• BabyVi@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Not gonna lie, if a Furry told me they got arrested by animal control I’d be impressed.

      • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Considering fur is a kink for a bunch of people, I’d say this is entirely likely. Even more so: your animal control Dom is also a furry.

      • HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        This is a thing at burning man every year. A group goes out as animal control with nets and catches furries. It’s an ongoing feud

      • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Considering how terminally online one has to be to find themselves on this platform, I’m surprised how little any of y’all know about furries

        And well, it’s not literally animals in that sense. At least not the entire community.

      • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        That happened to me once! I was 15 and going to school, was riding a Lotus Eclair I’d fixed up. I entered the school zone and wanted to see if I could get over 25 mph. But there was a cop hiding and I got a ticket. I had to tell my parents, and I think they were impressed with my 31 in a 25 speeding ticket.

        The best part was having to go to court, and the judge asking how I got a Lotus (she was thinking of a car) and then upon learning the truth, asking the officer why he was wasting his time stopping a kid on a bicycle.

    • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      10 months ago

      It’s because furries are overwhelmingly queer and often used as a stand in for fear mongering about trans people (ex: the “litter boxes in schools” rumor).

        • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          10 months ago

          I would say it’s more that they recognize furries are largely a queer subculture (regardless of the fact that straight furries exist) and correctly recognize it as less objectionable to most people’s sensibilities to say you’re getting furries removed from schools by animal control than it is to say you’re getting queer kids removed from schools by animal control.

          • Jimmyeatsausage@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            It sounds really outlandish until you remember that in the 80s, DnD was used to make everyone afraid of a literal Satan, and we ended up with children testifying they were flown across the country and back to participate in Satanic rituals or flushed down toilets into hidden chambers where people were sacrificing live animals to the Dark Lord in the 8-9 hours they were at daycare.

            People went to prison over this.

            • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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              10 months ago

              In the early 90s my mom was convinced Satanic women got pregnant and gave birth to babies to murder in rituals, and nobody could prove it because they gave birth outside a hospital and no record of the children existed.

              I get some of the 80s/90s nostalgia but SO much of it was just actual hell lol.

        • Furbag@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          I mean, furries have been targeted by the right for a long time, but they are nothing if not famous for winning the battle but losing the war when it comes to trying to stamp out subcultures they don’t like. They’ve finally given up on trying to legislate homosexuality away, so now they’re turning their attention to a less understood and more marginalized subculture of individuals. They’ll give up on that eventually too when they realize they’ll never win and turn their attention to the next vulnerable group to rally and galvanize their base.

      • HikingVet@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        Which stemmed from an active shooter measure that would have allowed kids to relieve themselves without out having to leave the safety of their hiding place.

          • jak@sopuli.xyz
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            10 months ago

            I know 11 year olds who would rather take a chance with a gunman than piss themselves in front of their whole class. Giving them a more dignified way to do things is only a good thing

    • Eylrid@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Being a politician is all about getting attention. The more outrageous the bill or the thing the bill is addressing the more attention. This bill will hopefully never pass, but here we are talking about it.

    • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de
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      10 months ago

      And projection that a bunch of them are probably into furries, or domination, or both.

      We clearly need Barney Frank’s ‘expose em when they oppress’ tactics back in the house.

  • Newtra@pawb.social
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    10 months ago

    anthropomorphic behavior

    Anyone else morbidly curious about what happens if they don’t fix the bill’s wording and accidentally ban “human-shaped behavior” at school?

  • Sylver@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    On one hand, this has got to be public trolling. On the other, it’s still a bill calling for a classification of people to be removed from society. If it weren’t so scary it would be funny.

    • auk@fedia.io
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      10 months ago

      Fascism demands outlandish “enemies” in order to justify punishment as policy. Usually, no suitable ones exist, so they are created through outlandish fantasy.

  • lntl@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    How does Oklahoma have nothing else to legislate on?

    • Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      They have plenty, but they’d rather distract from society’s issues as much as possible so their arctic temperature IQ constituents don’t realize how bad they have it

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      If they can keep everyone distracted by The Gays™ or whatever other sexual deviancy the redhats can dream up, then maybe people won’t notice the roads falling apart or the useless police, or more importantly, which people are stealing all the money.

    • body_by_make@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      Not saying this justifies it (kinda the opposite), but there’s a massive furry community in Oklahoma. They even used to have very large conventions there (still might?)

      • EsheLynn@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        10 months ago

        At the same time, this douchebag wants to specifically target kids who are playing pretend to make their miserable lives bearable, just to distract from real issues like trans bills, don’t say gay, and governmental corruption.

  • Furbag@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Humphrey’s bill, House Bill 3084, would ban “students who purport to be an imaginary animal or animal species, or who engage in anthropomorphic behavior commonly referred to as furries at school” from participating in class and school activities.

    This is, hands down, the worst description of furries I have ever read in my entire life.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      10 months ago

      Hell, it sounds like something Kindergarteners have been doing since forever.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        I used to pretend to be a monster at that age. Would they have to call Monster Control?

        (I was a nice monster, like on Sesame Street.)

    • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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      10 months ago

      So what I’m hearing is if I tell the teacher I’m a platypus I don’t have to go to class?

      Guaranteed if this law got passed there would be a high school somewhere where the entire student body shows up wearing cat ears.

    • Red_October@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Ironically also means that it basically wouldn’t apply to anyone unless that person specifically wants it to. Performative outrage bill.

    • Globeparasite@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      yeah you see you can’t do the intelligent thing of just saying “you have to come to school with normal clothes on” which is literally what countries with a brain did. Also this is generally left to the school to set up. In France the law just says that a school is allowed to implement rules regarding clothing. Just simply think of P.E clothing. The law has a couple safeguard like you can’t ban a specific outfit for being from another culture (obvious) and the rest is left for the school to decide

      • Hobo@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Like basically every school in the US has a dress code already. Don’t get this twisted into something else, this is purely performative nonsense by some backwoods inbred redneck.

    • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      I mean the impression I had for like a decade was essentially this. Then a guy sent me links on how to be his specific type of fantasy creature. It was sergel or sergal iirc. It had some really weird backstory and lore to the species detailing how they were warlords or something and I was really weirded out. It was very much like how some kids I went to school with would loose it if you told them that they weren’t whatever comic or movie character they were hyperfixated on, only more socially awkward and adults doing it.

      Anyway I feel like that’s as close as you can get without reading out someones entire backstory novel.

      • Eccitaze@yiffit.net
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        10 months ago

        …yeah that sounds about right for sergals, tbh

        Generally speaking, once you get past the “traditional” species like foxes, rabbits, cats, etc., and start getting more into the esoteric fantasy/scifi species like sergals, protogens, and yinglets, the people who create characters for those species tend to fall into one of two camps:

        • super srs “you must follow this lore to the letter or I will end you, by which I mean I will post a FurAffinity journal for my 7 followers complaining about your character diverging from the lore that nobody will pay attention to” types

        • “oh this looks cool I’m gonna make one and put my own twist on the design” types

        Funny story, the person who originally designed protogens tried to be the first type, but pretty much everyone ignored him and just did their own thing anyway

      • AMDIsOurLord@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Sergal

        It’s originally from a Japanese series or something I’m not really well versed into that specific lore

      • paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        The above description would fit many many circumstances that are not furry related or problematic at all. Saying “I’m a cat. no, really” or meowing or licking your hand would all fit that description, (except not really because the word anthropomorphic is used wrong), but don’t mean a person is a furry. Moreover these behaviors by themselves don’t cause any problems unless you imagine a bunch of other stuff that’s not included in this definition.

        So it is an overbroad law that allows prosecutors to apply it selectively and at the same time is very hard to defend against.

        A better definition for the purpose of the law would describe some behavior that actually causes damage to society, like disrupting class or arresting kids at school for saying they are a cat.

        A better definition of a furry would probably include some kind of pattern of behavior and the extent to which it impacts daily life, as here

      • CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        I wouldn’t use a definition that includes some kid prancing around race track pretending to be a horse. That’s just kids being kids and politicians need to stop sexualizing them.

        • AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world
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          10 months ago

          Not even sexualizing, right?

          I love furry culture because I can see the art that’s intended for Magic The Gathering cards before it goes into print.

          The internet has to get over this furry shame and start collectively recognizing that a tail is like a necktie for your butt, and everyone should have one, because it’s rather flattering.

  • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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    10 months ago

    Imagine being an animal control guy and having a school seriously call you and ask you to take a stranger’s child because of that child’s participation in a subculture.

    • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Pretty sure that will leave the animal control people open to being charged with botched citizen arrests. Not sure what Oklahoma’s particular arrest laws are like but for most States you are pretty limited in what you can do to perform one and the standards of places you can use to detain an arrested person in are usually at least required to be humane and actively monitored.

      The answer to "Little Timmy wore a tiger costume to school for Halloween do you have a cage available? " should properly be “Get fucked authoritarian scum I have actual work to do.”

    • scoobford@lemmy.zip
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      10 months ago

      Imagine working for the state and being ordered to engage in a random citizen’s kink.

      Yes, I know being a furry isn’t just a kink.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        being ordered to engage in a random citizen’s

        That’s called oppression. Also furry is an identity, believe it or not.

          • Catoblepas@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            10 months ago

            There aren’t fursuits in class and the bill is worded so broadly that saying “meow” would violate it.

            • pythonoob@programming.dev
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              10 months ago

              Ah well I guess I assumed the bill was written to remove people wearing fur suits to class. In general yeah, you shouldn’t remove someone from class because they’re a furry.

              • CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social
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                10 months ago

                A bill prohibiting fursuits in class, beyond how rare it would be for a student to have one in the first place, would be redundant anyway, because I’m pretty sure such things wouldn’t fit most schools dress code anyway

          • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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            10 months ago

            I doubt any kid is gunna wear a full mascot costume to school outside of the actual school mascot. Those costumes cost thousands of dollars to buy and at least half a grand to make from scratch and proper cleaning and maintenance means it fits into furry culture in the same function as wearing a tux . It’s a rare highschool student who can afford one and a rarer one who would risk wearing one where it might be ruined.

            The most you are likely to see is Halloween style cat ears and tails of the variety that are readily bought at the gift shop of a zoo… Which kids love to wear because kids like animals in a “I’m pretending I’m a tiger grrr rawr!” schoolyard kind of way.

            Kids like weird stuff and have a narrow band of time to play pretend and express themselves beyond adult judgment. Trying to up the humiliation factor and traumatizing kids for doing regular kid stuff and coming down hard on a largely made up problem is just double mild weak sauce in action. Guy’s a jerk.

            • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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              10 months ago

              I don’t know if any kid beyond the age of like 5 that acts like an animal. 30 years ago when I was in school it was never a thing either.

              There’s a huge difference between a kid (under 10) and a young adult (17, 28 or older) doing this stuff. You know as well as I do that Furries aren’t just a group of kids playing as animals on the playground for an hour, it goes a lot deeper than that.

              • Drivebyhaiku@lemmy.world
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                10 months ago

                I mean 20 years ago it was already a thing. I have enough friends who were at very least furry adjacent to know that for the majority of them it was basically a lower key funny art thing with an element where people were expressing themselves kind of the same way they resonated with like horoscopes and things with a fashion element. Like we had people who wore cat ears because they thought they were cute or drew avatars of themselves and their friends as animals because of some sort of perceived caracature of your traits physical or personality based.

                Cosplay culture was something that was on the rise when I was a kid but being a goth was huge when I was in school. It was all skulls, vampire shit, and leather spiked collars, bracers , trenchcoats and fishnets and kind of kitschy fake witchcraft you pretended was actually spooky … But of all the kids that kind of were into it most were completely oblivious to how many of those fashion elements came from the bdsm and fetish community and really couldn’t have cared less because that wasn’t why they liked it. SO many of us were complete prudes by any standard. Like, of my cohort of goth kids about 75 percent of us were still virgins when we graduated.

                Teenagers like to play dressup just like your 5 year old does, that’s why anime conventions are so dang popular. We’re just old now and the stuff changes and it doesn’t make sense to us.

                • pete_the_cat@lemmy.world
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                  10 months ago

                  Wearing cat ears or drawing someone as an animal isn’t as extreme wearing a full-body animal suit and telling people to call you “buttercup”, that’s the shit I’m talking about.

                  Also you can’t even compare being Goth to being a Furry.

  • ashok36@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Lawmaker: "If these flurries think they’re animals, we’re gonna treat them like animals! "

    Furries: “Yes, that’s exactly what we want.”

  • Maple Engineer@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Moral panic.

    The right isn’t happy unless it’s panicked about some moral outrage. In the absence of anything to be panicked about they make things up to be panicked about.

    • Seasoned_Greetings@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      I just described this phenomenon to a friend of mine today. We were talking about how racism evolved by the same people to be disgust against gay/trans folk. I explained to him that conservatives require an outgroup to hate on in order to operate and be happy.

      This mother fucker took a second and said “Do you think modern conservative discrimination was caused by the fall of the Soviet union? I mean, when communism was a big threat everybody was united and happy hating the soviets”

      My boy really trying to paint the red scare as a good thing

    • Globeparasite@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      the thing is if they solve the real stuff the don’t have anything to campaign next time

      (this work for all parties)

        • RubberElectrons@lemmy.world
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          I’m personally unhappy with arms being sent to Israel workout approval of shitbox Congress (no typo), and how bad housing and food prices have gotten… But not really a panic, those are very real things.

          Not this anti-furry shaming bullshit. What a waste of people’s time for something hurting nobody.

          Almost as dumb as that (both sides) argument.

  • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
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    Can’t wait to see the reporting on the fallout from this, if it goes forward.

    Bureaucratic backlash from department heads at Animal Control, and whichever state administration or department that their chain of authority ultimately flows down from.

    Overzealous Animal Control officer who assaults a child that a school administrator called in for pickup.

    Mass student protests of dozens of kids going to school as furries

    And that’s just a few off the top of my head. The possibilities are endless.

    • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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      10 months ago

      Mass student protests of dozens of kids going to school as furries

      This sounds like the kind of protest id participate in when I was in school. As a parent I’d totally wear a fur suit to pick up my kids as a form of protest

      • evranch@lemmy.ca
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        10 months ago

        For real, shit-disturbing teenage me would have immediately flipped from “furries are dumb and weird” to “what’s the minimum requirement to count as a furry” as soon as I found out that animal control would have to pick us up.

        The thought of an old-school dog catcher chasing me with a net while I ran away wearing floppy dog ears is just too amazing to pass up.

        What about a fish. Could I be a fish? Oh, what a time to be grown up and with kids of my own instead of being able to be a ridiculous jackass.

  • inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Who is Oklahoma Rep. Justin Humphrey?

    Humphrey has made headlines in recent years in his advocacy of prison reform, capital punishment reform and rural development.

    Oh I see now, he’s a dumb fuck white, rural, racist dumbass who saw something on the internet that made him feel funny and then tried to pray and then legislate the feelings away.

    Also more on Justin Humphrey via wikipedia:

    Humphrey’s efforts to introduce cockfighting legislation[27] has led to the outcry from animal rights advocates[28] and the former attorney general.[29] Oklahoma has been called the “Cockfighting Capitol of the United States.”[30] HB 2530, pushed by Justin Humphrey, died on April 13, 2023, for the second year in a row. Tulsa District Attorney Steve Kunzweiler said he was glad cockfighting remained a felony.[31] Transphobia and homophobia

    Humphrey has made multiple transphobic comments. In an email responding to a constituent Humphrey said “I understand transgender people have mental illness”.[32] This view is not supported by the World Health Organization or the American Psychiatric Association.[32] In an interview published after the incident on April 15, 2021, Humphrey doubled down by saying “I want to tell your audience there is no transgender. There is male and there is female. And transgender would be a mental health issue… So those people that say I’m bigoted, I will say you’re insane and you’re doing the people wrong by doing that.”[32] Freedom Oklahoma, an LGBT advocacy group, denounced Humphrey’s comments calling them “a long-debunked myth”.[32]

    Humphrey was quoted as saying “You’re dang skippy I’ll take my kid to a chicken fighting before I’m gonna take them to see a drag queen."[31]

    On the flip side, myself and my high school friends way, way back in the day would have a had a field day with this type of dumbass law. Would be a shame if this passed and students were to test the law and their parents and their state/local traffic engineers who probably didn’t think of this type of dumbass shit ever happening.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      When I was in high school, for some reason I will never know, the library had a concrete box of sand next to the two staircases that went to the library’s second level (it was a pretty big school). The mascot was the Panthers, and I always wanted to do a senior prank where I put fake dog shit in the sandbox and put a sign up that said ‘the panther’s litter box.’ Sadly, I never got around to it. But if this had been a law when I was in high school, I was such an asshole punk kid that I would have taken a shit there myself while meowing like a cat just to make a point.

    • gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      So, presumably he’d be okay with the furries if they were fighting each other?

  • Emerald@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    Imagine if this passes and the next day the entire school staff dresses up as furries in protest. “Okay Timmy you see that person with the fox outfit on? That’s your teacher today.”

    honestly small children might love that

      • skyspydude1@lemmy.world
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        10 months ago

        Yeah, a decent one is going to be $300-500. For a partial, the head is the most expensive part, and cheaping out on it is a great way to get some S-tier nightmare fuel. Full suits are minimum $1000, but I’d say a good one is at least double that, and they can go into the $5k+ range.

    • gmhh@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I have a friend who makes mascot costumes. She and her husband sometimes wear them out for entertainment. Little kids absolutely ADORE seeing human-sized Pokemon walking around the mall, bowling alley, or the like.

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I see all these silly rules being floated and part of me almost wishes I was back in high school so I could be really annoying.