I am clearly a bird.

JOKER CANONICALLY STOLE THE INVITE

The friendsim soundtrack is now available on bandcamp!

My dog is told “Would you like to wear your jewelry?” And becomes excited. He then chooses which necklace he’d like. He has a few and they all have to have tags on them. I discovered this because I bought him a second collar and he refused it with a sneeze that usually is his equivalent of “fuck you”. I asked him why he didn’t like it. He did a dance. I don’t know how I figured it out, but I remember putting the new collar on him and seeing him still beg for the older one and thinking “there’s got to be a reason”. It occurred to be that he might want a little jingle. So I took an old keychain bauble and put it on his collar and he was so happy I thought he’d leap outside. The whole walk, he pranced around like a prize pig. So I realized that the collar couldn’t be a collar. It had to be a necklace. And now he has a large selection for every season, each with a set of tags that have his name and some sort of jingle decoration.

Here we are at the finish line. Eighteen long volumes later, and you’re on the verge of befriending every last troll in the Troll Call. There’s a lot of sappy stuff and a lot of meta I could discuss but that’ll come later. Now? There’s trolls to meet.

It’s hardly going to be a surprise, but I’m pleased to present L–

Oh come on. Every fucking time with these clowns. You two, you’re supposed to be sharing. Baizli, get over there. Or, uh… Barzum? Which one are you again??? Whatever.

Okay, good. That’s much better. Now where’s Lanque? What did you two do to him. I swear, if you… Oh. He’s just fixing his makeup? Come on. LANQUE. YOU HAD LITERALLY SEVENTEEN VOLUMES TO GET IT RIGHT.

That’s much better. Are you going to do up that tie, young man? No? Okay. I’ll deal.

SO.

This eighteenth and final volume will take you on one final trip across Alternia. One location old, and another new.

You’ll get to join Lanque at a raging, utterly out of control teen party*.

*Degree to which party is raging and out of control may vary based on player choice

And you’ll get to meet the Soleils at…

Uh…

Well, good luck, folks!

Volume Eighteen is expected to launch about a few hours from now.

Content regulation algorithms tell me that sci-fi authors are overly generous in these depictions.

“Why did cop bot arrest that nice elderly woman?”

“It insists she’s the mafia.”

“It thinks she’s in the mafia?”

This is why a lot of people say AI are so dangerous. Not because they will one day wake up and be conscious and overthrow humanity, but that they (or at least this type of AI) are not and never will be conscious, and yet we’re relying on them to do things that require such human characteristics as logic and any sort of thought process whatsoever. Humans have a really bad tendency to anthropomorphize, and we’d like to think the AI is “making decisions” or “thinking,” but the truth is that what it’s doing is fundamentally different from either of those things. What we see as, say, a field of grass, a neural network may see as a bus stop. Not because there is actually a bus stop there, or that anything in the photo resembles a bus stop according to our understanding, but because the exact right pixels in the photo were shaded in the exact right way so that they just so happened to be statistically correlated with the arbitrary functions it created when it was repeatedly exposed to pictures of bus stops over and over. It doesn’t know what grass is, what a bus stop is, but it sure as hell will say with 99.999% certainty that one is in fact the other, for reasons you can’t understand, and will drive your automated bus off the road and into a ditch because of this undetectable statistical overlap. Because a few pixels were off in just the right way in just the right places and it got really, really confused for a second.

There, I even caught myself using the word “confused” to describe it. That’s not right, because “confused” is a human word. What’s happening with the AI is something we don’t have the language to describe.

Anyway what’s more, this sort of trickery can be mimicked. A human wouldn’t be able to figure it out, but another neural network can easily guess the statistical filters it uses to identify things and figure out how to alter images with some white noise in exactly the right way to make the algorithm think it’s actually something else. It’ll still look like the original image, just with some pixelated artifacts, but the algorithm will see it as something completely different. This is what’s known as a “single pixel attack.” I am fairly confident porn bot creators might end up cracking the content flagging algorithm and start putting up some weirdly pixelated porn anyway, and all of this will be in vain. All because Tumblr staff decided to rely on content moderation via slot machine.

SonicFox is incredible and VERY valid, but the only valid furry??

Girl, this year Midwest Furfest raised ~$93k for a charity that helps kids in lower income Chicago schools learn to read

In the last year furcons raised ~$612k for charities as a whole

We’ve been actively and triumphantly fighting a wave of neonazis, and taking them down

We provide safe spaces for trans and nb people to try out different genders without judgement.

We hold panels for queer/trans folk to teach them about makeup

We give folks with anxiety safe ways to be parts of large social gatherings

We focus on creation and support artistic endeavor across the spectrum. We enable countless artists to survive.

We’re fucking everywhere- were your lawyers, were your developers, were your firefighters.

Also we’re all PEOPLE who do good things. We’re fucking everywhere- and we’re all fucking valid. It’s wild to me that because y’all don’t understand us or who we are or what we do we’re invalid unless you see the work most of us are doing on an international award show pedestal.

SonicFox is incredibly good and important and valid- and the fandom loves him. Hes a VERY valid furry, but he’s not the ONLY valid furry.