As a concept I would welcome a safe affordable male contraceptive and would use it if appropriate.

I would say that I would definitely evaluate the option very carefully. Especially in a committed relationship. Sometimes female birth control can bring benefits beyond just birth control, along with its drawbacks. My partner suffered from severe period cramps at a point in her life, where the birth control she used suppressed that. That said, it would actually be positive to have the option of a male contraceptive in a relationship. We share the pleasure and the responsibility. In the end, the safest option with the least side effects will probably win out. If that is a male contraceptive, so be it.

Outside of a committed relationship, condoms just makes more sense. I cannot imagine taking the risks associated with sex and not taking any precautions for it. Then again, my early 20s was spent in a country and area with a high prevalence of HIV, so not taking chances is ingrained due to that. It would also depend on just active a sex life we are dealing with.

I think we can agree that your experience was valid and changed your life. The emphasis here is on your life for good reason. Porn and masturbation, like any other escape mechanism, is exactly that. I suspect something underlying as the cause for your need to escape that much. The nofap community there helped you reinforce that change. It does not make the community entirely wholesome.

What I wonder is if you would have had the same results with changes in your life without specifically focussing on porn and masturbation. I have observed this a few times in other areas, where changes to routine and outlook was the actual source of the improvement and not the thing the improvement was attributed to.

Just a thought. It is always good to try and understand yourself. It takes nothing away from your achievement in turning your life around.

Agreed, I installed Ubuntu 22.04 last week to play with stable diffusion. Decided to have a quick look at steam / proton and was blown away with how easily it works. Fallput 76, my primary online game installed and run with almost no hassle. I even managed to get a long time irritation with runaway frame rates fixed.

The only glitch that remains unsolved is a hang on exit. Which is a known issue.

This is a fact and a half. Ihave been using linux on and off for a headless Minecraft server. Vanilla Debian. Yesterday I decided to load up the latest Ubuntu lts, to run stable diffusion. My first end user linux install in ages. And it was a 15 minute seamless experience. From boot ISO to running a normal functioning desktop. Add another hoiur and stable diffusion was up and running. A far cry from building slackware from, from source, in the early 2000s. It truly is amazing when we consider what has been achieved.

I will go for the oddball answer. The Outer Limits. The originals and the later ones. The episodic short story format works very well for me.

I have to second the Elite Dangerous vote here. Especially if you find an online community to play with. It is part space flight sim, part trading and now part fps. It has its problems, but the expansive scope of it always amazes.

Groups like The Buur Pit are new player friendly and will help a new commander learn. Game can also be had fairly cheaply on its frequent spelials.

The rules of the internet remains unchanged, regardless of platform. Do not feed the trolls.

We still have a lot to learn of the psychology of the situation. Results from these studies are always interesting. Even if it is far from the real thing.

It is also a perfect starting point for a post apocalyptic novel. "The only group to survive the end was a small band of researchers, stuck in their isolation experiment."

Conceptually Boost and Upvote are intended for different things. That is in my very limited understanding.

Upvote is for the post only, but if you boost then the thing you boosted will be shared with your followers and is on your public feed.

The reputation calc does not look at upvotes at the moment, only boosts. This may change soon as the kbin author changes the site to be a better merge between the mastadon and lemmy concepts.

We are on a brand new developing platform. Things are changing fast, as we kick the tires and take it for a spin. It is both refreshing and exciting.

I believe it to be a real collaboration, where the question is almost meaningless. There are some points where we can clearly read Pratchett's humour and some places where a bit Neil's darker imagining shines through, but on the whole I think it is almost impossible to separate one from the other.

It will however remain on of my favourite books of all time. I can also recommend the TV series made a few years ago. It was probably as true to to book as you can make it and had me laughing out loud almost as much as the book did.

It is like watching a slow train wreck. You know you should just look away, but you just cannot.

Using voting on a post or comment like a yes/no poll. I think we should rather upvote if the comment is interesting, or related to topic and actually reply if we disagree with comment.