either misleading or reductive.

But most furries (roughly 75%) don’t own a fursuit. (They ain’t cheap!)

Why Do Furries Say OwO?

It’s an emoticon! OwO is like a sideways :3 face, but with surprised eyes. It comes from copypasta started by a shitpost mocking the typical behavior and communication style of furry roleplayers.

How Do Furries Talk?

Rather well, thank you.

Oh wait, you wanted to know about the anatomy that enables speech? Ask a biologist with a passing interest in science fiction and/or werewolves.

How Do Furries Work?

The same way most of us work these days:

https://twitter.com/UberGeekGirl/status/1237492868693938176

How Do Furries Feel About Cats?

Severely allergic. But that’s just me.
Photo by Kurdan.
Feline fursonas (cats of all sizes) are almost as common as canid fursonas (wolves, foxes, etc.).

If you’re expecting to see us fight like cats and dogs, you’re in for some disappointment.

How Do Furries Make Money?

A lot of us work in tech!

Soatok, the author of this blog.

But not all furries work in tech. You can find us in pretty much every vocation and profession imaginable.

Some furries work full-time as artists and content creators for the rest of the community. All of the art you’re seeing on this page of my fursona was the result of other artists’ work.

How Do Furries Go to the Bathroom?

Generally, fursuiters have to undress before they can do their business, then redress after.

Non-fursuiters? Same as anyone else.

Can I Hunt Furries?

No, that’s stupid.

Furries are humans (and humans are animals).

Wanting to hunt furries is completely sociopathic and immoral.

You’re effectively asking if it’s okay to commit murder against a predominantly LGBTQIA+ community.

But Since Furries Want to Be Animals, We Should Be Allowed to Hunt Them!

No, of course not. Not unless we can hunt you too, anyway!

“All is fair in love and vore,” or so they say. Art by ruemaw

No, but seriously, if you feel like you should be allowed to “hunt” other people, there is something deeply wrong with you and you should seek therapy before you hurt an innocent person.

Are Furries Legal?

Yes. Why wouldn’t we be?

There may be a lot of nuances to this question. (Are fursuits legal in $venue? That will depend on mask laws, etc.)

I am not a lawyer. Ask Boozy instead.

Are Furries Into Animals?

No. Furries are not “into” real animals, especially if you use that term idiomatically to refer to sexual attraction.

A lot of people assume otherwise, including some depraved people who are “into” animals and think the furry community will support their proclivities.

But the simple answer is: Sick people like that don’t belong in furry.

Me, to animal abusers: “GTFO!”

Are Furries a Gender?

Categorically no, but if someone wants to use a fursona to express their gender, more power to them.

Gender and fandom interests are orthogonal.

Are Furries an LGBTQIA+ Identity?

No, but most of us happen to be some other LGBTQIA+ identity, so a lot of hateful people like to target furries as a dog-whistle for their actual bigotry.

The author is demi/gay, if anyone was wondering ;3 – Art by Swizz

Those are all the appropriate and interesting questions I could find through Google’s search prediction feature. If I missed any that are worth including, let me know on Twitter or Telegram.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/29/furiosity-thrilled-the-cat-questions-people-ask-about-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #Google #predictiveSearch #questions #searchEngine

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

Update (2024-05-14): It’s time for furries to move away from Telegram.

A question I often get–especially from cryptography experts:

What is it with furries and Telegram?

https://twitter.com/Monochromemutt/status/1407005415099883527

No, they’re almost certainly not talking about that.

Most furries use Telegram to keep in touch with other members of our community. This leads many to wonder, “Why Telegram of all platforms?”

The answer is simple: Stickers.

(Art by Khia.)

Telegram was the first major chat platform that allowed custom sticker packs to be uploaded and used by its users. This led to the creation of a fuckton of sticker packs for peoples’ fursonas.

How many furry sticker packs are there? Well, my friend Nican started a project to collect and categorize them all. You can find their project online at bunnypa.ws.

https://twitter.com/Nican/status/1200229213627801600

As of this writing, there are over 230,000 stickers across over 7,300 sticker packs (including mine). It also supports inline search!

https://twitter.com/BunnyPawsBot/status/1345902008339898371

Additionally, there’s a very strong network effect at play: Furries are going to gravitate to platforms with a strong furry presence.

With that mystery out of the way, I’d like to share a few of my thoughts about Telegram as a platform and how to make it manageable.

Don’t Use Telegram As a Secure Messenger

Despite at least one practical attack against MTProto caused by its poor authentication, Telegram refuses to implement encryption that’s half as secure as the stuff I publish under my furry identity.

Instead, they ran a vapid “contest” and point to that as evidence of their protocol’s security.

If you’re a cryptography nerd, then you probably already understand that IND-CCA2 security is necessary for confidential messaging. You’re probably cautious enough to not depend on Telegram’s MTProto for privacy.

If you’re not a cryptography nerd, then you probably don’t care about any of this jargon or what it means.

It doesn’t help that they had another vulnerability that a renowned cryptography expert described as “the most backdoor-looking bug I’ve ever seen”.

(Art by Khia.)

So let’s be clear:

Telegram is best treated as a message board or a mailing list.

Use it for public communications, knowing full well that the world can read what you have to say. So long as that’s your threat model, you aren’t likely to ever get burned by the Durov family’s ego.

For anything that you’re not comfortable with being broadcast all over the Internet, you should use something more secure. Signal is the current recommended choice until something better comes along.

(Cwtch looks very good, but it’s not ready yet.)

Enable Folders to Make Notifications Reasonable

Last year, Telegram rolled out the ability to collect conversations, groups, and chats into folders. Most furries don’t know about this feature, because it doesn’t enable itself by default.

First, open the hamburger menu (on desktop) or click on your icon (on mobile), then click Settings.

Next, you’ll see an option for Folders.

You should see a button that says “Create New Folder”.

From here, you can include Chats or general types of Chats (All Groups, All Channels, All Personal Conversations) and then exclude specific entries.

Give it a name and press “Create”. After a bit of organizing, you might end up with a setup like this.

Now, here’s the cool thing (but sadly doesn’t exist on all clients–use Telegram Desktop on Windows and Linux if you want it).

Once you’re done setting up your folders, back out to the main interface on Desktop and right click one of the folders, then press “Mark As Read”.

Finally, an easy button to zero out your notifications. Serenity at last!

Inbox Zero on Telegram? Hell yes!
(Art by Khia.)

Note: Doing this to the special Unread folder is congruent to pressing Shift + ESC on Slack. You’re welcome, Internet!

Make Yourself Undiscoverable

In the default configuration, if anyone has your phone number in their address book (n.b. queerphobic relatives) and they install Telegram, you’ll get a notification about them joining.

As you can imagine, that’s a bit of a terrifying prospect for a lot of people. Fortunately, you can turn this off.

Under Settings > Privacy and Security > Phone Number, you can limit the discovery to your contacts (n.b. in your phone’s address book).

Turn Off Notifications for Pinned Messages

Under Settings > Notifications, you will find the appropriate checkbox under the Events heading.

A lot of furry Telegram groups like to notify all users whenever they pin a message. These notifications will even override your normal preferences if you disabled notifications for that group.

Also, you’re probably going to want to disable notifications for every channel / group / rando with very few exceptions, or else Telegram will quickly get super annoying.

Increase the Interface Scale

The default font size for Telegram is tiny. This is bad for accessibility.

Fortunately, you can make the font bigger. Open the Settings menu and scroll down past the first set of options.

Set the interface scale to at least 150%. It will require Telegram to re-launch itself to take effect.

Don’t Rely on Persistent Message History

This is just a cautionary footnote, especially if you’re dealing with someone with a reputation for gaslighting: The other participant in a conversation can, at any point in time, completely or selectively erase messages from your conversation history.

However, this doesn’t delete any messages you’ve already forwarded–be it to your Saved Messages or to a private Channel.

Aside: This is why, when someone gets outed for being a terrible human being, the evidence is usually preserved as forwarded messages to a channel.

Although Telegram isn’t in the same league as Signal and WhatsApp, its user experience is good–especially if you’re a furry.

I hope with the tips I shared above, as well as resources like bunnypa.ws, the Furry Telegram experience will be greatly improved for everyone that reads my blog.

Addendum: Beware the Furry Telegram Group List

A few people have asked me, “Why don’t you tell folks about furry-telegram-groups.net and/or @furlistbot?”

The main reason is that a lot of the most popular groups on that listing are either openly or secretly run by a toxic personality cult called Furry Valley that I implore everyone to avoid.

https://soatok.blog/2021/06/22/a-furrys-guide-to-telegram/

#chat #communication #furries #furry #FurryFandom #privacySettings #stickers #Technology

Dhole Moments

2024-05-14 16:26:41

I have been a begrudging user of Telegram for years simply because that’s what all the other furries use, despite their cryptography being legendarily bad.

When I signed up, I held my nose and expressed my discontent at Telegram by selecting a username that’s a dig at MTProto’s inherent insecurity against chosen ciphertext attacks: IND_CCA3_Insecure.

Art: CMYKat

I wrote about Furries and Telegram before, and included some basic privacy recommendations. As I said there: Telegram is not a private messenger. You shouldn’t think of it as one.

Recent Developments

Telegram and Elon Muck have recently begun attacking Signal and trying to paint it as insecure.

Matthew Green has a Twitter thread (lol) about it, but you can also read a copy here (archive 1, archive 2, PDF).

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789688236933062767

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789689315624169716

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789690652399170013

https://twitter.com/matthew_d_green/status/1789691417721282958

Et cetera.

This is shitty, and exacerbates a growing problem on Telegram: The prevalence of crypto-bros and fascist groups using it to organize.

Why Signal is Better for Furries

First, Signal has sticker packs now. If you want to use mine, here you go.

For years, the main draw for furries to Telegram over Signal was sticker packs. This is a solved problem.

Second, you can setup a username and keep your phone number private. You don’t need to give your phone number to strangers anymore!

(This used to be everyone’s criticism of Signal, but the introduction of usernames made it moot.)

Finally, it’s trivial for Americans to setup a second Signal account using Twilio or Google Voice, so you can compartmentalize your furry posting from the phone number your coworkers or family is likely to know.

(Note: I cannot speak to how to deal with technology outside of America, because I have never lived outside America for any significant length of time and do not know your laws. If this is relevant to you, ask someone in your country to help figure out how to navigate technological and political issues pertinent to your country; I am not local to you and have no fucking clue.)

The last two considerations were really what stopped furries (or queer people in general, really) from using Signal.

Why Signal?

There are two broadly-known private messaging apps that use state-of-the-art cryptography to ensure your messages are private, and one of them is owned by Meta (a.k.a., Facebook, which owns WhatsApp). So Signal is the only real option in my book.

That being said, Cwtch certainly looks like it may be promising in the near future. However, I have not studied its cryptography in depth yet. Neither has it been independently audited to my knowledge.

It’s worth pointing out that the lead developer of Cwtch is wrote a book titled Queer Privacy, so she’s overwhelmingly more likely to be receptive to the threat models faced by the furry community (which is overwhelmingly LGBTQ+).

For the sake of expedience, today, Signal is a “yes” and Cwtch is a hopeful “maybe”.

How I Setup a Second Signal Account

I own a Samsung S23, which means I can’t just use the vanilla Android tutorials for setting up a second profile on my device. Instead, I had to use the “Secure Folder” feature. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has more guidance worth considering.

If you don’t own a Samsung phone, you don’t need to bother with this “Secure Folder” feature (as the links above will tell you). You can just set up a work profile and get the same result! You probably also can’t access the same feature, since that’s a Samsung exclusive idiom. Don’t sweat it.

I don’t know anything about Apple products, so I can’t help you there, but there’s probably a way to set it up for yourself too. (If not, maybe consider this a good reason to stop giving abusive corporations like Apple money?)

The other piece of the puzzle you need is a second phone number. Google Voice is one way to acquire one; the other is to setup a Twilio account. There are plenty of guides online for doing that.

(Luckily, I’ve had one of these for several years, so I just used that.)

Why does Signal require a phone number?

The historical reason is that Signal was a replacement for text messaging (a.k.a., SMS). That’s probably still the official reason (though they don’t support SMS anymore).

From what I understand, the Signal development team has always been much more concerned about privacy for people that own mobile phones, but not computers, than they were concerned about the privacy of people that own computers, but not mobile phones.

After all, if you pick a random less privileged person, especially homeless or from a poor country, they’re overwhelmingly more likely to have a mobile phone than a computer. This doesn’t scratch the itch of people who would prefer to use PGP, but it does prioritize the least privileged people’s use case.

Their workflow, therefore, optimized for people that own a phone number. And so, needing a phone number to sign up wasn’t ever a problem they worried about for the people they were most interested in protecting.

Fortunately, using Signal doesn’t immediately reveal your phone number to anyone you want to chat with, ever since they introduced usernames. You still need one to register.

Tell Your Friends

I understand that the network effect is real. But it’s high time furries jettisoned Telegram as a community.

Lazy edit of the “Friendship Ended” meme

Finally, Signal is developed and operated by a non-profit. You should consider donating to them so that we can bring private messaging to the masses.

Addendum (2024-05-15)

I’ve been asked by several people about my opinions on other platforms and protocols.

Specifically, Matrix. I do not trust the Matrix developers to develop or implement a secure protocol for private messaging.

I don’t have an informed opinion about Signal forks (Session, Molly, etc.). Generally, I don’t review cryptography software for FOSS maximalists with skewed threat models unless I’m being paid to do so, and that hasn’t happened yet.

https://soatok.blog/2024/05/14/its-time-for-furries-to-stop-using-telegram/

#endToEndEncryption #furries #FurryFandom #privacy #Signal #Telegram

Whether you’re curious about the furry community or already decided to participate, allow me to extend you a warm welcome to the furry fandom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ItIjq8W-DY

Since you’re probably new, here’s a quick primer on the landscape of our community–good, bad, and indifferent. This is the sort of information I and many of my friends wish we had when we first joined the fandom.

The Furry Fandom

Furry is a decentralized, participatory community that is largely online and deeply rooted in Internet history.

You can estimate about 10% of the human population to be LGBTQIA+, but that number is closer to 80% for furries.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv0QaTW3kEY

As a consequence, our community is largely sex-positive (but not necessarily sexual), queer-friendly, and openly tolerant to people with diverse backgrounds.

Our community is vibrant, art-centric, and generally able to laugh at ourselves.

https://twitter.com/BadFurry/status/1296559345208102912

However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows all the time, so let’s address the elephant in the room and talk about the bad parts of the furry fandom.

The Bad Parts of Furry

Remember when I said, “Furry is a decentralized, participatory community” earlier? This is both a strength and a weakness: It’s challenging to effectively expel terrible people. Consequently, while most of the furries you run into will be reasonably cool, there are undoubtedly some bad eggs.

(Art by Khia.)

It would take me years to comprehensively list all of the badness within any community–let alone one as large as ours–so I’m going to make a few broad strokes for the sake of brevity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3ttlgg3k3w

Right-Wing Furries

Furries that describe themselves as “Conservative” are almost exclusively the sort of right-wingers that were okay with (if not participating in) the insurrection of January 6, 2021.

Right-wingers range from the milquetoast pseudo-centrists like PeaceWolf to open insurrectionists like Diezel Raccoon to the guy who made a fursona named Foxler (Fox + Hitler) complete with a red armband.

https://twitter.com/2ManyStripes/status/1331637014639230976

https://twitter.com/TheSteelStag/status/1347226337677881346

Even if you like to think of yourself as a tolerant and open-minded person, there is nothing positive to be gained by associating or interacting with right-wing furries. They aren’t your log cabin conservatives.

Think of the sheer cognitive dissonance it requires to be openly right-wing and/or evangelical in a community that’s 80% LGBTQIA+ (which is almost always a target of right-wingers and evangelicals, at least in America). And then realize these assholes possess it in spades.

Furry Valley (formerly Furry Menagerie)

Dogpatch has a very long Twitter thread explaining the myriad reasons why you almost certainly want to avoid the group calling itself Furry Valley.

https://twitter.com/DogpatchPress/status/1066817848985640960

Furry Valley is a cult of personality that tries to welcome new members with “love-bombing” and then hold them hostage with doxing. A lot of the groups in the Furry Telegram list have FV’s tendrils in them, which serves as an unfortunate recruitment funnel for unsuspecting furries.

https://twitter.com/FENNERGY/status/1215018746760368129

My recommendation here is: Look before you leap.

If the group description mentions Furry Valley, avoid it. If the rules (pinned message, usually) mention Furry Valley, leave it. If you report a pro-FV message to the mods and they allow it, block them and leave it without further incident.

The Fuckboi/Party Scene

There is a contingent of furries that go to furry conventions to do a lot of drugs, have a lot of sex, and go to a lot of private room parties–and not actually participate in the community at large. This is the same contingent that causes a lot of the “30 is gay death” talking points to resurface in the furry fandom.

Predictably, this churns out a lot of unsavory personalities running virtually unchecked by our larger community. After many years, this has become toxic beyond the point of being salvageable, best demonstrated by the organization and attendance of an illegal and unofficial furry convention during the COVID-19 pandemic:

https://twitter.com/RamuneTiger/status/1334940338096656390

They’re selfishness turned up to 11. Avoid like the plague–especially since most of them are more than willing to infect you to have their own fun.

Genuinely Terrible People

There are a lot of people that don’t fit one of the above categories, yet are still awful, so here’s a small sample of furries that should be avoided.

https://twitter.com/McBittypaws/status/1275513048015331334

The Twitter thread has receipts, should you wish to know more about them.

The Good Parts of Furry

(Art by Khia.)

Much has already been written about the good parts of the furry fandom. Furries improve everything. Even at an individual level, the furry fandom fosters friendships. I highly recommend reading these other blog posts for a complete picture of the good side of the fandom.

Easily 95% of the people I’ve met in the furry fandom have been genuinely kind, caring, conscientious, and generous. There’s probably some sampling bias and self-selection at play here, admittedly.

How to Get Started?

Don’t bother with local furries, at least out of the gate. Regional groups tend to be catch-all for people who have little in common beyond geographical location, and a lot of local groups are very bad at moderation.

https://twitter.com/SoatokDhole/status/1300911840000708608

First, find a group with common ground beyond just “we’re both furries”.

• If you like tabletop games, find a Telegram or Discord group about furry tabletop games.
• If you like video games, find a furry Twitch streamer and hang out in their community and get to know the folks there.
• If you’re interested in science and technology, consider joining the Furry Technologists group on Telegram.
• If you’re interested in art, consider joining art websites like FurryLife or FurAffinity.

And then… talk to people. The ball’s in your court on that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aQLDR5iSW4

https://soatok.blog/2021/01/14/welcome-to-the-furry-fandom/

#furry #FurryFandom

Dhole Moments

2020-04-24 02:43:25

My recent post about the alleged source code leaks affecting Team Fortress 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive made the rounds on Twitter and made someone very mad, so I got hate DMs.
No more Angry Whoppers for you, mister!
…Look, I only said I got hate DMs, not that I got interesting or particularly effective hate DMs! Weak troll is weak, I know.

A lot of people online claim they “hate furries”, but almost none of them quite understand how prolific our community is, let alone how important we are to the Internet. As Stormi the Folf puts it…

I guarantee you the internet would collapse in a most horrific manner if all the furries in the world got Thano's snapped.

They *run* the internet in more ways than most people realize

— 🦊Stormi the Folf🐺 🔜FWA (@StormiFolf) April 23, 2020

Stormi is the Potato of Knowledge and Floof
What Stormi’s alluding to is true, and that’s a tale best told by an outsider to our community.

Telecommunications as a whole, which also encompasses The Internet, is in a constant state of failure and just in time fixes and functionally all modern communication would collapse if about 50 people, most of which are furries, decided to turn their pager off for a day. https://t.co/k1UqOv5kpd

— Ẑ͚͔͍̻̤̟ä̶̼̗̟͔́̿̾̓n̬͙̫̿͑͊̈̚d̡̰̭̞͖̟̖̟ͬ̚ê̺͖̂ͩ̀̉ͣrͪ̓ (@mmsword) November 28, 2019

Their follow-up tweet that elaborates on furry involvement is here.
So I’d like take the time to explain why nobody should ever underestimate the ingenuity or positivity of the furry community.

The Furry Fandom Has Saved Lives

https://www.youtube.com/embed/3h9sO17CV9A?feature=oembed
This is just one of many anecdotes. You can find many more here.
Although the furry fandom is widely misunderstood, it’s difficult to overstate how many lives have been saved and enriched by our community.

I wanted to share this touching moment. @Reo_Grayfox was telling me his story, and said those lines while staring straight into his fursuit's eyes. Hearing personal stories like this makes you appreciate the vastly diverse reasons why the furry fandom is essential to so many. pic.twitter.com/fD09Wmv6mf

— Joaquín Baldwin (@joabaldwin) January 22, 2018

Furries Provide Much-Needed Comfort to Others

In 2016, refugees from the civil war in Syria ended up in a hotel in Canada. This would have been an utterly remarkable fact if it wasn’t the same hotel and weekend as the local furry convention, Vancoufur.

The kids loved it.

This isn’t an isolated incident either. Our community is well-known for kindness and generosity in spades.

https://charcoalthings.tumblr.com/post/132996328881/i-will-defend-furries-to-my-grave

https://wakor.tumblr.com/post/126072529744/ok-you-know-what

What’s there to hate?

The Furry Fandom is Collectively Pretty Bad-Ass

Art by RueMaw.
No, not like that.

The fandom is bad-ass in as many ways as the fandom is incredibly diverse.
Image source and backstory of this meme: Dogpatch Press

90s furries built the Internet pic.twitter.com/Gicxme2HkT

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) April 30, 2019

SwiftOnSecurity knows the truth about more than just corn.

So one of my friends said furries pretty much run the US nuclear response communication networks. Just in case you're worried about Trump.

— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) November 12, 2016

Seriously.

Some of the Most Talented People You’ll Ever Meet Are Furries

eSports Champions:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/TWhrECl6zOY?feature=oembed

Musicians:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/album/4NlXsjKmcWegIfQEI0JzHK?utm_source=oembed

Artists and costume makers: I could literally link to hundreds of artists here. Follow me on Twitter; I retweet a lot of cute stuff.

Pretty much everything you could aspire to be that isn’t also terrible, if you look hard enough, you’ll find furries in the leaderboards having a fun time with it all.

The only reason to hate furries is thinly-veiled homophobia, because only about 25% of furries are heterosexual.

Why So Curious?

If I’ve made you curious about our community, and now you want to learn more about us, I’ve got you.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/K2XeOxWW2oY?feature=oembed

Psychology Today: What’s the Deal with Furries?

Furry Fandom Documentary When?

https://www.youtube.com/embed/cF9DQQsUcs0?feature=oembed

Ash Coyote is releasing a documentary about our subculture soon, titled The Fandom. You can find out more about it on her YouTube channel.

https://soatok.blog/2020/04/23/never-underestimate-the-furry-fandom/

#furries #furry #FurryFandom #hateMail #positivity #Society

If living through the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything–and it surely hasn’t–it would be the importance of friendship and community to our physical and emotional well-being.

For more on the subject of People Who Ought to Know Better Not Learning the Obvious Lessons from Misfortune, one needs look no further than social media.

Popularity

One of the reoccurring topics of the Discourse on Furry Twitter is those gosh-darned popufurs–loosely defined as “anyone with a higher follower account than you”.

I’ve written an analysis post back when I posted on Medium that covered friendship and popufurs, which inspired Stormi to create a YouTube video about the topic:

https://youtu.be/sEJ3usS7bb4

I’ve never experienced popularity, but I’ve been close personal friends with a few people who do, and I’ve witnessed the fallout of parasocial relationships. Archantael did a really good video on that subject:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXGyKaOEz8I

Loneliness

One of the most dangerous falsehoods that too many furries believe about popularity is that you can’t be popular and lonely at the same time.

Loneliness was already an epidemic before COVID-19, and the prolonged social isolation has led to a lot of relationship strain, to say the least.

In the past year, we’ve seen a lot of long-term, loving relationships end abruptly. We’ve seen people who were coping with mental health issues suddenly succumb to them. Tempers hasten. Patience shorten. It’s been a royal clusterfuck, and at least in America, there’s no end to it in sight.

Friendship

I think a big problem that rarely gets talked about is that our society is plagued by weird beliefs about what friendship is or ought to be.

The “Friend Zone” Myth

One of the most deplorable myths about friendship is the so-called “friend zone”. The story goes something like this:

• When you meet someone, they’re a stranger. No arguments there.
• Once you and them start to gain familiarity, they become an acquaintance.
• After you’ve spent some time as an acquaintance, they become a friend.
• At this point, if your gender identities and sexual orientations are compatible, you’re expected to move onto some sort of romantic interest–be it a friendship “with benefits”, romantic partner, or something in-between.
• Once you’ve courted a number of flings, you progress towards a higher caliber of relationship. Namely: Marriage.