Furrsona Non Grata

It’s hard to blame wholesome British baking company Warburton’s for not being familiar with furries, an online community of people who enjoy dressing up as anthropomorphic cartoon animals.

Nonetheless, Warburtons’ holiday Instagram hashtag #CrumpetCreations, meant to highlight tasty recipes made by their followers using their brand’s famous crumpets, inadvertently hijacked a hashtag used within the furry community. This caused anyone looking for Warburton’s user-submitted crumpet content to be plunged into the world of furries.

While this wasn’t entirely their fault, even a few minutes’ research on their chosen hashtag could have avoided this awkward Instagram marketing mistake. So, before you launch your next hashtag campaign, don’t be like Warburton’s—just take a quick look and see if the tag is already being used by an internet fandom of people who like to dress up in cartoon animal costumes.

Adam Koebel: A Model Human Being

Adam Koebel is a Canadian Twitch streamer, game designer, photographer, relationship enthusiast and GM for many tabletop roll playing games, such as Dungeons & Dragons, Burning Wheel, Stars Without Number, and many more. Adam goes by the handle “skinnyghost” on both Twitter(48.5k followers) and Instagram(8359 followers) and has a Discord channel called The Math Squad, as well as a Youtube channel where a lot of his Twitch content can be found. Adam Koebel is a queer person, making him a prominent figure in Twitch’s queer community as well as a strong advocate of representation and equality in both tabletop and video games, as well as all other forms of media.

Twitter seems to be Adam’s primary social media outlet, next to Discord. Where as Instagram is almost primarily for photography. The Twitch stream and YouTube channel are where I get the majority of my fix though. Adam Koebel’s video game Let’s Plays are unique, in that he starts out with a segment called “A Book by its Cover”, where he critiques the title screen as a separate work of art from the rest of the game, or at the very least, an introduction to what can be expected from the rest of the game. As he plays the game he likes to point out and discuss various artistic elements/choices made by the developers, or in some cases, a lack there of. He has a program called First Look, where he analyzes a new tabletop RPG and goes over the mechanics and setting. He has a program called GM Prep, which is pretty self explanatory. and a GM advise program called Office Hours, where he takes three questions involving roll playing games, sent in via his website(adam-koebel.com), and answers/discusses them. There is also a spin-off of Office Hours called Hot For Teacher, with the same format as Office Hours, but instead of RPG advice, he gives relationship advice, or to be more accurate, he discusses relationship issues sent in via his website.

The reason I admire Adam Koebel so much, is that he one of most genuine people on the interwebs. He inspires me to be a better person, while making me feel validated as an individual. His show Hot For Teacher alone has helped me out with several issues I was having. He’s always kind and considerate to those around him, whether they are in chat, or playing an RPG with him. I could go on, but just watch some of his content, and you’ll see for yourself.

ERROR 404: JOKE NOT FOUND

The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games. He eventually sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for US$104 million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. Some VoIP(voice over IP) options required players to type in IP addresses just to connect, while other services like Skype or TeamSpeak were resource-heavy and had known security problems. This led the developers to develop a chat service that was much friendlier to use and based on more modern technology. To develop Discord, Hammer & Chisel gained additional funding from YouWeb’s 9+ incubator, which had also funded the startup of Hammer & Chisel, and from Benchmark capital and Tencent. As of July 21, 2019, there are over 250 million unique users of the software.

Citron’s initial vision was to create a space that brings gamers together. The Wiki definition of Discord is “a proprietary freeware VoIP application and digital distribution platform designed for video gaming communities, that specializes in text, image, video and audio communication between users in a chat channel, and is available on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, and in web browsers.”

Today, it is pretty much, a better evolved version of itself. Unlike other social media platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, which are each a single large pool of users, that do very little in the way of providing safe spaces for people to be comfortable being themselves, Discord is a series of smaller communities, where people can find like-minded people to build relationships with.

Discord allows game streamers to build communities around their channel(Twitch for instance), and facilitate more interactive involvement with their viewers/fans. Twitch chat allows subs to to communicate live with streamers, and Youtube chat allows feedback from viewers, but with Discord, viewers can keep the conversation going, and actually build relationships with other viewers and even the streamers themselves. The Discord channel I frequent, is called The Math Squad, created by Adam Koebel. Adam Koebel is a Twitch streamer, game designer, GM, and photographer, and an inspiration to anyone who wants to become a streamer themselves. His channel is a safe space for anyone, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, or religion, to be themselves and be a part of a community with others like them. The Math Squad is a reflection of Adam’s Twitch stream, with fosters the same values, and allows his viewers/subs to keep in touch with him in between streams.

The glaring drawback of a platform like Discord, is that it’s primarily for gamers, and is pretty much marketed that way, so if you’re not a gamer, there may be little to no reason to use it. There are outliers, of course, Discord communities that have little to do with gaming. Chances are though, that if you aren’t a gamer in some capacity, you aren’t going to use Discord.

Discord has had problems with hostile behaviour and abuse within chats, with some communities of chat servers being “raided” (the taking over of a server by a large number of users) by other communities. This includes flooding with controversial topics related to race, religion, politics, and pornography. Discord has stated that they have plans to implement changes that would “rid the platform of the issue”. To better protect its users and its services since these events, Discord has implemented a trust and safety team that is on call around the clock to monitor the servers and respond to reports. This includes dealing with user harassment, servers that violate Discord’s terms of service, and to protect servers from “raiding” and spamming by malicious users or bots. While they do not directly monitor messages, the trust and safety team can determine malicious activity from service use patterns and take appropriate steps, including more detailed investigation, to deal with the matter. The service plans to expand this team as they continue to gain new users.

Living Art

One often overlooked art form, that once was a great passion of mine, is the art of Bonsai. Before I moved to the place I reside now, I had quite a large collection of trees, ranging from seedlings to proper bonsai trees. Some I grew from seeds, some I dug up from the woods, some I bought from a nursery. All were intended to be beautiful bonsai trees eventually. However, due to the need to move, and the lack of room, I had to leave all of my trees behind. I’ve been meaning to get back into it, but it is(at least it can be) an expensive hobby. Here’s a gallery of trees I’ve collected images of over the years.