ceciliatan

${Work} decided that it was time for this all-virtual company to have a company-wide face-to-face, and after much to-ing and fro-ing, the venue chosen was a large bed and breakfast in Alsace, France. Our CEO is wonderfully organized and, basically, after getting buy-in from everyone who would be attending, just emailed us tickets to the airport, the train to Strasbourg, end pretty much every detail.

All I needed was to get on a plane and go. Which I did, Sunday at noon. Which meant I’d be arriving in Paris at 7am on Monday, although my body would only think it was 10pm, since the flight is ten hours great-circle over the Arctic.

On the flight, I did a little hacking on my Surface Pro, and got both Gamescope and XRView working, so I was able to play Warcraft in complete privacy on my Rokid AR glasses, which are pretty nice. Lets me enjoy my furry pr0n without my seatmates having to know. And I did get the blessing of having the seat to my left empty, so I could stash my bookbag and still have a place to put my feet.

The jet lag just murdered me. It’s a good thing the “business” part of the business trip was a four or five hour session in the morning and we were free in the afternoon, because I spent the next three days spending my afternoons napping and trying not to feel dead to the world, nor feeling insomniac when I was awake at 4am because my circadian clock was still convinced it barely dusk back home.

That said, Monday was our “travel” day, and since I’d gotten into France early, and so had two of my peers, we met up at the Gare d’Est (East Station) and rode the subway to the Louvre, where we walked through the garden, had a lovely snack and then a fantastic lunch, all while walking around the city and just, you know, touring. That’s what tourists do. The Eiffel Tower is surprisingly clunky-looking up close. The Seine is beautiful. The garden at the Lourve only proves the last couple of kings were perverts, since the garden includes a hedge labyrinth just tall enough to make it hard to guess the maze, but short enough not to hide the four statues of naked girls running along the path. Other statues of Greek Gods and French Heroes are also placed about the pathways, and it’s hard to imagine someone in the US leaving a marble statue gilded in gold and made in 1772 out where just anyone can touch it.

As we walked around, I did see some local collective was putting up antifa stickers with the slogan, “No neighborhood for fascists!” I can get with that sentiment.

The train from Paris to Strasbourg covers the same distance as the Amtrack from Seattle to Portland. Paris to Strasbourgh takes 1 hour and 45 minutes. Seattle to Portland takes 3 hours and 25 minutes, and that’s the “fast” route! We could have these incredibly civilized, ridiculously comfortable transports carrying us around the country, but we’re addicted to the cramped, painful, noisy airlines, and I’ll never figure out why.

The meeting itself was at a farm house in the middle of nowhere, in a small town about 20 minutes outside of Strasbourg. A barn had been converted into a bed-and-breakfast meeting area, and everybody grabbed a room, and we all sat down to dinner together, meeting each other for the first time in a space not mediated by Zoom or Google Meetup (or whatever the eff they call it now).

I woke up the next morning and wondered why it was still dark at 7:00am. I thought, maybe I’m significantly further south than Seattle, but, no, it’s only 1.2° south, which isn’t that far. This is one of those things that always blows my mind about Seattle and maps: 70% of Canadians live south of Seattle, and England, Scotland, and Ireland are all north of us.

We made a grocery run, and it was, well, it was a full-size grocery, comparable to the local Safeway or Publix. The vegetables were absurdly fresh, and we were told not to buy bread. One of my peers was a local, and he led us to a small bakery about a 20 minute walk from the farmhouse, and we bought fresh-baked bread there. I spotted this “HappyVore” fake meat being sold on the shelves. I’m sure in a furry universe that’s a popular, if controversial, brand.

That bread was amazing. The omelette I made for breakfast for myself the next day was mind-bogglingly good. All the food was incredible.

And we hired a chef. She came in the evening to cook French and Moroccan-style meals, recommended local wines (two every night! A white for the salad and a red for meal), and she always cooked so much I usually had leftovers to tide me through breakfast or lunch the next day.

The only thing that disappointed me was the coffee. It was about as boring as you could imagine. I make better with my kettle and press back home. On the trip home I actually stopped at a Starbucks to drink coffee that didn’t taste of the 1980s. Sure, it tasted like the work of the Omnissiah, but at least it didn’t remind me of Folger’s. Also, all of the soda pop is artificially sweetened as a form of harm-reduction.

We had really productive meetings, getting refamiliarized with general discussions of the architecture of the product, a long bull session on our values as a company, and wish lists of what we want to accomplish with the product. I thought some of my ambitions were outlandish but, no, everyone agreed that everything I said sounded perfectly reasonable, even the one I thought was truly crazy: turning the elements folder into a showcase for web components, styling, internationalization, accessibility, the whole shebang. It’s ambitious as hell, and I thought it would get a thumbs down, but the leads were like, nope, that sounds like a reasonable ambition to us. So what do I know?

I did walk the entire little town we were in. It was chill, hovering around freezing. In fact, we just left the soda pop, white wine, and beer outside, since there was no reason to use the freezer when it was colder outdoors. The wine was amazing, but the beer was… beer. I had only one, a brown ale the French guy liked, and it was drinkable, which is about the only thing that recommends it. At least the whole “the only beers you can get in winter are more bitter than your soul” thing Seattle has going on hasn’t infested other countries.

Henry Farrell (himself) asserts that LLMs are “cultural technologies,” stores of cultural information with patterns of retrieval that are new and to which we will adjust. If this is true, then Furry Fandom should probably be doing a lot of introspection and undergoing a lot of change.

Let’s emphasize that nothing I say here is the fandom’s fault. I am not blaming anyone. If I’m going to indict anyone, it’s the people who make the Furry-oriented models for Stable Diffusion and other image generation software, because that’s where the critical fault lies.

Obsessive Labeling

It’s an open secret among the people who enjoy porn illustration renders (not gonna call it “art,” it never is) that the best way to get a really good porn pic is to render it using a furry model first, and then use the image-to-image feature to say, “Rerender this with humans.” The furry community has an obsession with categorizing its interests, and the people who draw lewds will draw and tag everything. The accurate and comprehensive labeling on E621 can be found embedded deep in any furry-oriented rendering model, exceeding by orders of magnitude the accuracy and precision of models based off other image sites like Rule34 and its ilk.

It was also a commonplace joke that the first generation of rendering models, the Stable Diffusion Series 1 models, were incredibly bad at rendering men. It sometimes seemed as if SD1.5 and its offspring had only ever seen one penis, and an exceptionally ugly one at that. The furry models, on the other hand, have an incredible catalog of male bodies and body parts, and to this day exceed the state of the art in some of the models that came after Series 1.

The furry artist community is being devastated by its own success. The thieves (and they are thieves) who dumped all of E621 and other furry art collections into the first generation of furry illustration models, and who collectively managed to create models better tagged and far more comprehensive than the commercials ones created by Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, Dalle-E, and NovelAI as a non-commercial, under-the-radar operation, exploited this otherwise admirable dedication to accuracy to wreck the furry art community’s future.

And A Loss of History

At the same time, that labeling has gone on mostly in terms of acts and artists, not characters. If LLMs are stores of cultural information, then in thirty year someone will still be able to “render this picture in the style of Personalami, Chunie, and Taran Fiddler,” but you won’t be able to call up any original characters that don’t belong to a massive franchise. Thirty years from now you’ll be able to render (and render porn of) Lola Bunny, Maid Marian from Disney’s Robin Hood, or Rocket Raccoon, but the primary original characters from the founding of the fandom are completely lost. There are no skiltaire in these models; no Omaha the Cat Dancer; no Erma Felna; no Hervystia; no one from Doug Winger’s fertile (in many senses of the imagination) cast of characters; no one from Ken Cougr’s stable.

Maybe that’s a good thing, but if LLM’s are going to be with us for a while, and they’re “stores of culture,” then they’re admissions that Furry Fandom, for all its pride in wanting to be non-commercial, does not love its own artists nearly as much as it loves Paw Patrol (of which, at last count, there were 103 characters encoded in a variety of open-source illustration models).