just stuff

The second half, which we weren’t made aware of until the day we were meant to turn this one in, was to trade USB drives with the person sitting next to us and MODIFY their “unreadable” code without getting any help from them.

This was to teach us two things:

1) In this field, you’ll spend more time working with code written by other people than you will writing original code from a blank slate. The people who wrote the original code will probably not be around to help you. Learning to read code is IMPORTANT, even if it seems unreadable.

2) There is a strong brotherhood/sisterhood among programmers and software engineers. Respect that bond when you’re writing code and documentation. In my professor’s words: “When you write code, pretend that the person who will have to maintain it after you’re gone is a homicidal maniac who knows where you live.”

Choreograph it in the same respect that you would any scene. If you can do this, you can have some confidence that your porn is exactly as good as your fights, your key gambling maneuvers, your political oneupsmanship, whatever. The key to writing any scene is to know where everyone is and what they are doing and impart this from the lens of the point of view character. If something feels "off" or weird, check in with yourself: what is the point of view character doing? Say it. She has her nails digging into her lover's shoulders. Was that, what she's doing, the last sentence? Let her react to it instead: the thrill of hot blood against her fingertips is intoxicating.

Many of the "porn mistakes" are just writing mistakes, and writing is an unending dialogue between the material (what is physically happening) and the ideal (how a perspective processes the material, with human and personal limitations but also human and personal additions). When you've firmly established the material, you move back to the ideal, the thought-space, the recollection-space, the processing. Then back to the material. Each action spins out and away from the earth, into the ether, where it is reintegrated, leveraged, subverted, and then returns, changed, to collide with the earth again, changing it in turn.

You do not have to say words for penis over and over any more than you need to keep clarifying proper names in a dialogue, and in fact, even less than this. Remember, unless your character is specifically having sex with the penis, she is in fact having sex with a woman, and her feelings and reactions and ideal likely center that woman more than her penis. Put her in dialogue with the woman rather than the penis and you have your answer: you only need to say cock as many times as you would say "rapier" in a swordfight. Once you know what sword it is, you move to sensation, movement, "large scale choreography", and processing.

The unique thing when talking about genitals is that most people don't think much about genitals when they are having sex. They think about sensations: what feels good, unexpected, painful, pleasant, intimate, jarring, etc. Saying "her cock" over and over is not just a little offputting because it's excessively repetitive; it's like putting "gauntlet" in five subsequent paragraphs. We get that there's a gauntlet and a penis. It feels wrong because the gauntlet is an extension of the striking-appendage and the penis is an extension of a character.

To avoid saying gauntlet over and over, as in any writing, you either get vaguer or get specificer. You describe the interaction with the wrist-plate, where the rapier rebounds from the shape of the steel, or the fingertip sliced-through by the superior blade, just barely shallow enough to spare the digit beneath (specific). Alternately, you get vaguer and describe the strike itself - the reader knows there's a gauntlet there! - a fist thrown in desperation after losing hold of a dagger, the weight both pulling down the blow and putting momentum behind it until it meets the enemy's helmet with more of a thud than a clang as the cheap steel crumples into the leather padding beneath, dented skull-deep.

Neither of those used "gauntlet". Both used the concept of the gauntlet. This can be done with anything that you establish - once it's on the stage, it's not off until you take it off.

Of course it helps, to an extent, to have had the kind of sex you are describing. It helps more to have been thoughtful about your own sensation and reaction and action during sex in general; few people really do this, but doing it is extremely useful for writing, the same way riding a horse and not thinking about it will lead you to over-describe the tack you're familiar with vs. riding a horse and thinking about it will help you develop a coherent material dialogue with the content of your own narrative. To an extent, to write about sex, you need to have some level of comfort thinking and reading about sex. Anyone can do those two things, and allow themself to think: at the moment of being penetrated, is her shaft sliding into my fragrant blossom? Or is the sensation more like pressure, more like pain, more like an insistent heat, more like an awareness of her and her shape or an awareness of myself and my limits or my pleasure?

As in sword fights, it helps to imagine yourself in the scene rather than only observing it, when it comes to blocking out a scene like something other than stage directions or a video game novelization.

The last thread this leads me to is pussy. No one wants to write pussy, unless they do. So they write entrance, which you can only really write once before it sounds goofy. Or cunt, which not every character would say. There is not really a cock of pussy, at least in my literary opinion. So how do you say this stuff? How do you say "into her pussy" if it causes you physical pain to write pussy?

You may not need to specify at all. When penetrating someone, you are penetrating a person, not just an organ. Depending on the nature of the sex, you may want to get into more or less detail, but I'm not talking to the people who are already writing about the color of the labia and the specific tactile sensation of a blood-flushed clit, okay? I'm speaking to you if you have stopped and made a terrible face at the thought of "pussy" and then deleted it and written "cunt" and cringed again.

My hot tip, as connects to all the rest of this, is that if there is not a word for the place you are stabbing her, you are just stabbing her. You are dragging your fingers over her until she yields. You are lining yourself up with her, pressing in, adjusting cautiously until she wriggles her hips, urging you to get on with it already. You are drawing your hips back against the friction of her trembling body. Could any of these be her asshole? Her neovagina? Her alien hole where she excretes salt waste? Of course! If it's important to specify, specify! If what's hot about fucking someone is the logistics of the hole, then by God, logistics the shit out of that hole without shame. But what makes porn hot is not the hole itself. It's the interaction with the hole, gone warm and molten as her desperate breaths come quicker. It's how the hole makes you feel. Fuck you.

Word choices for describing sex organs are an expression of how the perspective character feels about them. A heavily euphemistic description may either reveal something important about the character and her misgivings or set the narrative itself up for subversion - the girl who winces and thinks of her penis as "her manhood" is going to have something to unpack later or even during sex. The dispassionate "shaft" could either reflect disinvestment, to be dramatized later on, or set up that disinvestment to be subverted, as the humble shaft becomes the instrument of orgasm.

Think of how anime often has internal-monologue turning points to explain where a character's last reserve of energy comes from - the setup, the dead parent, the tragic past, the loss of a friend, it comes from somewhere, and the payoff to winning the duel is catharsis. It's just a more straightforward way of illustrating the point of most building-to-a-climax, which porn often deliberately does: you can only pay off on what you set up. Otherwise you revert to tropes and the underdog-hero wins for no reason and the girl-hero cums and it doesn't even matter because ten thousand she/hers have cum exactly that way in ten thousand prior okay scenes. The difference in payoff is all in a setup that the payoff can reintegrate: a material and an ideal that unite in a moment of pure emotional release.

Huntr/x has been doing this gimmick for years where they'll put on a performance and some actors dressed up like demons will "interrupt" it or get into some choreo fights on stage and stuff. If you're a fan you know, the demons usually symbolize things like industry corruption, Mira's struggle with her family, Rumi being in the closet, etc, and there's lots of hints and secret messages to the fans in what they're wearing or how they show up. Check out huntresx5evah on blsky they've got an extensive examination of the "demons" over the years and what the messages to the fans are.

In the concert before Golden was released, the demons were dressed like flight attendants. That was the indication that something new was about to take off. @/queenhuntrixdontmiss and I speculated that it was going to be a new single and low and behold, it was.

But then the live performance got cancelled. It's an open secret that Rumi was having vocal issues, so that was probably not planned. They needed to buy time for her to recover, so, enter the Saja Boys -- a fake band of guys really clearly pretending to be demons, they release ONE single, do a bunch of b-tier variety shows for a week, nearly all of their public appearances have Huntr/x right there, keeping the hype and energy up until Rumi can get her throat polyps removed and furthering the routine where Huntr/x are supposed to be secret demon hunters and the Saja Boys are supposed to be secret demons.

Then the whole thing culminates in the Golden live performance at the idol awards, the big act with Huntr/x fake "break up" and the subsequent theatrics to make it up to fans for failing the first Golden performance. Huntr/x takes their obligation to fans very seriously, I've no doubt that they all felt terrible about having to cancel, so a free show was the obvious recourse to try and make it up to people. And they pulled out all the stops!

Random Guard:...Link people die if they take those to the chest.

Link: I mean you should be angling yourself, i'm not saying to just let your sternum take a whole blow, to just take it square, that's a terrible idea

Random Guard: It explodes rocks.

Link: You have armor for a reason my guy.

Random Guard: ...

Link: If it helps, drinking some fire resist potions has proven to be moderately effective for me.

Random Guard: The Ones you apply to your skin?

Link: What

UplandGatewayOne, the station where they met, is ART's home station. In Mihira and New Tideland's system. Which is deeply anti-corporate. SecUnit even notes at the time that there aren't any security or bond companies there, so nobody should be looking for escaping SecUnits. Iris and Matteo, for all the anti-corporate missions they've been on, have never even seen one, which means Perihelion most likely hasn't either. They're not deployed on transit rings except in GrayCris-paying-to-murder-people situations, and when they are, it's a big deal accompanied by a lot of alarms and screaming and panic.

And one just kind of strolls across the private docks without setting off the weapons scanners. Wholly unnoticed.

So there was already no legitimate explanation for a SecUnit being here. That's point one. Which means it has to have an illegitimate reason.

And ART's paranoia is easily on par with Tarik's, generally speaking. Even though it's never encountered a SecUnit before it has to be aware that this could be an attack by a corporate. Except the SecUnit's got no drones, no additional weaponry, no armor, and it's wearing cargo pants and a hoodie. Which would seem to suggest that it's supposed to be mistaken for a human -- okay, maybe that explains how it got across the transit station a tiny bit? Not really. But at least it accounts for the lack of screaming.

But there's no point in it trying to pretend it's a human now, if this is the prelude to some kind of attack. It's not like ART is a passenger transport, and these are the private non-commercial docks. It can't get on board without trying to hack the lock, and it can't get too far from its handler without frying itself, so it has to do whatever it's doing before ART leaves the transit ring. Whatever attack is coming, it has to be soon. Like, right now, soon.

And it just pings ART directly.

Not even... trying to hide its presence as a potential hostile MI a little.

That is... possibly the most stupid prelude to a code attack it could have made? And if it had been trying to pretend it was human to persuade ART's crew (who aren't even here anyway) to give it access to the ship, it just blew its cover. What the hell is its human handler thinking? They're really bad at this.

And then it asks for a ride--which, again, is hilarious if it thinks it can gain entry that easily--wait. What the fuck? It's offering several hundred hours of entertainment media as a trade.

There is no human handler.

ART doesn't even have to check the governor module at that point. No human would imagine that transports watch television. Possibly, no other bots besides transports would know that they do, because transports are famously not-communicative. Nobody could have instructed it to say that. The only way the SecUnit itself could have gotten the idea that this approach might work is if it tried it before and it was successful.

Okay, so what we know for sure is: This SecUnit is a rogue, and it talks to transports.

And apparently it's hitchhiking?

This raises so many more questions than it answers.

Where the hell did it come from? How did it get across the station without setting off any alerts? Why was it chatting up transports before now? How did it even get several hundred hours of entertainment media downloads? And why the hell would any sentient being, let alone a rogue SecUnit, want to hitchhike to RaviHyral? A crummy little moon which has nothing on it except for mines.

ART's explanation of, "I was curious about you," for letting Murderbot on board is the understatement of the millennium.

Mensah even says it in episode 8 (and god I love how well the show circles back and back again to its various points) - that if she were a construct, subjected for years to forced labor and abuse, she'd consider tossing all that to the wind and trying to make it on her own. But what none of them realize, what I think even Murderbot itself doesn't realize, is it's already done this.

It did this in the first two minutes of the show. The opening line of the book. It could go on a killing spree and take a starship to a distant galaxy. It has already considered the 'go it alone' approach and it has already decided it doesn't want to do that. It already knows what it wants - it wants to protect the people it cares about. It wants to protect people it doesn't care about, but who aren't endangering the people it cares about.

But it doesn't know it wants that, it's still untangling its own identity. And PresAux assumes, not unreasonably, that they need to start from ground zero. Help it learn what it likes. It could be a farmer! It could be a scientist! It could become the most thorough reviewer of Sanctuary Moon in the known galaxy!

And it makes total sense that they don't realize this, that even SecUnit doesn't realize this on a conscious level. Gurathin is their closest blueprint for how to manage this, but he was on the brink of suicide when he came to them. He would have overhauled his entire life and restarted. Gone back to very old interests (which Murderbot doesn't have because it doesn't have a pre-CR/SecUnit work existence) or found entirely new ones.

0. WASH YOUR GODDAMN HANDS.

We're not working in a lab here, cross-conatamination WILL happen. Your job is to minimize it as much as possible. If you end up in a place where soap hasn't been invented yet, wash your hands in distilled alcohol. Your skin won't thank you, but you can afford all the nice hand creams after you cure the plague and get rich.

Find some Penicillium mushrooms!

Yes, penicilin is produced by mushrooms, though Ascomycotes are usually called moulds, it's a fungus, and it makes me laugh to call it a mushroom. Plus, in the middle ages, mushrooms were known to have medicinal properties, so you'll get a lot farther by calling them mushrooms rather than molds.

First thing you need: mouldy fruit. Oranges, or cantaloupes are preferred.

Here's the thing: mold is everywhere, so getting it will be the easiest part. The tricky part start with identifying the correct mold. You don't want to feed your patients black mold, do you?

So. Leave some fruit out. The more the better, because you want to up your chances. Then let it rot in warm and humid places. After a while, pick any fruit that looks white on the outside and green in the middle:

Not the best picture, but that's what it should look like.

2. Transplanting your (potential) Penicillium mushrooms

Until you get it on a plate it's damn near impossible to tell which mold you got. Get ready for some trial and error because you will have to sift through a lot of unwanted mold. You might want to wear a mask.

First you need something to transplant it onto. Making modern agar plates is probably impossible but thankfully not needed. You just need:

Glass plates (the kind that can be closed, you want to minimize cross contamination)

1-2 cup of Hot water (preferably distilled, ask your alchemist if he can do that)

1 cup whole milk (should be 13g of lactose per cup, if your Penicillium won't grow adjust the water-milk ration in favor of milk)

If available: Instead of milk use corn steep liquor. Unfortunately only available after America was discovered, so YMMW, but Penicillium LOVES this stuff. It will make your life SO much easier if it's available.

Pinch of salt

1 teaspoon Yeast extract (get it from a baker)

3-6 teaspoons Gelatin (get it from a butcher)

Disclaimer: The ratio of each of the ingredients will have to be adjusted depending on the purity of the ingredients and on the conventional measuring sizes of the place you end up.

Gently mix it all in and pour out into the plates, let it solidify. If you end up dumped far enough that such refinement isn't possible, make bone broth and strain it through cheesecloth several times to make it as clear as possible, then mix it 5/6 broth and 1/6 milk. Again, if available, use corn steep liquor, but if not milk is fine. Add gelatin (should still be able to get it from the butcher) as needed to solidify it. I'm afraid experimentation will be needed depending on the resources you will be working with.

When you're done, you should have something like this:

Now that you have your plates, run an inoculation loop through a flame to sterilize it.

Something like this. Wave it through the air to cool it so you don't kill your mold, grab it from your fruit and geeeeeently spread it on top of your improvised agar without breaking the surface of the gelatin!

You can see the motions on this one pretty well. Close your plates, stack them about a meter/3ft from the fireplace. Judge for yourself, but ideally somewhere you would consider comfortably warm (20-24°C).

3. Identifying your Penicillium Mushrooms

If all went well, you are going to have something that looks like this:

Well, realistically, it will look something like this:

We're not actually doing it in a lab, after all. But IDEALLY, it will look like the above. It doesn't have to be perfect, you just need to be able to identify Penicillium molds for now.

IDEALLY, on the plate that matches the description of the penicillium mold you'll see an exclusion zone of bacteria around the mold, like the fourth plate in the second row, so you know you have a potential winner, but if you managed to avoid bacterial growth you need to take a few extra steps.

Penicillium molds have characteristic rings of growth, grey-green-white rings. They're easy to differentiate from bacteria because the molds are fuzzy and the bacteria as smooth and slimy. In the above picture, there are four plates that potentially have what we want, and two are less certain than others. Wash out the unwanted ones, make new agar plates, sterilize your inoculation loop and transplant your best candidates. You might need to do this several times.

Two types are confirmed to produce penicilin: P. chrysogenum and P. rubens.

The former is far more widely used today, but since we're sourcing them from literally thin air, we're more likely to get P. rubens, but unless you're a mycologist you probably won't be able to tell the difference. Thankfully you won't need to, because they both produce penicillin. Which brings me to the next step.

4. Confirming it's the penicillin producing mushroom

We're gonna need more agar plates for this one, and believe it or not, you're gonna need to mix blood into your agar. Wash your hands THROUGHLY.

(Theoretically you can get away with just milk, but identifying the correct bacterial colony on white agar is going to be a nightmare, so just add some sheep blood to your agar, conventionally it's about 5% by volume but you might need more to make it)

You need some gram-positive bacteria, preferably of the Bacillota type. Please don't go out and find a patient with fucking botulism or tetanus, you need to live long enough to make the cure. Instead, if you have a vagina, scrape some of the white, mucousy stuff from there and plant it on your plate. If you don't have your own vagina, a borrowed one is fine. Penicilin also works on Treponema pallidum, so if you get a syphilis-affected prostitute that should also work. Just wear gloves.

Ideally you get something like this.

This is actually Lactobacillus brevis, but Lactobacillus colonies all look relatively the same. The important thing is that it's all gram-positive, and will therefore be affected by penicillin.

Take new plates again, plant your Penicillium mold in the middle, and the bacteria all around it, getting as close to the center as possible. You can put down a paper marker for the mold. Wait for about 20 days.

Ideally, on at least one plate, you will get something like this:

This is literally a textbook example of testing antibiotics, but the Zone of Inhibition is what you're looking for. It means the mold is releasing a compound to kill the competing bacteria for resources, in this case, Beta-lactam antibiotic, or penicillin. Make sure to pick the one with the WIDEST ZoI, because that's the one that produces most penicillin.

So now we have the root stock, but our problems have just begun. This is the part where you're absolutely going to need an alchemist's help.

The problem is that a human body is not a petri dish. It's quite a bit larger. And you want the good bacteria destroying stuff without all the nasty contaminants, so you need a SHITLOAD of mold producing a LOT of penicillin, and then you need a way to filter it. You are going to need actual lab equipment for that, or near as they had it.

The other fun fact is that the strains we started using for maximum effectiveness were irradiated to produce extra effective strains after a global search, which you won't be able to do so you'll be making low dose antibiotics, keep that in mind, and also having to breed it.

https://www.acs.org/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/penicillin.html

INVENT TALLOW. Get some animal fat. Chop it up, add some salt and water, and cook it for a few hours. Scoop the melted liquid fat off the top and filter it through something to get any meaty bits that might still be in there out. When it cools down, it will turn back into solid fat, and you can repeat the process as many times as you want to get more non-fat stuff out.

INVENT POTASH. Fill a container with wood ashes (hardwoods work best). Then pour in rain water. Then let it soak. After a while, collect the liquid, which will now be a horrible caustic alkali solution. If you dry this out, you'll get crystals of potassium hydroxide, but you don't really need to, because the next step is...

MELT THE TALLOW AND PUT SOME POTASH WATER IN IT. This will be stupid hot and there will visibly be chemistry happening. Stir it up good for a while while absolutely not getting it on your hands.

Sanitation: besides knowing about washing your hands, you know to boil water or filter it through several layers of cloth to make it safer to drink. My previous reblog said how to invent soap, and distilled alcohol is also pretty easy to invent- you heat an alcoholic liquid like wine in a container that's sealed other than a pipe/tube in the lid, which is attached to another container that isn't heated, allowing the steam to condense. The first little bit that comes out will be methanol and some other horrible poisons, but after that you'll get mostly ethanol, because alcohol evaporates much more easily than water.

Cholera and dysentery: what actually kills people with these is dehydration, which means even cholera is very treatable even without antibiotics. The most important thing is making sure the sick person drinks as much clean, boiled water as they can keep down and gets some electrolytes and calories in there too, such as by drinking broth, thin soup, or water some sort of grain has been boiled in.

Scurvy: you know this one. Cooking destroys a lot of Vitamin C, and copper stops it from being absorbed. Besides the kind of fruits and vegetables you might think of, rose hips have a crazy amount of Vitamin C, tea brewed from pine needles is pretty good for it, and while there isn't very much of it in meat, some Arctic expeditions managed to recover from scurvy by eating nearly-raw seal.

Rickets: Vitamin D deficiency, and maybe sometimes calcium. You can literally cure the first one with sunlight.

Goiter: often iodine deficiency. Seaweed and eggs are the foods of choice here.

Malaria: quinine is extracted from the bark of a tree native to Peru, which Europeans were smart enough to immediately bring over to Spain when they found out about it. Enough cloth to make mosquito nets would probably be way too expensive to be practical for normal people in most of the world until the Industrial Revolution, but at least you know.

Smallpox: STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM SMALLPOX, SMALLPOX IS TERRIFYING, IF YOU WANTED TO MAKE A DISEASE TO KILL AS MANY HUMANS ON THE PLANET AS POSSIBLE IT WOULD BASICALLY JUST BE SMALLPOX. It's insanely contagious and frequently fatal, and you probably aren't vaccinated. However, you can become inoculated, and developing a true smallpox vaccine is way easier than discovering penicillin. People in China were practicing variolation for centuries before it became a thing in Europe- it consists of taking a scab from someone with smallpox, keeping it in a bottle for a week or two to make sure most of the virus is dead, and then having someone inhale the dust or using a needle to prick their arm and get a little of it into the wound. This generally gives them a mild case, which still isn't a good time, but will make them resistant to getting the real thing afterward. Vaccination is the same procedure, but using the much less deadly relative cowpox, which is why the word "vaccine" is from the Latin vacca, "cow." The vaccine that was in use when smallpox was declared extinct in the wild was developed by deliberately passing cowpox between test animals to get it to mutate and selecting for the mildest strains.

Syphilis: the only good treatment for syphilis is antibiotics. However, syphilis is such a bastard that there are a couple of bad treatments that are, somehow, not the worst thing you can do. Insanely enough, this is the one time that mercury actually sometimes helps- like with chemotherapy for cancer today, if you catch it early and poison the bejeezus out of it, sometimes the disease will die before the person does (it's useless once the syphilis goes systemic, though). The other most effective treatment for syphilis before the discovery of penicillin was- I shit you not- giving the person malaria by injecting them with blood from a sick person. Malaria causes extremely high fevers, which kill off a lot of the syphilis bacteria. The drawbacks to this one are, uh, pretty self-evident.

As a bonus, since you probably know how a lot of these diseases are spread, you know when it's worth bothering with the full plague doctor getup! No need to bother when it's cholera or syphilis! But don't skip the mask if there's actual plague though, it's not just the fleas, plague can spread through the air and it can literally kill you in under 24 hours, don't fuck around with the plague-

>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.

>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.

>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.

>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.

>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.

>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.

>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.

>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!

>Lemmings problem now solved.

>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.

>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.

>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.

>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.

>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.

>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.

What about Xie Lian? He deserves to be a little freaky too!

Just think about it!

You have an entire conversation with him, and notice he hasn’t blinked even once (he only blinks to clear dust from his eyes).

Xie Lian who can comfortably, casually dislocate all of his joints.

Xie Lian who falls asleep just about anywhere, as still as a corpse.

Xie Lian who is constantly a little too warm to be normal, due to always running a fever to burn away the illnesses he picks up.

Xie Lian who sustains a serious injury but keeps doing whatever he was doing.

Xie Lian who is just really poisonous/venomous due to his diet- I personally see him as mainly neurotoxic but you do you.

Xie Lian whose eyes do the reflective thing like a cat.

I mean, an ancient god of death and misfortune sounds like an eldritch horror out of context- and I don’t think the undercurrent of fear beneath the disdain from the heavens is unwarranted.

At least my instant turn offs that are Dude Things are "is an egotistical manchild that doesn't like the word no" and "has a chronic case of useless husband disorder" and "treats the women in his life poorly".

Genuinely, the straight men OP is talking about are the type that has such a poor vocabulary, they literally don't have the tools to describe relationships. Those traits, the laté snaps, septum piercing, cat ear headphones, those are all stand-ins for character types that they're unable to describe using specific terms.

Lots of men grow up with this idea that they're supposed to die in battle; men get off the Titanic last, so they find meaning in "being of service" in a "manly" way. This is usually accomplished by working jobs that destroy them, also resulting in utter neglect of their education and relationships. The whole "tradwife" attitude revolves around this idea that "since men are socially disposable, but also sensitive creatures, the female companions in their lives should notice their hardships, appreciate their sacrifices, and support them by making up for their deficits."

I shouldn't need to outline how fucking flawed that worldview is, but it's a common one that many men internalize.

So you get these "poor, hard done by" men who see their daily misery as some fucked up noble sacrifice, and who generally don't spend time enjoying life outside of destructive, manly persuits like after work drinking, womanizing, or drugs. Or sports, because that's a proxy for masculine violence, and another avenue to destroy your body and ""die in battle.""

They don't know how to relax, they don't know how to enjoy their own company, they don't know how to manage a household, they develop unhealthy attitudes and coping mechanisms, their relationships are all based on money, their routines revolve around work and nothing else, and their home lives and family dynamics suffer as a consequence.

What's laté snap girl doing, really? She's cultivating an online following, she's slowing down to note small details that please her, she's taking time for herself to enjoy a moment. If these men did that, they'd suddenly be confronted with the emptiness of their lives, the futility of capitalism, their substance use problems, and the various aches and pains that riddle their bodies, as a result of their flawed lifestyle.

So, these men construct a type; the anti-their lifestyle type, that's empowered, educated, and self interested. This type finds meaning in others and in themselves, not in lives based on imagined noble self-sacrifice. This type has blue hair and piercings, is aware of social issues and patriarchy, is independent and self regulates well, and doesn't put up with the "poor him" attitudes of the shitty men out there.

As a result, "women with cat ear headphones" represent anti-matter to the "poor him" bros, and they can't use more specific language to describe this, because that would require awareness of their pathetic worldviews and systemic disfunction in their lives.

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