From my Christmas 2020 sentiments: This year, Ignorance and Want are not mere wastrel wretches clinging to the ankles of a Christmas spirit,† rather they are massive kaiju, towering over us all, with a fell, desiccating breath and a petrifying gaze brought fully to bare. And as I write they thunder across the countryside razing human civilization like Godzilla leveling Tokyo.
† passage here. Note it’s not a secure site.
Curiously A Christmas Carol was what started the modern retail-centric rites of Christmas celebrations: prezzies, house parties and feasts.
Also at the time Dickens wrote it, industrial bosses were grudging about making it a work holiday, like Scrooge, often mandating reporting for work and penalizing those who didn’t.
These days we might add a spin on it, that the ghosts are of bosses past who failed to mind the welfare of their workers, only to be brutally turned into the ghosts they are today, and finding the afterlife not to their liking.
With accounts that are less data-miney, you can replace all your account details (name, email addy, region, etc.) with gibberish and wait for it all to update, and then replace your password so not even you can get into it.
If it’s more data-miney and you are willing to put in a few months / years of maintenance, you can trickle in the gibberish and false data until it’s thoroughly poisoned.
Acting in a manner reminiscent of being on meth. Spastic (from which we get spaz )
Now I think about it, young people are often high energy because (as I put it) the motor is too big for the chassis hence the need to run around on the jungle gym. So having new recurring slang for someone who is too energetic to be fully in control (i.e. well-behaved) makes sense.
When we rely on our lover to process our inner turmoil then yeah, it’s the same, just not a professional therapist. That’s the implication.
Hence a better model of having multiple holistic close friends that can distribute the work. Or a professional therapist and a separate FWB.
Ohio has a folk song about awful things happening there. So this scans.
Your psychotherapist is absolutely not supposed to have sex with his / her patients, and doing so (and getting caught) is grounds for losing your license to practice.
That said, about 30% of psychotherapists are banging at least one of their patients in the United States…or claims to be…or something. If we’re lucky that is a bogus stat, but frankly it’s plausible.
That said, ideally you’d get therapy and sex from different sources.
Look for BDSM munches, in which sex doesn’t (usually) happen but people talk about BDSM and hooking up. When the right people like and trust you, the party invites follow.
Yes. You have to hire a different companion for professional cuddling, and thanks to our effed-up healthcare system, it’s not covered by insurance.
I, for one, am completely down with the Aldus Huxley idea of creating a community system that allows everyone to get laid and get psychotherapy (id est, vent their troubles and get professional feedback). Huxley had to dystopia it up a bit with compliance drugs and criminalizing intimacy (and abuses of genetic engineering) since he was writing a cautionary tale, but I think if we did these things and then upgraded friends (or created a subset like BFFs) to include emotional intimacy, it would make for a pretty groovy society.
Right now, we are really far away from this notion, and are about to confront some great filters unprepared, so coulda, shoulda, woulda.
Tweaking once was chemsex when it wasn’t experimenting with the fine-tuning of your amateur radio array.
Now its erratic behavior like someone on stimulants trying to fine tune their radio array to pick up alien chatter.
Not gun in Korean, as per Johnny Gatt?
So in recent weeks I’ve learned that furries are a lot more shunned than I thought, and it’s one of those things like Bronies where it’s not the subject of their obsession but the enthusiasm they have for the subject of their fandom.
I grew up with Disney and Warner Brothers classics, read the Albedo comic anthology and a few others, but don’t see myself as a furry enthusiast (contrast my enthusiasm for late 20th century are we the real monsters? science fiction). Furry porn and furry-themed sex fantasies aren’t particularly my scene, but this is true for the majority of furries as well.
But our society has gotten weird about furries and anthros, which I guess became evident when the US right-wing started spreading the litter-boxes in schools canard. Curiously, in the porn media community, animal genital shapes are a controversy, and mainstream media platforms that sell furry porn will not allow for anthros with canine or equine genitals. I think VISA specifically will not allow transactions for such works, which is stunning interventionism both in its overreach and specificity.
And then some social media sites have special rules for furry content, that even SFW furry content can only appear inside furry-inclusive perimeters… unless it’s classical like Warner or Hanna Barbara. Wikipedia refuses to acknowledge Freefall (1998-present) one of the long-running fairly-hard-science-fiction webcomics (that gets into space-travel culture and robot culture), specifically because it has an anthro as a main character, more precisely, a genetically engineered wolf, next to a robot and a non-human trader.
It’s not that furries are weird. It’s that society is weird about furries.
I had an idea that the paws salute should become the official salute of the new resistance (since furries have been marked as a target for fascist enemy within rhetoric), but then trying to do some basic web searches, I couldn’t find a proper conventional name for the pose, nor easy-to-find art of it, even though I’ve seen the gesture made by catgirls often enough to know it’s a thing, and one of the salutes I might consider when standing before the firing squad.
In the last few years, I went from being resignedly a man to being enby, having become disgusted with how dudes obsessed with manhood have conducted themselves in our society. Before, I didn’t care that much, and my own notions of what it was to be a man turned into adulting in the 2010s (take care of business; make sure rent and utilities are paid; don’t do violence, especially when nuclear weapons are involved). Now men look like Matt Walsh and Donald Trump.
I’m not a furry or otherkin (yet), but considering how the furry community is among the untermenschen, I’m half-inclined to develop a fursona for sake of solidarity.
And I still think the paws salute should be the sign of the resistance.
As someone who doesn’t get the gender feelies at all, dresses and sarongs are cool (as in, good for warm weather). High socks are so amazing that everyone wore them for much of the middle ages (they’re warm!). Called hosen wool socks and a tunic was ordinary commoner attire. (And yes, your nethers and janglies were free to the open air underneath. Laundry without machines was too labor intensive for non-nobles to have underwear.)
Makeup is weird, but looking amazing is fun. (My experience with it was on stage, and putting on eyeliner was hard to do without flinching.)
While I can appreciate a cool tool (say tweezers with a magnifying lens attached) tactical stuff painted black doesn’t make sense in contrast to stuff painted a bright color that can easily be seen (on the assumption that I’m not in combat hidden in cover), bright pink is fine except when everything else is also bright pink. (A lot of beach dayglo colors are meant to be well offset against the ocean greens and blues).
Now that’s on the practical side. Some folks get a HUGE buzz from representing according to their gender identity. Trans folk know this because wearing the stuff they like is [regarded by others as] weird in contrast to the stuff that mom bought them while they were growing up, so they’ve had cause to actually explore this aspect of themselves.
But there are guys who like to double down on butchness and gals who like getting ready for the night out more than the going out, itself. And then there are dudes who, no matter how masculine they represent, feel inadequate and wussy, which likely informs alpha male rhetoric and the far-right man-o-sphere pundits.
In 1980s psychological parlance, the most common places to find partners were:
In the 1990s and aughts, we were already seeing that things had shifted. Fewer people were engaged in their church group. There was more awareness of sexual harassment at work (and power dynamics that could interfere with regular human interaction). People also had fewer friends and less contact with their extended family. This resulted in more people clubbing (and functioning by one-night stands) and otherwise looking for better places to find eligible partners.
I was in the psychiatric sector both as a patient and a peer counselor, and they recommended activity groups. Frisbee golf, knitting, puzzle-building, backgammon, gardening, etc. I sucked at those, but I was dating during the golden age of Craigslist personal ads. We still have sexual harassment in the workplace in 2024, often from upper-management on the clerical pool, which means for anyone not in upper management, they’re being micromanaged and kept from propositioning fellow employees. But curiously in the 1970s and 1980s employees often dated and married.