All righty, folks! I've finished all my summer commissions, so now I'm open again <3 If you want Christmas art from me, now is the time!

Fill out a commission form here: https://ursamajorartworks.com/commission-form.

I'll be in touch as soon as possible! <3

#furry #abdl #diaperfur

Aaron Swartz, a hacker in the original sense, having helped develop RSS and Creative Commons, downloaded academic articles he had permission to access, and the DOJ hounded him.

Sam Altman, who failed upward to where he is, is performing copyright infringement at scale and seen as a revolutionary innovator.

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/paul-graham-and-the-cult-of-the-founder

You know the main reason I think Harris will win? Because her campaign is not allowing itself to get sucked into the bellicose nature of 2024 politics. It's about joy and hope. In the small things: redirecting chants of "he won't win" into chants of "we will win." Eyes on the prize.

She's not shying away from attacking Trump - far from it - but she's openly attacking his rhetoric and record and policy agenda rather than relying on "tiny hands" and "orange skin" and stupid shit like that. All while she's promoting her own record and focusing on policy. That wins elections.

She's redirecting the campaign away from "We can't let Donald Trump win" into a campaign of "We have something better to offer than Donald Trump" and exposing him for the sad, pathetic, weak man that he actually is.

Reposted from FA discord: FA is under a domain hijacking attempt and has not been fixed yet. (The domain for now redirects to the real site, but this may change later.)

Probably do not use it right now.

EDIT: Luffy on Discord claims to have the domain back. Site currently directs to an image of Fender lazing about and a notice that further updates will be delivered at https://discord.gg/furaffinity .

EDIT: Site is fixed! You're good.

My primary motivations in moving between social media sites have been to gain more privacy, avoid ads, interact with the people I want to interact with, and sure if I can avoid giving data or money to billionaires that's a win.

But I think the shift from Twitter to here really highlighted to me how performative and divorced from reality social media really is. I enjoy wearing diapers and feeling little, and I want to talk to others that feel similarly and have a good time with them. I'm happy to be an open ear for others to vent when I have the spoons to handle it. I guess I want to be part of a community that builds people up, and especially helps them love and accept a side of themselves that they can't express in other places. I don't want to see amplified negativity from the rest of the world and from others in our own community tearing each other down. That was not 100 percent of my experience with Twitter but definitely enough to be off-putting.

A thing I've been thinking about a lot, though: when many of those most eager to dogpile and cancel in our community were faced with a decision between moving to small sites like Mastodon or Co-host to build a community in case the Musky Husky ran Twitter into the ground, or stay on Twitter, they chose the convenient option. Their morality does not extend far beyond their convenient action. I don't really blame them for that as I'm not any better. We're all beaten down by this world and only have so much energy to put up a fight. We have to pick our battles.

But it does highlight how awful social media is as a source of morality, especially when it's driven by an algorithm that amplifies sensational posts. It's very convenient to crucify people in the court of public opinion (both people who deserve it and don't), but next to impossible to enact any meaningful change in the real world because that's inconvenient. All the while it erodes every user's mental health.

I truly don't feel that way here. Without an algorithm to foist negativity on me constantly it feels like I'm getting an unvarnished look at what y'all really believe. We feel more like a community here and I feel like I know you all more deeply, even if I only read your posts and don't often reply to them. Of course that's also due to the relatively small number of users here and the longer form posts..

May have gotten a bit ramble-y but just some thoughts I've had related to posts I've seen this morning.

When I say hello to a new person, and we get to a particular topic that they're obviously passionate about and they just start chattering about it nonstop despite the fact that we haven't really talked before...

...I just let them talk. Because someone who acts like that is someone who obviously has that one thing that they really, really like, and if they're opening up to me, a relative stranger, over a very passing interest, it's probably because they've been shunned or ignored or told they're "cringe" every time they've tried to talk about it with anyone. And that fucking breaks my heart.

#BeKindToEachOther

Reason number 63457 to ditch #Twitter for Mastodon:

Here on Mastodon, my timeline has not once been subjected to any of the stupid "unpopular opinion" engagement bait.