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Friday Fun Thread for September 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Anyone know the story I'm thinking of? It was a world where every wall is dominated by porn, and people know nothing but that. People have fleeting memories of life beforehand (just dreams IIRC) but other than that this is all they've ever known.

Hard to google for obvious reasons.

The idea was that some civilization really liked porn, so they'd send somulated versions of themselves in to experience hundreds of years of it, not aware they were basically creating hell.

On a slight tangent. Is anyone else annoyed by conservatives' vilification of porn and video games?

It's not that I don't see the harm of those things. But they are the effect, not the cause. People turn to porn and video games as an escape from a shitty boring life. They can bring forth a shitty boring life in sufficient quantities, but criticizing the effect seems like pure laziness (and borderline grifting). The real cause is an order of magnitude more difficult to address.

At this point, porn has become an applause light for a subset of the online right. Which they extend to many other forms of technology as well (like AI???).

A shitty life is hard to solve, being poor and sick are real hurdles, being bored is another matter.

If you have a range of options going from fulfilling but difficult to unfulfilling but easy it's hard not to say that going with the latter is the cause and not just the effect of your life being unfulfilling.

And people do have options. Opportunity costs aside books are basically free, volunteering in a totally new type of work and dealing with new types of people is free, travel is expensive but if you've already got a shitty job you won't be sacrificing much in terms of material conditions. There is a whole lot of challenge in these options and they might not provide ultimate fulfillment (though there's something to be learned from the search), but they're surely more fulfilling than being stuck in a rut of heavy gaming and porn addiction.

Books are literally free if you have a computer or a phone. I mostly use annas-archive.org now, it has libgen and zlib's contents