"There Was An Exchange On Twitter A While Back Where Someone Said, ‘What Is Artificial Intelligence?'

it's always popular to ask "why is dating so difficult right now?" and the obvious answer is to gesture at the people asking this forever and perhaps rhetorically wonder why you would expect finding someone to share your life with to be easy, end of question.

but some people will plunge on and say it must be because young men have been misled by the manosphere and now they want the wrong thing or behave the wrong way or whatever, and that's such a tempting straw to grasp because Social Media Makes People Worse is a compelling hypothesis when we see it every day (and of course you can ask what all those makeup tutorials and true crime podcasts are doing to young women besides raising their suicide rate).

personally I don't think young men behaved better in the 1970s or the '90s or the early 2010s or whenever the supposed golden age of heterosexual dating was supposed to be, and while the manosphere is obviously a problem (in the sense that it's awash with ideas that are untrue, unkind, and unhelpful) I don't think it is the problem, it seems like a typical exaggerated social media response to other problems (gender segregation on social media doesn't seem more extreme than the gender segregation that ruled most of human history, so that can't be the entire story).

women will say that men don't want to commit (despite all wanting tradwives!) and men will say uh stuff about women that doesn't bear repeating to be honest but let's politely say that both sides will accuse each other of having unrealistic expectations or overly picky standards -- and of course that's a very real possibility, that people can be fixated on fantasies and find real life doesn't measure up; one of the original critiques of social media was that it could give a misleading impression of how good everyone but you is having it (until it became in vogue to post about your mental illnesses).

but if we want to look for material changes that could potentially have impacted the heterosexual dating market, there's no getting around the fact that staying single is a much better deal for women now than it was for much of the 20th century, and indeed the centuries before that, when the desirability of marriage was enforced by incentives that strongly penalised not settling for a man, in the worst case including institutionalisation for single mothers and even the forced sterilisation of unmarried women deemed promiscuous.

as the legal barriers and overt discrimination against women were dismantled in the 20th century, the wage gap followed: in the US prior to 1980, women earned about 60% of what men earned, but by 2002 this had risen to 80% (the rise has slowed, it's 82% today); this reduction in the pay disparity has the side effect of reducing the value of what a man would bring to the household.

it's not a good look for men but there's no denying that some of the value they used to bring to a relationship included privileges like:

access to higher paying jobs

protection from harassment by other men

ability to live independently of controlling parents or guardians

ability to have children without having them taken away

now that many of these privileges are extended to everyone in a more egalitarian fashion, having a man around is simply less necessary than it was; you would expect this reduction of privileges to push some relationships that were already marginal prospects into being nonviable.

and perhaps that's a good thing, for the relationships that survive to be mutually beneficial arrangements and less like hostage situations.

God, I can’t tell you how much the “there’s not enough enrichment in my enclosure” joke has helped my mental health. Because, for some reason I can’t comprehend, pretending that I’m a zoo keeper caring for an animal (which is also me) just makes everything easier to comprehend. Like “Your head gets screwey when you’re apartment is messy” just doesn’t carry as much resonance as “The tiger becomes agitated when its enclosure is cluttered” because then I’ll be like, no shit? The tiger? I’ve gotta keep things nice and clean for the tiger.

im cleaning out my phone and found that i have saved this tiktok no less than Five separate times

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

this is such a profoundly stupid thing to be mad about but. i periodically think about how banksy made one of my single favorite pieces of art of all time, and everything else he's ever done has sucked. man, how did you nail it once

hi, a lot of you need a perspective reset

the average human lifespan globally is 70+ years

taking the threshold of adulthood as 18, you are likely to spend at least 52 years as a fully grown adult

at the age of 30 you have lived less than one quarter of your adult life (12/52 years)

'middle age' is typically considered to be between 45-65

it is extremely common to switch careers, start new relationships, emigrate, go to college for the first or second time, or make other life-changing decisions in middle age

it's wild that I even have to spell it out, but older adults (60+) still have social lives and hobbies and interests.

you can still date when you get old. you can still fuck. you can still learn new skills, be fashionable, be competitive. you can still gossip, you can still travel, you can still read. you can still transition. you can still come out.

young doesn't mean peaked. you're inexperienced in your 20s! you're still learning and practicing! you're developing social skills and muscle memory that will last decades!

there are a million things to do in the world, and they don't vanish overnight because an imaginary number gets too big

The brain is just 8 lbs of meat that sits in complete darkness and plays a video game of what it thinks is the most realistic thing ever.

Locke and Key - Review

Plus Points:

Kinsey’s Character is written as the impulsive one who makes poor decisions because she does not think about the wider consequences of her actions, a character trait that is most commonly (to my knowledge) reserved for male characters. 

Tyler’s Character is written and acted out as the more empathetic character which is not a common way in which male characters are written

Uncle Duncan is treated as a character who happens to be gay and not a ‘Gay character’ and same goes for the character Logan Calloway who is also treated as a character first who also happens to be disabled. Normalise this.

Teenagers are shown as individuals who think they are grown ups and  think they can take care of themselves but at the same time do not do a stellar job of it and also childlike in the sense that they are trusting even in the face of imminent danger (giving the Key to Ellie)

Negative Points:

Major characters as always are white, thin and good looking (No surprises) also POC characters are on the periphery at best so comes across that showing diversity was an after thought (TBH the story surrounds the Locke family so maybe showing diversity could only come through in the way they did)

Could have spent more time exploring how trauma affected the kids and the parents

Overall: 

This show tries its best (And sometimes fails) to explore how trauma affects the characters. Everyone in the family has unresolved trauma and not addressing it will only lead to more problems in the future. Like in the case of the mother, Nina, not resolving her own trauma makes her come across as an uninvolved parent in almost all her kids lives. Kinsey removing her fear out of her head is something that seems empowering in the moment but really stupid in the long run and could have been missed if she’d had someone with whom she could access her trauma with (ahem a trauma councillor). Tyler does have PTSD and blames himself throughout most of the show which could have been explored more rather than giving us more examples of how Kinsey sans fear is a constantly making cringe worthy choices. Bode needs someone to look out for him.