Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[Uncle]

Definitely not the best update to this thread, but I feel it was important enough to share.

Mark Merlino, aka Sy Sable, one of the founding members of the Furry fandom, passed away on February 20th from cancer.

His involvement and work have definitely had an immeasurable impact on my life: it became another avenue with which I socialized with my brother and friends. I made new friends through participation in the fandom, I discovered fursuiting and that I enjoy actually making these crazy things, especially with my friends. The 12-hour road trips to conventions, the fursuit parades and raves, Duke's AC music video I danced in, the house parties, the cute little frog pin I wear on my jacket to work, all the money spent, the time, the stress, and the joy. Furry is now an inseparable part of who I am. My only wish is that I could've told Sy what it means to me in person. Rest in peace.

Believe Nepenthe is referring to this video, having to scrub through it but most likely

"finally found you" indeed

https://www.weasyl.com/~nepenthe/submissions/432404/snow-bird

My first fursuit Claudio Pascal, out and about in the Great Georgia Apocalypse of 2014, aka, two inches of melting snow. Made by me, pictures taken by my best friend.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/18651023/

I figured it makes no sense to host a fursuit business without backing it up with the work I've actually done beforehand, so here's the finished pieces and bases under my wing. From left to right, top to bottom:

1: Claudio Pascal, a lyrebird partial. Featured a paperclay beak and moveable jaw.

2: Aldagar Hunter, my current three-quarter suit. Features toony padded handpaws, a movable jaw, foam feet with the ability to insert shoes, exchangeable tongues, painted eye scar, and a funny asymmetrical expression.

3: A head refurb of mouseyk's current partial. I refoamed the original base a little, refurred it, added in my first set of follow me eyes, a sewn fleece nose, and fur hair. The ears were salvaged from the original while jjreaming did the neck.

4: Dencer the mutt, my first commission. Features bouncy mesh ears, a hollow vinyl nose, exchangeable tongues (I just love these on doggies), vinyl pads and claws, and no luxury shag!

5: Naraz the Indian Giant Squirrel. Will be a 2D-eye, static jaw head with low crotch and leg padding (wip).

So that's my abilities on display, in various stages of being finished!

bonus

[books]

Rest in power, dog. *dark fist enoji*

Seems like a dude whi liked to bone animals died; how is this news of any sort?

[Boredfrom]

https://www.sonicstadium.org/forums/topic/5421-penths-sketchbook/

In a botched mission to nab a suspected kidnapper and terrorist, Aldagar is shot in the shoulder. In the midst of being stitched back together and suffering a team-wide chewing out by commander Detroit, said bear considers their strongman down for the count; Not on this puppy's life!

Nep used to imagine ProCop stories!

[Boredfrom]

BTW, her yellow dog OC is a furry dog manlet called Aldagar Hunter:

My little fan character Aldagar Hunter, the most badass Yorkshire Terrier this side of the galaxy, doing one of the things he does best. And yes, he's been doing archery well before I knew Hawkeye was a thing.

[Hap Shaughnessy]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/sports-illustrated-the-games-industry-deserves-a-better-spokesperson-than-geoff-keighley.822210/page-12?post=119881374#post-119881374

User Banned (1 Month): Dismissing Concerns of Racism; Transphobia & Bigotry; Account in Junior Phase

Was also racist and very dismissive of transphobia so good riddance to his ass.

To each their own.

[Uncle]

https://www.sonicstadium.org/forums/topic/5421-penths-sketchbook/

In a botched mission to nab a suspected kidnapper and terrorist, Aldagar is shot in the shoulder. In the midst of being stitched back together and suffering a team-wide chewing out by commander Detroit, said bear considers their strongman down for the count; Not on this puppy's life!

Nep used to imagine ProCop stories!

Silver's obviously having an excellent time with the Natal. I dunno why I don't draw this fellow more often; I actually like him.

oh god remember when kinect was called natal 

[Boredfrom]

For better or worse, Nepenthe seems to have problems adapting to technology, just like Uncle speculated. While she seems to be very good in pencil work, sounds like it took her long to start using a tablet or graphics editors and she seems that genuinely sucks at coloring.

[benji]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/libs-of-tiktok-targeted-a-district-then-an-indigenous-non-binary-student-was-killed-on-campus.818712/page-6?post=119943372#post-119943372

Federal investigation opens into Owasso Public Schools after death of Nex Benedict

Good.

Finally

About time! Justice for Nex.

Great update. Get those murderers.

https://www.advocate.com/news/federal-investigation-nex-benedict

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has initiated an investigation into the Oklahoma school district where the 16-year-old sophomore went to school and was bullied before his death.

Look, they're experts but they don't actually know how the law works so they think the federal government is going to arrest some teenage girls.

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

They will not be thrilled with any investigation result that isn't hanging the 3 teenage (younger than Nex) girls.

[HaughtyFrank]

Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights

Mind hunters this is not

[books]

I've always advocated for algebra in junior high. Let's weed the smart kids from the riff raff early.

[benji]

Speaking of Nepenthe...

Today in benji shares historical parallels about false progressivism that nobody cares about requires a bit of setup.

In 1930, forty-two-year-old Rhodes scholar and Tennessee poet John Crowe Ransom wrote in the opening essay in a famous collection, I’ll Take My Stand, “the latter-day societies have been seized—none quite so violently as our American one—with the strange idea that the human destiny is not to secure an honorable peace with nature, but to wage an unrelenting war on nature.”58

Ransom and the other “Southern Agrarians” disparaged cities and industry for their impact on the environment and on people. They declared farm machinery, paved roads, and indoor plumbing as part of the “disease of modern industrial civilization.”

Malthusianism grew an even harder edge in the 1970s. Hardin, the University of California biologist, published an essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” in which he argued that “we must recognize the limited capacity of any lifeboat.”

The picture Hardin painted was of keeping people out of the lifeboat. Otherwise, the people trying to get in would doom the people in the lifeboat, in addition to themselves.

“However humanitarian our intent,” said Hardin, “every Indian life saved through medical or nutritional assistance from abroad diminishes the quality of life for those who remain, and for subsequent generations.”75

Top academic institutions helped make Malthusian ideas mainstream. In 1972, an NGO called the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a report concluding that the planet was on the brink of ecological collapse, which The New York Times covered on its front page.

“The most probable result,” the report declared, “will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.” The collapse of civilization was “a grim inevitability if society continues its present dedication to growth and ‘progress.’ ”76

Like the Southern Agrarians, ecologist Barry Commoner and physicist Amory Lovins argued that industrialization was harmful, and that we needed to protect poor nations from economic development.77

Spoiler: further setup, if you'd like, because sometimes I don't think people realize this shit is older than most of us not new or modern science (click to show)(click to hide)

The clash resolved itself when Malthusians including Ehrlich accepted a redistributive agenda of rich nations assisting poor nations with development aid so long as that money went to charity and not things like infrastructure. This was the seed of what the UN would christen “sustainable development.”79

Lovins, for his part, married the demand for energy scarcity to a romantic vision of a “soft energy” future that rejected the infrastructure of the rich world. In 1976, Foreign Affairs published a thirteen-thousand-word essay by Lovins making the case for small-scale energy production instead of large-scale power plants.80

Where electricity from large power stations had been viewed in the New Deal era and before as progressive—liberating people from such tasks as washing clothes by hand and providing a clean alternative to wood-burning stoves—Lovins viewed electricity as authoritarian, disempowering, and alienating. “In an electrical world, your lifeline comes not from an understandable neighborhood technology run by people you know who are at your own social level, but rather from an alien, remote, and perhaps humiliatingly uncontrollable technology run by faraway, bureaucratized, technical elite who have probably never heard of you,” he wrote.81

The Malthusians significantly modified Malthus. Where Malthus warned that overpopulation would result in a scarcity of food, Malthusians in the 1960s and 1970s warned that energy abundance would result in overpopulation, environmental destruction, and societal collapse.

Ehrlich and Lovins said they opposed nuclear energy because it was abundant. “Even if nuclear power were clean, safe, economic, assured of ample fuel, and socially benign,” Lovins said, “it would still be unattractive because of the political implications of the kind of energy economy it would lock us into.”82

Behind advocacy ostensibly motivated by concerns for the environment lay a very dark view of human beings. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean, and abundant energy,” said Lovins, “because of what we would do with it.”83 Ehrlich agreed. “In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”84

So much death and suffering was coming, Ehrlich and Holdren believed, humankind needed to play “triage,” and leave some people to die. In the “concept of triage,” they wrote, “those in the third groups are those who will die regardless of treatment. . . . The Paddocks [the authors of the 1967 book Famine 1975!] felt that India, among others, was probably in this category. Bangladesh is today a more clear-cut example.”85

Ehrlich and Holdren argued that the world likely did not have enough energy to support the development aspirations of the world’s poor. “Most plans for modernizing agriculture in less-developed nations call for introducing energy-intensive practices similar to those used in North America and western Europe—greatly increased use of fertilizers and other farm chemicals, tractors and other machinery, irrigation, and supporting transportation networks—all of which require large inputs of fossil fuels,” they noted.86

It wasn’t that poor nations needed to develop, it was that rich nations needed to consume less.

Ehrlich and Holdren claimed in their 1977 textbook that the only way to feed seven billion people by the year 2000 was for people in the rich world to eat less meat and dairy—the same recommendation IPCC made in 2019.88 “Unless food can be transferred from the rich nations on an unprecedented scale,” they wrote, “the death rate from starvation in [less-developed countries] seems likely to rise in the next few decades.”89

Where in 1977, Ehrlich and Holdren proposed international control of the “development, administration, conservation and distribution of all natural resources,”

“If present trends continue,” claimed the blue-ribbon authors of The Global 2000 Report to the President of the United States, “the world in 2000 will be more . . . vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now [and] . . . the world’s people will be poorer in many ways than they are today.”91

McKibben has done more to popularize Malthusian ideas than any other writer. The first book about global warming written for a popular audience was his 1989 book, The End of Nature. In it, McKibben argued that humankind’s impact on the planet would require the same Malthusian program developed by Ehrlich and Commoner in the 1970s. Economic growth would have to end. Rich nations must return to farming and transfer wealth to poor nations so they could improve their lives modestly but not industrialize. And the human population would have to shrink to between 100 million and 2 billion.108

Where just a few years earlier, Malthusians had demanded limits on energy consumption by claiming fossil fuels were scarce, now they demanded limits by claiming the atmosphere was scarce. “It’s not that we’re running out of stuff,” explained McKibben in 1998; “what we’re running out of are what the scientists call ‘sinks.’ Places to put the by-products of our large appetites. Not garbage dumps—we could go on using Pampers till the end of time and still have empty space left to toss them away. But the atmospheric equivalent of garbage dumps.”109

By the twenty-first century, Stanford University climate scientist Schneider was as much an activist as a scientist. In a chapter in which he describes his participation in the 2007 IPCC report, Schneider writes, “I was sometimes disgusted how national interests trump planetary interests and the here-and-now overshadows long-term sustainability. I remembered my ‘five horsemen of the environmental apocalypse’: ignorance, greed, denial, tribalism, and short-term thinking.”110

Since I don't expect most people to recognize this name and it's key to the punchline about Nepenthe specifically, I'll quote the Wikipedia intro:

Bayard Rustin (/ˈbaɪ.ərd/ BY-ərd; March 17, 1912 – August 24, 1987) was an American political activist, a prominent leader in social movements for civil rights, socialism, nonviolence, and gay rights. Rustin was the principal organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.[1]

Rustin worked in 1941 with A. Philip Randolph on the March on Washington Movement to press for an end to racial discrimination in the military and defense employment. Rustin later organized Freedom Rides, and helped to organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to strengthen Martin Luther King Jr.'s leadership; he taught King about non-violence. Rustin worked alongside Ella Baker, a co-director of the Crusade for Citizenship, in 1954; and before the Montgomery bus boycott, he helped organize a group called "In Friendship" to provide material and legal assistance to people threatened with eviction from their tenant farms and homes.[2] Rustin became the head of the AFL–CIO's A. Philip Randolph Institute, which promoted the integration of formerly all-white unions and promoted the unionization of African Americans. During the 1970s and 1980s, Rustin served on many humanitarian missions, such as aiding refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia. At the time of his death in 1987, he was on a humanitarian mission in Haiti.

Rustin was a gay man and, due to criticism over his sexuality, usually advised other civil rights leaders from behind the scenes. During the 1980s, he became a public advocate on behalf of gay causes, speaking at events as an activist and supporter of human rights.[3]

Spoiler: but oof, a race traitor chud in hiding? (click to show)(click to hide)

In 1970, Rustin called for the U.S. to send military jets in the fight against Arab states by Israel; referring to a New York Times article he wrote, Rustin wrote to Prime Minister Golda Meir "...I hope that the ad will also have an effect on a serious domestic question: namely, the relations between the Jewish and the Negro communities in America." Rustin was concerned about unity between two groups that he argued faced discrimination in America and abroad, and also believed that Israel's democratic ideals were proof that justice and equality would prevail in the Arab territories despite the atrocities of war. His former colleagues in the peace movement considered it to be a profound betrayal of Rustin's nonviolent ideals.[56]

Rustin maintained his strongly anti-Soviet and anti-communist views later in his life, especially with regard to Africa. Rustin co-wrote with Carl Gershman (a former director of Social Democrats, USA and future Ronald Reagan appointee) an essay entitled "Africa, Soviet Imperialism & the Retreat of American Power", in which he decried Russian and Cuban involvement in the Angolan Civil War and defended the military intervention by apartheid South Africa on behalf of the National Liberation Front of Angola (FNLA) and National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA). "And if a South African force did intervene at the urging of black leaders and on the side of the forces that clearly represent the black majority in Angola, to counter a non-African army of Cubans ten times its size, by what standard of political judgment is this immoral?" Rustin accused the Soviet Union of a classic imperialist agenda in Africa in pursuit of economic resources and vital sea lanes, and called the Carter Administration "hypocritical" for claiming to be committed to the welfare of blacks while doing too little to thwart Russian and Cuban expansion throughout Africa.[57]

The same idea is echoed forcefully by Bayard Rustin, the civil rights veteran, who condemns the "self-righteous, elitist neo-Malthusians who call for slow growth or no growth. The policies of these elitists would condemn the black underclass, the slum proletariat and rural blacks, to permanent poverty."

45 years later:  

[Boredfrom]

Rest in power, dog. *dark fist enoji*

Seems like a dude whi liked to bone animals died; how is this news of any sort?

For little I know, he was a pervert and was the one that made the furry cons infamous nests of sexual diseases but the dude was definitely against IRL animal fucking and had a partner.

[Boredfrom]

Two women can be friends, you know?

/s?

These women clearly aren't.

Yeah, but there's a clear difference between platonic friendship & yuri. Splatoon has both.

Think of it like JJK, except Pearlina is MUCH more blatant than Gojo x Geto.

 
 

they're gay as hell and it's a you problem if you can't extrapolate that from the content

https://www.resetera.com/threads/will-pearlina-pearlxmarina-be-confirmed-canon-in-side-order.751858/page-2?post=119948463#post-119947689

I love how Clicker Carl and stopmrdomino got hyper aggressive for the mere suggestion of that possibility while Neoxon mention his male OTP from a shonen anime. 

[Taco Bell Tower]

A you problem for not seeing them as a gay couple 

[benji]

Think of it like JJK, except Pearlina is MUCH more blatant than Gojo x Geto.

I can't think of it like that, I have no idea what these words mean.

[benji]

Think of it like Jake Manhattan's plotline in episode eight of Manhattan, AZ. It's pretty blatant.

[Boredfrom]

Think of it like JJK, except Pearlina is MUCH more blatant than Gojo x Geto.

I can't think of it like that, I have no idea what these words mean.

It’s like Ted Kord and Booster Gold. But Ted Kord turned evil and Booster Gold become the most popular superhero in the world.

Or Kirk and Spock. But Spock turned evil and Kirk was Kirk.

[LoverOfCycles]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/nintendo-is-suing-the-creators-of-popular-switch-emulator-yuzu.821889/post-119831361

Sucks to be you Little Timmy. Hope Papa Nintendo rereleases Super Mario Galaxy 2 cause wanting to replay or emulate an older game (And there are thousands of games that will never get rereleased) and systems that are long discontinued is entitlement. 

It is funny how they go on about Captialism bad and all that and then they turn around and side with literally the Richest Company in Japan.

 

They're making $30k a month from patreon and paywalling access to the latest builds behind that same patreon.
They have builds playing the latest titles before they hit retail.

They're not in it for 'preservation'.

This is always the part left out by the people arguing against companies who take action to protect their IP. If this was about preservation, why the need to have current gen machines emulated? Why are they seeking to profit from the emulator?

What gets my goat is that these people are bullshitting you by arguing their thinly veiled piracy is actually for "good reasons" when it's actually just so they can avoid paying for games.

Nah, people should be able to dump their games and play them at a higher resolution and framerate. Nintendo isn't starving. As GabeN said, piracy is a service issue.

[benji]

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

[Boredfrom]

I don’t think that is normal neither healthy to have emotional outbursts in presence of random strangers.

[benji]

I don’t think that is normal neither healthy to have emotional outbursts in presence of random strangers.

Tell me more about how you don't understand women, chud.

[Besticus Maximus]

Nepenthe has some very creepy drawings on that profile





You know who else took sketching commissions? ADOLF HITLER, that's who

[Boredfrom]

The cynic in me believes the only reason the US is air dropping aid right now of all times is to crowd out the news and distract from this massacre.

l would hope we finally hit a line in the sand, but you're probably not far off.

While it  definitely feels like  a reaction to the massacre… I don’t understand how this is going to distract the new cycle

If anything, it feels like the public apathy is starting to sink in.

[benji]

"The U.S. needs to do something about this!"

"We're going to drop some aid."

"You're only doing this to distract from it!"

[benji]

This shit hasn't been "news" in America since last October. They doomscroll about it on Twitter all day from other weirdos doing the same thing and think everyone in America is doing the same when many of those "viral" tweets aren't even hitting 100K on a platform of 100+ million daily users.

[NekoFever]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/katt-williams-told-joe-rogan-that-transgenderism-originates-from-the-demon-baphomet-and-has-been-pushed-from-hollywood-onto-the-world-as-corruption.823077/

From the article:

OK, yes, a few transgender TikTokers have adopted Baphomet as an ironic, unofficial trans mascot, but what is Baphomet and is this “demon” really linked to satanism, or “transgenderism”?
The short answer is no. Baphomet is not even considered to be a satanic symbol – and the LGBTQ+ and trans communities are definitely not satanic either.

When you ironically adopt satanism and then get mad that people connect you to satanism 

This is exactly what happened when they started “ironically” chanting about coming for your kids on Pride marches, then were all when the clips started getting used as evidence that they were targeting people’s kids.

[Nintex]

OK, yes, a few fascist Tweeps have adopted Hitler as an ironic, unofficial Nazi mascot, but what is Hitler and is this “fuhrer” really linked to nationalism, or “fascism”?
The short answer is no. Hitler is not even considered to be a fascist symbol – and the alt-right and Nazi communities are definitely not fascist either.

[Snoopy]

Somebody should commission Nep to do a really nice Vote Trump 2024 painting. It could have one of his nutter's slogans on it like Don't tread on me, or BLM are racist thugs. Worth 25 quid?

[Boredfrom]

My only real nitpick is the bit of string sticking out from Tifa's shorts to, I guess, really remind you that she's got a more 'standard' bikini bottom underneath. The tiniest of nitpicks, I know.

Also, and for the love of god please don't take this as any attack on anyone with a body similar to theirs, I really, really, REALLY wish Cloud and Tifa had more muscle mass or definition.

https://www.resetera.com/threads/why-women-criticise-sexualised-character-designs-ot3-make-her-look-more-corpulent-more-stuffed-where-the-eyes-cant-escape.275780/page-330?post=119955888#post-119955888