Everything is Happening All the Time

@orbis3 on v.mo

15 years old: i was so cringe when i was twelve, i'm super mature now though. i'm a totally different person. i'm basically an adult

18 years old: i was so. (trying to be nicer to myself) fifteen. when i was fifteen. i wasn't an adult even a little back then. i'm an adult now though of course

21 years old: i was so newborn fawn taking its first steps when i was 18. i wasn't an adult at 18 i'm barely even an adult now tbh

23 years old: i was so. hey wait the others have all gone up in increments of three why'd it change

23 years old: because i'm still 23 so i can't speak to that experience yet

23 years old: do you think anything will magically change in the next few months to the point where you can't possibly imagine how you'll feel at 24

23 years old: i mean you never know. anything can happen. they're letting people born in 2002 turn 24, for instance

One of the things she's told me she's proud of before, was a time when one of the (older) users of the game she was designing discussed her strategy of drinking extra water to wake up early enough to claim her dailies, and how proud she was that she made a game people liked that much.

Even looking her in the eye and asking "getting 60 year olds to disrupt their sleep schedule by pissing themselves makes you proud?" did not get her to hear herself talk.

I think a lot of people don't comprehend the evil of dark patterns. They handwave it all away by "it's personal decisions people make", even while they see the patterns of behaviour they create on the populace. They read falling into those patterns as focus and grindset, if anything. And for a good number of people, pay-to-win is a *positive* thing.

Here's a larger version of the original artwork, too.

I wonder what structure is being added here.

+ bonus:

and all the other women as well, they have full stories, personalities, motivations, and the show barely ever talk about the things that society wants women to be. and if it does, it's with criticism. richard warren's story is told through sarah's eyes and it is through her story and struggles we find out more about him. ruth's story is, at the end, about her daughter and her grandson; but she is 84, happily lives alone, is incredibly active, and has a full life with many social contacts and happy things going for her that have nothing to do with daughter or grandson. rosemary too; this is just such a lovely average woman that i probably wouldn't like if i worked with her. she is disinterested, off-putting and says the wrong things, and yet, she's not depicted as someone we should hate for that or who is the bad guy. she just.. exists, as a normal woman, with an important part to the story we see.

The key point in studies like this is that they always expect porn-related problems to go up as porn use goes up, and you would expect that because that's how every addiction works from gambling to cigarettes to alcohol to crack cocaine, but what they actually find is that the people with the most distress over their porn use is actually related to how religious they are, not how much porn they're watching. This is significant, because it means people who identify as "porn addicts" are not actually watching more porn than the average person; They just feel worse about it because they think they shouldn't be watching it AT ALL.

I really can't stress this point enough; Are there people whose lives are badly impacted by watching 22 hours of porn a day? Sure, they do exist and they have my sympathy, but the majority of cases of "porn addiction" are completely religiously motivated and have nothing to do with how much porn people are actually watching.

The key takeaway here is that shaming people for their sexuality is harmful. It's bad for people's mental health to make them feel shame over something they have no control over, like how horny they can get. It's wrong to force people to suppress their emotions and make them feel guilty for not harming anyone. As Drew of Genetically Modified Skeptic once said; You can't shame someone out of feeling horny any more than you can shame someone out of feeling hungry.

Gay people are INCREDIBLY ANNOYING for production when they are on reality shows cause they always do shit like this. Reality shows pick their cast specifically for people who will create drama, so it tracks that bringing in some gay people (in the era that I worked, 2013-2018, this was considered to be new and interesting) would diversify people enough to create some conflict. To a degree, this was true.

But what actually happened was that the gay person, or worse, people, would end up estranged from the other people because Straight People Who Are Fucking Nuts in a way that would be ideal for a reality show are very different from Gay People Who Are Fucking Nuts.

There's one particular instance I remember in which our Gay Person tm wasn't getting into drama and no one could figure out why. Any time anything happened it would just defuse almost instantly. Eventually we prodded during a solo interview and one of the guys said something along the lines of "Mayn gay marriage just got legalized n shit if I yell at this guy I'm being a homophobe". This meant that our gay was COASTING along in this reality show cause no one would vote him out!!

But you know what the PINNACLE of this was?

DATING SHOWS.

One... Very popular dating show I worked on (you know the one) has an unofficial, unwritten rule: you can only have 1 queer woman in the cast of ladies. This is because for a solid few years, if ever there were two bisexual women in the show, they would ALWAYS abandon the man and run off together instead. You can't have contestants saying shit like "this guy has no personality and sucks ass. I prefer this girl I met who actually listens to me". Like this was an actual epidemic in the casting. It happened over and over for YEARS and they couldn't find a way to stop it without literally separating the women from each other, which obviously wouldn't be good for the show. They also couldn't show this was happening because that. Uh. Would be pretty bad to reveal to audiences.

Eventually they just decided to subtly prod and see if women who were going on the show were gay and then avoid having two on the same season at the same time. To my knowledge they still do it this way.