I love how Zohran Mamdani is wearing a suit everywhere. And if he has anything else he puts it ON TOP of the suit. A basketball jersey. A high-vis vest. All worn over the suit. He’s like the mayor character in a cartoon who’s always dressed as The Mayor. If I didn’t know who he was and he biked past me in NYC I’d be like holy shit was that the mayor
Special shoutout to all the queer, intersex, and trans het folks. Sorry for all the “it’s illegal to be straight this month” jokes you’ll have to endure. Y’all are still very much part of the community.
"grace. grace! grace give attention. rocky perform human ritual of escape closet now. statement."
"come again?"
"i learn more from thinking machine. human gender preference. attraction to same gender, means word 'gay.' all eridian same gender." rocky stands straight up. "rocky come out to grace now. all rocky plural gay, statement."
"...wow, that's... rock, i'm not sure it makes much sense to apply human ideas of sexual orientation to a monogendered species."
“never kill yourself” is such a funny phrase to me that i think it’s accidently started working. its like an affrimation. say ‘never kill yourself’ enough times as a joke and maybe you won’t try to kill yourself over minor inconviences anymore
A doll youtuber I watch has made a video about the history of Polly Pocket, and she's describing the plots of the dvd specials, one of which features an elderly woman named Ms. Throckmorton, and my reaction was
It's kind of a shame that SAO went the way it did and that the game in it was not well-designed to begin with because, morality aside, I completely understand why a mad game developer might trap people in a lethal sandbox MMO just to see what they do and what kinds of societies and patterns emerge.
It sounds like it could be an extremely interesting thing to observe.
If you were to design a game to trap ten thousand people into, what would it be like?
Here is my take.
Features inspired by Old School Runescape:
1- I want a robust gathering and crafting system for the craft specialization. While I want it to be theoretically possible for a single player to be skilled at multiple things, I think reaching the highest levels in even a single one of these skills should be difficult and time-consuming enough that it's impractical to do so. This should let the players make not only food, tools, potions, and combat equipment but also stuff like books, housing, and etc.
2- I want a variety of strongly-themed overworld areas that have a good range of non-combat skilling options, encompassing many levels of difficulty in their general content, as opposed to the theme park MMO approach of "this zone is level 11-15, and then it becomes obsolete and you move to the level 16-20 zone."
3- I want Lethal PvP to be limited to a barren and particularly dangerous part of the world.
Features inspired by Din's Legacy and Mount & Blade:
1- I want the world to be active and interact with the players as much as the players interact with it. For example, if there is a necromancer boss in a dungeon then I want that to be an NPC faction that can grow in size and conquer new territory in adjacent areas and potentially threaten settlements the players rely on if left unchecked. It wouldn't even need human-level AI or anything to work. You could also use something similar to what is widely known as the nemesis system here.
2- In addition to personally protecting the settlements and clearing potential sources of danger, players should be able to train and equip NPCs and even recruit small numbers of them with sufficient wealth and fame.
3- Rarely, these NPC factions could be large enough for actual wars with hundreds or thousands of participants.
Features inspired by Ultima:
1- I want a relatively complex magic system based on learning various incantations that can be combined in logical ways to produce effects. These incantations would not be part of the UI but would need to be known in-game. Magical tomes available for sale at certain locations could contain most of them, but new combinations should be discoverable. New incantations and magical knowledge could even be dungeon rewards. Basically I want players to figure the most complicated stuff out themselves and then decide whether to keep that knowledge to themselves or share it.
Features inspired by nothing specific:
1- I want a small number of unique legendary items (mostly weapons) with special powers that can't really be easily replicated by spells or skills. These items cannot be created or destroyed, but using them could have some kind of cost to the user.
2- I do still want a central megadungeon that must be completed to "win" the game. It should not be the only dungeon in the world, only the largest by far. The floors of this dungeon should not be "cleared" permanently but should constantly replenish themselves at a fixed rate (bosses being the exception). Deep expeditions should remain taxing and dangerous even at high levels without proper preparation, but with the right skills I also want it to be possible to live within the dungeon for extended periods.
3- I want a high degree of aesthetic customization, including the option to access complete and instant transformations through player-made potions or certain NPCs. Clothing items must still be acquired separately.
Going to recommend Fairy Dance of Death as "what if Sword Art Online but the author was good at game design."
The magic system is particularly neat - it's a craft-your-own-spells system where you combine words to make spells, but it has a precise grammar for the language of magic, meaning you need to have actual linguistics knowledge to craft complicated spells. Average players can pick up some simple things by ear, like "fire spells start with hi" or "-jan indicates a projectile spell", but if you want to combine effects and elements it gets into full Latin-esque "the concatenative form changes the verb ending from -u to -e" madness. Also, the magic words are chosen so that more complicated spells are harder to pronounce for a native Japanese speaker.
"Kill your local sex offender!" Oh, you mean the guy who went streaking at his local college football game on a dare one time? That's a sex crime.
"No, I mean-"
Oh, maybe the woman who had to pee in a public park that only had pay toilets, so she tried to hide behind the bushes but got caught? Public urination is a sex crime.
"What? No, I mean-"
Oh, maybe you mean the homeless guy who had to strip down to get his clothes in the laundromat to clean them for the first time in weeks? He tried being subtle, but someone called the cops on him, and now he's on the sex offender registry for public nudity.
"Rapists and pedophiles! Kill rapists and pedophiles!"
Oh, like the trans woman who got called a pedophile groomer for helping a trans kid escape her abusive parents?
Or maybe the black man who got labeled a rapist because he came on to another man's wife, and he decided to get back at him by charging him with rape?
How about the 17 year olds who were fooling around, fully consensually, in one of their bedrooms? That's still technically underage sex and thus rape of a minor.
Oh, or maybe you're talking about the doctor who performed genital reconstructive surgery in a state that just voted to get that classified as rape?
People will do everything they can to get you convinced rape and pedophilia are the worst crimes possible, then accuse whoever they like the least of being either a rapist, a pedophile, or both, counting on you turning on them just for being accused of the crime.
"Oh, so you're saying you don't want to kill a serial rapist?"
That's exactly what I'm goddamn saying.
Once we decide a group is okay to kill, the government will do everything they can to convince you that their political enemies are either part of that group, or just as bad as that group, to get you to kill their enemies for them.
The only way out is to accept every life as worth saving.
a misogynistic society is so threatened by the concept of trans women - women that "had the opportunity" to be privileged men and chose not to - that they start making up privileges women have in order to explain why trans women exist. going into womens restrooms isnt a privilege, playing womens sports isnt a privilege, lesbianism isnt a privilege, yet they present them as such to try and explain why trans women are women for nefarious reasons. a misogynistic society will never understand that trans women have no ulterior motive for being women
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