"Traveller makes me into furries?" Topic

I'm prepping to run a campaign of Pirates of Drinax for Mongoose Traveller 2nd Edition and gathering images found on Pinterest and Google Image Search to give the game visual flair.

However, since I needed Aslan and Vargr images, both Pinterest and Google think I am avidly into furries despite me doing searches only for Vargr and Aslan. My inbox is now filled with recommendations for furry images and furry topics.

If you don't know what furries are, google it. You are in for a wild ride.

Step back from your machine and get a large hammer. You must put it out of your misery and never go on the internet again.

Furries is the lowest level of Geekshood known to man. You are now on a lot of lists.You now have miles and miles of pretty brown files about your new "hobby"

Be afraid be very afraid

You will also start getting ads for furry dating sites. Gogle is pretty thorough in targeting ads toward your "interests"…

Two words: Incognito Brower.

Highbrow, lowbrow, incognito brow?

But yes, I once needed pictures of the quiet Belgian town of Bodange--scene of a serious fight in 1940. Evidently the kinky sex people can't spell, either.

Serious tip: Don't use Google, especially for offbeat topics. Use DuckDuckGo.com instead. They don't track your searches, or push advertisers to the top of the search list. So you don't wind up with garbage pushed at you because an algorithm decides you're obsessed with a given topic from a past or current search. They also claim to be politically neutral; don't know if that's true or not.
I don't always go to them, as their searches occasionally give odd results, but when Google returns their typical "Wall of Amazon" response, I switch over.

The "incognito browser" is the Chrome version of a browser run in a sandbox environment. Basically, all the "history" stuff people are talking about above is the browser, either on its own or directed by the content you load, recording bits of information for later use.

In a sandbox environment, the computer copies the relevant recorded "history" data and points the browser to the copy. That copy will be updated and changed as usual while the browser is being used. When the browser shuts down, it deletes the copy of the "history" information. The next time you open a browser (or if you open another one while the sandboxed one is running), sandboxed or not, it is mostly like the other browser session never happened.

It's the equivalent of making a large area map of the Fulda Gap. Then making a copy to mark on while you run your campaign. After the Soviets have taken over the world, you throw away the marked up map and use the original to make a new copy for a new campaign.

startpage.com is another anonymous search engine, similar to DuckDuckGo.com.

Furries weren't even a thing in 1977 when Traveller was published.

Oh, and now I see this on a news site:

link

They're everywhere!

I posted this as an Utter Drivel posting because I found this amusing. I use DuckDuckGo as my default browser, and incognito on Chrome regularly. I'm not really worried or angry about this, just bemused that Vargr and Asian led to furries.

Well, since the redoubtable Huff Post reported about it must be true!

Side note, Albedo Anthropomorphics (reasonably hard sci-fi with intelligent dialog) started in 1983. For the longest time I wondered if it was someone's home brew Traveller campaign. :-)

Furries are not all bad, but there are problems within the community. A certain portion of the furries are mildly autistic, this explains some of it but most of the draw for people to the group are the aesthetics. They grew watching animation of animals in stories and it's stayed with them. Another small portion of the furries are gay/homosexuals or bi, these are where the over exaggerated stories of the wild sex parties. Which are not as common among furries as most would believe.

The problem within the furrie community and I have heard this from furries, that it has been infiltrated by pedophiles. This is the problem among the furries.
Just because this disease is within the furries should not be a reflection against furries as a whole. But that is the dark side of it.

When searching for Bodange or any term with a super-popular use, the syntax "Bodange -sex -bdsm" works wonders. With Google (and probably other search engines), you can "subtract out" any results that have the terms you don't want. "Twilight -vampire" is another good example.

link

From your browser go into browser history/cookies and delete all the furry cookies.

Your browser should have an "anonymous browsing" setting. I was advised by someone in the computer security business to use duckduckgo duckduckgo.com and do on this Mac. I have found Qwant qwant.com to be a little more intuitive on an Android tablet.

Now looking at Startpage too startpage.com .Thank you Oberlindes

I'm a furry and I agree wholeheartedly that the fandom has some serious problems. On the other hand, I can remember a glorious afternoon where I played DOWN SYPHON with anthropomorphic figures with a bunch of burnt furs (anti-porn). And there's another furry I know whose running out of WWI & WWII sites to document.

Yeh, google can get some strange ideas.

I have noticed ever since I googled Barcelona Universial Miniture, and the browser descided I needed to search for "BUM Slot" because they are big in the slot car circles.

That was an eye opener!

Frankly Google coughing up some strange results is nothing. I remember reading a thread of car crash RPG playing experiences, on RPG net IIRC, and one that stuck in my mind was a guy who ended up playing a game with people believed they were actually vampires or elves as an article of faith…. Put all my even faintly dodgy RPG experiences in context!

There was a MagWeb.com customer who signed up, looked at about 10 articles, and asked for a refund because the castle dungeons were not the kind he/she was looking for. :)