At this point I think the only way forward is for enough like-minded people to sort of stake their claim on some semi-walled off portion of the internet and greatly limit access from swaths of IP addresses.

Sort of like web rings 2.0. Everyone, or enough people, will have to chip in on costs and provide either money or hardware.

There will have to be some sort of regulatory body with voting members.

To be ‘in’ the site has to abide by certain advertising restrictions and privacy agreements.

A decent use (finally) for llms would be to audit the private index and remove slop. I think we’re just at the beginning of what will be a resource hogging AI arms race.

It’s sort of what we’ve been trying to avoid since the beginning but it seems inevitable at this point.

Plot twist, you absorb each other’s souls when you marry them and move into their lair. An enemy to lovers rom-com of the ages.

I don’t believe this at all. Sounds like more guerrilla marketing disguised as news.

If only we (the collective users) spent more time creating a framework and vision of how the Internet should develop and aggressively pushed back on attempts to deviate from it…

When the people refuse to convene a governing body with teeth, the vacuum is filled with opportunists.

In a sense we are suffering from our own success. A place where anybody can build anything they want digitally. Left a ripe field for unrestrained commercial interests to infest the whole thing. Now it is bloated with human and AI slop to such a degree it smothers everything else and every major tech push is tuned towards data scraping every morsel.

Correct.

To get closer to the gist of your original comment…

Any hang ups you have about being intimate with another person will largely vanish once you get a little practice.

Sex and intimacy is a skill, not just in the physical sense but in the vibe building sense. Don’t worry, you’re going to fuck it up a bunch before it starts to come together.

If you’re afraid you’re going to slip up and do something that will turn him or her off… you will, lol. But in the end it’ll be fine.

There is tremendous power in being able to choose your role. Masculine, feminine, non denominational, ha ha. Rough and tough, suave and sensual? Master, sub, equals? You want to be the daddy? Or you want to be mommied? You want to cry a little in their arms? You want to take them to heights of pleasure never felt before? You want to have a spiritual moment with them? These are all just variations, themes, props, you can pick up and play with. You don’t have to be any one thing.

And, if you find that you actually do trend towards the effeminate, there are plenty of women who find that cute, too.

It doesn’t matter. At the end of a life you want to be able to say you got to experience it all. Leave nothing on the table.

Alright, I’ll bite.

My young friend, I’ll tell you this: it’s perfectly fine to be exactly as you are. As long as you’re not hurting anyone with your behavior, you are free to express yourself in any way you like. Be who you want to be and how you want that to look like and you’ll gain the respect of others and yourself for living with authenticity.

The ideas and labels and history we have about ourselves, whether we are worthy of love or not, if we’re good enough or not, are largely illusionary anyway. They can be very persistent but in the end they are as malleable and ephemeral as any concept. Smoke and mirrors of the mind. You can let these conceptions of yourself lead you through a maze of confusion, twisting this way and that, your whole life, or you can abandon them, climb over the walls of this self constructed maze and be free now.

I guarantee that no matter what you’re into, how you present yourself, there is somebody out there that is into it. Don’t worry about what some broad spectrum of people might or might not like about you. Instead, judge each situation as it arises and attend to the specifics of that interaction.

When you are younger, you have little personal data collected about life to go off of. As a result, a lot of theories about people and the world are based on idealism, stereotypes and cultural biases and generalisms rather than first hand experience. The reality is that things are not these caricatures that are formed by our grasping minds but way more varied and nuanced.

Sure, there are superficial people in the world, a lot of them, in fact, depending on how their day is going, and you may not be their cup of tea. But over all you’ll find that people care way less about you (both in a positive and negative sense) and way more about how you make them feel. All the facts about you are very insubstantial compared to the impact you have on their esteem in your relationships with others.

One of the best developments in my life came when I stopped trying so hard to be a certain person or present myself in a certain way. It seems like the way to success is to be a certain way. I was afraid if I wasn’t manly or tough enough that I wouldn’t gain others’ respect or it would open me up to being attacked. Like you, I had some real life experiences that reinforced this perception. I have lived through certain situations where weakness absolutely would invite the wrong attention from very monstrous people. It very much was a matter of personal safety to be intimidating and to correct other people’s opinions on that if they didn’t agree. And later that bled into relationships with others. Our entire world view is shaped by key moments in our upbringing. So I thought I had to be a certain way and spent a large chunk of life not feeling I could be any other way. With guys, as well as being macho, or at least without weakness, when dealing with women, too. It was a waste of a life.

But the world is not your abusive upbringing, or a prison, or a reality island dating show, or any other artificial environment. It is vast and varied and filled with people who do not make up a monolith, and you can’t please or impress them all. Or even the majority. It’s much easier to just be you. Accept others as you would like for yourself and don’t cast your pearls before swine. It’s important to see the world as it is rather than assuming it is because for survivors of abuse their perceptions are often biased very heavily towards negativity. So stay in therapy.

And one last note about women. While it certainly helps to be… flexible with how you come across with image, and interpersonal vibes, and handling relationships, on the whole most women care way more about you being someone they feel safe with, someone they trust but aren’t bored by, than anything else. There are some vague universalities about attraction, but rarely are they absolute or limited to just one thing. For every woman who likes one type of guy, there is another woman that likes something entirely different. And, on the whole, women are way more accepting of variety and their criteria for attraction is different than men’s. A lady might be attracted to the manly man neighbor who chats her up while working on his motorcycle and then later her eye turns towards the the gentle warm guy serving her coffee who always has a smile and joke for her.

What ever role you want to play, there is a woman who will go on that journey with you provided you treat her the way she wants to be treated.

In short: You are exactly who you need to be right now. You can always improve how you navigate life but the quality of who you are is exactly right, right now. So just be at ease with that fact. You are worthy, good hearted, and a lovable person. Don’t ever forget that.

Edit: I’m going to leave this comment here because it’s funny, but after a little exchange I have given him the benefit of the doubt.

What do I really think?

You’re fishing for good wank material for some sub/sissy/humiliation kink and you find the whole range of responses from this section more intoxicating due to authenticity of the replies, potential for heated or derisive exchanges, and the thrill of being sneaky about it. As compared to just posting in some nsfw fanfic/roleplay, obviously.

In a few weeks you’ll probably ask a related question in a different section.

I’ll check them out, thanks

I’ll have to check that out. Thanks

We’re in between a rock and a hard place. The only way to shake the grip of enshitified companies is to either turn to government/tax backed public utility type incentives, which opens up a whole other can of worms, or lean on crowdsourcing, which is very hit or miss.

That and everything is a YouTube video now. Or at least that’s what the search company that makes money off their video service wants you to think.

I tried using an instance on a public page and after about a month I gave up. Maybe it was configured poorly but it was real hit or miss. Sometimes it’d deliver but just as often the results were nonsensical.

There’s probably some instance that’s really dialed in but I quit looking after the first go around.

If it makes you feel better, I don’t think being able to visualize helps as much as it would seem. Drawing is just hard. I say this as someone who has a very active mental imager and has been drawing (poorly) my whole life. The technical aspects of drawing/painting etc., is really just about understanding the theory, application, and practice.

Does it help? Sure, a little but nothing I’ve ever drawn has come out looking like the mental picture with any satisfaction and I could probably do just as well with a verbal or written description to go off of. And references, of course. Several famous modern artists have aphantasia.

Easy to confuse, these are actually art critics.

I’m a savage, only desert blushes for me.

Oh yeah, and watch some roasts of famous people. That stuff is comedy gold.

While everyone is giving you good advice about how to be yourself and how to deal with jerks, I am going to take a different approach and simply answer your question.

In order to have wit you have to have two things: an understanding of humor and thick skin.

Understanding humor means being able to break apart the message and find a way to reinterpret it in a relevant but unexpected way. The surprise is the key to a good joke, but it has to make sense. Humor exposes a truth, thus, an intentionally funny person must be able to see the truth in the world and in themselves.

Humor is a tool that takes the form of what you need. It can be a weapon, to insult or make foolish, a shield that repels, a cloak to hide your feelings or intentions, a clown nose to make another laugh, and so on.

The best way to learn humor is by listening to funny people. Watch a lot of stand-up comedians. Not only will it make your day brighter but you will absorb the essence of humor. Watch comedians that work the crowd. See how they get people to interact with them, how they handle hecklers. Even when they are under extreme pressure by performing in front of an audience, they always seem to be in control of themselves. That’s how you need to be.

The second part is just as important as the first. You have to have thick skin. You can’t take things personally. Humor and wit comes from a special mental place. Being too angry or hurt will prevent you from accessing this type of witty thinking. It requires a bit of cool confidence, in that even if everything else about you is lousy, you know you have the power of communication to protect or devastate at your fingertips.

To be able to clap back at someone quickly means brushing off what they say, analyzing the statement to find how to turn it around in an unexpected way, and then deliver it, not with hot anger, but with a cool, calculated malice. Slip the verbal knife between their ribs with a practiced ease and a smirk.

Do this enough and you’ll get faster and faster. Pretty soon you’re not even thinking on a conscious level. It only takes milliseconds to react, like a gunslinger.

Match the level. An eye for an eye. If someone is giving you a good natured poke, you can play along with them and take the ‘abuse’ in a funny way, or you can zing one back at them. Or even deflect it with a humorous meta comment.

If they are testing you, increase the pressure.

If they are mean spirited, go for the jugular.

You have to keep your feelings in check to respond at an appropriate level.

Being funny is a skill. But it’s one that is hard to learn by thinking about it. You see it in action and you have to practice it.

Read famous insults by kings, stars, world leaders, etc. A lot of public facing people were very funny when the time was right, and had to be because they faced constant criticism.

Read classic humorous essays. Watch entertaining people tell a story. Try some jokes out in the mirror. Make a funny observation about something or someone to a friend. Don’t be afraid to look foolish, once you’ve embarrassed yourself enough trying to make people laugh, no insult in the world can affect you.

Hope this helps.

Source: Me, a resplendent fool

Justifiable? Maybe. Maybe not. I’m not an armchair ethics professor like most of the nerds in this discussion.

I cut out all all the extra dance steps and forgo justification entirely. If I want it, I’ll attempt to take it one way or another.

Yo, dawg, we heard you like tabs…

I don’t know! I’ve already got enough shit to worry about and now you want me to contemplate imminent doom.