Especially considering a lot of the creative talent behind Valve’s acclaimed single player catalog are no longer at the company. Valve is a different company now and so their games will be different too.

young men have been told that white men are the worst thing to be.

Ok, but try not being a man and see if people think that’s any better…

ooh I fell in love with Taking Water by Billy Strings a day or two ago and it’s been in my head since

Yeah, pretty much everything one needs to know about what he’ll do as President is laid out by Project 2025. His ability to actually govern is secondary to the apparent desire for our own little christofascist Cultural Revolution. Wheeeeee

I forgor 💀

It always depends but tbh I hope you feel free to use whatever terminology you find useful to describe yourself! and I think there’s no valor that can be stolen, identity is what you make for yourself. It’s always a joy to learn someone I know is queer in any form. Lots of us have had times where we’ve doubted how we describe ourselves too and gatekeeping labels doesn’t tend to help anyone. You will come across people who do here and there, I did myself, but in my super objective opinion they’re annoying, smell bad, and stifle people just trying to figure themselves out. Labels are just tools for further conversation and more people using queer labels is a good thing.

+1 to this for sure. Applies for gender identity too. Speaking just for myself, the longer it’s been since I transitioned the less my actual labeled identity has mattered, to the point that these days I just say “nonbinary” and move on. It’s what makes a lot of the “what is a woman” rhetoric baffling, given the label and definition matters so little in day to day life.

My bf comes off pretty much straight, but he describes himself as pansexual and attracted to feminine people. It’s cool to see him engage with the queer community despite being more or less able to “pass” as cishet if he wanted to, and his nebulous labeling was really helpful in settling my nerves as a newly-out trans woman. Less worrying about whether or not I was woman enough, more just hearing him say he likes me and that’s that.

Was just about to post IDLES here myself. It goes and it goes and it goes

It’s something that’s important in personal relationships I think, but the context and human tends to get lost over the internet.

If a friend’s drowning in negativity, one can be present in some ways, but that can’t be fixed by anyone else nor would that even really make sense. They could be in a bad situation, in which case maybe there’s ways to directly help, but oftentimes it’s something only they can work through and we also have to maintain some distance and boundaries and recognize we won’t fix how they feel nor should we try to. And sometimes people just need to vent negativity and shout into the void or break down to a friend.

On the internet, we fire off walls of text under the presumption people will just read it and get it and fuck off and go change their whole worldview. It takes time and the ephemeral nature of communication on the Internet means we’ll never be around for the context or resolution of someone’s difficulties. (nor will they for our own.) So, even more than irl, we have to set boundaries on how invested we’re willing to get. It’s a constant frustration for me though.

ps muse dash looks cute as hell, have fun!!

Do consider this doesn’t actually happen - but this hypothetical point is often repeated and signal-boosted above the bad things that actually do happen to trans kids, and people who simply don’t want us to exist fully believe it’s real, discuss it as our agenda, and even threaten institutions and doctors who may or may not actually provide gender affirming care.

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

It really depends on the sport imo. Trans women may retain some more muscle and some parts of the skeleton are largely unaffected, but muscle elasticity, hip rotation, flexibility, and endurance all end up being more dependent on hormones than birth sex in the long term. How much these things matter varies a lot from sport to sport, and the current system is not sufficient to balance these traits even among people of the same sex. Multiple leagues based on broad body types sounds reasonable, but I have no idea how complicated the rules would have to be to make it completely fair, given we already accept a great deal of unfairness currently.

Whatever their flaws, as an ex-ruralite I have to disagree that the problem is just stupid rural people being stupid. It’s an oversimplification of the problem. Rural communities tend to be more tight-knit, more politically homogenous, and the risks of going against the grain can include ostracization and violence. In places where the church has influence, well-funded youth groups bring kids into a certain view of the world before they even have a chance to see it themselves, and enforce adherence to it through the same ostracization tactics. It’s a culture that breeds resistance to change and resentment of the unfamiliar. People caught by this often aren’t necessarily stupid, and in fact many, many smart people are victimized by it and then later reinforce it. They’ve internalized a bunch of ideological poison from a young age, and can’t step out of line or support others who step out of line, out of fear of losing their community.

God. I’m so sorry. Every story I’ve heard about the VA is absolutely fucked.

I’ve never dealt with the VA and my knowledge of it is limited, but someone I care a lot about was in the Navy. She’s been suffering constant flashbacks and slowly losing touch with reality over the past couple weeks, she can’t really be on her own, we’ve been trying to get her any form of inpatient care or even just meds. She was sent home from the clinic several times when we brought her because technically my partner is around to take care of her. She wasn’t lucid enough during appointments to talk to a doctor, so they kinda just shrugged their shoulders, scheduled another appointment in 4 weeks, and let her go. We knew we were in way over our heads taking care of her, but we weren’t given any other option and she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Fast forward a week, she’s in a hypochondriac panic, had to be restrained in order to keep her from consuming poison, she breaks free and attacks my partner and a few cops, now she’s in jail when she should have been in a hospital weeks ago. I am still wrapping my head around how badly the system failed her, and I can only imagine how many stories like yours and hers there are.

RedLetterMedia on YouTube. They’re great! I recommend starting with one of their Wheel of the Worst episodes, those are always fun

You start out in 2005 by saying “t----- t----- t-----.” By 2023, you can’t say t----. That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, parents’ rights, bathrooms, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about nicknames, and all these things you’re talking about are totally superficial things and a byproduct of them is, queer folks get hurt more than cishets… “We want to know about kids’ nicknames” is much more abstract than even the parents’ rights thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “t------ t------ t-------.”

It’s pretty damn great where I am, where I have access to medical and mental care. Just sucks that some think they know what to do with us better than we do.