Yeah, that's right. You're on .world, right? Which I believe is federated with just about everything. There are all kinds of instances out there, and some are more selective of which instances they're federated with to filter out communities like that.
If we want to talk theory, I think there's 3 major aspects of the human psyche represented in furries: our unconscious desire to apply human attributes to non-human things (anthropomorphization), human creativity and the creation of representations of the self, and, of course, the sexual aspect of being creatures that enjoy sex.
People unfortunately hone in almost exclusively on the last one (as evidenced by the other comments in this very post), but as the joke goes, the world's biggest collection of Disney porn is locked up in the Disney Vault. Artists get horny too, and if you could create porn with the power of your mind and a pen and piece of paper, wouldn't you? Years ago, there was a story about how the daughter of the man who created Astro Boy, one of the foundational pieces of anime and manga, had managed to open a locked drawer in her father's work desk long after his death. And what did she find inside? Porn he had drawn of sexy cat women.
We've been adding animal attributes to the human form (and vice versa) since the dawn of mankind. The vast majority of world religions are based on it in some fashion, from the gods of Egypt to the snake in the Garden of Eden to Zeus having sex with anyone and everyone as anything you can imagine, from a bull to a swan to a fucking beam of light if my memory is right.
And the one thing most people forget about furries is that the characters aren't some corporate mascots or media characters - they're often personal. A fursuit is often a representation of the suiter's self in some aspect, not a cosplay of their favorite character from a show or game. The fandom is a place that allows people to explore their own identities, whether that be exploring concepts of gender and sexuality, or styles of fashion and other things that they might be afraid to try in real life.
That might be an instance issue, honestly. I have never seen porn of any kind cross my feed unless I specifically go looking for it. Your instance might just be federated with a bunch of furry porn communities.
My feed is basically exclusively 196, politics, Linux, Star Trek, and related meme subs to those - and I just set my feed to top 24 hours or sort by active on the all feed. But I also think a lot of communities outside of those are rather underrepresented on Lemmy.
Except it's not a straw man though, because the furry=fetish stereotype has a verifiable source of when it entered the mainstream culture from a pair of TV episodes in the 90s and 00s - the famous CSI episode and one from a similar show that I can't remember the name of. These two painted furry conventions as basically sex dens filled with orgies of people in animal costumes, and that was the first time most people outside of niche parts of the internet had even heard of furries.
Before furries, it happened to Trekkies. People said that people only liked Star Trek for the sexy green alien women. But it isn't often that a fandom is treated like this and for this long. Anime had a similar but not quite the same stereotype, but that's largely relegated to the really bad parts of the anime fandom.
And it's very similar to the pathologization of trans women as men who get off on the idea of seeing themselves as women.
I'm not saying that they think that furries are sexual predators or something. I'm saying that the idea of furries being a fetish is a stereotype born from a malicious place that painted an entire minority as a bunch of sexual deviants for viewership on TV, and that they're perpetuating that stereotype.
Unfortunately, that's not what they meant.
Woah, you put a lot of words in my mouth. I don't mind them at all. I just wouldn't say they're cool. Thinking about it now, it's weird to think anyone is cool because of their sexual preference.
Turns out it was the bog standard "furries are sexual deviants" stereotype that's existed since the early days of the internet.🥱
Also a lot of grungy homeless people on the strip.
That's just tourist hotspots in the US in general (could generally just leave out the tourist part as well). I grew up in a summer tourist town and that county has the highest rates of addiction and homelessness in the entire state. When tourism becomes the economy, it pushes everything else out and leaves no room for locals to live. Half the businesses are closed 9 months out of the year and it's so crowded during the last 3 that you couldn't go anywhere if you wanted to.
When the mob looks like the picture of piousness in a story, you know it's bad.
Of course, you also know that just by the fact that corporations are involved.
Related:
The argument that these models learn in a way that's similar to how humans do is absolutely false, and the idea that they discard their training data and produce new content is demonstrably incorrect. These models can and do regurgitate their training data, including copyrighted characters.
And these things don't learn styles, techniques, or concepts. They effectively learn statistical averages and patterns and collage them together. I've gotten to the point where I can guess what model of image generator was used based on the same repeated mistakes that they make every time. Take a look at any generated image, and you won't be able to identify where a light source is because the shadows come from all different directions. These things don't understand the concept of a shadow or lighting, they just know that statistically lighter pixels are followed by darker pixels of the same hue and that some places have collections of lighter pixels. I recently heard about an ai that scientists had trained to identify pictures of wolves that was working with incredible accuracy. When they went in to figure out how it was identifying wolves from dogs like huskies so well, they found that it wasn't even looking at the wolves at all. 100% of the images of wolves in its training data had snowy backgrounds, so it was simply searching for concentrations of white pixels (and therefore snow) in the image to determine whether or not a picture was of wolves or not.
I saw some context for this, and the short of it is that headline writers want you to hate click on articles.
What the article is actually about is that there's tons of solar panels now but not enough infrastructure to effectively limit/store/use the power at peak production, and the extra energy in the grid can cause damage. Damage to the extent of people being without power for months.
California had a tax incentive program for solar panels, but not batteries, and because batteries are expensive, they're in a situation now where so many people put panels on their houses but no batteries to store excess power that they can't store the power when it surpasses demand, so the state is literally paying companies to run their industrial stoves and stuff just to burn off the excess power to keep the grid from being destroyed.
Are Millennials hating on Gen Z? I always thought our attitude was more like this:
Also, love how this skips Gen X. Always the forgotten generation.
Penguins do have predators in the leopard seals in the antarctic, but because they're the only bipedal animals down there they seem to view people as kinda just big penguins. They seem more than happy to jump into boats with people if they think there's a seal around or something.
And for their part, the seals also seem to view us as a curiosity or small seal. I know of at least one case where a seal tried to teach somebody how to hunt by bringing them fish and injured penguins like they would for a baby seal.