#this one's important

[falciesystemessays]

Can I make a confession?

I hate thinking about my future.

(I promise this is related to video games.)

It could just be something in my brain.

It could be that, the way school has always led to more school, I'd always felt like my life was being decided for me.

It could be that, as a suicidal trans kid living on a dying rock, I never felt like I had a future.

But I had never in my life considered I would get this far, and at this point I have to grapple with the fact that I'm only getting older.

I need to move out eventually. I need to make a living. And I need to keep myself alive and healthy.

But something in me just hates thinking about that.

Of course, I notice this in the games I play too. I love tactics games like Fire Emblem, but the superficially similar Advance Wars could never grip me. While Fire Emblem gives me all of my chess pieces and makes me use them accordingly, Advance Wars makes me think several turns ahead and choose which units to create. Advance Wars is a much more long-term game, and I can't help but hate that.

I've been thinking for years about the prospect of using games to teach me what I don't know. Surely, if a game can finally make me understand long-term thinking, then I will be fixed. And I hate that framing, "fixed." These issues are very likely caused by ADHD, and the brain is just more complicated than any platitude can solve. But I also know that I do have to start thinking long-term, or I will suffer.

I've always hated brushing my teeth. When I was a kid, I would pretend to brush them to make my mom happy, but I just don't like having to put some stick of goo in my mouth, and even now that I do it regularly it doesn't feel good. I thought things would be okay forever, until I started having dental problems. Any individual day where I don't brush my teeth honestly doesn't make that big of a difference. But these choices in aggregate across years can have disastrous effects.

I started thinking about this as I replayed FTL recently. FTL: Faster Than Light is the first game released by Subset Games. Their second game, Into the Breach, is one of my favorite video games of all time. But crucially, everything I like about Into the Breach was an explicit response to something I didn't like about FTL. FTL has too much randomness, so ITB removes a bunch of randomness. FTL has too much hidden information, so ITB shows you exactly what enemies are going to do next. And in a game of Into the Breach, everything you need to think about is right in front of you. In FTL, you have to think ahead.

There's a few design choices in FTL I chafe against. Upgrading your ship is pretty expensive, and I never know how much it's worth saving up until it's too late. Your ship taking damage is unavoidable, and that damage sticks around between battles. Nearly every action costs some kind of resource that I don't know if I'll get back. It's a game that demands you think about it on a large scale, and after years of trying and failing, I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get good at this game.

Do I just not have the brain for it?

But you know, it's not just lack of understanding that makes me put the short-term first. I've gotten into feuds with my parents about dieting before, as their legitimate concerns about health combined with unchecked fatphobia to leave me feeling like they just wanted control over my body. And while I recognize it's immature, these days I'll often eat something unhealthy on purpose out of spite. Making myself some dumplings, using all the salt and butter I could ever want, feels good, and tastes good too. But it was only today when, at a checkup about hormones, I agreed to weigh myself, and didn't like what I saw.

There are some games that provide delayed gratification. Games like Animal Crossing and Pokemon that use real-world time for game mechanics. In Animal Crossing, it's not enough to simply grow a tree, you have to plant it, and then water it for days. In Pokemon Shining Pearl, you have to wait until Friday to catch a Drifloon. These games treat the passage of time as a game mechanic in itself.

...Or at least, they do in theory. In practice, these games are awash with time travelers, changing the system clock to skip the wait.

I wish I had the answers, but I don't. I don't know how to teach myself this vital skill, and I'm searching still for a game that can help with that. Maybe I'll be the one to make it.

But I guess what I do want to say is that, if you also hate thinking about the future, whether that's in games or in life...

I understand.

[jewishcissiekj]

I'm this close to fucking losing it

something very tragic about the way Asajj can never go home/back to the places and people she was in and with but will always carry with her the pain feelings and memories of these places/people/situations and the consequences and marks they left on her

[insomniaink95]

Don't hold your tongue to avoid conflict. Be an open ally to trans folk. You never know who in your posse needs to hear that message.

Several years ago, before I first really started using twitter or got active on social media at all, I would go to regular weekly game sessions where I would play TTRPGs with friends. This was back when I treated most of my characters as "support" and did my best to not role-play as role-playing made my social anxiety bite into my brain with its sharp venomous fangs.

One summer night after the game was done, when we were all hanging around outside for a bit and enjoying the unusual cool breeze before going our separate ways. An old friend who was visiting home from another state, and who was always eager to bring up topics that would make people interrogate themselves and their beliefs, posed a hypothetical question to our group of guys…

"What would you do if you were in a long term relationship with a woman, the love of your life, whom you were engaged to, the wedding date approaching… and she admitted to you that she was transgender and had been afraid to tell you because she didn't want to lose what the two of you had built?"

It was a good question for a group of (seemingly) young cis hetero guys to be asked back in the early 2010s. Most of my friends didn't really want to say anything and made noncommittal grunts to express that they were thinking about the question… but it was clear they were uncomfortable with the shame that could come with answering the "wrong" way and believed that either answer could be seen as shameful and would affect them socially.

This was back when my social anxiety was near its peak, so I want you to understand that I didn't really want to say anything either. I used to be much more conflict averse than I am now as well, but I had known one of the friends for my ENTIRE life, one that I knew since the moment they were born when I was 2 years old, one that I met when I was 6 years old, and the one I had the least history with who was a friend of a friend I had been around for about a decade but only sparsely within that decade.

My brain hadn't been constantly awash in gallons of adrenaline and cortisol for over a decade and a half, so while I still had the debilitating social anxiety, the extreme hyper-vigilance in social situations I experienced with it had faded over time. I was among friends. I shrugged and replied, still in a slightly noncommittal way with, "What difference does it make?" The guy I had only known sparsely for a decade stated roughly, "Nah, of course I would break up with him. He lied to me, there's no excusing that."

I had grown up on the internet during the early 2000's, mostly in and around the furry art scene, and it had shaped the way I thought about basically every actual meaningful thing I valued as a person and had affected who I WAS as a person in a massive way. That, added to the things I experienced back in school laid the groundwork of me developing into someone who was very passionate when it came to things like fairness, gaslighting, empathy, bigotry, reactionaries, greed… I could go on. So despite being held back by the nasty social anxiety and being quite conflict averse, I was also extremely passionate. It could've gone either way, 50/50 chance. I could've stayed quiet easily but I feel like my brain had a "Harry Dubois rolling a stat check moment" and it was a success.

I replied roughly, "You're saying your hypothetical fiancee, the love of your life, was right to be afraid of how you would react to her telling you she's transgender? And after the time you'd spent together and the love you'd shared you would just throw it all away?"

His response was roughly, "Should have told me up front. It's only right."

So I asked roughly, "So you're saying if she had told you up front you would've had a relationship and become engaged before getting married and everything would've been fine?"

His response was a definitive, "No!"

I replied roughly, "So knowing that one fact about the person who would develop into the love of your life, your fiance, would, if she told you up front, prevent you from ever wanting to get to know the love of your life, and if she waited until a later point in the relationship to tell you it would remove all value of your relationship with her in your eyes and you would dump her when the wedding was imminent?"

No response from him but I stated flatly, "That's fucked up."

He said, "It's my decision."

I replied, "Yup. Fucked up decision."

He said roughly, "That's how I feel, should've told me, and it's my decision."

I replied, "Okay. I'm just saying that's REALLY fucked up."

The conversation ended and he left shortly after that and then the rest of us dispersed and I didn't think about it again for roughly a decade.

Flash forward roughly a decade… A friend who was present within that group that day came out to me as trans. I had no idea. After we finished talking I did what everyone does when someone comes out as a different gender, different sexuality, that they're a furry, or that they're a porn artist, and you didn't have a clue. I looked back at the time we spent together and tried to see if there were any signals I could've picked up on. There weren't. She had spent her entire life up until that point keeping it a secret from everyone. I was no further than the third person she had told and the first person who had been told without it being a necessity. And then I remembered that discussion where I butted heads with the other guy. And I realized that what I said that day was probably important for her to hear at that time. I realized what she would've felt like if EVERYONE had remained silent too. Hearing what I said probably let her know that even here in hicktown she had at least one person she could confide in some day. That may well have been why I was the first person she told without necessity.

So yeah, in summation: "Don't hold your tongue to avoid conflict. Be an open ally to trans folk. You never know who in your posse needs to hear that message."

[horizonboundtrainer]

May doesn't actually understand Pokemon speech btw. It's more like she bypasses the need for language entirely by catching the overall impression of her team's thoughts. Any emotions they feel bleed into hers and visa versa. ( If May dislikes somebody, Salamence will despise them with a passion. If she's fond of them, he will be too and so on )

In some ways it's far superior to being able to understand their words because it's what allows her to direct them as a single unit but it doesn't work on unfamiliar Pokemon.

[bamsara]

"youve already written that trope" yesss. i like it a lots. i will be writing it again. 1000 stories of the same trope over and over again for ten million years

[shitpostingkats]

We need less "shy, anxious, always second guessing" Apollo in fanworks, and approximately 400% more of whatever the hell this is.

[starspilli]

some random jason warmups. missed drawing him T_T

[adventures-in-poor-planning]

I rlly like the emphasis that live action one piece is putting on the fact that literally nobody else think about piracy the way luffy does. "Being a pirate is about being free and having friends :3" while every other pirate is doing legitimate career criminal shit around him.

[sangrefae]

i love getting to see day one expac launch bugs such as "eating pizza breaks male au ra faces" and "syrcus tower now has savage level difficulty mechanics"

[malenjoyer]

He’s shy

[catmask]

does anyone have like an anti aesthetic. like something you look at and can recognize as a complete fashion/interior design/artistic movement and understand it but it makes you shudder seeing it. i am not talking like “its morally bad” “its poorly structured” like just sheerly devoid of joy for you actually invites a repulse response.

[maeamian]

Hey y'all, now is a particularly good time to show solidarity with the Haitian refugee community of Ohio by donating to groups working on their behalf like The Haitian Bridge Alliance or Advocates for Basic Legal Equity.

The Republican goons are trying to stir up a racist hate mob against them based on extremely sinister lies. To hell with the sorts of people who want racist violence and for those of us nowhere near Ohio, this sort of donation is a decent way of telling both the Haitian community and their tormentors that we have the backs of refugees.

[evichuart]

i love the idea of luffy not wanting to let go of shanks after the arm incident and being by his side during his recovery

[flagellant]

yeah we might be brothers in christ but so were cain and abel so shut the fuck up before i decide to find a rock about it

[oooocleo]

ok surely this is allowed... im tripping over all these hands im drawing lately

patreon

[avarkriss]

listen. listen to me so carefully right now. (if you're in the eclipse path/planning on viewing). please don't stare directly at the sun tomorrow. i am begging you - do not stare at it. if you got eclipse glasses off of amazon/other, please put them on in your house and make sure you can't see anything; if you can still see like regular sun glasses, they are not safe for eclipse viewing, you will burn your retinas, and we cannot fix that. eclipse glasses should be iso/ce certified, and aas (american astronomical society) approved. please make smart choices and protect your eyes. please.