Kamala Harris got access to intelligence reports and this is what she did? I feel like this is a parody of a liberal. pic.twitter.com/JaZNu0Gr3l

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) October 26, 2024

!nonchuds !khive Let's get her in!

Elon Musk has now made 12 Americans Millionaires and instead of celebrating this, Democrats and the media are attacking him and the Biden/Harris DOJ is intimidating him. pic.twitter.com/j40CXxLFVD

— ALX 🇺🇸 (@alx) October 31, 2024

!goomblers

Part 9 of our epic voyage through the classic 1992 RPG Darklands.

Darklands Series

1 - Darklands LP Part I

2 - Darklands LP Part II: Charles Bronson Edition

3 - Darklands LP III: Nuns and Coins

4 - Darklands LP Ep IV: Introduction to Equipment & Combat

5 - Darklands LP Part V: We finally briefly go out into the dark lands

6 - Darklands LP VI: We actually start a quest!

7 - Darklands LP VII: We reach our destination

8 - Darklands LP VIII: Raubritter confrontation & learning how combat works

Thanks for making this @Losercel.

We ended last episode in Paderborn, having just been rewarded for slaying a raubritter and now we've got 16 florins to spend. We had some concerns about our weapons not penetrating armor well enough during that battle, so that's our first priority. Let's see what they have for sale here.

Equipment

OMG look at this. See where it says 38q next to the name of each item for sale? That means it's 38 quality. Weapons, armor, shields, alchemical potions, and various things like lockpicks have a quality rating which has a subtle impact on how well they work. For every 10 points of quality your weapon is better than their armor you get one extra point of damage. That may not sound like much but you get that bonus point even if you failed to penetrate their armor. That may not sound like much, but with a fast high quality weapon it can really add up.

Average items have a quality of 25. There is a shop in the marketplace that always sells 25q items wherever you go. But each city can have a swordmith, armorer, bowyer, and tinkerer (these sell certain specialized weapons) each with its own level of quality. So if you happen to be in a town with really good swordsmiths like we are now, you want to jump on that opportunity. You never know when you'll find that opportunity again.

One rule that I only just learned now after all these years while going through the hint book is that all the equipment you loot off of dead bodies drops in quality by 10. That explains a lot, because that crap is hardly ever worth using by the time you get your hands on it.

• Sasha - I'd like to get her a better quality longsword but they don't have any in stock.

• Redactor & Yuna - I'm going to replace their maces with military hammers. It does one point less damage than the mace but it has 5 penetration so it even matches plate. The main job of our impact weapons people is to penetrate heavily armored enemies, so that's my highest priority here.

• Nathan - There's not much selection of polearms here. I get him a pike, which at least has pen 4, but it's very slow. I'll keep that around just for heavily armored enemies.

The armorer here is only 23q so I'm ignoring that. Same with the bowyer. Paderborn isn't that big of a city so they must specialize in weapons.

As long as I'm here, I pick up some camomile for Redactor's alchemical experiments. One of my formulas uses it, and I have no idea when I'll find a store stocking it again, so I better get it while I can. Alchemey can be very expensive because you've got to hoard ingredients like this until you've collected every one you need for a formula.

At this point I'm just going to play for a while because we need more money before I can show you some mid-game content. Higher tier quests are quite a bit more difficult than anything we've done yet, so we're going to need good armor for the whole party. Also we won't get far without alchemy. I go on a couple more raubritter quests. If you want to maximize your earnings on these, go around to nearby cities and ask everyone for a job. A lot of them will want you to kill the same guy and there's no reason why you can't accept all of their offers.

Education

I end up in Leipzig. I managed to get a meeting with the mayor and he offered me a raubritter quest. This is a big win for us as the mayor pays out more than the merchants (20 florins I think?) and you get a huge boost to local reputation if you complete a quest for him. An especially big win since Leipzig is such an important city in this era, the most important marketplace in eastern Germany. As you can see, it's at the junction of roads leading in all directions. It even has a university.

Speaking of education, we've got 55 florins so we can afford to study for a while. We'll have to find teachers willing to take us in as students. Let's start with the monastery. They can teach us Read/Write, Speak Latin, and Religion. Usually these guys are pretty cooperative. They'll only refuse if you have little Virtue or local reputation.

Redactor has 40 in Alchemy, which is quite respectable, but you can never have too much skill. The higher it is, the higher the chance that you'll succeed in making potions. Let's see if we can get the alchemist to teach him. Nice. The alchemists are what we would today call "on the spectrum" so they often refuse. (Notice how the text here hints at which skills, attributes, etc. were being checked. You'll see this often all over the game.)

As long as we're here, I'll try trading formulas with him. See, this is what I mean.

I go to the tinkers and ask them for a teacher as well. They teach Artifice.

Let's go to the inn and start studying. Sasha is going to work on her Artifice. This skill represents your technical abilities. It's used in lockpicking and many other situations. We'll have Yuna study Religion as that's her specialty. As for Nathan, none of these skills would really do him much good. When these skills are checked it's almost always against your best party member and we've already got people better than him. So we'll have him work. He earns 9 pfennings per day as a blacksmith. The occupation you work at depends on your abilities. In his case it's probably his strength that got him the job.

We study for a week and each of us picks up 2-3 points in our skill. That may not seem like much, but most non-combat skills are extremely difficult to increase through normal gameplay.

Random Encounters

I'm going to just play the game for a while now. I won't write everything I'm doing as it's is going to be pretty boring if you're not the playing. I want to show you guys how alchemy works, so I'm going to roam around to various cities buying new formulas and the ingredients we need for them. I'll just write about the random encounters I run into. There are many of these and they make up a big part of the game.

I'm going to try to sneak away. It's probably just some bandits that we could take care of easily but you never know. Besides, this is a rare chance to practice our Woodwise skill.

These guys have no idea who they're dealing with. I wipe them out without breaking a sweat.

Pagans. I hate these guys. Let's vandalize their stupid altar.

Uh oh. These are schrats, basically German bigfoot. It must have been their altar. Some schrats are good Christians, but just like humans many of them worship Satan. I may be in over my head.

Oh boy. That's a lot of them. They're so close, our missile weapons won't be much help. There's not much to do but just fight it out.

It's a very close fight, with both Redactor and Yuna getting knocked out. A prayer to St. Clare healed Sasha and kept her in the fight. Without that we would have lost.

Yuna gains some Virtue. Which makes sense since we all got beaten up really bad for doing that. We'll camp here and rest for a little while and then head over to Magdeburg to stay at the inn to get fully healed.

Frick this guy. I'll just pay him to avoid any trouble. I don't want the Dominicans on my butt.

Where should I wander around? It's nice to have a certain region that's your home base where you've got good local reputation. You can return there every once in a while to take advantage of the better prices and do your studying there. But you've also got to do a lot of wandering to find quests, alchemy ingredients, and new saints. Let's go into Bohemia.

I head down to Dresden, kill another raubritter, and achieve "local hero" reputation.

Notice that near Freiberg there's two mines. The Erzgebirge ("Ore Mountains") between Germany and Bohemia were extremely important at this time. Tin had been mined there since prehistoric times, but in 1168 silver was discovered near Freiberg and settlers flooded in. More discoveries were made in the late 1400s. During this period the mines of the Erzgebirge were on the cutting edge of technology, driving progress toward the Industrial Revolution.

The important thing for us is that we can buy alchemical components there. But first let's learn some more formulas so that I know what to buy. I keep striking out when I try to trade formulas with other alchemists, but we're rich enough now to just buy some.

Bad Alchemist

I'm not giving you my goddarn alchemical materials. This guy may be a tough opponent but I think we can take him if we really have to.

His guards are poorly equipped. Like many of the thugs we've run into they're using falchions (basically machetes) which ordinarily would bounce right off our armor. But notice the plus there. That means they've been enhanced through alchemy. Depending on which potion was used, that could mean they can slice right through our armor. The alchemist himself would be easy to kill if we could get to him, but his guards will block us. They're even blocking us from using missile weapons against him. But he can toss potions over their heads at us. My first priority is going to be dispersing my guys because he's no doubt got some area effect attacks and I don't want us bunched up.

This is probably Noxious Aroma. It decreases all skills for several seconds before it wears off. He hits Redactor with the same thing and Sasha with tear gas which temporarily incapacitates her. When these get clear of the bridge I'm going to have Nathan try to get around them and go after the alchemist.

Sasha got tear gassed again. He tossed Stonetar at Yuna, which greatly slows down anyone walking through it, so she won't be able to get into the fight soon. Redactor is holding off two enemies while Nathan slips past them. I bet Nathan Chen could be a really good running back IRL.

He tries to slow down Nathan with stonetar but it's too late. He's run out of potions. Nathan kills him instantly with one swing of his halberd and the guards are easily mopped up.

This is some nice loot. He ran out of combat potions but he has a lot that can temporarily enhance our characters or their equipment. We'll save these to use in an emergency.

Notice how this combat was way more complex than just killing street thugs. Combat in Darklands is never going to be as intricate as Troubleshooter but once you get into the mid-game it's not just mindlessly slashing at each other.

Maybe in the next episode we'll finally do some alchemy. (Spoiler: we do!)

!g*mers click the trollfaces under snappy's comment to epically MAUL casuals! the more you click, the MORE CASUALS YOU KILL!

At the start of the year, Iran only had four S300 surface-to-air missile systems. In April, Israel took out one of the missile systems in response to Iran's first ballistic missile attack. A senior U.S. official confirmed the airstrikes took out the three S-300 missile systems.

inb4 "men wrote the algorithm!"

!titsorgtfo !thotpatrol !thotpatrollers

I have spent a quarter century obsessed with the weirdest corner of the weirdest section of the worst internet law on the US statute books: Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law that makes it a felony to help someone change how their own computer works so it serves them, rather than a distant corporation.

Under DMCA 1201, giving someone a tool to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work" is a felony punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine - for a first offense. This law can refer to access controls for traditional copyrighted works, like movies. Under DMCA 1201, if you help someone with photosensitive epilepsy add a plug-in to the Netflix player in their browser that blocks strobing pictures that can trigger seizures, you're a felon:

https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html-media/2017Jul/0005.html

But software is a copyrighted work, and everything from printer cartridges to car-engine parts have software in them. If the manufacturer puts an "access control" on that software, they can send their customers (and competitors) to prison for passing around cowtools to help them fix their cars or use third-party ink.

Now, even though the DMCA is a copyright law (that's what the "C" in DMCA stands for, after all); and even though blocking video strobes, using third party ink, and fixing your car are not copyright violations, the DMCA can still send you to prison, for a long-butt time for doing these things, provided the manufacturer designs their product so that using it the way that suits you best involves getting around an "access control."

As you might expect, this is quite a tempting proposition for any manufacturer hoping to enshittify their products, because they know you can't legally disenshittify them. These access controls have metasized into every kind of device imaginable.

Garage-door openers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Refrigerators:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#filtergate

Dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

Treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

Tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

Cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

Printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty

And even printer paper:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/16/unauthorized-paper/#dymo-550

DMCA 1201 is the brainchild of Bruce Lehmann, Bill Clinton's Copyright Czar, who was repeatedly warned that cancerous proliferation this was the foreseeable, inevitable outcome of his pet policy. As a sop to his critics, Lehman added a largely ornamental safety valve to his law, ordering the US Copyright Office to invite submissions every three years petitioning for "use exemptions" to the blanket ban on circumventing access-controls.

I call this "ornamental" because if the Copyright Office thinks that, say, it should be legal for you to bypass an access control to use third-party ink in your printer, or a third-party app store in your phone, all they can do under DMCA 1201 is grant you the right to use a circumvention tool. But they can't give you the right to acquire that tool.

I know that sounds confusing, but that's only because it's very, very stupid. How stupid? Well, in 2001, the US Trade Representative arm-twisted the EU into adopting its own version of this law (Article 6 of the EUCD), and in 2003, Norway added the law to its lawbooks. On the eve of that addition, I traveled to Oslo to debate the minister involved:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

The minister praised his law, explaining that it gave blind people the right to bypass access controls on ebooks so that they could feed them to screen readers, Braille printers, and other assistive cowtools. OK, I said, but how do they get the software that jailbreaks their ebooks so they can make use of this exemption? Am I allowed to give them that tool?

No, the minister said, you're not allowed to do that, that would be a crime.

Is the Norwegian government allowed to give them that tool? No. How about a blind rights advocacy group? No, not them either. A university computer science department? Nope. A commercial vendor? Certainly not.

No, the minister explained, under his law, a blind person would be expected to personally reverse engineer a program like Adobe E-Reader, in hopes of discovering a defect that they could exploit by writing a program to extract the ebook text.

Oh, I said. But if a blind person did manage to do this, could they supply that tool to other blind people?

Well, no, the minister said. Each and every blind person must personally - without any help from anyone else - figure out how to reverse-engineer the ebook program, and then individually author their own alternative reader program that worked with the text of their ebooks.

That is what is meant by a use exemption without a cowtools exemption. It's useless. A sick joke, even.

The US Copyright Office has been valiantly holding exemptions proceedings every three years since the start of this century, and they've granted many sensible exemptions, including ones to benefit people with disabilities, or to let you jailbreak your phone, or let media professors extract video clips from DVDs, and so on. Tens of thousands of person-hours have been flushed into this pointless exercise, generating a long list of things you are now technically allowed to do, but only if you are a reverse-engineering specialist type of computer programmer who can manage the process from beginning to end in total isolation and secrecy.

But there is one kind of use exception the Copyright Office can grant that is potentially game-changing: an exemption for decoding diagnostic codes.

You see, DMCA 1201 has been a critical weapon for the corporate anti-repair movement. By scrambling error codes in cars, tractors, appliances, insulin pumps, phones and other devices, manufacturers can wage war on independent repair, depriving third-party technicians of the diagnostic information they need to figure out how to fix your stuff and keep it going.

This is bad enough in normal times, but during the acute phase of the covid pandemic, hospitals found themselves unable to maintain their ventilators because of access controls. Nearly all ventilators come from a single med-tech monopolist, Medtronic, which charges hospitals hundreds of dollars to dispatch their own repair technicians to fix its products. But when covid ended nearly all travel, Medtronic could no longer provide on-site calls. Thankfully, an anonymous hacker started building homemade (illegal) circumvention devices to let hospital technicians fix the ventilators themselves, improvising housings for them from old clock radios, guitar pedals and whatever else was to hand, then mailing them anonymously to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Once a manufacturer monopolizes repair in this way, they can force you to use their official service depots, charging you as much as they'd like; requiring you to use their official, expensive replacement parts; and dictating when your gadget is "too broken to fix," forcing you to buy a new one. That's bad enough when we're talking about refusing to fix a phone so you buy a new one - but imagine having a spinal injury and relying on a $100,000 exoskeleton to get from place to place and prevent muscle wasting, clots, and other immobility-related conditions, only to have the manufacturer decide that the gadget is too old to fix and refusing to give you the technical assistance to replace a watch battery so that you can get around again:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/26/24255074/former-jockey-michael-straight-exoskeleton-repair-battery

When the US Copyright Office grants a use exemption for extracting diagnostic codes from a busted device, they empower repair advocates to put that gadget up on a workbench and torture it into giving up those codes. The codes can then be integrated into an unofficial diagnostic tool, one that can make sense of the scrambled, obfuscated error codes that a device sends when it breaks - without having to unscramble them. In other words, only the company that makes the diagnostic tool has to bypass an access control, but the people who use that tool later do not violate DMCA 1201.

This is all relevant this month because the US Copyright Office just released the latest batch of 1201 exemptions, and among them is the right to circumvention access controls "allowing for repair of retail-level food preparation equipment":

https://publicknowledge.org/public-knowledge-ifixit-free-the-mcflurry-win-copyright-office-dmca-exemption-for-ice-cream-machines/

While this covers all kinds of food prep gear, the exemption request - filed by Public Knowledge and Ifixit - was inspired by the bizarre war over the tragically fragile McFlurry machine. These machines - which extrude soft-serve frozen desserts - are notoriously failure-prone, with 5-16% of the broken at any given time. Taylor, the giant kitchen tech company that makes the machines, charges franchisees a fortune to repair them, producing a steady stream of profits for the company.

This sleazy business prompted some ice-cream hackers to found a startup called Kytch, a high-powered automation and diagnostic tool that was hugely popular with McDonald's franchisees (the gadget was partially designed by the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang!).

In response, Taylor played dirty, making a less-capable clone of the Kytch, trying to buy Kytch out, and teaming up with McDonald's corporate to bombard franchisees with legal scare-stories about the dangers of using a Kytch to keep their soft-serve flowing, thanks to DMCA 1201:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Kytch isn't the only beneficiary of the new exemption: all kinds of industrial kitchen equipment is covered. In upholding the Right to Repair, the Copyright Office overruled objections of some of its closest historical allies, the Entertainment Software Association, Motion Picture Association, and Recording Industry Association of America, who all sided with Taylor and McDonald's and opposed the exemption:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/us-copyright-office-frees-the-mcflurry-allowing-repair-of-ice-cream-machines/

This is literally the only useful kind of DMCA 1201 exemption the Copyright Office can grant, and the fact that they granted it (along with a similar exemption for medical devices) is a welcome bright spot. But make no mistake, the fact that we finally found a narrow way in which DMCA 1201 can be made slightly less stupid does not redeem this outrageous law. It should still be repealed and condemned to the scrapheap of history.

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

True story, with photo as evidence. During his visit to the Fincantieri shipyard on June 25 '20, I was this close to Trump when he contrasted the original bow and mast design of the FREMM vs the then FFGX design, and directed the Navy to keep the FREMM bow. I have notes. https://t.co/TacL7pOlw0 pic.twitter.com/ul1gLI6X3i

— Jerry Hendrix (@JerryHendrixII) October 31, 2024

The same group of Dems manipulating Reddit was caught attempting to astroturf X and manipulate Community Notes.https://t.co/fvpwY2XdZp

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) October 30, 2024

The Harris-Walz volunteer groomercord server just banned my account.

We expected this. That's why we quietly archived the server over the past week and are now releasing the files to the broader public.

Deadman's switch.https://t.co/0Sud1WxbqQ

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) October 30, 2024

Democrat Staffers are instructing volunteers to share posts from the @KamalaHQ X account via the official Harris-Walz groomercord server.

Coordinated attempts to make accounts appear more popular than they are is a violation of X's rules against "Platform Manipulation" pic.twitter.com/QUbo85XTOS

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) October 30, 2024

The quoted post comes from Reach, an astroturfing platform used by the DNC to make Kamala appear far more popular than she is online.

The "Joy" is fake. https://t.co/RVxCEnE7GU pic.twitter.com/Oizcf4wJHA

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) October 30, 2024

X's new "Radar" Feature is incredible for sniffing out astroturfing campaigns. pic.twitter.com/i5yTseolAp

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) October 30, 2024

Don't expect to fit the new M4 Mac mini into too tight a space because you're going to have to tip it to reach underneath every time you need to switch it on.

If the position of the charging port on the Magic Mouse isn't the questionable design choice it's been called, the New Mac mini power button might be. As pointedly not shown by Apple in its launch video or new ad — the Mac mini power button is underneath the device.

As can be seen on the online store's page for the new M4 Mac mini, the button is not on the very base of the model. It is, though, underneath it, raised off the ground only by the cooling vent.

Another banger design choice from Steve Tim Apple

Wagner member gets stomped by locals in occupied Luhansk. pic.twitter.com/i9DweCxnGJ

— BroSINT 69™ (@osint_69) October 31, 2024

!nonchuds !khive Chalk up another win for Momala!!!

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) --- Taiwanese American drag queen and "RuPaul's Drag Race" winner Nymphia Wind (妮妃雅) has endorsed Kamala Harris for president ahead of this November's election.

Nymphia, who made history this year as the first East Asian American to win "RuPaul's Drag Race," announced her endorsement of the Harris-Walz presidential ticket in a video released by Taiwanese Americans for Harris in October.

"If you believe that LGBTQ folks deserve to be treated equally, then vote for Harris and Walz," Nymphia urged in the video. She also shared her personal story of being bullied as a child due to her sexual orientation, highlighting Governor Tim Walz's early advocacy for LGBTQ equality.

"As someone who was bullied as a kid, it was so touching how Coach Walz initiated the first queer student club, decades before marriage equality became the law of the land," she said, also noting his support for banning conversion therapy, a cause she holds dear.

Nymphia emphasized, "Taiwan needs an ever-inclusive America in protecting Taiwanese sovereignty and ensuring that our democracy, freedom, and equality can continue to shine."

These are not Halloween decorations. This is a calendar produced by Russian FSB and intended for sale.

I wonder why Xi Jinping is there, not Kim Jong Un. pic.twitter.com/cw9D8FY7Cs

— Anton Gerashchenko (@Gerashchenko_en) October 31, 2024

Putin is shorter there, what does that mean?

Realized I need to buy a citrus press, as squeezing twenty limes by hand was annoyingly time consuming.

Monkfish and red snapper for the protein. Julienned pickled onions, sweet potatoes, celery, and roasted hominy.

Had the fish in lime juice for 40 minutes, was getting too many bitter notes, so added sugar and clam juice and let go for another 20.

‼️Austin TX podcast or let her walk. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/05N9SHVzEv

— Joe Rogan Podcast (@joeroganhq) October 29, 2024

!nonchuds !khive

Because it's always relevant

This is the person falsely texting people that they already voted

Thousands of Pennsylvania voters received a text message this weekend that falsely claimed that they had already voted in the Nov. 5 election.

"Records show you voted," the text read, linking them to an official Pennsylvania website with information about polling places and early voting.

But the message did not come from an official government resource or a well-known get-out-the-vote advocacy group. Instead, it was signed by "AllVote," a self-proclaimed voter-mobilization program that election officials have repeatedly flagged as a scam to be avoided and ignored.

If "AllVote" sounds familiar, the name has been linked to other confusion-sowing text campaigns in the lead-up to the election. Montgomery County officials in August warned voters about "AllVote.com" that was texting registered voters and falsely claiming that they were not registered to vote — part of a scam to "capture personal, sensitive information from voters in an attempt to exploit them later on," election commissioners said.

Sounds credible and very good faith

Charlotte Clymer, a contracted spokesperson for AllVote, sent The Inquirer an apologetic statement, describing the texts as a well-intended reminder-turned-disastrous mistake, thanks to a typo committed by staffers.

"We are mortified by this mistake and the confusion it has caused," the organization said in the statement.

The organization would not say how many voters were sent the erroneous text.

Clymer described AllVote as "funded by progressive donors aiming to increase voting participation" but declined to provide details about the group's backers. A political action committee with that name was registered this year. Yet little public information is available about AllVote, and its website lists no founder or staffers.

Clymer said the organization does not disclose its backers for fear of being targeted by the far-right. She also said that election officials and news reports that issued statements characterizing their recent efforts as phishing scams were incorrect.

Wow, being anonymous is all the sudden good again!

Tomorrow is TERF Island's new Labour government's first Budget - this is their opportunity to explain how they're going to spend money, any tax changes and other funding.

Let's see how a random sampling (?) of TERF Islanders feel about their incomes:

Read the article if you want more words.

£33k in benefits (tax free) while not working is outrageous.

Dear How to Do It,

I'm a 26-year-old, bisexual, cisgender man whose sexual experience has been mostly with men. I've been dating "Sam" for almost six months. Sam is the first trans man I've been with and the first person I've had complete peepee-in-vagina s*x with. At first, we seemed really sexually compatible, but as we've gotten more comfortable, Sam has opened up about some kinks of his.

Sam likes to pretend to be going into heat like a dog, and wants me to pretend to be an "alpha" male who is uncontrollably attracted to his smell and takes him as his conscious mind says no. I'm cool with the consensual non-consent aspect and even into it. The bestiality aspect weirded me out at first, but Sam assures me he is not sexually attracted to actual dogs, and anyway, neither of us has a dog. What I really don't love is that Sam persistently refers to this as "breeding." He begs me to "breed" him right as we're going for it and talks about how he's been "bred" afterward.

Even though it's obviously all a fantasy, it is really not for me. I 1000% do not ever want to be a father. I find pregnancy to be severely gross and unsexy. I'm not going to barf if I see a pregnant person out in public, but I don't want it to be any part of my s*x life aside from preventing it. If I'm not able to tune this out sufficiently, just the thought will sometimes make me go soft. Should I continue to try to be accommodating of this kink? Is there anything that could help make it less disturbing to me? Or would it be OK to ask Sam to keep the impregnation part of his fantasies to himself?

—No Pups Please

Dear No Pups,

I can't know for sure what could help make a breeding kink less disturbing to you, nor do I know what compromises might work for Sam, but the two of you should be able to have a conversation about this. It is absolutely OK to approach Sam and tell him that you're experiencing a squick (an uncomfortable and visceral reaction to a kink you're being asked to engage in). S*x should be fun for both partners, and if you're feeling disgusted about one part of what the two of you do together, you should be able to ask your partner for help navigating it or negotiate a way to avoid it.

Unless Sam has had his uterus or ovaries removed, or is using birth control, the risk of pregnancy looms in the background so you might use condoms to greatly reduce that risk. Reducing a real risk of pregnancy might make his breeding kink easier to bear. You also might consider a vasectomy, as you're certain you don't want to be a father, which could take some of the weight off of this dynamic with Sam and also any future partners you might have peepee-in-vagina s*x with. But if the two of you can't come up with ways to make the talk of breeding tolerable for you, it is more than acceptable to request that Sam refrain from vocalizing it. You can ask Sam to keep those fantasies to himself.