[-] uriel238 1 points 11 hours ago

I would say, given any anthro character, there's a good chance a furry or some furries want to fuck them, but most furries don't.

A large subset of furries want to be an anthro, though, and likely have specific characters they aspire to.

[-] uriel238 2 points 11 hours ago

Dr. Dan McClellan has a great segment on Data Over Dogma about Prototype Theory ( On YouTube, time counter at 35:17), in which he points out dictionaries aren't authoritative in telling us what words mean, rather they tell us what words have been used to mean so far.

He brings up the word furniture as an example talking about prototype theory, and talks about how we have a general sense of what furniture is ( we know it when we see it ) but we cannot define a set of features that includes all furniture and excludes all things not furniture.

[-] uriel238 1 points 11 hours ago

Babs Bunny is a known nexus of this controversy, having been drawn a variety of ways from more chibi to more realistic and with various degrees of adult sexual characteristics.

To be fair, there's been more public freak out over the green M&M redesigns.

[-] uriel238 7 points 12 hours ago

This very much sounds like a mushroom (psilocybin) moment.

Though full disclosure, the one time I tried mushrooms, I didn't experience anything that I could actually attribute to an altered brain-state.

[-] uriel238 2 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago)

The rule of law is not dependent on democracy, but it's super easy for the elite to circumvent the rule of law, even in democracy.

An example would be the Napoleonic code. Even after Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of France, he established the Napoleonic code which declared that the same laws that applied to the commons also applied to bourgeoisie and even the emperor, himself.

Of course, the same thing that happens here in the states happened in post-revolutionary France, that those with means could muster a defense where those without could not, so the law could be circumvented with money and resources (and sometimes the power of force).

So it's a mess.

The rule of law -- that the law is applied equally to everyone, -- is an ideal that societies strive for, typically only with limited success. The challenges include yoking in those with ostentatious means who are able to escape justice or hire strong defenders, and elevating the destitute and the contemptible^†^ so that they can get true due process. In the US, since convictions advance careers (contrast, fair adjudications), prosecutors and judges tend to favor false convictions over ruling out innocent suspects brought to trial, which has created the plea-bargain epidemic throughout the US today.

† Suspects of heinous crimes often end up the subject of abuse, or of illegal search. The only way we enforce the protections provided by the fourth and fifth amendments to the Constitution of the United States (Wikipedia: Fourth; Fifth ) is by penalizing the state by allowing mistreated suspects to go free. And it's particularly odious when we know that the walking perp is guilty of baking children into pies. (We've also seen potential misuse of this when the justice system doesn't really want to convict someone, say a favored entertainer who is guilty of sexual misconduct. Ooops. )

As a result, police techniques that would constitute an illegal search become legal by precedent for having been used to bring in the most contemptible criminals and are then applied to people guilty of possession of controlled substances, and we end up with SWAT raids on black-community barbershops for their haircut licenses being out of order. We also get people convicted for eating jelly donuts because the $2 field drug test that reacts to cocaine also reacts to glazed sugar.

So rule of law is not only difficult to attain and preserve, but it very quickly deteriorates.

[-] uriel238 11 points 1 day ago

So, in the 1970s, climatologists just said +2.0℃ is going to kill us. The reason the Paris Accord chose +1.5℃ is because everything above +1.5℃ is expected to get pretty exciting and it's difficult for labs to R&D or to include mitigation projects in the budget when your coasts are being hammered with hurricanes yearly, and your mountains are burning all the time.

Nowadays when we ask climatologists what happens if we let the global mean temperature go above +2.0℃, they like to say it won't be good or even it's going to suck but few actually talk about what will actually happen, and I think this is partly because no climatologist really wants to be discredited as alarmist because what they'd say is pretty extreme.

So here's the gist, because I wanted some solid dick from an Iron Man:

We're running out of water. An example would be in southern California, where acres of choice land are owned by the Saudi family and are used to grow alfalfa using water pumped up from the water table. All this alfalfa is then shipped to their cattle ranches and fed to cows. Alfalfa is incredibly water dependent, and the water table in question is getting low, which is a concern locally, but since the Saudis control water rights there, there's not a thing they can do about it. Eventually all the water will be extracted and all those farms will either depend on some other source (like the Colorado River) or will go dry and stop growing things.

This is a problem all over the world. We've been pulling up bunches of water, or using the various rivers which have been getting progressively lower (and letting all the ecosystems dry up) and there will be a point where it will all run out.

And at that point, when there's not enough water to grow stuff, we're not going to have enough food for everyone. Famine will follow. Those who don't want to die from famine who have guns will try to take from other people who might or might not have guns, and war will follow.

In our best case scenarios (Imagine if everyone in the world took action today ) we'll have enough food for about a billion people. Contrast eight billion who are alive today.

But we're not doing anything. We watching the water get pumped, we're still growing alfalfa and feeding cows. We're still burning fossil fuels and coal and polluting the sky faster than ever. So it's not going to settle at a sustainable population of one billion, it's going to settle at much much less. So instead of one out of eight of us dying, it's going to be one out of eighty, or eight hundred. We don't know because we don't know at what point we turn around and take it seriously, and if that's in time.

Big picture time: Homo-Erectus as a species lasted two million years (roughly) or eight times the 250K we homo-sapiens survived. However, there was at least one period in which the total H-Erectus population was less than ten thousand, and they survived under stark conditions until the conditions improved enough to multiply again. Eventually H-Erectus would be out-competed by its smarter, more social cousins. We, too, may survive by a dwindling, lingering number if we don't completely wipe ourselves out. Since we're navigating not just the climate great filter, but also the plastic great filter, we might be screwed already. But we don't know.

At any rate, all the culture that exists today is at risk. From Beethoven's symphonies to the Words of Lao Tzu to the Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems, all our culture is in jeopardy. It's likely that the next chance we get to try our hand at global civilization will have little to nothing to do with what exists today, for better or worse.

[-] uriel238 8 points 1 day ago

If Russia drops a single nuke, everybody.

That's the thing, no one wants to break the ice at this party.

[-] uriel238 5 points 1 day ago

TIL game cheats is a category of deplorable that belongs with pirates sofware and warez.

I remember looking on line to unlock game cheats for Saints Row IV specifically to turn off the downstage pixellation effect and found that this was the most common SR4 cheat in use.

[-] uriel238 7 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Mental illness is normal in 2024, especially in the United States, which continues to go though a mental illness epidemic. The mental health sector of the world is looking at the results of the 2024 general election and noting the corellation not just of social and family dysfunction but intergenerational mental illness handed down through abuse and isolation, as a possible factor in the election results elevating a known threat to US democratic features to President of the United States.

While there may be correlation between mental illness and furry identity (I haven't seen any data based assertion this is true) that still would not indicate causality. Interest in TTRPGs correlates since gaming can serve to aleviate symptoms, distract from trauma, and give people with social deficiencies a mechanism by which to express themselves safely.

Besides, there is a notable similarity when calling furry identity a mental illness is juxtaposed to the classic assumtion that LGBT+ identities were indicative of mental illness.

That said, some of us are actually diagnosed and contend with symptoms like suicidality and interpersonal dysfunction, so please don't use mental illness as a subject of derision or contempt. We aren't 1980s era slasher antagonists.

[-] uriel238 13 points 2 days ago

Why? If someone's identity as a furry is as much a part of them as your identity as gay, or for that matter, Marcus' identity as black, isn't it similar enough a violation that society deems you can't be that and be a full equal?

This, to me, is the problem. Mystique shouldn't have to hide her mutant status even though she could.

[-] uriel238 63 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

So in recent weeks I've learned that furries are a lot more shunned than I thought, and it's one of those things like Bronies where it's not the subject of their obsession but the enthusiasm they have for the subject of their fandom.

I grew up with Disney and Warner Brothers classics, read the Albedo comic anthology and a few others, but don't see myself as a furry enthusiast (contrast my enthusiasm for late 20th century are we the real monsters? science fiction). Furry porn and furry-themed sex fantasies aren't particularly my scene, but this is true for the majority of furries as well.

But our society has gotten weird about furries and anthros, which I guess became evident when the US right-wing started spreading the litter-boxes in schools canard. Curiously, in the porn media community, animal genital shapes are a controversy, and mainstream media platforms that sell furry porn will not allow for anthros with canine or equine genitals. I think VISA specifically will not allow transactions for such works, which is stunning interventionism both in its overreach and specificity.

And then some social media sites have special rules for furry content, that even SFW furry content can only appear inside furry-inclusive perimeters... unless it's classical like Warner or Hanna Barbara. Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge Freefall (1998-present) one of the long-running fairly-hard-science-fiction webcomics (that gets into space-travel culture and robot culture), specifically because it has an anthro as a main character, more precisely, a genetically engineered wolf, next to a robot and a non-human trader.

It's not that furries are weird. It's that society is weird about furries.

I had an idea that the paws salute should become the official salute of the new resistance (since furries have been marked as a target for fascist enemy within rhetoric), but then trying to do some basic web searches, I couldn't find a proper conventional name for the pose, nor easy-to-find art of it, even though I've seen the gesture made by catgirls often enough to know it's a thing, and one of the salutes I might consider when standing before the firing squad.

In the last few years, I went from being resignedly a man to being enby, having become disgusted with how dudes obsessed with manhood have conducted themselves in our society. Before, I didn't care that much, and my own notions of what it was to be a man turned into adulting in the 2010s (take care of business; make sure rent and utilities are paid; don't do violence, especially when nuclear weapons are involved). Now men look like Matt Walsh and Donald Trump.

I'm not a furry or otherkin (yet), but considering how the furry community is among the untermenschen, I'm half-inclined to develop a fursona for sake of solidarity.

And I still think the paws salute should be the sign of the resistance.

[-] uriel238 51 points 2 days ago

It's something that really bothers me about communism and socialism being derisive in the US, even in 2024, about 35 years after USSR fell.

The alternative to community-centric society is autocracy, typically devolving into monarchism.

Death to monarchists!

52
Get MacDruled (OC) (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 week ago by uriel238 to c/196

An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.

I may just be an esoteric nerd.

330
submitted 2 weeks ago by uriel238 to c/196

Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.

So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.

515
submitted 2 weeks ago by uriel238 to c/196

A semicolon after "youth" will help keep it clear.

96
All Hallows Rule in America (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 weeks ago by uriel238 to c/196

Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!

Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.

There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)

The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.

It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on ~~good~~ better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.

And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.

Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.

Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.

In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.

And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.

Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.

A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.

Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)

Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.

The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.

O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.

Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.

By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.

(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)

These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.

But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.

Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.

401
Rule Studis. (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 1 month ago by uriel238 to c/196

Another Qu'ils mangent de la brioche moment.

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submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by uriel238 to c/atheism@lemmy.world

Refrigerator logic, or a shower thought:

According to Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating fruit of the tree of wisdom, specifically of knowledge of good and evil.

Serpent talks to Eve, calling out God's lie: God said they will die from eating the fruit (as in die quickly, as if the fruit were poisonous). They won't die from the fruit, Serpent tells them. Instead, their eyes will open and they will understand good and evil.

And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of wisdom, learning good and evil (right and wrong, or social mores). And then God evicts them from paradise for disobedience.

But if the eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, this belies they did not know good and evil in the first place. They couldn't know what forbidden means, or that eating from the tree was wrong. They were incapable of obedience.

Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.

Putting the tree unguarded and easily accessible in the Garden of Eden was totally a setup

Am I reading this right?

5
submitted 2 months ago by uriel238 to c/twosentencehorror@sh.itjust.works

Only too late would we discover what would become of our children.

(More terror than horror, but I think qualifies.)

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submitted 2 months ago by uriel238 to c/196

We recently had this conversation and I realized I have new headcannon.

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submitted 3 months ago by uriel238 to c/196

{"data":{"msg":"Required command ffprobe not found, make sure it exists in pict-rs'
$PATH","files":null},"state":"success"}

This is what I get when I try to u/l a picture from the Lemmy instance website (Blåhaj)

< sadface >

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submitted 4 months ago by uriel238 to c/196

I was thinking Low Key Gigachad Enclave

10
submitted 4 months ago by uriel238 to c/fakebandnames@lemmy.world

Courtesy of Ray Bradbury, of course.

(We assume Jim took the deal.)

227
My beautiful child... (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 5 months ago by uriel238 to c/lgbtq_plus
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uriel238

joined 1 year ago