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đżđ¶đđ¶ "not yet begun to fight"
Lana@beige.party
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On the 2nd of July 1813, a young man successfully passed his examination of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, earning his doctoral degree qualifying him as a medical surgeon.
His medical education had not been without obstacles. In fact, he was very nearly denied entry into medical school at all - not because of his grades or intelligence, but because his short stature, unbroken voice, delicate features and smooth skin led many to suspect that Barry was a young boy not past puberty. The University Senate at Edinbourgh initially attempted to block Barry's application for the final examinations due to this apparent youth. However, David Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan, and a close family friend, personally persuaded the Senate to relent. What neither the Senate nor Lord Buchan knew at the time was that young James Barry's stature and voice were not due to his youth, but to his status as a trans man.
So, in 1812, at the age of 23, a young James Barry earned, first his medical degree, and then not a year later, his license to practice as a surgeon. Barry immediately enlisted in the British Army and was enlisted as a Hospital Assistant, taking posts in Chelsea and then Plymouth. Not two years later, in December of 1815, he was promoted to Assistant Surgeon to the Forces (a rank equivalent to lieutenant).
Once again, Lord Buchan came to the young man's aid. His next posting was to Cape Town, South Africa - which had been permanently ceded to the United Kingdom from the Dutch a year prior as part of the treaty following the Napoleonic Wars. Through Lord Buchan, Barry had a letter of introduction to the Governor of Cape Town, a Lieutenant General Lord Charles Somerset.
Charles' daughter had been gravely ill for some time, and Barry was able to nurse the young girl back to full health in what some called a miraculous recovery. Charles then welcomed Barry into the family with open arms. James became his personal physician and the two maintained a close personal friendship for years.
In 1822, at the age of 33, Somerset appointed Barry as Colonial Medical Inspector. This was an extraordinary career jump from Barry's previously low military rank, bringing with it a lot of new responsibility which James was determined not to squander. Over the next ten years of work in the Cape, James was able to effect significant changes such as improved sanitation and water conditions, better conditions for enslaved people, prisoners and the mentally ill, and the creation of a sanctuary for a local leper population.
But his crowning achievement in the field of medicine was performing the first ever known C-Section birth in which both the mother and child survived. The child was named James Barry Munnik in Barry's honor, and the name was passed down through the family for generations. One of that child's later descendants, still bearing the same name, became Prime Minister of South Africa. General James Barry Munnik Hertzog, better known as Barry Hertzog or J. B. M. Hertzog, was one of the principle advocates during the late 1920's and early 1930's for the development of Afrikaner culture and was determined to prevent Afrikaners from being excessively influenced by British culture.
Barry was promoted again to the rank of Surgeon to the Forces on the 22nd of November, 1827, and subsequently posted to Mauritius. A year into his assignment, Lord Somerset took ill, and Barry went AWOL, risking his entire military career, to go care for his sick friend in England. He stayed there until Charles' death in 1831.
James then took a series of postings, to Jamaica, the island of St Helena, the West Indies, Malta, Corfu, and Canada. He dealt with outbreaks of yellow fever, and a cholera epidemic which eventually claimed the lives of over a million people worldwide. Barry rose through the ranks, earning promotion after promotion, relentlessly fighting for better food, sanitation and proper medical care for prisoners and lepers, as well as soldiers and their families wherever he went.
Barry was outraged by unnecessary suffering, and took a heavy-handed and sometimes tactless approach to demanding improvements for the poor and underprivileged which often incited anger from officials and military officers. On several occasions Barry was both arrested and (temporarily) demoted for the extremity of his behavior.
In 1859, over his very vocal protests, Inspector General James Barry was forcefully retired from the military, citing his now advanced age and ill health. James retired to London, and died six years later of dysentery.
The charwoman who laid out his body discovered James' assigned sex at birth and attempted to blackmail Barry's physician, a Major D.R. McKinnon, who had issued the death certificate, threatening to go public with the knowledge if she was not paid. When McKinnon refused, she followed through with her threat. As the situation became more and more public knowledge, George Graham of the General Register Office asked McKinnon about the story's veracity. McKinnon responded in writing. Among his many remarks about having known James for many years, he said this: "[The charwoman] seemed to me to think that she had become acquainted with a great secret & wished to be paid for keeping it, I informed her that all Dr Barry's relatives were dead, & that it was no secret of mine, & that my own impression was that Dr Barry was a Hermaphrodite. But whether Dr Barry was male, female, or hermaphrodite I do not know, nor had I any purpose in making the discovery as I could positively swear to the identity of the body as being that of a person whom I had been acquainted with for a period of eight or nine years."
Barry is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, with a Portland stone headstone, on which is inscribed simply "Dr James Barry, Inspector General of Hospitals"
Tell our stories.
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MrCheeze 
MrCheeze@wetdry.world
* N64 games such as Paper Mario have bugs that allow running arbitrary code in-game
* N64 emulators such as Mupen/Bizhawk have bugs that allow for malicious game code to hack your PC
The amusing consequence: A TAS that, when played back, bluescreens your computer.
https://tasvideos.org/8982S
https://youtu.be/u3KmW-02wsU
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ENG. Tretron đČ
tretron@bark.lgbtYou can do everything in right and still lose.
I really wish more people would realise this. You don't get sick because you ate that hotdog. You don't get depressed because you didn't walk enough outside. That the person died doesn't mean you didn't do CPR correctly.
You can still do everything right and still fail. And that's okay. It's okay to fail, to lose, it's okay to feel anger and sorrow. It's part of the human experience. But a lot of people have this "just world" idea. That if you dress right you don't get raped. That if you eat well you don't get sick. That if you work hard you get promoted. That if you just give everything to the world you get everything back.
No. It's not a weakness and more people should realise that bad things happen not because you failed. But just by the fact that bad things happen. Maybe if more people would realise this, then maybe we have more people willing to help.
That's the only thing we can do to make it a just world. Help others in need.
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ENG. Tretron đČ
tretron@bark.lgbtShow content
Friend is doing an art raffle for their TG channel..more info here: https://t.me/Greyl0ngArt/1073
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/Cinny 
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Simon McGarr
Tupp_ed@mastodon.ieAs a general rule, the state should over-supply services. There should be slack in the system almost all the time. Relaxed GPs with lots of time to talk to their patients. So many teachers that the main trouble is finding rooms for them all.
Not only does this see a better quality of service mostly, but it also cushions the system in the event of an unexpected shock.
If you have just enough professionals to deliver at 100%, you donât have enough professionals.
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I think I have teased this already, so here it is:
Proudly presenting âligraâ, an open source projector/projection (LiGra â Light Graffiti) platform, allowing you to broadcast your messages, your logos, your artwork, whatever you need others to hear, to whoever sees it! :3
With ligra I wanted to explore image-projection and especially projections on the cheap, so I went to my local flea market and built a platform around old camera lenses. You can find two of them in the wild at #GPN22
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Jason Scott
textfiles@mastodon.archive.orgShow content
The Backrooms of the Internet Archive
https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/01/the-backrooms-of-the-internet-archive/
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Alice Averlongđłïžââ§ïž
foone@digipres.clubAs someone who spends a surprising amount of time at ewaste/junk shops:
non-bluetooth wireless keyboards should be banned for environmental reasons.
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abadidea
0xabad1dea@infosec.exchangeThis is a graph of Discordâs algorithmically inferred gender (extracted from ârequest your dataâ json; axes are probability and days) for a user whose display name is âTiffanyâ, whose bio is âshe/herâ, whose pfp is a drawing of a girl and whose profile theme color is pink.
Algorithmically inferred gender is worse than useless. Presumably the issue is that she talks about programming, and all the deliberate âI am explicitly telling you I am a girlâ signaling in the world canât convince a computer. I sometimes watch a livecoding streamer whose youtube stats claim his audience is 99% male even though you can see fem-coded chat participants regularly. Algorithms like this are deleting the women
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PointlessOne 
pointlessone@status.pointless.one
#Chromium (and #Chrome) begins phasing-out Manifest v2.
https://blog.chromium.org/2024/05/manifest-v2-phase-out-begins.html
This means, among other things, that uBlock Origin is about to be disabled in Chrome. Google will choose a different extension to recommend but it can not be as effective as #uBlock Origin.
Following #Google's example, may I instead recommend you switch to #Firefox.
Firefox will continue to support Manifest v2, and consequently uBlock Origin and other extensions that can not be implemented with Manifest v3.
Happy browsing.
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Jeff 
jnadeau@tech.lgbt
âWhat next, should I have a computer that eats my dinner and fucks my wife?â is one of those perfect sentences that just sticks in your head
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Soatok
soatok@soatok.blogMany of the most annoying and pervasive problems with the furry fandomâfrom the cyclical nature of Twitter discourse to the increasingly frustrating issue of furry convention main hotel registrations selling out immediately after openingâare entirely predictable if you know even a little bit of mathematics.
And itâs going to get worse. If you donât believe me, read on.
âBut Soatok, my whole thing is being a dumb animal online. Why would I know any mathematics?â
This video from Colorado professor Albert Bartlett is a must-watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZA9Hnp3aV4
Gimme the Numbers
WikiFur has historical data on furry convention attendance. Letâs start with the list of furry conventions with the highest attendance in their most recent year.
| Convention | Year | Location | Attendance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Midwest FurFest | 2023 | Rosemont, Illinois | 15,547 |
| Furry Weekend Atlanta | 2024 | Atlanta, Georgia | 15,021 |
| Anthrocon | 2023 | Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania | 13,644 |
| Furry Fiesta | 2024 | Dallas, Texas | 8,001 |
| Further Confusion | 2024 | San Jose, California | 5,826 |
| Megaplex | 2023 | Orlando, Florida | 5,189 |
| Anthro New England | 2024 | Boston, Massachusetts | 4,482 |
Note: We can make a similar analysis for most furry conventions that have historical data available.
For ease, Iâm going to focus on the more popular events.
Additionally, Iâm going to take the average of percentages just to smooth out the variability Year-over-Year and make simpler statements.
Using averages like this is normally a risky move, especially if a statistician might one day read your work and get cross with you. Iâve provided more granular data in a Google Sheet.
- Anthrocon saw an average of 14.2% growth year-over-year since 2000. If you only focus on the past decade (which includes a dip during the pandemic), their growth rate was 12.6%.
- Midwest FurFest grew by an average of 17.9% since 2000 and 17.8% since 2014 (omitting the cancelled year).
- Furry Weekend Atlanta grew by an average of 26.3%, or 25.9% if you only look at 2015-2024.
- Texas Furry Fiesta saw an overall growth rate of 31.8% since its first year (2009), and a growth rate of 17.4% over the past decade.
- Megaplex was grew 24.6% each convention, with a 25.2% growth since 2014.
Okay, if you havenât watched the video and arenât good a math, that maybe sounds like sustainable, healthy growth for a community, right?
Well, letâs use the past 10 year average growth rate to make some predictions.
- AnthroCon attendance grows by 12.6%, which corresponds to an attendance doubling in 5.5 years.
- Midwest FurFest? Doubles in 3.9 years.
- Furry Weekend Atlanta? 2.7 years!
- Texas Furry Fiesta? 4 years.
- Megaplex? 2.7 years!
If the growth rate keeps up, for example, we can expect Furry Weekend Atlanta to have approximately 60,000 attendees by 2035 (11 conventions in the future).
If you think the FWA elevator wait times were long this year, just let the current growth rate keep up. Especially if their staff are short-sighted enough to sign a multi-year contract with the current convention hotel.
What About Furries That Donât Go to Conventions?
We see exponential growth in the furry fandom outside of convention attendance, too.
https://twitter.com/Dragoneer/status/1766121415156146610
Iâm sure there are many other data sources we can consider, but the conclusion is likely to be the same elsewhere.
What Do The Numbers Mean?
Simply put: The furry community is growing at a break-neck exponential speed.
Art: AJ_LovesDinosWe are seeing year-over-year growth rates exceeding 10% (a benchmark which represents a doubling time of 7 years, as that video up above was fond of pointing out).
Given that the world population is growing at 0.8%, it may be tempting to assume that, in a few short decades, the entire world will be furry. That is not the case.
Exponential growth cannot continue forever. You will always run headfirst into some sort of carrying capacity or limiting factor that impedes growth. Every exponential curve eventually becomes an S-curve.
Where Are We Headed?
Based on the numbers presented above, letâs think about what risks the furry community could be aimlessly blundering into right now.
I must stress that this is not a realistic threat model of the future, but an examination at what could go wrong.
Awareness of the risks could be sufficient to actually mitigate them before they manifest.
Or perhaps these words will fall upon deaf ears, and things could go more-or-less exactly as I will describe in this section.
Or maybe Iâm entirely too optimistic and things will get much, much worse than I can imagine.
This is all to say: The future isnât written yet, so who the fuck knows?
Credit: HarubakiBut we can make a somewhat educated guess on the trajectory weâre on. So letâs do that.
Know Your Limits
What limiting factors could the furry fandomâs explosive growth encounter in the near future?
Thatâs a broad question to ponder, but one possibility that comes to mind is that while there is an exponential growth in furry participation (i.e., convention attendance), there is not an accompanying exponential growth in the quantity of conventions themselves.
(Nor of convention staff, for that matter!)
The demand for convention attendance is a bull market, but the supply is more-or-less static.
THIS IS NOT SUSTAINABLE.
If things continue at the same pace theyâre currently marching, conventions will become increasingly overcrowded. But the problems will not stop with just that.
Rooms at the main convention hotel will become accessible only for the wealthier and/or more technically savvy, rather than for all furries.
Convention registration costs will rise, to little benefit for attendees. Some of that money will be spent on big, non-fandom performances from celebrity headliners, which will drive some non-furries to attend as well, further exacerbating the crowds.
All kinds of systemic, structural issues in society at large will become more pronounced within our community.
Registration, elevators, the dealers den and artist alley, and even the fucking stairwells will have unreasonable lines of people waiting to use them.
When confronted with this stress, people will take out their angerâwhich is caused by a complex mess of factors stemming from this relatively simple mathematical observationâon comparatively simpler targets. Slightly more literal than usual scape goats, if you will.
A lot of ageist, classist, ableist discourse will emerge from the fault lines of our ever-expanding community.
There will be calls for more gatekeeping, rooted in nostalgia for simpler times when there were fewer of us to try to accommodate.
Convention staff will eventually buckle under an exponentially rising amount of pressure. People will burn out. It wonât be pretty.
Meanwhile, Drama YouTubers (or whatever platform or vestige they adopt in the future) will be collectively increasing Orville Redenbacherâs quarterly sales with the content they can farm from this discontent.
CMYKatâThat sounds bad; surely other furries are aware of this explosive growth?â
Of course, but they mostly think itâs a good thing. For example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JumV2UQf43A
What Can We Do About It?
I donât know.
I agonized for a long time about how to write this section, and I donât have any good answers.
I mean, sure, I have some ideas that might help in some way. A couple of them are:
- Embrace Virtual Reality. Itâs much easier to scale up VR servers on the fly than it is to just accommodate thousands more furries. No reg line to deal with, either.
- Focus On Smaller, Local Events. While itâs kind of cool that tens of thousands of furries will descend on the same city for a weekend to attend the same convention, it would also be cool if there were more local events. Not just weekly or monthly meet-ups, either. Iâm thinking of picnics, barbecues, etc. âThink global, act local,â as it were.
However, neither idea does anything to alleviate the fear of missing out that can accompany large conventions.
Additionally, artists may depend on large conventions as a way to network and grow their audience, which is necessary to make their commission income sustainable. These ideas wouldnât really help them at all.
CMYKatSolving this problem is outside my wheelhouse. Iâm not a social scientist, by any means, and this feels like the sort of problem they would be more successful at tackling than a computer security and math nerd.
Who knows? Maybe to an expert in another field, the solution is more obvious and known to be effective.
Or maybe nobody really knows, and weâll have to make something up as we go.
Internet meme; source unknownRegardless, being aware of the problem is the first step towards solving it. So if I can do nothing else, I hope to ensure that the folks that enjoy my blog are made aware.
Beyond that. my plan is to let people more qualified think about what (if anything) to actually do about this potential mess.
Until next time.
AJ_LovesDinosMore Coverage of This Topic
Woofles, cited above, wants to help solve some of these problems:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKW0qdJJbTA
Beta Eta Delota read the original version of this blog post and added his commentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tu2xQQBp_Lo
Finn the Panther has ideas (some specific to Midwest FurFest):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eI_2lDrGq4&t=476s
https://soatok.blog/2024/05/30/furries-are-losing-the-battle-against-scale/
#doublingTime #exponentialEquations #furry #FurryFandom #Mathematics #population #Society
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Rib 
Rib@fedi.rib.gay
Finally, after years of searching, I have obtained a GBA cart with a Mega Drive/Genesis emulator on it (thanks to Ankos!). I have been wanting to research this for some time after seeing it on YouTube, and it turns out it is far more interesting than I anticipated. đ§”(1/14)
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miifox
miifoxShow content
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them: "what's that tattoo?"
me: "it's Ned Ludd, the mythical leader of the luddites"
them: "but aren't you in tech?"
me: "aha! you have fallen for my expertly laid trap, and now you must listen to my lecture on the history of the luddites!"
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Luisf
Loosf@yiff.lifeShow content
Needing a traumatic justification for why someone is into a kink is like
*fucked up*
"Oh you poor thing, you are broken by that in such a way, I will accept this deviant behavior of you because I pity you, exploring that in a controlled way"
Like, yeah, kink can be USEFUL for that. Not universal.
the whole medicalization and Justification for kink expression is *fucked up*
"these queer beans are into this because of trauma" is *fucked up*
like, personally
I have trauma response to being bound. I legit wish I could engage in bondage but my personal trauma *actually prevents me* from exploring that aspect.
That is, as far as I can tell, my only intersection between trauma and kink
a lot of people cannot just accept "it feels good and it makes me feel good" as the root explanation. A lot of that is because of disgust reaction, and seeing themselves in the situation, thinking and feeling "That would be AWFUL"
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Colin the Mathmo
ColinTheMathmo@mathstodon.xyzAn answer to a 100-year-old puzzle. I say *an* answer, because there is still part of the question that's open.
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