Hmm… usually I prefer push-in 😇

Gotta say I’m glad we can be and date any genders we like these days with much milder pushback (on average) than used to be the case. Really does help zoomers be a lot healthier imo, even if we’ve got other issues in the internet age.

young men have been told that white men are the worst thing to be.

Ok, but try not being a man and see if people think that’s any better…

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.

they had to change the motto because it got too cumbersome to set up the drum machines when they wanted to say AUDIOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO [synth riffage] VIIIDEO DISCOOOOOOOOOO

I will say, these days it’s more or less impossible to release a game that’ll run perfectly on every system and it’s a good thing we’re able to fix crashes and patch issues as they come up. This has naturally had its downsides as publishers squeeze devs for tighter releases, but outside of that it’s a very good thing for devs and players.

Np, thank you for asking!

That’s a good question! It’s definitely very rare that a birth name is entirely necessary to use in conversation, but an occasional situation comes up where I’m talking to an old friend about someone who’s since transitioned and I need to use a deadname to let them know who I’m talking about. Generally I say something like “so I ran into Denise, you knew her as Brett back in the day, etc etc etc” and just use Denise from there on. If the person I’m talking to isn’t caught too off guard by that, it’s a very smooth and natural way to handle that as a matter of circumstance and move on to using the preferred name quickly.

Generally, using their current preferred name/pronouns (or neutral pronouns) is best. She’s still the same person, so it’s true to say Caitlyn Jenner won the 1976 Olympic Decathlon. If any other facts about the event itself were directly relevant to the conversation, that’d be ok - e.g. it would be accurate and inoffensive imo to say she won the men’s division.

But name/pronouns change all the time otherwise so it’s more normal to use the current ones. If Ms. Jones gets married and is now Mrs. Smith, it wouldn’t be inaccurate to talk about Mrs. Smith’s car breaking down last summer.

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

I’ve attempted to do public-facing technical support for a game and dear Christ you’re spot on. I love people for wanting to engage with something I’ve spent a substantial part of my life putting together and trying to make it run okay, and am sympathetic to people feeling frustrated when technical issues prevent them from fully enjoying an early access game. Early on when the community was small I had a great time shitposting with the players, but once we hit release the environment turned toxic pretty much overnight as the community suddenly grew.

But like, none of them know how hard we crunched to get even a playable version of the game out, nevermind one that’s playable on the lowest of netbook specs. None of em know how complicated the system is that’s breaking preventing them from logging in, that that’s not actually my area of expertise and that I’m just feeding them information from the matchmaking team who are all freaking the fuck out because this is the first time we’ve tested this shit at scale. None of them know that we were getting squeezed by our publisher, who wanted us to do a progression wipe that we didn’t want ourselves, but like they control if the game gets shipped at all so… not really a choice there. And we can’t admit any of this because accusations of incompetence come out pretty early, tend to stick around, and leave devs very little room to make bad decisions (which happens a lot!)

And like, being trans now on top of that? Hell no, I’m never touching a public server again if I can help it. Slurs and mistrust were already flying before, I can’t throw myself in front of that bus again. I’m gonna miss it because I cared a lot about connecting with people playing the game and for a while found a lot of joy in responding to bugs and fixing individual system issues and integrating into the community. And there were some amazing people who were great to talk to that I really missed when I left. But the inherent abuse that comes with that gets so overwhelming and it drained my desire to even work on games at all for quite a while.

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.

It feels like a sequel honestly. Kind of incredible how many of the core mechanics from the base game they threw out in service of telling a new story differently.

Outer Wilds, to my estranged family. I think they could use a new religion and that game’s probably a better place to start.

It really depends on the sport imo. Trans women may retain some more muscle and some parts of the skeleton are largely unaffected, but muscle elasticity, hip rotation, flexibility, and endurance all end up being more dependent on hormones than birth sex in the long term. How much these things matter varies a lot from sport to sport, and the current system is not sufficient to balance these traits even among people of the same sex. Multiple leagues based on broad body types sounds reasonable, but I have no idea how complicated the rules would have to be to make it completely fair, given we already accept a great deal of unfairness currently.

There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn’t run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.

That being said, generally I do agree.

Well said. We’d be so much better off if people generally had a better understanding of ©PTSD. Everyone has a responsibility for how they act, but maladaptation is a hell of a thing and takes lots of time to address, especially when people know these triggers and weaponize them because they want to see you hurt.

Personally, it’s nbd when people slip up - especially people who’ve known me for a very long time pre-transition. Oftentimes they correct themselves, and I usually feel worse that they feel bad about it. It’s pretty easy to tell when it’s intentional or not, and I reserve my ire for people who clearly mean disrespect.

Though, I should say, that’s now - early on in transition, it was certainly a bit harder to take. It reminded me of very fresh family abandonment and abuse over my identity. That’s not on the people who accidentally called me by the wrong pronoun, but it certainly could put me in a pretty bad place and I’m sure I wasn’t the friendliest in those moments. The more that trans folks are supported by their friends and family, the more secure they feel and the less likely they are to react strongly to being accidentally misgendered, imo.

the singular use is so old, when it was first introduced, “they” was still spelled with a fucking thorn!

I heard there’s a holy yellow sky / Just make sure you close your eyes