If I can gush about something I like real quick: sometimes online I stumble on a thing that I'm not sure if it has a name or not, but I've been calling it a post-fursona.

okay so like, to me the most important part of furryism is representing yourself with a cute little guy. I love seeing how people represent themselves. Animals are a really easy place to start from, they have a lot of cultural baggage and symbolism in them that you can lean into or out of, play with or subvert, but they're actually not the most important part of it to me so I love when I see someone who definitely wants to represent themselves with a little guy but doesn't really care about the animal part of a fursona, and instead of just giving up is decides they wanna be a cute stylized little knight or wizard or ghost or wispy shadow person or robot or whatever else. I think that's so creative and cool.

it’s unfortunate that some of the most interesting interactive narrative stuff out there comes from live service-type games with real-time energy systems. on a personal level, i don’t have the attention span for that kind of thing. on an ideological level, i find the “play every day” incentivizing bad.

it’s not exactly the kind of game i’m referring to, but i stopped playing mtg arena when i realized the only reason i wanted to play it over cockatrice was “but i don’t want to miss out on my daily quests :(”

real-time energy systems aren’t quite on the same level of lootboxes, but in my ideal world they’d be similarly regulated.

If you believe you have astrological skill, you can also put yourself to the test by taking the same challenge that we used in the study! We're making this challenge permanently available so that anyone can test their own abilities at any time. At the same link, we also offer a practice test (based on matching celebrities and events to an appropriate chart), which is less scientifically rigorous but can be used to practice before taking the official test. Additionally, we've released the anonymized data from our study, so that anyone who wishes to can analyze the data for themselves.

so some folks did a study to test out the idea that astrology works if you use the whole chart instead of just sun signs or whatever. based on their data it very much does not, & also i'm obsesssed with the cheerfulness with which they say "try it yourself bitch!"

i don't know what else to say about the current racism issues other than i think staff should be less afraid of banning racists on sight. if this is supposed to be the leftist blog-site then they need to exercise their ban hammer and just fucking ban em. edge case, who cares. unclear? probably not as unclear as you think. don't let Cohost fall prey to the nazi bar phenomenon. the racism clearly is happening enough to be an problem so maybe just take a few hours to blitz through the reports list and nuke some assholes. you'll get some experience doing it and it'll make the people happy.

i hate that this issue has taken root here, cause it's honestly my favorite website. I really don't like the way Tumblr works and it's got it's own staff transphobia issues and also the fact there are weird cells of weirdos on there. Twitter is twitter. Facebook is facebook. Mastodon... idk, I should probably blow the dust off that as a backup if nothing else, but I've overheard the drama, and I just hate starting a social media feed from scratch.