birdybirdnerd

[birdybirdnerd]

Wait, do people know about the Before I Play wiki?

I have used this for..... at this point easily over 6 years. It's a wiki where there will be low-spoiler/non-spoiler hints about just stuff you would want to know before playing a game.

It's always stuff like.... "Vitality in this game is useless, put your points in everything else first" or "Don't leave the second hub town until you buy X item, it'll become unobtainable."

Lemme pick an example almost everyone will know. From the Animal Crossing New Horizons page, the first tip is:

Nearly everything on the island is movable later, including all buildings and even cliffs and rivers. The main things that are fixed are the stuff on the border of the island (river mouths, beaches, rocks/peninsulae, the dock and the airport) and the resident services plaza, so picking your island layout should be based around that primarily.

That's stellar advice, tbh, given what you'll know about the game 30 hours in instead of 30 minutes.

Not every game is covered obviously and not every piece of advice is good, it's all subjective, BUT..... I look up almost every game I play for the first time, just to keep stuff in mind. The SMT4 page had top tier advice imo.

[birdybirdnerd]

The strangest attitude I've ever seen on people about anything is when someone is aware that their situation is bad, and that other people have it better, and not only have their no intention to personally do anything to fix their situation, they'll actively fight you if you try to help them. They don't want their situation to get better. They just want you to feel bad about how bad they've got it.

[birdybirdnerd]

classicists will make the ugliest least functional website in the history of html and it will contain the entire library of fragmentary papyri of the works of aeschylus. for free

[birdybirdnerd]

Intellect devourer: please... you must rescue us... I am newborn...

The husk it's inhabiting:

[birdybirdnerd]

Wow you busted that coat off fast. Let's get those pants off pronto. Comment below with your experience! Each call/letter earns points, but they gotta be new! If I liked the reply yesterday, it's been counted and can't be used again!

Check yellat.money for numbers, information, and scripts!

[birdybirdnerd]

I’m at a 4-H beef club achievement day, and they have this tiny calf in a pen off to the side for kids to pet.

It is currently being fawned over by a gaggle of kids in an arrangement — and I cannot emphasize this enough — pulled straight out of one of the Unicorn Tapestries

[birdybirdnerd]

[birdybirdnerd]

I get what internet (often borderline or overt rad)feminists are trying to say with shit about how men never have to deal with x, but sooo many of the examples get shot to shit when you apply any other Man to the example than a cishet rich thin white guy.

“When have men ever had to worry about being killed for something they wore?” Black men. Gay men. Trans men.

“When have men ever been body shamed?” Fat men, balding men, disabled men.

“When have men ever had to worry about walking home at night?” Black men, gay men.

People reinvent “if men could get pregnant” over and over and when someone says “oh they do actually” it’s always viewed as hostile and not a potential intersection.

Like no, you do not have to coddle men, but men saying “hey I do know what it’s like actually” are not outright our enemy trying to center themselves, they are often extending a hand saying “hey I do get it too.”

[birdybirdnerd]

Okay the WEIRDEST THING is going going down right now

So some guy in Michigan in the US has just found a letter in his grandmother’s house; it seems to be a pen pal letter from 1973ish, and it’s from a young Welsh girl. In it, she lists:

Her name, and the names of her brother (Gwynedd) and sister (Catrin)

Their ages

Where she lives in Wales (Denbigh)

Her hobbies, including horse riding and reading pony books.

So this American dude decides to take a photo, whack it on Twitter and ask the only Welsh person he knows if there’s any way to track this Welsh girl down, because you know, ALL WELSH PEOPLE KNOW EACH OTHER, OBVIOUSLY

Except

I am furious to report that it has worked

Welsh person he tags doesn’t know, but takes up the challenge. Someone reckons the Catrin might be a woman who translated a hymn book once, and checks the foreword to see that the dates and ages do seem to be about right. Someone else suddenly has a brainwave - wait, isn’t she the mother of Steff, the comedian?

My husband gets tagged, takes one look at this letter, and is like “That is 1000% my aunt.”

So now it’s 20 to midnight, Steff’s aunt has obviously not yet seen the excited message to put Twitter out of their misery, and my mother-in-law is currently on the phone gleefully telling us that when that letter was written her sister had never sat on a horse in her life before, and she’d lied to an American pen pal for clout before the internet even existed.

[birdybirdnerd]

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[birdybirdnerd]

Loved that moment in System Collapse where there’s a little philosophical debate about whether the colonist’s system (can't remember what it's called atm) is trying to get them to trust it: Iris asks ART about it, and ART responds with being skeptical about ascribing human motivations to machine intelligences (MIs). and Ratthi is sooo down to debate about what qualifies as “human” motivation.

Like it’s such a great example of why Ratthi is so knowledgeable about constructs. He’s thinking about MIs in really interesting ways, which, coupled with how intuitive and empathetic he is, makes him such a great ally. Ratthi respects Murderbot so much 😭 and their relationship is very charming.

And I find it sooooo interesting how Murderbot doesn’t chime in at all… I mean, it’s in character for it (and it is Going Through It™️), but MB absolutely treats every MI or system it comes across with some level of respect or regard. It wants to foster trust and be kind… I think this has something to do with SecUnits being social beings whose only outlet for that (especially with an intact governor module) are systems and then bots.

That post (via @iridescent-glitter-dragon) about ART being better with humans but not knowing how to talk with other MIs, and Murderbot being so much better with MIs than humans, makes so much sense for both of them. Like, ART was raised alongside a human and mostly works with other humans (and it has NO PATIENCE <3). MB, on the other hand, was dehumanized and completely alienated from people, with systems and other bots as its only means of socializing. of course it would have a great deal of empathy for them <3

[birdybirdnerd]

really wanna talk about how keeping SecUnits depressed and suicidal is absolutely a feature, not a bug, since suicidality (or self-harm behaviors at the least) bolsters their function, which is to throw themselves at a threat with no concern for their own body/well-being. yes, they can come back from a lot more damage, but the fear of being left behind and getting their brain fried by the governor module might also make suicide in this way more appealing. in fact, in light of the constant ruthless reminder that they have no agency, death in this way is almost a means of wresting some agency out of corporate grasp

like obviously this is at a cross-purpose with SecUnits being expensive pieces of equipment, but since they can be repaired so thoroughly, a SecUnit’s potential suicide-by-job being successful is pretty null.

i’m also thinking about Murderbot’s and ART’s protectiveness when it comes to their humans…. for MB in particular, there is a certain satisfaction it gets when it successfully saves people… like there’s an interesting pack bonding component that feels like another SecUnit/MI feature. like show a SecUnit any type of regard and it will adopt you and protect the ever-loving shit out of you, from hiding data from the company to sacrificing itself

they’re inherently a social intelligence: a network intelligence that reaches for other systems.

this is such a cruel combination when you really think about it, even more than at first glance, in that people have created something social, something with emotions, only to cut it off from *everyone*—people and even other SecUnits. i mean, people fear them, other units and bots are distrustful

and, again, this is a feature, not a bug, because it’s disempowering, an easy way to keep them subjugated, *and* might actually make them better at protecting people by making them more keen on throwing their bodies to the meat grinder. in fact, destroying themselves probably has a cathartic quality, as evidenced in System Collapse, when, in a moment of distress, Murderbot talks about how it wishes it could smash something, especially itself… clearly, self-harm must be an ingrained relief for it!

and this just makes sense! like of course constructs are prone to other mental health issues/distress. this is a whole other thread that i’d want to get into in another post. like, constructs are susceptible to trauma like a human. and that trauma cannot easily be fixed with a memory wipe and a repair of its physical structure. echoes of that shit *stays* in their neural tissue

like how how much do corporates actually know about all of this, really? how much of this is by design vs exploiting happy accidents? how much actual research has the company put into them? how deliberate is the propaganda against SecUnits (to keep people from empathizing with them)?

much to consider

[birdybirdnerd]

I have come to admit that my own toxic trait is that i DO hold a quiet disdain for people who think that putting flatpack furniture together is hard. Why is IKEA furniture in particular regarded as some Ultimate Test for Couples - "If you build it without killing each other, he's the one, haha!" ???? Like, listen, I get it, i've got a fuck'd wrist nowadays so I DO find that hammering peg A into slot B is considerably more difficult than it used to be, but the task ITSELF? It's like building lego, y'all. Except that at the end of it, you end up with not just some sort of miniature spaceship (admittedly very cool, if not particularly useful) but a functional and stylish side table. It's the perfect enrichment. I smashed together three Billy bookcases last summer with nothing but a screwdriver, a pencil, and the love in my heart, and I had the time of my life. Do you, too, not feel a thrill in your heart at the satisfying feeling of a cam lock twisting into place? Do not the tiny little crinkly bags of screws remind you of candy wrappers to be torn open and piled gleefully upon the floor, like a child at Halloween emptying your haul onto the living room carpet? Am I the freak, or are you? I am willing to accept the former but i die on this hill regardless

[birdybirdnerd]

They’re so silly

[birdybirdnerd]

Working at a sex shop has ruined me because I was checking out a booth at a public market selling bone-shaped collar tags that said shit like “I’m lost” and “pet me” and “spoiled” and it wasn’t until I saw “I pee when I’m excited” and thought damn okay kind of hardcore that it even occurred to me that they could be for like. ACTUAL dog collars 😭😭😭