Christian

Carrion is so good.

What does it even mean for one person to be 50% more intelligent than another person?

how much are you paid?

I don’t remember exactly, but I remember feeling insulted by the stipend because I spent more on parking in downtown Detroit and had no means of transportation into the city other than driving myself. I had such a hard time finding cheap parking spots within reasonable walking distance of the court.

Remember kids you can be who you are without needing external validation. Especially not external validation gotten by being against your “own group “

I don’t think it’s quite that straightforward, because they’re doing this because they’re also perceiving gamers as their own group and feeling like being a part of two groups at odds with one another demands that a choice be made. Their version of not being against their own group begins with asking themselves “which group do I identify more with”, rather than asking whether the two have to be at odds with each other in the first place. The lesson is that your immutable characteristics are not character failures, and if you’re starting to feel like they are it’s really important to introspect on where that’s coming from.

I know people generally look at this kind of gatekeeping from the outside and write it off as a repressed self-hatred, but I’m kind of inclined to think of it the opposite way. If your immutable characteristics are a handicap to being a part of something important to you, then actually being accepted into that group is a triumph that most people with the same handicap can’t achieve. If gamers are cool and I don’t question the premise that girls aren’t fit to be gamers, then if I can kind of sort of be accepted in this space that’s still better than most other girls. The boys fit in better here of course, but it’s not impressive it’s just normal. This other girl is just larping because she wants to be like me.

We should strive to identify cultures of looking down on others. We should strive not to participate in that. Don’t just find comfort in being who you are, but allow others to find the same comfort with more ease than you had.

Anime avatars have been a thing for much longer than that but these are clearly not anime girls, it’s the thing where people customize the reddit logo to look like themselves. I might be wrong but I’m under the impression that the culture with these isn’t one where toxic masculinity will mesh with presenting as female.

Obviously this is not a representative sample, but it’s hard not to notice that the three redditors in these screenshots that are gatekeeping gaming all have female-presenting avatars. It makes me think of an article I read two or three years ago written by a black man saying he gave his son advice that in an emergency white cops were a significantly safer bet because institutionalized racism gives them a lot more leeway to show empathy towards minorities without being ostracized for it. A woman actually trying to fit into a misogynistic culture is going to feel more pressure to consistently prove her belonging, and can end up being more ruthless in enforcing the misogyny and more effective because her gender allows a cover of legitimacy.

It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into ‘casual’ genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as ‘real gamers’.

This is a really good point and it makes me realize that “casual” as a genre translates pretty well to “games stereotyped towards women”. I’d go as far as to say most modern video games can be played casually, but if we actually put the bar at games that aren’t intended to be played otherwise we’re looking at freecell.

War Thunder is a game that I only know exists because of how many times it’s made the news from actual military vehicle schematics being leaked by forum users hellbent on winning arguments.

edit: After writing this comment I went to double-check I was remembering the right game by searching lemmy for “war thunder” and immediately found this exchange, which I find funny:

I beat the demo before getting the actual game, the demo was just levels 1, 2, and 10. When you beat the demo it gives you a code to skip to level 11 in the full version. I ended up beating the game after using the code, but I could never beat level 3, so I never even got to play levels 4 through 9.

A friend once texted me that she really liked my writing and said “It sounds like you”, with “sounds” italicized. It was like she was just focusing on my writing and hadn’t even thought through that using “like you” as unambiguously complimentary is a bigger compliment towards me than towards my writing.

I was really passionate about math for years, and I spent most of my free time on it. When I got to grad school and I had to do it to survive my passion dried up. I think it became harder to have fun when I knew I wouldn’t be free to put a project down if I wanted to, and when math stopped being fun I stopped being good at it.

I passed all my coursework and exams but I burned out before finishing my dissertation and dropped out seven years into my phd program. It’s six years later and I still barely touch it. I passed qualifying exams in algebraic topology and today if you asked me to compute a homology group I’d be clueless.

I’m not going to discount that monetizing your passions works for some people, but the experience of finding out you’re not one of those people is soul-crushing.

Monster Sanctuary is your best bet for hitting those points. The game is pretty lackluster in a few ways (graphics, storytelling) but the gameplay is really well-designed and that’s been enough to get me to come back to it a few times.

Monster Sanctuary had much worse graphics and the story was not engaging at all but somehow I still enjoyed it a lot more than Cassette Beasts.

Removed by mod

Before I lost my sense of smell I was absurdly sensitive to ranch. If my ex opened a ranch dip in the apartment I would be dry-heaving very quickly. When I was a kid I would sometimes move seats eating lunch at school because other kids had ranch doritos. Not having to deal with that anymore was a rare positive to come out of my awful experience with covid.

I can enjoy coldcuts and cheeses, but they’ll make me sick if they’re not extremely fresh. In some cases they already smell and taste like they’ve gone rancid fresh off the slicer.

Pancreatitic sepsis fucked my tastebuds, my hospital stay was extended a full week because I couldn’t keep down foods other than sweets. They actually restarted me on the feeding tube because of that. When I went off the NPO and got to eat again for the first time I asked for a spicy sandwich from Chick-Fil-A, I’m pretty sure it was just an ordinary spicy sandwich but in that moment it tasted like the spiciest thing I had ever eaten in my entire life. I don’t like the taste of water anymore, which is miserable.

Ever since I had pancreatitic sepsis I hate the taste of water, it’s so frustrating. I mostly drink a few specific zero-sugar sodas now, I wish the prebiotic sodas weren’t so expensive because they would be the best solution.

I think it’s increasingly easier to feel empathy for a killer the more steps there are between them and the trigger. I personally find it much more jarring when someone can just fully turn off empathy when given context. A lot of the time what you’re talking about goes hand-in-hand with dehumanizing the impoverished, that’s the one I can’t fathom.

I didn’t realize there were alternate hardware options available. I have the custom firmware installed on mine, but I had two of them crap out of me in the past so it’s crossed my mind that if that happened again the resale market for them might force this one to be my last.

Some ds and 3ds games tried to shoehorn in touchscreen usage, which was annoying because there’s no shame in a good game not making use of the stylus. With that said, the ones that made good use of both screens were spectacular. Shoutout to Yo-Kai Watch 3.

Like 10-15 years ago I took a screenshot from my pokemon game. I named my ditto “children” and then put it in the daycare center, so that when I went to pick him up the daycare lady says “If you want your children back, it will be $5000”.

As someone who had never watched the movie “Taken”, it was kind of unsettling to login to reddit the next day to find like five messages in my inbox saying some form of “I don’t know who you are but I will find you and I will kill you”.

Probably doesn’t fit the intent but thankfully those are the only examples I have.

I genuinely do appreciate you saying this, because I felt pretty bad about myself and logged off for a while.