Yeah I did consider that people are going to share keys, but people are going to share accounts too so that’s always going to happen. The best thing you can do is stick some safeguards on the keys where if a key is found online, it can be deactivated and potentially investigated since you can tell which shop sold the key. If there’s a shop out there just giving cards away to minors, well they’re in for a world of trouble.

Under the Licensing Act of 2003, it’s illegal to sell alcohol to an adult if you reasonably suspect that they will be then giving that alcohol to a minor. You can assume the same will apply to people selling Wank Cards.

Hm, I’m going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.

The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It’s a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you’re over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.

When you go to the porn site, they check if you’re from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site’s API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying “Yep! This is a valid key!” and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it’s you! If you don’t have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.

As a result, you can both prove that you’re over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn’t get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record “Oh this key was used to verify on this site”, they’d have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he’s ever sold to.

So… Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.

Well then, time to start fining them under GDPR.

In the case of The Boys, the show is objectively better than the comic book.

Demons are meant to be tempting!

I feel like a sloth demon would take it a step further. You’d be enticed to napping, until one day you wake up from a nap, your face is wrinkled, every one of your friends has forgotten you, you’re alone with only the sloth demon. Your life has been wasted away lying in bed.

Remember that time you said you were gonna travel? You were gonna go to Japan, you said. Too late now. You’re too tired, you don’t have any money. All you have is the Sloth Demon.

One day, your girlfriend calls you for your third nap of the day, and little do you know, you won’t be awakening from that nap.

Your funeral has no attendees, at most you’re a minor headline on a social media post about mental health. Your girlfriend? Gone, gone to find her next victim. Sloth Demons may not go through as many victims as their lustful cousins, but they get every last morsel out of them.

You’ve got some weird teachers. My teachers were all pretty keen to nurture curiosity. When we’d just learned about combustion and how fire needs oxygen, I asked my teacher after the lesson about the sun and how it could be burning without oxygen, and she just explained nuclear fusion and what the sun actually was, and that the words “burning ball of gas” is a bit of a misnomer because that’s not what’s happening.

I can kinda understand the appeal. An AI isn’t gonna judge you, an AI isn’t gonna leave a mean comment or tell you to get over it and man up. It’s giving an unnerving amount of personal information to corporations, but I can sympathise with the thoughts these men are having.

I can’t believe when I was in university, people would start pre-drinking at 10PM so they could go out already drunk and not have to pay for drinks at the clubs.