I want to see someone make a fully articulated one of these with custom software running on it so it writhes along with whatever furby stuff it’s doing.

Making toilet custard for fun and profit in tubby prison!

Pretty sure it doesn’t do that on lemmy. I definitely have comments with blocked responses (they show up a specific way in Jerboa) from people I blocked ages ago. If I open the thread in a browser where I’m not signed in I can see their response clearly.

So they can still see and reply to my comments, I just don’t have to see more than an error message that the comment couldn’t be loaded on my end.

Ouch, that hurts. Didn’t know it was cancelled.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of these very… saccharin posts here lately going “I’m not a human being with all the complexity that entails, I’m just a wittle bitty babby. I’m just a cutesy wutesy kitten! I poopy in a box and I’m all fuzzily! How could you be mad at me or hold me accountable for anything when I’m a little puppy dog? Look how cute I am when I get all chewy with your shoes! Oopsie woopsy, I tore the couch to shreds, but you can’t be upset for it when I’m just a puppy!”

I can understand it if it’s a sex or a fetish thing. I can understand it if it’s a furry “this is how I self identify” or an alter ego sort of thing (I’m admittedly not very well versed in the whole furry culture stuff, apologies if I worded that poorly).

I can also understand the desire for escapism from the crushing weight of all of life’s troubles, which I think these are ultimately an expression of, mixed with wanting someone to treat you in the sort of sweet and loving way people should treat pets. “I just want someone to take care of me and all this life stuff for me so I can just… be. I want people to have patience with me when I mess up because I’m doing my best. I want someone to love me for just existing.”

But pretending to be a cutesy little pet isn’t going to help lessen the weight of the world, it’ll all still be there just getting heavier until you decide to start being a fully fledged person trying to deal with it again.

It’s also potentially degrading to people not in on this whole “cutesy pet” schtick who are struggling their way through life’s problems. See the comment I replied to. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable response from someone actively struggling through shit.

Ultimately I can’t believe this “kittyboy/puppygirl” stuff is a healthy coping mechanism for life’s problems. Temporary escapism, maybe, but that’s not healthy if that’s all you’re doing.

Anyway, that’s my great big entirely unasked for opinion.

Man, every time someone goes “I want to keep my news separate from my social media feed” you folks jump at the chance to be self righteous.

If Lemmy (or any social media) is your main source of news, or the sole way you keep up with politics, that’s a problem.

If you think that constant exposure to an inconsistent firehose of news even more effected by personal biases than normal is some sort of virtue, then you don’t have much media literacy, or any awareness of the many studies that show just how much this shit has negative effects on worldview and emotional state. Before you start in on “but the world is shit”, more than one of these studies specifically tracked differences between what people thought crime rates were vs what they actually were, based off news exposure. The result was that all the people in the study exposed to news media thought things were a significant order of magnitude worse than the real statistics.

It’s not a sin to curate your own exposure to the news media apparatus, or to control your exposure so it happens on your own terms. It is literally all designed to provoke strong emotional reactions in order to increase page views and therefore ad impressions.

Avoiding news entirely is a problem too, but this constant attacking of anyone who dares to publicly talk about curating their news media diet, and especially trying to lay the blame for current mess in the USA on them, is some bullshit of the highest fucking degree.

This is rich considering the ICE raids where people with visas to be here training Americans are being snatched up and “choosing” to go home instead of deal with the bullshit.

Nanotrasen thanks you for your brave sacrifice in contribution to robotics research and construction of a new Bio-Utility Techno-Tool on Space Station 13.

OMG CUM BUCKET REAL??? (at 3am (gone shreksual))

When Are people Going to Care About THE real Problem! HOW Am i SUPPOSED to Be confident In MY SEXUALITY if I Might Be attracted To A WOMAN with A penis! the WOKE Is Forcing ME to Think? ABOUT PENIS!

That whole 4 hours of sleep sure isn’t gonna help with all that mess.

If you think rural Georgia is such a shithole, why in the hell would it make sense to build a datacenter there? Just keep your shit out of their shit if you hate them so damn much.

I get the idea, but you gotta get one big enough to stretch out in. Back and muscle stiffness from having to curl up to fit aren’t fun. Definitely isn’t helpful for any sort of sexy time, pet play, or even just general day to day existence.

I’ve slept in small spaces before without much between me and the floor, and plenty of awkward “just grab the space you can and make the best of it”. No cage, but a pile of pillows and blankets on the floor in a hotel room when I missed the last train back to my accomodations at a convention, another time at a con when the hotel let us book a room with a pull out couch but then didn’t actually have one in our room (and was booked solid so there wasn’t anywhere to put me), many nights crashing on friends’ couches or the floor when the couch was already taken, one night in a beanbag chair when about 20 people crammed into a 2 bed apartment before a huge camping trip, air matresses, crappy 20 year old pull out couches, cots, cramped overfilled tents… you get the picture.

The biggest and most consistent thing for comfort I’ve found was getting enough space that I didn’t have to crunch myself tight and keep myself in a specific position the whole night.

Space > temperature > surface for your head > whatever is under your body, at least imo.

Whatever you were going to do, don’t.

This company has illegally installed their cameras in more than one town, then tried to sell the local police force on them.

They have lawyers on staff that they use to coach local politicians on how to hold the votes to establish contracts with them in ways that aren’t technically illegal, but ensure that no community opposition has a way to have their voices heard.

You can find a lot of these sprts of stories by searching online. In local subreddits, ones dedicated to talking about flock, and local news.

Benn Jordan has a good 40 minute video giving an overview of these systems, how they work, what they track, and why they are a problem. He highlights some cases where families were held at gunpoint by police due to failures of these systems. He also experiments with defeating the AI that reads plates.

Louis Rossman is currently leading a campaign against their installation where he lives in Austin, Texas right now. Has a number of videos on it.

Overview before the Austin City Council vote: https://youtu.be/4RM09nKczVs

Call for people to show up at the Austin City Council session to discuss the potential contract with Flock, and showing how difficult it is to find this sort of stuff and be involved with your local government: https://youtu.be/g4vL1ERdZ9Y

Call to action 2: https://youtu.be/hDOmYqlwxD4

Austin City Council reschedules the vote (in a questionably illegal fashion) with less than 24 hours notice when they realize they kicked the hornet’s nest: https://youtu.be/iscDYp6dtl8

Minor followup during the wait for the revised time, at two of the three parks with 90% of reported car break ins these cameras are meant to deter: https://youtu.be/2QbtDWrlPpc

Climbing down from the trees was the begining of the end.

Look man, I get it. The world is heading to hell in a hand basket, and in a lot of ways accelerating towards it.

But there’s a difference between awareness and… I guess feeling the “doom” of all of it constantly. Existing with that weight constantly pushing down on you. At least part of that is a choice.

Letting the weight of all of this impact you constantly is not a virtue. Do what you can to push back the oncoming waves where you can. Don’t beat yourself up for not being able to hold back everything. And enjoy the joy and beauty where you can find them.

Living your life bent out of shape about things you can’t do anything about is just wasting what little time you have, and wasting time while things are comparatively better than they’re likely to be later.

And I get the need to speak out about all of it. But it doesn’t help. What helps is getting involved with stuff locally, being active in local politics (to a degree, the rot and shitty lying politicians exist on local scales too). Doing what you can. Trying to discard the worry and upset about what you can’t. Try to influence those close to you to do the same.

Slap a fur shader on it and ship it!

They can’t leave, they can’t opt-out.

If you’re going to be this pessimistic about simply existing as a human being, it’s worth noting that this is absolutely false. There are plenty of ways to opt-out permanently, and some of them are even peaceful.

Less darkly, there are communes and mutual aid communities and the like. Some even arguably self-sufficient.

Beyond that, if you truly feel existence is that fucking bleak, do you really think it helps to spread this shit to people who might otherwise be happily ignorant to it? Or are you content just making the collective experience of existence worse by putting this out into the world? Explicitly desiring to bring others down with you into the pit because you haven’t grown enough to find life worth living and enjoying anyway.

My wife and I had a daughter with her at 45 and myself at 31. We had to use IVF, and in the end, donor eggs. So it is possible, despite the age. You’re probably in a better situation biologically with him being the older one.

That said: don’t have a kid if you just think it might be nice.

Kids aren’t some sort of casual addition to the existing patterns of your life. They disrupt almost all of them. They are hard work, take up more time than anyone without could imagine. You can’t just put them to the side and deal with them later when it’s convenient for you. They need you when you’re sick, when you’re having a bad day, when you’re grieving the death of a loved one, when you haven’t had your coffee and are still waking up, when you’re just trying to get some sleep, when you’re hung over, when you’re trying to cook, when you’re trying to clean, when you’re trying to get five minutes to yourself to take a shit, when the last thing you want to do is deal with a kid.

They are 100% reliant on you for years. They need to be taught everything, and I mean everything. Basic stuff like “don’t bite people because you wouldn’t like being bit” isn’t intuitive. They will fight against you trying to get them to do something they enjoy. They will break things that are important to you. They will push boundaries intentionally and unintentionally.

And you need to handle all of your shit and all of their shit, and still have energy to handle them with kindness, near infinite patience, understanding, and with an eye for their learning and growth. You at least need to strive for this outcome, and hit it the overwhelming majority of the time. No one is perfect, but you have to strive to be for them, especially early on.

It’s exhausting. It is one of the most gratifying things in the world. Just don’t do it unless you’re 100% sure you want to sign yourself up for it.

But look, at the end of the day, there are people having kids older than you two, and grandparents having to take sole guardianship over kids as well. You can do this, if it’s something you both want.