#down to a binary or *maybe* a trinary

[tiger-moran]

When people are unironically using the terms TMEs/TMAs or AFABs/AMABs or 'men, women and enbies' or fucking 'theyfabs'

[transingthoseformers]

SG Earthspark: Maybe after Shockwave is met, after people have calmed down and introduced themselves, there's a small conversation about pronouns at some point? Because Shockwave is nonbinary (like Nightshade) but uses he/him, and i've noticed that even in writing forums' LGBTQA+ threads*, people seem to be really confused by the idea of off-the-binary people using the "gendered" pronouns he/him and she/her.

Maybe after Nightshade tells their pronouns, Shockwave says he's NB too, Nightshade asks about his use of he/him because they're a young child and they don't know everything, and Shockwave explains that pronouns aren't inherently gendered or something like that?

(I'm propably allowed to write this because i'm somewhere off the binary myself)

(*I've talked about my TFP humanformers/species swap fic on writing forums, without mentioning that it's actually a fanfic and about Tranfsformers because that'd just confuse things, and people questioned Shokufeh/Shockwave being an enby but using he/him)

No you're totally right that's a discussion that would be super fascinating (nightshade and Shockwave discussing their different experiences with being nonbinary) and yeah that's a serious thing (people having a specific image of what a nonbinary person is and being confused by nonbinary people who use he/him or she/her)

This feeds into my love of transformers and gender being not as binary with them as it seems, or even trinary as that's a rhythm i see people fall into of treating nonbinary as some solidified third gender rather than an umbrella term

[ohheyidothat]

I am dropping an armful of trains of thoughts here all at once without any concern for "making sense" and only concern for "set all the trains down in one place, or else I am going to drop them and not be able to find them later"

Also: sorry I don't speak human very well and I'm translating from Wordless Brain Language, kinda haphazardly, so interpret the vocabulary with a, as they say, grain of salt.

I think that weaving over-under in a four-dimensional space would not only ALLOW, but REQUIRE, three lines intersecting, like an over-under with an extra over OR under (not both--maybe in a space with five dimension though). This could also be worded as top-middle-bottom, at which point the binary quality of weaving has clearly expanded into a trinary, at which point I decide to play a video game because I've been trying coax my brain into comprehending more-than-three-dimensional space for at least a decade and haven't yet gained the ability to comprehensively understand what the fuck I just said, much less determine the value or "truth" of such said thing.

Oh found another train hiding in my brain: why does a 3-dimensional weave innately comprise a binary system, and a 4-dimensional weave a trinary? Oh! Ahah, right, the other dimension is filled with the overlap, otherwise you'd have two things in the same place which...I'm assuming is just as impossible in 4D space as in 3D space.

Yay space!

[queercripintersex]

First off: this is super friggin cool.

As a work of documenting and describing pride flag designs this is excellent. It's clearly a massive undertaking and you're clearly committed to representing the data honestly and faithfully. The circular graphs are really pleasing.

But.... you motivate this out of wanting to improve cognitive accessibility. And I'm afraid this is still way too much, cognitively.

You've reduced the data down to 80-something tags and 24 hues. I'm sure that took a ton of work. But... it's still too much, if the goal is cognitive accessibility.

Since your stated goal is cognitive accessibility, I think you need to switch your analysis from being totally inductive to being a bit more deductive. Right now you're trying to be 100% faithful to the data, and I'm not sure that's actually compatible with producing an easy-to-understand framework.

I am not an art/design person like you are. I didn't know what chartreuse was before reading your report. I can tell the difference between chartreuse and pine green. But the difference between emerald and viridian? Not something I think I can do reliably (especially out of context).

Same problem with the blues. There are too many blues. It's really nice that so many things are literally opposite their opposites but I am not an art person and cannot look at a colour and be like "oh yes, this green is the opposite of that purple".

So here's a stab at simplifying your framework. I've moved tags so that each hue has a thematic coherence, and reduced the number of hues from 24 to 17 so it's more visually accessible:

By hue:

Pinkish red: aesthetic [attraction, xenogenders]

Red: physical [attraction, bodily sex, altersex]

Vermillion (orange-red boundary): bold [fast, strong/large, move in increasing, aporagender/maverique, non-conformity, sensual attraction]

Orange/brown: culture [keep culturally-specific genders here, move POC and non-Western here, move vanilla and Christian here]

Gold: intersex [keep otherwise free]

Yellow: platonic & nonbinary. I couldn't come up with a unifying theme for these two together and they're both big tags.

Chartreuse (green-yellow boundary): neither [neutral and flux stay, maybe move exobinary here, move placeholder here]

Warm green: mental [romantic, emotional attraction; self, autonine, envy; neuroqueer]

Cold green: many [polyam, ambiguous, multigender]

Teal (blue-green boundary): three [trinary genders, move tertiary here; stable can go here because tripods are stable]

Cyan: wannabe [move alterous & conformity here, plus slow, weak, decreasing, also universality]

Blue: masculine [keep it otherwise free]

Indigo (blue-purple boundary): alternative [keep kink & disabled here and move in kenochoric, different, social attraction]

Lavender: two [androgynous, both/between, move binary and perisex here]

Plum: sex but not bodily sex [sexual attraction, intergender]

Purplish pink: queer [fluidity and drag go here, love and same stay]

Pink: feminine [and feminist]

And monochromatic:

White: all

Light grey: partial [move questioning here]

Dark grey: one [single, monogamy]

Black: none [move anarchist here]

And here's another way to make it cognitively simpler: give lightness and chroma consistent meanings.

What I'm imagining is a table where each row is a hue, and then you have like a bunch of columns: gender, expression, sex, attraction, politics, etc.

Each column has a specific lightness and chroma.

For example, intersex according to your table has lightness 85% and chroma 0.18. We make that combination mean bodily sex.

So if we take the hue for pink (0), and apply lightness 85% and chroma 0.18, we get female (the bodily sex). Which is a light pink. And same idea with masculine - male (the bodily) sex is a light blue.

In your table, drag is lightness 65% and chroma 0.17. So maybe we use that combo to mean gender expression? I apply that to the feminine hue, I get a dark pink. It could mean feminine gender expression. Ditto masculine blue.

Right now it is A LOT to remember all the different colours for each hue. They don't seem to follow any patterns, which is very faithful to the chaos that is flag design.

But I don't think I can keep track of all the colours in your tables. So imposing a pattern onto how the different hues are shaded I think would help simplify things a lot.

Hope this helps! Again, it's really awesome work for describing how things actually are. But if it's gonna be cognitively accessible I think you're gonna have to impose some patterns on the data to make it simpler for folks to remember.

What Pride Flags Mean, Part 1: Gender and Attraction

Welcome to the latest installment of my autistic hyperfixation on flags! I wanted to figure out a common language of Colour X means Thing Y. Like how pink is consistently used for feminine.

Having a common language for flag meanings matters because it improves cognitive accessibility of flags. ♿️💙

But I didn't want to be prescriptive about what colours should mean what. Just because I think Thing X should go with Colour Y doesn't mean everybody else would.

So this turned into a descriptive, empirical project. I gathered a data set of 2060 pride flag colour choices to figure out what are the most common colour-meaning combinations. Some of the results:

And here are the abstract modifiers: these are modifiers that were generally shared between the genders and the attractions. For example, black is used to indicate having no gender as well as having no attraction.

Click here for tables with okLCH values, hex values, definitions, and notes - I've put a more detailed write-up on my Wikimedia Commons userpage. (Mediawiki supports sortable tables and Tumblr does not.)

METHODS-AT-A-GLANCE

To make the figures above, I assembled a data set of pride flag colours. It contains 2060 colour choices from 624 pride flags, representing 1587 unique colours. Click here for a detailed description of how I gathered and tagged the pride flag colours and tagged them.

For each tag, I converted every colour to okLCH colour space and computed a median colour. OkLCH colour space is an alternative to RGB/hex and HSL/HSV. Unlike RGB/hex and HSL/HSV, okLCH is a perceptual colour space, meaning that it is actually based on human colour perception. 🌈

In okLCH space, a colour has three values:

- Lightness (0-100%): how light the colour is. 100% is pure white.

- Chroma (0-0.37+): how vibrant the colour is. 0 is monochromatic. 0.37 is currently the most vibrant things can get with current computer monitor technologies. But as computer monitor technologies improve to allow for even more vibrant colours, higher chroma values will be unlocked.

- Hue (0-360°): where on the colour wheel the colour goes - 0° is pink and 180° is teal, and colours are actually 180° opposite from their perceptual complements.

The important thing to know is that okLCH Hue is not the same Hue from HSV/HSL - the values are different! (HSL and HSV are a hot mess and do not align with human colour perception!)

You can learn more about okLCH through my little write up, which was heavily influenced by these helpful articles by Geoff Graham, Lea Verou, and Keith J Grant.

You can play with an okLCH colour picker and converter at oklch.com

🌈

MORE RESULTS: COLOUR DISTRIBUTIONS

Back when I started tagging my data, I divided my data into five main chunks: Gender qualities (e.g. masculine, androgynous), Attraction (e.g. platonic, sexual), Values (e.g. community, joy), Disability (e.g. Deaf, blind), and Other.

I'll talk about Disability and Values in future posts! But for an alternate view of the data, here are the full distributions of the colours that were placed in each tag.

They come in three parts: tags I created for Gender, tags for Attraction, and tags from Other. The abstract modifiers are spread between the first two, though their contents transcend Gender and Attraction.

Some distributions have a lot more variance within them than others. Generally speaking, major attraction types tended to have the least variance: sensual attraction is really consistently orange, platonic is really consistently yellow, etc.

Variance and size do not correlate. Many of the smaller tags are quite internally consistent. I don't have a ton of tags in "current gender" but they're all the same dark purple. Xenine/xenogender has a whole bunch of entries, and there's a really big spread from blue to yellow.

Some tags, like intersex as well as kink/fetish show there are a small number of different colours that are very consistently used. Whereas other tags like masculine show a very smooth range - in this case from cyan to purple.

Overall I'm pretty satisfied with how things wound up! 🥳 It makes sense to me that an umbrella term like xenogender would have a lot of variance. What honestly makes me happiest is just how many tags wound up 180 or 90 degrees from their opposites/complements. 🤩

Not everything lined up nicely (the opposite of drag is .... neuroqueer? awkward.) 🤨 Some things lined up in hilarious ways, like how initially I had the opposite of kink/fetish being Christian (amazing.)

But as a whole, there's a lot of structure and logic to where things landed! I hope this makes sense for other people and can help inform both flag making as well as flag interpreting (e.g. writing alt-text for existing flags). 🌈

I'm hoping to post the Disability and Values analyses in the coming days! If you want to learn more, my detailed notes along with tables etc are over on my Wikimedia Commons userspace. 💜

Everything here is Creative Commons Sharealike 4.0, which means you're free to reuse and build on my visualizations, tables, etc. Enjoy!

[aeide-thea]

(i’m only doing dracula secondhand rn, although i have read it ever, and i’m delighted that everyone’s having fun but i gotta say, the inevitable way in which the usual tumblr discourse is starting to creep in around the edges as people belatedly discover that the text is, gasp, Problematic is—a lil exhausting 2 me? like. of course the text is Problematic. maybe tumblr book club can do wilkie collins next and really have fits. like. what kinds of things did you expect a victorian-era brit* to position as scary??

and like. not fair of me, probably. people don’t know shit and it’s good they’re learning and it’s always good to contemplate and analyze things! but at the same time it just feels a little like—are you going anywhere with these announcements of Orientalist Spectres Haunting Europe, etc? or are you just having fits abt having made contact with something Impure, and trying to expiate yr sins by squawking about it?

like. idk. i love analysis! but some of the posts i’ve seen starting to float around just feel like. halfway between Baby’s First High School English Essay (That Doesn’t Really Have a Thesis, Just Descriptions of What’s Happening in the Text) and, like, scrupulosity? like. tell me something about all the fucked-up fears stoker is leveraging here! make an argument! just announcing that these things exist in the text feels like. no shit. so glad we could crowdsource a second sparknotes (now with more guilt!) right here on tumblr dot edu, so we don’t have to look anything up.

idk, i’m having trouble articulating exactly what’s alienating me about this, and i do realize i’m probably being excessively irritable! really i think it’s just like, i desperately want a mode of reaction to media—to the world, really—that’s more complex than either ‘shhh, i’m averting my eyes from anything troubling abt this bc Capitalism Has Worn Me Down and now i’m too depressed and exhausted to engage with anything in a way that isn’t purely escapist,’ or else ‘i’m going to enumerate all the -isms that Taint this narrative, in a way that strongly suggests i’d prefer some kind of ahistorically, implausibly sanitized version of it so i was spared the necessity of confronting anything real or difficult, and could revert back to the aforementioned eyes-averted escapist mode without being Tainted by Associating With Problematic Narratives I Failed to Denounce As Is Proper…’

that’s a lot of words and not a lot of clarity, but basically: there has to be a more generative mode of engagement somewhere, somehow, that isn’t just this facile binary in which we either spit something out immediately, like reactive children, or else swallow it whole! i want to chew on stuff, and build muscle.)

⸻ * it has been pointed out in the comments, and i agree, that this is an oversimplifying elision—stoker was, yes, british, but more specifically irish (which i did know, but didn’t say), and while really this phrasing was an attempt to gesture at the way in which brit-ish orientalist anxieties are activated in the text, not compress stoker into an uncomplicatedly imperialist boogeyman, it’s still a reductive description! like. ‘colonized artist leans into colonizer anxieties, aligns self as sympathetic narrator with Correct Worldview at expense of more-othered Foreigners’ is still not an especially innovative analysis, but it does at least immediately bump the complexity of our model from binary to trinary—a complication devoutly to be wished, under the circs!

[rotationalsymmetry]

About the diversity of nonbinary people:

I think a lot of harm comes from “allies” who are very vocal and indeed aggressive about making sure other people use the right language etc for nonbinary people, when really the “right language” is a work in progress and nobody knows what they’re doing.

It’s hard for me to parse out which things I object to actually are bad and which things are…just not applicable to me. Like…I really don’t care if people assume my gender based on my appearance, and I don’t think making a big deal about not assuming gender is helpful to me. But, I mean… I don’t not identify as my gender, I just identify as more than that. So maybe that’s just a me thing, I don’t know.

But, uh, yeah, there’s a lot of intensely politicizing the experience of being nonbinary and tying it to the idea of abolishing gender and I’m really not here for that, and I don’t like that they’re associated. I think people who aren’t nonbinary and also against gender roles should leave nonbinary people out of it, or stick to only directly amplifying what nonbinary people say, not speaking for nonbinary people.

I don’t have a problem with gender roles existing. Gender roles are fine. (And all cultures have them! There are plenty of cultures that have male and female gender roles and also have a lot of social room for people to color outside the lines, to identify as something else, to be a woman or a man but in a gender non-conforming way, etc. There is a colonialist aspect to criticizing Western culture for having rigid and patriarchal gender roles and then assuming that indigenous cultures with gender roles are just as patriarchal and need to get rid of gender roles in order to not be patriarchal. Rather than attempting to understand indigenous gender roles on their own terms, and listening to what indigenous feminists and two-spirit/queer/not entirely cisgender indigenous people have to say about it.) Overly rigid gender roles are the problem, and also gender roles tied to a social hierarchy that gives men power over women. People should get to move freely between different roles and carve out space for their authentic selves. You don’t need to get rid of “blue is for boys” to do that.

I mean, I still want “blue is for boys” to get toned down a lot. I want it to be OK for boys to have pink things and play with makeup and not be weirded out by physical affection, and of course I want a lot of room for girls to be able to play chess or hockey or avoid the color pink like it’s got cooties. For girls that want that. And of course I want there to be room for people of all ages to say “actually, I’m not the gender you thought I was, I’m that other one/both/neither/something else/it varies.”

Like… I enjoy Effie Calvin’s books a great deal and I’m glad she has a third gender woven deep into the fabric of the world her books are set in. That’s awesome. (It’s also awesome that she wrote a romance story where one of the main characters is a trans woman.) It’s also not my kind of nonbinary, and as of yet she has not written any characters that are like me.

Which is, I mean, she’s not obligated to. It’s just…a lot of people think that’s what nonbinary is. They/them agender people and that’s it. If there isn’t a gender binary, there has to be a gender…words. Trinary? Trinity?

And I love they/them “I don’t have a gender” people and I want you all to see yourself in stories and get your pronouns respected and get a body you feel at home in, if the one you have now isn’t home, and all the rest.

In a lot of ways, my invisibility is directly tied to my relatively few problems, as far as not fully/exclusively identifying with your birth gender goes. And I don’t want to minimize that.

And.

[guardsbian]

the discussion isn't relevant to any current events or anything but like. ok

A lot of people want to boil down things to semantics. It's easier to grasp and use to avoid accountability. So if we take things like the ableism discussion regarding Tundras a while back, there was this sort of barrier, I'd say, where people wanted to distill the issue into something easy to grasp and easy to avoid. People read the argument as "don't call Tundras/anything 'dumb'" and that was that. I got called a hypocrite as a result of that. Because it's easier to think "this word is bad" than actually try to deal with a trend and your learned biases. The real problem was that intelligence should not be linked to an individual's worth, and intelligence or disabilities (again, separate things, but the concept of intelligence itself is linked to so many types of bigotry) should not make a person a "burden" to be around or care for. But reduce it down to semantics, or the way a specific character was drawn, and you get to avoid the conversation altogether.

It's a common discussion you'll see when it comes to body positivity/fat acceptance, too. People would rather reduce the issue down to whether fat people can be attractive. The actual issue is that weight should not have any effect on a person's worth or the respect they get, both from their peers and when it comes to systems or industries where fatphobia is rampant, such as healthcare. But it's easier for people to instead reduce body positivity down to whether they think fat people are attractive, and it's those same individuals who would probably just as quickly not say "fat" because they think it's offensive- that describing someone's weight would make it seem like they're worth less, or be disrespectful to them. But reducing it to semantics means avoiding that issue.

And maybe it's easier to see with trans and nonbinary individuals- when one set of pronouns will get respected, but not another. Because "they/them=nonbinary" helps people compartmentalize gender into trinary of male, female, and other- when, in reality, gender distinctions, roles, and expected presentation are arbitrary. That truly acknowledging nonbinary people would not only mean "between male and female," but outside of them, beside them, both of them, regardless of them, moving between them. But reducing it to semantics, of a rigid "third gender" or "60-something genders" lets people carry on treating nonbinary individuals as part of the binary.

And that's not to say words or correcting one's vocabulary isn't important. Words can be hurtful, and carry long histories- to say someone should "get over it" is ignorant, but so too is correcting your vocabulary without correcting your behavior or examining your biases. To respect people means to respect their plight and to respect them as a whole person, and realize that omitting part of oneself in a discussion- their disability, their weight, their gender or lack thereof, their sexuality, their race, their nationality, their class, their struggles, their identity- is not being open-minded or accepting. And there are ways to do it harmlessly, to discuss sensitive topics without being disrespectful. But reducing things like bigotry down to the choices of an individual- yourself, in this scenario- is ignorant. Words are tools, and they can be a sign of respect, but rarely are they change.

[bigowlenergy]

Notes for the Nontraditional ABO Nonsense I’ve Created

I hate ~traditional~ abo with a passion. Just reading the summaries of those kind of fics gives me anxiety like woah. it’s Gross, dude. Once accidentally read a fic where male omega were ~biologically predisposed~ to getting sexual pleasure from being told the price point they were sold for during sex with their alpha/owner and like?????? No. Gross and Bad. Can other people read and write it? Sure. Whatever. But keep it far away from me, pls. Thank you exclusion options on Ao3, you’ve saved my life.

Anyway, not this is any “better” since i’m still just writing weird smutty abo fanfic on the internet, but this is my preference, and, if it is yours also, click here to read Maman.

There’s actually only a few points to it: (1) Ghouls have abo, humans do not. (2) Ghoul’s physical bodies are mutable. (3) Transphobia does not exist in my world. (4) Horny stuff.

(1) I adore the clear division between the human and ghoul worlds in TG: the human side of the equation is basically reality - patriarchal, few women as investigators in a male dominated position, the usual. Then on the other side, there’s really only the one male ghoul ever shown as a leader - the guy Rize kills, and also kind of Banjo? Kaneki is prophesied, so it’s different - and the strongest ghoul and strongest kakuja are women. Survival is praised above all else, and that’s about it, actually.

So I wanted to work within that by deepening the divide further. If canon will weakly imply that ghouls go against human standards of gender roles, then I will catapult that concept to the top floor. They don’t have human gender standards, period. Those who live in the human world may socially identify using which ever side of the gender binary fits their appearance better as a way to blend in with humans, but it’s not an internalized identity. It’s just another mask that they have to wear.

And, being a society that functions on survival and strength, I decided to marry these concepts together to create this system.

The entire Greek alphabet, go for it. Why not? There’s little point in applying a new gender binary (alpha/omega) over the irl subscription to such, and/or the extremely weak trinary with plot-forgotten beta is much the same. Gender is a spectrum.

(2) ...and so is sex. Why have a cis based system when I could literally do anything else? Ghouls can turn into giant kaiju, plant detached kagune in walls, and regrow their heads. Take it further, coward Ishida! A ghoul’s body is totally mutable based on their power level. Omega being the strongest because I love myself, and Alpha the weakest.

Most ghouls inherit their mother’s dynamic bc of RC cell transfer before birth, but as kids they aren’t considered to actually be that dynamic since they’ll often mature into something else. And it is not a permanent change. Any ghoul can work to become stronger and rise higher on the spectrum, or get weaker and end up falling lower. There is a natural power cap in them for whatever their ceiling is without resorting to cannibalism (Ex: Tsukiyama family weak genes), which means ghouls can still be trans, by ghoul standards. (Example: Nico. Okama stereotypes aside, applying this au to them gives them a concrete id of being more powerful and closer to being socially labeled an omega than they want to be, so they id as something closer to alpha without sacrificing their strength level.)

Is all I’ve said is Everyone is Trans and also Girls Rule? Yes. Is just inverting gender roles a bit trite? Yes. But does it make me feel better? Also yes. Therefore fanfiction exists.

TL;DR Omega ghoul are the strongest, and therefore the most socially powerful, and a large spectrum of gender and sex exists that ghouls can id with and move through fairly easily. It’s more fun this way.

(3) Just gonna take the trash out on day one. Fuck terfs.

I won’t say it doesn’t exist in ghoul society, since Torso is absolutely a transphobic bitchwad, but it is super rare. Ghouls raised by humans might struggle with this, but that’s about it. Also, I’m just not gonna write about human transphobia. I don’t wanna.

(4) ....But at the end of day, do you know what I am? A kinky dumbass.

All I was really aiming for here was to be able to actually enjoy this genre of lemon (all hail tumblr staff’s rules and regulations) without being creeped out by. Well. You’ve read traditional abo. You’ve scrolled past some horrific summaries. You know what I mean.

So, with an actually interesting and less obnoxious base outlined as above, we can finally get into the pulp of the lemonaide:

Heat. The real and only reason abo exists. I’m a sucker for it as much as the next guy. So yeah. There’s a good deal of lemon here.

Only ghouls from phi and up to omega can have heat, but all ghouls kappa and down to alpha can have ruts. Rut makes the weaker ghouls have a higher chance for survival against an overpowered omega by answering their heat. I decided to kick out knotting bc I personally don’t prefer it and it sounded like a dangerous thing to be doing in this au. Gonna get ate bc your dick got stuck, dude. :/

It lasts about 12-16 days, roughly. 5-3 days of preheat preparation and hormonal overdrive and aggression, 6-4 days of the actual Event, and then a resting period of coming down from the hormone high and recovering about 2-5 days. It only happens once a year, regardless of power level. Culturally, a ghoul is considered to be in heat from day 1 of the preheat phase, not just when the actual event happens.

Ghouls mature faster than humans because of their low survival rates, but I’m not a pedo so heat only becomes possible once a ghoul crosses the threshhold of physical maturity - which is about 25 in humans, so maybe 21-26 depending on the individual. And then later in adulthood if that ghoul arrived at a dynamic that experiences heat later on in life.

That’s all I can think of for the abo rn. should Discuss the etoneki content next installment.

smell yall later.

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Tempo Strategies

So there’s a really weird paradox that shows up in games with any kind of strategy, particularly if advancement is one of the pillars of the gameplay:

If your opponent is attempting advancement, the rock to their scissors in the counter-strategy circle is to rush them down.

In Dominion this might mean buying out a third stack to end the game before the enemy’s engine gets going full-tilt, or in certain games might mean focusing on attack cards. In League of Legends it means harassing the enemy ADC so they never have enough gold to buy the items that let them pop off. In Starcraft it means an early strike to punish the enemy for trying to drop all their gas on upgrades instead of troops. In Magic or Hearthstone it means running a deck that tries to kill in the first five turns or so.

The paradox is that - to me at least - the rushdown strategy just feels kind of shitty.

Maybe this is a subjective thing and paradox is the wrong word? I don’t know. What I’m trying to express is that the development of resources - the flourishing of a build - reads to me as an inherent good, and a fundamental part of why we play. Which means rushdown strategies always feel like preventing someone from playing the game. It feels like stopping the game early, which is in mechanical terms not true; mechanically the game is designed to end when one player’s hp reaches 0 or when the third stack is bought out or when the base explodes. That’s the designed true end of the game and whenever that happens it was proper. If it’s happening too early there might be tweaks to units or cards to make rushdown weaker against a stalwart defense.

It doesn’t help that in multiplayer settings it feels like bullying. In fact that’s generally what it’s called in-game - bullying your lane opponent. It has a different (much less negative) connotation in games; It just means “pressuring,” really, not throwing slurs at them in chat or emoting rudely over their corpse. And since you’re on opposing teams it’s not like you’re supposed to be cooperating. But again, it hits this feeling of stopping someone from experiencing the game as it was meant to be played. Their deck doesn’t get to perform its cool combo. Their champion doesn’t turn into a whirlwind of death. Their army of battlecruisers doesn’t get to sweep across the map.

Part of what I like about Dominion is how poorly it allows for rushdown, I think. The game almost always ends with a comparison of engine vs engine, with one of the engines having come to fruition a little earlier than the other, and if the other didn’t quite get going that’s usually down to either luck or its designer (that is, the player who was trying to set it up).

The other piece of this is the premeditation in a lot of these games. You have to build your deck to try and stop the enemy up short, in Magic and its ilk. You’ve set up your strategy on rock, and if they’re playing paper instead of scissors you’re in for a rough time from the start. The same is true of some champions in LoL, who don’t scale well and are better-served trying to win the game before it runs long or else doing all they can to feed power into their own scaling champion.

A fortunate part of these is that they aren’t binary (trinary I guess, since this is a rock-paper-scissors analogy). They’re on a sliding scale between these points and rare is the champion or deck that focuses so totally on one point that it doesn’t do SOMETHING toward the other points. In fact it’s nearly impossible; The most aggressive M:tG deck I know of - Sligh from the Tempest block - still had creatures that were capable of blocking (though I don’t think I ever saw it happen), and spells that were capable of killing enemy creatures (which it did sometimes but only to keep those creatures from blocking its own). To be truly 100% aggro it’d have to have creatures that could only attack and spells that could only damage the enemy player and that would be stupid; Those limits while “more pure” would actually make it worse at aggro.

I don’t know that there’s a solution to this. Dominion’s route is fun for me but I’m also aware that the cost for that avoidance of the trinary of strategies was direct interplay between the players. Dominion often feels like playing a solo game at the same table and being told at the end which of you did the solo game the best. And if development of resources is to be a valid strategy its validity is tied to the possibility that attempting the strategy won’t work. For that to be possible there has to be a counter to it, and the counter has to be baked into the list of options.

[punishedvenomsnake]

Let me preface this by saying this: I really don't care how you identify. But if you identify as pansexual please understand the negative connotations attached when a lot of bisexual people hear the word "pansexual" and why it harms the bisexual community, which will both be outlined here.

First, let's start with the definition of pansexual. This has been changed over time, with the general concept being the same, "equal attraction regardless of gender (and a lot of people say), transgender/non-binary or otherwise". Let's dissect this. Equal attraction regardless of gender. Bisexual has long meant attraction regardless of gender. It's been written in manifestos and manuscripts since long before any of us were born. Talk to any elder or even anybody in real life and they'll tell you the definition of bisexual does not only include both sexes, and the insinuation that it does is not only transphobic, but biphobic as well, the reason being that, well, for lack of a better word, you're mangling words, along with the definition of bisexuality. The reason behind it being transphobic is because, as a baseline we KNOW there are more than 2 genders. Bisexual people are and have been attracted to non-binary people for ages, and I can't believe I need to say this, but some people on this website can't seem to grasp that concept. Next, "transgender/non-binary or otherwise". Holy fuck. I really shouldn't need to tell you that this is transphobic, but if you're too dim to understand why, it's because you are creating a unneccesary bubble and, for lack of a better word, making an exception for transgender people when they are inherently in the criteria of "male" or "female" if they are binary, and thus saying you're also attracted to transgender people is transphobic, whether you mean it to be or not. Also, maybe this is me but saying you're attracted to "non-binary people" instead of "regardless of gender" definitely feels like you are trying to put non-binary people into a gender trinary, which is not just regressive but surprise surprise, transphobic. Concluding this point, the definition of pansexual is not only reductive and regressive, it is also inherently harmful towards trans and bi people.

Why should a definition stop people from IDing as pan, you wonder? Well, read my first sentence again chucklenuts, but I'll also tell you why. Because it creates an unnecessary subdivision of bisexuality, while also putting bisexual people down and acting like we're a bunch of old fashioned regressives. Pansexuality is generally more palatable towards cishet people, because it is a gross oversimplification of one of the many facets of bisexuality. Bisexual people don't inherently love all genders equally, but a lot of bisexual people, myself included, do. Being bisexual is a lot more complicated than loving two genders, and the pansexual label and identity spits in the face of this. Bisexual people are oftentimes left out of discussions and often an oversight or an afterthought when creating things like merchandise, left in the wind in favor of pansexuality, because again it is seen as the "more progressive" version of bisexuality when in fact it is not just regressive, but more palatable to cishet audiences.

This next part is a weak link in the conversation but please Christ stop saying "hearts not parts" because everytime you do I get more ringworms. I really shouldn't have to tell you that that is not just biphobic, but also homophobic, lesophobic, etc. Implying that bisexual people or otherwise prefer "parts" over hearts is not just harmful, it's been a stereotype for CENTURIES that lgb people don't love their partners, and are predators who only care about sex. Let me reiterate; we also care about love, romance, personality, etc. Sex is just a facet of love and romance, and sexuality as a whole.

In conclusion, I really don't care how you label, but for god's sake read this if you identify as pansexual. The label has historically put stigma against us, and has put us in a whole new world of hurt, and I just want everyone on this website to understand. Before you claim I don't know what I'm talking about, I am literally bisexual. Not only am I bisexual, I used to identify as pansexual. It wasn't until I did some reading until I figured out the true difference between bisexuality and pansexuality, and that is that there is none. So please stop pretending pansexuality and bisexuality are even different to begin with, because, again, pansexuality is just a more palatable and oversimplified version of one of the many nuances of being bisexual.

a few days ago i got into ace discourse. i think it's time i got into pan discourse

[ivory-spire]

So I felt compelled to add my thoughts to the 5.4 datamine fiasco.  Obviously, spoilers.  I apologize for length.  I didn’t edit this and I let it get away from me, but the core idea is my issue with the recent BIG REVEAL and BWA’s poor track record with consequences.

I’m not even going to touch the ridiculousness that is the traitor’s identity--I agree that it doesn’t make any sense--what I’m becoming progressively more upset about is the knowledge that there will never be any meaningful consequences to this.

I, perhaps naively, am in the camp that thinks Theron is playing triple agent.  One, I like to hope even BWA realizes how monumentally bizarre and awful it would be to take his character and say, “Yeah, btw, even if you romanced him, he apparently still wants to kill you.”  Two, I also like to hope that they recognize that the grandiose verbiage that shows up in the dialogue mines is... not in character?  My first thought upon reading that is that it’ll turn out to be a hint, played so heavily the player will have a concussion when it drops.  (The fact that he gives you a Bond-villain-esque monologue of his intentions, rather than just disabling your character from behind or just killing them.  The fact that he still apparently fails to steal the crystals no matter what, which makes me suspect that the intention was akin to what the LS!Agent can pull on Balmorra.  The fact that, no matter what, he reaches out to you to tell you that he’s doing “what has to be done,” which just leaves me off to the side like, “yeah I didn’t care about the Boss either, so let’s not play this card.”)

But that’s really not the point, just setting the stage for the issue that I’m taking right now--that, when it comes down to it, I suspect BWA is going to reduce this to a binary choice of “FORGIVE THERON (+ KISS IF APPLICABLE)” and “KILL THERON LIKE THE TRAITOR HE IS.”  Maybe they’ll make it a trinary situation with the neutral option being to let him live, but exiling him, but BWA hasn’t liked neutral options lately.

If BWA does decide to take the approach of “had to lie to make the betrayal look genuine,” those kinds of plots have the potential to still be interesting, imo, if the author is willing to consider the psychological implications.  Imagine if someone you love and trust does something awful to you, such as betrays your trust or publicly humiliates you, whatever.  Then they say they did it because someone would do something even worse if they didn’t.  It changes the context you view it from, but it doesn’t erase the fact that it hurt.  And it probably doesn’t change your feelings of betrayal, because rather than come to you to figure out what was going on and maybe figure out a better approach that doesn’t hurt you as deeply, they decided immediately to capitulate and do as they were told.

This is the feeling that I’m applying in this situation.  My “main,” inasmuch as I can be said to have one in swtor, is an inquisitor who romanced Theron, so a lot of this relates to their response to the situation.  And so I keep imagining what would happen if they found out that someone they loved, one of the few people they believed they could wholly trust, just tried to assassinate them.  That fucks a person up.  And my fear is that BWA is going to try and act like that binary decision above is enough to absolve Theron of the fact that, at the end of the day, he decided to go behind your character’s back in order to “authentically” betray them, rather than trust your character enough to involve them in the plans.  It’s shitty enough if your character is just friends with him; it ought to be devastating if they’re in a romance with them.  As I said, the only thing that’s changed in this situation is context, not what he does.

The other frustration I have with this theory is the hypocrisy of it.  In SoR, Theron is justifiably outraged that Lana let him be captured, instead of letting him in on the plan, because she was worried that letting him in on the plan would be given away, and he wouldn’t gain the intel.  In that situation, she demonstrates a disregard for his skills, his safety (lbr, he’s tortured), and, most importantly, his consent.  But in this situation, Theron pulls the same shit on you: you aren’t given a chance to agree to this.  He makes you a key player in his plot (by necessity, but that doesn’t change much), but never offers you the opportunity to refuse.  Like Lana, he disregards your character’s skills (ability to sell the con), safety (even if he made a “haphazard” effort, he still has to make it look ~*legit*~), and, again, consent.

I don’t even want to get in on the idea that Lana might be aware and have conspired with Theron to pull it off.  If that’s the case, I’d argue that Lana is, again, guilty of all of the above--even if she’s not the one playing the betrayer, she still contributes to the overall scheme.

But the issue here, as I said, is consequence.  Even though I took a lot of time to discuss why I felt like it was regressive to Theron’s character to take this route, I could tolerate it if I felt the game would let me have a reasonable response.  But BWA probably won’t let my character feel betrayed.  They’ll let me have some sorrowful lines about Theron’s betrayal initially, but I want dialogue options to reflect the damage this will do to the Outlander’s relationships with Theron (and possibly Lana).  I don’t want a forgiveness/execution binary.  I want the game to recognize that, even if Theron does it ~*FOR YOU AND FOR THE RIGHT REASONS*~ it’s still a betrayal.  Context matters, but it doesn’t nullify hurt.  I get that in the context of an MMO, and one with dwindling funds, it may be hard to delve too deeply into this.  Even just a line or two here and there where your character can say something to the effect of, “I still care for you (romantically/platonically) and I acknowledge your explanation, but what you did was indescribably painful and I don’t know if/when that can be forgiven,” would at least prove that the devs acknowledge that this isn’t a simple matter.

Disclaimer: It has entered my mind that, if the Star Cabal wasn’t wiped out completely, then Theron might be doing this against his will.  If that’s the case, he’s a victim in this and I want BWA to treat this TASTEFULLY.  No Vaylin repeats.  I don’t want my character, a former slave, to be forced to enslave another person in any way again.

Unrelated: Like, not going to lie, the cynical thought that came to mind as soon as I read it is, “Troy Baker demanded a raise, and so BWA has to find a way to limit Theron’s scenes/write him out entirely.”  But like... as much as I think TB’s a great VA and gave Theron a lot of personality, I’d prefer it if they replaced Theron’s VA and just shrugged and said, “What can you do, eh?” than completely destroy a character out of what, if this turns out to be true, in so many ways amounts to spite.

[jeremy-ken-anderson]

Analysis Paralysis

I’ve come up with a game that might get murdered by AP but otherwise sounds pretty damn cool.

Basically, it’s a mix of Dominion, 7 Wonders, and Infernal Contraption.

Everyone has the same 10-card starter deck. Each turn you draft a card from a card pool. And then you play out a turn using your favorite 5 cards.

I’ve seen games that have such a problem with AP that they include an hourglass in the box JUST so there can be an official rule that 30 seconds or a minute after the second-to-last player has worked out their turn, the last player has to be done. You can have an optional no-timer rule for special needs, but having the expectation that players are allowed to rush each other would probably be important.

Execution-wise I’d want two design elements to alleviate this a bit. One, little to no adjudication needed card-by-card. Once you’ve got the 10 cards in a row in an order, they’ll do something without further input. This means your paralyzed player can’t put stuff down and then keep being paralyzed. There could be cards with options but the options would have to be binary/trinary, the decision would have to be made based on information you have before execution begins (no “draw a card. discard it or put it back on top” kinds of effects), and if the game includes choices (which it maybe shouldn’t, I dunno) there’d be a positional indication of what you’d chosen, with the most standard positioning (probably just stacking under the card before it?) being option 1. Two, having all the cards do something of value no matter the order. FFXIV has a good model for this with their combo system: The Rogue’s Spinning Edge has a potency of 210. Gust Slash has a potency of 160, or 320 if played right after Spinning Edge. Doing things in the proper order is hugely important, yes, but doing SOMETHING is always, well, doing something. That kind of idea.

For something more competitive/adaptive, you could have players allowed to ban each other’s stuff for a turn. So turn order goes Draft Phase. Everyone picks a new card to add. Ban Phase. Everyone reveals five cards at random from the cards not banned last turn (on turn 1 this is all cards). The player just after them in draft order picks 3 and they can’t play any of those this round. Order Phase. Players put 5 of their non-banned cards in order of play and do any weird physical card-positioning for handling binary/trinary decisions. Effect Phase. One at a time players’ orders play out, earning them resources of some stripe. These could even be adjudicated by the next player, further cementing that decisions are over once the Effect Phase starts. (Naturally, this part would be super easy on a computer)

And that’s it! It goes for [proper number] rounds, with increasing complexity, value, and interconnectivity of card effects. Perhaps on the final turn nothing can be banned, or maybe the set of final awesome cards is long enough that you can have a magnificent second-to-last turn and having your last picked card happen to get banned doesn’t ruin your whole game.