Pahvl's Varia

Green Sea Turtle for a $15 Ko-fi supporter

whenever someone asked me to hang out i often wanted to decline and stay home, but recently i started scruffing myself saying "no, you need sunlight and human interaction. outside with you."; and it's been pretty great for my mental health since.

obviously if i'm tired and exhausted from work or haven't any meaningful Me Time in a while, yeah okay i'll take the day for me to rest and vibe. but if i wasn't planning on doing anything specific that day, yeah i'll push myself to go out with friends when they ask - even if staying home feels more appealing. declining plans over and over because home is more convenient and comfortable just rewards and reinforces isolated behavior, and in a world growing increasingly isolated socially, that can be disastrously detrimental to both your mental health and your social life. if you keep turning people down when they ask to hang out, if done over and over and over again they'll eventually stop asking simply because they've realize that the answer rarely if ever changes.

now, mental health absolutely plays a huge factor here. it can be overwhelmingly difficult to motivate yourself to go out and see the sunshine and friends when dealing with depression; but that's the insidious thing about it. depression traps you in a self-sabotaging cycle. it makes you stay home alone withdrawn from people, which then exacerbates your depressive symptoms causing you to stay home and withdraw even more. pushing yourself up and out to go see people, no matter how misery-inducing it may feel to get dressed and out the door, will do so much more for your mental health than any number of rest days home alone ever will. like a muscle, the more times you combat that discomfort and overcome the resistance, the easier it'll be.

when your brain is bemoaning "I don't know, that's scary..." you gotta combat it with with "who cares if it's scary? that's what makes it an experience!"

now, you don't need to push yourself to do big, grandiose social events. pushing yourself beyond your comfort level is crucial, yes, but you have to hold yourself to realistic proactive steps that work for you. you can start with small, casual hangouts. going for coffee. visiting a friend's home. having a walk around the park. something low-pressure that gets you past the threshold of your front door. whenever you're feeling that reluctance, that urge to hide away and hole up in a blanket burrito instead of socializing, fight it.

poor mental health can also make it difficult to communicate interest. sometimes you're just not up for something or just can't go, and that's normal! we're all people with individual lives and schedules! it's not realistic for anyone to be ready to hang out at any given moment. a mere "sorry, can't today" could come off disinterested even if you are indeed interested. instead, you could try:

"I'm not feeling up for [insert activity] today, but maybe could we go do [insert other activity] instead?"

"I can't go to [insert activity] today, but I want to! Could we do [insert activity] on [insert specific date] instead?"

these reaffirm your interest while also offering compromise / solutions, which is a lot better than just outright declining.

because it's related, i'd also like to add here: sometimes lives get busy and wind up in an initiation stalemate. people want to hang out, but they don't act on that intent. it ends up being a passive back-and-forth of "we should hang out sometime!" but never goes anywhere. more often than not people do want to hang out, they just can't on short-term notice. to tackle this you need to kill the phrase "we should hang out" and instead try:

"hey! wanna go do [insert activity] on [insert specific time / date]?"

not only does this initiate the conversation and communicate interest, it also offers the person an activity with a specific time or date they could then plan for if said activity interests them; and if they're someone that's got their own career or family stuff going on, planning is everything.

All 16 embroidery patches are available for pre-order until March 7! 

Patches for the following pride flags: asexual, aromantic, rainbow, bisexual, lesbian, gay, non-binary, transgender, demisexual, and genderfluid.

‘I don’t understand this’ They’ll explain it if you wait.

‘I don’t like how this episode left things hanging’ There’s a continuation next week.

‘This character is flat’ Wait for them to be fleshed out.

Level 2: Sci-fi aliens exhibit the target audience's gender binary with some specific feature conspicuously inverted, like women are the stereotypically violent and lustful ones or whatever.

Level 3: Sci-fi aliens exhibit the target audience's gender binary, plus 1–3 "extra" genders just sort of dangling off the side of the system that literally never come up except to make jokes about them.

Level 4: The text insists that the sci-fi aliens have no genders, which are a human conceit; that every individual alien we meet happens to neatly conform with the target audience's gender binary is coincidence.

Level 5: The text attempts to un-gender its sci-fi aliens simply by taking the target audience's gender binary and subtracting one of the genders, like all of the aliens are lesbians, but you can still clearly tell which aliens are meant to be the "man" lesbians and which aliens are meant to be the "woman" lesbians.

Level 6: The text genuinely departs from the target audience's gender binary, but only because the author is using the sci-fi aliens' genders as an allegory for something else – e.g., physical disabilities, political affiliations, etc. – in a way that doesn't really make sense if you think about it too hard; "capitalist" is now a gender.

People who've never heard of the genre of game I'm riffing on and think I'm vagueing, like, Subnautica or some shit

People who have heard of the "stuck in a submarine where you spend ten minutes learning how to operate cryptic control panels and then die" genre, but think Iron Lung is the only one. (It's not, though it did a lot to popularise the form; play Water Womb World, to cite one of my personal favourite pre-Iron Lung examples.)

People who've never played Myst and don't know that operating various valves and levers is like 50% of the franchise's gameplay, thus mechanically justifying the segue.

"It turns out, he wasn't. In recent months, YouTube has secretly used artificial intelligence (AI) to tweak people's videos without letting them know or asking permission. Wrinkles in shirts seem more defined. Skin is sharper in some places and smoother in others. Pay close attention to ears, and you may notice them warp. These changes are small, barely visible without a side-by-side comparison. Yet some disturbed YouTubers say it gives their content a subtle and unwelcome AI-generated feeling.

2. Why this crosses a line

Ownership: Your video is your work. Your face is your image. When YouTube silently rewrites it, they are asserting that they—not you—own how you appear on their platform.

Trust: Creators like Rick Beato and Rhett Shull rely on authenticity. If the platform itself tampers with that, it erodes the bond between creator and audience.

Consent: On your phone, you can toggle filters. On YouTube, you aren’t asked. That’s the difference between a tool you control and a platform that controls you.

Reality creep: These changes seem tiny, but they normalize the idea that media is always pre-processed. Once you accept that, the very expectation of “realness” starts to vanish.

3. Why YouTube thinks they can do this

Most people won’t notice.

Those who do notice won’t leave; there’s no real competition at YouTube’s scale.

With bigger global crises, this feels too trivial to fight. They know apathy and exhaustion keep most people quiet.

4. The deeper problem This isn’t about whether a shirt wrinkle looks sharper. It’s about power. YouTube doesn’t see itself as a neutral distributor of your work. It sees itself as the author of the experience, with full rights to “optimize” your content however it likes. Creators are just raw material. That’s why they didn’t ask: asking implies you could say no.

5. What can be done

Raise awareness. The only reason this surfaced was because creators with big audiences noticed. Keep amplifying it.

Demand control. A mandatory opt-out is the minimum. YouTube must not alter identity without consent.

Diversify. Explore Nebula, PeerTube, even Patreon-hosted video. Every bit of independence reduces monopoly leverage.

Frame the stakes. This isn’t “just a filter.” It’s a question of who owns your image, your work, your voice. If we concede that to the platform, we’ll lose the last trace of authenticity online.