Category: Blog

Original post written by Ahmar Wolf

Original post written by Ahmar Wolf

A crowded Westin hotel on Saturday afternoon. The convention has doubled in size while staying in the same footprint. (Flayrah/Eberra Wolf)

When Anthro New England had its fourth year in the Westin Boston Seaport Hotel last month, it was obvious to attendees that it had outgrown the space that it occupies. When moving into the Westin in 2023, after being in the Boston Park Plaza hotel for a few years, there were 3,548 attendees. By 2026 they have more than doubled that, to 7,284. All the event space in the Westin had already been contracted out in 2023, and there isn’t additional space to grow in the hotel. Yet the convention needs more of it.

At the end of closing ceremonies, the convention hinted at expansion, telling attendees to wait for an announcement later in the year. Flayrah has been given exclusive information, in a series of interviews, on the plans the convention has for the future of the convention. While not finalized, it gives a glimpse into negotiations and plans often kept hidden from public view by organizers.

read more

Original post written by EberraWolf

The Ohio Grassman was kind of featured in Episode 6 of Season 5 of MonsterQuest, which also touched upon some similar Bigfoot subspecies, and padded the hour out with paranormal stories about Amityville and even “time slips.”

Now the Grassman who had previously been covered during Season 2, Episode 4 of MonsterQuest has been previously reported since the 19th century, and is said to make large dens of grass and sticks from which his name is derived. Standing seven to ten feet tall, the Grassman weighs between 300 to 1,000 lbs…

In Galena, Ohio in 2017, a man went walking his Doberman near dusk when a black thing jumped from a ridge to a bush, throwing a rock and then a tree branch at him. Other branches followed, and the man walked through a creek to retreat back to his house. The creature or creatures followed, knocking over his pool furniture, deforming a chain link fence, and knocking underneath a deck that he was standing upon. He later found 15″ foot impressions in his mulch bed…

The Spottsville Monster plagued a family at an isolated farm in Kentucky near the banks of the Green River. In 1975, chickens began disappearing from the farm, with strange noises heard in the field. A chained goat was later taken, with the chain broken. A pony and dogs were also killed. While waiting for a school bus, a large 9 to 10 foot tall creature was seen. The property owners decided to dig in, and with friends and neighbors laid in wait upon a rooftop, firing upon creatures heard in the surrounding woods one evening…

In the Amityville, New York site of the infamous slaughter of an entire family in 1974, the killer contended that “voices within the house made me do it.” The subsequent occupant of the house in 1975 reported seeing two red eyes in the boat house of the property, and later a horned figure’s head seen in a fire. A giant white hooded figure was later seen on a staircase, and the front door was torn from its hinges. These accounts were apparently given as illustrations of hostile presences invading domestic places, although the invaders were more demonic than biological entities.

An encounter with the Fouke Monster in Arkansas in May of 1971 was touched upon, described as being a massive, hair-covered beast. It was speculated that the creature may be following rivers that connect the mid-west. In Southern Indiana a girl with her dog in an isolated setting reported locking eyes with a seven-foot tall ape-like creature with tangled, reddish-brown hair. She fled the site, the next day seeing footprints in the mud that convinced her that she had seen the Fouke Monster…

Although it didn’t seem congruent with the other stories, the last segment of the hour touched upon time slips, a reported paranormal phenomenon where a person unexpectedly travels to a different time period. These often fleeting experiences typically involve witnessing or temporarily existing in a past (or even future) era without using technology, often accompanied by a sense of dread or environmental change. At times a personal awareness appears to be gained by the experience. A 1996 case was cited in Liverpool, England where a then-contemporary person time-slipped into the 1950’s, noting the change in vehicles and stores present…

A 1981 case in South Carolina was touched upon where a young woman in a farmhouse was admonished not to go into a front room, but left alone ventured into that room to observe through a window a man on a tractor in a different season hit on the head by a tractor part. Years later, she learned that her great uncle had died from an accident on a tractor in that location…Spooky, but not fitting in well with the other segments…

Original post written by vulpesffb

Friendly reminders for those booking #Anthrocon hotels soon:

Only paid pre-registered attendees will be issued a unique booking link
A large number of people are booking; please be patient with the system and customer service
A valid credit card is required to confirm a booking; however, no deposit is taken upon booking
Only Orchid Events can provide official hotel rooms (booked through Meetingmax), and they can only be booked online. If any other provider or website claims they have official rooms, it might be a scam.

Info: https://www.anthrocon.org/hotel/

Kaze

Original post written by Ahmar Wolf

Gdakon • 18-22.03.2026 • Radisson Blu Hotel, Sopot

It works out to $138 to $363

For more Info https://gdakon.org/

Original post written by Ahmar Wolf

Original post written by Ahmar Wolf

Original post written by Ahmar Wolf

I am crossie, and I bid you welcome, dear reader, to my top ten movies of 2025 list! Enter freely, go safely, and leave something of the happiness you bring in the comment section, here or at my Letterboxd account!

This year, I have chosen as my Best Furry movie of the year Zootopia 2. Please do not be too surprised by this. I pick a furry movie each year as the list is not meant to be primarily furry, despite Flayrah being a furry site. In addition, I sometimes pick a movie that I saw too late to include on last year’s list, but would have made a good choice; this year that movie is The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie, and only then because it had a small awards qualifying run in 2024.

With those preliminaries out of the way, read on for the actual list. (Note that each movie title as well as movie poster has a link to either a Flayrah review, when available, or barring that, an IMDB page.)

read more

Original post written by 2cross2affliction

One of the recent topics in Messaging App Discourse is whether it makes sense to prioritize End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) when searching for an alternative to Discord.

Who’s Saying “No”?

I’m going to quote 0xabad1dea here, because she is awesome and explains my “opposition” position better than anyone else:

So You Want To Write An Open Source Discord Replacement

Things you don’t need:
– federation/distributed systems
– multiparty end-to-end encryption
(…)

0xabad1dea (link to the full post)

She then followed this up with a second post, pointing to this news story, highlighting the dangers of overconfidence in your encrypted messaging software with large numbers of hard-to-vet participants.

Her overall argument is a simple one to understand, and is congruent to the one I made in my previous post: You cannot hope to replace Discord for the overwhelming majority of its users if you don’t even know what Discord is for them. The user experience is more important to adoption than federation or even encryption. You don’t need to build infrastructure for “planning the revolution” to replace Discord.

While everything 0xabad1dea said is true, we need to stop and ask, “Why is Discord even pushing for age verification to begin with?”

Why E2EE Still Matters

You could point to the anti-porn lobby’s strategies that have been at play for years, to start with: Target infrastructure to repress everyone.

Discord isn’t pushing for this because they want to, they’re pushing for this because they’re a centralized platform used by millions of people. Not only do Christian extremist groups look for these single points of failure in their lobbying efforts, many countries and states have pushed for laws requiring platforms verify the age of the users.

Cryptographers know how to satisfy these requirements without sacrificing user privacy, but, often, these laws do not allow such measures.

Age verification requirements and centralization go hand-in-hand.

Federated platforms have two advantages, and one massive crippling disadvantage.

Federated systems do not create a giant central hub that lobbyists and right-wing politicians can target. Additionally, users can choose instances that do not exist under the jurisdiction of oppressive laws.

However, if a viable federated alternative springs up, the Christofascists will simply change their tactics: Have law enforcement investigate large instances and harass the people that operate them.

The downside of federation is that most instance operators do not have the war chest or legal resources to fight overreaching government demands (nor extralegal measures taken against payment processors). They’re lucky if their operational budget is solvent to begin with.

And that is the reason end-to-end encryption matters for federated systems: If law enforcement shows up demanding all of your user data, if it’s all encrypted so even you can’t decrypt it, you can only surrender ciphertext to the authorities.

In short, the reason multiparty end-to-end encryption is still important for any Discord alternative is as follows:

1. Any centralized system will inevitably need to comply with stupid age verification laws. Without federation, your alternative will follow suit.
2. Any federated system that has access to user messages will be a juicy target. Without E2EE, your instance operators are at high risk.

End-to-end encryption doesn’t just protect the users, it protects the people operating the infrastructure. And that’s why it still matters.

E2EE Should Be Ubiquitous

Secure end-to-end encryption needs to become table stakes for communication software.

In an age where user data is sold to the advertising industry and large language models are trained on users’ posts, the less data that service operators can slurp up, the better.

But additionally, we need to make its existence so mundane that no one becomes overconfident about their use of encryption.

“Don’t plan your crimes in a chatroom full of 300 people” should be common sense, whether or not that chatroom uses encryption properly.

E2EE Should Be Better Than Today

If your understanding of E2EE is informed by using Matrix or XMPP+OMEMO, you might think this is bonkers. That is because you are coming from a bonkers user experience.

For example, Matrix’s encryption library only allows you to buffer 40 messages before encryption becomes unusable.

In order to make E2EE ubiquitous, the developers need to step up their game to make E2EE better.

Can E2EE Scale to Thousands of Users?

Yes. I explored this in my proposal for encrypted messaging for BlueSky.

TreeKEM from RFC 9420 (Messaging Layer Security) scales logarithmically to the number of participants.

A server with a million users would only require about 21 key encapsulations per group operation. The bandwidth of that is digestible for most folks. And then, for the epoch following each key agreement change, you only need symmetric-key ratcheting.

What About Message History?

What about it?

There’s no law of mathematics saying you can’t create an encrypted backup feature that lets you persist history across devices, or across identities, if you really want to. Go nuts.

Closing Thoughts

I was originally going to write this as an addendum to my Discord post, but ultimately felt it was nuanced enough to warrant a separate, focused discussion.

---

Header art: Harubaki, CMYKat, Johanna Tarkela

Original post written by Soatok