What have you been doing lately for your own fitness? Try out any new programs or exercises? Have any questions for others about your training? Want to vent about poor behavior in the gym? Started a new diet or have a new recipe you want to share? Anything else health and wellness related?

Prompted by a recent tildes post about vice, and also this from the bbc, and a conversation with a colleague who just went to a strip club, I keep thinking about this issue.

I have a stake in this, despite being cis male: I have mother, sisters, wife, and most importantly young daughter. And I am a feminist, on simple moral grounds.

My baseline position is that whether a woman chooses to engage in sex work is, and should be legally and socially supported as, entirely her own choice.

The only question I have any business answering, or participating in finding an answer, is whether my patronage of sex work is inherently exploitive, to either the woman whom I am patronizing* or to other women individually or to womanhood and general issues of gender.

And I just can’t come up with a good answer. I do look at porn, but increasingly, as with meat, the potential ethical problems of it are reducing the enjoyment. I have tried to ease my conscience by limiting myself to cartoons and stories, but those wouldn’t stop the harm that is caused by the mere existence of porn, if any exists.

As a purely practical matter, the existence of the industry leads to opportunities for exploitation of individuals, and the advancement of a culture of gender exploitation. But as the war on drugs has so ably demonstrated, any attempt at prohibition only increases the level of exploitation, while smart regulation decreases it. Regardless, though, there’s plenty of exploitation to go around the world, I heard there’s thing called #metoo.

I come from a sex-suppressing, fundamentalist “Christian” background. The quotes are there to indicate that I think much of the practices were anything but christ-like. The principles there swirl through the culture around me in varying degrees of intensity, and they inform and direct my choices (sometimes against my will and my better hopes and ideals). I have to be open to the notion that any objection I have to sex work, or my participation, is entirely a cultural construct. And while I don’t think it is true, I cannot dismiss the notion that morals themselves may have no possible objective existence, having relevance and utility (if at all) only in very time and space limited scopes.

It is what I believe the sociologists call a “wicked” problem. It involves really complicated normative stances, and there’s no data analysis that can provide any guidance. For myself, I expect my participation to continue to wane as I mature. I only hope that whatever I do only further enables and empowers the women in my life and everywhere.

• I almost stopped myself from using this word when I realized potential implications, but ultimately left it in because it (and the fact it was my natural inclination to select it) really highlights the issue for me and hopefully others

Bonus hypothetical: If porn is somehow wrong and harmful, even drawings and writings, are sex fantasies also wrong?

This question really came to mind to me about last week when I was hanging out with some friends. I always noticed it as a part of my personality but I never really thought about it as in depth as I have recently. That night I immediately got concerned to the point of it ruining my evening about the following things:

• We're running out of helium in the world
• Where is my birth certificate
• The old VHS tapes of my childhood and important moments in my family are slowly degrading but I can't digitise them until I go home to my parents and that's not for at least half a year, will they hold up that long?
• There's too much space junk
• I used so much plastic just cooking dinner this one evening for my friends, imagine how much gets bought and consumed worldwide
• Some languages are going to die out and there's nothing I can do about it
• Are the rhinos doing ok?
• What's my blood type and am I allergic to anything?

Does anyone else suffer from this idiosyncracy? If so, what are some things that concern you or what are some other things that I can be concerned about?

EDIT: This turned dark, I thought I was just sharing some lighthearted fun and now I have schizophrenia, OCD and should talk to a therapist... jeez louise

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

My D&D group mostly used Lego for the longest time, but we recently decided to give miniatures a shot because we were adding more people and I only have so many minifigs to share (unless you want Stormtroopers in your fantasy setting, that is!). A few weeks ago we met up to paint our miniatures for our new campaign and I think that was the most relaxing, calming thing I've ever done. We all sat in silence basically, noobing our way through the painting process and we had a lot of fun.

My character is a sheltered rich southern man who sounds a bit like a mix between Colonel Sanders and Foghorn Leghorn. He's a sorcerer and despite how is mini ended up looking, he does not cast bubblegum -- https://imgur.com/fr4tc6Z

But anyway, looking at it now there are some obvious spots where I messed up and certainly some things I'd do differently now. But until I'm able to get my hands on another miniature, I was wondering if anyone here had experience with painting miniatures and would be able to share some advice?

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?