Gender and sexual identity are way more fluid than people want to give credit for.

So looking for a “final answer” at any point in your life might be biting off more than you can chew.

I’m a cis-man, but I’m personally with the Gender Anarchy folks. We’re stuck in weird gender roles that literally don’t matter anymore and maybe androgyny or things like it truly are the way forward.

And sadly clearly does not think voice actors deserve the same protections as film actors.

Their union deals were a win for everyone but voice actors it seems.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/01/10/video-game-voice-actors-criticize-sag-aftra-over-agreement-with-ai-company/

Everyone needs a Gary in their life.

I’m happy to be the Gary for my less technically inclined friends. Their lack of knowledge would get me kicked off private trackers if I invited them so they could curate their own collections, so it’s just easier to be the guy who makes it easy for them.

Be like Gary, sharing is caring.

Like… which scene groups or individuals?

Don’t really have a particular favorite, although Subsplease is pretty snappy for anime if you want it as-it-releases.

Otherwise, for groups focused on US/UK/European media, whatever’s got the quality range I’m seeking and preferably a season pack all from the same group/same quality.

Negativland - Time Zones

I love you, you’re perfect, now change.

GIFs exported in the original file resolution are usually pretty damn big, but I don’t like giant GIFs myself, so I’ve found the 480x270 to be a good size to keep most of them below 25 megabytes.

Brian Posehn: Dude you’re both wrong, it’s CORE.

Mr. Show, almost always relevant.

I don’t know, crustpunks were a real thing.

What’s preventing you from exploring hypothetical options like Furrypunk, Meatpunk, Tallowpunk, PharmacyPunk, Leatherpunk, or Candlejackpu----

When I realized I could just make high quality GIFs with KDEnlive it was a game changer.

Devil’s Advocate:

FOSS is basically an endless development cycle. Anyone who wants to pick up and keep developing can. This has benefits and drawbacks.

I would say the main drawback is that you might be expected to work longer on this code than you plan to. The gaming community can be pretty demanding while also not stepping up to contribute themselves.

Further, it means some games can end up in unintentional “development hell” because there really isn’t an end-state for the game. The nature of the game keeps changing because the person in charge can’t decide what they want to go with long-term. The Duke Nukem Forever problem.

Now, indie titles like Terraria and Stardew Valley stand as examples that show an eternal development can be a good thing, but they’re truly in the minority and they’re really both driven by auteurs, which is why the themes are so crisp and well placed throughout the games. It’s kind of hard to have a single brilliant auteur in charge of a giant game involving lots of people and have it work out. Look at the shitshow of an aftermath of what happened to the auteurs behind Disco Elysium. When you’re part of a big team, some things always become a shadow of their original intent. Things become anodyne not on purpose, but simply because not everyone is on the same page. Designing a horse by committee results in a camel, etc.

It could work for small indie games, I don’t think it would work for anything AAA-level.

Further, a lot of that old media tied up in proprietary formats that simply don’t exist anymore.

Fuck, half the equipment I used in local television news broadcasting 20 years ago is all up in smoke. Media from that time is on tapes that probably don’t have easily findable tape decks to play them.

I would suspect its similar happens in print media.

In fact, I know it happens in print media because Adobe PageMaker was big for a long time. I used it to build and format my high schools newspaper when I was in my senior year. I was the layout editor because I was the only one who knew how to halfway use it.

Adobe InDesign was the successor to PageMaker and… for a while… you could convert PageMaker documents to InDesign documents, but they dropped that support years ago.

So you want an old Adobe PageMaker file from the 90’s to recreate lost information from then?

Well you better figure out how to pirate both an old copy of Windows and the final version of Adobe PageMaker just to be able to fucking run it in a virtual machine or something. Adobe is fucking ruthless when it comes to copy protection.

End result: Why would a business hold on to documents it functionally cannot use because the proprietary program or hardware used to “read” it no longer functionally exists? They simply won’t the cost of keep useless documents around is too high.

i always have good success with libgen.is

People like this are jerks who only share their library with people who already have ultra rare shit. They want to trade rare for rare.

They think they are special for their collections and their actions are anti-thetical to the entire piracy ethos.

I would ignore them and keep searching for another source because its unlikely you have anything they will willingly trade for.

It’s dumb and I can’t stand those people.

But it makes me laugh when they have their collections locked up but other people are freely sharing what they have locked up.

The stuff I don’t want to share… I just don’t share at all. No reason to make it frustrating.

Anyone trying to sell you a cure for something mainstream society tells you is shameful, doubly so.

Trumpers really took this one and ran with it during COVID with not masking and spitting in people’s faces.

They literally want to hang the people who tried to sell them a cure for something mainstream society told them was shameful, a disease they decided was a “librul hoax.”

…because guess the fuck what? They were actually, genuinely, acting shamefully. Too bad they had no shame.

I don’t think this as strong of an argument than you think it is. Sometimes mainstream society can be right about an act being shameful.

Ima be real with you.

Arguing all masturbation is inherently good isn’t any better or morally superior than arguing all masturbation is inherently bad. Extremism is extremism and literally all I was talking about was moderation. If you can’t handle someone arguing moderation, it sounds like maybe you really do have a problem.

I’m not really sure where this is breaking down.

Phrases like “couple this with” from this sentence from my first comment are how I’m breaking it down. The meaning of this is “in addition to” not “these are equals.” I’m sorry you’ve not managed to read the context words I added specifically for this purpose.

Couple this with how incredibly unhealthy the social relationships portrayed in most pornography are, and you’re gearing up for a lot of young men addicted to wanking and having unrealistic expectations of sex.

From my second comment:

The porn is rather a social knock-on effect because people often seek out porn to make the pathway to dopamine release easier.

Because it’s true that people use shortcuts to cumming, like porn.

I reiterate, reading comprehension is dead.

how that relates to dopamine in your first comment if you’re not talking about porn addiction

Dude, we’re literally talking about how orgasms release dopamine. What the fuck are you smoking? I’m literally talking about the orgasm itself!

Fucking reading comprehension is dead.

I want you to go back and re-read both of my posts and tell me where I said the words “porn addiction” or alluded to porn being the addiction. I’m trying to work with you here buddy, but you’ve decided that I’m saying something I haven’t said, after I took the time to clearly explain as much.

I literally am not talking about porn addiction nor have I used the words porn addiction, so can you take your crusade elsewhere, please and thank you.

The people you’re talking about with cum jars often don’t even see their behavior as a problem, much less labeling themselves addicts.

Literally what I am talking about and why I didn’t use the term porn addiction.

I actually agree. What’s addicting is the hit of dopamine from sexual release, not the porn itself. I see porn as more like how people who quit smoking often still find something to fiddle with in their hands and mouth. Biting on pencils, straws, etc. because part of their ritual of using the substance involved taking out a cigarette and putting it up to their mouth. The act of viewing porn itself isn’t the addiction, but it’s associated with it.

Like I said, moderation is key, because there’s a wide difference between masturbating a healthy amount and filling various cumjugs with figurines in them. Like if you can go out and live a normal life after jerking it, awesome, fuck yeah, that’s great. If you can’t make it through a workday without going to the bathroom to crank it, maybe you’ve got a fucking problem. I shouldn’t have to deal with some fucking weirdo breathing heavily and shaking the whole stall next to me in the bathroom because they can’t wait until they get home.

The porn is rather a social knock-on effect because people often seek out porn to make the pathway to dopamine release easier. The seeking of the orgasm has almost nothing to do with the societal implications of porn and its impact on relationships. However, the social impact is that people begin to associate unhealthy aspects of porn with a sex life and achieving orgasm in a sex life.

There are unfortunately deep layers of exploitation, unhealthy power dynamics, and control in porn that can be healthy between consenting adults who have achieved trust but some people really start digesting this porn before they’re mature enough to know how to healthily navigate those issues (especially in a society that sure as fuck isn’t teaching them, because of the aforementioned religious demonization of sex). This leads to further unhealthy experiences with sex, and I don’t think the gay (and LGBTQ+ community as a whole for that matter) community is free from that exploitation or people being exposed to it before they’ve had to education to navigate it healthily either. In fact, as a minority group, I would rather think they’re more likely to be exploited by the same people who hate their very existence… which further ingrains and exacerbates the very problems I’m speaking to, because the exploitation aspect of pornography is normalized. The areas that consume the most LGBT themed porn tend to be the most religiously restricted, and their viewpoint of that porn is almost 100% exploitative. To me it’s a hard sell that that’s not somehow a net negative for the LGBT community and that they’re mostly being exploited in pornograhy and in sex work by the very people who want to demonize their very existence.