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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • There’s been kind of a “last week of school before summer vacation” vibe, which I suspect is related in part to the overall weirdness of this moment as reddit partially collapses and the Fediverse figures out how to absorb the influx of new users and, I dunno, I figure everyone is just feeling kind of impish and punchy.

    Anyway I’m a humorless old person and unfond of scatological humor in general, so I emphatically share your sentiment. I suspect it’ll die down shortly, though. In the meantime I hope the literal shitposters are at least enjoying themselves. Everybody’s gotta blow off steam from time to time.





  • I think there was a wide and deep vein of “look at these fucking weirdos” that shaped a lot of early aughts internet gathering places. I’m thinking of Something Awful in particular but the phenomenon was certainly a lot more widespread than SA.

    While “look at these fucking weirdos” was by no means confined to dunking on furries, I feel like for whatever reason furries kind of became the highest profile subculture to be brought to wider, mainstream attention—and derision—during this era. I vividly remember poking around on SA when I was in college circa 2003-04 and there was a lot of anti-furry sentiment (much of it grounded in the assumption that for all furries everywhere furridom was exclusively a sex thing.) Eventually that anti-furry sentiment was felt across the internet. LiveJournal, for example, was home to a lot of furries but also to a lot of furry-hating trolls.

    The internet in the first decade of the new millennium was a deeply weird place. For a good (though extremely distressing!) overview of how and why places like SA became what they did, the Behind the Bastards series on Chris Chan is solid. It’s not furry-related, but a similar “let’s gather around and gawk at and eventually harass and provoke this fucking weirdo” thing played out in Chris Chan’s “discovery” by Something Awful. I’ll put a link below with a caveat that basically every type of content warning you can imagine applies to these episodes , though imho Robert Evans and Margaret Killjoy handle the Chris Chan story with as much sensitivity and compassion as one could hope.