Feral Goblin

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
nicoleartist
ashfurthepoorlittlemeowmeow

No, kids should not have unsupervised acess to the internet.   Yes, I got that and it was the best thing that ever happened to me.    Its a paradox.

penrosesun

It’s not a paradox – it’s a different net.

When we were kids, the internet was a sandbox-style open world – full of dangerous things, yes, but also nearly unlimited potential – and we learned to be careful, and we learned fast, and we learned fairly well.

Now, the internet is a series of black box silos built by corporations to maximize engagement at the expense of everything else.

I may have seen Two Girls One Cup by accident and at the tender age of ten, but I never had to deal with companies using gambling-addiction-creating strategies pioneered in literal casinos to try and make me hand over hundreds of real dollars at the same age. I may have been exposed to vicious bigotry in anonymous and pseudanonymous messages boards, but I never had algorithms spoonfeeding me explicitly far right radicalizing content. The blithely unfettered access people of our generation had is just genuinely not the same as what kids with unsupervised access are getting today.

problemnyatic

There were also like… actual places for kids on the internet back then. Real ass websites full of engaging content geared towards children that was made by actual people who cared about the product.

The corporate internet has pretty much leveled the majority of it and what hasn’t been leveled has largely been turned into advertising. All that’s left is horrific bot-generated content and advertisements and algorithmic slop. The rest is the Adult Internet.

There’s fewer curios and neutral spaces, fewer forums, fewer places that are topic-specific- it’s all on youtube or social media or tiktok or whatever. It’s all the corporate net, where algorithms and advertisers are enacting agendas on their users literally constantly.

Before, unsupervised internet was dangerous because you could find anything out there. Now it’s dangerous because of what you can’t avoid.

curseworm
theguardian.com

'I felt I killed my children': lead poisons California community – and fills kids' teeth

A battery recycling plant blanketed Latino communities with chemicals – and thousands of properties remain toxic
news-queue

For years, Terry Gonzalez-Cano encouraged her children to get outside and play in the dirt. “I grew up doing everything outside, and I encouraged my kids to do the same thing. We played in the backyard, we gardened,” she said. “I thought I was being a good mother by forcing them to spend time outside.”

Gonzalez-Cano, 48, didn’t know that, for decades, the Exide lead battery recycling plant in the neighboring Los Angeles-area city of Vernon had blanketed blue-collar Latino communities with layer after layer of lead and cancer-causing arsenic.

In June 2015, the soil on her property in the LA neighborhood of Boyle Heights was tested for lead by the California department of toxic substances control. Gonzalez-Cano said the results had come back in April 2016, 10 months after her property had been tested: her home had more than double the 80 parts per million (ppm) that California deems acceptable. At her father’s home a block away, where she and her brother spent countless hours playing in the backyard when they were children, the number averaged over 800ppm. One neighbor’s soil tested so high that it surpassed the 1,000ppm required to qualify as toxic waste.

“When I found out, I couldn’t breathe,” said Gonzalez-Cano. “I felt like I was the worst mother in the world. I felt that I had killed my children.”

Sitting next to her on the couch at her home recently, her brother Jose Gonzalez emptied a plastic bag full of bracelets from his dozens of trips to the hospital for sinus cancer on to the floor. “Here’s Exide’s legacy,” he said. “I thought I was staying fit when I used to play football in the mud. I didn’t know it, but I was poisoning myself.”

Six years after their property was tested, the siblings say that the state has not given them even a prospective timeline for when their property will be cleaned up. They worry about the damage that has already been done, and the health problems they and their families may have that will only manifest with time.

The evidence of the plant’s contamination is not just in the soil of local homes, but in the teeth of the children who inhabit them. A 2019 study found high levels of lead in the teeth of local children, indicating long-term exposure that was passed along to many while they were still in their mother’s wombs. “Mothers in these communities are exposed, and they pass that exposure on to their children before they’re even born,” said Jill Johnston, an assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California who authored the study.

Despite its nearly 100-year presence, many in the community had never heard of Exide until less than a decade ago, although community organizers had been protesting against the plant and demanding action for many years. The company could not be reached for comment.

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cool-dad
pmmmgaiden

for this upcoming TDOV, let’s recognize the trans people who can’t be visible online. the closeted trans people, trans people that aren’t comfortable with their body enough to take pictures, trans people that can’t show their face online for safety reasons, and everyone else who can’t do things like post selfies today. you’re beautiful, brilliant, and loved, and you don’t need to show your face (or even go by your preferred name and pronouns) online to be able to celebrate.

froody
froody

That post about being horrified that heaven is a never ending suburbia touches upon a terrible fear I have. Will there be freedom of expression in heaven? Any concept of identity? Those who actually get to heaven, those who follow God’s narrow path and return if they stray, can there truly be individuality to them? The metaphor of heaven being the suburbs, where every house is warm and safe and has food and amenities but it is identical and every house outside is the same forever, can that me bliss? It is already fantastic, perfect, anything you could need but could it be better? What is the point of going to heaven where everything is soft and there is no pain? How will you feel joy anymore if you cannot measure it’s distance from misery? Is there free will in heaven, can any action have a ripple?

froody

The idea of a heaven devoid of free-will or individuality or true meaningful emotions/creations terrifies me more than the thought human consciousness ends with death. I would rather be turned over to nothingness, without thought or existence. I hope that’s what happens when I die. And yet, I fear God anyway. I pray to him not out of love or respect but because it has been bred into me over hundreds of generations to fear him. Even now I try to break free from the prison of cultural Christianity and I cannot.