I don’t see this furry science being referenced outside of furry science.

I don’t quite understand what you mean by that but their publications have been cited by people who aren’t part of the research group. Which is an actual academic endeavor with many contributors, not just someone blogging.

They have verifiable sources and are an international group of interdisciplinary scientists but their conclusions don’t mean that your subjective experiences aren’t real. Still, they are anecdotal, which is why I wanted to provide another source of information for people reading this thread.

EDIT: To clarify, Furscience is a research group funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. They are actual, published scientists, some with doctorates. Even if some of them are part of the subculture they still apply proper methodology and are subject to peer review.

Since anecdotal evidence can only go so far here’s what a group of researchers say on the topic:

Some seek psychological explanations, suggesting that furries may be people with developmental problems or psychological conditions. Others assume situational explanations such as a broken childhood or a tumultuous, friendless, socially awkward childhood. After all, most furries have experienced significant bullying, and abundant psychological evidence shows that bullying, stigma, and concealed stigmatized identities can be particularly damaging to a person’s well-being. One would therefore expect furries to show evidence of significantly compromised well-being.

Data collected on the well-being of furries suggests otherwise, however. Across several samples, furries and non-furries did not significantly differ from one another on measures of life satisfaction and self-esteem.

Furries did not differ with regard to their physical health, psychological health, or the quality of their relationships, and were actually more likely to have a stable and coherent sense of identity than non-furries.

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The well-being of furries was also compared across fandoms (see figures above and below.)

Furries did not differ significantly from convention-going anime fans or fantasy sport fans, and were actually higher in life satisfaction and self-esteem than online anime fans, all groups which experience less stigma than furries do.

[Image]

Taken together, these data, in conjunction with the rest of the data in Section 117, demonstrate that furries, contrary to popular misconceptions, are surprisingly well-adjusted. It’s worth noting that this lack of difference in well-being occurs despite the fact that most furries have a history of significant bullying. One possible explanation for this is the ameliorating role of the fandom: given that belongingness and acceptance are both important values in the furry fandom, as is compassion, helping, and global citizenship, for many furries, the fandom is a source of social support. Social psychologists have long recognized the important role that social support plays in building resilience and fostering well-being, and future studies are planned to test whether this mechanism explains furries’ tendency to thrive despite often enduring significant hardship.

https://furscience.com/research-findings/wellness-dysfunction/11-1-wellness/

Funny how one event where the actions of a few people fucked everything up must imply something for the whole group, especially since there’s bigger, long-running conventions like Anthrocon that have become part of the city’s event culture like any other festival. But you don’t hear about that because it’s not scandalous.

I agree those things can coexist, but when for a significant portion of the people it is sexual it is going to taint the meaning naturally.

What do you think about other groups then? There’s plenty of people cosplaying characters from media, sometimes in a very tame way, sometimes very much not. Those can be the same people, in the same outfits, minutes apart. You have people cosplaying Princess Leia in basically lingerie, is that alright?

maybe say “I vant to fuck your butt” in a fake Romanian accent, I can work with that

[Insert words of judgement here]

The nazi ones are all blonde dogs? Do they hate people who dress as rats/mice?

Nah, they are just your average white supremacists except they also have a fursona. It doesn’t have to be intermeshed like that.

I’ve seen these sentiments a lot, usually not spelled out like this though. I think the unease often comes from associating anthropomorphic animals with children’s media exclusively. That way it seems scandalous that there is an adult component to the subculture. Pretty much every subculture/fandom has that, of course, but people don’t seem to mind as much when it’s anime, goths and so on.

The fact that they insist it isn’t sexual, when it clearly is at least for many.

In my experience people push back against that characterization because the existence of an adult component seems to make everything else disappear or read as dishonest for some people. There is plenty of perfectly innocent, family-friendly content and we genuinely like it for that, not as a sex thing. Those things can coexist just fine with neither diminishing the other.

feeling like if I saw a dominatrix and her sub licking her heels in a McDonalds

If you remove the sex/fetish stuff from the BDSM community you’d really have nothing left, if you remove it from furries you’d still have a group of people who really love anthropomorphic animal characters, just not also in that way.

Also, ew, who goes to McDonald’s?

The fact that everyone wants to be an animal and for many that is sexual is uhh…not not creepy

If we just roll with that, what do you think about all the people who fetishize vampires, for example? That’s pretty much mainstream now (not just because of Twilight) and it’s literally undead, blood drinking, mind controlling monsters.

"Idk the guy who stabbed me was like…some blue dog or wolf thing, goddammit.” Lol

You’ll be relieved to know that most people in costume can’t see or hear very well, so you’ll have the advantage in a knife fight.

An insignificant portion of furries are actual literal nazis.

Yeah, in open groups with tens of thousands of members you’ll have some bad people, not really surprising is it? Look at anime, comics, warhammer, … anything nerdy and not-so-nerdy, they are there too.

They convey time instantly, without reading. You don’t even need the numbers for them to work. It’s like showing a progress bar versus just giving the percentage as a number.

The unease doesn’t come from the word itself being a grave insult but, for example, from being bullied for being “weird”.

Also the guy who fixed GTA Online’s ridiculous loading times.

I am, only reason I’m dealing with Powershell is work.

vi is the way it is for very good reasons, I don’t really see that with VS Code. Even gVim has menus. You can have both accessibility and flexibility/speed.

I would still try to adapt to it, but the PowerShell experience I had a couple months ago put me off it (and VSCodium) for good. Install IDE, install plug-in, hangs forever until you figure out that the useless error message means you need to install some additional .msi from Microsoft. Blergh.

I agree, thought Atom was kind of a fun text editor but silly for being an entire Chrome browser, then it mutated into this intentionally held back IDE where not even developing PowerShell or C# can be done without mucking about first.

There is barely any functionality without add-ins but not because they want to keep the base program light. And it siphons all the data it can get, of course.

It’s pretty clear to me that they don’t want it to be better than Visual Studio proper, so you don’t get a sane menu structure or out of the box functionality. Microsoft made an editor that is somehow more opaque and unintuitive than vi, not because of necessity or for practicality reasons but because it has to be different from the flagship product.

I’d much rather work with Spyder, Netbeans or Eclipse. Or some Jetbrains product. Or Notepad3 + Terminal and a browser.

For real though, containerization isn’t the only way to separate applications from each other but totally fine, it’s the “It works on my machine, so here’s my machine” mentality that doesn’t fill me with confidence. I’ve seen too much barely-working jank in containers that probably only get updated when a new version of the containerized application itself is released.

It’s never too late, especially if you can combine the two!

please don’t let them fuck this up.

Totally unrelated question: Which chaos god feeds on disappointment? Tzeentch? Malice?

Don’t forget to add a little bit of post-atomic horror!

I definitely have.

You are correct!

It is telling you to eat that deadly mushroom though.

Don’t hold your breath, 10 already broke the pattern IMO and all I hear about 12 is that they will cram “AI” into everything. Windows the operating system is dead, replaced by Windows the sales platform.