islanddlost404

Shane gets the condo because of his shame and internalized homophobia, AND ALSO to protect the hookups with Ilya. He can't have Ilya seen at his home, he's getting nervous about hotel meetups, but he also CANNOT stop their hookups — he can never ever let that go. So this change not only diminishes the extreme fear and shame he’s feeling, but it totally undermines Shane's insatiable horniness and absolute inability to deny sex with Ilya, despite the shame (as does the 2-year gap, but that’s a whole other thing). 

Adding that gap and cutting the condo takes away Shane's fundamental characteristic of loving sex with Ilya so much that it overpowers his deep deep fear of being gay. So in the show, this positions him as wanting a real relationship much earlier in the timeline than he does in the book. Leading to the virginal-sub of all time characterization in fanon, which just isn't #myShane.

But ALSO! Cutting the condo also changes Ilya. It undermines Ilya's yearning and loneliness in the HR years. Ilya's loneliness gets a little lost in the show, with Svetlana as a real friend, not just an occasional hookup. In the book, it's so obvious in how much Ilya romanticizes Shane's life. He sees Shane's happy family from afar and tells himself he doesn't need or deserve that, while he secretly longs for it so hard. So, Shane keeping him emotionally AND physically at arms length only enhances Ilya's self-denial and makes the tuna melt scene so much more vulnerable in the book. And despite Ilya’s bone-deep yearning, even when Shane is finally wanting to be something more, Ilya is STILL reluctant to go to the cottage because he thinks it will be an indication to Shane that he wants to commit. And that makes the Skip kiss even more impactful, because it's the push Ilya needed to let himself *have this.* (And even then, they both go to the cottage expecting that this will be the end, a last hurrah kind of thing.)

Without this clear indicator of where Shane has been withholding and where Ilya has been silently wanting more, the show presents Shane as wanting a relationship since before Sochi, and Ilya as a withholding asshole who can’t make up his mind and keeps Shane hanging on. 

And it kind of muddies the waters, when the book perfectly sets up the conflict in TLG: Shane's internalized homophobia & shame & insistence on secrecy (to his own comfort level) -vs- Ilya's resistance to emotional vulnerability and honesty with Shane despite his deep desire to be seen and loved loudly, because Shane has been hiding him away since 2013.

One of my favorite moments in HR is when Ilya reveals he's been longing to be with Shane in his real bed for YEARS, and it’ll always be a moment I wish we got to see. What I wouldn’t give to see Hudson’s beautiful face reacting to that reveal!

In the books, Shane's need for control comes out by forcing the distance between them, because if he doesn't have real feelings for Ilya then everything is fine and he doesn't have to admit anything to himself. Physical distance = emotional distance. The sex condo gives him that space and distance so that he can feel in control and like it isn't really that big of a deal that he's sleeping with Ilya. He'll wait for hours in the condo for Ilya to show up and tell himself that he's about to leave and end everything; and even though we know (and he knows) he's not going to do that, he wouldn't be able to play that fantasy in his own home because it's not a place he can really leave.

And I think with the show, because they had to get rid of the sex condo and that pressure valve that Shane gave himself, they decided to bring the food control in early.

In TLG, Shane can no longer hide behind distance because he has accepted that he's in love with Ilya. No emotional distance and no sex condo distance. BUT he has brand new stressors because he has a relationship he deeply cares for that he's terrified will become known. So he has to clamp down on all of his own emotions to make sure they're not visible at any time. And this manifests with his increased control over his food. Control his food, control his emotions. Control the way he is perceived by everyone.

To me, bringing in the food control early to try and replace the sex condo doesn't work the same. Especially since they bring it in before he and Ilya ever properly hook up, it makes it seem more like just a facet of Shane's personality than a reaction to the relationship stress/internalized homophobia he's under. And it gets confused because there are several plot-relevant food scenes (the tuna melts and sharing the fritters/fries with Rose) that make his macrobiotic diet seem inconsistent.

It also makes me worry about how they're going to have to make Shane even more strict in season 2 so that they can show that there is pressure building inside Shane he's unwilling to admit to that is requiring him to exert more control over himself. I get that the discussion around Shane's food and whether he has an ED should be nuanced, but to me, TLG walks the line with it where it is happening and isn't super healthy but it also isn't a real concern. He isn't enjoying his food but he's still eating enough to maintain his professional athlete body. And I worry that bringing it in too soon in the show means it is going to go places that are more concerning in season 2.

through the pain of being sick

he’s just outta there

it installs a user-login-time "startup" executable that ignores any windows directives to disable it on startup. doing so only removes the even-more-malicious taskbar-icon-creating advertisement-notification-creating process. no matter what you do, the sleeper "updater" process starts when you log in, and runs perpetually

it sends & receives encrypted network traffic both periodically and non-periodically. both are bad, both are suspicious, and a program doing both is more suspicious than the sum of their parts. and to boot: acrobat will polymorphically edit its code after such network activity

this isn't new: it has always done this. now, it does not even do the thing it is meant to: provide a way to interact with documents, which is amongst the very first features computers were built to provide. you can merely open PDFs and read some of their content in the narrow space between the requests for adobe to give them your money, and interface for features you cannot use (because you don't) or do not, have not, and will not ever need

adobe and microsoft would very much like the user's cultural norms around computers to allow for advertisement built into the local software and even operating system itself. the web being 100% advertisements was not enough! sure enough, acrobat will hijack the windows notifications system thing to give you the 2026 equivalent of pop-ups

i don't really know enough about windows software equivalents, so i'll paypal $20 to the first person that reblogs this with a list of 3-5 PDF reader/editor/etc acrobat equivalents that meet the following criteria:

open source, locally-built executables must match checksum of prebuilt distributed executable

no paid features/premium version/subscription/whatever

not a toy hobby project thing, must be windows-users-proof

KDE Okular: is a decent viewer and can also do basic annotations, and is so not-a-toy that you can even download it on the Windows app store.

Here's what I need you to do:

If you see a post with a "mature content" label, and it's 2026, DM me a link to the post.

Yes, that's really it.

I am hoping to collect several thousand such posts, so that I have a decent sized dataset. I do not care what the post is about; if it's labeled as "mature content", I want to add it to my dataset.

The simple act of holding a camera in my homeland of Western Sahara can be a crime. When Sahrawi film-makers and journalists attempt to document everyday life under Moroccan occupation, they can often end up in prison cells. For the Moroccan regime, a camera in the hands of a Sahrawi threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco. In contrast, when celebrated international names in the film industry wish to capture an ideal picture for an epic journey, and decide that our land is exotic enough to shoot the desired scenes, they are welcomed, escorted and granted access by the same authorities that usually deny us that right. [...] Nolan’s choice to film in an occupied territory highlights the extractivist practices embedded in the western film industry. Western cinema has often been complicit in mining stories and immaterial culture from the global south at a scale no smaller than the material resources mined by the western colonial industrial complex. International film crews parachute in, shoot our faces, clothing, dunes and material culture, then fly off. For them, it seems we are simply decorative elements for their sets and back in New York, London or Paris, they gain prestige, box-office returns and awards. For Nolan’s Dakhla shoot, he appears to have neither sought our consent nor considered the ethics of in effect helping to prop up and legitimise Morocco’s occupation, thus making the space even more unsafe for Sahrawis living under it. He is actively participating in a state-sponsored PR campaign designed to legitimise an illegal occupation.