she/they/it // disabled personal trainer, luddite game dev, walking oxymoron
glad it worked out for y’all! It seems rare for a monogamous relationship to be successfully opened up, rather than it being the expectation from the outset. I can imagine it being a big challenge and test of your compatibility + ability to communicate. Was that your experience?
for me I just… couldn’t stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn’t believe these were people that “should” be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (???) I was fully checked out.
The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I’ve had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn’t need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I’m glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.
I picked up a $10 cane at random last year and it helped me walk enough to realize there was a chronic issue at play. Definitely worth trying if it seems like something that might help, worst case you have a walking stick.
definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I’d give it a problem I was having, it’d spit out some symbol that seems related, I’d search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I’d get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like “oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!” but most of the time it’d give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn’t be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I’m sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.
more complex yes, but more hands in the family unit and structure between the other two can be a really nice perk too. when conflict happens, you have someone else you love who knows your partner and relationship who can bridge the gap and give perspective.
I have two sets of beliefs here. There’s what I rationally believe based on what I know, and there’s the story I’ll be telling myself for comfort if I know the end is soon (and I think benefits me in day to day life too)
The experience of death and if anything comes after is inherently kind of unknowable and if there was a truth to know I don’t think human minds could comprehend it. Even if the answer is nothing, I can’t comprehend experiencing nothing. When consciousness lapses we only have what we experience before and after to contrast it to. So I have to live life with the understanding that I will die and I can’t know what that will be like until it happens.
That being said, we really don’t know anything about how consciousness is connected to our physical forms, and we don’t know that experience ends after death, either. Especially when you consider time may not be linear in the way we perceive it. The closest thing I have to a belief would be some form of reincarnation, where consciousness would resume in another life in another time. Maybe every life is the same consciousness reborn an uncountable number of times. I can’t say I believe this per se, more that it’s just as possible as any other theory, and it’d be a comfortable delusion to pass on with. it helps me feel closer to others too.
I guess my main point is go play Outer Wilds (and its DLC) if you haven’t gotten to it yet. It helped me grapple with a lot of this and even if I’m still scared of the end, I no longer find it overwhelmingly distressing.
Hi, this sentiment from non-americans pisses me off and it’s okay, but I feel it’s important to explain why so I’m copying another comment I made today.
Goodness knows some of us are trying our best. I mean keep in mind our country is a democracy in name but systemically props up white supremacists in excess of the real popular opinion. And a media disinformation machine keeps the working class divided against itself, with open support from the wealthiest and owners of the most popular social media platforms. Social media platforms that, let’s be honest, are super recent inventions we are not yet capable of engaging with safely. It makes it an uphill battle to try to reach out to people whose necks aren’t on the line. And the responsibility to do so falls upon the disenfranchised themselves, who are increasingly saddled with economic and health burdens that might just kill us someday.
I get the potshots at Americans, but frankly I don’t plan on taking the blame if this goes tits up - many of us did a hell of a lot more than vote to resist fascism. Nothing happened here that isn’t happening elsewhere. And I’ll fight the notion that citizens at large are the problem. It’s a cynical outlook that serves to individualize the responsibility for a systematic disaster. Our country was built to make this possible after all. And I sure as hell know I don’t plan on giving up. Kind of morbidly curious about how much of an incompetent clusterfuck Project 2025’s implementation will be.
Victory or no, fascists are paper tigers and I plan on sticking around to remind them of that fact however I can.
Excellent answer and I’ll also jump off this to say this applies to marginalized groups just as much as anyone else, in a way I see a lot of people forget all about. Some percentage of marginalized people, through being in the right place and/or putting themselves there, do experience upward mobility through capitalism and therefore identify with it.
People forget that queer conservatives exist, but think about a gay couple with a lot of wealth, living a fairly standard nuclear family existence with an adopted kid or two, integrated into a society that probably still doesn’t fully trust them but sees enough signifiers of “normality” that they’re willing to let it slide. Which side of the political divide benefits them the most to align with? And what ideological principles will they come to internalize in the long term? Might they come to see themselves as somehow different or better than others in their marginalized community?
I’m getting tired of the fluff pieces expressing shock at the fact that some % of black voters are conservative, clutching their pearls at the thought of that number increasing, and speculating about black churches and “social conservatism.” While also completely disregarding the fact that black voters have always leaned left yet are also affected by some of the same political shifts that every other demographic is. Our first loyalty is generally to our class.
Best description of this I’ve read, thank you. It’s not a question about men directly, it’s a question about how women have to navigate a world with a small percentage of men that will hurt them given the opportunity.
My answer too.
And also for the benefit of anyone who’s just played the base game: the DLC is basically a sequel, and I found it even more impactful than the base game!
That’s been my experience with GPT - every answer Is a hallucination to some extent, so nearly every answer I receive is inaccurate in some ways. However, the same applies if I was asking a human colleague unfamiliar with a particular system to help me debug something - their answers will be quite inaccurate too, but I’m not expecting them to be accurate, just to have helpful suggestions of things to try.
I still prefer the human colleague in most situations, but if that’s not possible or convenient GPT sometimes at least gets me on the right path.
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
To be fair, Bluesky does have “blocklists” maintained by other users that you can opt into, and quite a few popular ones exist with active maintainers who take and act on reports pretty quickly. So you still can delegate moderation responsibilities. One advantage to this is that you can opt into a few blocklists based on what you personally want to block - separate lists exist for hateful bigots, crypto pushers, and so on. I gave it a shot out of curiosity and haven’t run into any issues yet, but that’s just me.
I still prefer Mastodon for broader AP integration, and I think blocklists aren’t discoverable enough outside of word of mouth, but I am curious to see how that turns out for Bluesky. Certainly an improvement over Xitter imo.
Well ultimately, someone’s age is (generally) a pretty easily verifiable fact with little room for argument. Whether or not someone’s actions constitute an insurrection is not something you can read off a birth certificate - it relies on a subjective standard of what constitutes an insurrection. And given how many different forms that could take, I feel the 14th has to be as vague as a it is about what constitutes an insurrection. Jan 6 very obviously qualifies imo, but making a bulletproof legal argument to that effect is a whole other matter, especially considering how much scrutiny this decision will be under. Remember how wrapped in dog whistles this whole thing was - getting up on stage and vaguely suggesting to an angry mob to take their country back then going home and quietly muttering “nooo don’t break the law or hurt anyone pls go home nooooo” gives a very annoying level of rhetorical wiggle room to those responsible. It’s an intentional strategy to make this exact kind of argument as difficult as possible.
That on its own is no reason to not pursue invoking the 14th, because imo this is the exact situation in which it should be used, and it specifically does not require the same level of proof as in a criminal trial. But it is a significant complication we will be dealing with at all stages of this process and it remains to be seen how many are willing to stake their political careers on it.
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.
It’s working out great! I’ve been openly polyamorous for a few years now. Romantically engaging with multiple people has allowed for the longest-running, most secure relationships I’ve ever had, with basically no downsides except the fuCKING work. It complicates the logistics (my shared calendar is a nightmare) as well as the emotions. (recognizing when I am jealous is a nightmare)
But the payoff is so worth it. We make the best use of the time we have together, because we have to. We communicate effectively, because we have to. Through many intersecting relationships with appropriate boundaries we’ve weaved a cohesive family unit, one that achieves a lot of mutual aid needs around housing, food, and mental health support among local queers. I’ve grown a lot as a person through having to communicate my insecurities, sort out my trauma, and think more clearly about the people in my life.
I think some people on the internet have heard of insane polycule drama at some point and declared it categorically unapproachable. But idk, we don’t write off monogamous relationships because a cousin’s friend’s marriage exploded. Polyamorous relationships run the same spectrum of great to dogshit, but with less rules that monogamous relationships demand, we have so much more flexibility to solve problems when they come up.