avdi

avdi, 2 months ago

If you haven't played No Man's Sky, give it a shot. It's good for endless, low-stress, relaxing gameplay, and at this point it contains so many mechanics that it's kind of whatever game you want it to be.

avdi, 2 months ago

Ah, a reply highlights one possible reason: many technologists still view it as a technology for generating content rather than a tech for searching and summarizing content. The latter is going to be the most common use case, by far.

avdi, 2 months ago

Nobody "signs up" to be subject to violence from a kid who's bigger than them, can't moderate themselves, and is likely to be killed if emergency services are called. Most parents are unaware this is even a possibility because guess what, the parents presently living it either don't have the spoons to talk about it or are afraid to. It's an impossible situation.

avdi, 2 months ago

Lots of parents - maybe even most parents, we will never know - have complicated, contradictory feelings that include forms of "I would not have done this if I had known".. Usually mixed with - "I wouldn't trade my kids in for the world".

It's not neat and clean. Admitting that they wouldn't have had kids doesn't make them eugenicists. Refusing to countenance these feelings in a public conversation is stifling, regressive, and patriarchy-affirming.

avdi, 2 months ago

It's also pretty fucked up in an era where reproductive choice and bodily autonomy is being rolled-back to be shushing parents for discussing ambivalence about their choice to have a kid. Y'all. People need to HEAR how scary it is to be a parent and they need to be fully supported in having second thoughts. Standing for reproductive rights but shushing parents for talking about regrets is cognitive dissonance.

avdi, 2 months ago

Millions of children are born out of sexual assault, from religious coercion, from ignorance, from lack of access to contraception, into horrible abusive relationships that become harder to escape by sharing kids, or into sudden unexpected poverty, or unexpected parental disability, or into war. Millions of parents will have contradictory feelings because their commitment to a child - "typical", or with special needs - radically circumscribed every hope they had for their own life.

avdi, 2 months ago

That is the way it currently is in a world that categorically rejects fully communal responsibility for children.

avdi, 2 months ago

Parents need to be able to feel and express regret, full stop. Without it having the SLIGHTEST MEANING about a child's worth as a person.

avdi, 2 months ago

A parent's feelings and a child's worth as a human are separate things. Parents can and do hold the two ideas - regret and unconditional love - at the same time. This is not only OK, it's vital.

Validating someone for who they are -- their gender, their orientation, their sexuality, their neurology -- does not require that the person randomly selected by capitalist individualism to be 100% responsible for their early care and success feel GOOD about the experience.

avdi, 2 months ago

Yes, it's hard on kids when they realize that their parents' lives are harder for having them, in ways the parents had not understood they would be. Maybe in ways the parents would have chosen differently if they'd known.

But these complicated feelings are a normal part of navigating the slow journey into adulthood. And they help kids grow to understand that having kids isn't an achievement, it's a radical surrender to fate that not everyone needs to make. Or at least... maybe not yet.

avdi, 2 months ago

People want to frame parenthood in terms of "you signed up for this" but even leaving aside the cases where that is categorically untrue...

• nobody plans to have a kid then become disabled
• or lose their job
• or have to leave an abusive partner
• or have their country invaded
• or have a kid that requires 24/7 care
• or have a kid the cops will shoot if they are ever called because cops aren't trained for de-escalating psychotic episodes

Nothing about parenthood is actually planned.

avdi, 2 months ago

Didn't happen to me (yet), but I see threads like that and know it easily could.

Back in my libertarian days there was this stupid argument that pure socialism ultimately meant forcing doctors to provide infinite care at gunpoint. But there are a surprising number of people who actually think that that is more or less exactly how parents should be treated in an inclusive, progressive world.