A repository of my most intimate thoughts.
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This is such a cute recipe book concept.
If you haven’t heard Takeo Ischi yodeling, then was your life even worth living?
Played some more Super Mario Odyssey today.
Jumping into Shiveria Town was a pleasant and unexpected surprise. The townspeople are sea lions in eskimo outfits. It’s really cute.
In the Hollow Crevasse (I think that’s what it’s called), there are these enemies (Bitefrosts) that push you up and then serve as platforms before they try to eat you. I thought those were pretty creative.
The *Bound Bowl Grand Prix* was fun. I did Class A in 1:03.60 (best lap was 20.19). I also beat Class S, but slower. This was actually quite a fun concept. I wish that there were more tracks. This could be an entire series of minigames.
One moon involved dressing Mario up in just his undies. I left him that way for the rest of the time that I stayed in the Snow Kingdom. The outfit matches the Seaside Kingdom, which I will go to next.
At the end of this play session I managed to get 33 out of 37 moons in the Snow Kingdom and 286 in total.
I did the groceries today, as I do almost every Sunday, and I wanted to get myself a treat.
As always, when I decide to get a treat, I get very overwhelmed by all the options.
What makes it worse is that a lot of snack foods that I would like to eat, have ingredients that I’m not comfortable eating, so the process of selecting a treat is made even more frustrating by the fact that I need to read all the labels.
So, today I was thinking about how I could avoid this overwhelm in the future, and I think that I came up with a good solution:
I started a list of “acceptable treats” on my Notes app. Over time, I will add to the list more and more treats that fulfill the following requirements:
1. They are something that I enjoy eating.
2. They have a relatively short list of ingredients.
3. They are relatively unprocessed.
4. They are relatively cheap.
I immediately came up with three treats that fit these criteria and got myself a treat from among them.
Next time I want a treat, I will choose it ahead of time and add it to my grocery list. That way I won’t feel analysis paralysis.
Also, whenever I see something tasty that I might like, I will look at the ingredients and the price, add it to the list, and later get it and decide whether it’s worth keeping it there.
I can also check off the items on the list so that I won’t repeat which treats I buy before I try out new ones or get the ones that I haven’t checked off yet.
Genius. I know. What can I say?
I have some more thoughts on the UK porn ban.
I don’t think that requiring ID verification (which is not only a violation of Internet users’ privacy, but also risks getting their personal data exposed if it leaks) is the way to go about protecting children from sexually explicit content.
I do think that children should be shielded from pornography though.
Maybe you disagree with me. Feel free to send me an e-mail with all the scientific studies that prove that exposing children to pornography does not harm them. I’ll gladly read those if you can find them.
However, I do have a personal history with pornography, and I wish that I didn’t. I “stumbled” onto it in my early teens, when classmates lent me magazines, floppy disks, or CDs containing pornographic material. My parents later also made the mistake of gifting me a computer that sat unattended in my bedroom (that I could lock the door to), connected to the Internet.
What has the result of my porn addition been?
I’m in my mid-30s now, and in a happy, long-term relationship with a partner. When we make love, I enjoy the emotional closeness. However, I struggle to maintain a full erection. I do get erected, but not as “firmly” (sorry for the graphic language) as I do while I watch porn. The sex just isn’t as stimulating to me. It lacks the fantastical (as in, “fantasy”) elements of porn. It makes it so that I need to “keep going” for a lot longer than even my partner needs in order to climax, overstimulating her in the process (and probably making her feel inadequate, even though she always enjoys it when do make love).
I also haven’t been able to completely shake the addiction to watch porn. In fact, I masturbated today again, three times. Now, I will say that I have greatly reduced how often I masturbate since I was a teenager and a young adult. It used to be a daily habit. That dwindled after a lot of personal effort in my early 20s. These days, I relapse maybe once a month, like I did today.
Still, porn has (perhaps permanently) damaged my brain, in that I cannot, for the life of me, behold a woman (especially one who is attractive, and intentionally or unintentionally dressed in a provocative manner) without “lusting” after her. I’m getting better at “looking away”. (I do this thing where, if I see an attractive woman, I tell myself “look away”. I’m hoping that it eventually turns into a habit and retrains my neural pathways.) It’s still very difficult not to fantasize about random, attractive women that I see in everyday life. It’s gross and objectifying.
Whats more, is that I don’t even find my partner exceptionally attractive, even though she is conventionally attractive. She is attractive to me. The shape of her body just can’t live up to the fantasy that is pornography, or all the women on the streets that get my attention because my brain craves novelty.
My partner does know that I have masturbated in the past. I don’t know if she is aware that I still do it. She has always been very patient and gracious about it before, not taking it personally, but I very much want to get rid of this habit once and for all: for my sake, as well as for her sake. We don’t make love very often (thankfully, we have an otherwise perfect relationship), and that’s to a great degree because I just never feel the urge to initiate it, because my brain is so porn fried that I just don’t feel enticed by the idea of making love, the good, old-fashioned way.
So, again, feel free to disagree with me. Feel free to tell me that there is nothing wrong with me and that I just need to “spice up” my sex life. Talking to hundreds of people on the Internet about this though, I have learned that I’m far from being the only one who struggles this way and/or thinks the same way about this topic. In my opinion, pornography is not, and never will be, a viable tool for sex education. I don’t know how it is that we will properly educate children on sex in a manner that is appropriate to their age and doesn’t mess them up, but I am convinced that pornography ain’t it.
There is no doubt in my mind that this “Online Safety Act 2023” (more commonly referred to as “the UK porn ban”) is causing more harm than good. It kind of reminds me of SOPA. All that the porn ban has done is to greatly increase the profit of VPN providers, encourage people to walk into dodgy websites that don’t require age verification, and maybe get Wikipedia shut down in the UK altogether.
Meanwhile, no children stopped watching porn. It’s still trivial for them to find porn on the Internet. It always will be.
People say that this is somehow the conservatives’ fault. Yet, even though it started under them (I think), the Labour [sic] Party under Keir Starmer has pushed it forward. So, what gives?
The way I see it, the UK government is just trying to enforce surveillance on its citizens. That’s what this is actually about. I don’t understand what the end goal of the surveillance is, and I don’t understand how there is no mechanism through which the people can pressure their government to walk back on this atrocity, but it is clear to me that “protecting the children” was just an excuse.
(In fact, and forgive me for sounding like a conspiracy theorist, those people up top might actually all be “PDF files” anyway. They don’t care about children.)
I hope that we see another Internet-wide blackout like during SOPA, particularly from Wikipedia. I think that if it got bad enough that the Americans got affected by it, then they would quickly put pressure on the UK government to walk the entire thing back. Somehow, though, I have no faith that anyone will do anything about it this time. There doesn’t seem to be any sort of organized movement protesting against this act.
Learned a new acronym: HENRY, “high earner, not rich yet”. Unfortunately, not my problem. I’m more of a PAUL: “poor, as usual, lol”.
Elvis Presley died 48 years ago today.
OK. I have no idea what this website is about, but I love its Wii-themed 404 page.
I figured out a “design”. Do you like it? I love pink. Specifically, I like #FF8596. Finding an accent color was a bit laborsome though. After trying every tone in the visible spectrum, I finally settled on #ffee85.
I created a new Proton e-mail account to register on Neocities with, but the e-mail sent to me for verification got flagged for some reason. After going through many hoops and loops, I somehow managed to verify my new e-mail. phew