#Talking About Difficult Subjects

[i-like-forcefem]

When browsing through the wares of a newly opened magic shop you passed by an item that caught your interest, a massive mirror

You peaked inside expecting to see yourself, but instead you saw, a girl? About your height, quite pretty, good taste in fashion… Maybe your mom when she was younger?

It feels weird, in a good way, to see this girl follow all your movements, you couldn’t help but smile, and her smile is radiant

You felt an odd sense of relief… until you looked down to see that, you’re you, of course you are

Why do you feel so sad?

…

“Quite the item isn’t it?”, the Witch tending the shop noticed your interest and started talking to you “a magic mirror that shows you what you’d look like if you were born the opposite sex”

You stare into it

Why do you feel this deep dread?

“But that’s not all it does!” The witch continues “want to see a magic trick?” The witch asks laying a hand on your back

You’re curious to see where this is going, so you nod your head

In one swoop the witch pushes you against the mirror and as you brace yourself to slam into it, stumbling on your feet across the floor, you find yourself slamming into the witch face first

She laughs “I probably didn’t need to push that hard”

As you lay on the ground you feel different, you look as you prepare to push yourself up from the ground you notice your hands… are they smaller?

As you get it up and oriented yourself you glance at the mirror, still the same showing girl you, but how did you get turned around did… did you get

“Sorry” the witch says as her laughter days down “that’s the first time I’ve pushed someone through a mirror, should’ve seen that coming”

You look down and see the dress you’re wearing

“Now cutie” the witch claps her hands, and jumps up! She has a grin you don’t trust “I hoped you enjoyed the trick! If you ever want to become a guy again And I hope you have some savings! Gender-bending magic is quite expensive!”

You stumble back, you can’t turn back? The mirror is showing yo- Girl You, not the real Guy You, so… that’s a no go? You’re way to poor for anything

“But don’t worry cutie, we pay quite well here and just so happen have an opening for a maid and I can assure you, you’ll look just adorable in the uniform”

[kerosene-saint]

I wish people didn't act like dd/lg or abdl were like pedophilia. not even into it and I'm a sfw age regressor (non community due to this problem) but like. ugh. and the problem is my views on it have changed so much over just this year. because guess what. whatever people do in their free time surrounding sex, as long as it is not genuinely illegal, should not fucking matter to you. it is not your fucking business to tell people you think their kink is gross and pedophilic, especially because it's not pedophilia. it is fine. to be uncomfortable with a kink page of a certain kind interacting with you. I get it. and there are some pretty mean people in those communities but guess what? there are mean people in EVERY COMMUNITY. and you do not have to relate that kink to pedophilia to say you'd prefer their kink blogs to not interact with whatever blog you have. but when you say shit like "pedos and also people into ddlg and abdl dni" it's annoying. you could say "ddlg/abdl blogs dni" absolutely fair. but saying don't interact abt an entire group of people of which you do not necessarily have the means of checking everyone for being in that community??? alright then. you have fun in puppy play isn't anything like fucking dogs but ddlg is like fucking children world.

[toytulini]

me, stupidly and weirdly resistant to listening to audio books vs reading a physical book for no real reason: man i wish there was a way to like, read a book while i crochet like i do with tv shows and movies and podcasts

[blujayonthewing]

opening the group chat for the first time today and there's like 200 new messages because everyone's Going Through It today it seems but one of my friends dropped 'I'm separating from [terrible boyfriend she's been living with for like eight years] for real this time, I just moved a bunch of stuff to my parents' and I'm losing my mind because y'all the subject changed almost immediately HEY HI EVERYBODY ELSE SHUT THE FUCK UP I WANNA HEAR ABOUT THAT???

[junk-culture]

can we be serious. can we grow up and be serious and stop talking about invisible hands and unseen forces for one second please . you might as well tell me that every day the magical economy stork comes down from market heaven and leaves goods and services on the doostep.

[elftwink]

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

[the-entity-down-the-street]

I want to talk about suicide. Wish we could have more open discussion of suicidal ideation without getting shut down by goddamn search engines going "are sure you're okay??? Here's the suicide hotline!! Also we won't show you anything related to this search because it's triggering and might encourage you to self-harm!!"

Like no bitch I'm not trying to die, I'm trying to open a dialogue about suicide rates in the trans and autistic community you stupid fucking algorithm.

There's a societal squeamishness around suicide that definitely plays into why it's treated like this. Social media censors it, forcing sanitized language like "unalive yourself" because it's more ad-friendly.

Of course, hiding it doesn't discourage folks from attempting. All it does is add more stigma around suicidal thoughts, and that keeps people isolated.

There's also not enough discussion about what happens when you *recover* from suicidal ideation, and have to live with the lingering scars (psychological and physical) of it. Like, when we talk about recovery, it's always about how much better things are, how you get your life back, etc. And yes, that's important, but like most things, recovery is more nuanced as that. For me it feels like being haunted by my own ghost. It's eerie, and sad, and I'm angry about the childhood I lost to abuse and depression. It's a whole second phase of suicide recovery that I never see conversation about. Not to mention that my idea of "a future" getting stretched out by a few decades is disorienting.

We deserve to be able to talk about all this. Sorry a good chunk of my life experience isn't monetizable, or ad-friendly, or suitable for all ages. It's still worth talking about.

[redysetdare]

Y'all listen just because you learned something in school doesn't mean everyone else did. idk how y'all got this idea in ur heads that we all learned the same shit when literal book bans are happening in schools across the united states and certain subjects are being banned from ever being talked about. (do not even get me started on the fact different countries have different curriculum too) Like you cannot say "You guys obviously just didn't pay attention in school and are stupid because we all learned this" like you are ignoring like 50 other options as to why people may not have learned this ranging from poorly funded school to disabled kid getting shoved into special ed classes which are often notorious for mistreating their disabled students. I'm begging you all to understand the nuance of why certain skills and abilities aren't as widely spread as you assume they should be.

[spiribia]

is this true. funniest character in the world

[opens-up-4-nobody]

...

[silver-stargazing]

Gosh, I don’t know why The Idiot has been on my brain recently but it’s been almost 3 years since I read that book and I am still in awe that Dostoyevsky really went to unexpected places when talking about epilepsy.

He very directly talks about how, for some folks with epilepsy, they experience what is essentially a high before a seizure. Like a brief moment where you experience an on-rush of ecstasy that feels like the single greatest moment in your entire life before slipping off into the void.

Speaking as someone who regularly had that experience, it’s really difficult to talk to others about it because seizures are obviously bad for you. It’s weird to talk about anything other than negative experiences with seizures and yet I still have to make sense of these strange positive experiences that are often the only moments I can actually remember from the seizure.

IDK what I’m rambling to but it feels like there are still some taboo subjects when talking about epilepsy and it’s wild to me that someone from the 1860s just approached a lot of these subjects head-on and, for the most part, addressed them in a way that’s still approachable to modern readers. 

[cartoon-skeleton]

not to bring up beef from when i was in second grade but i'm still not over how teachers/teacher aides would automatically assume i was trying to be a smartass when I was actually just curious/asking for clarification. BECAUSE! in second grade, we were writing in our journals, and a kid leaned over and asked me how to spell "gonna," so i told him "g-o-n-n-a." but the teacher overheard and was like "WE DON'T talk like that. we say GOING TO!" and i was like, with genuine curiosity, "but what if someone talks like that and you're trying to write how they talk?" and she got so mad at me like i was trying to be a little shit and not just asking a question!!! AND. in third grade. I wrote a poem about a frog and used the word "leapt," and a teacher aide came up to me and said "um, it's leaped. past tense verbs end in ED!" and i said "oh, i think you can say leapt too, check in the dictionary!" and I WAS NOT TRYING TO BE A SMARTASS! I for real thought i was being helpful and showing this lady a new word but she got so mad at me for "talking back" and made me erase it and change it to "leaped" even though that didnt even rhyme. bitch. smh. I will have beef about this until i die idc if its petty. its my villain origin story

[bubblesandpages]

Having online spaces specifically about your hyperfixation where there are literally thousands of you with a shared common interest really sets you up for failure in what your expectations are for what is considered a regular amount of knowledge or interest to have on any given subject in the real world.

[lovsome]

seeing my therapist for the first time since before christmas in a couple of days 🫥

[moshieee]

Ew, essays :[

I miss the old days of kindergarten when we attempted to color butterflies and ate erasers and glue

-🎁

I hated kindergarten

Essays may suck but at least now I'm not the weird kid in the corner wishing I had friends

However yes I absolutely despise essays with all my being... in fact!

Achievement unlocked: you somehow found a topic moshie hates enough and on a bad day to start them ranting in the tags...

Warning there are curse words, poor spelling, and caps locks

Sorry in advance

[froshele]

today in the wild I came across a phrase to the effect "...And this [pair of ethical axioms about what constitutes quality of life for purposes of discussion about disability and coma prognosis, based on the opinion of one person who has not ever been in a coma or disabled thereafter] suggests that maybe, just maybe, [relevantly comatose or recovering or disabled] people may have quality of life sufficient to make them ethically relevant"

that's ... not, um, normally considered to be what makes people "ethically relevant" in the world where all the people are and there's sunshine and grass and things, but, you know what, ok jennifer, A for effort! :) gold star for you, philosopher extraordinaire, moral lodestar for people unsure what to do with granny, paragon of ethical conduct!