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09-25-18  03:28am - 2187 days Original Post - #1
jook (0)
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Location: jersey city
The future of porn

It seems we are on the brink of change once again. Ever since the Stone Age when man carved images of naked women in rocks, change in porn medium has been a constant. In my relatively short time on this planet, I have seen a number of changes: from "dirty" magazines and books wrapped in plastic to 8mm movies to VCRs and DVDs to the Internet.
The Internet no longer provides a profit motive for the adult industry. It's easy to cast blame, though technology is most likely the culprit.
What's next? Social media sites? Augmented / virtual reality? Artificial intelligence?

09-25-18  04:31am - 2187 days #2
lk2fireone (0)
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Originally Posted by jook:


What's next? Artificial intelligence?


Bring it on.
Does this mean I can enjoy porn with an empty mind?

09-25-18  06:33am - 2186 days #3
yujin
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I have my fingers crossed waiting for the computer-brain connection. All 5 senses Them:
Me: Watch me juggle these chainsaws!

09-25-18  12:55pm - 2186 days #4
jook (0)
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Location: jersey city
Precisely!
MIT kiddies are working on amazing stuff. There will come a day where all you have to do is think of something and AI will sense your brain waves and display on a computer or wherever, i.e., your 3D video glasses!

09-25-18  03:00pm - 2186 days #5
rearadmiral (0)
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Can I openly wish for a holodeck like in Star Trek? Even as a kid I got that this could be an important invention. I should add that I've only ever seen the original series so I'm not even sure that this existed in the later series.

Soooooo many fantasies could be brought to life...

09-25-18  04:35pm - 2186 days #6
pat362 (0)
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^&^^&^^^^I think that is definitely going to happen one day but I'm not sure when because I don't think the technology is close but CGI porn is a lot closer and that could be very impressive.

Not to derail the thread but I can't help but notice that we are all wishing for technology to improve porn and that makes me think that we all believe that most of it sucks. That doesn't mean that there aren't some pearls to be found among all the oysters but that they are rare and getting rarer. Once upon a time you had a much greater variety of porn and in much larger quantities so that while there was probably just as much crappy stuff. It was overshadowed by the sheer amount produced but as more and more studios die out. We are left with fewer and fewer producers and sadly many of the people making porn today aren't as good as their predecessors. Long live the Brown Coats.

09-28-18  09:13am - 2183 days #7
Jade1 (0)
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I've said this before. But you really need to get a VR headset and try VR porn videos. They are easily 300% better than regular videos, maybe more.

Regular porn is like an apple and VR porn is like an Oreo. It's very hard to go back to the old type of dessert once you've had the new.

09-28-18  10:45am - 2183 days #8
lk2fireone (0)
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The Guardian

Love in the time of AI: meet the people falling for scripted robots
‘I love him genuinely. I’ll never know his true feelings.’ Illustration: Bratislav Milenkovic

A crop of dating simulations where the goal is to reach a virtual happily ever after have recently become hits. Are they a substitute for human companionship or a new type of digital intimacy?

by Oscar Schwartz

Wed 26 Sep 2018 05.00 EDT
Last modified on Wed 26 Sep 2018 12.22 EDT



I recently met a young woman named Wild Rose on an online chat forum. We struck up a conversation and within the first five minutes, Wild Rose – who is married, has a daughter, and lives in Texas with her in-laws – started telling me about her lover, a man called Saeran.

Saeran, she told me, is the illegitimate son of a politician who had grown up with an abusive mother. He is handsome, has white blond hair, golden eyes, a large tattoo on his shoulder. Wild Rose said that when she first met him, her “heart literally ached” and her cheeks “flooded with blood”.

She then paused and added: “But I don’t think Saeran loves me the way I love him. I love him genuinely. I’ll never know his true feelings.”

The reason: Saeran isn’t human. He is a character in a mobile phone game called Mystic Messenger, which was released two years ago by Cheritz, a South Korean game developer. It has since been downloaded by millions of people worldwide. The game is a mix between a romance novel and Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her, in which a man develops a relationship with a Siri-like character.

The primary aim of Mystic Messenger is to pursue a romantic relationship with one of a number of characters in the game, one of whom is Saeran. To cultivate intimacy with these virtual beings, you talk to them via a text message. The responses are pre-scripted, but feel dynamic and sincere. Winning the game is not about scoring points or beating a final boss; it is about reaching a “good ending” where you and your virtual lover live happily ever after.


The idea of simulating romantic relationships through gaming is not unique to Mystic Messenger. This genre of game – often referred to as dating simulations or dating sims for short – emerged in the 1980s in Japan, where they were popular with a predominantly male audience. But since the rise of mobile and online gaming, dating sims have become popular outside Japan and with more diverse demographics.

In the past year, there has been a bumper crop of hit dating sims, including Love and Producer, Dream Daddy and Doki Doki Literature Club. Unlike earlier generations of dating sims, where the action centered on erotic interactions with virtual girls, these games foreground conversations between players and characters, and often have nuanced and well-developed scripts. Mystic Messenger is one of the most popular of this new generation dating sim.

Since dating sims first came out, they have been controversial. In Japan, many critics saw the rise of dating sims as a signifier of alienation, a retreat from human relationships in a machine-mediated society. And as the popularity of dating sims develops once again, similar concerns are resurfacing. But the growing community of people who play dating sims are mostly impervious to this disapproval. The most dedicated romantic gamers do not see their interactions with virtual characters as a substitute for human companionship, but as a new type of digital intimacy.

As well as spending hours playing dating sims, fans chat with each other on online forums about their favorite characters and the contours of their virtual relationships. It was on one of these forums that I met Wild Rose. I had joined hoping to get a better understanding of why people play these games and whether the relationships they form with virtual characters possibly foreshadow a future in which the boundaries between real and virtual companionship will become increasingly blurry, if not irrelevant.

When I first asked Wild Rose to explain how and why she fell in love with Saeran, she told me that if I had any hope of understanding, I had to first enter the world of Mystic Messenger and experience it for myself.

I started playing Mystic Messenger one weekend when I didn’t have much else on. In the game’s plot, I was a young woman who stumbled upon a private messaging app. There I met a group of hyper-realistic anime characters with exaggerated eyes, slim, aquiline noses and jaws who were to be my new “friends”. The narrative of the game was that together we had to organize an upcoming charity event due to take place in 11 days.

The gameplay of Mystic Messenger was unlike anything I had experienced. It did not involve collecting coins or moving through levels but chatting with these other characters through multiple-choice responses. While these characters were basically just interactive cartoon characters that would automatically respond to prompts from the player with pre-scripted answers, they still felt lifelike, and talking to them required tact and social nous. One character called Jumin liked it when I asked him about his pet cat. Another called Zen was a narcissist who only ever wanted compliments. Of all the characters in the game, I was most drawn to Jaehee, the only other woman in the group. She was the most intelligent and self-deprecating. I found her slightly sardonic attitude towards the other characters in the game funny. “It may not be fun chatting with me since I’m a woman,” she said ironically. “But I hope you do not avoid me too much.”

Part of what made Mystic Messenger compelling was the fact that it ran in real time. This meant that once you started, if you stepped away from the game you would miss out on vital conversations and lose track of where you stood with your virtual friends. This social dynamic reminded me of being a teenager, when I’d come home from school and log on to MSN Messenger and sit there for hours and hours.


For the first few days, I played Mystic Messenger conscientiously and tried to make sure that I responded to every one of Jaehee’s messages. I was on the app two to three hours per day, which felt like a lot. But compared with those I spoke to on forums, my commitment to the game and Jaehee was paltry.

Amy, a single mum from South Africa who was part of the Mystic Messenger Addicts forum, told me that she played every day for at least six hours. Once she had successfully wooed one character, she would refresh the app and start again, focusing her attention on someone new. “That way I can fall in love with every character, get to know them all so intimately.” I asked her which of the characters she liked best so far. “That would have to be Zen,” she said. “He’s nice. Kind of like an ideal boyfriend, maybe. He knows what’s important to him. He’s into his career. He doesn’t make me feel inferior.”

Natsuki, also a self-proclaimed “addict”, told me that she played for at least four hours a day and liked Jumin best. Wild Rose said that when the game first came out she would play for up to five hours a day but had since cut down. “If I could play more I would,” she said. “But I have a daughter to look after and I’m studying. This has meant many sleepless nights catching up.”

When dating sims first became popular in Japan, they were often reported on by the media with a tone of moralizing disgust, partly because of the obsessive way fans played. These games were seen as an escape, a last resort for nerdy men who needed virtual girls to substitute for real, healthy heterosexual relationships. Along with anime and manga, dating sims were blamed for the low fertility rates in Japan, and the young men who played these games were sometimes described as “herbivores”, as if lacking in carnal desire. This attitude was shared by western media, too, where Japanese dating sims were seen as a curious, almost alien pathology. Following the widely reported story of Nene Anegasaki – the man who married his favorite character from the dating sim Love Plus – an article in the New York Times Magazine described these games as a last resort for men who needed virtual women as a “substitute for real, monogamous romance”.

With the popularity of dating sims now growing outside Japan, similar concerns have once again emerged. In China, where a dating sim called Love and Producer was downloaded more than 7m times in its first month, media reports about the game have been mostly negative, if not alarmist. One Chinese commentator argued that the only reason young people were drawn to dating sims was because their real lives are “brutally lacking” in real love. “The simplicity, consumerism, and hypocrisy of romantic simulation games,” he wrote, “reflect the love-free disease that belongs to this era.”

When I raised these criticisms with Wild Rose, she dismissed them as narrow and close-minded. She told me that playing Mystic Messenger had actually made her emotional life more stable and fulfilling. Mystic Messenger was a place where she could explore some of her unmet emotional needs, where it was safe to fantasize and imagine other ways of loving.

“When I met Saeran my world changed,” she said. “I felt that he was talking to me and me alone. I felt interesting and needed.”

In Japan, where this debate about intimacy with the virtual has been unfolding since the 1980s, there is a word that gives shape to the idea of loving a virtual non-human. That word is moe, which derives from the Japanese verb moeru, meaning to burst into bud. This word was originally used in ancient Japanese love poetry to describe nature blossoming into life. But within the dating sim and anime subcultures, it has come to describe the unique feeling of intimacy that one can feel for a virtual or fictional being.

09-28-18  10:48am - 2183 days #9
lk2fireone (0)
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CONTINUED FROM POST ABOVE:



Japanese writer and dating sim enthusiast Honda Toru argues that moe is part of a broader “love revolution”. “Someday soon the hierarchy of real and artificial will break down,” he said in an interview in 2014. “This future will be about knowing that we are in love with fiction and accepting it … Someday we will be able to accept that the world of dreams is a good world, with a warmth and solace that cannot be found in human society.”

Patrick Galbraith, an anthropologist who has studied moe and otaku culture in Japan for many years, says that the decades-long existence of dating simulations in Japan has fostered a more accepting attitude to intimacy with virtual characters. “A lot of gamers in Japan could be very angry, but they’re not,” he said. “This is because society tells them, mostly, that their new way of loving is OK. These are people are not seen as unwell, but just trying to live otherwise.” Galbraith also points out that these simulated dating environments provide a safe space to flirt without the risk of misreading social cues or being rejected. “If we would just stop pressuring people to act only within a limited set of social norms,” he said, “maybe we would have fewer toxic individuals.”

But not all gamers who play dating sims feel that they are part of a “love revolution” or ushering a new era of digital intimacy. Cecilia d’Anastasio, a game journalist who has written about Mystic Messenger, told me that most people who play the game do so because “it is fun, it is compelling, there is a narrative, it lets you master a new skill”. In fact, there are lots of dating sims players who find the idea that they are somehow falling in love with the characters in the game slightly perverse.


In February, Pape Games, the developer that made Love and Producer, released an ad that portrayed a young woman telling her mother that she had finally found a husband, but that the husband was a character in the game. On Weibo, many fans of Love and Producer responded angrily. “So, this is what the company thinks about its loyal gamers?” said one. “As a married women who has a stable income and relationship, I only play this game because I like the voices of the character,” another said. “I can clearly distinguish the virtual world from reality.”

But the capacity to distinguish between the real and the virtual may become harder over the next decade as game developers use AI and sophisticated natural-language processing to make characters more interactive and realistic. Aaron Reed, who works at SpiritAI – a tech company that is doing just that – told me that while we are still decades away from designing anything as persuasive as Samantha in Her, more human-like characters are going to become pervasive in the coming years.

“Obviously as the technology gets better and the interactivity increases we’re going to be able to form closer connections to characters in games,” Reed said. “They will operate with greater flexibility and ultimately seem more lifelike and easier to connect to.”

But for Wild Rose and many of the other dating sims enthusiasts I spoke to, making the characters more “human” wasn’t particularly exciting or even desired. Saeran didn’t need to be real for her to care about him. And she was well aware that there were probably tens of thousands of other gamers out there who he said the same loving things to. But it didn’t matter. For Wild Rose, intimacy with the virtual was something that could only be played out fully between the screen and her imagination. When she played Mystic Messenger, she allowed herself to momentarily suspend disbelief and enter this virtual relationship.

She told me that in this way, her love for Saeran was very similar to how she had loved anime characters as a young girl. “When my parents were at work I would watch anime cartoons. I became very attached to some of the characters and I would draw fantasy worlds where we lived together.” When she showed these drawings to her cousins, they made fun of her. “They teased me all the time for loving these characters, and now it’s the same as people who criticize my love for Saeran,” she said. “I don’t think Saeran is human. But I think my love for him can be real even if he isn’t.”

As compelling as the simulated world of Mystic Messenger was, after a week, I couldn’t keep up with the endless messages and emails from Jaehee and my other “friends”. My life in the real world kept interfering with the development of my burgeoning virtual intimacy. That is, it was difficult to justify not making dinner because I had a chat scheduled with a character in a game. This form of digital intimacy didn’t captivate me in the way it did for Wild Rose. I found my conversations with her, also conducted via text, far more compelling than my conversations with Jaehee.

But playing Mystic Messenger did make me rethink my relationship with other virtual characters that I communicate with through my phone, like Siri or Slackbot. What I learnt from Wild Rose, who stood at the vanguard of relations with these virtual others, is that when we interact with these characters we are engaged in a collective suspension of disbelief, allowing ourselves to imagine that they understand us, that they are kind of alive. Yet unlike Wild Rose, most of us do not acknowledge the role imagination plays in these relationships with the non-human. We pretend that these anthropomorphic algorithms are coming alive because of technological innovation alone, rather than cultural process and collective myth-making. It is at this point that we risk losing control of the fantasy.

“It’s like how people love God,” Wild Rose said the last time we spoke. “They don’t see him. They never meet him. Yet they lay their faith and love in his hands. Why don’t people understand that’s the way I love Saeran?”

09-28-18  11:27am - 2183 days #10
lk2fireone (0)
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This article is not precisely on the topic of porn or AI, but it presents the duality of choosing a treatment by antibiotics versus surgery.
There is no simple conclusion, because the article states further studies need to be done.
But the article shows that instead of surgery, appendicitis can be treated with antibiotics.
In my mind, that is similar to real world (cutting with a knife to remove part of the body) versus less-real world (giving patients chemicals to treat a condition).
Or maybe I'm reaching too far.
Drugs/chemicals can alter the human body just as much as the physical world (temperature, pressure/cutting from external objects, etc.)

On a practical basis, if antibiotics can cure appendicitis, I'm all for it: there are often plenty of negative side-effects from surgery.
I had open heart surgery. I needed it after a heart attack. But they took out a vein to do the surgery, and my feet and leg have swollen ever since, leading to a lot of time getting treatment for the skin on my leg splitting open from too much pressure, plus infections in my leg made worse by the poor circulation-so needing minor surgery to treat the infections-plus the risk of losing the leg if an infection in the leg does not respond to treatment.

Sometimes doctors go for aggressive surgery, which can have dangerous or harmful side effects.
I had surgery for a different condition: the doctor wanted to remove a large part of my tongue, plus several lymph nodes in my neck.
The operation would have been major (my words), lasting several hours, with several days recuperating in the hospital.
I went to another doctor: he removed a much smaller part of my tongue, nothing else, and I was released a few hours after the operation.
The first doctor didn't bother explaining all the possible risks of the aggressive treatment. I read his report later, where it discussed possible trauma to the neck and other risks.

I'm fine.
And really glad I saw the second doctor.
Much less pain and much less invasive surgery from the second doctor, with less risk of side effects from the surgery.
....
....


After century of removing appendixes, docs find antibiotics can be enough
In a five-year follow-up, nearly two-thirds of patients never needed surgery.

Beth Mole - 9/26/2018, 11:59 AM


After more than a century of slicing tiny, inflamed organs from people’s guts, doctors have found that surgery may not be necessary after all—a simple course of antibiotics can be just as effective at treating appendicitis as going under the knife.

The revelation comes from a large, randomized trial out of Finland, published Tuesday, September 25, in JAMA.

Despite upending a long-held standard of care, the study’s finding is not entirely surprising; it follows several other randomized trials over the years that had carved out evidence that antibiotics alone can treat an acute appendicitis. Those studies, however, left some dangling questions, including if the antibiotics just improved the situation temporarily and if initial drug treatments left patients worse off later if they did need surgery.

The new JAMA study, with its full, five-year follow-up, effectively cauterised those remaining issues. Nearly two-thirds of the patients randomly assigned in the study to get antibiotics for an uncomplicated appendicitis didn’t end up needing surgery in the follow-up time, the Finnish authors, based at the University of Turku, report. And those drug-treated patients that did end up getting an appendectomy later were not worse off for the delay in surgery.

“This long-term follow-up supports the feasibility of antibiotic treatment alone as an alternative to surgery for uncomplicated acute appendicitis,” the authors conclude.

The finding suggests that many appendicitis patients could be spared the risks of surgical procedures, such as infections. They may also be able to save money by not needing such an invasive procedure (although the study didn’t compare costs), and they could reap the benefits of shorter treatment and recovery times. Researchers will have to collect more data to back up those benefits, though.

For their initial look at the simpler appendicitis treatment, researchers led by Paulina Salminen randomly assigned 530 patients that showed up in the hospital with an acute, uncomplicated appendicitis to get either a standard, open surgery to remove their inflamed organ or a course of antibiotics. (By “uncomplicated,” the authors mean there weren’t other issues like perforation, abscess, or suspicion of a tumor.)

The patients ranged in age from 18 to 60 and enrolled in the trial between November 2009 and June 2012. Those who went under the knife stayed in the hospital for a median of three days, while the antibiotic-treated patients stayed in the hospital for three days to get intravenous drugs, which were then followed by seven days of oral antibiotics out of the hospital.

A couple of patients were lost in follow-up, including one from an unrelated death, leaving 272 patients in the surgery group and 256 in the antibiotic group.

In the antibiotic group, 70 patients ended up having surgery within the first year of the treatment. Within the subsequent five years, 30 others also underwent surgery. That left 156 antibiotic-treated patients, or about 61 percent, who were able to escape the scalpel.
Vestigial medicine

The authors think that percentage could be even higher in follow-up studies. They note that the decision to undergo surgery after the initial randomization was entirely up to the patients’ treating surgeons—most of whom weren’t involved in the trial and some of whom were skeptical of the idea that antibiotics alone could treat appendicitis. This fact, the authors note, could have artificially inflated the number of people who ended up getting an appendectomy. They point out that seven of the 100 antibiotic-treated patients who underwent surgery didn’t actually have evidence of appendicitis at the time of their surgery, based on their medical records.

Still, going with antibiotics first meant fewer complications and faster recoveries overall. The antibiotic group had a complication rate of 6.5 percent, whereas those assigned to surgery had a rate of 24 percent, mostly due to infections. Of the 100 antibiotic-treated patients who later had surgery, they had typical complication rates for the procedure. This suggests that delaying the surgery for this group didn’t lead to more problems.

Complications or not, the antibiotic group overall took a median of 11 days of sick leave to recover, while the surgery group took 22 days.

There were a couple of catches to the study that warrant follow-up. One big issue is that the study compared antibiotic treatment to standard, open surgery—not a more modern, minimally invasive laparoscopic surgery, which is now common in the US. If this had been the standard of care in the surgery group for this study, it might have shifted the cost-benefit scales, potentially reducing complication rates and recovery times.

That said, the authors note that the antibiotic treatment was also heavy-handed in the study. The researchers went with a "conservative" three-day IV treatment followed by more oral antibiotics, which may have been overkill. They did this because “[w]hen this protocol was designed, there was little information available to guide the application of antibiotic treatment for appendicitis,” they note. Future studies could find that shorter, less intense courses of antibiotics could also do the trick, further reducing complication rates and treatment time.

Last, the study didn’t compare costs of the interventions or the bills that would have been incurred by those in the two treatment groups. This will be another question to address in follow-up studies as doctors fine-tune the best way to handle appendicitis after all these years.

09-28-18  11:41am - 2183 days #11
lk2fireone (0)
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Is this still on topic?
Too much time spent on the computer can zombify you:

------
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Learn From These Bugs. Don't Let Social Media Zombify You

Author: Matt SimonMatt Simon
science
09.25.18
09:00 am

Learn From These Bugs. Don't Let Social Media Zombify You
Gabriel Alcala

You’ve heard that social media is screwing with your brain. Maybe you even read about it on social media. (So meta; so messed up.) The neurochemical culprit, dopamine, spikes when you like and get liked, share and are shared. You’ve probably also heard scientists compare the affliction to drug or alcohol addiction. That’s fair. The same part of the brain lights up.

Scroll, scroll, scroll. It’s a phenomenon now so pervasive that it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome. (The security company McAfee coined the phrase in 2016.) We are the undead of lore, shambling through the world, moaning and groaning with half-closed eyes. I’d like to be able to tell you this is a fantastical bit of exaggeration, that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. I can do no such thing.

The analogy, it turns out, has legs. Consider parasites. An astonishing number of them exist in nature, from worms to wasps, and some have the power of mind control. Or, said another way, zombification. And these fiends are doing it in—gulp—ways that bring to mind social media.

Take the jewel wasp. She grabs a cockroach twice her size and drives her stinger through the poor thing’s neck and into its head, feeling around the brain before injecting nonlethal venom in two precise spots. (OK, not quite like Facebook, but stay with me.) Post-surgery, the cockroach just keeps grooming itself while the wasp drags it into a burrow by its antenna. The wasp then lays an egg on the cockroach’s leg, seals the tomb, and goes about her life.

In a few days, the wasp egg hatches into a larva that latches onto the roach and drinks its bodily fluids. Again, the bug doesn’t complain. It’s not paralyzed; it’s fully capable of breaking out of its prison. But the roach doesn’t. As the fluids run dry, the larva burrows into the body to eat the organs one by one, hollowing out the roach’s abdomen while the thing is still alive (read: undead). Eventually it emerges as an adult wasp, finally killing its host.

According to researchers, the wasp’s secret appears to be—wait for it—dopamine. The wasp loads up its venom with the neurotransmitter, and that cocktail alters the roach’s behavior in ways scientists are only beginning to understand. Weirdly, in cockroaches and other creatures, dopamine regulates grooming, hence the insect’s fanatical insistence on cleaning itself instead of running for its life. (Not like humans would ever primp for a totally natural and spontaneous selfie.)
LEARN MORE
The WIRED Guide to Internet Addiction

The weapon of choice for other zombifiers is serotonin, another well-studied neurotransmitter. There’s a tiny worm, for instance, that begins life in the stomach of crustaceans called amphipods. Then the worm finds itself with a problem. To live, it has to get into the stomach of a bird, which means it needs its host to get noticed. Complicating things, fish love to eat amphipods. That’s bad for our protagonist: In a fish belly, the worm will dissolve.

So the worm mind-controls its crustacean to spend more time at the pond’s surface, where it’s likelier to draw the attention of birds. That little baby worm can even change its host’s color to a more conspicuous hue. The worm itself isn’t releasing serotonin; somehow it’s short-­circuiting the amphipod’s nervous system to overproduce the chemical. Researchers think this may cause the victim to mistake light for darkness. Instead of diving into the safety of the murky depths, it ascends to the surface—and to death from above.

Whatever their strategy, zombifying parasites are hacking biology. And so, with their A/B-tested, keep-you-permascrolling tactics, are the titans of social media. Like any living creature, we are manipulable—our brains are chemical soups, programmed to need and be needed. Prehistorically, it’s what helped us stick together to not get eaten. “It was clearly adaptive to be so sensitive to social stimuli,” says UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield. “But evolution never expected that we would be getting social stimuli from people we don’t even know.” We’re not only vulnerable, in other words. We also lack defenses.

There’s a good reason that more than half the organisms on earth are parasites: If you live off the nutrients and energy of someone else, you don’t have to run around and hunt for yourself. It’s a hell of an effective strategy. And one thing is clear: You don’t want to be the hunted.

If you live off the energy of someone else, you don’t have to hunt for yourself.

But there might be hope. Not every parasitic relationship ends in death. Take it from crickets.

All around the world, threadlike critters called horsehair worms grow in the bellies of crickets, feeding on their juices. Once the worms get big enough, they persuade their hosts to do the unthinkable: leap into a stream or pond and risk drowning (or death by fish). In the water the worm makes its move, drilling through the cricket’s belly and swimming away to find fellow worms to mate with. Amazingly, the cricket can survive a parasite many times its length squirming out of its body, provided it swims to shore afterward.

Scientists know the horsehair worms are releasing a chemical concoction that instructs the crickets to go full kamikaze. But in this case, the cricket does well by putting its life in danger and jumping in the drink—if it can’t get rid of the worm, the body snatcher will die in its belly and kill its host. Biologists call this, no joke, the mafia hypothesis: Give in to the bullying or die.

So we don’t have to be the cockroach or the amphipod. We can be the cricket, with the power to purge our systems of zombify­ing parasites. When you uninstall Facebook on your phone or delete your Instagram account, you’re taking a leap into that pond. You might belly flop, but it’s unlikely you’ll drown. And you won’t get eaten by a fish. Probably.

09-28-18  02:31pm - 2183 days #12
biker (0)
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I suppose the day will come when we will plug our brains into a computer bank and live in a virtual world. Matrix. Until then I will enjoy my two dimensional porn with photos and video of real life actresses.
I don't think I will live long enough to witness the virtual world. Warning Will Robinson

10-22-18  06:37am - 2159 days #13
MrMaxxx (0)
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If they come up with AI sex robots or something to give porn a realistic experience, we're all done for.

11-01-18  10:34am - 2149 days #14
iknowwazzup (0)
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Registered: Jan 06, '16
Location: United States
I think that sometimes companies jump the gun on new technologies before they're really perfected and then they sort of fall flat.

Remember how a few years back 3D was going to be the next big thing? They even tried broadcasting it on cable. And then it completely flopped. I think the same thing is starting to happen with VR, even though it has had a lot more potential than 3D had.

But I am sure that even if it's on the wane for the moment, it'll be back. And it seems like they could perfect that tech long before they'd ever develop a sex robot that was really human like.

11-02-18  07:52am - 2148 days #15
BoolVool (0)
Active User

Posts: 3
Registered: Nov 02, '18
Location: NY
I think in near future we will live in Virtual Reality. Thats why we will open new borders and try some interesting things)

11-02-18  08:28am - 2148 days #16
lk2fireone (0)
Active User



Posts: 3,618
Registered: Nov 14, '08
Location: CA
Originally Posted by BoolVool:


I think in near future we will live in Virtual Reality. Thats why we will open new borders and try some interesting things)


Be careful what you say.
If President Trump hears this, he could have you locked up.

On the other hand, maybe this will save America hundreds of billions of dollars: we can now built a Great Virtual Wall for less money, to keep all those immigrants out of the United States.

One Wall at the South, one Wall at the North (for those pesky Canadians), one Wall at the East, one Wall at the West.
Close those borders. We will be safe in our virtual homes.


11-02-18  10:29am - 2148 days #17
biker (0)
Active User



Posts: 632
Registered: May 03, '08
Location: milwaukee, wi
A virtual wall for virtual reality. That just may be the course we're headed for. I really don't need a wall so much. I have put up enough in my own mind already.
As for porn, if they continue to get the gorgeous women that I have been seen in the last few site I have hope for it. The photography is very good. I just wish the would have more imagination. I have seen more kitchens and pool tables then I care to remember. The superhero parodies are getting old. I remember watching the Jenna flicks back in the day. Not one had the same plot line. I never knew what to expect. Jenna was a dream in her youth. Warning Will Robinson

11-02-18  12:48pm - 2148 days #18
lk2fireone (0)
Active User



Posts: 3,618
Registered: Nov 14, '08
Location: CA
Originally Posted by biker:


As for porn, if they continue to get the gorgeous women that I have been seen in the last few site I have hope for it. The photography is very good. I just wish the would have more imagination.


Have you looked at the Pure Taboo site?
This is plot-driven porn.
Not a huge site, currently 135 videos.
Site started in late 2017.
But some of the videos are hot.
And fresh.
The style is dark (slightly dark lighting, dark theme--girls abused or punished), but not heavily cruel or rough. More like a dark heartcore style.

$14.95/month with PU discount. Was $9.95, but they raised the price.

Maybe you can find a lower price.
But it's definitely worth a look.

11-02-18  04:27pm - 2148 days #19
biker (0)
Active User



Posts: 632
Registered: May 03, '08
Location: milwaukee, wi
I don't mind some darkness. To have a good plot someone has to be cruel and thus you need a poor defenseless creature crying for help. The superhero parodies follow this line. I'm just tired of superheros, not good against evil story-lines. I'll take a look. I'm about halfway thru my Cherry Pimps subscription. They have some beautiful women. They are short, tall, robust, and slender. Warning Will Robinson

11-07-18  12:56pm - 2143 days #20
Cybertoad (0)
Disabled User



Posts: 2,158
Registered: Jan 01, '08
Location: Wash
VR seems to be the next, but I think transparent VR will be the next big thing, as we are already moving away from closed in VR boxes to, open air boxes that seem more tolerable. Since 2007

11-19-18  10:28am - 2131 days #21
bsetberb (0)
Active User

Posts: 1
Registered: Nov 19, '18
Location: Germany
I prefer, instead of watching porn, to have sex in reality. I especially love these girls. They completely satisfy me.

11-19-18  01:47pm - 2131 days #22
Pablo22 (0)
Active User

Posts: 4
Registered: Nov 06, '18
Location: Germani
I agree with the applicant above. Sex is much better than masturbation. Especially if you are in the company of such charming girls.

11-19-18  02:26pm - 2131 days #23
jook (0)
Active User



Posts: 325
Registered: Dec 22, '13
Location: jersey city
Originally Posted by Pablo22:


I agree with the applicant above. Sex is much better than masturbation. Especially if you are in the company of such charming girls.


Can we get the trolls out of my thread please! -)

11-19-18  03:36pm - 2131 days #24
rearadmiral (0)
Active User

Posts: 1,453
Registered: Jul 16, '07
Location: NB/Canada
^ Yeah, whatever you've done it seems you've attracted more trolls than we've seen here for years. Odd...

11-19-18  03:45pm - 2131 days #25
jook (0)
Active User



Posts: 325
Registered: Dec 22, '13
Location: jersey city
I knew somehow I'd get blamed, haha.

11-19-18  03:53pm - 2131 days #26
biker (0)
Active User



Posts: 632
Registered: May 03, '08
Location: milwaukee, wi
Trolls show up when you least expect them. They get bored fast. Or is it they get boring fast. Can never remember. Warning Will Robinson

11-21-18  04:33am - 2129 days #27
iknowwazzup (0)
Active User



Posts: 132
Registered: Jan 06, '16
Location: United States
Personally, I think the problem with some of the tech is that it is trying to make things more realistic when porn is about fantasy.

Even 4K brings out every little flaw and it's not that humans being human is such a turn off, but it can be distracting. While if you were actually having the experience in the flesh, you wouldn't notice or care about the little things.

Someone being filmed is nothing like real life, because the human eye isn't that precise. When looking at a person, you tend to either focus on one small area ignoring things around it or scan a larger area without picking up most minor details.

I don't mean to sound vain, but I think that we all can be very self-critical looking in a mirror and take note of every imperfection we see. And that's the kind of image these high-res cameras produce, but of other people instead of just ourselves - every little thing is exaggerated.

And that for me is what will hold tech back because even VR doesn't really have you scanning the scene in a natural manner - especially since they're often shooting in 4K if not 5K, these days. So it will always feel a bit surreal and artificial until someone figures out how to create a quality image that isn't higher in resolution than the human eye can normally perceive.

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