Mossy Feathers (She/They)

…are you literally wanting plain colored t-shirts? I mean, those exist, but… They have other shirts that don’t say “Hyena Agenda” on them.

You know you don’t have to be a furry to buy furry stuff, ye? It’s not like anyone’s checking for a “furcard” or anything.

Besides: for those of y’all boycotting US goods, Nomad Complex is Canadian. It actually sucks for those of us in the US because afaik, Nomad Complex has stated that they’re not attending US furcons anymore. They’ve apparently had issues with immigration and customs prior to Trump, and they’ve decided (and for good reason) not to enter the US for the foreseeable future.

No, but it’s one of many. c:

This is why I love furry stuff. Nomad Complex, Hyena Agenda and Weasel Gear are great. I mean, I guess Nomad Complex and Hyena Agenda could technically be kinda considered branded since Nomad Complex puts their logo on the front of their hoodies and Hyena Agenda has some shirts that incorporate their logo into the design, but the designs are generally really good.

Edit: okay fine, it’s one of the reasons why I love furry stuff.

Some kind of ancient forest spirit emerges from the woods, consumes my soul and leaves my body in a coma before fading back into the trees without a trace.

Who the fuck are you talking to that is saying, “oh, well, both sides, you know?” The only people I know who are still saying that are people who are wealthy enough to not feel the immediate effects of Trump, or are conservative, white, christian assclowns who voted for Trump. Why are you talking to those kinds of people for an honest read on the US? Those people are part of the reason we’re here now.

Yeah, uh, last I checked American territories don’t have the ability to vote in federal elections. Someone from Puerto Rico can’t vote for the US president despite being governed by the US. It’s one of many bullshit systems designed to keep the GOP-Democrat right-wing ratchet going.

Contrary to that Europe doesn’t have one cohesive identity, your example of Orban is multiple country borders removed from me personally.

Orban would probably be best compared to a state governor. Just a reminder that Texas is literally larger than the largest EU country with some space leftover for a city-state or two.

The idea that the US has a cohesive identity is just… unbelievably ignorant. I’m actually amazed that you believe that considering that no one in their right mind would say the same thing about places like Africa, Europe, or South America.

I didn’t have a choice to be born here, and, had I had the option, I wouldn’t have defaced a Native American monument in the first place. This is on top of the fact that the US is currently trying to find ways of disowning/executing me (trans).

Quite honestly, maybe I shouldn’t be offended by being lumped in with other Americans, because maybe I’m not actually being included in these kinds of sweeping statements. However, it rubs me the wrong way when people imply that Americans as a whole are responsible for the things our government has and is doing.

Again, I didn’t ask to be born in the US. I don’t like that I’m “American”. No one asked me, please don’t lump people like me in with the others.

Well yes! You stupid leftists don’t have the right to live a comfortable life, free from criticism and accountability like us right-wingers. We’re the ones who are right, it’s right there in the name, “right-wing”. As such, anyone that might cause us discomfort, such as breaking ties or criticizing the ones who we support, is espousing a disgusting, ignorant, liberal ideology.

(I hope it’s obvious that I’m being sarcastic)

I mean, they have closed caption devices you can borrow. They fit into the cupholder and display captions for you.

Eh, I personally think it is, but you have to temper your expectations. It’s absolutely not Artificial General Intelligence, nor is it as flexible or capable of rapid learning as human intelligence (or likely most forms of living intelligence in general). However, I’d challenge the notion that it lacks intelligence entirely.

AI still “learns” from what you shove into it; it’s still creating algorithms to adapt to the information stream(s) it’s being exposed to which is not unlike how the human brain is believed to function. As such, I personally view it to be intelligent, but not anywhere near as intelligent as people think it is, and absolutely not in the way people want it to be.

One of the big differences that I see is that, afaik, AI is unable to learn while it’s running. You have to train it, run it, train it again based on user input, run it, train it again on more user input, and so on. Humans are more efficient at learning when they sleep and take breaks, but are still capable of learning things without “shutting down”, so-to-speak (not that we ever truly shut down outside of death, but that’s tangential).

Another difference is that, unlike “natural intelligence”, AI ends up being hyper focused on a specific task. It’s a bit like grabbing an ice cream scoop and removing a very specific part of the brain, let’s say the part responsible for imagining images, and then letting people interface with that alone. Yeah, it’s not gonna be good at parsing text because that’s not what it was designed to do. That’s a different part of the brain. The one you’re playing with right now is only good at visualizating images, so you’re gonna get pretty images, but good luck with getting it to do proper text, understanding proper body language, etc.

Finally, AI hallucinates like crazy. This is one where I’m not sure if we’re really that different from AI (I’ll explain in a moment); but it is a big issue when it comes to try to get AI to factually report information or perform logic tasks. You can ask an AI what 2+2 is and get 4 one day, 5 the next, 3 on Saturdays and then -2027346 on Christmas.

But wait! Doesn’t that make it unintelligent?

No.

Going back to the previous statement about AI being hyper-focused, it just means you’re not interacting with a part of the brain capable of logic; you’re interacting with something else. Maybe the speech center, idk.

However, there’s another element to this where AI doesn’t have a persistent “reality anchor” like we do. To an AI, fact and fiction are purely conceptual because it doesn’t truly exist in our world, it’s off in its own little digital world. Furthermore, the experiences it can gain from the training set are heavily limited compared to what living creatures experience. We have a constant stream of information that reminds us about what is real, who we are, what things look like, how things move and so on; and we get that data stream in 3 dimensions (arguably 2.5, but I digress) instead of 2. It’s like expecting a plant to thrive when given a trickle of water when it normally grows exclusively in a swamp. We ourselves tend to begin hallucinating when our senses become cut off from the outside world because our brains make up stimuli when the expected stimuli is missing. So… I’m not sure if the hallucinations are totally unreasonable, unrealistic or all that different from how we’d behave if subjected to the same environment; but at the very least it’s something that makes AI appear unintelligent.

That’s not to say that AI is a good thing or that it lives up to the hype. Fuck AI for being wildly overhyped, overused, and destroying people’s livelihoods in a world where “earning for a living” is still required for some god-forsaken reason (just a reminder that the phrase, “earn a living” implies you don’t deserve to live if you aren’t able to make money or have someone doing it for you). At the same time, however, it kinda is intelligent. I think people are just expecting way more from it that it’s capable of doing. It’s like people expect intelligence to manifest in grayscale when it’s more like RGBA or something.

Edit: sorry about the massive wall of text; I was fascinated with AI and its potential for a while, which meant it lived rent-free in my head at a series of philosophical questions about things like intelligence and what it means for humans that something designed to function as a series of virtual neurons would behave so similarly yet differently to humans. These were the kinds of conclusions I came to.

I don’t actually use these much, but I love using them whenever I get a chance:

CRT monitors

iPod Classic

OG GameBoy

DSi XL

I actually had rockbox on the iPod but had to take it off because I’m more concerned with how it feels to use than the actual functionality; and rockbox kinda fucked it up.

Edit: I kinda unironically wish dial-up would come back, but as a novelty that ends up blowing up into an actual, community-driven internet. A) gives me fuzzy feelings for when I was a kid at my grandparents house before they ate the MAGA brainrot, and B) might force people to learn how to optimize their shitty websites or get left behind on the corpo-web.

I may be misunderstanding what you’re saying, but it absolutely is not an obligation to remember one’s family (unless we’re specifically talking about chosen family and not bio family). I have many friends who have been disowned, kicked out, physically/emotionally/verbally abused or even raped by their biological families as a result of being gay, trans, bi, pan or something else. It would be abusive and highly immoral to force them to keep their biological family in mind when making decisions.

They have no obligation to remember the trauma inflicted on them by their family members, except, perhaps, in a legal context against said family members; but once said legal context is fulfilled, they have no obligation to continue to remember. To state otherwise is to demand that they relive their past trauma, and for what? So their tormenter(s) can continue to torment them?

No. They have no obligation to continue to allow themselves to be tormented. Nor do they have any obligation to remember their biological families.

Now, if you’re talking about chosen family, then you might be onto something, but as long as their chosen family is taken care of and does not need assistance from them, should they not honor their loved one’s desire to one day be forgotten? Should they not allow the photos, keepsakes and whatnot that document a person’s life, someone else’s life, to be destroyed once they’re no longer in use by anyone? To do otherwise would be selfish; if I am going to die and my best friend wished to not be remembered, I would allow them to go through my things and remove themselves once I had passed. After all, it is unlikely I will remember them once I’ve hit my expiration date and my things will no longer be of any use to me. If they wish to purge themselves from my mementos, then they may do so.

The only exception I can think of is if someone was exceptional in some way. The kind of person who gets a paragraph or more dedicated to their life in a history book. In that specific case I believe they should be remembered, but done so respectfully; perhaps with a pseudonym.

Damn, that sounds awesome. I’m gonna have to try that.

gasp that’s a wonderful idea! I should try that.

Basically everything. I’d be completely devastated. Unlike many of the people who’ve replied, the things I care about the most can’t be saved from a fire. My plushies, my records, my shirts, my collars, that’ll all burn or will be so smoke or water damaged that they’ll need to be replaced. And some of them can’t be replaced. I have a lot of limited edition stuff that you literally can’t replace without considerable effort.

Even if they could be replaced, that’s ignoring the emotional attachment that I have with my plushies (as well as one of my collars).

If you don’t have the nerve to hold a stock for 30 years through ups, downs, crashes and rebuilds, there’s a thing called a high yield savings account that may better fit your current stage of life better and risk tolerance.

While this is usually true, I personally am discovering that I may need to liquidate all my stocks to pay for an escape plan. If the stock market crashes, that will change what I can do to escape.

God I wish. I have boy genes though and slightly above average height (even for guys).

Bleh.

Wish there was an en-smallening procedure. It’s harder to feel intimidated by a guy (which can be a bad thing or a good thing, depending on the atmosphere) when you’re taller than he is.

7~8 days while camping (boy scout winter camp).

1~2 during a bad power outage.

I don’t really want to be in an enclosed space like that with a stranger, especially a man. Men can be psychos and it’s not worth the risk.

Yes, women can be psychos too, but A) women are less likely to feel entitled to another woman’s body, and B) the playing field is more level in terms of strength.