The problem with those comics is that they left me wondering "but can rats and mice be interfertile?" which is probably not what the creator was getting at.
Part of the second comic has the two treating a squirrel as if he'd 'perfect' donor, until the problem comes up that he's survived testicular cancer, not that he's from a different suborder. There's furry conventions where interspecies relationships are treated as their own type of birth control, but they don't really mesh with the 'return to small town' vibe here, so you're just not supposed to think about it much.
how many kids? how many does she want? does she have kids with each new partner? how many kids can they support, we're talking mice and rats here who have litters...
It's kinda cute. I think the theme is supposed to be more 'crushed on a girl, her baby-daddy/boyfriend is a jerk, and woo she's into me', which... uh, is not an unusual fantasy, nor is its distaff counterpart.
(Also also, who the hell wants to be a rat? But I guess these are lab rats, not ordinary dump, harbour, and other wild spaces, rats).
Rodents in general are a surprisingly common furry species, if not up there with the stereotypical dogs, cats, and dragons. FFIX's Freya (tbf, a white rat species) had a big impact on people. I'd say anthrofying them gets away from some of the real-world equivalent's grosser behaviors, but there's also a Skaven-specific fandom, so maybe it just doesn't matter.
Tradeoff is that the gym membership model is a lot more reliable for cashflow; if you court whales, even a small economic downturn can have buyers you've put a ton of time and effort into become much more wallet-aware.
Of course, both.jpg is an option, too. FFXIV is one of the 'healthier' options down that path, but there's definitely people who forget about their subscription for months or only do the story on one hand, and those who want every single unlock including the paid ones on the other. Probably a decent number of players who've gone from one category to the other and back again!
In the furry world, the meta seems to have fallen this way, such that old or gratis (especially free-to-view comics) work is advertising, patreon or subscribestar funding acts as a base income stream, and personalized commissions or your-characters-here handle sudden expenses and otherwise act as an adjustable way to turn time into funding. But the incentives and forces in the furry fandom are pretty different from OF.
FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity
I'm curious how you'd distinguish this from desire-to-be-masculine. I think both components are present, but to provide a pretty straightforward (hur hur) example, this and this comic (cw: furry, NSFW, FtM/F) says a lot of things about how the ftm character reacts to someone he's penetrating touching there... and also is more gynophilic in his partners than I am, and a longer-running thread revolves around wanting to be a dad, and not just (or even primarily) in the breeding kink sense.
Now, tbf, I haven't stalked the writer's twitter/bluesky enough to be sure they're specifically transmale... but a lot of transmale people in tumblr space found it pretty resonant. And it's not exactly an uncommon framework: most of the other good examples just look like M/M or M/F, are really gay, and/or just a lot kinkier than bedupolker's, but I can provide links if requested. Not always or even often a plausible one in every way -- very few transguys are going to get six-foot-three with a Christian-Bale-as-Batman voice -- but if we're talking about what people want or are attracted toward or fantasize about, it's kinda relevant that you can just look at people's fantasies, these days, and find at least existence proofs.
I'm not sure I'm calling for it now: the above post is a steelman, and one with a number of caveats, qualifications, and carveouts.
There are valid counterarguments, like what extent smaller competitors licensing ARM chips might be able to pull an underdog reversal in a big hurry, or how much a lot of central infrastructure needs modern processing power rather than just having grown like a goldfish to fill it, or whether a failing IBM might fracture such that its foundry side survived rather than got pulled down with the rest. There are some less credible but at least plausible ones: maybe China's Not That Bad after all, or going to collapse under its own inertia before any of this could be relevant, or military/economic considerations are a lot less important than social ones.
But these aren't new considerations, either; they're the sort of thing people were bringing up in response to the CHIPS Act itself, too. It's long been a point of controversy in even libertarian circles what tradeoffs exist between private and public management of matters like disaster response, military readiness, telecommunications, and core public welfare. I'd like if there were simple, easy, Big Head Press-style answers, but if they exist they're not self-demonstrating.
Fair; it's definitely not that they were trying to be the next desktop infrastructure, and it's not like what they're doing instead is easy. It makes sense for them to focus where they've focused. If I ever have the free time, I'd love to get some experience working with the IMX8 stuff as an embedded linux tool.
But even compared to where Freescale was in 2002 versus the market segment NXP is aiming for in 2025, the difference seems bigger. Some of that's just the top of the market has gotten much higher -- Razr mattered, but it mattered pre-smartphone; some of the network equipment goes in a similar boat -- but it's something that separates the business from being meaningful competition for most of Intel's most important stuff.
And NXP is definitely not even close to a tier-one fab these days; I think they've capped out in the >50nm range. Thanks for the catch, not sure why I thought they still had a telecom branch.
... there's not really any good 'if you squints' left, then. TI have got the process tech to leave 'guy in shed' fully in the dust, but their ARM stuff is more at the embedded systems level from my understanding, in addition to the TI tax. BAE is heavily focused on defense sector, unsurprisingly, which good for them but not helpful for the rest of us. Tower, I guess? I dunno much about their production outputs beyond some cmos stuff.
This is the first I've heard of a significant military interest in Arc. Could you unpack that?
Uh... technically it's Intel's Flex for the server side, and this is extrapolation rather than anything I know first-hand so it's probably wrong, but :
At the higher confidence level, these boards can run inference comparable to mid-tier nVidia cards, and could potentially be made in Arizona, rather than in TMSC. That's not going to get you massive AGI from LLMs, if such a thing is possible, but there's a lot of video and image data, signals analysis, and more esoteric stuff (HMDs!) that needs realtime or near realtime processing. Yes, most applications would prefer a Jetson over either a normal nVidia card or an Intel one, but since even the Thor-sized Jetsons can't keep up with realtime efforts, they get to compromise. The nVidia boards aren't currently irreplaceable, but military procurement does consider whether there are alternative sources, and Intel is the only even potential alternative.
The... more speculative bit is that Intel's got a number of design opportunities that they were starting to build around. Optimizing data transfer from network card to CPU to GPU is a boring and unsexy thing, but it's actually a big deal for extremely realtime behaviors like streaming video operations, and something where nVidia's offerings (an ARM 'superchip' call Grace) were far behind the competitors... before Intel killed their better solution. There's also some weird messiness with nVidia's solutions for licensing and for chip-to-chip interconnects that are navigable for datacenters for a nightmare for US military procurement.
This isn't readily available to consumers (or even prosumers) yet, because the vast majority of extent AI/ML workloads don't work in Intel ARC environments to start with; those that do seldom even get the full benefit from the GPU's hardware, and even fewer get any serious benefit from GPU/CPU integration. But it's at least a space that would be interesting if Intel could get its core crap together.
This is tantamount to giving up its foundries, and I'm surprised not to have seen more analysis. I wonder if he thinks that that portion of the business is totally unsustainable in the long run, or if he's just playing chicken with the U.S. government hoping for more money.
Officially, they're just doubling down on the 1.4nm stuff. But I don't think I'm the only person reading it that way. For motive, it's hard to tell. He could even be playing chicken with buyers, trying to pressure them to step up early rather than wait until after engineering samples have already gotten off the floor. But I'm not optimistic given the amount and variety of other cuts.
They're not nVidia (and not even Intel's own foundry, lol), but the ARC models are encouraging. A bit better for inference in raw specs than an nVidia 4060, mostly hampered by poor software support that's quickly improving, and that the chips themselves are just coming from whatever spare time is available on a mostly-saturated TSMC line.
If Intel can get the software support figured out, and get their own foundry up and running, they'll have a pretty major impact on the market. But while the former isn't a huge leap of faith, the latter has got a lot of question marks on whether they're even going to try for it.
EDIT: While less central, there are some industry components to the CPU side that matter a bit, with AMX doing well enough that AMD felt they had to kinda smear it, and I think there's some KV cache stuff they're ahead on Intel around. Less important for training and especially the 500B+ parameter space that modern LLMs have moved into, but there's a lot of strategically relevant spaces well below that range.
Just no one has even tried to explain how exactly government buying up and owning private enterprise is a smart idea (something that we've been saying isn't good for decades) and why it's a solid goal towards improving the nation's economy and wealth.
... to steelman the counter-Lincicome argument:
High-grade semiconductors have massive military and economic importance. There are a variety of things that either can't be done, or can only be done on glacial timescales, just going from <10nm to 100nm process scales, due to thermal, electrical, and latency issues. Losing the ability to produce or source those processors would put a country literally twenty years back; having them sourced to a supply chain that's opposed to that nation risks serious security and core functionality threats. AI is the current-day focus, but these tools are necessary for everything from telecommunications to hardware control to transportation in their 'conventional' programmed form.
((It's actually worse than it sounds, because in a lot of military and industry roles you can't just switch out a scavenged motherboard and CPU and call it good enough. In extreme cases, you end up with very specific chips not just to manufacturer or generation but even specific chips. On the upside, the smarter businesses buy in bulk. On the downside, there's a lot of buyers that aren't smarter, or things in-development that can't be undone.))
Lincicome discusses government support for Intel as stiffling third-party competitors, but this is a class that basically doesn't exist, here. AMD and RISC-V and everyone else even remotely in the field either depend on Intel or Taiwan, or on Chinese manufacturers. There are no other <10nm foundries in the United States or even Western Europe, and the closest companies as a process level (STM, Micron, maybe Motorola if you squint EDIT: definitely not, thanks Skooma) are neither capable of nor interested in micro_processor_ work at the desktop scale. Any attempts, even attempts using third-party foundries oversees, have ended poorly, as anyone who recognizes the name VIA might recognize. Any model for how those systems could respond to a complete collapse of Intel is necessarily guesswork, but I've seen credible estimates of 10+ year timelines to bring even mid-end devices assuming everything works out perfectly the first go.
Meanwhile, the competition is not exactly operating from a free market. TSMC is the closest, and it's a national project for Taiwan, unsurprisingly with how much of its economy revolves around the business, and one part of that is Taiwan gave the company a giant pile of seed cash in exchange for just-shy-of-half of its ownership, and other parts involve widespread continuing indirect subsidies on its major material costs. The Chinese government doesn't exactly give out the most honest breakdowns for how its subsidizes foundries, but even ignoring the !!fun!! question of industrial espionage with CCP characteristics, the official numbers are significant and come with very pre-2018-Jack-Ma-sized strings.
Which could be surmountable. Intel, as recently as 2015, was still on top of the world, to a point where people were worried AMD would go under.
But it's gone from merely slightly behind-the-curve in 2019 to consistently the less-good choice across entire fields, often by significant margins and with no or negative price premium, along with a number of serious stability and reliability concerns due to manufacturing defects. And that's worse than it sounds. Chips and foundry technologies are costly not just to produce, but also to fail to sell, both due to how the sales model works and due to rapid depreciation. To skip over a whole bunch of technical details, they're in a cash crunch at the same time that they need a lot of investment to not be in more of a cash crunch unless they want to turn into a second- or even third-rate foundry.
((There's also some messiness involving Intel ARC, which is both strategically very important to the Western world's military, not obvious, and which has an entertainment business case that it's only barely starting to credibly begin to compete with kinda, but is a short investment away from being a really big deal.))
Which might just be the only achievable result, if we trusted Intel to be doing (or trying) the best thing. But there's a lot of reasons to be skeptical. The current CEO and board have been abandoning new development processes since December of last year. Critics have focused on said CEO's ties to the CCP, and to be fair those do exist! But even if Intel was making these decisions from a solely economic basis, they're overwhelmingly emphasizing matters to maintain stock price over either the availability of next-gen onshore foundries or the company's long-term dominance or relevance as a first-tier manufacturer. The actions here are ways to credibly commit both the US government to continued (or starting) the funding it claimed it would provide, and Intel to actually running the things.
It's not that the conventional criticisms of crony capitalism stopped existing! There are significant risks to this sort of investment and (tbf, minimal) control. But there are tradeoffs and risks to non-action, and Lincicome seems neither willing nor able to even consider them.
Yes. Some of that’s specific to (coastal) ranching, which has its own issues separate from human medicine, but point of care ultrasound has its pressures from a relatively remunerative group of technicians who do have a few genuine points about potential sources of error and also have serious financial incentives.
The epic quest for the rarest commodity in the game: a bee hive.
ffffff-
Plaintiffs are unlikely to succeed on the merits. Connecticut’s restrictions on AR-15s, .300 Blackout-chambered “other” firearms (in Plaintiffs’ intended configuration), and large capacity magazines are one more chapter in the historical tradition of limiting the ability to “keep and carry” dangerous and unusual weapons. The challenged statutes are “relevantly similar,” to historical antecedents that imposed targeted restrictions on unusually dangerous weapons of an offensive character—dirk and Bowie knives, as well as machine guns and submachine guns—after they were used by a single perpetrator to kill multiple people at one time or to inflict terror in communities.
Unanimously, the 2nd Circuit has now redefined "dangerous and unusual" to mean "unusually dangerous". I don't see many ways to resolve this which don't leave the Second Amendment a dead letter, or at best allow a gun in a circumstance. The logic? To repeat myself: (because fuck you, that's why)
Association of N. J. Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Platkin updates
In theory, recent changes to the 3rd Circuit's makeup could result in this case having a pro-gun and perhaps even fast decision. The case had no chance at the appeals level (two judges, Schwartz and Freeman, have already signed onto pretty bad anti-gun rulings), so this could even simplify matters.
In practice, I'm not that optimistic. The whole circuit has only a slight R-D lean, and it has enough squishy Rs on a complex enough topic that it'd be a hard situation to run on, and unlike Range has no easy way to limit to the borders of this case or the limits of the popular.
On the other hand, I guess it could be worse. It could be Koons. Except then there's a question why the en banc Koons, too.
Girl Genius was well-enough regarded in the Hugo set that they had to actively refuse nominations into the start of the Sad Puppies era, and they're still pretty well-regarded among the tumblr set, modulo a few (not wrong!) complaints about the comic's pacing. I'd like to say they've been grandfathered in, but I'd said the same for Lackey and was proven wrong, so I'll guess it's more that even if they're not faster than the bears, they're at least faster than the other guys.
((Fair on the het bit; especially given the fandom, it is unusual that the closest thing to an in-universe mention of a gay pairing in Girl Genius has been joking references to Othar/Gil. There was one M/M bit in one of the old XXXenophile, but it was actively less erotic than one where a guy's brain had been transplanted into a dog. Given conventions of the convention circuits of the 1990s (where there was a much stricter wall between gay and straight than today) and the amount of F/F the series had, I was never sure whether this was just down to the Foglio's audience, but it probably does point to Kaja not being a fujoshi.))
I haven't had time to play the newer release, but I'll second this from the 1.18 update.
The part I found most addictive is how there's always one next small task to run, usually 'just' a five or ten minute task, and they're almost all pretty engaging. Absolutely will eat several in-game days of 'and I just need to finish this - oh and -'.
Warrior Apprentice does start slow, but it gets a lot better when Miles get into Dendarii mode. If you got turned off in the first couple chapters, try skipping to chapter five and start from there. On the other hand, if you were still getting bored by the pathos in chapter ten, you're probably better off skipping the book. The main character's a bit bipolar, so Warrior's Apprentice isn't the last time he'll go into a pointed funk, but it's usually paced a lot better. If that's issue, some options:
Cetaganda works without having much knowledge of the setting. I think it leans a little to heavily on the 'throw a grenade in when stuck' approach to plot pacing, but it's got a reasonably good grabber and at worst that pacing errs toward the rushed, so it's a good middle-of-the-pack read. Murder-and-politics mystery in a scifi setting that pushes real heavy on what transhumanism might actually look like rather than Star Trek-style goofiness, though the expectations are a bit dated today.
The Vor Game is much stronger work and a lot faster to the point -- which is good, because it sets up a lot more small plot points for the rest of the series, often in pretty subtle ways -- but it is still very much The Sequel To Warrior's Apprentice. It'll tell you most of what you need to know about big plot, but there are especially some character bits that won't hit as hard without having seen the characters in action before. Great villains, witty heroes, and Miles at his most second-most saving-the-day-by-the-seat-of-the-pants, and necessary reading for the great Memory and Komarr (and, indirectly A Civil Campaign). There's a particular quote about unsolvable problems that'll stick with you.
Barrayar is probably easier as a starting point, and a much faster-paced work with clearer stakes (and a more specific timeline) for the protagonists, along with being set chronologically earlier. It gives a lot more complete an understanding of how fucked up the titular planet is, rather than leaving you wondering if it's Just These Assholes, and the motivation for all the characters is generally resonant even where a reader might know what the actual conclusion to the character's arc is going to be. Downside is that Miles is literally prenatal, and while Cordelia is a good main character, she's drastically different in tone. Also, like Pratchett's Night Watch there's a lot of subtle references to chronologically later works that you don't need to know, but will still miss out on. (Shards of Honor is chronologically even earlier and is readable, but it's the most Star Trek-fan-story of them all, so I wouldn't recommend it as a first read in the series.)
Borders of Infinity is a short story, and does show up enough in the rest of the stories to be worth reading in timeline order, but also they're representative of the highs and lows of the series. Would read before Komarr regardless, but it's a good intro to the pre-Memory Miles character and works with fairly little knowledge of the setting. There's a few stories in the series that are better, but if you don't like this one you're probably going to find getting to the best ones not worth it.
You've got a strong skill for explanations available to outsiders, so I've got a pretty decent number in that category. Here you also go into both the appeal of the genre and a lot of its weaknesses, and how they could be much stronger if writers engaged with them more critically, in ways that even a lot of strong fans of the genre (and even some Digimon fans!) tend to overlook.
Aw, I liked Tremaire (although I didn't even think of the author's gender until now). Not a fan of how hard it leaned into the telecom tropes, or an issue the writing quality/plot pacing?
There's a pretty decent number of women authors who just write male-focused or general fiction, especially for teen and young adult audiences. See Diane Duane (the first three Young Wizards and then Book of Night With Moon are highlights) or (and 6/6 of Erin Hunter) for better-known examples. It's probably more interesting to talk about women writing female-oriented-relationship-stuff in ways guys wouldn't be repulsed by. For that... :
- Diana Wynne Jones is best-known these days for Howl's Moving Castle, but I like to recommend her Dark Lord of Derkholm and Year of the Griffin as good examples of stories that have a plot, but are about relationships. In Derkholm (tl;dr: fantasy send-up of portal fantasy from the view of the world's natives who are treated as a tourist spot, as a commentary on industrialized evil and pointy-haired bosses), between the main character and his wife and family, and with his immediate peers; in Year of the Griffin (tl;dr wizard school story with the interesting twist that the main characters don't struggle to fit in) between the protagonists and a society that they don't know if they can trust.
- CJ Cherryh's more standard scifi fare, and she's no Zahn, but she's a pretty good writer, and especially Chanur is driven by relationships far more than tactics or technobabble, but still hits that Pernish 'there's an actual plot, it's just not faffing and then suddenly everybody's friends/lovers'.
- Bujold should go without saying, but the Vorkorsigan saga is very much about phrasing women-relationship-things into forms men and especially young men are trying to grow into: honor, loyalty, trustworthiness, and legitimate use of force. I'll recognize that Gentleman Jole isn't very good, but Komarr, Memory, Cetaganda, just very strong each.
- Mercedes Lackey... is mixed. Valdemar is Very female, even by the standards of Telecoms (if you liked that bit of Pern) or Romantic Fantasy; the Elemental Masters series (and not-quite-part-of-it Fire Rose) are extremely well revised takes on classical fairie tales in ways that are more enjoyable reads than technically impressive. But she's pretty much a distillation of what guys say they don't like, without the obnoxious parts that they don't like about it.
- Tamora Piece is more male-friendly and often technically better, but in turn it's less clearly women's-relationship-writing in most works, if still less could-pass-as-male as Duane.
((That said, I'm one of probably thirty people on the planet who liked Darkship Thieves, so my taste is... not very refined.))
EDIT: for a 'do they follow the Hero's Journey' rule, I'd say most of them fit pretty well. No on Fire Rose and there's a couple of the Vorkorsigan books that break from it, though they've still got the 'failed-to-do-thing, developed-skills, do-the-thing' bit. Year of The Griffin's Abyss is pretty shallow -- it's a ultimately a comedy -- but the points are there and somewhat refreshing for not just slapping the Harry Potter-style stuff in. Book of Night With Moon's Abyss is both deep and realistic enough (
Fair, was speaking more to the extent that they're basically rat-monkeys.
Sounds a bit like Bujingai or Asura's Wrath? Sounds like worth looking into.
I'd argue vanilla WoW is pretty unserious (and willing to throw random stuff that wasn't there historically, from goblins to kobolds). But to answer the question:
Fauns and satyrs, harpies and sirens, sphinx. The dog-headed ones were kinda universal myths in the Old World, but they existed long enough ago in European mythology that Augustine debated their historical existence. If you throw in shapeshifters, kelpies and selkies. If you include mere behavioral anthropomorphism, Reynard the Fox (and his whole company) and Puss-in-Boots, arguably Br'ers Rabbit Fox and Bear (1880s) -- which makes the 20th Century Disney variant more of a conversation with folk legends than you'd expect from first glance.
Some of these have Warcraft equivalents, but very few are furry bait even where they're fan bait (eg, there's a lot more Draenai fandom than burning-legion-proper-as-a-whole fandom).
They… kinda have both. Although, while pretty far from the weirdest junk out there(you don’t want to know how ducks work), still pretty far from mammal anatomy.
Traditionally, redistricted has been restricted to the years immediately after a census, with outliers being driven by judicial command (or the results of recent judicial command, like the 2005 Georgia redistricting being driven by Cox v. Larios). In this case, the charitable motivation is downstream of the serious errors by the 2020 Census; the less charitable explanation is just politics.
Whether this difference matters or is anything but an ex post rationalization is left as an exercise for the reader; as long as it's a compelling and coherent rationalization the difference is pretty academic.
I think only Friedman found a case-wide failure to carry the burden of proof; the rest of the judges mostly focus on the burden of proof for disgorgement aka the high fines.
In New York, as in most other jurisdictions, appeals courts can only overturn an action from a lower court with a full majority of the appeals court judges. Here, there's a majority (5/5) on the fines and sanctions, and division on everything else, and it's not even clear that Higgitt and Rosado want a retrial here so much as think it would be appropriate in a non-Trump case.
Beyond that, there's also just a lot of issues with this specific case getting a retrial -- Higgitt/Rosado might have settled for a dissental because they couldn't get a third signing onto a retrial, but they might have not really wanted a retrial in this case and only argued it for others in the future. Everyone else gives a different reason why they don't want a retrial. From the Moulton/Renwick:
Returning this action to Supreme Court for a new trial as urged by Justice Higgitt is both unnecessary and likely terminal. It is difficult to imagine that a trial could proceed while one of the principal defendants, and a central witness, is President of the United States. The inevitable elapse of time and the attendant difficulties in recreating a vast record of testimony and documents — an exercise that is both Sisyphean and unneeded, because an extensive trial record already exists — would likely consign this meritorious case to oblivion.
From Friedman:
First, I do not believe that we can ignore the fact that ordering a new trial of a case in which the primary defendant and witness is the sitting president of the United States (and will remain so for approximately another 3½ years) would disrupt the political life of the United States and would undermine its national interest, particularly at a time of high global tension, with ongoing conflicts in Europe and the Middle East.[FN3] Second, while it is obvious from the divergence of opinions among the justices of this panel that this case calls out for further appellate review, an order by this Court directing a retrial is not immediately appealable to the Court of Appeals unless the appellant stipulates to be bound by the prior judgment in the event his further appeal is unsuccessful (CPLR 5601[c], 5602[b][1]; see Trezza v Metropolitan Transp. Auth., 23 NY3d 1011, 1011 [2014]; Maynard v Greenberg, 82 NY2d 913, 914-915 [1994]). It seems inconceivable that defendants would stipulate to a judgment carrying a half-billion dollar award against them.[FN4] Finally, even if Justice Higgitt is correct that neither side should have been granted summary judgment on their dueling pretrial motions, I agree with Justice Moulton that the record before us — more than 100 volumes, comprising nearly 50,000 pages — is more than sufficient to decide the case without holding another trial.
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I guess I'm curious what you'd say "being a man" means, then. I know transguys who fantasize about having a harem of their preferred gender, or for not-bedroom examples who spend massive levels of focus on code (though I guess they do mostly like Rust...) or woodworking or car stuff or small aircraft. But if literally wanting to become a father doesn't at least give something to update around, I'm not sure there's any information that could serve as information to the gender-critical side.
EDIT: and, conversely, I'm not sure it makes sense to say someone's rejecting femininity while literally screwing as feminine MILF-to-be as possible.
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