Restarting...

#ToesOutTuesday #aDailyViolet

Sorry for the really crap video here - bad framing etc. I was just setting up when he did this, so I wasn't ready yet.

George doesn't flop or "floomp" a lot - occasionally yes, but usually it's more just like this, where he kind of settles to the ground and his feet slide out from under him. This is him settling in after finishing his dinner. Gotta give it time to digest...

It's probably good that he doesn't flop much. When he does, he kind of shakes the floorboards - you can actually feel it. Have I said lately that he's a big (and portly) #bunny?

#rabbit #RabbitsOfMastodon #HouseRabbit #flop #floomp #BigBuns #portly

talking about the idea of "tactical fursuit", I was asked why antifa wear black rather than camo. there's many reasons, some overt, some unconfessed, some good some bad.

first there's no good urban camo because urban environments are too diverse in colours and lines, if you do gray for concrete you stand out in a shopping mall or red bricks or park. the good urban camo in non-war situations is "gray man" camo—jeans and white T-shirt and a baseball cap, or whatever passes as "normal" to blend in the crowd. antifa often have these underneath their black clothes, or in a backpack to quickly change after a protest. I was once being pursued by a harasser (just annoying not dangerous) and went into a toilet, they stayed outside waiting for me, I walked out right next to them, they were still l waiting for me to come out and missed me completely. changing the vibe of your outfit can fuck up people's expectations.

then there's black bloc, which is where the idea of "antifa=black uniform" comes from. there's a lot of misunderstandings about how this works. it's not that you want clothes that will make you perfectly anonymous, this is more or less impossible in surveillance society. rather imagine there's a protest and the cops want to punish someone who burned a car. well cops can't be everywhere all the time so all they have is footage from a nearby security camera. if the person is isolated it may still be possible to identify them, if not by the specific black clothes they're wearing, then by stuff like DNA traces. but if there was a mass of black-clad bodies and one among dozen of hoodies lifts a hand to throw a molotov, the few underexposed pixels are really hard to pin on a specific person. the power of black bloc happens in groups, black is ideal for literal and metaphorical blurring of lines. therefore "black" "bloc", emphasis on "bloc".

black clothes can also be useful at night, of course, but less than one would think—it's never really dark in a city, and black outfits stand out. (think about it—if there's gray mottled buildings and you're wearing a gray mélange that matches it in tone, then at night when the buildings get darker, your sweater will also get darker to the same amount). if it's dark enough that there's a lot of shadows they become actually hard to see, but this is highly situational, usually you just draw attention in all black.

however that brings up another reason, one that people don't like to admit even though it's not necessarily bad: group identity, signalling, and intimidation. the State does the same thing, like reserving certain types of camo for certain special squads, which wouldn't make sense if it was the most effective camo—it's about a hit in morale. cops in the Americas use the "multicam black" specifically to project authority, it's not really camouflaging anything, it's social engineering. people _know_ that antifas are supposed to wear black, and we want the nazis to feel threatened when they see a gang of black hoodies turn the corner. can attest it works.

and finally black is just easy, almost everybody has black clothes lying around, if you want everyone who's going to the counterprotest to fork off money and time to dress in Phantomleaf WASPII Z4 you're going to have a bad time. punks and goths and metalheads all already wear black clothes anyway, Marie who has to dress exclusively fem-coded clothes for gender reasons has a whole range of choices in black pieces, so does Josefine who doesn't wear animal fibres nor synthetics, Mohammed who is anti-consumerist and hasn't bought clothes since 1994, Asuman whose body shape is considered "non-standard" by the fashion industry, Vanessa who has clothing restrictions during Pessach, Dongmei who is new to the scene and only has party outfits—in every situation, it's much easier to procure black than any sort of specialised tactical thing. and remember we benefit from numbers.