A plug for FurAffinity
If you use the Internet (and if you're reading this some other way, please let me know how), you know that all that free content comes with a curse: animated adverts. Granted, your favourite websites have to pay the bills somehow, and a certain big company in Mountain View figured out a great way to do this fairly unobtrusively ... but other advertising firms weren't so gracious. So we are cursed with adverts that suck up bandwidth (often far more than the page content itself), suck up processor power, and are so ubiquitous that we ignore them anyway.
Or even better, we give in and use the only tool that makes extensive websurfing even possible without a T-1 connection and a supercomputer: the ad blocker. I run FireFox, so I use AdBlock Plus, which is pretty much the standard ad blocker for the flaming vulpine.
Ad blockers have two problems, though. First, because they automatically opt you out of essentially any adverts hosted on any of thousands of advertising services, regardless of the page on which you're actually viewing them, they harm the revenue stream of your favourite websites. And second, if you frequent a narrowly targeted website that insures its adverts are similarly narrowly targeted, you may miss out on stuff that you actually would want to buy.
(On the flip side, if you're stupid enough to buy car insurance from someone whose Flash advert features a row of dancing green chickens, you deserve what's coming to you).
While I was at RainFurrest and didn't have my usual computer, I pulled up FurAffinity on my smartphone ... and I was surprised to see advertisements on the page. Remember how I said adverts are so ubiquitous that we ignore them? Apparently we also don't even notice when there used to be adverts on a page and then they suddenly go away. Yes, FurAffinity is now so big that it has drawn the attention of the people who manage AdBlock Plus's filter list, and ABP now blocks adverts on FurAffinity.
Of course, FA is one of those narrowly targeted websites that I happen to fancy, and I would prefer it to get all the money it can ... not to mention I probably would purchase (and indeed have purchased) things that it advertises. So if you use ABP, I'd urge you to unblock adverts on FA. The load on your computer and Internet connection will be small, since FA uses only animated GIFs and not Flash or HTML5 animations.
On any FA page, go to the ABP dropdown menu and select "Disable on furaffinity.net".
Then open the preferences panel and make sure the exception rule for "@@||furaffinity.net^$document" has its "enabled" checkbox checked.
It's good for the site, and it's good for you.