"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead."
That kind of thing is actually covered by a related guideline:
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—things like article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
> I had no idea it was such a controversial topic.
I find this statement hard to believe, for reasons that might become more clear as I explain the history that makes your remarks controversial. For the time being, I'm going to assume good faith, and I'll revisit this [suspended] disbelief at the end.
In another comment, you said:
> On a personal note, it's not my cup of tea, but that's cool, there's a million tech blogs without sexualized mascot drawings.
The history of the "furry is sexual" premise can be traced back to imageboard culture (i.e. 4chan), which got its start from Something Awful, which was the origin of a lot of anti-furry sentiment. This hatred of furries was rooted in queerphobia. See: https://archive.ph/fX8Jo
> A huge, huge motivation for early furry hate was homophobia. That remained the one axis on which we (non-furry dweebs) could punch down, no matter the stated justification. Furries helped mainstream majority-queer online spaces. That made them easy to mock, because they were unashamed enough to be public with their weird art and their dragon wings and their rejection of all the suffocating norms that still make mainstream geek culture an unrelenting hell.
> That invited scorn. It hurt to see others free of the shames that wracked us so. Disgust was the immediate response, a kind of unbodying rejection which would seek to purge any otherness from ourselves. Some of us knew it to be queerphobia, and I'm sure that was the motivation for a lot of the early trolling. Others just wanted to be part of the in-group, and there was no easier way to do that than take a swing at a designated punching bag.
> Something Awful had a particular response to furries. After creating a subforum specifically for furries to post in, everyone who used it was marked with a custom yellow star avatar, then banned.
So, given that historical context, when someone comments on a technical blog post that they couldn't get past the art (followed by "Maybe separate interests." as a standalone sentence, which comes across as snarky and condescending), and offer up a defense that boils down to "your fursona is too sexualized", it's certainly a red flag.
With multiple data points and doubling down, it becomes very challenging to not read that as an unstated "teehee I'm going to dog-whistle my way around overtly breaking the rules while still signaling anti-furry hate and there's nothing you can do about it, because I'll just play stupid if you call me on it". I deal with this a lot from tech people. To wit: https://soatok.blog/2021/03/04/no-gates-no-keepers/
I'm not saying that's what you're doing or how you feel. This is simply how it comes across to my peers and myself. Only you know what you feel in your heart and believe in your mind.
But that's why dismissing technical articles because of cartoon animal characters and calling them "too sexualized" is likely to be controversial on Hacker News comments.
I hope you find this information helpful for future interactions with furries on Hacker News, because we're not going away.
I think you're getting a bit too worked up over this, possibly due to past interactions with others.
It was my professional suggestion to separate the content to avoid that misinterpretation.
You can't control how you are perceived by others. You have to grow thicker skin. You can simply say "No I don't care about that, it's my passion and I will stand behind it.", instead of getting offended. As some on the right I have to constantly be interpreted as a racist or sexist, or any other ist. That's fine as I know those claims are false and I believe in my views.
More power to whatever you want to do, I'm a libertarian and I think people should be able to do whatever they want as long as they aren't infringing on other people's rights. But you don't get to control other's speech or how they think. You can certainly try to convince them though, which you've certainly made an effort to, I applaud that. I don't think the victim mentality or linking it to "phobias" is helpful though.
> I just advised that you should learn to not get so offended because it's pointless, people will think what they think.
Here's the thing: I'm not offended.
If I believe you're acting in good faith, I'm absolutely going to explain to you why you're getting a negative reaction. That's what I did above, which you seemed to have parsed as "taking offense".
If you're not acting in good faith, just tell me what you really are so I can file your opinions where they belong and move on with my day.
One day you're going to be confronted with your "I don't care about the consequences of my actions" attitude in a very personal way, and you're going to think, "Of course I'm not ___ist/______phobic!"
When that finally happens, remember our conversation today, where you took a minority describing how you come across to their peers as them taking offense, and introspect. Maybe you'll learn the lesson I was trying to impart today.
If not, all of this is moot. I don't need your advice, and it's not welcome.
> From the above post. I realize that "sexualized" is subjective but that's how it looks from my pov.
What, exactly, about this image seems "sexualized" to you?
This is a con badge from a Fairy Tales themed convention. The artist drew my fursona in the style of Little Red Riding Hood--a fairy tale deemed appropriate by most parents for young children.
There are no genitals depicted in this drawing. There's no secondary sex characteristics being emphasized.
No reasonable person would look at this cartoon image and think, "Oh, this is sexualized" UNLESS they had a pre-existing cognitive distortion to assume "furry = sexual". But that's a false equivalence.
but... you had to go looking for that one, skipping over the part where you saw a bunch of waist-up pictures of a cartoon canine and got too hot and bothered to continue reading? it's not linked from the original article
I'm not saying your POV is wrong. I'm asking you to explain it.
EDIT: Since you edited your comment, I'll edit mine.
> I wouldn't open this blog at work. I certainly wouldn't buy a children's book with this type of art in it.
Why not? I don't see anything wrong with this blog post. I'd happily share it with colleagues and coworkers alike because it's useful information.
The only crowd that might take offense to the content here are cryptocurrency enthusiasts, because of the shade thrown at secp256k1. But, personally speaking, I'm okay with them being upset with me for sharing a link to such a thing.
> You must have to admit that little red riding hood is usually depicted a lot more modestly.
I'm not sure the same rules of clothing apply to cartoon animal characters as to real-life humans.
I certainly don't shriek if a coworker posts a picture of their pet cat at work without the critter being fully clothed.
What are the standards you're applying to this situation?
Also, the image you linked isn't included in the blog post about elliptic curves, so it's a bit weird to cling to it in defense of your initial reaction.
