Vulcans take improv classes to act “normal.” They’re a surprise onstage because they never play the straight man. Being that one degree off from their sincere personality is confusing, difficult, and psychologically troublesome. But they can take a pratfall with comedic timing analyzed to the millisecond.
… actually, improv comedy is a great way to demonstrate understanding of a culture. Vulcans would make analytic connections between subjects in a heartbeat, and with some training they’d be excellent lateral thinkers. The gap between that and comedy is understanding expectations and violating them in a way that safely builds and releases tension.
Vulcans could tell brick jokes separated by months. You would never get them with a shaggy-dog story. They might have absurd reaction times for comebacks, but it would be limited, because I don’t think they’d handle wordplay. You’d never hear a Vulcan mutter “that’s what she said” in a timely fashion.
That’s your worst-case scenario, right? Minors with ready access to vanilla photographs of naked people, on above-board commercial websites? So what. Tell me this abusive horseshit is the only way to stop that and I’ll still reject this abusive horseshit.
The pearl-clutching horrors imagined by conservative dullards are a mundane experience for millions of people, and relatively few of them become dog-fuckers or axe-murderers. Almost like a healthy libido is normal and 18 isn’t the day you take the shrink-wrap off your genitals.
Teenagers masturbating is a non-event. It’s as unremarkable and unpreventable as atomic decay. It will happen. Do you want it to happen to whatever quasi-erotica passes through the filter? Bugs Bunny in drag, beach volleyball, that one episode of their favorite show where everybody shrinks? Shoddy AOL filters probably made more furries than Disney ever did. AI’s gonna twist kids right up. Tell me with a straight face that’s better than real photos of fake tits.
By all means, keep actual smut off broadcast TV. Expect websites to put the weird stuff behind warnings. Don’t sell porn to minors. But if your website doesn’t take a credit card to visit, hey guess what, anyone can see it, and anyone will. Oh well. People who think that’s the end of the world are lunatics who mean it literally.
English is an endless deluge of that experience, because our orthography is bullshit. People have tried to fix it. Their clever rules were partly adopted and became even more exceptions and special cases.
One is obviously made-up by ancient peoples who knew fuck-all about the world, but insists it’s eternal truth beyond debate. Even the parts that contradict the other parts.
The other is an openly hypothetical idea based on what we expect is just beyond our current capabilities… and it relies on that we’re-just-atoms materialism.
Open Watcom is a compiler for DOS. Every search engine will try ten ways to politely tell you that you obviously meant Wacom tablets, you illiterate goblin, and then shrug and direct you to the project’s own single-page FAQ.
Asking questions about DOS itself is even worse. Say you want the scan codes for arrow keys. Then say it a hundred more times, with increasing specificity and occasional vulgarity, because you are getting nothing but “how to use a terminal window in Windows.” Or at best, Ralph Brown’s big fat interrupt list, rearranged into the most Geocities-ass jumble of pages, where you can easily look up what any specific hex code does, once you already know which code to look for.