When people here change their profile pictures, I get lost when I am reading my timeline fast and trying to ignore what I am potentially not interested in.
Keep your brand.
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Il servizio sanitario UK paga uomini a rischio suicidio per fare stand-up comedy. 6 settimane di workshop, un palco, un microfono e il compito di ridere (e far ridere) del proprio trauma davanti a cento persone. La ricerca conferma: funziona meglio di molte sedute tradizionali. Il programma Comedy on Referral è attivo in 10 ospedali pubblici e 8 quartieri di Londra, con risultati che stanno ridefinendo cosa significhi "prescrivere una cura".
futuroprossimo.it/2025/12/comi…
Comicoterapia: in UK ora lo stand-up lo prescrive il medico
Il NHS britannico finanzia corsi di stand-up comedy per uomini a rischio suicidio. Salire su un palco può fare più di una seduta.Gianluca Riccio (FuturoProssimo)
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🤣
paginaum.pt/2025/12/12/obituar…
Why do schools have dances? Why do many high schools host parties, sometimes inter-school parties at the school?
A school isn't just a machine that puts knowledge into people's brains, it's an organization of people. And those people will want to celebrate together from time to time. This WILL happen. "official" events can be more inclusive.
But also for young people it's a part of social education, providing some baseline for how you interact with other people.
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There's something in all this that's triggering to me at a pretty deep level and I'm not 100% sure what it is. I think it has something to do with control.
As someone who was manipulated from a young age and who was bullied by kids and adults alike, the Internet for me was a necessary escape. I needed not only to communicate through text but with people outside my community. I didn't really know it at the time but I also needed a place where things wouldn't get back to my parents.
Now I don't know all the social dynamics of how school kids are using social media and I'll readily admit it probably isn't healthy. If kids are getting treated okay in the halls where teachers are watching and then cyberbullied by their peers over lunch, that's bad. And the popularity contest that is IG pretty 😬.
But I'm not sure if social media being a direct extension of school is great, either. For the kids for whom what they say and do making it back to their community is a useful motivatior for good behavior, it may help. But for the kid who everyone has silently agreed it's okay to bully, it just extends that hell to their phone.
Teachers, as we always do for any school activity. Same rules.
But there could also be some work for student government. (we have student government make the dress code and this works well)
OMG I have a 13 yo now and he's a great kid and he loves his school and community
It would be so great for him and his friends to have a loosely supervised social media account run through his moderately sized school (200 5th-8th graders)
I actually ... don't hate this. Supervision (i.e. moderation) is an issue, but assumably could be done similarly to sports or clubs (putting yet more burden on overworked teachers, but that's another issue.
(But also too: school dances and sporting events and yearbooks all had the express purpose of showing me just how excluded I was from the community. Same will happen with this.)
(But also too: school dances and sporting events and yearbooks all had the express purpose of showing me just how excluded I was from the community. Same will happen with this.)
That's how I felt about them too. I didn't attend my school's prom, for example.
But I think I would have liked it even less if it was one of those events I wasn't even invited to. (which also existed and only looking back can I see how obnoxious it was that the kids who went had to let me know)
Let me validate your choice: I went and really really wish I hadn't.
But yeah, your point is taken. And sometimes there's a quiet kid who can write like an angel and has the most interesting thoughts. Maybe they'd share.
There was this 1950 style soda fountain where I grew up and it was a big deal to go there for milkshakes on friday's
The entire class except for me and the other two unpopular girls would go.
Very obnoxious. Though that was middle school.
How do French teens have social events? Clubs? Church? Just small things with friends?
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I'm trying to think if there is something other than the school that could provide some pretext of "neutral ground" to serve as the place for youth social media... though I don't know much about France so it is kind of beyond me.
In the US schools take on a LOT of this role as it is. If it's not the schools it's the church... (I would take the schools...)
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There are a lot of parallels and overlaps with sex education here: if adults don't provide realistic, healthy answers, kids will find theirs in all the worst places online.
Oh that gets in the mix too. But not in the NYC city schools.
They don't really do much "romantic" dancing. They just eat all the snacks and argue about what music to play then dance in a circle.
Which is fine.
There are always a few gay prom dates, but also sometimes friends will go together and it's not romantic.
There are also lots of girls and guys who will go to prom together and that's common but not mandatory.
The seniors are mostly interested in getting very cute photos with the backdrops they spend WAY TOO MUCH TIME making and they make a huge mess.
Anyway.
@faithisleaping
Beyond just not doing anything about bullies, the school system I went to treated *me* as the problem for 1) *being* bullied, 2) honestly expecting teachers to do their alleged job in stopping bullies, and 3) just generally not fitting in (*especially* because "fitting in" is what girls are "supposed to be" good at).
I half-wonder if some faculty secretly thinks bullying is a *good* thing that punishes misfits for them.
"I half-wonder if some faculty secretly thinks bullying is a *good* thing that punishes misfits for them."
There are adults who think this. They are real and they are incorrect.
No, I can't make an outcast kid feel like they are a part of the class 100 percent. But, I can make them feel like they are just as valued as everyone else and deserve to be treated with respect.
Teens don't like it when you point out they are being a jerk. They will stop, or tone it down.
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In fact, I've seen some pretty dramatic changes just from pointing out that "no one wants to be treated like that" and "you are being mean."
It's your job if you are the adult.
I realize this isn’t about the social aspect, but I do wish that the music at dances wasn’t at literally deafening levels. I’m fairly certain a good percentage of my hearing loss is from attending high school dances where my ears were left ringing afterwards. My two kids who attended one during their middle school years both refused to go to a second one because the decibel level was painful for them.
We don’t need to harm kids’ hearing for them to have a good time together.
Yeah I never got that. The kids at the school where I work don't like loud music but it's a very nerdy school.
I think some people like it for some reason, though. Extroverts need to be studied.
@pomegranate_stew Heck, extroverts need to stop being treated as "normal" and introverts need to stop being treated as "broken".
Really, the entire idea that there is only one "right" way to be and that way is whatever cluster of common traits is most convenient for those who would want to control people (parents, teachers, bosses, politicians, etc.) needs to be thrown in the wastebin of history.
I'm pretty sure the majority of my own bullies knew damned well that they were being mean and no one would want to be treated the way I was; beyond merely not caring, they actively wanted to harm me specifically. There *was*, however, a minority who didn't actually *want* to bully me and was peer-pressured into it.
Oh the kids I've spoken to know what they are doing too. They do not like having it pointed out by an adult.
That the adults didn't do anything for you or acted like they couldn't is a failure on their part.
Kids will be mean on purpose because it can feel grown up and powerful. They see it in media, or they know an adult like that. They don't always think about the fallout fully.
But when another adult isn't impressed it's not so mature and worldly seeming anymore.
At first, the teachers *did* scold the bullies... and that didn't work, which meant that the teachers got frustrated with my continuing to ask them to perform a futile task, which quite frankly had a lot to do with them starting to treat me as the problem for expecting them to do their jobs.
I had a teacher in high school ask the whole class at the beginning of the period to pray for me since I hadn’t let Jesus into my heart. Good times.
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@pteryx @faithisleaping I've done this with strangers on the bus once, they'd been dumping on the one girl in the group for far too long and I just snapped at them
they got a BIT defensive but in a self-soothing way, and they did lay off her. Sure, teenagers often won't admit it when they realise they were being a dick. But they tend to reel it in, yeah
This is a wonderful idea, except for the “not connected” part.
Many secondary schools have introductory computer science programs. Students could gain practical experience in sysadministration, gain valuable experience in moderation and social responsibility, serve the schools wider community, and popularize the model of a federated social media.
A lot ^could^ go wrong, I know. But if we wish to have an educated citizenry, this would be a way.
Gibt es Erfahrungen oder Gründe die gegen einen schulinternen Mastodon-Server sprechen?
A mastodon instance per year group could be a nice alternative. But they already have a school provided "social media" which is strictly moderated - maybe too strictly.
This is a fascinating idea and you've used an excellent social education metaphor in the school dance.
The great roadblock I anticipate would need to be overcome would be the legal liability, followed by the political and moral panic.
I was about to say no one freaks out about teaching math—but yeah, they do. Folks definitely freak out *more* when educators teach social skills or anything bordering on someone's idea of morality. This'd allow students to express themselves. Oh no!
My impression is that Bonfire would be a great way to go, and that remaining federated would be OK if the moderation team was good.
I'd love to do this for Pasadena unified, and I think I could probably partner with Pasadena education foundation to do it not as a school thing but as a foundation thing the school could promote. moderation could be teachers and parents like PTA members... maybe I'll look into this in the new year? it goes along with the library stuff ive been doing...
@thecrushedviolet
At least you recognize bullying as a serious problem at all.
As for learning about setting boundaries and asking for help... quite frankly, the lesson I took away from how the faculty treated me at school is that authority figures will do anything, *ANYTHING*, to minimize their own workload, and therefore asking appointed or self-selected authority figures for help is not just futile, but potentially counterproductive as they turn on you.
Small town Texas in 1995 or 1996. Good times.
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@ELS
Schools have email and this isn't an issue? What new liabilities would be raised?
It's possible that the disconnect is not taking for granted (or perhaps even grasping) the concept of a large, organized school. There are cultures that *don't* herd all their children into big, compulsory educational institutions together.
The most efficient way to do this is to have a centralized organization to do this. This shares the costs of IT across every school that needs it. A school would contract them out to set up an instance and provide mod privileges to the teachers willing to do this.
The org could also do other cloud services (email, wiki, owncloud, etc) as an alternative to MS or Google.
And then, SV capital could buy the org and sell students' data to advertisers
@ELS
I don't really see the point of having an anonymous network inside of a school. Hadn't even thought of doing that.
I can say with 100% certainty my elementary school considered bullying to be a necessary social skill. It was like they were grooming us to work for or marry into the Ewing family.
@ELS
School email is just regular email although out-of-school incoming mail is blocked by a whitelist that includes parents and a few others.
No "anonymous" accounts is part of the "boring school party" aspect.
I'm seeing people in this thread who were let down so badly by their schools, and the trauma caused by that abandonment, that betrayal, is still so very real and present. I feel that, as another person with lifelong cPTSD caused by emotional abuse in the school environment.
(I refuse to even give it the respectable label of "bullying"-- it was calculated, intentional, repeated, emotional traumatisation.)
But I want to "pay forwards" to you my thanks for standing up to abuse, for stopping it happening where you have power.
Because throughout the hell that was secondary school, a tiny handful of teachers were willing and able to say "not in my classroom". I remember looking thru my diary and feeling the visceral relief that I had science that day, or English. For 55 blessed minutes, my nervous system could recover from the state of hypervigilance that I was spending every other hour of my day in.
I am not exaggerating when I call those teachers lifesavers.
@pteryx @faithisleaping
I guess I'm an unlikely champion of the school dance considering I hated the whole concept as a kid, only went to one under duress (it was too loud) and never went again.
I get a different perspective as a teacher and hope that we've encouraged something better than what I was exposed to when I was younger (which to be fair wasn't as bad as it could have been, even in 1997 I somehow was at a school that didn't mandate )
That all of the students show up I take as a good sign.
> They ALL come to the dances
I didn't. Most dances I absolutely refused to participate in, and the one or two that I didn't I mostly stayed on the bleachers away from everyone.
And of course the one that I *did* go to someone wound up getting seriously injured / (killed?). So there was that.
My mom and dad, experienced a very different kind of school dance in the 1960s. It was very focused on straight dating cosplay I guess?
There were a billion rules about buying flowers for a girl and if you could pick her up in your horrible car.
These things evolve.
That said. I liked knowing I COULD go to the school dance and not going more than I'd like if all the parties were the kind where I wouldn't be invited.
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@grant_h did the adults themselves express interest in using it, including using it themselves and not infrequently showing interesting things on it?
and were things other than pixelfed considered? (i still do not see anything pixelfed can do that multiple other fedi platforms don't do better)
I haven't gotten as far as talking about software yet. Though I'm starting to think the way to sell them on this is to point out how much more elegant it would be than our current school electronic communication which is basically everyone spams everyone with email all the time.
Every club, team, department, etc. is just posting stuff to these horrible listserves like it's usenet and there are no forums. Just one big forum.
This would be a way to tame the chaos.
Today, on a sunday I have 130 school email notifications and all of them are from the listservs and I need to open most of them and look to see what it is.
OK I'll open like half of them.
But it's a mess.
Nonetheless we are already a school where students and teachers do mass digital communication in the community all the time.
Ballroom dance was an extra in 1961, taught in the junior high school’s gym. A community center held “canteens” Saturday nights in Summer. Dancing cheek to cheek at 13.
so much THIS!
*but* you have to get the ADULTS to not be the idiots in the room. 6 or 7 years ago our local charter school had a Facebook group, and the kids did NOT interact with it because there were one or two adults absolutely sucking ALL the oxygen out of the room with their bad takes and frankly 12-year-old behavior, modeling the worst of the worst to the student population.
This was before the current-day miasma that is FB and others, sadly predictive of current state…
Good point.
I may have made an incorrect assumption that you were proposing that a school homegrow or otherwise implement its own social media platform...like a Mastodon instance.
The services you identified are all provided by third parties under contract with the school. That contract provides obligations for those parties to assure FERPA-protected and other private data is kept safe. This provides a certain indemnity under the reasonable actor standard. (At least where I work.)
That's because you're sensible.
Dances do not typically create a perfect digital record of everything that happens at them, and social media platforms typically do. That's great for people investigating actual wrongdoing, but it also makes a gold mine of innocent content to be used by profit-seeking lawyers and disingenuous adults to intimidate, harass, and legally destroy whatever school tried to implement such a platform.
There's also those generally-ignored child privacy laws.
I never made it to a single dance. Not even prom.
Here (South Africa) there are a coue of dedicated school comms packages.
Privacy is also a thing - parents with access to teachers private phone num ers is a big no at my school, which I appreciate. Also, email has an auditable trail, not something most social media platorms have.
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yes! i've been thinking a lot about a related question:
now that more and more of our world is experienced through personal devices like smartphones and laptops, how do we gradually include children and youths in our adult world?
for instance: growing up there were newspapers on our table every day, and LP's on the shelf. pieces of a larger shared reality it was possible to learn from.
and then, of course, perhaps reject - but after at least exploring it for a bit.
our role as adults is to invite the kids into our world in a gentle way, show them around a bit, introduce them to our reality.
and i think that takes more intentional effort now than it used to.
because the effortless default now is just: hand them a device, let them figure it all out themselves from scratch. and then tell them off for making the wrong choice.
I want to thank some of you for your comments on this post that have made me realize a few things:
1. When talking about "social media intranets for teens" I need to make it clear I'm NOT talking about anonymous networks. Just like with school email it's one account per person.
2. I should probably define the difference between internet and intranet as well.
3. I'm going to hear "can't do it legal reasons*" over and over and should be ready with the big guns for THAT one.
* It's something you pick up if you work in a big organization. Even the most innocent seeming ideas can be shot down for "legal reasons" --I think it can be very counterproductive to internalize this notion if you aren't a lawyer. Let the lawyers raise the "legal reasons" ... we don't live in some kind of paralyzed time when nothing can be done.
If "field trips" didn't exist I'm certian the first person to propose them would hear "can't go on a trip for legal reasons"
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And, using the field trip example again, there *are* legal implications to taking students on a trip. That's why we have permission slips.
Legal reasons are surmountable if you are doing something reasonable.
Don't abandon your idea before you even try it because thinking about the "legal implications" is complex.
In the case of having a student intranet I think there are basically ZERO legal implications since everything the network would do already exists in a school.
If the students have school email addresses, it's hard to imagine an intranet social network creating additional legal implications.
(And besides, if more than one school did it, they could pool resources to get an actual lawyer to look at what they were doing and ensure compliance with relevent liability standards.)
IANAL, of course.
A lawyer friend of mine once informed me that anyone, anywhere can sue you no matter how carefully you set up to avoid being sued or how diligently you avoid doing things for "legal reasons."
He advised, instead, being consistent across policies, following the policies, and paying attention to guidelines provided by licensing organizations. Otherwise, get creative (his words, not mine).
The Social Institute | Giving Students Life Skills for the Modern Day
The Social Institute provides a gamified, online learning platform that equips students with the modern-day life skills they need to navigate social experiences — online and offline — in positive, high-character ways.The Social Institute
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Wow, this thread screams "Was never bullied" (of course I don't if you actually weren't, but it doesn't sound like it)… We must have had radically different experiences (although I don't know which direction is worse) if you really think "every creep on the internet looking in on it" is the main threat and not that the people you're forced on threat of state violence to spend 6+ hours with every day for years will make your life living hell when the way you "express yourself" strays even a bit out of societal norms.
Also, if you're concerned with not excluding the socially awkward kid you'd have to disable the block feature, because otherwise they will just get blocked by most people except those "kindred spirits" you don't care about.
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Are you saying it's better not to have such a network?
You are very incorrect about my experience with bullying.
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I get into this a bit more in this part of the thread:
sauropods.win/@futurebird/1157…
As a teacher who is always looking out for kids who struggle with "socializing" the part about being shut out really bothers me.When I was in HS internet was a secret world for a few dozen nerdy kids who knew about it. Now it's more like the socially savvy kids figure it out, and even manage to use it rather responsibly, but the kids who are more like I was... they have no idea what's going on or where to start and they are just left out.
That sucks.
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I'm sorry that you were bullied.
From an anti-bullying perspective, it might be not actively harmful to have such a network as long as it is not becoming (legally or de facto) mandatory. From a privacy perspective I have my doubts, although I would need to think more about it to say whether that would be a reason against it.¹ From a youth liberation perspective, I think kids are already surveilled and controlled by their parents and school enough, so I don't really jump in excitement at a new way to do such. Also I worry that such a network causes kids to join non-censored social media only later, hindering their ability to seek out (or chances to stumble upon) important information for them.
Re your other reply: Thanks for the link, but I read the entire discussion your original post spawned (including your thread) before sending my first reply already, so that doesn't give any new arguments.
(¹ What I can say though is that the idea of permission slips is (mostly) useless, in the same way how (nearly) noone actually doesn't get one for going on a school trip (and for those it's (I think at least, but I don't have data on that) just their parents being controlling, not actually for their safety.). After all, even I – Mr. So-Obsessed-With-Privacy-That-He-Gives-Himselfs-Two-Anxiety-Disorders (I wasn't out as genderfluid at the time, so therefore the misgendering) – did sign one for being able to use my arch-nemesis M365 in school.)
I’m not sure if you’ve heard but those fields are *outside*!!!
It’s scary out there. Ants might get you!
😉
While a shaky ceasefire holds in Gaza, Palestinians hope the festivities are a step toward a more peaceful future in a region shaken by tragedy.
“It’s not like it was before the war,” 30-year-old Bethlehem resident John Juka said. “But it’s like life is coming back again.”
mississippifreepress.org/chris…
Christmas Celebrations Return to Bethlehem After 2 Years of War in Gaza
Bethlehem bustled with families and lights on Saturday evening, a hopeful change in the Palestinian city since war broke out in Gaza.Megan Janetsky (Mississippi Free Press)
Sanctum 2: 1-1 Introduction ("Flesh & Steel", 2 Player)
Sanctum 2, developed by Coffee Stain Studios, is a tower defense game and first
person shooter. Flesh & Steel is a challenge, where you don't make use of any
towers. Some rules:
- You must play in Campaign and with all five Feats of Strength enabled.
- No tower must ever be placed down; Bases are fine.
- Pre-built towers must be sold before a wave can start.
- Environmental damaging factors like mines, explosive barrels, windmills and
lasers are fine to make use of.
Rules were partly copied from S2 Challenges1. The document also provides more
details about challenges in general, as well as other completions done on them.
Comments
While this technically doesn't count as a true Flesh & Steel completion, since
Feats of Strength can't be actived since the first wave, this is still a fun
map, especially with all the glitches. Thanks to map-mixing you can play the,
normally, solo-only map with other people. Fun and easy :)
Strategy
This map got cleared using map-mixing. You can read about it at the Strange
Encyclopedia2.
Go out of bounds at the beginning of the map to sell all towers (so they can't
deal any damage to enemies).
Timestamps
- 00:00 build phase 1
- 00:12 wave 1
- 00:46 build phase 2
- 01:02 wave 2
- 01:27 build phase 3
- 01:34 wave 3
- 02:00 build phase 4
- 02:14 wave 4
- 02:47 end game statistics
Sidenotes
The video was recorded with GPU Screen Recorder and edited with FFmpeg.
Originally recorded back in around 2025-03-28.
Footnotes
#Poland political analyst Edwin Bendyk:
The term ‘war fatigue’ often comes up in discussions aimed at showing declining Western public support for aid to #Ukraine. The latest More in Common survey, conducted in late November and early December, shows that talk of ‘fatigue’ is exaggerated.The public in #Poland, the #UnitedKingdom, #France, #Germany and the #UnitedStates remain determined and have a clear view of who is the aggressor and who is the victim in this war, and what is unacceptable in peace negotiations. It is unacceptable for the terms of a ceasefire and peace to reward the aggressor.
Of course, there are clear differences between the electorates. In Germany, #AfD voters are more supportive of #Russia than Ukraine, in Poland less than half of #Konfederacja voters support Ukraine, PiS supporters are at the same level of support as the national average, and over 80% of Koalicja voters have no doubts and sympathise with Ukraine.
The study is very important as it presents a very concrete and evidence-based counterweight to the flood of disinformation plaguing the media. Russian trolls, including some politicians, present their projections and wishes, while this study presents the social reality.
Full article (in Polish): polityka.pl/tygodnikpolityka/s…
Full study: moreincommon.com/international…
Zmęczenie wojną? W badaniach tego nie widać. Europa nie daje się zmiękczyć Putinowi
Najwyraźniej wysiłek Władimira Putina, wspieranego w mniej lub bardziej otwarty sposób przez Donalda Trumpa, nie przynosi oczekiwanego przez nich efektu.Edwin Bendyk (POLITYKA Sp. z o.o. S.K.A)
Germany's Merz says Putin seeks to restore USSR and will not stop at Ukraine
@
correct, also the current us krasnov administration seeks to separate italy austria poland and hungary from the eu to make the eu more vulnerable and to exit all us troops from europe before 2027 (possibly may mean an exit from nato as well from the part of the us)
poland and hungary may be the next with baltic states and finland ... putin and krasnow planning a holy eu cruisade ...
@
pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2025/12…
Germany's Merz says Putin seeks to restore USSR and will not stop at Ukraine
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz believes that Russian ruler Vladimir Putin will not stop at Ukraine in his aggressive foreign policy.Ivanna Kostina (Ukrainska Pravda)
"Wäre Teheran also die erste Metropole, die wegen der #Klimakrise unbewohnbar wird?
Ich glaube, das ist die falsche Frage, sie führt in die Irre. Bewohnbar oder nicht – das ist kein hartes Entweder-Oder, sondern eine Frage der Leidensfähigkeit, der Mittel und der politischen Priorisierung.
Richtig ist das: Teheran wäre die erste Metropole, über die politisch das Urteil gesprochen wird: in der Klimakrise nicht mehr zu bewahren.
Sie wird nicht die letzte sein." — Jonas Schaible @beimwort
RE: mastodon.art/@JenJen/115684867…
ONLY 2 LEFT 
THANK YOU 
EDIT: physical comic SOLD OUT - Thank you!!If you want your supernatural spice comics, all handpainted and stuff - this is your sign to get it!
jenniegyllblad.co.uk/wp/produc…
#MastoArt #Comics #Lewd #fedigiftShop
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SHIRAISHI Yuri #白石ゆり
#YuriSHIRAISHI #SHIRAISHI_Yuri #kinbaku #shibari #rope #JapaneseRopeBondage #suspension #crotchRopePunishment #crotchRopeTorture #KIMONO #costume #SexyJapanese #SexyAsian #gravure #SugiuraNorio
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SHIRAISHI Yuri #白石ゆり
#YuriSHIRAISHI #SHIRAISHI_Yuri #kinbaku #shibari #rope #JapaneseRopeBondage #suspension #KIMONO #costume #SexyJapanese #SexyAsian #gravure #SugiuraNorio


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