QST Metaverse & Furries Cover
The November 2023 QST, the Journal of the American Radio Relay League[1], had an interesting cover to say the least. I first saw this on fuckhams post, and thought it was a clever photoshop. When it arrived in my mail box, I was dumbfounded.
The League has recently been aquised of being out of touch with it's members and the myARRLvoice group has been critical of recent board decisions. Based on people involved, I think both sides are highly corrupt in different ways. The most telling thing was a recent post on their facebook group showing the ARRL study that of the 3000 new members they get each year, only 200-300 are a member in their third year[2]. This is just bad for the future of the League.
The League has been trying to connect with younger people and is now at a fevered pace. I think someone saw this article as a way to connect, since it's all video games to them. Further, they decided it needed to be on the cover! When many, many people brought up this was clearly a Furry Fetish inspired thing, the League PR people doubled down on it.
My point of writing this is not that I have an issue with Furry Fandom people, but rather that the League is so bereft of fresh ideas and content they put this on the cover. I suspect this was a joke that went too far, or a great hack just to see if it could get published. This is an MIT Level hack and my hat's off to the Author for getting this published.
Evidence of Furriness
Reading the article, it's clear the Author is a Furry, and any person of normal intelligence would see this. This is not only a metaverse, but Neos is primarily inhabited by people in the Furry Fandom subculture[3].
Facts: The author is listed as "Oryx 'Rucio' K0RYX", a Oryx is a type of animal and his callsign at the FCC shows that as his name.[4]
However, this is a vanity call, and his prior call K2ORX, shows his given name of "Jeremy Bair".[5] Note that you don't need an ID to change the name on a vanity application.
So searching for this fursona (persona, but for furries) shows this link https://www.furtrack.com/index/character:rucio_(oryx)[6].
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I belive this is the author in his fur suite at various conventions. You can see their online meta-fursona "dabbing" in the back.
http://quakefox.com/finder/?fursuitid=497&name=Oryx
That shows they are in MD and the twitter (now X) handle @RucioDonk https://twitter.com/RucioDonk
https://www.weasyl.com/~rucio
A google search for that, comes up with more furry fetish stuff.To say this is not a furry thing is disingenuous. I have no issue with furries, rather my issue is the ARRL which not only didn't catch this obvious troll, but put it on the cover and promoted it further.To the furries behind this, excellent trolling. This is an MIT level hack.
