The news on this keeps popping up. Couple other articles that were tossed up yesterday from here: https://lemmy.world/post/38217297

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gjjyvg1nqo

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-26/child-sex-dolls-sold-on-temu-and-shein/105636720?future=true

I mean, that seems like a pretty dumb conclusion for him to jump to, but yeah, it could be the case I suppose.

TBF to the guy, I never believed in instant love either for the longest time. Then a couple really shitty things happened, and I was pretty much left with zero emotional anchors. Then attraction/infatuation suddenly went wild, and I was so not ready to cope with it. Maybe that dude is just not there yet for one reason or another. It’s hard to believe in an experience you haven’t had yet.

Pajama day. Know someone who doesn’t have pajamas? GIVE THEM PAJAMAS. Or a fuzzy bath robe. Or a snuggee. And tea or coffee.

I’m reminded how in hospitals they keep blankets inside heaters to give out warm blankets to patients or people waiting in the ER. TIME TO MAKE BLANKET OVENS A THING.

Coffee and tea cakes not required, but heavily recommended. Decorations can be anything from cottage core to the plushest bean bags. Soft, plush, or fuzzy is KING.

Unfortunately, I seem to favor the neurotic. It’s not a thing I can control. I know damn well not to act on it, but attraction/infatuation can be a bastard sometimes. On the flip side, on the not-instant side of things, plenty of togetherness and shows of affection and tenderness can also call forth attraction over time.

I got poor, and the vapes/smokes got expensive. That’s really about it. I will say that after vaping, I’ll never ever go back to cigs. Vaping is just better and there is no awful smell.

That’s not really the same as a person.

I’ll give it a shot.

I would love a new wave of happy hardcore.

Yeah, my parents did that when I was really little. I enjoyed it. Parents even did the thing where they each hold a hand and sorta pick you up and swing you as they walk. It was fun.

I enjoy physical affection, whether platonic or romantic, though as an adult, I feel pretty starved for it. I wish I had a girl I could walk around and hold hands with. That said, I still get hugs from people within my community, so it’s not as bad as it could be. But I still feel starved, anyway.

This is actually my third attempt at trying to stick to Lemmy since Reddit changed their API rules and gutted third party apps. My problem with Lemmy is pretty simple: it just doesn’t generate content as fast.

But Reddit, Reddit I have really come to loathe, but after spending what’s probably over a decade on it, it’s hard to leave.

I hate that the most upvoted posts on Reddit are lowest common denominator jokes that can often be predicted at a glance. It used to be there was a good chance you could get something informative at the top, or a source if showing someone else’s skill/talent.

I hate that the most common response to skill/talent being displayed is often a declaration of normalcy rather than praise for the skill/talent on display. For example, someone pulls off a skateboard trick, then you get a mini-thread of people saying variations of “I walked up the stairs this week,” or I “tripped and fell leaving my house today.”

I hate that Reddit has repeatedly narrowed what can show up in /all over the years.

I hate that Reddit does not allow me to block communities that show up in all.

I hate Reddit’s algorithm, it is complete ass at predicting what I want to see.

I hate Reddit ads.

I hate that Reddit now has politics make up a huge chunk of /all these days.

I hate shitpost, circlejerk, and buddy subs. Subs where people encourage one another to just be stupid and asanine for fun. It is my firm belief that they played a major roll in the dumbing down of reddit comments over the years, as idiots were given the space to be idiots, normalized that behavior, and then it spread outside those subs to the other serious ones. And there’s so many people that participate in it, and it caught on. I would put these subs to the torch if I had my way.

I hate the proliferation of certain cultural media fanboys. An example is EldenRing and FromSoftware fanboys. I have some 80 hours in Elden Ring, and played the first Dark Souls. They’re not bad games. They’re not great, either. And for whatever reason, they just seem to have a massive fanbase within Reddit, that the games genuinely do not deserve, leaking out of their sub and constantly posting elsewhere about the game or showing up in my /all since, to reiterate a previous point, Reddit won’t just let me block that shit and save me the headache. For a while, Jujutsu Kaisen Fans and memes were the same as well, but it has since died down. But the point being that this kind of thing happens in the first place.

I hate how Reddit community has latched on hard with image replies, leading to a proliferation of non-comments that are nothing more than passing memes around. This is also something that I believe was fostered and encouraged within the shitpost/circlejerk/buddy subs.

So, when you ask why I still hang on to Lemmy, that’s why. Because I fucking detest what Reddit has become. It is a shithole and a shell of its former self, and I desperately want Lemmy to be something better.

We/they are. So maybe we don’t pay then. I’ve never asked. We just have the premium package, so I assumed we paid.

No, but I had a coworker once who very much was. She coped by taking lots of pictures/videos and making sure they were stored in a well-organized fashion. Maybe consider doing something similar? If you want to hang onto internal mindstates, write a journal/diary.

I use this at a center I volunteer at that works with the mentally disabled. Unsurprisingly, a lot of those people are old. Surprisingly, Canva is simple enough that I’ve been able to train the elderly, of all people, to use the program to make fliers or three-fold pamphlets for themselves. It’s a good program for what it does, and the center pays for a premium subscription, so it’s not something I personally need to worry much about.

Honestly, I’m fine with this in terms of the program’s functionality, as long as Canva does’t fuck with its user interface. It is pretty simple and intuitive, and I’d argue that the UI is quite possibly one of its strongest assets, seconded only by the massive amount of options/elements you can add to your project. And it’s already apparent what AI is mostly used for within the program: making more graphic elements to slap onto your page, and more ready-made templates you can still go in and alter everything in at-will. And honestly, I’m fine with that.

I like growing and tending to plants, painting miniatures, and working on DnD projects. All of these also generate a physical, tangible thing which is also nice (though I really wish I could use the DnD stuff more.)

Ehhhhhh, no. I support sobriety, but this is definitely not the answer. Yeah, bland is normal, but it is definitely not happiness, and there’s definitely such a thing as too much of it. It is important to have activities or hobbies that bring joy in life and help break out of that blandness.

Ah, my bad. Guess they’ll just churn out Elden slop for awhile.

Videogame Time

Call of Duty
Battlefield
Modern Warfare
Uncharted
Assasin’s Creed
Dark Souls
Tombraider
Final Fantasy
Tales Of
Zelda
Street Fighter
Mortal Kombat
God of War
Deus Ex (pretty much dead already thanks to Square Enix doing a shit job)

Half-truth take. It’s not stretched artificially in the fashion you describe. It is still rife with artifical stretching. Rife with filler. An absolutely obnoxious amount of screaming. Several minutes in each episode wasted explaining what happened last time. And so on. It is garbage that needs to end, but for those who absolutely want to dive into it, I’d at least recommend canning the anime shit and just read the superior manga.