You probably have a higher attack surface from the gremlins in your walls. OTOH, Amazon knowing that you use Mullvad is a tangible downside, as they will probably use that to stick you in a marketing group or something. Monero is still an easy solution with the ~same cost if you're concerned about that.

How would Amazon track a voucher? It's a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They're also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

Possibly, though I suspect that releasing your new DRM early is a good way to have it broken by the time you actually want to protect something with it.

I knew there was something wrong when my pirated copies of these games suddenly started vanishing from my hard drive! Curse you, DRM!

~ What the execs think will happen, I guess? What is the point of applying DRM to a game that has already released?

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it's more like gambling with your wallet if you don't get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

It has a very high opinion of itself.

JXL is the best image codec we have so far and it's not even close. I did a breakdown on some of its benefits here. JXL can losslessly convert PNG, JPG, and GIF into itself, and can losslessly send them back the other way too. The main downside is that Google has been blocking its adoption by keeping support out of Chromium in favor of pushing AVIF, which started a chicken and egg problem of no one wanting to use it until everyone else started using it too. If you want to be an early adopter you can feel free to use JXL, but just know that 3rd party software support is still maturing.

Something you might find interesting is that the original JPEG is such a badass format that they've taken a lot of their findings from JXL and made a badass JPEG encoder with it named jpegli. Oddly, jpegli-based JPEGs are not yet able to be losslessly-compressed into JXL files, per this issue - hopefully that will be fixed at some point.

Well it’s an interesting idea. People already are animals just as giraffes or elephants, we’re just a different species - but still we are part of the Animal kingdom. So in a way, people ARE furry from birth, in having intrinsic animal-like qualities.

I think the draw is a lot deeper especially when contrasted against people who don't consider themselves furry. The idea that a person "doesn't feel like they had a choice in the matter of being furry" is actually very common, and I can vouch for that feeling as well. Luckily I don't mind that part of me. I wonder how people that reject it feel about themselves - I suspect a lot of the loudest anti-furry people fall into this category, similar to the self-hating LGBTQ+ right-wing.

It’s odd that most furry costumes basically look alike - I mean, basically with big eyes and ears and big mouths

This is mostly a matter of practicality and logistics from my understanding. Even with giant eyes it's difficult to see out of them, and the big mouths probably need to be matched to the eye size so it doesn't look bizarre. The full head itself also needs to be big enough to fit over a regular human head. I don't think everyone intentionally wants the costumes to look like they do, but there's probably a handful of factors preventing more realistic costumes from being common, like cost increases for custom designs. I'm not really into the fursuiting part (many aren't), so this is just secondhand info.

It looks like fun - except aren’t the costumes kind of hot after awhile?

From my understanding, they get very very hot. I think the main reason people get them is to have fun goofing off at cons or doing photo op stuff. They cost upwards of 3-4k IIRC and they're handmade, so it's probably something you have to wear carefully.

In an accepting world I think the furry fandom would still be quite large. The accepting community is why a lot of people stick around, but there are many other reasons for it to exist which aren't influenced by being persecuted. Some people feel like they're inherently furry from birth, like a gay person would, and some pick it up during their life as something they want to be associated with aesthetically or otherwise. You've also got therians and various other subcultures that are heavily based around the furry/animalistic themes themselves without considering any sort of societal values.

I also personally think pseudo-anonymity is healthy even when all of society is accepting, and I suspect there's a large draw in being to socialize and try out different versions of yourself while keeping the option to burn your account and start again if you make mistakes. Now more than ever in our surveillance state, it's nice to leave your identity behind and say things without worrying about it coming back to you IRL. I personally find furry/animal avatars to be a fun way of achieving this without needing to pick something boring and impersonal.

As for gender disparity I don't think this is any inherent aspect of the furry fandom but just how predominantly-online cultures are weighted in general. I'd expect this to change given enough time. You can see recent gender studies here, and I highly recommend checking out some of the other pages from their findings if you're interested in some of the bizarre trends that furries have compared to the average person. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that being furry is heavily biased by specific genetic circumstances, and that the explosion of furry culture is a figurative opening of Pandora's box.

Edit: Also I found this page and the graphs+text have a lot of overlap with this topic.

LGBTQ+ acceptance isn't about throwing specific people under the bus in order to win the favor of bigots. That's what the right-wing gays are doing when they speak out against trans people, as if being gay is fine but being trans is a bridge too far. As for kinkshaming just read up on anything regarding keeping kink out of pride. I don't share everyone else's kinks either but I fully support their right to have them.

You're close but coming in from an odd angle. The furry fandom is foremost extremely accepting, especially of people considered minorities or "weird" by normal society (LGBTQ+/autism/anything "cringe"). Putting on a fursuit or a furry avatar online and being able to pseudo-anonymously show the true parts of yourself is very liberating to those that don't feel safe being themselves IRL. As an example, I've seen many trans people first switch the gender of their fursona to see how it feels to present as their preferred gender, and how it feels to be acknowledged by others as the person they are inside. I won't say having a fursona is a mandatory part of being in the furry fandom (there are basically no rules on being included), but for many people that have one a fursona is often an idealized version of themselves and who they wish they could be IRL. So yes the furry fandom is often pivotal in a person's "stages of acceptance", but it has nothing to do with any kind of internalized "masking" and everything to do with the fandom's external supportive community helping them become more comfortable with who they've always been.

Break the beef into smaller pieces first so the germs can't find it.