the only solution to the "problem" of trans women in sports is to desegregate sports along gender lines entirely. weight class is literally right there. "but men are stronger" hey what if women have other advantages besides brute strength? what if the athletic capacity of human beings exceeds the limitations of our socially-constructed gender roles?
or how about this: what if our obsession with "biological fairness" in sports is inherently eugenic and bad for society? instead of asking how unfair it would be to let women play women's sports, why don't we ask what our commitment to this arbitrary social dichotomy is losing us? and what might we gain from shedding such an outdated priority from our athletic institutions?
i just don't think any arguments in favor of maintaining gendered segregation can be accepted as valid when they are indistinguishable from the arguments in favor of racial segregation. if the only evidence in your favor is "biology," all i can ask is why should that matter? what does it mean that we've decided it matters? why is it such a visceral threat to the powers that be to even suggest softening these boundaries? and why don't we question the impulse to say "that's ridiculous"?
I recently read an article about Kickstarter projects for MMORPGs in the past 13 years and whether they were successfully released or not. It is a German article, but I am not going to write about all these MMORPGs now anyway.
The author concludes that out of 24 games, only 3 were actually released. Three more are in Early Access. 12 games are offline with apparently 7.5 million Euros raised and…
What happens if you mix the gameplay of Stardew Valley, Animal Crossing and the aesthetic of Breath of the Wild? This is The result.
I´ve been looking foward to this game for months, specially since it takes cues from several farming sims that have been showing up lately.
Disclaimer: “As of this writting the game is currently in open beta, thus it might comes with some incomplete features or…
Two paintings inspired by “A Short Hike” – one from last year, one from more recently. I really love this game and recommend it wholeheartedly! Maybe at some point I’ll draw Claire doing something other than sitting and taking in the sights.
"Scenes from ‘A Short Hike’" was originally published on Proairesis
blaugust: thoughts on being an online creator in 2025
it's bad. end of post.
nah just kidding, the situation is Nuanced. and it really depends on what specifically you're creating, if/how you're charging for it, and the political tendencies of the crowd you're creating for. if you're the conservative failchild of a lifer at northrop grumman complaining about woke disney on your lifestyle podcast, business has never been better. sawdust dick pills and protein powder meal replacements are today what gamer loot boxes and square space were 15 years ago, just throwing money at whatever abandoned refrigerator slime mold short-circuited an iphone into saying slurs and got 100k subscribers over it this week. truly, the united states has finally reached its final form as infinite griftopia, a lawless land of endless opportunity for those looking to lie, swindle, and deceive. it's been bad for a long time don't get me wrong, but trump 2 has certainly ushered in the golden age of chump4chump.
now, if you're a writer, game designer, programmer, artist, musician, filmmaker, poet, service worker, poc, queer, or otherwise conduct yourself in a manner which does not evince a depthless hunger for wealth and fame at all hours of the day, "right now" is pretty tough. a lot of if not most job listings are fakes, companies across wide arrays of disciplines are performing mass layoffs under the delusion that chatbots will be able to replace all labor that isn't "collect a fat paycheck," and the very infrastructure most of us rely upon to make a living as independent creators is seemingly at war with our needs and resents us for not being pro-corporate philosophical zombies. you want to sell porn? ummm, sorry, our payment processor doesn't approve of that kind of thing. you want to make leftist media commentary? idk man that's awfully controversial, we're gonna have to pull that one from search results. every platform we rely on, whether it's discord, tumblr, bluesky, spotify, youtube, tiktok, webtoon, etsy, patreon or substack has one goal and one goal only: sell out as soon as possible. most of them already have, multiple times. many have explicitly sided with the authoritarian fascists and eugenicist wingnuts in the white house and have basically devoted all their R&D resources to the problem of "people who say and do things we don't agree with existing."
and that's not even touching on the unbelievable toxicity of the internet as a social space! every single trans person i know has experienced some form of callout & harassment campaign that significantly impacted both their economic situation and their mental health. virtually every queer/furry artist i've talked to in the last ten years lives in fear of nuclear retaliation for, seemingly, anything they do in public which might be construed by someone as Problematic. there is no sense of scale or reciprocity, no theory of harm, no anticarceral politics, not even a half-hearted gesture towards "innocent until proven guilty"-- if you are a Target, it's all or nothing, and if you've ever been a Target, you know damn well that shit's glued to you like your own shadow. so people who would otherwise be making transgressive, boundary pushing work are censoring themselves for their own safety; or otherwise, they're doubling-down on the transgressions to build a callous armor of cynical disaffection. i've been both, and neither has really solved any problems.
there exists a feeling of paralysis among a lot of online creators, particularly of the leftist variety. between biden and trump, we're living through an astonishingly vast dismantling of public services writ large (biden oversaw the disenrollment of 25 million americans from medicaid, lest we forget). the status quo of digital life, which has largely remained unchanged for the last 20 years, feels increasingly under threat as political speech is censored and politicians push for our online presences to be tied to legal documentation. it just feels so fragile, so tenuously balanced. and meanwhile the real-life problems around us are so all-encompassing and our ability to affect them so deliberately minimized that most of us are just frozen to the spot, stuck between two equally unavoidable hells that would've been so, so, so easy to prevent if our country wasn't run by a bipartisan coalition of landowning stock-trader war hawks who flip a coin every four years to see which conservative party can do a better job of lying their way into power.
it's incredibly sad to me that what once felt like a peculiarly millennial condition has now lasted well into the young adulthood of gen z as well: the notion that we are Naive, Irresponsible, and Not Ready For Prime Time. my generation has been ceaselessly locked out from any position of power or influence, and the very same bog mummies that were too old to be running things in 2006 are STILL too old to be running things now! and whenever a young person does break through the neoliberal fog wall, ohhhhh you better believe they'll circle the wagons to blast them with delegitimization rays 24/7. they're doing this for zohran mamdani now, they did this for kshama sawant in seattle, they did this for bernie (not a young person but he was primarily speaking to young people) and aoc and rashida tlaib and and and etc etc etc, wheeling out red scare rhetoric so old it dates back to the mesozoic.
this attitude of foregone exclusion permeates our lives and poisons our imaginations. we lack control at our jobs and in the decisions of our politicians, so we desperately exercise what little control we have left in the arena of capitalist consumption, the free marketplace of ideas. it turns us all into terrified little suburbanites suspicious of every stranger who might be out to Sell You Something, convinced that sincerity is a trap that blinds you to the dangers that lie in wait around every corner. and the cult of individuality only makes us that much more precious of the sanctity of our mental equilibrium, treating any abrasive contact with an outside stimulus as inherently hostile and deserving of immediate retaliation. it's bad!
but at the same time, it's not all bad. despite everything i just said, and speaking now as someone who's lived daily on the internet since 2003, we are presently living in a golden age of radical independent art. there are more games, more furry artists, more novels and short stories, more comics, and more porn of all the above than ever before. i can't tell you how often i've ogled at the surplus creativity online and thought "GOD i wish it was like this when i was younger."
and not for nothing, this stuff is more popular than ever too. the transparent injustice of griftopia is that it's unbelievably expensive to maintain. capitalists blow untold millions every day to keep up their stranglehold on culture, maintaining systems that incentivize low-effort content, personally paying all the rightwing commentators, buying up the newspapers and tv stations and platforms to spam us their message at all times, t-shirt cannon firing wads of cash into the pockets of eager politicians to rig the game in their favor, and it only kind of works. everyone hates the way things are right now. nobody is happy. and the opportunity to improve the situation here just gets juicier and juicier every passing day. despite the propaganda, zohran mamdani is impossibly popular. people want the things he stands for.
and through all of this, over the years one thing has remained true: folks want to pay artists. not everyone, and not all the time, but enough. looking at the creator economy in 2025, i feel like i'm playing a game of tetris and the board is stacked almost to the very top-- but there's exactly enough gaps in the right places that with the right shapes in the right order, oh man, you'd be double-fisting tetrises until the cows came home. with a bit of regulation and just a handful of democratic-socialist economic policies, you flip the entire situation on its head practically overnight. as always, i don't mean to suggest that it'd solve all or even most of the biggest problems, not by a long shot. but the precarity with which most people are living their lives right now is blatantly unnecessary and artificially induced. regulate payment processors, mandate democratic worker involvement in the operation of businesses, treat essential net infrastructure as a public utility, crack down on scammers... free healthcare, public transit, affordable housing, universal basic income (i have reservations about UBI as a standalone solution but in concert with supportive regulatory actions i'm all for it)... i just don't believe that these things are impossible. i refuse to behave as though descent and collapse is the only path forward.
in truth, i've never been more hopeful in the future of being an independent creator. not because i expect things to get better in the immediate future, god no, they will almost certainly get worse! i'm hopeful because we are here, now, and we are alive, and we see what's happening. every day more people are radicalized against the status quo. the center will not hold. i don't expect a magnificent collapse or a glorious revolution, but i doubt those are the only two options. whatever the future holds, i know this: it will be different. generational agency is within our grasp. a better world is possible. we are going to win.
what the hell, let's talk about the worm. here's the first scene involving said worm, for those who haven't read godfeels:
basically, at this point in the story, "J" is the residual pre-transition selfhood of June Egbert whose only remaining characteristic is suicidal ideation personified. this chapter, "the shadows left behind," takes place in ideaspace, specifically in June's mind, giving us a glimpse in the bizarre happenstances of her as-yet unacknowledged headmates. the arc of this chapter is all about "J" slowly realizing that they want to live, ultimately fighting against apocalyptic forces to achieve self-instantiation. i joke that they are the secret shonen anime protagonist of godfeels. anyway.
i've gotten a lot of questions about the worm over the years. it shows up one or two more times in the chapter to provide similarly off-putting philosophical dialogue, and then is never mentioned again. people wonder if the worm is a headmate, or a scion of antagonist Epigone, or some other weird thing.
the truth is, i wrote the little bastard to be ambiguous. certainly there's worm imagery elsewhere enough to compel some Connections. but everyone gets so fixated on the worm, they miss the general fabric of ideas that it exists as part of. so let's start from "you're bored and talking to yourself through me" and work our way out from there.
there's a running gag with J about "putting words in people's mouths." it happens a couple times this chapter. here's the first:
to my mind, this is partly a result of the blending between two headmates sharing a brain, and partly an extension of the powers of being A Narrator. Vriska, notably, is not able to this back at J. seemingly no one is, at least not without a lot of help. in saturday 2, when Epigone is making everyone sing the birthday song, J is the only one who shows any resistance. this notion shows up throughout the circus egotistica as well. i mean, really, this facet of J's character is kind of the entire reason that anybody survives the events of chapter 8.
let's remember that waaaaaay back in godfeels 1, when June kind of has a suicide attempt, she does so under the assumption that she won't just die but be retconned from reality altogether, so that no one will remember that she ever existed at all. J is June's suicidal ideation, you recall. so what happens when a person who wants to erase themself from reality decides they want to live? the full answer to that question is a story we're still in the process of telling, but i think it's safe to say that the inverse of erasing yourself from everyone's mind is imposing yourself on everyone's mind. this idea is drawing from a single line in the Epilogues that i can't be bothered to track down right now, where it's implied that John's retcon powers extend far beyond what we understand and might include manipulating reality itself (something that's demonstrated through him forming silly shapes in the clouds at the end of Candy, if i remember correctly).
but let's pare the scope back a little here. there's also the scene in chapter 8 where J is trying to figure out how to un-spaghettify Dave and Dirk (it's a long story), who have been rendered into little more than taut red and orange strings that extend infinitely into the abyss of June's mind. out of ideas, J starts talking through the problem by putting words in their mouths:
but they're not really just talking to themself, are they? even though J knows they're not real, it's like these snap personifications sort of get away from them by tapping into some essential essence of the person they're imitating. like, that doesn't not feel like Dave and Dirk talking, you know?
which gets us at last back around to the worm. what is the worm? well, a worm is a creature that burrows into the earth, exchanging nutrients with the soil. we know that symbols carry real weight in ideaspace, it being a realm of pure metaphor and all. i think it's entirely possible that by imagining a worm, and then putting words in that worm's mouth, J somehow conjures a verbal window into the metaphorical soil of their own mind. into the most primordial of truths about June's metaphysical relationship to retcon. about life and death, hope and despair, yadda yadda yadda. it never stops being J just talking to themself, but that doesn't mean that something else isn't speaking through them as well. "the dream in the dark place" is a pretty loaded phrase in godfeels, after all.
does that answer your question? do you feel like you know what the fuck was up with that worm now? i hope you're just more confused. either way, you're welcome.
sorry gang, the blogging has been inconsistent because someone got mad that he wasn't allowed to infinitely distribute a work he doesn't own without any strings attached after saying no to an offer that would allow him to infinitely distribute the work he doesn't own with some strings attached, and decided to make it everyone's problem by turning it into a censorship issue. it's a total non-story that has nonetheless blown up because nobody likes anything more than immediately taking the loudest redditor in the room at face value. fifty queer people will line up to say "i've personally had problems with this guy stalking me & misrepresenting my words for years" but ohhhh that just means they're biased and being paid off or something. it's like qanon in this fandom sometimes, i swear.
whatever. the guy who doesn't own the thing was given an opportunity to legally continue distributing the thing and he said no. that's it. that is the entire situation. the thing is still up and available, it was never at threat of being taken down, the sum total of the issue here is that one guy's ego was too big to accept a license that is above and beyond the standard practice of virtually every other successful media property out there. if you still believe otherwise, i don't know what to tell you. nothing this company or anyone in its orbit does will ever be good enough for you. for the sake of everyone in this community who is actually trying to make stuff and enjoy the thing for what it is, please move on. none of this matters. it really is not important.
if you don't know what this post is about, you're better off not knowing. no, i will not be taking questions.
