desiran's ramblings

A Fond Faredo (from desiran.gay)

A Fond Faredo

Good evening. Now that members of the United States (five separate links there lads) have decided that we are all horrible evil disgusting perverts with nothing else on our minds besides corrupting "the youth", I find myself in a bit of a pickle. I live in a state where these laws have not yet passed, but are threatening to. This site is already noncompliant in a couple US states.

I have two choices. Choice 1 is to remove all the pornographic content from this website. Choice 2 is to remove the website entirely. I don't think this website can justify itself as a blog alone; furthermore, this is a website for a creator of porn and porn games. Removing the porn from it would feel a little disingenuous, no?

So I'm going with Choice 2. The legality of pornography in these new laws lies on the host site, hence this site needing to either comply or shutter. My itch.io and Steam pages are fine (for now). I refuse to employ practices that require violating the privacy of citizens. On 31 May, I will be pulling the plug on desiran.gay. I am not happy about this. In fact I'm pissed. I could block this website in the 23 US states where these laws are in place, but it's not worth my time and effort. Going to prison wouldn't be very fun either. An unabridged archive of this site will be available on my itch page.

Time Keeps Passing On

I feel a bit guilty that I got to experience the Wild West internet, knowing a large chunk of people younger than me never have and never will. It was a lawless place, yes, but most importantly, it was a separate place. The internet was somewhere you would visit, somewhere you would browse. Now, the internet and reality have merged. News is delivered via Twitter. People communicate and meet new friends via Discord (this is an extension of AIM, yes, but AIM was not used by every motherfucker on the planet).

The world has changed. It's not 2013 anymore. Nerd culture is mainstream; video games are a widely accepted hobby; programmers are venerated instead of bullied; furries are celebrated, or at worst, begrudgingly accepted. And yet I still operate as if it was a time where comic books were laughed at; video games were the hobby of lonely shut-ins; programmers were smelly nerds in dank caves; and furries are a laughingstock and/or tortured (online).

Forums are largely gone. Discord has usurped them; even FurAffinity, one of the last bastions of the original Web 2.0, has done away with theirs. Dedicated sites for specific kinds of "content" - before the term "content" was applied how it is today - are also mostly gone. Everything has moved to Twitter, Discord, or Twitter2 (BlueSky). 4chan is pretty much the only major forum site left, and it has a finite (and miserable) userbase - good luck getting new users for that site.

"Memes" have dominated culture. Image macros and rage comics were replaced with sound bites and wojaks. They differ only superficially. Yet, now, a meme flares up and burns out in a week's time, and becomes the only conversation point. "They're eating the dogs". The game Concord's crash and burn. And of course, chicken jockey.

The world has changed. I do not cling to the past with most of these - I'm not here to tell you that actually image macros are very funny and epic. Rather than adopting the new hotness, I disengaged with the zeitgeist. It felt as strange to no longer be "with it" while I was still in high school. Now an entire generation has gone through their teenage phase, and I'm less anchored to this world than ever. The internet is no longer a familiarly hostile battlescape; I blinked and it became a playground, where what's considered "edgy" wouldn't have ruffled any feathers in my time, or even before it. Now people my age and younger use real pictures of themselves on their Discord profiles, with usernames involving their given or even family names. Personally identifying information is given out like Books of Mormon. It was only 15 years ago that it was drilled into me that if any information about the real you was leaked on the internet, you were as good as dead. It was only 15 years ago where meeting with an internet friend was a SERIOUS gamble that could cost you dearly. It was only 15 years ago that every other user on the internet was met with powerful and justified suspicion.

OK, That's Cool Miles, What Does This Have to do With Furry Porn?

The internet that allowed for completely unrestricted expression of all kinds is gone. Clinging to the past only brings more heartbreak.

Freedom was traded for convenience. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, etc. promised to simplify the internet through a centralized, controlled environment. And, to their credit, they did. However, they worked so well, the federated internet was sacrificed. I understand that bookmarking 10 websites to follow creators you like was annoying. I understand that free hosting on centralized sites in exchange for intrusive advertising is a trade most were willing to make. I understand most people were and still are completely ignorant of how the technologies they use every day. Do you know what an IP address is? Well, do you need to? No. It's been relegated to specialist knowledge.

Internet pornography melted minds. It warped a generation not aware of the dangers of sex's primal powers. You can observe the cohorts moving through culture, if you look for it. You have the "80s/90s cartoons" cohort - this is your Ninja Turtles, Digimon, etc. cohort; the Pokemon cohort (hello!); the Minecraft cohort (now in their early 20s); the Fortnite cohort (possibly reaching maturity now); and the Alpha Internet cohort (Sprunki, Helluva Boss, etc.). You will notice that two of these cohorts are not necessarily adults. Elsagate was real, and the people on the receiving end of it have been morphed. Yet, the Alpha Internet cohort was not exposed to pornography directly; usually, they were exposed to fetish art, and usually that came about through the ever-present memes. The "look up sonic inflation to learn more" meme and its variants never directly contain pornographic material.

If you're a government official who wishes to preach the evils of pornography, you must acknowledge that all roads lead to Rome. You must acknowledge that the mere continued existence of human beings creates sex. You must acknowledge that these people you claim are sought out and manipulated by pornographers and other sinners (we'll get back to that) are completely oblivious until a switch flips. King of Queens making a joke about impotence can lead people down the same road. Pornography has existed since the dawn of time.

Unfortunately, sex is co-opted by cunts who have attempted to control populations for milennia. That's right, it's time for the regrettable religion bashing! Classify anything you personally find offensive as sin, and you can warp minds however you see fit. Rename "sin" to "obscene", and suddenly you can be a career politician too.

Obscenity is bullshit. Obscenity is subjective. Labelling acts as obscene is a blatant attempt to label people as obscene. Falsified evidence in a sexual criminal trial can lead to the impossible to remove label of wrong-cock. So if we legalize and even encourage labelling an entire group of people, based on their behavior, as obscene, then it makes it very easy to dehumanize and "cull" this group. It happened with the gays. It's certainly possible for it to happen to "pornographers".

This long-winded warm-up leads me here: furry pornography, and pornography in general, has been deemed obscene and "the thing that is corrupting the youth". It is a ploy. If you believe this, you are legitimately an ignorant fool. You have been taken for a ride, and your superiority complex is matched only by your pathetic repression. The youth don't need porn to "corrupt" them when there are so many other things instead:

and some other things I can't think of right now. Pornography isn't the keystone keeping the world from becoming magically good again - the world was never "good". Neophobia is real, and what's happening right now always feels scarier than what already happened, because you survived that. You will survive this too. The human race has been through much, much worse.

Bloom

The world is closing up, like a flower in autumn. Countries have become hostile to each other, escalating to three major conflicts at time of writing, with countless smaller (or more accurately, less reported) conflicts happening elsewhere. It's true this is the safest and most peaceful time of modern history; the nuke is a greater deterrent to war than people realize.

In this time of hyper-nationalism, please keep your world in mind. You can only affect your life and the lives of those you care about. You probably won't change the world, but you don't need to; change your world. Make your own life better. You can do whatever you want with your time. We live in an age of instant, unlimited information - please use it to expand your own knowledge and skillset. Don't wilt alongside the rest of the world.

When Mr. COVID was making his rounds, I remember seeing two sentiments online. Sentiment 1 was "this sucks, I hate that I can't do what I was doing, I'm going to wallow and watch Netflix forever". Sentiment 2 was "oh shit I have so much free time I can finally learn to draw/program/3D model/paint/garden/cook/etc.". COVID is over, but its lessons should be remembered: you have more time than you think, and you alone can choose how that time is spent. I feel trapped in my own career, so I use my free time to shape a world I can control, the world of furry sex porn video games. You have a world too. Voting is the only thing you can do to impact the world larger than your own.

Thank you for joining me for this two-and-a-half year experiment. It's a shame that it must end on someone else's terms, but I do not control the world. Do what you can to control yours, and if your world sucks, seek a new world.