"I do not want to live in a society where half the country simply uses whatever power is available to them to go after the other half. I do not believe the average Democrat voter believes that successfully engaging in good-faith debates on college campuses warrants death. But, and I am hardly alone here, I am increasingly concerned that there are forces on the left that cannot be debated, they must be made to feel pain until they stop. I pray that this can be done within the bounds of the law and the Constitution, not that the left has much cared about those restraints.

"If that seems like a bleak future for American politics, well, that’s because watching one of America’s most promising young leaders die in front of our eyes is pretty damn bleak. We survived a civil war, and I pray for everyone involved in American politics that understanding and forgiveness will once again be this country’s guiding lights. But I am also reminded that there are times when vengeance is necessary and just, and millions of Americans will not stand for Kirk’s death to be in vain."

https://thefederalist.com/2025/09/1.....t-must-change/

Posted without comment...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2.....itish-columbia

From a Facebook group dedicated to IBM mainframe computing...

"I will tell you a story about Gene Amdahl. One day I was in his office, he had a beautiful desk. But I noticed a big scratch in the top, and he noticed that I noticed. So he told me the story of it. As part of the marketing promotion of the 470 he was photographed with a tiger on his desk. It was a little sedated but still quite intimidating. After the photo shoot, the trainer got the tiger to get off the desk but scratched it as he jumped off. The trainer said he would sorry and that he would pay to have the desktop refinished. Gene said you’ll do no such thing, how many can say that they have a scratch in their desk from a real tiger."

Amdahl was one of the main designers of the IBM System/360, and later led a company that built computers compatible with IBM's, named for him.

 qwaychou is in need of some commissions. I really love the commission she did for me and my wife. Her style is really lovely, and she's incredibly easy to work with.

Head on over to her journal and check her out.

The common refrain is that "if you support this politician, you support all the evil things he supports".

No, that's not true at all. The problem is that our elections are usually binary choices: pick one or the other. That nearly always makes it a choice of the lesser evil. Choosing the lesser evil involves deciding which of hte positions you disagree with you can nonetheless set aside because of the other issues you agree with more.

So please, let's drop the whole "you support Candidate X, so you're as evil as he is!" business. Nobody's perfect, and demanding simon-pure doctrinal perfection will only make you unhappy and not accomplish what you set out to.

My lovely and smart wife  beta3491 and one of my favorite artists  otakuwolf both posted messages talking about a journal  tydrian wrote about being bullied enough to consider withdrawing from the fandom entirely.

In case my previous journal did not make it clear: If you think someone else does not belong in the fandom and are willing to attack them enough to drive them out, the problem is not them. It is you, and it is you who needs to leave.

Tydrian has my unqualified support, and that is entirely independent of anything he has been accused of doing.

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10140807/

He demands that I, and those who think like me, leave.

What gave him the right to decide who is welcome in the fandom? Who died and made him Emperor? Head Commissar? King? President? Prime Minister? Lord High Grand Poobah?

No, I'm not leaving. I'm also going to keep politics and personalities separate. Unlike him, I know there are good people on both sides of the political canyon, and I am happy that some of them call me friend. I hope the same goes on the other side.

So no, I'm not leaving. Up yours, Kamerad Zampolit.

(copied from my DeviantArt)

It's a common trope in BDSM fiction, especially latex, for someone locked inside a suit to have a cock gag flexible and long enough to slip down into the throat a ways. It's often part of a hood, and locked on so the wearer cannot do anything but put up with it.

For example, take a look at joahtheo's hood with gag and nose tubes, at https://www.deviantart.com/joahtheo.....sk-2-853520681 .
That gag will slide well into the throat, past the larynx. A later image in the series shows the slave sealed into the suit with that outer end of the gag flush with his lips (and the tubes in his nose; those, at least, should be tolerable). There is no apparent sign of discomfort, though we do not have any information on what the slave is actually feeling or how long he's had it in place.

My question is: How realistic is it to portray a slave with one of those in place, long term? By "long term", I mean any period longer than it takes for the slave to basically not have his entire attention filled with the feeling of the gag; I expect that to take several hours, maybe a day or two (but I'm prepared to be corrected on that). Let's set aside any breathing issues having to do with clearance around the gag between the larynx and the upper airway. Can the slave learn to adjust to having his throat filled like that for the long term? I would assume that for the first while after the gag is emplaced, the slave would be fighting to get it out and extremely uncomfortable at best. How long would it take for him to get past that and accept it, and to become comfortable with having it there? The former would take substantially less time than the latter.

There's also the minor matter of whether the gag would damage the throat, larynx, esophagus, or epiglottis, either on insertion or with long-term presence. I do know that tubes with inflatable balloons in the esophagus need to have the balloon carefully inflated with minimum pressure if they are to be left in place for any great length of time.

Thoughts?

The price of graphics tablets with built-in screens has dropped drastically. Last time I looked, they were going for $600 or so. Well, last Saturday I pulled out my Huion H610 Pro to do a little work that I couldn't do by dragging a finger around my Magic Trackpad 2, and it wouldn't work. Grrr. I finally decided my time was more valuable than to tinker with a tablet that was a few years old and for which I've been getting complaints out of macOS for the past couple of releases.

So I went looking on Amazon...and found that tablets with screens were now down in the $200-300 range. I wound up getting a Huion Kamvas 12 (2020 version) with a 12-inch 1920x1080 screen, and the ability to connect with my Mac Mini with a single USB-C cable (that I had to get from them because special or something; it was part of a bundle, so I didn't complain).

Got it in today. Plugged right in, came right up, became a second display on the Mini. I just now did some playing around with Sprite Illuminator to do some normal map work for Second Life, and wow! Drawing with a pen is one hell of a lot easier when you are drawing right on the graphics display instead of looking at something besides where your pen is.

And all for under $250 with tax and shipping. This is one great purchase. My only complaint is that the special cable is too short; it barely reaches my desk from where I keep the Mini under it. I'll probably try other high-quality USB-C cables to see if any of them work.

Looking for a good Latin translation of my motto:

Be careful what you wish for. You may get it.

The first seems to be common, and translates as "Cave quid vis." The second seems to be all over the map. Suggestions?

Why do people have to make assumptions about others based on their politics that fly directly in the face of years of experience with that person?

I've recently had a long, caring, deep relation ship with someone go down the tubes because they found out about my politics and leapt to conclusions based on that. They demand that I be simon-pure on the leftist doctrine of the day, and agree with them on every issue of importance to the social justice left, or else they don't think they can associate with me any more.

My political beliefs are as much a part of me as anything else. I've arrived at them through years of consideration and observation of what happens in the real world. Further, no two people are going to agree on everything. To expect that they will is to reduce them to a caricature and ignore their lived experience.

I am who and what I am. That includes my politics. If you want me, you get all of me.

Used to be that people could separate the person from their politics. That people can't do that any more is a major cause of the polarization, and impending destruction, of our civil society. I don't know how to get people to return to that norm. Me, I never left it.

I commissioned a piece of high-end art a few years ago. It's never been delivered, even though I paid in advance, and the artist seems to have disappeared. I've given up waiting on it, so I'm looking again.

Three characters, with background, and really high-quality work. The original commission was $175, and I'm willing to go to $200 this time for truly good work.

Edit: I've awarded the commission. Thank you all for suggestions and offers.

Edit 2: And it's done.  musuko42's work can be seen here.

Many of you know Mitch Marmel. Well, between disability, not getting his disability benefits yet, and expenses, he's in dire financial straits. He's set up a GoFundMe to help out.

Edit: Thanks to everyone who helped! Mitch got past the crisis and has shut down the GoFundMe.

A friendly political discussion broke out among the folks I was with on Second Life this evening. Nobody got mad, nobody threw anything, nobody left in a huff, nobody rage quit the group.

But it still left me sad, because I spent the whole time worrying that some would.

A couple of weeks ago, I lost someone I considered a good friend over the recent election. I've backed out of a group he runs because of it; if my presence makes him that uncomfortable in his own group, then for the good of that group, I'll back out. I'm not out to ruin anyone's good time.

By the same token, I believe I had good and sufficient reason for voting as I did, and I resent being told I was just casting a vote to disrupt, or because I'm any one of several epithets one side loves to throw around.

But I'll go on biting my tongue and not defending my choice. Friendships are too hard to come by, and always have been, for me. I can't just casually throw them away. Especially not in a group I'm working very, very hard to build as a refuge from all that.

So no, no more. Not here, not in SL, not anywhere furs gather.

 farorenightclaw has done it again. To go with her submissive's guide to dominants, she now has added a dominant's guide to submissives. Definitely worth a read.

Tonight, our long national nightmare will end, as the campaign is finally over.

Tomorrow, a new one will begin, no matter who wins.

Still, you need to go vote...because at least you get to help choose your nightmare, and if you don't and the worse one for you gets chosen, you'll never forgive yourself.

I've posted the uniforms I made for Hospes Lategum on here recently. There's far more to it, though. It's a RP environment on Second Life, with some real world building behind it.

We're now open for new members to come and play with us. You can read about it on my blog, and find out about the world we've built on the Hospes Lategum wiki.

New York Magazine has a story on how furries are about the only folks willing to pay indie artists what their work is actually worth.

Here's one for fans of the Mercedes 107-chassis roadsters...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9m.....arenMorrisVEVO

You know, I think she gets it.

Edit: I tried getting the damned thing to embed, but it's refusing to...

I gave myself a couple of birthday presents. The one of interest is a Huion H610Pro graphics tablet, which I got from Amazon for under $80. It's a nice big tablet with high resolution and a nice-feeling pressure sensitive pen. I'd bought Clip Studio Pro a while back at a steep discount.

So now I'm all set. I find myself confronting the same problem as beginning programmers, though: what should I do to work my way into it? I know what I want to draw, eventually: furry fetish porn. There's a long way between the drawing equivalent of printf("Hello world!"); and the kind of images I have in mind.

How do I get there from here? I know, practice a lot. But practice at what? What approach should I use so that I'm working to progress, and not spending lots of time learning things I'l have to unlearn later?

Lately, I've been hanging out in one sim in Second Life that has a rich history and environment designed and intended for roleplaying. It's been fun, for the most part, but one aspect of it drives me koo-koo: the folks there tend to be para-RPers.

By that, I mean that they prefer to write long posts, richly detailed, showing every aspect of their character and their surroundings. It's long enough that it almost always takes more than a few lines in SL's chat window to show them, and sometimes more than one screen in that window. It's clear they put a lot of effort into creating just the description they see in their mind.

The problem with that is that it makes the RP d-r-a-a-a-a-a-g on. Very few people type quickly enough that such a long post comes out in a minute or so. Instead, I'm left to twiddle my thumbs, go get a drink, start dinner, start laundry, go get a tub of ice cream at the store, change the oil in my car... well, you get the idea. A scene can take a few hours just to have a simple bit of action.

A related problem is that, by specifying so much, the tendency is to describe several actions in a row, and that makes it harder to respond to each action in the RP. Instead, I wind up having to think well ahead and judge my partner's possible reactions - and, unless I'm careful not to, limit them as well by anticipating and reacting to them.

I greatly prefer to RP in short pieces, describing one action, or one reaction, one emotion, one expression, one sentence or thought, or the like at a time. Not only does that keep the action moving, but it also makes for a more fluid scene that can turn in unexpected places and unexpected ways.

I don't understand the attraction of para-RP, or where it came from. I've been RPing online for 25 years or so, and it's never been the norm in places I've been. What's the deal?

Yeah, yeah, i know. Until this afternoon, I was using crappy passwords too.

What's a crappy password?
It's a password that's way too easy to guess. Or a password that's way too easy to brute-force dictionary search. Or a password that has very little randomness in it. Or a password that's your one standard password that you use across every site you can think of because after using it for 10 years, you can type it in in 0.83 seconds while passed out blind drunk.

Password crackers have gotten too good, and password breaches too common, to get away with using crappy passwords. The recent FA attack has put out a great big treasure trove of passwords for folks to get cracked with.

I've come to the conclusion that the only real answer is a password manager. It's a program that lets you record your passwords and enter them automatically so you don't have to remember that this site has a password of uo1bh5@&gg1 this week. It'll even let you generate a strong password, stronger than you can do yourself. It'll sync your passwords across devices and operating systems.

Yeah, the good ones cost money. It's worth it to harden yourself against the consequences of crappy passwords.

 farorenightclaw has written the best explanation of what a sub should look for in a dom[me] I've ever seen. Check it out.

Via  bondedlevity, an open letter to Rainfurrest attendees.

Good grief. What kind of idiots are we dealing with here?

And it's not just Rainfurrest. MFF has had its share of problems. While I hadn't planned on returning to MFF any time soon, the repeated false fire alarms (and my fursuit is not hot, unlike the usual kind, so standing around outside in November in Chicago in it is a largely hopeless exercise in staying warm) and the hazmat incident of a couple of years ago would have me thinking twice and more about going back.

Frankly, I'm surprised that the Hilton is honoring Rainfurrest's 2016 contract. They would have a defensible position if they were to say "You're done. Don't like it? Sue us." They would have a non-zero chance of winning in court, even if the con could afford to pursue a lawsuit. That kind of concentrated vandalism is something no hotel should have to put up with.

Folks, if you know of someone who's pulling this kind of bullshit, don't be complicit in their destruction. Tell someone. This has to stop.

A: Age
55

B: Biggest fear
Living in a state of greatly diminished mental capacity.

C: Cold or warm weather?
Warm! I get cold below 70 F.

D: Drink you last had
Diet Coke with Lime. I go through a 6-pack a day or so.

E: Extraterrestrials: do they exist?
It seems highly unlikely to me they don't. But Calvin has a point: that they don't interact with us is proof of their intelligence. (I'm only half joking.)

F: First thing you did when you woke up
Checked email and Google+.

G: Ghosts: are they real?
No.

H: How tall are you?
175cm

I: In love with someone?
Yes.

J: Jealous of someone?
Yes. (And you mean envious, as  amelie points out.) I envy people who can afford to retire and do what they want to.

K: Killed anyone?
Hell no. I spent a lot of time working to save lives, one at a time.

L: Last time you ever cried
A couple of weekends ago, when it seemed one whole fandom hated my guts.

M: Music genre you dislike the most
High Music, the current "classical" stuff. Like all High Art, it's impossible to partake of and enjoy, at least for me.

N: Newest acquisition
A power switch with a Web interface so I can remotely reset my crashy Mac Pro.

O: One wish
A cash lottery prize large enough that I'd never have to work again.

P: Pie flavor, which is your favorite?
Key lime.

Q: Question you often ask
What does it do when you try it? (in reply to "My computer won't do X.")

R: Reason to smile
Driving down a country road in my 380SL, top down on a sunny day, stereo blasting.

S: Song you like the most
Too many choices! Nearly anything by ZZ Top will do.

T: Time you woke up
6 AM.

U: Underwear color
Just about any color but pink.

V: Videogame you like the most
I don't do videogames. Never have. I've never been good at them. And no, Second Life is NOT a game.

W: Worst habits
Meh...

X: X-rays taken
You name it, it's been X-rayed.

Y: Your favorite food
Tex-Mex. Give me three cheese enchiladas with chili and onions on top, and rice and beans, and I'm in heaven. Ubiquitous in Texas, damned hard to find in Minnesota.

Z: Zodiac sign
Leo. (Well, it's close, anyway.)