[equalseleventhirds]

like, listen, the best dynamic for tma/wtnv crossover is cecil being cheerfully oblivious and jon being at first all serious & sinister like he is abt statements and then gradually being more and more confused by this strange happy man. like. for example.

jon: statement of cecil palmer, regarding...

cecil: oh, idk, i guess i went to target last week?

jon, ominous: ...regarding a trip to target. statement recorded direct from subject.

cecil, with that 'never mind all that' tone: o...kay! so as always the target greeters saw me at the door and were all like 'our dark lord shall feast on those who enter here' and i was like 'great! do you guys have those infuser water bottles?' because carlos saw some on tv and was telling me--

jon: i'm sorry, the target greeters said what?

cecil: you know, their standard greeting! it's been standard since the 90s, when they changed it from 'beware the burden your soul will bear'!

jon, getting less ominous as he gets more confused: ...right. continue?

cecil: anyway, carlos was telling me all about how proper hydration can help deter throat spiders--

jon: throat what.

[narcissuscore-archived]

[nothorses]

I know this is gonna be shocking to some folks, but transmascs are the ones you should be listening to about transmasc experiences.

So many people fully just come up with shit and decide they’re Real Transmasc Experiences, and the invisibility of actual transmascs means that these things tend to go fully unchallenged.

TERFs say they love us, and people believe them, so “transmascs aren’t targeted by TERFs and don’t have to worry about them”. When we speak up to say that’s a lie, that we are targeted, that we as individuals have been harmed by TERFs or know someone else who was, we’re brushed off or silenced. 

Radfems say we experience male privilege & are treated as cis men by society, and people believe them, so “transmascs are exactly like cis men, trans men are oppressors”. When we speak up and say that’s not true, that we personally have experienced, at most, negligible, momentary “privilege” reliant upon being stealth and keeping a massive part of our identities a secret- that transphobia as a system prevents anyone from seeing us as Real Men on a systemic level, even if we want to be- we’re disregarded as “misogynists”.

Cis people say we can’t experience misogyny, because only women do, & it’s “respectful” to our identities to deny our lived experiences. And people believe them, so “transmascs shouldn’t take up space in women’s issues”. When we speak up and say that erases our experiences with oppression, that we still need to be included in conversations about misogyny, reproductive rights, and patriarchy as men and as transmascs, we’re scolded for “misgendering ourselves”.

This theory and these definitions were not created with transmascs in mind. Invisibility has always played a huge role in our community’s struggle, and by shutting us down when we try to broaden the discussion, make space for ourselves, and speak to our own experiences, you are only enabling further violence against us.

Listen to us when we speak to our lived experiences. Don’t let TERFs, radfems, cis people, or even other trans people define what a transmasculine experience is. Don’t even let one of us speak for all of us; put in some work here. Include more perspectives, contradicting voices, and think critically about what seems truthful rather than convenient.

[spikekat-deactivated20250713]

This touches a little on some things I’ve been struggling with recently. I’ve noticed, in my own experiences trying to study queer studies in academia, how transmasculine experiences are brushed off, such as in an introductory (and sociology-oriented, which is its own problem in my opinion) LGBTQ+ course where the professor offhand mentjoned that transmasculine folks “saturate” academia and then didn’t list a single transmasc scholar, and then several papers we read about “transgender studies” that actually meant transfemminine, with a single paragraph about not having enough data for transmasculine folks to be included in the study. In another (queer film) class, the professor offhand spoke about the “pushing out” of women in the three films about transmasculine protagonists we watched (Boys Dont Cry, Pojkarna, and Romeos, respectively), despite the films themselves giving women complex supporting roles, as if the existence of transmasculine focus was inherently taking away from focus on women (who, for the record, were the focus of almost every other film we watched).

Which I bring up only to highlight how, it seems to me, in my personal experiences, for even professors who are allies and who are vocally invested in uplifting trans voices, it is still acceptable and incredibly common to dismiss transmasculine perspectives or to not consider them worth listening to.

I wonder how much this is connected to misogyny, as viewing transmasculine perspectives as “not real”/“immature”/“play acting” etc, in the same way that TERFS view transmasc folks as “confused girls” in conjunction with TERF-poisoned leftist rhetoric that poses anyone even vaguely related to masculine experiences as inherently predatory.

This reply is specifically about my experiences in academia, but for the record, in ways that are a lot messier and difficult to talk about, these attitudes and dismissals have for sure been echoed and reproduced in my experiences interacting irl with cis, and even some trans queer folks.

[storybookprincess]

i see posts sometimes that say things like “wouldn’t it be cool if ao3 would recommend you fics similar to the one you just read?” or “wouldn’t it be cool if ao3 had a function similar to spotify wrapped that showed you your fic reading habits over the year?” etc. and while on one hand, yes, i can see how these functions might be neat & fun & helpful, i think the fact that ao3 *doesn’t* do any of these typical media website things is actually utterly spectacular

like, i enjoy looking at my spotify wrapped as much as the next person, but when you start to think about that, it is honestly pretty horrifying that spotify collects & stores all this data about its users & can produce it at a moment’s notice.  and netflix is not recommending you shows because it actually cares that you watch something you enjoy.  it’s recommending them because in the digital age, attention is money & every website is fighting for as much of yours as it can get.

the fact that a website hosting as much media as ao3 doesn’t try to analyze or predict or manipulate your content consumption in any way is truly an oasis in a landscape where user data is the most valuable commodity around.  ao3 gives all of the agency to its users & i don’t think we realize just how rare that is.  you go looking for the content you want.  you sort and filter based on your preferences.  you subscribe to the story or author updates you’d like to see.  so on and so forth.  nothing is recommended for you.  no algorithm is trying to maximize the time you spend on the website.  you engage with it completely on your own terms.  and given the way most media websites choose to operate, that is nothing short of a miracle.

[megpie71]

Could we just sit and contemplate the term “archive” here for a while?  Because I think this is where a lot of people are approaching AO3 from the wrong perspective. 

An archive is a storage space.  That is its primary purpose.  It exists to store material.  Storage.  Not retrieval (although retrieval is implied through storage).  Not audience.  Not social interaction.  Storage.

AO3 was created as an archive by a group of people who were aware (some of them exquisitely aware) words have meanings.  They could have called it anything - “fanfic hub”, “yet another fanfic site”, etc etc etc.  They chose to call it “An Archive Of Our Own”. 

Could we just sit with this for a while?

[zz9pzza]

From @naryrising​ tags

[anxwheeze-deactivated20230801]

promare makes my colors go brrr

[pauliedraws]

NEW The Adventure Zone animation. I’ve had this piece of audio sitting on my desktop for well over a year. I’ve gone through three computers and it’s hopped from desktop to desktop, so I finally gave in and animated it. I’m thinking about redoing some of my older TAZ pieces so let me know if that’s something you want to see. 

[goodzillo-deactivated20220127]

I wish gamers would realize that there’s a baseline level of like intuitive understanding on how to control video games in general that you build up through hours upon hours of gaming in general plus another level of it you build up with each genre. These are things like being able to figure out basic movement in a game and use it proficiently, or navigating a dozen different menus in slower paced games. The sort of things that I think a lot of people don’t realize they’re already adept in, because most “serious gamers” powered through this phase when they were young and at their most capable of learning (coincidentally ages you just don’t remember a ton of).

Snobby MMO players will be like “oh the high level raids aren’t even hard you just have to know the fight” not realizing that they have, oftentimes, literal years of experience with how to memorize an MMO boss and intuitively use that knowledge, how to go through and adapt a rotation during a fight, how to coordinate with the rest of your group, etc. And this goes for other games, too; the Soulsborne series has only gotten harder and harder as it’s gone on because it’s been forced to ramp up difficulty each game for a playerbase that is increasingly used to it. I’ll see people saying Dark Souls 1 is easy and Dark Souls 3/Bloodborne are the only hard games in the series and… Yeah, that is true if you’re Gud™, if you’re extremely used to the series Dark Souls 1 is a very straightforward game, but to the average non-fan, Dark Souls 1 is still very difficult and the bosses the later games threw in to challenge hardcore fans are inaccessibly hard.

And that’s where this becomes a real problem, accessibility. Real Gamers sneer at AAA games that aren’t difficult and have a lot of tutorials, but the only reason video games have become as ubiquitous as they have is that your average big budget game these days puts in effort like that to draw in people who don’t have years of skill built in before starting a game. When someone talks about how modern gamers don’t have the patience for classic cRPGs (or, really, any older game), I just think, well, yeah; you got into them when you were young, had vast amounts of free time, and at a point in time where the interface was contemporary and up to date. Anyone trying to get into them now has to get past dated UIs that they either no longer have or never had a proficiency with, past poorly explained mechanics and concepts, and past aged graphics, all usually with limited time and the opportunity cost of not doing something easier to get into and more immediately fun.

[shuttershocky-deactivated202512]

Sometimes I think about Red Dead Redemption 2’s development where the devs were begging people to not boycott the game to protest the news about their absurd working conditions because their bonuses were dependent on copies sold. I remember one of them made a statement around the lines of “We worked ourselves to the bone on this and we want to at least see people experience the fruits of that labor”, which makes me think about how we talk about blockbuster games developed under crunch.

I was given a copy of RDR2 to review it, and I couldn’t help but think about how I kept seeing so much that was technically impressive and yet just not necessary. Did some poor guy really work overtime for weeks just so Arthur’s horse had realistically shrinking testicles in cold water?

I honestly did not know how to properly articulate my thoughts on this at the time. I still don’t. Red Dead Redemption 2 was polished - I couldn’t deny that - but it didn’t have to be that polished. I could have connected every bit as strongly to Arthur if every horse in the game had no realistically shrinking horse balls, or even no balls at all. I would much rather have never had it and known the hardworking people who made the game enjoyed their lives more.

Still, I was impressed by the technical proficiency on display. Do I acknowledge that when I talk about RDR2?

I haven’t read any of the reviews for Cyberpunk yet (I want to form my own thoughts and I promised to play through it for a trans friend worried about whether or not she would have a good experience with the game) but I’m betting there’s going to be plenty of praise from people rating specific features as very good. Of course they’re very good; too many people have spent too much time on those features for it to not at least be good. The question is if it even needed to be that good. Could we just have not had this very good part in exchange for the developers living better lives?

The answer should be yes, but all people will really see is “this part was good” and sing its praises and demand more of it. Upper management watches these reactions and concludes that their methods are working splendidly. The company executives laugh all the way to the bank, tickling themselves with the dollars stuffing their pockets as more talented developers vow to never work in the industry again.

It sucks.

[shuttershocky-deactivated202512]

I don’t know if I properly expressed this in the original post but there is a specific pain I’m probably failing to capture here. There is a special hurt, an anguish, for when you work in games as a smalltimer and you see the fucking magic that the veterans at AAA studios are pulling off and knowing that it was accomplished through crunch.

These developers are accomplishing feats that can only be described as insane when you understand what they need to do to make that shit happen. The thing they made is incredible, and it must have no less than to have its praises be sung in every corner. That it was made under abuse and that your words of admiration that the devs so rightfully deserve to hear will only ensure their continued abuse is heartbreaking.

[elexuscal]

Adding onto this… I think we’re hitting a real wall. Not in what’s technically possible, but what’s technically feasible. 

Because I get it. I get it. We started in a place where video games looked like this:

and then this:

And the desire was: How can we make this more like real life? The landscape, the models, the dialogue, the ability to simply interact in the world. 

And you know what? We’ve made it pretty damn far. More than once I’ve seen a clip from a video game and literally not been able to tell at first that it wasn’t live footage. 

But

How viable is that really? To have giant, sprawling open-world games where every character, no matter how minor, is fully voice acted? Where you can see every pore on peoples’ skin and the subtle shift of the hairs on their heads?

Cyperpunk 77 was in production for seven years. It was delayed what- twice, three times? CDProjectRed forced its employees into grueling 100+ hour work weeks to get it all together. And by most accounts, it still came out a buggy mess with entire missing systems.

To me, that’s evidence that this style triple AAA hyper-realistic game is getting so out of control that this scale is simply not tenable. 

And do we even.. need all this? Really? Because I have had plenty of fun with smaller, less-realistic video game titles like Hyperlight Drifter, Slime Rancher, and Abzu. Near-perfect emulation of reality isn’t the be all and end all of gaming. Maybe it’s time the industry stopped chasing it so desperately. 

[bunniope]

[frightlyphantasmals]

campaign two: the campaign after the campaign after the campaign

[frightlyphantasmals]

i am constantly haunted by the fact that if someone were to see this now, it would make no sense because they actually do say “the campaign after the campaign after the campaign” now

[frightlyphantasmals]

okay but imagine how different the naddpod finale would be if caldwell didnt draw the knight card & they didn’t have balnor

[frightlyphantasmals]

i was ready to yell about me expecting galad to return and being right but after that ending y’all,,,, holy shit

[frightlyphantasmals]

campaign two: the campaign after the campaign after the campaign

[frightlyphantasmals]

i pay five dollars a month to hear emily, jake, and caldwell’s characters discuss the top five fuckable npc’s that murph has created. i regret nothing.

[frightlyphantasmals]

listening to the first ep of naddpod is like a rite of passage bc they spend a hefty amount of time talking about dragon genitals before starting the campaign and that will make or break you

[frightlyphantasmals]

“I’ve killed before and I’ll kill again.”

—Donkey Kong, in the fucking Donkey Kong One-Shot

[frightlyphantasmals]

spoilers for nadpodd ep 69: The Dark Lord of Ember Heaven

lydia: if you would choose glory, over your own family, then, i’m glad your son will never get to know you.

gang that has me all types of fucked up im not ready for this actually amazing storytelling???

[frightlyphantasmals]

murph: we talked about this on the short rest before, but, um, growing up catholic I, um, don’t have any of the, um, cool stuff that comes with religion like, um, hope.

[frightlyphantasmals]

deadeye: why do you think they use brown leaves as money? do you think that we might be a cash-poor place that’s been historically marginalized by other more advanced civilizations in bahumia?

beverly: i thought you just did it ‘cause it looked funny.