Mothed_Man

why do i give a shit about social media restrictions? well, i went to the library three months ago with my two teenage brothers to sign them up for new library cards (they just moved) and i was told that under 18s can't have a library card, even a restricted kids-books-only card, without a parent there in person to give consent.

that's fucked for abused kids for sure but that's also fucked for kids whose single mum works two jobs and can't get to the library while its open. and there is NO good reason for it except to appease parents who want to control what their kids can read.

people coming onto my posts telling me 'kids should just do X' have not actually looked into the possibility of doing what they are suggesting. kids now cannot do what you did when you were a teenager even a decade ago. abused kids, disabled kids or kids from low income families ESPECIALLY cannot do those things. they are running out of places to go.

interviews and studies with teenagers repeatedly prove that they WANT to hang out with their friends in real life, and it is getting harder and harder to do it. the internet is one of the only places they can all spend time together, unsupervised, without spending money or getting hassled or moved on by adults.

The beauty of it is that you could place that exact same dialogue into any time and place in human history and it would make just as much sense, you could have it as a conversation between sailors in a 1600s ship, a group of bronze-age warriors cleaning their weapons, stone age hunters walking home from a hunt, or a bunch of 21st century redditors on the internet, and it would hit just as splendidly.

There was this conversation about if you could have sex with any specific person from any time through human history, which one would you choose? Famous legendary lovers were brought up, queens, emperors and such were popular, might as well fuck Rasputin just to see what the hype was all about, the kind of answers one would expect.

Then some guy said he would choose his own late wife. He went on to talk about how brutal it is, that you might find the love of your life, but there's no promise that this life couldn't be suddenly cut short. That his body aches for hers and how there isn't much he wouldn't do for one more opportunity to make love to her one last time.

Now, I'd like you to imagine a pause in the conversation. A solemn, contemplative moment of silence, with several of the people present nodding in agreement that this is indeed the finest answer - it wasn't a competition, but there's no doing better than that.

And then someone breaks this solemn silence and says:

Fictional small town in the middle of nowhere in real country: par for the course in any genre

Fictional major city in real country: standard fair, but it's usually clearly based on a real city

Fictional suburb of real major city in real country: strange but I can see the application