Vivat Libertas

This article talks about porn, sexual harassment and bullying. If you are uncomfortable with this, you probably shouldn't read it . In the UK, porn websites will now have to verify that their users are over 18 - perhaps with credit card information. Plenty of people are hailing this as a good thing to protect our children, but frankly, I think it's going to be about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Firstly, there are a mind-boggling number of porn sites out there and more will spring up. The BBFC is not going to have the time or resources to block them all. Secondly, not all porn is on sites dedicated to watching people fuck. I think I've gone to a dedicated porn site exactly once in my life, but I've still seen a lot of porn. How? Reddit and tumblr host a fair amount (including pornbots everywhere - spectate lecherous women online!). Snapchat too. Twitter used to be full of pornbots. DeviantArt has been around forever, but has a ton of drawn images and directions

It's one of those days. I have too many deadlines, the world is run by overgrown toddlers who are going to get us all killed, and May's just called a general election. Bleh. I can't hide my cynicism about this. And on top of everything, I would have to be depressed, because the best way to react to turmoil in my life is to stop being a functional human being. I've been to my GP and am now sitting tight on a referral, but the service is apparently overstretched because the NHS has no money. Right now, all I can do is wait for them to process my reference and see if they think I'm mental enough to qualify for their help. In the meantime, I've been trying to be proactive, because it beats being miserable and not doing anything. Because I still more or less trust the NHS, I looked at some of their resources for self-care, where they suggested self-help books. I'm not opposed to self-help books when used in conjunction with some kind of therapy and w

...actually, the positive thinking sort of worked. Well, not quite, but sort of. What worked better for me wasn't trying to cultivate a happy happy shiny shiny attitude. It was doing what my body told me to do and getting some sleep. It was doing what my mind told me to do and getting out of the house to see some green space. It was seeing my amazing boyfriend and holding him, spending time with him, spending time just talking and making music and exploring new things. It was realising that I have really, really good friends, who care about me and actually want to spend time with me. It was realising that all of those things have been there since the beginning and I'm only just noticing them. It was going to parties and dancing badly and ending up covered in my friend's soft toys. It was diving deep into physics books and connecting with what made me love physics - with the strange and beautiful and elegant ways of viewing the world - and drawing on that to stud

(Actually, the inspirational quotes did nothing.)

This semester, I've been taking a C++ course. I like programming. I want to suck less at it. So far, it's going okay. My workload is heavy, so I don't write so much anymore. I don't expect it to get easier. I find I learn programming decently by reading around - by reading documentation and forums and random pdfs I find lying about. I learn about culture and other people's personalities. Even if something isn't directly relevant to me, I still find it useful. While trawling the internet to fix my current problem, I came across an essay by Paul Graham . It was useful, but not immediately so; it gave me food for thought, but it's not something I feel I have the free time to learn right now (I should really spend it sleeping). Somewhere in the back of my sleep-deprived brain, I remembered...something. A website very, very similar to the one I was looking at. In fact, the layout was almost identical - but the essays were different. The one I was reading di