I see a lot of teenagers falling for the “I’m a Gazan and need help getting out.” accounts too.

I guess, desire needs to be reciprocal for me.

I later found a lot of enjoyment in entering gay “cruising” culture as passing man. It’s that same impersonal, focused on just the pleasure and not the meaning - but without the power dynamic and pretense. I say, this is what I want, he agrees, and then a fun time is had by all.

I think the difference between say, sex as work and making food as work - I don’t really need to care or like the person who makes my food. There’s not an incentive for them to participate in something that can be physically painful or uncomfortable and then even pretend to be enjoying it through that pain. A lot of workplaces do force you to pretend in similar ways - don’t Chikfila employees have to say “my pleasure” or something - but pretending while dissociating in the act does fuck with your head in unique ways I think.

Working in Nevada or the Netherlands might be different. I guess when legalized, maybe you can say “slow down” or press a button for help when they take off the condom. I’ve only lived my life of course.

I do have some professional help, but don’t live in an area where the mental health needs of transexual former hookers are particularly accommodated for.

Are you sure it’s not just the women you’re having sex with are faking their orgasms?

Like, penetrative sex does not lead to orgasm for the majority of people with vaginas. You have to stimulate the clitoris. If you aren’t doing that - they probably are faking to get you to be done with it.

I’ve never met women concerned about dick size - being a “size queen” seems to be more of a thing for gay men. I don’t think there’s a lot of variation in feeling in a vagina for anywhere in the 4-7 inches range.

The attitude that all women are whores and that all sex is transactional seems sad to me. I had men say that to me when I was in the trade, and that was the kind of thing that contributed to it being hellish and unpleasant. I like the idea that sex is something people do because it’s fun and makes them feel good, not that it’s some sort of asymmetrical and hostile game.

I guess, it’s something that I have extremely complicated feelings about and severe trauma associated with. “Roses” on CL were kinda essential at a point in my life, and I’ve wondered what the other party got out of it.

Idk - like tons of men will “stealth” you. Or they’ll pressure you into not wearing condoms when they know you’re desperate.

Maybe this is trauma dumping I’d like to be retroactively humanized by a “john” a bit. But I’m just not sure how common it is not to be ultimately traumatized at the other end of things. This is not to be a “SWERF” - but what’s the difference between a human and one of these robots?

Edit: maybe a story more aligned to positive feelings towards “Johns” - the older man who saw that my tires were deflated and brought out a pump to fix it. He liked a thing I don’t but isn’t abnormal. Tolerable but not “enjoyable.”

The others are hard to balance it out against. Perhaps a consequence of not having a “Nordic model” or legalization. But also the kind of thing that often make it hard to think rationally. This is why I’m deeply empathic to Dworkin.

Former sex worker - what’s the appeal?

It’s basically impossible to do full service work without being severely traumatized. I guess I don’t have to pay for sex since I like men - no matter what age sex gender race what the fuck ever there’s a guy within 10 miles that’ll stick their dick in you - but I guess I don’t see the appeal of sex that my partner isn’t enjoying.

Hbomb’s video is a good overview if you have about two hours to spare.

For the paper he published - he got his subjects at a birthday party. Not all of them even had autism. He was positing that autism had something to do with the digestive track, and they did shit like lumbar punctures on some of the kids (one iirc had serious complications - they basically tortured autistic children with a bunch of painful and complicated medical tests).

The fact that The Lancet published a paper with such horrific failures in methodology, ethics, and even fucking sample size is an embarrassment.

The game tells you these things though. You have to pay attention.

It’s an RPG before it is an action game. The mechanics align with that - you just might not like traditional CRPGs - which is fine, most don’t which is why Bethesda basically dropped the pretense of their games being RPGs by Skyrim.

Edit: if you want the easiest time in Morrowind - a Redguard. Adrenaline Rush will get you through tough spots. If you’re impatient and willing to sacrifice optimization for speed (which isn’t really that much a big deal), take the Steed as your sign. The Lady is better for optimization and will save you money on bribes.

If you want cheese: steal the lime ware plate on the shelves in the Census and Excise office right as you start the game. Drop it before the guard confronts you, pick it back up after he chews you out. Sell to Arrille, buy equipment matching your best armor skill/weapon skill. Hop over to Addamasartus, clear out, grab the moon sugar, sell to Ravirr in Balmora for one of his “Daedric weapons.”

But really the purpose of the game is that you should be a low level dweeb for a while. Pacing is slower - if you’re going to do the Mage’s Guild - you should be capable of magic. Lots of those early quests are no combat/easy.

It’s an experience about immersion. The gameplay and mechanics are built to facilitate this. You’re supposed to suck at first - that’s why Caius basically tells you to fuck off at the beginning of the game. You do end up with your god power fantasies at the end - by the time you’ve killed two gods and a pretender, you do get to run around one shotting everything. (Better than Sheogorath him-fucking-self getting ganked by a troll because its health pool is in the triple digits.)

Don’t run everywhere (keep fatigue bar at least half full). Don’t use weapon skills that are less than 40 (train them - there aren’t restrictions like in the later games).

It’s closer to D&D than an action RPG. Your swing is like a “to hit” roll. The game cares about your character’s skill - not yours.

I like Morrowind a lot mechanically - I like that the game will happily allow you to kill anyone you want (and with Taunt - you can do it legally!) You can complete the main quest after slaughtering everyone on Vvardenfell bar one person (the thread of prophecy might be broken - but a larger theme in ES lore is that we make prophecies happen).

I like that the game is designed around the lack of fast travel. When I complain about fast travel in Oblivion and Skyrim, I hear “just don’t use it” but it isn’t really feasible (playing a Survival run in Skyrim and life just sucks if I have to go to Morthal).

Morrowind’s world is just real and thought out in a way that I haven’t seen in a game since. The towns are designed around food sources, there’s a lot of thought into to the economies of plantation slavery, and it’s all used to enhance the world building.

Scaling in Morrowind wasn’t really a problem because almost every enemy was hand placed. You don’t have hordes of generic “Bandits” (in glass fucking armor at end game) - you have Tunipy Sharmirbasour, who has a reason for being where she is and a set level. Barring like guards and some of the humanoid enemies in Tribunal and Bloodmoon - everyone has a name.

Leveling only really comes into play when it comes to some of the generic loot that can be rolled, what some shopkeepers might have, and generic creature enemies. Even then, the scaling isn’t ridiculous - going from rats to Kagouti doesn’t feel uneven. Unlike Oblivion, you also will continue to see lower level enemies generated.

Oblivion even levels the quest rewards - so your Daedric artifacts and faction completion rewards will be useless once you level.

Leveling in Oblivion also affects enemy stats, and a lot of time it’s a flat bonus. Late game ogres and Minotaurs are not fun to fight, because they’re just massive health pools.

Morrowind has the same “inefficient” leveling problem (like, endurance is something you want to upgrade as early as possible, because it effects how much health you get every level up) - but in Morrowind you aren’t permanently fucked because you spent your first ten levels training acrobatics and speech craft or something.

I don’t see Bethesda has doing anything about this project.

Like TESNexus did take down my Morroblivion main quest implementation back in 2010 (although someone else had already uploaded a half done version which was allowed to stay up? maybe they had sucked Arthmoor off or something.) I just moved to the Morroblivion forums after, nbd.

But you’ve been able to complete basically all of Morrowind in Oblivion for more than ten years, and I don’t think Bethesda has done anything. I think they threatened/scared the French guy who made the executable that converted everything, but backed off and never really bothered again.

Tbh, I could see them giving Morrowind away for free at some point - just like Daggerfall and Arena.

The way they might fuck people over is the endless Skyrim and Fallout updates I guess that break fucking everything. But not legally I don’t think. This gets people to buy more copies of Skyrim (and we know the modern gamer isn’t patient enough for Morrowind proper)

Remember the meltdown over “Obamaphones”?

Yeah - there are a shit ton of Joker’s epic boners.

Also a lot of funny stuff with Superman and Jimmy Olsen. The Bronze Age is… something.

DRMless digital is great - I have a calibre library of thousands - but still more vulnerable.

Canticle of Lebowitz is a great post apocalyptic novel. After the nukes, Catholic monasteries preserve the ancient tradition of copying down manuscripts. Text doesn’t require any form of infrastructure.

There are also many texts/other media that are not available in any digital format. Obscure or older. For as much of an Information Age we are in, a lot of knowledge is being lost through neglect.

Amazon’s ebook store front (as well as the internet in general) is flooded with AI slop. The internet is a place where the signal to noise ratio is dropping rapidly.

Physical media is necessary. Especially books. Especially the kinds of books regimes might want to ban. When it’s time to rebuild, we’ll need firm ground to stand on, and physical books work as long as you can hold them.

This is going to be bad.

I’m in some homesteading/backyard chicken groups, and they are already gearing up some disturbing conspiracy narratives. “Bird flu” isn’t real, and it’s a ploy by the globalists to kill off poultry to force us to EAT ZE BUGS and fake meat. There will be people who will be ready to revolt against any action taken to prevent or control the outbreak.

The same types are also pushing raw milk.

We are going to have another pandemic, with an administration that is actively hostile to public health and already has a track record of exacerbating this previous one - responsible for the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. This is intentional as part of the accelerationist project to break down the US into micro fiefdoms.

They get handed locked down chromebooks or iPads at schools. They’re only really exposed to a walled garden, and they also aren’t explicitly taught a lot of concepts that need to be taught (almost all MS/HS I’ve met have passwords which are just sliding their finger across the keyboard - it’s bewildering. I teach “correct horse battery staple.”)

You can’t learn much if you can’t install your own software. Learning is breaking things though, and most schools seem allergic to hiring competent tech teams/setting up sandboxed computer labs. Security concerns are huge - eg, if your kids school uses PowerSchool they probably got hacked this year - but when your teaching physics and can’t install MathLab or whatever…

There are still the little geeks that figure out how to get video game emulators going - Pokémon Emerald is probably more popular among middle schoolers today than it was in 2005.