Bizarre thought...

In the early-to-mid 1990s, a group of men— mostly men— came of age. They had all the classic symptoms of their group— they were slightly neuroatypical, driven to find others of their own kind, and this new thing call the Internet facilitated that drive, and they formed a new on-line community.

They had one common characteristic— they were so poorly socialized, perhaps by nature so incapable of understanding most of humanity, that they latched onto archetypes and adopted them, using these archetypes as shorthand for understanding various aspects of humanity— their own humanity as well as the humanity of others.

They were, like other men in their late teens through early 30's, still driven by their hormones. They sought out, could not find, and ultimately ended up writing and drawing their own pornography.

Here's the thing I find so bizarre. The early Furry community, so distant from the mainstream, so separated from acceptability, so uniquely unaware of what was expected from mainstream sexual interaction...

... ended up creating an astonishingly egalitarian and playful body of work. The people in furry porn, more than in the porn of any other subculture, like each other. Tops and bottoms, male and female, all seemed to be having fun. Artists experimented with all sorts of dynamics— sex, race, size— with an eye towards pleasure and not toward controversy or concern. Even when the material was of dubious consent, such as one artist's notorious (and notoriously well-drawn) macrophile anthropophagic romps, it was still wildly out of the mainstream in terms of presentation; it fetishized monster movie kitsch rather than made sexual points with deliberate inversions of traditional sexual power dynamics.

For the first decade of its existence, the Furry community was blissfully, wonderfully uninfested with rape culture. They were completely unfamiliar with the traditional dynamics of top/bottom, seme/uke, male/female. They were making it up as they went along. Rejects— both in being rejected by the mainstream and rejecting the mainstream in turn— fur fans created an erotica of desperation. They were desperate for joy, and they wrote and painted that joy.

Sadly, even Furry Fandom must be cast out of Eden. Too many fur-fans these days are aware of what ordinary people expect out of sex, and market to those expectations.

That math problem, current attempt

Remember the geometry problem I wrote about a couple of weeks ago? Well, I finally knuckled down and wrote the example.

I'm really flustered at times with graphical programming. First, the entirety of the problem must be translated from the origin into the positive plane, because (obviously) graphics displays don't handle well negative coordinates. Then comes the equally problematic issue that the Y-axis is flipped— positive means futher down— and trying to visualize the whole thing makes my brain ache. It's good for me, I suspect, in much the same way that poorly cooked spinach is still good for you. (Pan-wilted spinach over high heat with a balsamic reduction, on the other hand, is awesome.)

I tried last night to do the algorithm. It wasn't correct; I've gotten something wrong somewhere, and now I need to figure out where. What I did end up with was interesting. You must have Javascript enabled to see it run:

Experiment Six.

What was really sad was that I didn't have it animated, I just picked two angles (45 and 60). Sadly, at 45, the equation woks perfectly. I thought I had it nailed. Then I animated it.

Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

[EDIT]: Whoa, that is cool. I kept watching the blue line, and noticed that it wasn't perfectly perpendicular to an axis when its intersection point crossed that axis; it was tangential near the axis rather than on it. It is perpendicular to the axis when the other line crosses it!

Huh. I wonder what this means...

Note to non-geeks and non-scientists: "I wonder what this means..." is the mark of my tribe. :-)

Canvas and Slopes, Experiment Seven

And here we go, thanks much to zanfur!

Experiment Seven.

For my next trick, I have to figure out where the blue line intersects the outer circle closest to where the orange line does, and draw just that segment. It's Just Algebra, with a little bit of algorithm.

Kouryou-chan and I made Lasagne...

Working with a leftover batch of pasta sauce Kouryou-chan and I had made last week for (store-bought) tortellini, we boiled noodles and stacked, in an 8x8 casserole dish, four deep layers of sauce and a mozzarella-ricotta blend, topped off with a handful of Parmesan.

It was maginificent. Kouryou-chan loved it. The casserole divvied into nine pieces, and when the five of us were done (Storm, Omaha, and Lisakit were also in attendance) only two were left. Kouryou-chan took those to school for lunch the next day.

Next time, we're gonna make the dough all by ourselves.

Understanding my maturing neurons...

It occurs to me that I was fascinated by Canvas Experiment Six's failure, but not fascinated enough to wrap my head around what was going wrong and identify the problem.

It should be obvious that I have an objective for this, a particular visual effect for which all of this is just stepping stones. It's such a ridiculously small visual effect that I can't believe I'm spending this much effort on it, and I thank everyone for peeking in while I do it.

Once upon a time, I would have found the relationship between a line's slop, and the inverse of its slope, fascinating as the two secant lines oscillated around the animated circle I was drawing. I was fascinated, but once I would have been fascinated enough to delve into the problem and actually grasped, hard, the relationship between polar and cartesian coordinates enough to intrinsically understand them, rather than mechanistically, as I do now.

But it seems that ADHD, perhaps even sub-clinical aspy, part of me has mellowed out with age, family, maturity, manhood, perhaps even with alcohol and exercise. Sad, but true.

p.s. in case anyone cares, I've updated the projects/raphael_arcs folder with the Coffeescript and HAML versions of the project, as well as the Makefile.