Detective Costeau hasn’t figured it out yet, you haven’t even met him yet, he’s still sleeping off his last bender. Kim, on the other hand, already had your pronouns in his notes alongside a comprehensive psych eval

Two pickup trucks

Making love

American made

Built Ford tough

Two beautiful murder machines

American angels in the sky

Grown men cry

I’ve attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you’re spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I’ve spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that’s playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that’s breaking preventing them from logging in, that that’s not actually my area of expertise and that I’m just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we’ve tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn’t want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so… not really a choice there. And we can’t admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I’m never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can’t throw myself in front of that bus again. I’m gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

Ultimately I think any conversation that boils down to who is or isn’t LGBT+ is a bit reductive. It’s not like every person in that broad grouping is completely valid as they are - there’s lots of abusive and dangerous queer people, just like any other group. It’s not like we endorse every LGBT+ person’s behavior uncritically, nor are we asking for anyone else to do so.

That’s kinda why I prefer “queer” as a broad label. It’s less about whether what you are fits into the acronym and is therefore valid. If someone identifies as queer, the question becomes - how so? And if someone spews some obviously abusive nonsense in response, we don’t have to support them, but if they experience attraction to people they know they can’t safely engage with (and don’t), my thinking would turn empathetic pretty quickly.

like most of these things, depends on context I think. being a furry is technically something different and not inherently sexual, however furries are treated as such and also overlap a lot with other queer communities. so there’s lots of solidarity to find there. same goes for lots of neurodivergent folks too.

carrying a crab around in your pocket is unfortunately not a zero-cost abstraction

my dnd party is fighting a bunch of crabs right now and the crabs are winning. thank you for this

as always, c++ lets us do better in breathtakingly elegant fashion:

#\
i\
n\
c\
l\
u\
d\
e\
 \ 
<\
i\
o\
s\
t\
r\
e\
a\
m\
>

finishing out hello world is left as an exercise to the reader, but the advantages and superior performance of this format should be obvious

This is what I came to the comments for! Thanks for the explanation, that’s cool as hell.

I crunch it in my mouth and spit it into the pan

I fight people and have opinions!

Really depends on the sport. In non-professional fencing and HEMA, practice tends to be coed. Men and women tend to perform equivalently - really height is the biggest “biological advantage”. More reach means more ability to hit an opponent before they hit you, and this goes the same for men and women. Sure, men can accelerate a bit faster and tend to be taller, women can plant their feet a little wider and tend to be more balanced and flexible - but these are just averages. Individual people vary wildly because biology doesn’t give a shit about the categories we create to describe it. And strategy can make up for a lot of those things in ways that you really just can’t with height discrepancies. We had to give our club’s tallest member a shorter axe just to make up for the reach advantage when she fought people she stood a head above.

Dividing strictly based on AGAB is not an even playing field and I feel trans athletes only draw attention to what’s already a significant problem in competitive sports. And once you get to a professional level, I understand there’s more nuance, but a vast, vast majority of athletes are not professional and the issue is blown far out of proportion for them. Anyone pushing to enforce divisions in kids’ sports via genital inspections has lost their goddamn minds.

It feels like a sequel honestly. Kind of incredible how many of the core mechanics from the base game they threw out in service of telling a new story differently.

Outer Wilds, to my estranged family. I think they could use a new religion and that game’s probably a better place to start.

Is math in the room with us right now?

Escapism is a valid reason to enjoy music, but catharsis is a thing for some too. Sometimes it’s helpful to hear someone artfully articulate something I feel but haven’t put words to. When I’m frustrated with the world I put on some Against Me, rage about things for a bit, and then feel better.

I’m still the same metalhead as ever, hah. Transition doesn’t change your interests, passions, and hobbies. If transfems are into some traditionally masc things as a product of being raised as boys, that’ll tend to stick around after transitioning. That doesn’t make them not women, but it does make them more likely to be in traditionally masc spaces than cis women.

And ultimately, I feel that’s a good thing - there’s really no reason women wouldn’t be interested in metal outside of cultural norms, and if more trans women are in those spaces I hope it makes cis women more comfortable to explore those interests too.

I love this so muuuuuch

I love how divergent those two popular interpretations of AI are, too. One is all Skynet and scary and all-powerful and the other is being refactored for the umpteenth time because navmeshes broke and all the enemies are T-pose floating 10cm in the air.

If you haven’t already heard it, I highly recommend Pyre’s OST! I’m a little biased, it’s one of my favorite games of all time, but I feel the OST especially improves on elements of Bastion/Transistor’s soundtracks but with a style all its own.

also yasssss frozen synapse rules