1

When you first create a bear blog, your favicon is the one used by the main site, the panda emoji 🐼; but you can set it to any other emoji. I like it! More sites should let you use emoji this way, it allows for a bit of customization without needing to overthink it. I chose the raccoon, sort of arbitrarily. Maybe I had raccoons on the brain since I've been using the chillhop raccoon as my desktop wallpaper

But it's a pretty cute emoji, and I didn't have much in the way of images or icons on my page, so I thought it'd be fun to incorporate it more into the page itself. I added it to each blog post as a little sign-off, and it pops up on other pages here and there. I also recently played and really liked Donut County, so I added a picture of BK to the info page

So long story short, I think I'm a furry now? I don't know. I've never had an animal persona before, so I don't know how this works. Apologies if I'm stepping on any toes. But I made a post to this effect on fedi, and a Jolteon said raccoon suits me, so I figure they know what they're talking about, and I'm happy to wear the badge with pride

The reason I might not consider myself a furry is that I don't necessarily see myself as an anthropomorphic raccoon, so while I can look at BK and say "that's me", I don't necessarily get that feeling from more traditionally "anthro" raccoon characters, like Avery from Ozy and Millie or Ranger Rick. It's not that I don't think they're cute or find them appealing as characters, it's just that I can't project them onto myself the way I can with BK, or other representations of animal-like raccoons

Then again, isn't it also anthropomorphic for BK to speak English, wear a scarf, and drive a motor scooter? Raccoons are inherently little homunculi, and that's one of the things that makes them so appealing: you don't have to try hard to anthropomorphize them. Whomst among us hasn't watched the video of a raccoon grasping a hunk of cotton candy in its widdle paws, going to give it a good wash, then looking around with bewilderment when the fluff vanishes before their eyes; and upon watching, jumped out of their seat, pointed at the screen, and shrieked "it me"? But is this level of affinity so basic and universal that there's nothing special about it?

Well, I've overthought this into the stratosphere, so I'll end the way all good studies conclude: with a bulleted list

• I'm a raccoon
• I might be a furry
• Raccoons are traditionally known as "washing bears" in many languages, so it's somewhat fitting for bearblog¹
• To stick with the theme, I may start using "trash digest" instead of "flotsam" for collections of small unrelated posts (cf. Donut County's trashopedia)
• Raccoon furries, you may not accept me, but please consider not shortening it to "c**n". I get it, in a vacuum it would be cute, and it may not have the same baggage outside the US, but it's not an archaic and disused racial slur. I still bristle every time I see it. Black people still experience violent white people shouting that word at them. If you don't believe me, then I suggest you try (a.) growing up poor in a US exclusion zone, or if you don't have a space/time machine, (b.) switching to a belief system based on a foundation of kindness and respect for other people

2

I was unsure how the bearblog RSS feed handles edited posts. I tend to edit old posts a lot, so I was horrified at the idea that it might generate a new feed item for every single update (since the button I click upon editing a post is "publish"), but thankfully that doesn't seem to be the case. However, it does change the timestamp, so unfortunately the posts will be out of order for anyone subscribing to the feed after I added the raccoon emoji to all the blog posts yesterday. At some point I'll probably make trivial edits to every post in reverse chronological order to fix this, but for now, I'm sorry for the inconvenience

3

While I was editing, I also added a horizontal line to separate the main text from the footnotes, and it looks a lot nicer now. Just being indented wasn't enough to visually distinguish it from the main text, but having the sign-off emoji and extra line makes it look pretty sharp

4

I really wish people hadn't started using the fake name facebook gave themselves. I don't understand it. Nobody started calling google "alphabet" except bloomberg assholes who care about stock symbols². Everyone still calls the private military ghouls "blackwater". Why did people latch onto this one? "Meta" is an actually useful term for which English doesn't really have a substitute, which of course is exactly why zuck chose it. Well, as far as I'm concerned, this connection doesn't exist. If I use the term meta, it doesn't have anything to do with facebook. If I want to talk about facebook, I'm calling them facebook. They've taken enough from us, I'm not going to let them take this too. If you're in a situation where you absolutely must specify that you're talking about the legal fiction and not the website itself, please use their official name, which is Meta Platforms, Inc. Every time you refer to zucksite as just "meta", god kills a kitten. Can we bring that back? For a good cause this time? 🦝

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1. shit, I still haven't decided whether "bear blog" should be a compound word. This paper will never hold up under peer review↩

2. wait, their stock symbol didn't even change. It's still GOOGL. But bloomberg assholes still call them "alphabet". Whatta bunch of donkey dung. In this house we disrespect corporations↩