Plenty of rituals are awful and destructive. But as long as your paricular ritual playing the show is enjoyable and beneficial, by all means continue! That's why we make it.

I think what you're noticing is ritual. It's not weird, it's just how people work. Rituals can be grounding, calming, clarifying, a way to reconnect people, or unwind, open yourself up, or let go. This is why we always end October with a Samhain. Life is so full of rituals.

One of the most powerful moments comes when Rutger names factory farming as today’s clearest moral failure and points out how hard it is to find anyone who will defend it publicly.

You can read extracts from our conversation on my Substack here:

I hope this episode makes it easier for you to get started talking about KOSA and age verification from an informed position, but there's a lot more out there if you're willing. Check out the show notes for links.

Go to 5calls.org or get their 5calls app. It's simple and tiny and makes it super easy to find your elected representatives, pick an issue, and you guessed it, make five calls. You can even organize call groups with friends and turn your 5 calls into dozens or hundreds.

Do the thing!

Sloppy, uninformed legislative language is an existential threat to sites like e621 and even to normie sites like pornhub and reddit. You can fight these bills and win. Colorado just killed theirs for now.

While Tarro, Mike, and I were combing through legalese and critical coverage from rights groups for this episode, e621.net dropped their April 1st prank, asking visitors to draw their ID for age verification. The result was a mountain of amazing little drawings, but to e621, it wasn't a joke.

I'm not joking. A few dozen calls about something is considered a big response at a local and state level, and it's very low effort to make that happen.

If you live in the United States, you aren't powerless to fight bad legislation. Your representatives answer to you, and their jobs are at risk if they don't. And they all know this. It does not take much feedback from YOU to change their mind about an issue!

Apple and Google both (reluctantly) offered very similar proposals that try to be simple, secure, and private by storing the least possible information about the fewest possible people. Neither is perfect, they are just the least bad solution we have, and probably good enough.

Handwaving away the details for the nerds to figure out doesn't work either. Some of it is technically impossible, or ruins business models, or is so expensive to do right that the only rational option left is to ban the people and the content entirely.

And that's before special interest groups get their hands (and money) on the bill to morph it into something that enables them to make their weird, hateful, sad hangups about queer people existing everybody else's problem, and giftwrapping it in "protect children" to make any criticism suspicious.