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PaperclipPerfector  15hr ago (text post)   745 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 20, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I thought about posting this last night in response to the question about the new NFL kickoff rules, but since that thread is a bit stale I'm posting it here today. First, the new kickoff rules are dumb. There are more returns, but it seems like all these returns end up at the 30 yard line anyway, so there's no point in not kicking it out of the end zone. If we want to "fix" kickoffs, here's my proposal: At the beginning of the 1st and 3rd quarters, the receiving team simply takes the ball at their own 25. Onside kicks are rare enough in these situations that little is lost by eliminating them. We move touchbacks back to the 20 where they belong. After a touchdown the scoring team kicks from their own 40, practically guaranteeing a touchback. After a field goal, though, they have to kick from their own 25, pretty much guaranteeing a return and pretty good field position to the returning team. The obvious positive consequences are fewer field goals and more 4th down conversion attempts. But the real benefit is less obvious: More situations for mentally overwhelmed coaches to fuck things up in comedic fashion.

Consider the following situation: The Steelers are trailing the Chargers by 4 points on Sunday with 7 minutes remaining in the game. After a third down pass that ends up short of the sticks after the receiver inexplicably runs backwards after catching the ball, the Steelers are 4th and 3 at the Chargers 22 yard line? If the Steelers kick the field goal, they're still down a point and give LA excellent field position to finish off the game. If they score a touchdown, they have the lead and LA will almost certainly have to start the ensuing comeback drive from their own 20.

So what does Mike Tomlin do in this situation? First he wastes a timeout unsuccessfully challenging the spot of the ball. Then he wastes another timeout so he can think about the decision. Then he kicks the field goal anyway, because of course Mike Tomlin was going to kick the field goal. Then the Chargers start the ensuing drive at their own 40, but the Steelers defense forces a 3 and out. The Steelers then take over deep in their own territory and begin to quickly march down the field, only for time to expire before they can get into field goal range because they were out of timeouts (they wasted their other timeout to avoid a delay of game penalty on first down early in the third quarter). Then I get to listen to yinzer heads explode on talk radio the next day because they totally would have scored a touchdown if they had had Justin Fields run a keeper / given the ball to Jaylen Warren / run some other dumb play that probably wouldn't have worked. At no point would the poor clock management come up.

I love the Steelers, but I must admit that the inevitable meltdowns make losing almost as good as winning.

[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]

A little over a year after the landmark UAP hearings with David Grusch that took place in the US House of Representatives, both chambers of Congress are gearing up to have additional new UAP hearings within the coming months. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand's office confirmed that the Senate Armed Services Committee is planning on having a public hearing after the November elections which will focus on the progress in UAP analysis made by AARO, the official "UFO office" in the Pentagon. Rep. Nancy Mace further confirmed that the House will have its own public hearing on November 13th.

Would be nice if they had something concrete planned. Maybe we'll finally see that stunning photo that Matt Gaetz mentioned last year? Or at least some new witnesses coming forward.

I'm teaching a class on LLMs right now, and the students are working on a project to use LLMs to answer questions about the current election. (They're using a RAG based system to pull in news articles to answer the questions, and they're next assignment is going to be to get the system to respond in the style of Harris/Trump.)

Anyways, to evaluate the students' work, I needed to create a dataset of US election facts. I call it the Hairy Trumpet dataset (github link), and I'm surprised I haven't heard this pun on the candidates' names anywhere else yet. I especially like the pun because hairy trumpet is also the name of a weird fungus, which seems fitting for a dataset on politics.

Can you share the course content with me?

Github repo with course content: https://github.com/mikeizbicki/cmc-csci181-languages

All the lectures recorded and put on youtube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSNWQVdrBwoa4KNaiKr-ayUdROZdSZ_1E

(unfortunately the audio didn't capture on the first video)

Whoah, haven't seen you post in a while. Or maybe I wasn't paying attention.

I'm starting another office job which requires a reasonable amount of typing, so instead of using the work supplied keyboard which makes me want to throw it out the window, I'm interested in what input devices everyone uses. I find my YouTube and internet searches aren't definitive, and I really don't want to spend a grotesque amount of time and money on finding the right keyboard. My current criteria are:

  • I prefer linear over tactile or clicky. I hate clicky the most.

  • Full size is preferred. I use the num pad for work

  • Hall effect is a plus

  • Minimal out of box tinkering, even if it comes at some premium.

What keyboards are you using?

Kinesis freestyle 2

Numpads are overrated. I won a nickel in a bet with a coworker that I could type numbers faster without. I love my keyboard.io model 100 split ortholinear walnut thumbcluster keyboard

I used to work a job doing inventories where we used machines that were nothing but a keypad and a one-line LCD display. After banging on that for 8 hours a day I'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who can enter numbers faster than me without one.

Something that bothers me about the whole mechanical keyboard market is that there really is no good way to test keyboard without spending the money. It's more than what I'm willing to spend by about $100, especially if I'm going to be leaving it in an office. I might bring my current keyboard into the office and keep the new keyboard at home.

I use Unicomp, but it's the mother of all clicky keyboards.

I bought and used one for months before my teammates staged an intervention.

I've never quite got the appeal of deep mechanical gaming keyboards for work. I prefer something my fingers will fly over, not sink into.

As such, I like the thin aluminum Apple ones, or similar in office. I still use a thick one for gaming though. Feels more secure in WSAD-position.

For my personal use, I use the GMMK. Unfortunately Glorious caught the stupid and stopped selling full size keyboards, so you would have to get one secondhand. For work I use a Keychron K10, which is also pretty good. I prefer brown switches myself, but the GMMK is customizable and I believe the K10 is too.

Keychron Q6. Full sized, simple, easy to use, and customizable. I never customized it, but it is. One negative is that it's heavy, but I prefer it that way.

I'm leaning toward Keychron myself, but almost everything I heard says they still require modding after work to make them really good. Maybe their higher end models are better out of box experiences.

Depends on what you mean by "really good." I just used mine out of the box and it's better than the others I've used.

So, I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner. It feels surreal for two reasons, one being that I never expected my life to become the plot of a bad romantic comedy, and the other being that it makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America. It was also an interesting dichotomy - I loved spending time with my SO, but detested the city. I couldn't stop noticing just how ugly and unmaintained the city is, and couldn't help wondering how it got this way. Disclaimer: I spent much of my time downtown.

It's a ridiculously Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia or any of its previous satellite states. Much of their architecture, including their public spaces, looks like it's trying to be a soulless pastiche of Le Corbusier or Walter Gropius; structures supposedly built for the public that actually looks like it hates the very people it's meant to serve. They are featureless blocks of concrete that evoke no joy, and in line with the modernist architectural ethos ornamentation is basically absent. Also, if there is any doubt about the unpopularity of modernist and postmodernist architecture alike, look at "America's Favourite Architecture", very few of the buildings people actually chose as their favourites are from the post-war period. The response from many architects was that the list didn't reflect the opinions of "architectural experts", which isn't insular and elitist at all. Good to see that people who build for the public actively couldn't care less about their aesthetic preferences, and in fact are incapable of predicting their preferences at all.

The starkest example of the shift in architectural trends is probably the current Toronto City Hall. The new City Hall is a featureless, barely geometric concrete block, framed by the treeless, austere Nathan Phillips Square - apparently supposed to be a public gathering space. Now compare it with Old City Hall, which is still there but no longer in use. I think most people would view Old City Hall as a much more appropriate building for its purpose, and find it more pleasing to look at. Another example of the modernist turn is exemplified in the Royal Ontario Museum, a building that looked like this in 1922. Then it had a (now-defunct) planetarium and terrace galleries attached to it in 1968 and 1984, then in 2007 oh my god what the fuck is that. There is not an iota of respect for any of their architectural traditions. Old buildings that are part of the city's intangible heritage just get "iterated upon" and superseded by horrific modernist/postmodern/deconstructivist blocks with no relation or connection to the previous style the building used to have.

The same pattern can be seen in public art. This infamous piece of public art, named Zones of Immersion, is displayed in the tube in Union Station, one of the TTC's major transportation hubs, and it succeeds marvellously at offering your average commuter the indescribable experience of being loaded on a train headed straight for Auschwitz. According to the artist, Stuart Reid, "This window into our contemporary isolation offers faces and body language, blurred and revealed poetic writings from my journal entries, and rhythms of colour that punctuate the ribboned expanse." I, too, would like to be reminded of the bleakness and misery of everyday life every time I try to go to work. This is a very clear example of an artist being distanced from the very people they are designing for, and pursuing clout in an increasingly small and incestuous sphere of "art fanatics" who have long disappeared up their own ass in the endless pursuit of social status. It wouldn't be so bad if everyone wasn't forced to look at it every day.

As if it wasn't bad enough that the city is by and large a mix of seedy strip malls and truly unpleasant brutalist blocks, on top of that there's the sheer lack of maintenance of any of these spaces. The train stations are some of the best examples of this - the poor state of the TTC is well known at this point among Canadians. These tubes are depressing spaces often marred by water damage, missing tiles and ceilings, and just in general seem to be falling apart at the seams. Here and here are some illustrations of normal scenes in the tube system. The same applies to many of the buildings, where their already unfriendly-looking concrete surfaces are further marred by water stains and damage, and nobody seems to have given it any care for decades. Other aspects of the city's design also worsen the experience, such as how when you walk around the city centre on hot days an awful stench will often waft out of the gutter grates (Yonge in particular smells like human faeces). Oh, and then there's the homelessness problem, which I won't get into here but really worsens the sense of dinginess and disrepair that the city already possesses. Downtown, there is at least one encampment every kilometre you walk.

The general vibe of the city is also information-overload in the worst way; an instance that sticks in my mind was when I was walking in the town centre and all at once the following was happening in a crowded square:

  1. Someone playing a flute in an absolutely fucking ridiculous way that somehow almost reminded me of Kazoo Kid.

  2. Someone trying to proselytise the glory of God to random passers-by.

  3. Somebody with burns trying to solicit money by sitting naked in the street showing the grisly scars all the way down his body.

There was probably more happening that my brain filtered out due to necessity.

All of this could've been compensated for if there were many particularly interesting things to see, but the issue is that there just isn't very much that's worth stopping and looking at. The Royal Ontario Museum and perhaps the Distillery District are virtually the only things worth visiting, the Art Gallery of Ontario is only worth stopping by for the Group of Seven paintings (which are, to be fair, beautiful to see in person). The CN Tower and everything around it are unashamed tourist traps built and maintained largely for vanity purposes, without all too much to do there. The beach on Centre Island was hardly a beach at all, and seemed dirty enough that I didn't really want to step on the sand barefoot (though I am almost certainly spoiled with the best beaches in the world due to living in Australia). Outside of that, I can't remember anything else particularly memorable about the city.

In short, I didn't like Toronto. It was unpleasant enough that once I got back to Sydney, I remember walking into the train station at International and heaving a massive sigh of relief at how spacious, light, quiet and well-maintained it all seemed.

Endorsed -- be aware that everyone in Canada (other than people from Toronto, who will smugly inform you that 'it's a World Class City') has felt the same way since roughly 1965:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=-4x54lnkCMw

Toronto is a Soviet-looking city considering that it isn't actually in Russia

Heavy disagree, honestly. Lived in Moscow and Toronto. Toronto is possibly nothing like Russia

The best description of Toronto I've heard is that its a city that "thinks its the equal of New York, but in reality is less then half of a Chicago". I would have judged this an unfair critique until I met a bunch of people from Toronto, all of whom thought that I should have been impressed by their status as denizens of the aforementioned metro area (in fairness, New Yorkers and Londoners do this too, and are just as mad when I do not ask for their recommendations for the most up to date and hip spots in town, but in theory there are places in NYC and LON that i would want to visit, Toronto has no such saving grace). I guess I don't connect with people who are boosters for their home city, and that seems to be a large percentage of Torontians.

I went to Toronto in June of this year to meet my partner

makes me the only member of my family to have ever been in North America

🤨🤨🤨

Toronto is very sprawled and mediocre, despite people who live there never being willing to admit it, it's just a large Midwestern city no different than Cleveland or Indianapolis. However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist. Consider how bland and boring most public art is:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/city-of-calgary-public-art-1.6757072

https://globalnews.ca/news/8787114/the-ring-art-place-ville-marie-esplanade/

🤨🤨🤨

It's long distance, and "member of my family" here just means people related by blood.

However while I can't make any insight into whether the art community is shrinking or growing, the fact that this piece made you feel emotions, and then discuss them, is probably a victory for the artist.

They certainly succeeded at making a piece of art that evokes emotions, but that's just not my criteria for what constitutes good art since (as someone who dabbles in arts myself, primarily literature and music) I think it's trivially easy to do so - especially if you consider "intense hatred of and anger at the artist" a valid emotion to evoke. Part of the problem is that the art in Union Station looks like it was taken straight from an unfinished sketch. Skill is an integral part of it for me - an important part of being an artist is constantly questioning what you bring to the world others couldn't already offer themselves, and if your art lacks technique and is easily replicated, you genuinely don't offer much. In order for any art to be considered good at all, there also needs to be a way for it to be bad, there needs to be a set of failure-criteria that a sizeable amount of people would not be able to reach. A lot of modern artists, even celebrated ones (e.g. Rothko) don't have that.

Furthermore, there are works that fit an art gallery that don't work in a public space. I don't know about you, but I don't think Francisco Goya's Black Paintings should be displayed in a public square, and that was constructed with infinitely more talent than whatever was in Union Station. I would honestly rather have an inoffensive, bland piece of public art than something that makes me feel depressed or annoyed every time I encounter it.

The architecture thing is a dead horse, but at the same time, they can't keep getting away with it. The worst thing I've seen recently is Vienna's modern art museum which they plopped into the middle of a nice 18th century baroque complex (pay no attention to the building with the cock and balls on the roof).

Would you want to live in this cute, perfectly-code-compliant neighborhood?

(Yes, I was too lazy to add radii to the driveway corners. Sue me.)

Too much wasted space while the houses are tiny. The road between the houses is bigger than the houses themselves, and double-wide driveways are hideous.

I would do the following:

  • slim down the road as much as possible (one-way, pedestrians have priority, no setbacks etc)
  • somehow classify on-street parking as off-street parking, then each lot will have three parking spaces
  • if that's not possible, turn setbacks into driveways (6m/20ft deep setbacks)
  • make the houses as wide as the fire safety code allows and as shallow as necessary, aiming at 33sqm/330sqft per occupant

Example implementation

Note that parallel-parking spaces are 8 ft * 22 ft rather than 9 ft * 20 ft, so the lots have been changed from 60 ft * 100 ft (6000 ft^2) to 66 ft * 91 ft (6006 ft^2). Also, the installation of underground utilities presumably will require a lot of easements somewhere.

At my current stage of life, no. But it does look better than the various slum efficiency and sub-basement units I lived in when I was younger.

Is there a particular reason for all the side yard space and front drives? Is it supposed to be generally preferable to row homes or town houses? I would rather have slightly more personal square footage and a small back garden, than a side yard and code minimum sized bedroom. You could have a back alleyway, shared front parking diagonally in the center of a long cul-de-sac, or even resident street parking (parallel or diagonal), if parking is necessary.

Another option that would have similar density, but more interior square footage, for a development would be a n-over-one or "stumpy." It's not cute, but real-estate developers in North America clearly think they offer the best net balance for medium density right now.

I also thought that they were below-code size, but I see now the minimum size requirements were removed from the International Residential Code in 2015. I had no idea. Also did not realize they added appendix AQ, specifically with respect to "tiny homes." I guess that's a win for density.

Is there a particular reason for all the side yard space and front drives?

Under the International Zoning Code:

  • The densest single-family residential zone has lots of at least 60 ft * 90 ft and 6000 ft^2. The lots in this image are 60 ft * 100 ft.

  • At least two 9 ft * 20 ft off-street parking stalls must be provided for each dwelling unit. I've made the driveways double-width for the larger houses, to accommodate multigenerational households.

Is it supposed to be generally preferable to row homes or town houses?

I didn't consider anything but single-family houses in this particular flight of fancy.

The sheer gall of the authors calling their American building/zoning codes international will never cease to inflame me.

I prefer attached garages.

A garage is a needless luxury, just like a closet and a pantry.

(In response to deleted comment "Where's the garage???" by @sarker)

I deleted it because I figured the big black blocks are garages and driveways, but I guess I was mistaken.

The big black blocks are driveways without garages.

Garages are kino. You can park your car there, have a gym, or a woodshop, or a metal shop, etc etc.

A basement can serve most of the same purposes.

Not all areas have need for basements: if you're not digging to get below the frost line (warmer climates), soil is shallow, or the water table is near the surface (the entire Gulf coast), a basement is really expensive to build as an option, and they aren't very common choices. I'll keep my garage.

G-d preserve me from schlepping heavy equipment to a basement.

Volokh: Security Clearance Denied for Watching Furry Porn Depicting Animated 16-Year-Olds

Bierly confessed that some of the furries in the videos he watched were depicted as minors as young as age 16. The SOR advised that Bierly's history of "engaging in criminal sexual behavior by viewing and masturbating to pornographic images of minors" and intent to continue doing so constituted a "security concern". For his part, Bierly objects to characterizing the videos as child pornography because they featured animated characters rather than actual 16-year-old people.

Bierly's constitutional claims are as follows:

  • Count I claims that viewing animated furry pornography is protected speech under the First Amendment, and that DCSA's suspension of his security clearance therefore infringes this right.

  • Count II argues that DCSA's suspension of his security clearance abridges Bierly's First Amendment freedom to associate with others who share his political, religious and cultural beliefs.

  • Count III contends that SEAD 4, which allows the DCSA to withhold clearance based on sexual behavior that "demonstrates a lack of judgment or discretion or may subject the individual to undue influence of coercion, exploitation, or duress", is unconstitutionally overbroad under the First Amendment.

  • Count IV challenges the same language in SEAD 4 as unconstitutionally vague.

  • Count V is a substantive due process claim, arguing that the viewing of legal pornographic material is a protected liberty interest that the DCSA has wrongfully abridged.

  • Count VI is a Fifth Amendment Equal Protection argument, alleging that the defendants have unequally and arbitrarily applied SEAD 4 against Bierly, and that this uneven application fails strict scrutiny.

The court avoided the substantive constitutional questions, in part because federal precedent provides that "the grant of security clearance to a particular employee is committed by law to the appropriate agency of the Executive branch" and therefore "employment actions based on denial of security clearance are not subject to judicial review", especially when it comes to requests for injunctions seeking the grant of a clearance (to oversimplify in some measure).

The court also rejected Bierly's separate statutory claims under the Administrative Procedure Act, Freedom of Information Act, and Privacy Act. Note that Bierly's Complaint states that, "Mr. Bierly admitted to watching 16 year old Furry pornography when he was 15 years old, and the polygrapher used that age for all subsequent Furry pornography that Mr. Bierly admitted to watching," though that wouldn't affect, I think, the court's analysis.

Oof. That's a mess.

While it (and even the publicity) might not completely kill this guy's career, it definitely chops a lot of potential off it. There's some civilian uses for the sorta skills the software parts of that career field do, and some cybersecurity shops won't really care, but quite a lot of them either depend on background checks or lower levels of clearance that are gonna red flag this. Even if he didn't plan on staying in the DoD, having a security clearance before leaving can be worth a lot of salary.

(LinkedIn points to a higher education nonprofit, which... works, I guess, though depending on exactly where it falls in 'higher ed' would raise different concerns if he really were a threat. Dunno if it's more or less of a Google Problem than having your real name tied to the other sort of 1000-year-old dragon.)

And while not the most central case of where these definitions break down, and squicks me a bit (especially "intent to continue doing so" as he stops being a teenager, though not being able to read the complaint leaves me some concern for how accurately that's being repeated), it's still the sort of thing that also gets played at Cannes or put into a school library when there's a sufficient bow slapped on top. Law is filled with these sorta graduations, but if you wanted a similar level of 'officially banned, unofficially tolerated or sometimes feted' the first place to come to mind would be marijuana legalization, which... hasn't worked out great.

It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense. Ashcroft v Free Speech is usually what people point to as suggesting that obviously fictional works can't be generally prohibited, but that opinion allowed such speech to be restricted under the rules around obscenity, and Congress did do that. While that definition is vague (imo badly so) and counterproductive (imo badly so), modern technical advances have made Rehnquist's dissent much more persuasive at the same time that SCOTUS's makeup is more skeptical of the ACLU takes. From a legal realist perspective? It's a clusterfuck to determine if any one piece has 'redeeming value' (though a majority of furry porn is straight-up porn that would directly fail by honest tests, and others by close-enough checks), whether it offends community sensibilities, whether the ways it does offend community sensibilities are actually the sort the courts unofficially overlook because it's a proxy for 'animus', what the age of characters even are (is this goat the probably-older-than-universe-but-woefully-immature Asriel from Undertale, the unknown-aged-but-probably-late-high-schoolish Ralsei from Deltarune, an aged-down version of either, an aged up version of either, or an Original Character Donut Steel?), yada yada. Prosecutors generally don't want to deal with it, but they have on rare occasions with especially clear cases.

On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.

On the gripping hand, the extent the underlying laws and definitions are a mess and largely unconfrontable is gonna keep making the paradoxes more present, both here and in cases with more serious consequences. I get that critics of the law are (understandably!) looking for cases with perfectly sympathetic defendants and especially clear legal processes, both for normal legal tactics and because a decent number of the 'it's ephibophilia' people end up taking off the mask, but in practice there's been thirty years of establishing a pretty harsh new social norm.

((On the other gripping hand, it's quite possible we'll seriously confront those central cases where the definitions completely break down and decide that's because we do need to crank up enforcement of stricter social and legal norms. Totally fictional porn by people who are just working through their own missed opportunities in their youth still have the Kabier problem, and there's a lot more evidence in favor of even sometimes-above-age-of-consent sexualization being either risky or prone to abuse.))

It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense.

It probably isn't, but as you observed, you can be denied a security clearance for behavior that is not illegal. For example, smoking weed in a state where it's legal (granted, that is still federally illegal), or having too many foreign contacts, or having financial problems or a gambling habit.

It used to be, of course, that homosexuality was grounds for denying a security clearance. The reasoning was that it "made you vulnerable to extortion," but even an out and proud homosexual would be judged unsuitable. Homosexuality is now a protected class, but being a furry hentai aficionado is not (yet).

So yeah, looking at underage hentai, even if they are 1000-year-old vampires, is probably legal but still likely gonna get you flagged as "deviant with lack of impulse control and judgement" by a background investigator. (I too have questions about "intent to continue doing so" - who actually tells the humorless polygrapher who's about to torpedo your career, "Yes, I totally intend to keep doing this"? But then I have watched a lot of police bodycam and predcatcher YouTube, and the things people will admit to on camera is amazing, so...)

I think some or all of the underage content would be covered by federal obscenity law, if in the same marijuana sense. There probably is a Stanley v. Georgia right to receive non-obscene furry porn, though I wouldn't want to wager that much on any one piece as passing that test and I wouldn't be absolutely confident in Stanley surviving modern review.

I too have questions about "intent to continue doing so" - who actually tells the humorless polygrapher who's about to torpedo your career, "Yes, I totally intend to keep doing this"?

I tracked down the full complaint and security background paperwork (attachment 2, relevant page 147) on the FOIA project. 'Intent to continue' seems attached only to the supercategory of 'these types of images', even by the government's telling. Especially if Bierly didn't realize how deep shit he was in, not completely disavowing future consumption of above-age furry porn and/or insufficiently distinguishing between it is... plausible. And it's kinda clearance investigator's jobs to not let people they're investigat_ing_ realize the shit is neck-high.

((Hell, there are some internal parts of how tags/blacklisting worked at e621 at the time where that might have augmented that confusion even had Bierly been very aggressive about blocking underage content, though I expect no one wants to hear about those details.))

But short of his account getting linked to his real name, and maybe not even then, we're probably never gonna know with more certainty than just what he wants us to think the story is.

On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.

It does seem like the space between "can't get security clearance" and "criminal prosecution" should be fairly large.

Yeah, and it's not necessarily a completely overlapping set of circles -- there's a lot more security clearance red flags in totally-legal levels of financial mismanagement than in getting in an ill-advised fistfight. A clearance isn't an official designation that you're a good person, or even a completely trustworthy one, so much as trying to hedge off certain security risks. As I said, I'm not sure the clearance determination here is wrong.

But the heuristics are wonky, here. I'm sure mine aren't representative, but it's hard to name ones that are compatible with what we do.

Really, I'm not entirely sure why this is an issue. Security clearance depends on a low blackmail attack surface, so as Puritanism [about what books one reads, in this case] in the population increases or becomes more powerful as a social force, things that wouldn't be an issue in more liberal times start to become viable blackmail avenues.

And yes, that means society is leaving talent on the ground; on the other hand, defending people who hate you is stupid and if their fake moral standards get them killed because of it, then so be it. Maybe the survivors will smarten up.

Every time I see furry artists cancelling each other because one of them drew a guy fucking a cartoon dog that was only 17 years old in one of the Nickelodeon spin-offs, I become even more grateful that foxy Maid Marien didn't groom me as a toddler.

Wouldn't even have such a problem with furries if they'd stick to their own communities and leave the rest of us to play Blue Archive in peace. But the number of furry communist they/thems who do nothing but witch-hunt for artists who drew, said, or thought something "problematic" makes the entire community too toxic to coexist with. I can't imagine how awful it is to actually be a part of it.

It'd be funny if it were just the they/them Marx fandom furries -- hell, it wouldn't even be the most defamatory thing from DogPatch Press, somehow. But I think that the problems the furry fandom fight with are just particularly prominent, because the most arguable border cases and the central version of the prohibited content are visible without the FBI getting involved or having to read three hundred pages of crappy Harry Potter AU fanfic for context, and the resulting internal discourse has given some of the witchiest and witch-hunterist people a lot of ammo to work with.

There's been similar problems throughout the various writing spheres, Archive Of Our Own gets regular attacks over it, it's one of the main Tumblr Discourse platter options. And the New Right has its own versions. I think there's a broader matter where it's become the new room temperature.

I mean, SomethingAwful was the original furry community. That should tell you all you need to know about how things were going to play out.

The fact that 4chan splintered from SA because of loli is similarly informative about the politics of its people, for good and ill.

Furries are hypermasculine superstimulus, loli (and shota) are hyperfeminine superstimulus, neither one wants to admit the obvious implications (though zoophilia is the lesser of those), and the narcissism of small differences does the rest.

(Actually, I wonder if that means diaperfurs/cub fans are more likely to be bisexual? Furries are generally gay and lolicons are generally straight, so maybe furry lolicons are more likely to be a mix compared to the average.)

Furries heavvvvily predate SomethingAwful: for adult content focuses VCL dates back to something like 1995, PureYiff and YiffStar to 2002. For SFW content, Werewolf(.)com was not solely furry but had more furry and therian content than SA, was on its second or third software iteration by the time 4chan launched; WereWeb had been launched, had its height, and died before 4chan launched. And that's ignoring IRC or UseNet communities.

The entire original Burned Furs mess happened before 4Chan existed, and started before SomethingAwful was founded. (Thankfully.)

Furries are hypermasculine superstimulus, loli (and shota) are hyperfeminine superstimulus, neither one wants to admit the obvious implications (though zoophilia is the lesser of those)

Sorry but I'm lost. Do you mind elaborating? What's a (hyper-masculine/-feminine) superstimulus, how is furry masculine, how is dubious anime porn feminine?

I assume the obvious implications you imply are that furries probably wanna fuck animals and hentai people probably wanna fuck children.

how is furry masculine, how is dubious anime porn feminine?

Look at the faces.

Furry [well, unless it's actively trying to avoid this... and ends up looking like a girl/boy in a onesie] is typically so far divorced from facial neoteny it might as well be bara. Anime characters, by contrast, tend to have round faces and large eyes- emphasis is on soft/round/cute/happy, not hard/angular/ugly/angry.

(Western animation tends to have a mix of both- the largest exception to that was, of course, My Little Pony (specifically Gen 4), and now you know why 4chan liked it so much.)

Mind you, this is just the broad strokes of it- it's a lot more detailed (and honestly, a lot more normal) than I make it out to be- but these are the broad strokes as they relate to the people who are most taken by that stimulus.

I'm still having laughing fits from his post, so sorry if there's typos in this.

I think what he's getting at is that all furry porn is literally gay bathhouse sex orgies, with slightly more literal bears. It's hyper-male-sexuality in the sense of bro-y casual sex where the guys drink beer and lose their keys fisting each other.
If characters are sexual they are grotesquely so, with comically large sex organs and insatiable appetites (often literal ones). Non-sexual characters literally don't exist somehow, because the scenes bounce from frat party to shower room to bdsm club. Even the straight porn is gay male hyper-stimulus. All the furry transsexuals you see dress as bimbos and get enormous fake breasts because their fetish is at its core a hyper-male sexual fixation.

And on the your hand your typical loli book has an awkward girl who looks like a potato thinking about her feelings for 30 pages (or 60 chapters if it gets serialized). She is possibly caught in a love triangle between her kindly vampire English tutor and a dark and handsome werewolf delinquent who rescued her from bullies on his motorbike. One or both of these relationships may be socially forbidden, heightening the emotional tension. There will be post-chapter art of the girl dressed as a princess and the guy as a suave butler, probably with a floral screentone background.
The story would become a best-seller on Amazon's ero-fiction self-publishing charts before being banned.

The way he said it is guaranteed to upset both sides (which is why it's so hilarious), but the basic truth behind it is undeniable.

The way he said it is guaranteed to upset both sides (which is why it's so hilarious), but the basic truth behind it is undeniable.

Huh? Why is it guaranteed to upset both sides? It seems obviously directionally correct to me (I'd nitpick that femininity is more prominent than masculinity rather than being hyper-feminine, which implies the near absence of masculinity to me) from the lolicon side and I have pointed to research supporting much the same conclusion in the past:

Recall Kinsella's suggestion that lolicon be understood as men performing the shōjo to come to terms with an unstable gender identity (Kinsella 2006: 81-83). If being a man ceases to promise power, potency and pleasure, it is no longer the privileged subject position. Akagi explains that lolicon is a form of self-expression for those oppressed by the principles of masculine competitive society (Akagi 1993: 232).32 Lolicon is a rejection of the need to establish oneself as masculine and an identification with the "kindness and love" of the shōjo (Akagi 1993: 233). This interpretation reverses the standard understanding of lolicon as an expression of masculinity to one of femininity. This is, of course, not the only way to approach the wide range of lolicon images, but it certainly highlights the complexity of "pornographic content" and its uses.

What's there to be upset over?

for those oppressed by the principles of masculine competitive society

Fucking academics. Saying "men who are getting off using the mental/sexual pathways that [normal] women use to get off with, by projecting themselves onto the self-insert female character just like everyone who read 50 Shades does, maybe because a thing or combination of things in their brains makes that the more attractive option" doesn't need to be this hard.

But then again I'm also of the opinion that the real reason we don't have an accurate taxonomy of sexual behaviors is that we don't have the language to express them, they're all defined by their [statistical] normal distribution anyway, and then people just take language not meant for them and wield it as a weapon so maybe it's pointless anyway.

I'm finally carving out the time to hit up the sporting clays course again tomorrow morning for the first time in quite a while. Shooting, as a hobby, has my worst enjoyment/time allotment ratio. By this, I mean it's unbelievably enjoyable, and I almost never get to. The reasons are many:

  • I live in an urban area. This clay course is a 45 minute boring drive. Nearby ranges are all indoor, and the nearest range is run by fudd cunts who constantly play the game of using my relative youth and politeness as a reason to go on a power trip.
  • I'm in an ugly valley of competence where I've done enough competitive shooting and training to be horribly bored standing in an indoor range anyway, but not good enough to place meaningfully in competition. I'm typically midrange when I do go to these sorts of events.
  • The amount of time investment required to support the hobby that aren't actually shooting is high. The aforementioned driving, waiting for other participants at competitions, preparing gear beforehand, and cleaning my weapons afterward is massive.
  • The direct benefits of being good at shooting are minimal and low-probability. I have only a handful of friends who will go shooting with me, all of which top out at being good clay shooters but who cannot do the sort of tactical course-based shooting that is even more fun. I've taken an indefinite hiatus in teaching almost anyone people to shoot post-2020, which I previously loved to do.

In any case I'll be bringing along my Beretta 1301 Comp Pro. I absolutely fucking love this gun, but it's hilariously overkill in terms of capabilities and price compared to my skill. I purchased it thinking I would be able to use it for the aforementioned tactical 3-gun competition circuit that it's never seen but is purpose-built for. The sporting clays course is covered by rich old country boys, some of whom have $20,000 over-unders while I'm toying with a smurf-colored, plastic "tactical" shotgun that'll drop 4 rounds a second.

Speaking of price, the Beretta comes nerfed from the factory because of shitty firearms laws. Once you get it in your hands, you "have to" drop another $200+ on various accessories to get it to its intended configuration and magazine capacity.

I need to figure out where I want to go with the hobby. I've done ultra-long-range classes with some success and have a reasonably capable rifle for playing at the ~800m range. I've done a lot of handgun courses and competition, and regular sporting clays outings. If I had to pick what to really be good at it would be what is hardest to get practice on, which would be midrange carbine work with my AR. I may have to move back to my hometown to get the amount of rounds and practice in that I need.

That’s a bit of a bummer to hear. My wife and I were thinking about buying guns like 2 months before Covid hit. My main concern now is the time commitment to stay fresh on maintenance, training and skill.

When you say your friends “cannot” do the tactical courses, what do you mean?

My wistfulness has much more to do with missing out on the fun of shooting rather than it requiring a huge investment for baseline competence. It's a bit like riding a bike. After a brief period of shaking off the rust it all ends up being pretty peachy. My $.02 is that going through ~2 hours of instruction and then at least trying a dynamic course of fire at a range (I.E. where you move and shoot) would put you in the top 10% of gun owners. Which is sad but true.

By "cannot" I mean they can't invest the time/don't have the interest/don't have the competence/some combination of the above.

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