I am a mad scientist! So cooool!! Sonuvabitch.

Well yes, but I don't even necessarily mean a gun :P

Yeah, I feel much the same. Shit happens sometimes and it's good to be prepared. That goes for situations where civilization is collapsing and also in day to day life too. "Preppers" are so hyper fixated on one particular hyper-individual fantasy outcome. The merits of, say, integrating into a mutual aid network are completely missed.

It's always so much more useful to have AND KNOW WHERE every one-off necessity you might need is. A flashlight and spare batteries. First aid supplies. Spare medication. Superglue. A good utility knife. Emergency bedding. Enough shelf stable food for a few days. Some card games to pass the time. A few creature comforts that are easy to keep on hand. An appropriate weapon you practice with regularly. Some space an unhoused friend could crash for a week.

You get whatever you can together and organized and then you SHARE IT, because these things will all solve day to day problems for people in your life who maybe don't have them on hand. And then you pay attention to other needs that come up and make small additions so you're prepared for the needs of people you care about. And then boom there you go you've done actual fucking preparation! And get to sleep a little easier knowing you're ready for a lot more that life could throw at you.

Margaret Killjoy has a great podcast on effective preparation that comes from a very practical community readiness perspective. Definitely worth a listen. Live Like The World Is Dying

Can also recommend looking into local HEMA clubs as a step in that direction depending on your goals. Generally they tend to be queer friendly (if not queer themselves) and can help you learn some melee combat basics, which may be more relevant depending on your environment. I learned a lot from axe-and-shield fighting, even though it's not directly applicable in most real world situations. But the silly Viking shit was fun enough to make me really love showing up and practicing, and it helped me get confident using an axe. So now I feel comfortable open carrying a utility axe for self-defense with a lot of plausible deniability. Also taught me how to deal with a riot shield :3

I was getting ready to come out to my sister in like late 2021, she had a really bad motorcycle accident and we were catching up and it seemed like the right time to tell her.

then she started talking about how a near death experience made her start re-evaluating some things, and then she came out to me and it was the fucking spiderman pointing meme. Both of us moved to WFH after covid hit so the timing makes sense, but it was such a wonderful coincidence.

"hey wanna come hang out this weekend?" "sorry but-"

omg I just wrote a comment about a student project with this mechanic, wishing to see it in a full production and then scrolled down and here you are telling me that game actually exists! Thank you 😁

I played a student project game a long time ago that based itself around this kind of mechanic. It was a horror game set entirely in the dark, and the only way of seeing was by echolocation - you'd click to send out a pulse, and you'd get brief ghostly glimmers of your environment. Importantly, you couldn't directly see anything moving - you'd have to send out another ping if you wanted to see something in motion.

Given that monsters could hear your pings too, it was a wonderful little game of cat-and-mouse deduction trying to figure out where monsters were with as few pings as possible, remembering their patrol paths in the dark, and so on. Really cool and I'd love to see that mechanic in a full game production.

(edit: apparently that full game exists, it's called Perception, and I'm absolutely giving it a shot!)

The thing is some games make the line really fuzzy and it's hard to draw an exact line where it no longer is a game.

Pyre does have a whole RPG wizard basketball thing going on that I enjoyed, but wasn't the reason I recommend the game. The more engaging part of the game was the visual novel stapled to it, which was affected by wizard basketball in cool and interesting ways, but inside each scene it's largely non-interactive.

Disco Elysium also has some RPG mechanics going on, and there's a city block for you to wander around, but the vast majority of the game is dialogue. It could largely be written as a more complicated choose-your-own-adventure book, but it's so much stronger as a game.

Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood is almost entirely dialogue and telling people's fortunes, with only brief moments of creating new tarot cards to break up the dialogue. Despite this, the fortune-telling aspect of the game has made it one of the most interesting games I've played in a bit.

There's any number of "walking simulators" that this debate comes up around and I counter that with the fact that Outer Wilds built off the back of that formula to create something unquestionably a game, but built off of gameplay loops largely based around traversal and finding new bits of lore to unlock progression.

These were all successfully marketed to gamers as video games. My hot take is that they're all games, but with a form of gameplay that some may find too simple for their liking and that's ok. And the semantic debate over what's a game and what isn't is just feels vibes based sometimes.

The Internet has provided us a wealth of information. In fact.... maybe too much information, with questionable veracity. Social media has provided viral ways of spreading this information to people finding a truth that fits their existing beliefs, not necessarily finding the truth from an objective set of facts.

This isn't just about Trump, the GOP, or even just fascism. It's a complete breakdown of our trust in shared reality. It's an indication that humans are not as smart as we think about applying technology we've invented, or maybe not as capable as we think about connecting with as many people as the internet allows us to.

it's true and honestly really inconvenient. I keep trying to kiss my gf but we're always interrupted by tornado sirens. How are we supposed to groom any kids into our satanic sex cult under these conditions??

I have a couple answers to this that might be uncommon, personal, and wouldn't have helped me in the early stages, but were the final nails in the coffin of this doubt for me and I haven't ever worried about it since.

The first came a couple months after coming out. I noticed that I had already changed a lot, almost entirely mental. I couldn't describe exactly how, but it felt like I really had done myself a favor and burned the bridges I needed to in order to take control of my life. At that point, I started to figure - well, if this whole being-a-girl thing doesn't work out, who's to say I can't transition again? I couldn't imagine going back to who I was before - I knew that if I was going to ever identify as masculine again, it'd be a retransition, not a detransition. And tbh if that ever happens I very much look forward to what new roads lie in front of me. It's nothing to be afraid of - everyone I fell out with in the process of coming out was no real friend of mine anyway. And I know the people in my life now would have my back.

The second was that I developed pretty severe fibromyalgia after some time on HRT. I think I had it to a low grade before? But it definitely worsened to a disabling degree after about a year on hormones. It's not a very well understood condition (and as a diagnosis of exclusion it's probably not just one condition) but it's a lot more common in women, which maybe implies it's just part of how my body works on estrogen. So I had a choice to make - would I rather go off estrogen if it'd help with the pain? And the answer was a surprisingly immediate and definitive "hell fucking no". Even with a new disability life was so much better. That's the point I knew it was the right choice and I've never doubted it since.

I guess the way I'd tie this up is - it took a long while after I started giving it a go to be 100% assured I'd made the right decision. It is a leap of faith you will have to make without a guarantee - that said, if you're thinking about it to this level your odds are probably extremely high. And you'll know pretty quick if things like HRT are for you or not.

You might also benefit from nonbinary identity in the meantime to give yourself the space to explore any and all options. I landed on identifying as nonbinary but broadly transfemme - you can figure out the more specific parts of your identity later, just figure out what you want to explore in the present and you'll get there with some time!

For real. The human body's ability to repair itself and adapt is astounding and scars represent how immense injury can become distant with time. they also accentuate curves quite well :>

as a masochist I forget people feel bad about their scars, given how much joy I get out of leaning into mine. They're badass no matter what they're from, and personally I get so much euphoria out of the fact that my body reflects how much shit I've persisted through just to be alive and how much pain I can take. kind of like a tattoo, and tbh might work em into one at some point.

my sister had a pretty nasty motorcycle accident and had to get her elbow rebuilt. it rotates in a pretty different place and there's all sorts of scars around where the asphalt tore her up. and every time I see her in her short sleeved Ripley-ass jumpsuits she likes I'm like "YEAA THAT'S MY CYBORG SIS"

I know it's never as easy as "but they're hot tho!!", not here to dismiss the feelings but... they're hot tho!!

IIIIT'S LIKE RAAAAIIIIIIIIIN ON YA WEDDING DAYYYY

It's funny cause to me it's always meant a third entirely different thing! To me small talk is just starting from a basic place to feel each other out a bit, bringing up mundane things and simple questions to find topics we could drill further into.

"How was your day" to a partner would be small talk, even though I care about what they're saying - I'm just asking so they can bring up something to talk about. "Weather's been shit lately" to a stranger is small talk, but the ensuing story about how they had to rush to work late in the rain would not be.

Given it means three different things to three random people, it's almost like "small talk" actually covers a broad set of social purposes and people who "aren't into it" might actually be missing a lot 😝

I guess that one level in a silo is kind of a downward spiral lol

I'm gonna try and level the same benefit of the doubt that I wish people would give us: this would be a matter between a patient, their community, and their health providers, and if transition would in fact improve someone's quality of life to the extent that gender transition does, I wouldn't oppose it. This is the same conclusion I came to about transabled identities once I thought about it for a while.

I'm skeptical of it in concept, but it's not really my place to cast judgement as someone not familiar with the experience (also white) and I'm sure someone willing to come out as transracial is going to hear a lot of arguments against their existence already. they probably wouldn't need one more from me.

Tbh, I'd honestly just be really interested to talk to them about it to the extent they'd be willing. I haven't heard from anyone I can trust is being earnest and genuine about it but I won't assume they can't possibly be out there. I can't think of a source of dysphoria for transracial people that wouldn't be steeped in false racial hierarchies dreamed up by white people, but just maaaayyyyybe someone out there has a different experience. No way to know without hearing from em directly I guess is my point.

For this one I only read the headline and context in comments so thanks for jumping in with some info. Bacteria producing spores is definitely something I'd never heard of, and sounds like an interesting wikipedia binge for later