You already got Pokémon Legends: Arceus, a bit of a new direction for the enduring series that came to Nintendo Switch back in February. It’s excellent.
Now, just over a month later, The Pokémon Company is back with some news: Two new Pokémon games are still to come in “late 2022” and the pair takes us back to that traditional Pokémon vibe of releasing two largely identical games that have their own titles and critter lineups. The upcoming pair are called Pokémon Violet and Pokémon Scarlet.
The trailer also gives us a peek at the games’ new Pokémon starters, from which all players choose their starting pal when they fire up a new game. This trio is as predictably adorable as any other Pokémon starter lineup: There a delighted-looking green kitten-thing, a smiling creature that looks like a cross between a dinosaur and a Shy Guy, and a cute, little duck that’s either wearing a vaguely beret-shaped hat or has a swooping teal pompadour.
Credit: The Pokémon Company
Pokémon are a riot. Look for Pokémon Violet and Pokémon Scarlet when they come to Switch later in 2022.
John Mulaney has officially checked into the Saturday Night Live five-timers club.
As the club’s name suggests, SNL five-timers are people who have hosted the show at least five times. Mulaney, who used to be a writer on SNL, is now one of them. He joins an illustrious crew that includes Tina Fey, Paul Rudd, Steve Martin, Candice Bergen, Elliott Gould, and a portrait of Drew Barrymore. Also, Conan O’Brien I guess (another legendary former SNL writer!).
These celeb-filled sketches can be hit or miss, but this one’s a big time hit.
Streamline the process of going live on Instagram by scheduling it in advance.
Since Oct. 2021 you’ve had the ability to schedule lives on Instagram. This helpful tool makes the time of your scheduled live visible in your bio, and also gives you the option to post that you’re going to go live so your followers will know about it ahead of time. Beware that Instagram won’t send you a push notification reminding you when your live starts, so you have to remember.
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How to change your camera tools setting on Instagram
How to use voice effects on Instagram Reels
Don’t worry, you can also reschedule or cancel an upcoming scheduled live. We’ll walk you through how to schedule a live and how to cancel a live.
How to schedule an Instagram live:
1. Open Instagram
2. Swipe to the left
3. Find “Story” and the bottom of your screen
Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
4. Swipe to “Live”
Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
5. Select the calendar icon on the left hand side of your screen
Select the calendar icon. Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
6. Type the title of your Live Video where it says “Video Title”
Title your live here. Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
7. Tap “Start time” and choose when you want your live to begin
Tap “Start time” to choose the time of your live. Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
8. Select “Schedule live video”
Tap “Schedule live video.” Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
9. Tap “Share as a Post” to post about your Instagram live, or tap “Share Later”
When your Live is scheduled it will be shown on your profile.
The Live showing up on your profile indicates you have successfully scheduled it. Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
How to cancel a scheduled Instagram live
1. Open Instagram
2. Navigate to your profile
3. Tap “Live video”
Tap “Live video.” Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
4. Select “Edit”
Tap “Edit.” Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
5. Select “Cancel live video”
Tap “Cancel live video.” Credit: Screenshot: Instagram
More Instagram Tutorials
How to disable Instagram embeds (and why you should)
How to post a photo to multiple Instagram accounts at the same time
How to clear your Instagram search history
How to post Live Photos on Instagram
How to delete individual photos from a carousel on Instagram
How to turn your social profiles into hubs for charity
How to create an “Add yours” story on Instagram
How to hide photos on Instagram without deleting them
How to see your ‘Least Interacted With’ on Instagram
Portal fans, rejoice — or rather, bask in the mixed feelings of a new game set in the beloved franchise’s universe that isn’t at all what you’ve been clamoring for over the past decade.
Just as Steam Deck pre-orders started going out, Valve dropped a surprise trailer for Aperture Desk Job, a free Steam Deck game that’s coming on March 1 and is set within the world of Portal. BUT (isn’t there always a “but” when it comes to long-awaited continuations of Valve games?), as the description on Steam emphasizes in bolded capital letters, it is “Not Portal 3!“
Instead of a long-awaited follow-up to the iconic puzzle game, Aperture Desk Job is characterized as a “walking simulator” and playable short. You begin as a starry-eyed, entry-level employee of the game’s eponymous and cheerily dystopic corporation (which sorta kinda probably accidentally brought about the apocalypse), Aperture Science. While eager to jump-start your bright future climbing up the corporate ladder, though, everything is not as hunky-dory as it first seems.
Hilariously, the game’s Steam description contains several pleas for fans to abandon any high hopes before playing this extended universe title.
“Lower your expectations: This is not a sequel to Portal,” it cautions, reading more like a hostage negotiation than a description for a video game. “Desk Job puts you squarely in the driver’s seat at Aperture Science. Then quickly removes the driving part and adds a desk in front of the seat.”
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Today, Valve is best known for Steam, the mega-popular online PC game store. But previously, the company was known for housing the game development team(s) behind such history-making, critically acclaimed franchises as Portal and Half-Life.
This isn’t the first time the gaming titan recently resurrected a legacy IP in a way no one wanted or asked for. In 2020, Valve released the not-Half–Life–3 virtual reality game Half-Life: Alyx after launching its Valve Index VR headset. While it’s not technically a Steam Deck exclusive — you just need a controller to play — Aperture Desk Job appears to be a case of Valve once again strategically using one of its beloved franchises to funnel fan fervor toward a new business venture.
The Steam Deck is already off to a good start as it launches, fortunately for Valve. But we suggest that Portal fans heed the company’s warning and temper expectations for Aperture Desk Job.
In a vivid cosmic image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, two galaxies are shown after what is almost certainly a dramatic deep space collision. On right is the dazzling galaxy NGC 2445, surrounded by vivid bursts of star formation. On left is the less brilliant, but still powerful NGC 2444.
What happened?
“Astronomers suggest that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm in NGC 2445, where thousands of stars are bursting to life on the right-hand side of the image,” NASA explained.
Yes, they struck each other, but then, like apparitions, traveled through one another (over millions of years). The ancient impact stoked those vivid outer bands of stellar activity around NGC 2445.
“Simulations show that head-on collisions between two galaxies is one way of making rings of new stars,” astronomer Julianne Dalcanton of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement.
Tweet may have been deleted
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A rocket will crash into the moon. It’ll leave way more than a scar.
This galactic collision left a “weird” aftermath, explained Dalcanton. There’s an uncanny triangle of star formation, as opposed to a ring, around the galaxy NGC 2445. That’s because the galaxy NGC 2444 still has ample mass and is tugging on the galaxy NGC 2445.
“So they’re not completely free of each other yet, and their unusual interaction is distorting the ring into this triangle,” said Dalcanton.
You can spot this tugging in action. Between the two galaxies is a bridge of “taffy-like strands of gas,” notes NASA. The galaxy NGC 2444 is ripping mass from NGC 2445.
The cosmic evolution — collisions, transformation, and birth — continues apace.
Over a trillion exoplanets likely orbit distant stars in our humble galaxy. Astronomers suspect one, 855 light-years away, harbors metallic clouds and raining gems.
This peculiar world, WASP-121 b is known as a “hot Jupiter,” because it’s a gaseous giant that orbits close to its searing star. Crucially, the planet is tidally locked to its star — like the moon is locked to Earth — meaning that one side of WASP-121 b is incessantly seared by its sun, while the other is dark and cooler.
In new research published by the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists demonstrate that airborne metals and gems exist on the planet’s cooler side. (The intensely hot, 3,000 degree-Celsius, or over 5,400-degree Fahrenheit, dayside evaporates such clouds.) Using unique observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers measured the temperature of the nightside atmosphere and showed that it was cool enough for various metals to condense, Thomas Mikal-Evans, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and a lead author of the research, told Mashable. The detected metals on WASP-121 b include magnesium, iron, vanadium, chromium, and nickel.
It’s currently rare, and challenging, for astronomers to probe the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. In this case, the team used a clever observational method to glimpse the make-up of WASP-121 b’s upper atmosphere. Hubble watched the planet orbit its star, and was able to analyze the sunlight that passed through the atmosphere, which ultimately reveals some of the chemicals present.
Even on the “cool” side, temperatures hover at 1,500 degrees Celsius, or some 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s much too hot for water clouds, like Earth’s. But metals in a gaseous state will condense in such environments. What might such unusual clouds look like?
“I don’t think we can say what they’d look like for sure, because cloud formation is complicated and we don’t have clouds like these to observe up close in our own solar system,” Mikal-Evans said over email.
“I don’t know what the clouds would look like for sure, but it’s fun to speculate.”
But he suspects the metallic clouds could potentially resemble dust storms that form on Earth, as seen in this YouTube video. As for the clouds’ color, it’s also speculation. But why not speculate? The researchers suspect WASP-121 b contains aluminum, which condenses into the mineral corundum. Ruby and sapphire are made of corundum, along with other trace chemicals (also likely on WASP-121 b) that provide these gems their rich colors. Fine droplets of ruby and sapphire may form clouds. “So perhaps some of the clouds would have red and blue coloration,” Mikal-Evans mused.
Other clouds might be beige. Others grey or green. “As I said, I don’t know what the clouds would look like for sure, but it’s fun to speculate,” Mikal Evans said.
An artist’s conception of the exoplanet WASP-121 b, which orbits close to its sun. Credit: Patricia Klein / MPIA
Like on Earth, when conditions are right, metallic droplets in the clouds will condense enough to rain, in spectacular form.
“Liquid gems could therefore be raining on the nightside hemisphere of WASP-121 b,” the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy noted in a press release.
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The mega-comet hurtling through our solar system is 85, yes 85, miles wide
Exoplanet research, already fascinating, is about to be revolutionized.
The James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful space telescope ever built — successfully launched into space and arrived at its home, nearly 1 million miles from Earth. Its science mission will begin this summer, and considerable time (one-quarter of its first year) will be spent observing the atmospheres of exoplanets. We’ll learn unprecedented things. The Webb telescope can see more light than Hubble, and detect molecules that Hubble can’t see.
Crucially, Webb will peer at smaller planets, like rocky planets around twice the size of Earth, and see if they contain the ingredients for life (as we know it). This includes water, carbon dioxide, and methane.
“We’re going to be able to tell what [the planets] are made of,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable.
Stay tuned. We already know the galaxy contains wild exoplanets almost certainly hosting otherworldly clouds. What else will we find in distant solar systems?
Twitter’s 2021 test of user-added content warnings was apparently a success. The feature is now live.
The company confirmed on Friday that Twitter users accessing the social media platform on Android, iOS, and the web can now add content warnings to any photos or videos attached to their tweets. It’s a relatively simple process that forces anyone who wants to take a look at your posted media to manually click past a prompt first.
Tweet may have been deleted
It’s not a perfect implementation at this point. The content warning doesn’t show up when a tweet that has one is embedded. The warnings also aren’t visible in third-party Twitter apps — I use Tweetdeck and they’re not showing up there.
Still, the process of adding a content warning is easy enough. And the feature should improve over time. Here’s how to take advantage.
Create your tweet, attach any media
Yeah, the tweet comes first. Don’t post it yet, but create your tweet. Add whatever media you plan to use. Then click or tap the “Edit” button to open up Twitter’s built-in editing tools.
The “Edit” button is what you’re looking for here. Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable
Click the content warning icon
Once the Twitter edit tools pop up, look near the top of the window. You should see a few different tabs. The default one is for cropping and resizing, as indicated by the crop icon. The middle one, labeled “ALT,” is for alt text, a basic description of the contents of whatever media you’re sharing. Alt text is used by screen readers to help those who may not be able to see the media you’re sharing know what’s there.
In this case, though, the third icon is the one we want. It looks like a little flag.
You’ve got three types of warning tags to choose from. Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable
Select your warning
Clicking or tapping the flag icon opens up the content warning tab. You’ll quickly notice there are three options to choose from here: Nudity, Violence, or Sensitive.
Choose whichever one is most appropriate for your media share, this appears to be the user’s prerogative. So if you want to, say, stick a spoiler-y movie clip behind a content warning, the lack of a “spoiler” tag doesn’t mean any of the others is the “wrong” choice. Your best bet is to go with “sensitive” in any situation where the thing you want to share isn’t an easy fit in any of the categories.
You get to see your content warning before it’s live. Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable
You can select multiple warnings if you want. Once you check one of the boxes, the editing tools’ preview window shows you what the warning will actually look like once it’s live. Once you’ve got your warning set, click or tap “Save” and you’ll be taken back to the original post editor.
Publish your tweet
At this point, you should be done and ready to publish your tweet (unless there’s more you want to add). So do that. Anyone who looks at your post on Twitter official, whether it’s the app or browser interface, will see a warning in front of your media just like it appeared in the preview.
The live version of the warning is identical to the preview version, as you can see here. Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable
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At a Christie’s auction, bids on a scrappy dog house did what a meteorite had done three years ago: They went through the roof.
The rusty, corrugated tin shelter — with a gaping seven-inch hole on top — went for $44,100 earlier this week, more than double the amount fetched by the extraterrestrial rock that blasted through it. Meanwhile, an extremely rare auction lot — billed as the third-largest Martian rock on Earth and valued at up to $800,000 — failed to find a buyer when the sale closed on Feb. 23.
The dog house’s sale may reveal something about what drives private collectors to possess the rare objects that fall to Earth from outer space. Beyond their ancient ages and the distance they’ve traveled is the notion of a close call: Something unexpected and otherworldly fell from the sky, and, in doing so, showed its potential for destruction.
In some cases, the reminder of that power is more valuable than the rubble itself.
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“It’s incredibly unlikely for [a meteorite] to actually hit something that’s in our day-to-day lives.”
“It’s incredibly unlikely for [a meteorite] to actually hit something that’s in our day-to-day lives,” James Hyslop, head of scientific instruments, globes, and natural history at Christie’s, told Mashable.
The story behind the dog house began at 9:07 p.m. on April 23, 2019, according to its record in the Meteoritical Bulletin, a publication of peer-reviewed meteorites. That night, a meteorite shower pelted a rainforest in central Costa Rica. Cameras at the summits of volcanoes captured the fireball, an unusually bright meteor. A chunk weighing close to two-thirds of a pound crashed into a German shepherd’s abode. Coincidentally, his name was “Roky.”
The Brazilian Meteors Observation Network, University of Sao Paulo, and Sao Paulo State University figured out the trajectory of the meteorite, dubbed “Arguas Zarcas,” by reviewing four security videos and dashcam cameras.
A note to concerned dog lovers: Roky survived the ordeal in better shape than his house.
Roky, a German Shepherd in Costa Rica, wasn’t injured by a meteorite that crashed into his dog house in 2019. Credit: Christie’s
Appraising these astronomical objects at auction has more to do with a gut feeling, Hyslop admits. The only data Christie’s had to guide it was a meteorite-dented mailbox from Claxton, Georgia, that sold for $83,000 in 2007.
A few years ago, Hyslop attended a meteorite exhibition in Paris. Outside in a glass box was a Chevy Malibu that had been struck by the Peekskill meteorite in 1992.
“I just thought that was such a great bit of theater,” he said. “It’s not just these meteorites that capture our minds. I mean, we all know the story of the asteroid that crashed into Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The impact that a meteorite has is a part of the story.”
“I just thought that was such a great bit of theater.”
A meteorite struck a Chevy Malibu in 1992. Credit: Ingo Wagner dpa / Picture Alliance / Getty Images
Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons of billions-of-years-old meteor material rain down on the planet daily, much of which vaporizes in Earth’s atmosphere or falls into the ocean, which covers over 70 percent of the planet.
Over 60,000 meteorites have been discovered on Earth. The vast majority come from asteroids, but a small sliver, about 0.2 percent, come from Mars or the moon, according to NASA. At least 126 have been identified as originating from the Red Planet.
In order for meteorites to get formally documented, the owner must give a large piece of it to an internationally authorized institution, such as a natural history museum. The institution will cut off a piece to preserve for enduring scientific research.
“The impact that a meteorite has is a part of the story.”
An “Aguas Zarcas” space rock that smashed into a dog house sold at auction for $21,420 on Feb. 23, 2022. Credit: Christie’s
Christie’s auctioned a piece of Roky’s rock that weighed half as much as the weight recorded in the Meteoritical Bulletin. The meteorite is mostly covered in a fusion crust, caused by its fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere. Its front face features a reddish-brown streak from when it crashed through the oxidized tin roof. The meteorite, composed of carbon compounds, sold for $21,420.
When Hyslop saw the unique remnants of the Costa Rican crash in the gallery, he thought it looked like an art installation.
“For me, it fits very comfortably alongside some very cool contemporary artworks of the moment,” he said.
As a sophomore in college, I was on Tumblr every minute that I wasn’t in class or watching YouTube. And as a fan of One Direction, I couldn’t avoid the platform’s No. 1 ship of 2015: Larry Stylinson, the pairing of band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. Larry supporters scoured videos of the group for “evidence” of their romance — a lingering gaze, a gentle brush of an arm — and transformed those moments into GIFs that were reblogged tens of thousands of times.
At first, I found the conviction of Larry truthers fascinating. And then something strange happened: I began to believe in Larry, too.
Larry content was everywhere, blooming across photo edits, blog posts, fan art, and fanfiction. However, it was the GIFs that did me in. They re-framed a fleeting moment as significant, as romantic, then suspended it in time. Scholars Dr. Dominik Maeder and Dr. Daniela Wentz have written that in a GIF’s “infinite loops of human and animal gesture… meaning eventually surfaces.” For me, and for many Larry shippers, that was true. Styles and Tomlinson deniedthe romance, but the hypnotic carousel of their small, silent moments made it feel completely possible, maybe even real.
Kayla, who now works as a social media consultant in the entertainment industry and requested we change her name to maintain her anonymity, used to make shipping edits of Arrow‘s Olicity (Oliver and Felicity) and The Old Guard‘s Joe and Nicky. GIFs were her way of showing others something she saw that they might not have picked up on. “When you slow these things down, you’re noticing smaller moments that you didn’t see live, that you wouldn’t see otherwise,” she explains. “That’s really special when you’re talking about romanticizing these couples and their chemistry. It increases the investment of fans in that relationship because they can see it in a new way.” Fans share those interpretations through creative edits, sometimes leveling up a romance to be on par with a Disney love story or the fiery passion of The Notebook‘s Allie and Noah or the tragedy of Titanic.
[GIFs] re-framed a fleeting moment as significant, as romantic, then suspended it in time.
During her time on Tumblr from 2014 to 2018, Kayla mostly posted sets: collections of GIFs or photos that capture shorter frames of a larger moment, like storyboards. Sets were native to Tumblr, and have now been co-opted by fans on Twitter. “With GIF sets you break the moment down a lot more to see the evolution of it in a way that encapsulates almost all of the emotion or all the chemistry.” They can also capture dialogue exchanges that are too long for a single GIF. “Sets to me are a little bit more emotional, a little bit more palpable,” she says “and I think really tugged at the heartstrings of the moment more than a single GIF would.”
In a 2013 interview, Tumblr’s founder and then-CEO David Karp called this kind of GIF editing and remixing “a really clear example” of a way that Tumblr gave creators “room to do something that they couldn’t really do anywhere else.” In contrast to nascent social platforms of the day, which he said had “gotten more and more restricted — [with] square photos, 140 characters, six-second videos,” Tumblr gave creativity a “place to flourish. We didn’t want to define the medium,” he says, “we wanted to leave it wide open.”
According to researchers Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield, the GIF is “an ideal tool for enhancing” what they call “the performance of affect” or the way we process and react to experiences. Basically, GIFs are like stand-ins for our own experiences, allowing us to analyze, replay, and potentially portray the actions they depict.
This is especially significant for queer communities on Tumblr. Other academics suggest that while sharing GIFs are the “smallest and most innocuous of Tumblr practices,” for LGBTQ users specifically, GIFs are a way to “trade in affect across the site.”
“Millennials kind of paved the way for queerness on the internet, and a lot of it happened through Tumblr,” says Amanda Brennan, who dug into the data behind Tumblr’s fandoms over her seven years at the company. “The way that we talk about gender and sexuality now wouldn’t be here if Tumblr hadn’t laid that path. It’s a space where you could be yourself and support each other, and the queer community is the cornerstone.” And GIFs can be a vehicle for discovery in the same way that “we use memes as a way to talk about things that we may or may not want to be vulnerable about,” she says.
That visibility helps queer users see themselves in stories historically centered on heterosexual relationships, and celebrate their identity.
Brennan points to data from 2013 showing that more than 76 percent of the most reblogged ships on Tumblr were slash, or same-sex pairings. That visibility helps queer users see themselves in stories historically centered on heterosexual relationships, and celebrate their identity. It’s important “to be able to see these queer relationships and queer joy when you’re just trying to figure yourself out,” to be able to say, “‘I see the way this person looks at this person. And I know that feeling and I’m going to dive into it because it brings me joy.'”
GIFs capture these ephemeral moments in a way that is immense and interminable. A GIF lives on in perpetuity, as eternal as love itself. Brennan points to one of her favorite femslash ships: Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught (Wayhaught) of Wynonna Earp. “I love seeing love, wherever it is,” she gushes, “Like, fuck yeah, I want to look at every GIF of the way that Nicole gives Waverly heart eyes.”
Over the last few years, there’s been hand-wringing over (young) peoplenot havingsex anymore. The latest came on Valentine’s Day, when CNN declared Americans are “less likely to have sex…than ever.”
Twenty-six percent of American adults didn’t have sex at all in 2021, according to the latest General Social Survey (GSS), a national representative survey of American adults released most years since 1972. While COVID certainly didn’t help matters of physical touch, the trend is in line with pre-pandemic levels. In 2016 and 2018, the last two times the survey was conducted, 23 percent of people reported not having sex at all.
Are we really having less sex than ever? It’s impossible to tell in a few data points. If you find yourself in the sexless category and want to climb out of it, though, there are ways to do so.
Consider the data
As always when looking at survey numbers, be mindful that even a nationally representative sample won’t illustrate what each and every person is going through. When looking at the actual breakdown of the 2021 GSS data, for example, the hard number of people telling GSS they haven’t had sex in the last 12 months is 633 out of 4,032. In fact, 46 percent of participants (1,875) either didn’t have an applicable answer, said they didn’t know, or plain didn’t answer that question.
That doesn’t mean we should disregard these findings entirely, though. The GSS is far from the only survey to suggest people, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, are having less sex.
One statistic doesn’t tell the whole story, however, and also doesn’t dive into the reasons behind it.
Why are we having less sex?
Sex educator and author of Beyond Satisfied: A Sex Hacker’s Guide to Endless Orgasms, Mind-Blowing Connection, and Lasting Confidence Kenneth Play suspects that as our online lives become richer, our ability to connect IRL diminishes. “This trend has already been catapulting with every new device and dating app,” he told Mashable. “Coupled with pandemic lockdown, we now have a recipe for loneliness and disconnection.”
Prior to his current career, Play was a personal trainer. He discovered that he wasn’t competing with other fitness businesses; he competed with the entertainment industry. It’s much easier, for instance, to binge Netflix than to drag yourself to a gym.
“We have too many options that compete for our attention in this hyper-convenient society,” he said. “It makes social connection more of a chore than ever before.”
Combine our hyper-convenient society with the stressors of a pandemic and the busyness of modern life, and it makes sense that we’re having less sex.
Still, people may desire sex even if they’re not having it. According to dating site eharmony’s latest Happiness Index, a nationally representative survey of 3,000 people, 41 percent of singles reported that their libido is higher now than pre-pandemic.
Play, a “sex hacker” who coaches clients on how to improve sex and intimacy, said he’s getting more requests than ever for help in the bedroom.
Stephen Quaderer, creator of the inclusive app for people who love oral pleasure Headero, said the influx of 20,000 users on the app since July 202 is a counterpoint to these statistics.
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“Within the Headero community we’re seeing a very different picture than the broader societal trend,” said Quaderer. “People are coming to Headero to seek out sexual exploration and experimentation – and based on the feedback that we’ve received, they’re finding it.”
Quaderer believes Headero’s growth and the sexless trends actually have something in common. The reason the app is growing is because it’s a safe space for people to be honest with their intentions and desires while grounding in safety and consent, he said. Meanwhile, in broader society, sex is increasingly framed from the prospective of stigma, so people don’t interrogate or act on their desires.
This is certainly true of social media companies, which are our current communication hubs. Tech giants are increasingly prudish due to legislation like FOSTA-SESTA, which set out to curb sex trafficking but in reality is just pushing sex workers — and discussions of sex — to the margins.
As University of Toronto pornography platform Ph.D. student Maggie MacDonald told Mashable, sexuality is just one social element that we like to connect with others about. On our main methods of digital communication, however, we’re not allowed to express this side of ourselves. This stifling of online sexual content — combined with a concerning lack of sexual education in schools — can bleed into our sex lives because if we’re not talking about it on the internet then we may not be talking about it at all. Porn, which is stylized entertainment, becomes the de facto rulebook to sex.
Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok don’t allow sexual content. While Twitter does, some users (like sex workers) claim they’re shadowbanned (when one’s account remains up but their content is blocked from others seeing it).
Sexuality is policed online by both the U.S. government and by the platforms themselves. But what if you want to have more IRL intimacy and don’t know where to start?
How to have more sex
While we alone can’t solve the erasure of sexuality online — or the pandemic, or the hamster wheel of late-stage capitalism — there are small, actionable steps individuals can take to have more sex,
Play’s first suggestion is to schedule it. “I know, it sounds kind of lame,” he said, “but one of the key findings in sex research is that responsive desire produces far greater results in getting people in the mood.” Responsive desire is getting horny after external stimulation, like someone touching you. Spontaneous desire is getting horny with or without stimulation…in other words, spontaneously.
Transitioning from a stressful day to a sensual partner session can be challenging, Play acknowledged. He suggested creating a transition ritual to get in an erotic headspace. An easy sex hack? Take a sensual shower with your partner.
“The goal is to caress each other’s bodies slowly and focus on the awakening sensations in your body,” Play said. “As a bonus you also get clean and smell great for all the dirty fun ahead!”
Quaderer advises folks to educate themselves beyond “the birds and the bees.” Read about communication, and of course consent and safety. Learning more about sex won’t just make you a more understanding and empathetic lover, but will also ground your own value system about sex, said Quaderer.
Questions to ask yourself are: What matters to you? What conditions must be met before sex? What boundaries cannot be crossed?
“Sex is complex, and it can be confusing,” Quaderer said, “so having a firm set of personal sexual values can help you navigate that complexity as it arises.” Knowing what you value out of sex can help you determine if a partner is right for you, and what desires you want to explore.
Once you have firm boundaries and desires, you can seek out communities of like minded people. Quaderer suggested his own app, Headero, and there are others out there like sexual exploration app Feeld and polyamorous community app Bloom.
The sex data is bleak, but it’s not a life sentence. If we carve out time to be with our partner — or ourselves — and determine our sexual values, we can bunk the trend.
