I'm not sure if there's a web page for the official announcement but it's discussed in this blog post here: https://easystaff.io/building-easystaff

The short version is that the weird and awkward payment platform EasyStaff is now scraping an extra fee off of transactions and basically forcing you to buy into a crypto DAO pyramid scheme.

It was already rather tedious for me to use EasyStaff's services to pay artists for commissions but I was willing to go through it in the rare case when it was required, but from here on out I think I'm going to be a lot more insistent on NOT using this platform.

EDIT - it occurred to me that I could just copy and paste the text of the email. So here it is:


Hello,

A new client fee on EasyStaff Connect will be introduced on September 1, 2025.

3% DAO Benefit Fee is the first step toward launching our DAO mechanism. DAO is a decentralized model where key decisions are made by community members — customers and freelancers.


Why are we introducing this fee?

This innovation is in line with our strategy to develop EasyStaff Connect according to the principles of autonomy and decentralization.

Please note: All funds collected with 3% DAO Benefit Fee will be redistributed to token holders.


What does this mean in practice?

DAO tokens will be stored in personal accounts of users. Tokens are awarded for completing DAO missions:
Tokens reflect your contribution to the platform’s growth;
Tokens help you vote on future development of EasyStaff Connect and influence it;
Additional income (Benefits) is available to token holders.

Stay tuned for more information on how to earn DAO tokens and receive Benefits.

Best,
The EasyStaff Connect Team

I don't mean real friends, who needs those? What I mean is that people semi-regularly send me friend requests on Discord and probably at least half of them are scammers.

Of course it's obvious to me that they're scammers as soon as I see the friend request pop up, and I only accept it and and message with them in order to waste their time, and also because I'm a little curious about who or what is behind the wave of them that seemed to start flooding in a few years ago.

The reason I bring this up is because Discord has a "mutual friends" feature that shows you if any of your friends are friends of your friends, and I don't want my trolling of scammers to confuse anyone into thinking "well they're friends with Nico so they must be legit."

So, you know, be careful out there. Use your head. The scammers are pretty bad at pretending to be artists so if you pay a little attention it should be obvious when something's not right.

I wrote my last journal pretty quickly and didn't really expand on my ideas too much, so I wanted to swing back around and do that now.

In particular, I made some mention of the notion that trying to apply a fixed set of descriptive tags to an image is kind of disrespectful to the artistic expression and not useful as a categorization or discovery mechanism, and I want to dig deeper on that topic in particular.

So let's lay out a scenario: you're in the mood to hear some music. You open up Spotify or Apple Music or whatever, and you type in some search terms to describe the music you're looking for: you want it to be in the key of G lydian, have a 12/8 beat, fall somewhere in the range of 85-90 bpm, and have at least one part be played on a harpsichord. You know, just the same way as any other perfectly normal person searches for music.

What's that you say? You don't search for music that way? Of course you don't. Even though criteria like those describe readily apparent aspects of a particular piece of music, the chances of a search like that turning up something that you might actually enjoy are really no better than random chance. It's likewise largely futile to try to find art you like by searching for descriptive keywords: sure, you're narrowing down the set of images you need to sort through compared with just randomly flipping through the entire compendium of all furry art ever drawn, but you're still not going to efficiently find art that you actually enjoy in any manner more than "this art superficially contains some subject I have shown interest in".

If we return to the music example though, you might say that what you DO search for is certain genres of music. And yes, that is a very common way to search for music. But there's two problems with extending the analogy in that direction:

1: Furry art really has no equivalent to the concept of "genre" in music.

and 2: This is a good thing, because genres are actually really toxic.

This is a bit of a digression but bear with me. The music world, to the surprise of no one, has a bit of a discovery problem. Suppose I make a piece of music, and I want to get it out in front of an audience that I think will appreciate it. As of right now, the only actionable step I can take towards that is to pick a genre to categorize it as, but this choice is inherently fraught: if I pick a genre that's widely popular, it'll be more likely that someone will search for that genre, but also more likely that my song will be lost in an endless sea of other songs, with no hope of standing out. If, on the other hand, I pick a really small, narrow microgenre, then I've whittled down that ocean of other songs into a tiny puddle and my song has a much better chance of getting noticed if only someone were to search for that obscure microgenre I picked.

But worse than that: to integrate into that microgenre, I have to carefully craft my song to fit the expectations of that microgenre, and that has lead to the peculiar phenomenon of musicians piling onto any microgenre that starts to gain traction, creating songs that are nearly undifferentiated from each other, in hopes of riding the wave to recognition. It's a suboptimal outcome that results from the perverse incentive created by the simplistic and ineffective discovery algorithm (that algorithm being 'pick a genre and hope someone searches for it').

The microgenre system also doesn't serve listeners well either, as each microgenre has its own fixed center-of-creative-mass. So if you stumble upon a microgenre that you have some affinity for, it's quite difficult to crawl out to the fringes of it and bridge to different-but-related music; you're always fighting the search-by-genre force drawing you back to the bland, undifferentiated middle.

Now let's look at this in the context of furry art again. Due to the simplistic and ineffective discovery algorithms of sites like FA and E6, artists are pushed towards producing works that cater to superficial keywordization, which detracts from creativity and depth, and often threatens to pigeonhole them if one of those keywords gains traction. Like they get a bunch of traffic from "toebeans art" and now they're stuck being a toebeans artist.

So let's peel back a layer here. The goal of this keyword sprinkling and people doing search-by-keyword is for users to hopefully be able to find new works that appeal to them in some artistic sense. What people are trying to achieve here is to create some sort of discovery algorithm. And yes, I know that the term "algorithm" carries some pretty negative connotations, but remember that an algorithm is optimized for whatever the owner of the algorithm optimizes it for. Like Facebook optimizes its algorithm to make users miserable so that they'll mope all day on Facebook. Twitter optimizes its algorithm to make its thin-skinned trillionaire owner feel like people actually care about what he says. Spotify optimizes its algorithm to funnel people towards AI-generated slop music that costs the platform virtually nothing per-play to pour into your ears. But there's also plenty of algorithms out there that are implemented in a way that's actually useful to users, and focused on helping them find content that they'll genuinely enjoy.

So how do you implement such a system? It's relatively straightforward (or at least as straightforward as any ML classification and predictive system is): you run an algorithm across the corpus of works looking for clusters of mutual interest. Some of those clusters will align on aspects that might be easy to identify (things you might have found via keywording, for instance) but often you'll generate clusters that defy easy explanation, yet still bear a strong predictive signal for shared interest. This allows you to place each work into a vector space based on past user interactions where each vector dimension measures the correlation of that work with a given cluster, and from there you can populate a "show me more like this" by searching for nearby nodes in that vector space (and potentially weight or anti-weight the results based on their relative popularity, so that you don't lean too heavily towards making popularity into a positive feedback loop, while also not flooding users with a sea of works that might be unpopular for a reason).

Of course this is just the first layer of the system, and it relies on a given new work receiving some interaction before it can be classified. The second level is to train an image recognition ML model on the clusters that were deduced from the first one, so that you can make an initial prediction of the cluster vector without relying on the chicken-and-egg of collecting user interactions before knowing what users will interact with it. Obviously that second layer is a lot more involved to implement.

But even if you never actually make it to that second layer, the results from the first layer operating only on works that have gathered enough interactions to classify them through that mechanism will produce recommendation results that are far more appealing than the naive search-by-keyword mechanism. And, since the clusters are nuanced and plastic, and the vectors encode a rich cross section of each works' association with those clusters, you don't fall victim to the microgenre center-of-creative-mass problem: the pool of recommendations for each work will be specific to that work, and will contain an equal distribution of nearby works across each dimension of the vector space.

And so that brings me to my intense dislike of kewordization: I specifically commission works that defy naive classification and which lean hard into artistic depth instead. Being forced into the keyword system is, as such, offensive and insulting to me and an affront to my efforts to foster more nuanced creative expression in the furry art world. It sends the message that "your art is only as good as the shallow keywordable microfandoms it panders to". It disgusts me.

A heads up and fair warning: if you leave a comment or note me or whatever about "omg you should tag this upload with ..." I will delete your comment, ban you, and happily forget that you ever existed.

Tagging is a fundamentally flawed system. It relies on the false notion that there is sone shared, objective and universal interpretation for a piece, when the inescapable truth is that art is foundationally about the personal and individual connection between the viewer and the artist through the medium of their work. You can't reduce that to a list of categorized keywords that are imposed upon a work and rammed down the throat of the (other) viewers. Your interpretation of a work is yours and yours alone; it is not my interpretation, it is not the artist's interpretation, and it's not any other viewer's interpretation.

"Oh but browsing with filters! And searching!" you say? Browsing with filters is the leakiest sieve you could possibly create, and only encourages people to be pushy and entitled about tagging. And searching? I literally don't care if anyone is able to find my uploads in searches. The only thing I care about is that people are able to follow me if they like what I upload and unfollow me if and when they don't, and that if they stumble upon my work via people sharing it in a discord/telegram/whatever chat then they can click on that link and look at my gallery of uploads and make that follow/unfollow determination based on what they see. I can't even imagine an alternate universe where I spare even a single thought for FA's archaic and useless "discovery" features.

And in case you're wondering: yes, I will be 100% pissed if FA adds community tagging and doesn't allow uploaders to disable it.

But not the kinky kind... Ok, maybe the kinky kind, it depends on what you're into. I'm not gonna judge. What we're talking about today are bonds, as in the financial instrument.

So we'll start with a definition: what is a bond? In its simplest form, it's a promise of repayment. A bond issued with, for example, a face value of $1000 and a maturity date of January 1st, 2030, can be redeemed for $1000 in cash on or after January 1st, 2030. (There are other forms of bonds where the face value and maturity date have a different relationship with how much money you will receive and when you will receive it, but as we go along I think it'll become clear why we're focusing on the simplest type of bond, and for the most part the other types of bonds can be reinterpreted as this simple type with some basic mathematical manipulation).

Now suppose I offer to sell you a $1000 bond that matures in 2030. You might look at the $1000 sitting in your pocket and wonder why you would ever want to trade it for this promise of getting $1000 sometime in the future; after all, you could just hold onto that $1000 as cash and, providing you don't spend or lose it in the meantime, you'll be guaranteed to still have it in 2030. So if I want to sell you this bond, I'll need to sweeten the deal somehow: instead of offering to sell you the bond at $1000, I decide that I'll take $900 of your money today in exchange for giving you $1000 in 2030. This is known as the "discount". Of course it might be that $900 is still too high for you to be interested in the deal, since perhaps you have other things you could spend that $900 on which would give you better returns than $1000 in 2030, but for the sake of simplicity let's say that you find the deal appealing.

Now let's consider the flip side: why would I ever want to promise to give you $1000 in 2030 in exchange for $900 now? Well that all depends on what I can do with that $900. Suppose, for example, that I'm running a small business, and I need to buy a piece of equipment to help me produce my products. I've done an analysis of how this equipment will help my production and determined that I can make an extra $250 per year with it. But I don't have that $900 in my pocket right now to help me buy the equipment, and so I'm in a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario: I could make enough money to buy the equipment if I had it, but I need the money to buy the equipment before I make it.

So now the deal starts to make more sense: I issue you a $1000 bond for $900 and put that that $900 towards buying the equipment. Over the next 5 years I make $1250 using that equipment and then when 2030 rolls around I repay you the $1000 face value of the bond. You end up $100 richer, I end up $250 richer, and everyone is happy.

But now let's consider a twist: suppose that in less than 5 years from now you find some other opportunity to invest your money in. But you don't have your money just yet, all you have is a bond that will mature in 2030. You could pass on the opportunity and just wait for the bond to mature to get your $1000, but you'll miss out on that other opportunity and you're pretty sure that even if you sold the bond for less than $1000 right now, if you could jump on that new investment you'd make back more than what you'd give up selling the bond at a discount. This is where the "secondary market" comes in.

The secondary market is where investors can sell the bonds that they hold to other investors, and the price is determined by what each investor finds to be mutually agreeable. Since NicoCorp is doing fairly well and I'm raking in the cash with my new equipment, there's no particular reason to expect that I'll fail to repay the bond at maturity, and there's only a few years left until that happens. So it's almost as good as cash, and you shop it around and sell it for $975, still making a $75 profit on your initial investment, while also freeing up the $900 you initially put in, so that now you can jump on that other opportunity.

So at this point you might be wondering how people figure out what price a bond should sell for, and this is determined by two factors: the yield and the risk. The yield can be directly calculated, and it's the difference between the sale price and the face value, expressed in terms equivalent to an annual compound interest rate. So as the sale price of a bond goes down relative to its face value, the equivalent compounded interest you'd earn on it at maturity rises. Conversely, if the sale price goes up, the equivalent compounded interest falls; essentially your money isn't going to grow as much. Expressing the yield this way allows investors to combine the time-to-maturity and the discount into one number that expresses the meaningful combination of both, so that two different bonds can be directly compared.

So if we suppose that one bond has a 6% yield and another bond has a 3% yield, an investor would, risk aside, be better off buying the bond with the 6% yield. So why would any investor pick the 3% bond instead? Well, because they don't put risk aside.

Remember that a bond is only a promise, and until it's redeemed it's only really worth the paper it's printed on. If the issuing entity defaults on its obligations, then you might receive nothing at all in return for your investment, or perhaps just a small fraction of it, and you'll have no recourse to recover the rest. So if there's a high risk of default (or conditions equivalent to a default, such as high inflation devaluing the currency that the bond was issued in) then an investor would demand a higher yield to make up for it. Or, if that investor has a low risk tolerance, like for example if they're a senior citizen who doesn't have a lot of years left to make up for some short term losses, then they might want to opt for the safer, lower yield investment regardless of how much potential extra returns they could get by assuming more risk.

Now this risk factor is a characteristic of the issuing entity, so let's take a closer look at why those issuing entities (businesses, governments, etc) issue bonds, and what their debt load and budget deficits mean.

In our example above, we only really looked at a single transaction buried inside of NicoCorp's budget. I needed to buy one machine, I issued one bond, and I bought the machine. Let's look at the whole picture instead: NicoCorp normally makes $10,000 per year in revenue and has $9,900 of expenses, for a healthy surplus of $100 in profit. However buying that machine, which was $1000, drove up the expenses to $10,900 on the same $10,000 revenue (remember, this is just the snapshot at the start, I haven't installed the machine yet and got it up and running), leaving me with a $900 budget deficit that I have to somehow cover. But luckily I sold you the $1000 bond for $900, which means that I just barely broke even for the year in terms of cash flow, but increased my debt load by $900, and as we already saw, that $900 of debt is easily manageable with the increased revenue that the upgrade will bring in.

So thinking about this, you might wonder: why stop at just that one $1000 bond? What if I sold a few more bonds and bought even more equipment? Could I make even more money? The answer is: maybe!

Let's look at a few limiting factors: perhaps I might saturate my market and start to run out of people to sell things to. Well, that would mean that each extra piece of equipment I buy would bring in a smaller amount of revenue, and eventually I'd get to a point where that revenue wouldn't be sufficient to pay off the bonds at the discount I could sell them for. But also, as my debt load increases, investors might start to get nervous about the amount of risk they're taking on by buying bonds from me, and so they'll start to demand higher yields which will also make it harder for me to balance that against the increased revenue I'd expect to make. And that's not to mention that there's my own risk tolerance: I can't necessarily predict what the future might actually hold, so my projections of how much revenue I'll earn for each additional piece of equipment might not be what I expect, and I might want to reduce my risk exposure and opt to grow my business more slowly.

So there's a risk to issuing too many bonds and taking on too much debt, and that's a risk that most people are familiar with. But surprisingly, there's also a risk when you take on too little debt!

Let's suppose that the yields in the bond market are way down and confidence in my business is high: there's a lot of opportunity for me to make money, but tapping into that opportunity is going to require spending money to make money. If I just sit on my hands, that opportunity will pass me by, and the easy money I could have made will just slip away; my inaction will have cost me those potential future profits. But even worse, suppose that my balance sheet is already slipping into the negative because I steadfastly refuse to make capital upgrades: I'll have to issue bonds anyway to keep the cashflow balanced, but since I'm not issuing enough bonds to make those capital investments in buying new machinery, I won't be seeing any increased profits that I'd need to make in order to pay back those bonds. I'd just be in a downward spiral toward bankruptcy because I didn't have enough debt! How counterintuitive!

So to restate the question: what's the right amount of debt to carry? What's the right level of budget deficit to have? As we've established, the answer is definitely "it's complicated" and it's very rarely the "zero" that some people tend to gravitate towards. Does it make sense to compare the size of my debt to my annual revenue? A ratio like that can give you some sense of scale, but there's no magic numbers. Similarly, what about comparing my budget deficit to my annual revenue? Is there a magic number there? Again, not really.

And of course, if I'm both carrying and issuing debt, does that mean I'm taking out new loans to pay off old loans? In a way, yes, but again if there are investments I could be making in NicoCorp that will pay a better risk-adjusted rate of return than the cost of issuing new debt, then I'd be a fool for not doing it; I'd be leaving money on the table.

Now all this is really a long winded way of saying that when people talk about the size of the national debt, or the budget deficit, and throw around numbers like debt-per-capita, debt-to-gdp, and so on and so forth, you really need to do your homework to make sure that you're not getting mislead. There isn't a "right" value for any of these numbers, and there isn't a moral imperative to reduce either of them to zero (so don't be fooled by "balanced budget" initiatives). What is imperative, though, is to ensure that the investments that are being made are sound and that the revenue being raised is being done effectively and efficiently. Unfortunately, you'll need to do more than just look at headline numbers to understand how good a job is being done on those fronts, but now that you understand bonds you'll be on a much better footing for it!

Yeah, WHO DO YOU LOVE? The answer might surprise you.

I hadn't originally intended to write two of these journals back-to-back, but this one was rolling around my head for a while and then the lovey-doviest day of the year popped up and it seemed appropriate for the occasion.

Love is one of those things that seems so simple. You meet someone, you feel something, and everything clicks into place like it was made to be and you suddenly find yourself at the center of a whirlwind of emotions. But we've also all seen love go bad, when it seems like a couple that was so unlikely to come together finally realizes that they were never made for each other in the first place, and then they're on a one-way train to splitsville.

But why does this happen? How could something that have seemed so right to them, at first, turn out so wrong in the end? The answer is simple: the person they loved wasn't the person they were actually in the relationship with.

When you meet somebody, when you fall for somebody, the person you actually feel all those emotions for is actually a figment of your imagination. It's the person who you want them to be, who you expect them to be, informed by what you know of them and what you experience of them. The more time you share with them, the more of the real them that you get to experience, the more that who they are in your head will come to align with who they actually, really are. At least, so long as you're open to revising your impression of them and don't fall into the trap of denial.

Naturally an ideal situation would be that the person they really are turns out to be not too different from the person you want them to be. Or the person they are and the person you want them to be drift together through your mutual influence on each other. A mix of both is probably the recipe behind most successful relationships.

But whether the crossings of your souls works out or not, knowing that there will always be some difference, however large or small, between the person you stare lovingly at, and the person that you're thinking you're staring lovingly at, will help inform you as you watch for signs of trouble. And not just for your affection for them, but their affection for you.

Keeping an eye out for clues as to who it is that your special someone thinks you are, or watching for signs that might show you where your impression of them might have been misaligned, will help you refine those imaginary people in your head to better represent reality. Sometimes that refinement will be for the better, and sometimes perhaps not so much. But the important thing is to always strive towards you knowing the real them, and them knowing the real you.

Your imagination can be intoxicating, but imagination doesn't last forever.

Allow me to introduce myself I'm a- wait, wrong thing.

Today I'd like to talk about sympathy, sort of. Not the usual sort, but something kind of related. A bit of an expanded version of the concept.

Traditionally the way we think of sympathy is in a negative context: we see someone suffering a misfortune, and we share in their despair. However, I think this is really only one facet of how sympathy works, and perhaps not the most telling side. You see, it's also the case that, for someone we're apt to feel sympathetic towards, we'll share feelings of joy when good fortune comes their way. We'll share pride in their accomplishments, feel unease at their anxieties, join in their wistful longings, and so on. Sympathy, in this sense, is when our reaction to observing another persons' experiences is concordant with theirs.

But then, turning things around, there's the opposite. Feeling positive emotions when seeing someone's misfortune (the classic schadenfreude). Feeling discouraged when they experience good fortune. I'll use the word antipathy for this, when our reaction to their experiences is in opposition to theirs.

And somewhere in the middle, as one might expect, is apathy. Being unmoved by someone's misfortune, feeling no particular joy or pain when good things come their way. Things happen, it doesn't matter, you pay it no mind.

The reason I bring up this subject is because recognizing when other people are sympathetic towards you, especially outside of sharing negative emotions during unfortunate experiences (which is muddied and obscured by social expectations), is a very important signal for what role that the people around you play in your life, and what role you play in theirs.


There have been a number of times when I've called people friends, hung out with them, shared a little slice of my life with them, only to, after some time, come to realize that they did not have sympathy towards me. If I shared an opinion or some advice, they'd react as if it was overbearing and unwelcome. If I shared some positive life event, they'd interpret it as bragging. If I told a joke or made a funny quip, they'd struggle to force a laugh. If I mentioned something sad, they'd respond with what was expected of them within the framework of acceptable social norms.

Of course, I naturally felt the chill. And, as is appropriate, I took the time to introspect. But what was usually notable was that their reaction was an outlier. Sharing the same things with other friends, in much the same way, yielded far more concordant reactions.

Despite the fact that I liked them as friends, and that likewise they had no identifiable reason not to enjoy my friendship as well, what was happening was clear: they were simply unable to feel sympathy for me. There was no schism or transgression that precipitated this change, and I'm not sure if there exists any logical explanation for why some people do and don't feel sympathy for others. It just is what it is.

The important thing, though, is that recognizing when this apathy or antipathy sets in gives you the signal that it's time to move on. I don't really necessarily believe that it's a thing that you can change in someone, nor even that it makes sense to try to change it. Rather, I think it's just better to wish them well and agree to go your separate ways.


I'm not sure how to sum up the life lesson from this other than to say, maybe pay attention to this aspect of how people around you respond to you, and likewise look for signs of how you're reacting to them too.

Much ink has been spilled about the problem of political division, and many people, regardless of their voting preferences, find it concerning and disheartening. However, when reading articles about how one group or the other has fallen down a rabbit hole of tribalism, suspicion, and a troubling disconnection from the very reality they see around them, insulating themselves in a bubble of comforting lies, it's all too easy to think "someone else is to blame for that".

But how can you be sure that the "someone else" is actually someone else, and not you? How can you be sure that your epistemology has not become unmoored from the real world, allowing yourself to drift harmfully into the ream of "alternative facts"?

The answer is to form a routine of grounding yourself. Creating a set of self-checks, a set of questions that, when answered honestly, will tell you if you've gone astray.

For example, you might ask yourself "have I recently taken joy in seeing another person suffer distress or misfortune, even though that particular person has never wronged me?"

Or for another example, you might ask "have I recently been overtly antagonistic to another person, when I could have been compassionate or empathetic instead?"

Or perhaps you might ask "have I ascribed blame for a transgression perpetrated by a small number of people to a larger group they belong to, even though it is unlikely that the larger group contributed to or condoned their behaviour?"

Or any number of similar questions. If you see worrying signs when you ask yourself this, then this is your cue to take a step back and ground yourself. Examine the edges of your bubble, the media you consume (be it news media, podcasts, tiktok or other social media feeds) and ask yourself, honestly, if you feel like that media is genuinely informing you about the true state of the world, or if it's feeding you distortions, inaccuracies, and outright lies which you've come to accept as the truth because they comfort your preexisting biases, or contribute to a shared collective outrage. Think of some specific examples of tidbits of information that you've accepted as being true: were they presented with evidence of their veracity, or simply with concern and urgency; and how often have other bits of information from those sources turned out to be false, unfounded, or otherwise misleading?

It probably comes as no surprise that my personal politics are left-leaning, but that doesn't mean that I consume any and all media that caters to the left. There are, in fact, a fairly large number of left-targeted news sites, media personalities, etc etc who I have deliberately evicted from my regular consumption habits specifically because their content was tailored to evoke an unthinking emotional reaction, either trying to comfort me by mocking or degrading those on the right, or trying to rile me up with inflammatory reporting of shenanigans and misdeeds. I recognized that consuming that media would not usefully inform me about the state of the world, about the goings-on on the left or the right of the political world. It would just draw me into tribalism, encourage me to mete out my happiness based on how many "points" that "my side" scores. It would make me toxic.

Now nobody likes the feeling of finding out that they've been played for a fool, but the solution isn't to burrow deeper into the comforts of the lies that have been spoon-fed to you. You need to rip off the bandaid and put a stop to it, reject those who would deceive you, and become the better person that you know you can be.

If you've recognized any signs of trouble in yourself when reading this, then know that you can do better. I believe in you.

Except I do. I actually kind of enjoy it, so long as people are being respectful and making well reasoned, good faith arguments. But things in US politics have not been quite right lately, and by "lately" I mean "since about 1996" if I were to pick an inflection point.

You see, it used to be that there was a school of conservative political philosophy, and a school of liberal political philosophy. They both had their strong points and their weak points, but throughout the 70s and 80s the conservative establishment suffered some setbacks when they ended up on the wrong side of history on some major points, particularly when it came to economic policy. Fast forward to the mid 90s, and the republican party had decided to react to these failures by untethering their political platform from political philosophy, and when time Newt Gingrich had ascended to become the house speaker, he ushered in an era of "whatever the democrats are, we're the opposite".

As you can imagine, this lead to a dramatic downturn in bipartisanship, although it still, barely, existed enough to keep the government from completely collapsing (there were, of course, a number of government shutdowns, orchestrated by Newt Gingrich's obstinance). The goal became simply to deny the democrats any political or legislative wins, even if the subject in question was well aligned with the (now obsolete) conservative political philosophy.

Meanwhile in academia, this lead to a bit of a feedback loop. Since conservative political philosophy had been abandoned, the supply chain of conservative political academics dried up. This also corresponded with the republicans turning away from science in general, since they also ended up on the wrong side of issues like "is smoking bad for you?", "did evolution happen?" and "is climate change real?", and this all came together to drive a very sharp, mutual wedge between academia and republicans.

So this has lead to an entire political generation where the republican party has adhered to no other philosophy than "obstruct the other side at any costs," and leaning hard into wedge issues, tribalism, and our next guest to the party: superficial TV news sound bites.

And this is the other reason I picked 1996 as the turning point, as that year also saw the founding of Fox News, lead by the charming and totally-not-out-to-literally-destroy-america-from-within Rupert Murdoch. Fox News gave the republican party the perfect forum for delivering their performative politics. Political philosophy and nuance didn't matter, what mattered is that you could get people excited for whatever it is you were doing in a 30 second video clip. And what better message to put into those short clips than "I'm fighting for you against [other people] by opposing [whatever they're doing] because hell and damnation will rain down on earth if we let them get away with it." It didn't matter that you couldn't bring the receipts, because the receipts wouldn't fit in those 30 seconds anyway.

Now the point of me telling you all this is that I'm really quite disappointed by the demise of conservative political philosophy. I think that you could form answers to political questions near and dear to our hearts here in the furry world, in both conservative and liberal terms, that would not be significantly conflicting or hackle-raising. LGBT issues? What business does the government have regulating the private relationships between consenting adults. Abortion and contraceptive access? It's no business of the government to intervene in the fertility decisions of individuals. Legalize weed? Why is the government even regulating it in the first place?

And so on, and so on.

But that's not what we have represented today in US politics. Instead we have the democrats who still try to turn liberal political philosophy and empirical science into policy platforms (with varying levels of success, perhaps), and the republicans who only seem to want to use tribalism and division to gain power, in order to... I mean, they don't really have a political philosophy anymore to execute on, so I can't really be any more charitable than to say that they want to gain power so that they can inflict their "democrats, except the opposite of that" platform onto america, a platform full of surprisingly unpopular initiatives and policies that are inexplicably harmful not just to the rest of america, but to their own core supporters as well.

And so now this long and weird history has come together to bring us Donald Trump and his circle of weird and deranged sycophants. They've perfected the act of "I'm going to do a bad thing, and then point at the other side and accuse them of doing it while professing my own innocence", an act which is uniquely enabled by the Fox News fast paced news cycle, where nothing is challenged or fact checked; all that most regular americans get to see is just the bare accusations flying back and forth.

But what prompted me to write this journal isn't the looming menace of DT and his weirdly projectionist mudslinging. Rather it's JD Vance, whose writing I used to enjoy reading back when he was an opinion contributor at National Review (and I'm sure most of my followers will have to read that sentence 2 or 3 times to realize that it isn't a typo). He was well spoken, seemed to be reasonably well educated, and while I rarely agreed with his conclusions I felt like it was refreshing to see some sort of spark of rebirth of conservative political thought. I thought that people like him might be able to ground the republican party back in something other than naked, performative partisanship.

Sadly, we all saw him take a complete 180, going from a never-Trump detractor to his biggest kiss-up sycophant, earning himself the position of becoming the republican VP nominee. It's just so disheartening to see him make a statement after the attempted assassination of DT, starting off with the clear and lucid observation that this reprehensible act is the result of those who court division and flirt with political violence. In a former life, he would have pointed the blame directly on where it should lie: on Donald Trump and his circle. But no, instead he somehow abandons rationality and points at the democrats as the instigators.

And once again, those who tune into Rupert Murdoch's fox news will only ever see the accusation, unquestioned and parroted over and over. It doesn't matter that he can't back up his accusation, it doesn't matter that he can't show the receipts. Nobody will ever ask for them.

So look, I think that conservatism can be saved in america. I think a healthy, functioning democracy needs viewpoints rooted in multiple schools of political philosophy. I think everyone in america deserves political representation that aligns with their deeply held values. But the only way to get there is to recognize that it's time for everyone in america, whether you're left, right, red, blue, or whatever, to come together and reject those who are trying to gain office through stoking tribalism, division, threats of political violence (let's not forget the Jan 6th incident), empty accusations, and dishonest lies. I'm not saying this because I want Joe Biden to win. I'm saying this because we should all want Donald Trump to lose.

He's not your champion.

He's not anyone's champion.

You can do better.

We can all do better.


Now for an editorial note: I've turned comments off for this journal, not because I don't want to hear from you, but because I don't want to have to moderate conversations between you all. Things can get heated and I don't want to be in a position to have to be shutting anyone down. If you think I've missed the mark on this, or that I'm way off base, I'd like to invite you to drop me a message, preferably on discord or telegram because the notes system here is ass, and we can talk it out. Be civil, be logical, be sensible, and bring receipts; it'll save both of us some time.

There's a number of scammers active within the furry commissioning world these days. In particular, many scammers are impersonating artists and contacting people either offering custom commissions, or offering to re-sell a YCH slot that they claim the winner backed out of purchasing. While we might never be rid of these leeches, there are steps that we, as a community, can take to make their scamming more difficult to pull off.

For buyers, the usual advice applies: double and triple-check that whoever you're talking to is indeed who they say they are. Never use "friends and family" payment on paypal unless you're absolutely sure you never want to see that money again. Don't be shy about contacting an artist through alternate methods to verify their identity: for example, if someone contacts you on Discord saying "hey I'm [so-and-so] on FA wanna buy some art?", then go to FA and drop that artist a quick note to ask if they're really the one who just contacted you. If you don't recognize the supposed artist at all, try doing reverse image searches on any examples of their work they share with you. Often what shows up with just a little digging won't even begin to pass the sniff test, and you can save yourself a lot of money and stress.

But the point of this journal is to explore a few things that artists can do to make it harder for someone to impersonate you.

First and foremost: keep your profile updated with all your active socials. Link to your Discord, FA, Twitter, Telegram, Boosty, or whatever else you use prominently on your profile. Make it easy for people to, at a glance, verify that you're the same person across all these services.

Second: upload your finished work. Yes, it's a pain in the ass sometimes, especially with FA's stone age upload UI, but there's tools out there like postybirb that make it much, much easier. Uploading a completed YCH, for example, makes it much more difficult for a scammer to claim that a bidder backed out and that their slot needs to be resold, especially if you update the description of the initial auction to point to the finished work.

Third: I'm not too fond of this suggestion because I hate deleting things, but consider cleaning up old auction submissions after the work is completed and posted and any possibility of a payment dispute is over. If you really want to keep a record of it, you can always use a full page screenshot or print-to-pdf to save it locally.

Stay safe out there!

(Mature themes ahead)

Except don't come, that's the whole point!

I've managed to sign myself up for something silly and misery loves company, so I'm inviting you all to play along at home by doing your own fap-free-february. Think you can make it all the way to March 1st? Or longer, like I might have to? The rules are pretty simple:

1: Can I cum?

No! Not even once. If you accidentally popped out a load this morning without realizing it was Feb 1, just tack an extra day on in March.

2: Is edging and teasing allowed?

It's not just allowed, it's encouraged!

3: What about ruined orgasms or prostate milking?

Use your discretion. If you know you'll still be just as pent up and needy afterwards then you can allow yourself the mispleasure.

4: It's just fap-free, right? That means that BJs and intercourse are still allowed?

Only if you're on the giving end. Treat your special someone to the most earth-shattering oral they've ever known, and fuck them to climax using a strap-on over and over until they can't walk straight!

Just so long as they're not doing the FFF too, of course.

5: Are chastity devices considered cheating? Or what about if I get my FWB-or-better to lock me in bondage mitts every evening?

Anything that keeps you from release is fair game.

6: A whole month, huh? Are you sure I can last that long?

I believe in you!

7: But I'm gonna be leaving slimy snail-trails everywhere I go!

That's the spirit!


 glee has set up a discord server if you'd like to spectate on the action or join in the fun real-time. Keep an eye out for them to share an invite, and don't forget to read the fantastic stories that they'll be writing and give them all the fav/watch/comment love that they deserve.

So FA is getting into the business of trying to twist the thumbscrews of policing artistic expression, again. I'm no fan of cub art myself, but I know when to live and let live. Trying to moralize an artist's expressions when their works are not specifically targeting harm towards any particular individual or group is just bullshit, and shouldn't be tolerated by anyone.

Just because I don't want to see something doesn't give me the right to tell you that you shouldn't be allowed to share it.

It's not an exceptionally common occurrence, but from time to time someone will approach me and show some interest in seeing me purchase some art. As one would expect, this comes in the form of both artists hoping to ply their wares, as well as fellow commissioners aiming to partake in a shared purchase.

And that's pretty cool. I like buying art.

Now of course there are a variety of ways to approach this subject, and while I wouldn't be so bold as to say there's a hard division of right and wrong, but there are certainly at least some approaches that are more prone to success than others.

So let's discuss that.

The main goal here is for me to be able to look at a proposal and, in relatively short order, give a solid answer of yes or no as to whether I'd like to go ahead with it.

As you might expect, the important part there is to actually have a proposal to work with. That can come in two forms, really, although most successful case will generally be a mix of the two.

The first and most obvious is simply for you to become familiar with the style, content and themes of the art that I frequently purchase and then come up with and present a complete proposal for a piece that lays out enough of the details that I can get an idea of exactly what you're looking for just by reading it. That should include a reasonably complete description of the subject matter, an indication of the characters involved and their roles in the piece, as well as suggestions for the artist you'd like to work with (if you're the artist, then obviously that last part is pretty easy).

The second is where I have become familiar enough with your tastes in art that I can predict with some reasonable amount of certainty what kind of content you might be interested in creating, which of my characters might be involved, etc.

The easiest way to build this familiarity, in both directions, is to simply follow me here, hit the +fav button on pieces you enjoy, and in particular leave comments on pieces you especially love pointing out particular aspects, themes, etc that you like (just, y'know, not all at once. I don't need to wake up to 1500 comments in my inbox all from one person some random morning).


So after all that familiarity building and proposal prepping, will I buy some art? No! Or possibly Yes! The simple fact of the matter is some days I do feel like buying art and some days I don't. Some ideas I like, some just slightly miss the mark. Some artists have styles that I think work well with my tastes, others not so much. Sometimes the desired artist(s) aren't even open for comms, or their art is in too much demand from other people to the point where I don't feel like it's a good value proposition for me. There's a million things that can go wrong, and often the stars just don't align right. There's no need to feel bad about it, it happens all the time.


I think it's worth cooking up a few examples of what's more and less likely to be successful, so here goes.

Example 1, from an artist: Hi Nico, I noticed you left a lovely comment on my piece [X]. I was considering of drawing another piece in a similar theme, and you might have noticed from comments I've left that I'm a big fan of your character [Y], and I think they'd be a great fit for this. Specifically, the idea I have is [description here]. Here's a [link] to my usual price sheet, let me know if you're interested.

Example 2, from a fellow commissioner: Hi Nico, I really like your character [X] and recently I've been working out a commission with [Artist] where the picture would be [description here] and I was wondering if you'd like to join in and have your character [X] in [some role in the picture]. Splitting the cost fairly, your share would be [furry dollars].

Example 3, from an artist: Hi Nico, I was just putting together a sketch [link] for a YCH and I actually had your character [X] in mind when I was doodling it out. Usually my auctions go fo around [X furry dollars] but I figured I'd give you a chance to buy it out beforehand for [Y < X dollary-doos] because I really want to work with you, and your character would just be perfect!

Example 4, from a fellow commissioner: Hi Nico, I just saw this YCH here [link] and I think it'd be really fun to have your character [X] in slot A and my character [Y] [link] in slot B. I'm sure you could guess from the comments I've left over the years that I really like [X]. Anyway the AB price is pretty reasonable, we could split it 50/50.

And some counter-examples.

Bad example 5, from an artist: Hello internet furry user, I am an artist and like to draw for money. Please send me some of your suspiciously plentiful furry dollars in exchange for art. I have never interacted with you or your art in the past, and likely never will in the future either.

Bad example 6, from a fellow commissioner: Hi I like ur art u buy can we get a commission together?

Bad example 7, from ???: (no subject) hi.

I've been going to FC and BLFC the past few years not because I had any compelling reason to do so, but rather because I had no compelling reason not to.

There's people out there who get really jazzed about cons and have all sorts of things they love doing and people they love seeing. But over the years I've just never discovered convention activities I desperately long for, and never collected a group of people I can't stand to not see.

The basic fact of the matter is that my introversion isn't a half-way thing. I'm not a little bit introverted or a rainy day introvert or whatever. I never feel the urge to hang around with people no matter how much time I spend alone. I don't "realize what I've been missing" on the rare occasions I do get together with folks. I'm happy when I'm alone, and happiest when I don't have to interrupt that solitude.

Do I enjoy going to restaurants? I like good food, but the restaurant experience has always been... I hesitate to say stressful, but it's definitely not something that brings me joy or puts me at ease. On the balance, it ends up a bit of a wash.

And of course the elephant in the room is the 'rona. I've got my shots and I mask when I go out without any fuss. But the idea of spending the majority of the whole weekend masked is not particularly appealing, never mind the slim chance of a breakthrough case: I've made it this far without even a hint of sniffles, and I don't want to screw up that clean run this late in the game.

So, no more cons. Not for a while, hard to say if that'll be forever or not. If you were looking forward to meeting me in person at a con: first of all whyyyyyyy, but also learn to live with disappointment I guess. There's still plenty of other (much more) fun folks to hang out with, I promise you won't miss me.

Made some new friends, saw some old friends, discovered that people I know know people I know, and didn't find a few folk I was hoping to find.

I also got stuffed full of meat, which is an essential component of any con. Mmm, Brazilian barbecue!

For everyone who was there I hope you got exactly as many hugs as you were hoping for, and for everyone who couldn't make it I hope you can find a way to get there next year.

I'm free! Time to spam your inboxes with commissions again.

There was no particular reason for the three week drought, just a bunch of stars aligned. I kind of slacked off jumping on commission openings and YCH auctions during the two weeks I took off work around BLFC. While I had commissions outstanding with other artists, this time of the year tends to be kind of busy for a lot of folks. (School finals, dealing with students going through school finals, just emerging from hibernation after a long, cold winter, etc etc)

I'm still being a little slack on picking up new comms though. This is usually the time of year I remind myself that my Scrooge McDuck vault full of gold isn't technically infinite and I should pace myself out more. But hopefully I'll be back to my usual pace of having at least one piece per week to share.

Had a great BLFC trip. Loved seeing everyone I saw, wish I could have met more folks, etc etc. Looking forward to next year again.

I had an interesting thought while I was sitting in on  stigmata's panel about characters and stereotypes. I realized part way through the talk that furry characters are often designed in an oddly backwards sort of way: the design starts with meaningful ideas and traits, and then the features of the character are tailored to suit. Like someone designing a character might say "oh, they like to dance and party at the club" and then decide to give them color shifting glowing markings that turn them into a self-contained portable rave.

But over in reality things tend to work the other way: you're born a certain way with no control over the traits and features you get, and then you find your path within that framework of limitations/enhancements/whatever.

I've oddly found myself leaning heavily towards the latter paradigm. I'll start with what the character is, their traits, design, features etc, and then figure out from there who they are. And it's the same whether they're an adopt or an original design of mine.

Now that's not to say that nothing about the character changes in response to their interests or life experiences, but it tends to be within the realm of plausible body manipulations. Like Cayes reshaped/resculpted her shell to achieve her personal ideal of beauty; Ruby was in a terrible accident and had to have her limbs replaced by advanced prosthetics; Sam was unlucky and got transformed into a demon.

But in terms of who they are, they worked with what they had, and pushed through things that might have held them back. Megan and Ailith are both adorable puff-balls but Megan became an intergalactic hero and Ailith became an underground fighter.

I suppose in the end this is why, despite how creative I try to be with my characters, I don't mind that a fair number of them started as adopt designs. That was just their accident of their birth, and who they become afterwards is the real adventure.

I'm curious what thoughts other folks have on this?

A friend recently ran into this issue, and I thought it might be useful to add my own bloviation to the discussion:

The fact that you run a Patreon does not relieve you of the duty to give your paying commissioner the full res file of their commission, along with any alt versions (if applicable).

I mean, you could certainly try to stipulate that, but I'll quite happy tell you where you can stick your business. If you want to ask me to delay posting a copy of the commission to my gallery then, so long as you're upfront about it and set a reasonable timeline, I can play along. But if you want to make any part of the picture completely Patreon-exclusive, excluding me as well, then you're going to have to fund that drawing through Patreon alone and you will most definitely not be using my characters in it.

Now don't take this the wrong way. I'm totally cool with people running Patreon campaigns as they please, this is just a matter of keeping priorities in order in terms of who's paying for the art and who's getting what they paid for. It's simply not appropriate in any way, shape, or form, to give someone other than the paying commissioner more access to the art that they paid for than you give to the commissioner themselves.

At the end of the day it is not my duty to bankroll your business in ways that not only deliver no benefit to me, but compromise the benefit I might have otherwise gained by employing your services.

So the other day Fancy-Fancy drops me a note like "Hey I notice you never got any art of that character you bought from me 5 years ago". I reply back with the simple explanation that I have no memory nor record of ever buying a character from them, but they seem really convinced that it was in fact me who bought her.

https://www.furaffinity.net/view/10946357/ https://www.furaffinity.net/view/10201630/ The character in question.

The simple explanation is that they probably sold her to someone else and, memory being a fickle thing, got mixed up about who bought her. But that kind of leaves me with a lingering curiosity: who did buy her? Anyone know?

First and foremost, if you're traveling to FC be aware that there's some pretty severe (by California standards) weather moving through that's dumping a bunch of wind and rain on the bay area, and a lot of snow in the Sierras on Wed/Thurs so expect some travel delays.

Secondly, I'll be there rocking my new Nico mask (pics will be available shortly) and I'm doing a 3D printing panel on Sunday so keep an eye out for both of those things.

I have basically zero actual plans other than wandering around and chatting with people I run into, so by all means feel free to invite me to things or just stop me and say hello.

Either way, for those of you going I hope you have a great con! And for those of you stuck at home, have a lovely weekend anyway!

I know 3d doesn't get a ton of love around here, but it's pretty much the only style of art i've managed to make decent headway on, and Blender has been my tool of choice along the way. The new version, 2.80, is looking pretty sweet, and has really made some big strides in the 2d workflow if the spooky third dimension is a bit too much for you to handle.

Now I just have to see if this embed code works...

Life updates are kinda boring so I’ll try to keep this quick:

✨ I’m moving to a new house at the end of the month so communication might be sporadic from time to time. There’s a lot of paperwork, setting things up, and the physical act of hauling all my crap around to deal with, but in the end it’ll be worth it.

✨ Just in case there’s any doubt, my characters are my babies and I’ll never let them go. If you ever see someone else trying to claim them then you can feel free to give them a earful. If you wish you could buy them you’ll just have to find some way to do without.

✨ You’re all precious beans. It fills me with joy every time an artist gushes about how happy they are to draw for me, and I love seeing that my commissions are well received in general. I know there’s been people in the furry world where everyone rolls their eyes in an expression of “not this guy again” or “why must this guy waste so many artists’ time” and I’ll always strive to not be that guy, and try to make sure that the art I buy is something everyone can enjoy as much as I do.

✨ Winter is coming and bringing those short days along with it so make sure to get as much natural sunlight as you can manage and don’t be afraid to supplement your vitamin D! Stay hydrated and sleep well!

Trying to snipe an auction is a one way ticket onto my shitlist. I don't honestly care about winning the auction, and I don't even care whether or not it was me being sniped. I care about treating other people, and especially the artists trying to make a living here, with respect. Sniping an auction sends a clear message of "I don't care about anyone else, or about anything but my own personal gain". It short changes the artist by trying to exclude other bidders from the bidding process, and is an overt slap in the face to everyone else involved. Whether or not the artist explicitly puts in rules to disallow it, you should always consider that kind of tactic to be off the table.

As I sit here in my hotel room on Monday morning, avoiding the chore of packing up, I have time to reflect on the weekend gone by.

To be honest I had been feeling a bit down on the con scene since FC, and in the week leading up to BLFC I had seriously been weighing the value of just staying home and playing Skyrim instead. But I still came. (phrasing!)

To say I'm glad I did would be an understatement. I feel fully revitalized after this con experience and ready to take on the world. More than anything I feel like this weekend has been a turning point in my furry life, where I finally feel like I'm emerging out of the shadows of 20 years of fandom obscurity and I'm finally able to make a positive, memorable impact in people's lives (or at least in their con experience).

Some highlights:

My panel went amazingly well. There was actually a decent turnout and I feel like people really got some value out of sitting through me nerding out for 3 hours about 3D printing.

Almost everyone loved my severed Nico head. I still don't get people asking for photos like they would for normal suits, but it still gets an amused reaction when I explain "I got it off a real fursuit".

On a whim I dropped in to watch the dance competition and I was really blown away. There is some top notch talent in this fandom, and no reason for qualifiers like "they're good, for furries". They're just plain good. The experience of watching them perform even helped inspire me to design a new character, and hopefully you'll be seeing the first signs of them in the coming months.

The opening ceremonies, musical and closing ceremonies were a blast, and I was really thrilled to take part in the charity bidding on the album and push it up into real money territory, even if I didn't walk away with it in the end. I've never before had multiple people come up to me afterwards and thank me for my bidding performance, so I guess I made quite an impression! (I really hope that FC steps things up a bit in this regard. A little bit of theatrics and stage presence would go a long way towards reinjecting that con with fun)

Some lowlights, because nothing is perfect:

Sales were apparently down in the den this year, and combined with CaliFur imploding it's left a lot of artists and vendors in a tough place. Now is the time to pick up the slack by buying commissions and merch online, so get to it!

Hearing that a young girl got bullied for wearing a cheap walmart tiger costume is just the pinnacle of disappointment, but I'm really glad that folks all across the con got together to make it up to her and give the story a happy ending.

As always, I didn't get to hug everyone I hoped to hug. There's only so many hours in the day and with people running back and forth between meals/parties/events/etc so it's to be expected, but is none the less tragic. If I didn't see you enough this con, then I'll make it up at the next one. If I saw you way too much and you really wished I'd just move on and bother someone else, for goodness sakes just shoo me away, don't be shy! "Hey I need a breather right now" won't hut my feelings.


I don't have any other cons on my menu until FC next year, so I'll see you fuzzy-butts then!

People aren't always easy to deal with in life. Especially on a site like this you can run into people that don't seem to live up to any sort of standard of decency and decorum. It can be frustrating, tempers can grow short, and reading through comments, submissions, journals etc can become a source of fatigue and misery.

But great strides can be made not by trying to change people, to "fix" them so that they conform to your personal standards of communication and interaction, but instead by taking a few steps on your own to make sure you're approaching the situation in the right frame of mind.


First and foremost, it's important to ground yourself in reality. Look around and ask yourself if the expectations you have for other people are well aligned with the expectations everyone else in that particular community has. Like if you're going to church on Sunday expecting an informed and reasoned discussion on the merits of BDSM in a genderqueer relationship then either you're setting yourself up for disappointment or alternately I'd like more information on what church you attend because it sounds like it's pretty legit.

Certainly if there's some aspects of a community that you find distasteful you can try chipping away at the edges and gently guiding people closer to your ideal, but you need to recognize that it's a slow, uphill battle, and budget your energy accordingly. Chances are that if your expectations are too divergent from the status quo, you're probably better off finding a community that's better aligned with your ideals, or it could be a sign that you might need to re-evaluate those ideals and figure out if they're even realistic in the first place.


Secondly, even if your ideals are aligned well with the community, you're still going to run into people who act and communicate in ways you find off-putting or distasteful. When dealing with these people (obviously excepting folks who are being deliberately rude) it's important to start by giving them a bit of credit. They've made the effort to reach out and communicate with you, and try to connect on some personal, human level. If you snap at them and try to browbeat them into conforming to your ideals of interaction and then immediately add them to your block list then the truth is that you're the one being a jerk, not them.

It's important in this sort of situation to be gentle and polite. They're an individual and a human being; they're not the 12 dozen people that came before them and made the same gaffe, and they're not some cancerous sub-human deserving only your spite and vitriol. When you correct them, picture in your own mind what you'd want to hear someone say to correct you on something: You'd probably want to hear that they appreciated the interest you showed in contacting them in the first place, and what you could have done better with in your interaction. Think positive, not negative. You're unlikely to do any good by snarking or shaming.

Sometimes, though, things are beyond hope, and it's at that point where you have to invite the other person to move on. Again, keep things positive. Saying something like "I think things aren't going well and you'd probably be better off interacting with someone else" is much easier to swallow than "I hate you and I never want you to contact me again", or just shouting them down and putting them on your block list.


The fact of the matter is that there are people on this site, in this community, however you want to slice things up, who have a terrible time of things: constantly dealing with toxic people saying offensive things. I'm not one of those people drowning in negativity, yet every day I see people leaving comments, posting journals, etc, saying things that could lead me down the path of seeing them as reprehensible sub-human filth. But because of the things I've outlined here, I don't, and that's why this community continues to be a friendly and inviting place for me, and all it takes is giving people a little credit, and treating them with dignity and respect.