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on the trans ranma posts part 3 the link to part 4 is still broken

I am kinda shocked this is the first time someone pointed that out! Fixed now, thanks.

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Solo Tryout of Vice & Violence (Part 2- Downtime, Shopping, and Dungeon #2)

Continuing my little exercise in running 4 characters through the sample adventures in Vice & Violence (part 1 is here) to get a feel for what, again, feels like an extremely well designed RPG that I can't just rope a group into trying out (yet) since the art is pretty intimidatingly porn-y, our group of newbie adventurers had just finished clearing out some dangerous feral undead from the home of some fairly well-to-do zombie, with the liason who hired them a bit curious what was up with the odd stockpile of spare parts. May as well explain this because it's pretty relevant to these quests, but every so often zombies need to swap out bits that are getting too rotten for relatively fresh ones to avoid going all mindless monster mode, and the plot of that first adventure involved someone's staff not getting their allotment as someone was hoarding extra bits which ended up forming a hideous corpse ball to fight. The second dungeon is going to be a continuation of that, but first everyone needs to rest up and spend some of that reward money.

As I mentioned, the nuts and bolts of how the big sample city in the book is laid out are a little ambiguous for my liking, but since the quest-giver suggested it and it's honestly real cheap, the party flagged down a taxi, negotiated a group rate discount, and avoided the headache. They found a nice inn for the night, split a pair of rooms, again, haggling down a little, and rested up. The next day they spent doing Downtime stuff, and while I might be being a little mean with this, I figure that's a whole day's worth of activity, so I charged'em for a second night afterwards, cab fair back to their questgiver when they found a note requesting their presence the next day, and took off 2 days of food and water from everyone. I might be going a bit mean compared to what's intended, but everyone still came out ahead from their adventure by enough to get some fancy new stuff, and as this game decidedly does NOT suffer from the same economic problems D&D 3.X and beyond brought to the table, I'm actually really happy with most of an adventure's loot getting reinvested into the economy. Gives everyone a reason to go on the next adventure and get some side hustles going. Speaking of...

One of the many things I find interesting about this game is that leveling up doesn't really do much for you. Here's the full list of options... and yeah that one towards the middle is an example of mechanical horniness, but look, it's this game's solution to the problem of high charisma types just trying to seduce their way out of every problem they come across.

Point is, the level cap is 10, and you get one tiny little scrap of improvement to one area every level. Any cool class abilities you have to pick up in Downtime sessions between adventures. You wanna be a proper fighter, OK, go spend a day in the arena, maybe win some prizes, maybe learn some cool new moves. Wanna be a bard? Play a gig. Wanna be a spellcaster? Go apprentice or attend a class. Etc. Generally you're going to cycle around dungeon crawling/leveling up/having downtime evenly, but you can mix it up, and keep learning stuff after level capping. Anyway, for how our group is spending downtime, part of me is just sort of pulled in the direction of the fighter/rogue/blaster/healer Traditional Party and I might have had my thumb on the scales to start towards that, but honestly I just kinda took everyone's stats/traits/starting gear into account, worked out a personality based on it, and sent them all off to stuff that made sense. Particularly So'Ranfi. Let me show you her full character sheet, minus the spicy bit:

So'Ranfi Dragonkin (Quetzian) Born under Sais'i: +2 Hotness [That very jiggly trait.] I have an annual duel with my own father. Smarts +4 Brawn -1 Moxie +0 Hotness +3 Starting Weapon: Bronze Spear d6+2 Starting Weapon: Medium Armor d6 Life: 6/6 Food: 4 Water: 4 Jade: 60 Starting Gear: A pair of high heels A spare leather choker A former lover's favorite tunic Several of my own teeth A voucher for a free Blood Magic Spell A longleopard stringgut violin

Downtime and Classes

Now, there's a couple things that would make sense here. Smarts is the stat for picking locks and such, and I totally got her a set of lock picks to deal with that when it comes up, but between the jiggling, the high hotness, the heels, the choker, and a musical instrument, this REALLY feels like a character who is going to jump at the first chance to sign up for the Dancer class, where you stab polearms into the ground to use like stripper poles both for the normal reason you'd do that, and for a wacky fighting style where you twirl around kicking people in the face. This eventually lets her use that high Hotness in place of Brawn, and it's a tricky one to even qualify for (although through pure luck of the dice, only one of my characters lacks the minimum +2 Hotness to take levels. Unlike most classes, there's no randomness to progression here. All you need to do to rank up as a dancer is back up a bard while they play a gig. This of course means So'Ranfi needs to talk one of these other jerks into going bard.

Whut'en was also kind of eying Dancer. These two have a lot in common, might even be related. She's not as deeply destined to it though, so, sure, she'll get on stage and play a harmonica. She actually managed the best possible roll for her debut performance, jumping her Bardic Performance stat up to a +3 instantly and raking in 750 jade (this is the other reason I'm not worried I'm being too mean with cost of living), plus a couple hundred in tips from So'Ranfi's dancing. They split that up between them. So'Ranfi immediately turns around and drops most of her cash on a steel halberd (which for her anyway is like, the best weapon you can ever get) and some Skimpy Armor (like a lot of classes, she needs that for class abilities down the road, and besides armor bonuses become penalties when sneaking around and she's our default thief-type since nobody's actually going thief). Whut'en's just saving up in case there's like a cool magic item or something and already started with a stupid useful weapon.

The other two respectively started out with a little light and death magic, and figured they should hit up the local wizard's tower to pick up some staves to maybe actually use that and not kill themselves in the process, and learn some extra spells. Now, I'm a little iffy on whether what I'm doing here is actually the intent behind the rules. There are five flavors of magic in the game: Life, Death, Utility, Blood, and Advanced. Advanced spells can only be learned if you know at least one of the other 4 flavors. Blood magic you quite explicitly learn from your local weird evil cult (and it's probably a good idea, if working towards those advanced spells, to sneak that in before your GM has you fighting said cult, because then they won't like you and all). Utility spells are also completely unambiguous. You go to the local wizard's tower and offer yourself up for experimentation. Life and Death, you can start with one or the other as part of character creation, and I'm pretty sure you can gain further spells the same way you pick Utility up, but I'm not 100% on that. You can also pick up more of what you got on level-ups, and learn a couple specific Light spells from lectures, so it'd be technically POSSIBLE to get those advanced spells if this method was only for utility.

That said, utility spells are pretty good! So sure, Knocks will grab Cure Poison and Swift will take Weightlessness. Those should be handy. And let's see, what happens when they volunteer to repay those favors? Well, Swift gets tossed across the room with a big ol' Smarts penalty for the next day from the resulting head injury, which surely won't be a problem when we're out adventuring. Knocks meanwhile has her entire arm detach itself from her body and and crawl off seeking fortune and adventure. The wizard responsible for this totally promises it'll come back and reattach itself in a day or so so she shouldn't worry. Anyway it's that easy! Free spells!

So OK! Now we've got a fighter, kinda (presently really just a stripper but one who made a solid investment in a real good melee weapon), a rogue, kinda (well, a bard, that's close enough yeah?) a proper fireball tossing wizard (who's also kind of the tank, somehow), and a healer (really, a second wizard just taking more defensive/curative spells). There's a more traditional fighter class, but everyone's kinda scrawny is the thing, there's actual thieves, but progressing there means unloading treasure to be redistributed to those in need and we're a bit shy on loot so far. And we have more of a white mage than a cleric because... yeah clerics don't really get healing magic in this.

The setting has some interesting stuff going on, including a whole bit with these very Lovecraftian creator gods whose whole deal is building up new civilizations, ruining them with their influence, cataclysmically destroying them, and starting over, which they have done several times. With the current iteration of the world part of how they tried to do that was to infuse four people with amazing demigod powers and try to pit them against each other, but everyone they picked was just too darn nice and it totally backfired. So there's a god of combat who just kind of immediately got distracted exploring basically-the-underdark in search of cool monsters to fight, the goddess of the afterlife who just decided to really personally handcraft a uniquely pleasant one for everyone, no judgement, the goddess of knowledge, whose just really annoyed at the concept of worshiping gods at all, telling people to quit that and learn to read and do math and science and such (Paladins follow her, specifically, and are kinda just The One Adult In The Room, the class), and the god of pleasure who... mainly exists to rationalize the particular flavor of porn the creator of this game enjoys painting, just kinda rewriting the rules of plausible humanoid anatomy, and THAT'S the god that clerics are connected to. If anyone in this party DID want to become a cleric, they would have to spend at least 3 Downtime sessions just kinda living in a brothel, and if they had a good enough time with people there, then they'd sprout the first tentacle out of their back. Which would admittedly be pretty handy in a lot of ways, but nobody's enough of a hedonist to make that kind of commitment here.

Other classes not being taken by these four include Paladin (I'm trying to properly embrace the spirit of a party full of well-meaning idiots here, but Knocks might go that route later), Warlocks (I think I covered how you can make a deal with the first freaky fae lord to take interest in order to avoid death, after that you've got Tasks to do for them), and Blood Mages, which I kinda covered, and which work as a path to becoming a vampire if that's your thing.

Dungeon #2

So yeah, did that first dungeon, took a day off to learn cool new skills, and everyone's showing up again to talk to their zombie questgiver pal, with a splitting headache, a vacationing arm, and a stupidly large pile of cash, respectively. This second adventure is a direct continuation of the first. Something doesn't add up here, with spare parts for zombies being traded on the black market or something, and it's time to start looking into what's what with that. So the first part of the adventure is investigating the owner of that first dungeon and what can be made of the notes found during the adventure, and follow up on that with a quick little foray to another location to talk to his lovable lacky and search for more clues. There's another boss fight at the end, and against the exact same sort of hideous monster even, but this time the party isn't given a really combat-capable ally and change to set traps before fighting it, which is a pretty cool way to escalate things honestly, but up to that little surprise, it's mostly a mix of some light low-stress puzzle-solving and trying to get info out of this fellow:

It is difficult to judge how well this sort of thing works when playing both the GM and the whole party, but I really like all the GM coaching in this bit, and in particular the note that it's good to throw something like this in early in a campaign just to work out what page everyone is on in terms of wanting to do some puzzle solving in their dungeon crawling vs. just chatting up NPCs for entire sessions vs. taking the violent path, and then taking that into account when designing stuff later. In any case it's a pretty brief little dungeon hop this time, with again, no combat besides the boss at the end. For what it's worth, I had a pretty good time running that one. It immediately tried this fancy grab and disable move on the first person it saw (our thief-like dancer) but she slipped free. Remembering how tough these are, both casters tried to do their thing, Knocks partially failing but still getting a decent armor bonus onto the basically unarmored dancer, who took full advantage of it to negate the free counter-attacks these things get, and Swift somehow just barely getting a big fireball off despite still being pretty concussed from before. And the bard still has a stupidly good ranged weapon. Other than discovering a hidden boss though, this little delve just leads to a horrific gory scene as the location is a secret dead drop for dead people. Just kind getting tossed into an open shaft to land in here. There's a conspicuous symbol to investigate later, and a saving throw against everyone gaining a new vice from witnessing this.

Whut'en was fine, Knocks is a little less keen on combat now, So'Ranfi's got some nervous sweat/greasy skin thing going, and Swift somehow developed a case of "chronic horniness" which... what the hell dude? I guess it works in a whole "confronted with mortality, he feels compelled to ensure a legacy in a new generation" sorta way but wow that is a weird reaction to finding the corpse pit. Also the stat penalties from these are starting to add up and this group is really going to have to hit the town later and settle their nerves. On the upside, there's a suggestion to pass out another level up here, which I think is a little premature honestly, but the chance for everyone to take a stat point at an even level up helps with the mounting vice penalties. Nerds get smarter, dancer gets hotter, bard gets brawnier because bards don't really need stats and someone has to carry stuff for this party of twigs.

Anyway, coming out of this short delve with a clue about who's responsible, the book strongly suggests that unless the session needs to be cut short, it's immediately time to head back up to the surface from undead town and do some proper investigation. We have a lot of suggestions on how that could go, but no big final confrontation or even definitive enemy here. Part of that is, again, these sample adventures intentionally leaving more and more work for the GM to do on their own each time as a slowly taking off the training wheels sort of thing, and part of that may also be the author still being in the middle of working on this section when I grabbed the PDF. Judging by this here bluesky post about working on some longer term campaign stuff explicitly pointing to these two adventures as a potential entry point to a much much longer storyline.

I'm down for that, and pretty excited to play with these NPC generators/random encounter stuff/points of interest around town, so I'm going to run through the back half of this second adventure after I... go write it myself. Not just now, but soon. Meanwhile I'm taking a look at what's left in the pre-written adventure section here.

We have a third dungeon, this one being a self-contained adventure (all on one page) for when the party is getting out of the city somewhat. Should be fun, but I'm not swiping anything from it just now to flesh out the ending this current multipart story demands.

Next we have a spread of 3 "5 room dungeons." The first of these is a bit of a truncated/cliff's notes version of the introductory adventure, which I think is a great thing to include here so you can flip back and forth and see how these others would look fleshed out in the same fashion. The other two are a two-part story about zombies stealing each other's extremities and the party getting involved in a pretty open ended fashion. That's about the right scale of threat and distance from home for our low level starter party here, so I'm definitely going to work those into something fuller for a third proper adventure after finishing this second one.

So here's my short term trajectory:

Next time, the party goes topside and asks around. Maybe some mischief in the markets and inns and such, then either they find a randomly generated group of ne'er-do-wells in an alley, or maybe I try this random sewer dungeon deal, confront the villain of this arc there. Regardless, the party is going to get a plot hook that will take them out of the city for the next bit of major plot business.

Before that though, as they're resolving the immediate situation, they're going to get pulled into this squabbling zombie sketch adventure. That'll rationalize getting them up to level 3, with 3 or maybe even 4 downtime sessions under their belts before hitting the road and finding this last sample dungeon along the way.

Final Thoughts & Questions

Overall: Still having a good time with this. Combat still feels more about getting things over quick and keeping your head down than standing there trading blows, character progression seems fun and involves a good mix of choices and random shenanigans.

With Sexy Results? By the book that first bardic performance was a real barn-burner and people were ripping their clothes off, so that probably counts, but again, typical D&D game stuff. Swift got horny looking at a corpse disposal chute, I think that definitely counts, or will when he needs to deal with that. And you know, another PC became a pole dancer and all.

Am I being too cruel about time passage? It feels like Downtime is supposed to be a day off, gotta sleep at the end. Pretty sure inns aren't B&Bs by default so you need to eat and drink something still.

Am I being too nice about learning new light/death spells? I haven't had anyone take any yet but this is something I really want to make sure I have straight if I ever really run or play this.

Should I add some audience participation to this? I know I have a couple people willing to actually play maybe and if those stack up enough I might hold you to it, but for now, is there something you'd like to see me poke at in this investigation/villain hunt planned for next time? Whether it's something about the main city if you've actually looked at the book, or some particular scenario you want me to showcase how it's handled if you haven't? Shout it out, I'm game.

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Solo Tryout of Vice & Violence (Part 1- Background/Character Creation/1st Example Dungeon)

I like playing tabletop RPGs. Also designing them, GMing them, and just kinda reading through the rulebooks. I've done a surprising number of these things professionally. Really professionally even. And I have a good number of Opinions about things. One of those being that people have some real dumb hang-ups about comparing different games and editions of games and really need to get over their weird console wars mindset and vary up their diet.

Another rather strong Opinion I have is that people have terrible terrible blind spots about the things they don't personally need out of a core RPG book. Just about everyone leaves out SOMETHING big. TO play a game you need basic general rules, ideally some weirdly specific ones, stuff on how to build up a setting, NPCs to populate it, enemies of some kind, rules for making characters, some real sense of flavor in terms of "hey, what's the deal with the PCs, what sort of adventures are they going on, and why?" and all sorts of stuff about interactions between players and the GM and how to pace things out. D&D tends to give you so many granular character options and monsters but handwave the actual roleplaying bits. A lot of indie stuff just kind of assumes you want to ad hoc ALL the rules. So many things have a cool setting and forget to explain how you interact with it... but the other day I somehow randomly stumbled across something that's super good at presenting the total package. Really everything you need, nice and concise, smart design decisions, cool rules, really good GMing advice, sample adventures, a bestiary, the works!

There's one catch though, and it's why I'm not going to link to the game directly here, nor show much of the actual contents. The cool game I found, Vice & Violence, is a single-person project with a lush 200 page free PDF of a core book, illustrated by the creator... and the creator's day job is drawing REALLY extreme fetish porn. Whole book is SUPER NSFW.

Now, the game itself, it should be noted, isn't inherently porn-y. There's a couple details about the core setting that tie into the creator's general proclivities. To use the example the author promotes it with, the main central city has a taxi service where your party pays a giant to climb into their mouth and safely get across town riding in their stomach, so, that's a thing, and there's totally rules for having sex in here, but they're a pretty dry "OK so if the slutty bard wants to seduce the guard and the rest of the party slips past, here's a chart to roll on for how much time they can buy, and here's a stat for how long the bard needs to rest for before they can try that sort of thing again. Text-wise I've seen much worse in some Pathfinder APs and official D&D splatbooks. The actual big thing thematically is this very Darkest Dungeons flavor of adventuring being an inherently traumatic business and having to balance scoring treasure hauls from dungeons so you can keep buying food and water with being so harrowed by the experience you develop drinking and smoking habits you then need to deal with.

The whole thing IS illustrated though, and while some of these are just gorgeous spreads like this , most of them are A LOT.

You'd think the easy fix for this is, find people willing to play it, copy all the text out of the book, make some tasteful edits, and run it with some friends. However, all the text in here is baked into images, so, I can't really do that, and even if I could, it'd feel way too disrespectful? This is someone's passion project, released for free, and I don't wanna go being some censoring prude bootlegging it. Plus there's a culture war going on. This art is not at all my thing, but I can hang, and I'd like to get an impression of it all as-is. I ABSOLUTELY don't know anyone willing to play the RPG with the giant bare boobs and anatomically correct satyr on the cover though, so the only recourse I have is to roll up a whole party, GM it for myself, and see how it goes!

Character Creation

A LOT of this game's flavor is 1st Edition D&D, which includes character creation (and most other things) being really really dice based. Not only are you encouraged to roll your stats (for your first character anyway), you also roll your race, some background traits, your starting equipment, and your birthsign, which isn't your class (you don't even get one of those at level 1) but points you towards it.

Here's the party my dice spit out at me:

Whut'en Otherling (Effectively a tiefling but the actual deal is VERY mixed ancestry) Traits: I'm fascinated by stuff from the Imperial age. I came from a Dragonkin egg. It was weird. Stats: Smarts +0 Brawn +1 Moxie +0 Hotness +3 Combat Gear: Glass Bow d8+3+1 Medium Armor d6 Life: 6/6

Knocks Klunkin Alloyan (Half-human half-dwarf) Traits: I have dwarven tattoos all over my arms. My butt often gets stuck in doorways. Stats: Smarts -1 Brawn +0 Moxie +1 Hotness +2 SPELLS: Shield (2d8 armor bonus 1 round or barrier) (1/1 uses) Combat Gear: Wood Short Sword d4+1 Full Armor d8+1 Life: 7/7

Swift Dasherskin Centaur Traits: My fur is turning grey. I want to go out in a blaze of glory. My eyes are two different colors. Each. Stats: Smarts +0 Brawn +0 Moxie +2 Hotness +2 SPELLS: Fireball (3d6 damage+burning/set fire) (3/3 uses) Combat Gear: Bronze Axe d8+2 Medium Armor d6+2

So'Ranfi Dragonkin (Quetzian) (Mostly the obvious, some neat/weird biology) Traits: [Exact wording's a tad spicy. Let's just say jiggly.] I have an annual duel with my own father. Stats: Smarts +4 Brawn -1 Moxie +0 Hotness +3 Combat Gear: Bronze Spear d6+2-1 Medium Armor d6 Life: 6/6

Everyone also has a bunch of random stuff they started with like "a very harshly worded employee evaluation" and "a half empty bottle of banana daiquiri," but you don't need to see that. And I skipped over everyone's birthsign. While you do roll those, you then get a pretty signifcant choice of perks from them. Here's what Swift got for example:

Poison comes up a lot, so being immune to it would really help, and make sense for a party animal (his full set of starting gear suggests a bit of hedonism), but casting spells when you don't have the right stats or gear can have Very Bad results, and he has a deathwish, so I went with the spell. All of these I had to think about a bit like that. It's interesting as the one way to really guide your character at level 0.

Adventure #1: Clearing out some zombies

This book has a LOT of stuff for first-time GMs, including a nice series of pre-written adventures which start off extremely detailed and handhold-y and slowly give way to providing looser tips and charts to kinda take the training wheels off. We start of very easy, just beginning our campaign with the party getting briefed about an adventure and dropped off at the location, which conveniently has a little shopping stall out front with someone to recommend some general supplies people may not have, what with starting with a bunch of random crap and a handful of coins and all.

One of the things that really grabbed me here is how granular this gets about time management. As you can see here, you basically do things in boardgamey 15 minute turns. Enter a room, do a thing, whether it's search it, talk to people, or get in a fight, that's 15 minutes. Walk in with a lit torch, it's going to sputter out about 8 rooms in. Random encounter chances get rolled on the hour and climb up. It's pretty easy to manage, it adds a sense of time pressure, and some risk to stopping and resting for a bit. I may steal this bit for other games.

Anyway, this setting has a ton of undead, mainly due to the death goddess not wanting to rush people through the process and leaving people waiting. Most of these are perfectly kind and civilized zombies (and indeed, the rules for PC death involve making a roll to see if you actually die/spend the rest of the adventure as a ghost/just get up as a zombie and have to deal with the social ramifications). But some end up as the mindless violent sort, so here, some zombies are hiring the party to put down some other zombies. Mostly it's a straight shot through some quick combat bits, with a couple set pieces, a friendly NPC encounter, and a nasty boss fight at the end. Rooms where a fight is set to break out in particular have a lot of attention called to environmental features the party can use to get an edge, and encourages, this being a bit of a tutorial, for the GM to really point them out proactively. Solid design.

And combat is... pretty solid here. Attacks always hit, you just roll damage and subtract a roll for armor. Initiative depends on what you're fighting mainly rather than stats or a roll-off. Dumb cannon fodder zombies just go last, things that come charging in lead with that, unless you sneak up on them, some things actively go between PCs' turns. Since you're basically guaranteed to do SOME damage on a hit, it's pretty easy to predict who needs to hit what how many times to take it down, so you can coordinate and prioritize targets pretty well. It's all theater of the mind based so there's generally no awkward positioning to worry about (although the first combat in here has a narrow bridge if you wanna force something there). PCs can go down QUICK, particularly when starting out, but you've got a hero point sort of resource to auto-dodge catastrophically damaging things, you have to spend 3 rounds at 0 HP before death is on the table and getting people back on their feet just takes the equivalent of a move action, so barring a TPK or getting really separated, you're not going to die unless the circumstances are REALLY deadly or it's a TPK, and even if you die, you might be able to walk it off, and if you're really attached to your character, there's also this fun option to just kinda sell your soul to the first random freaky fae lord to take interest and really mess your character up forever as you work for/get your body reshaped by your new weirdly alien boss! So that's rad.

As things went for me here though, there were a couple pretty close calls, but nobody actually dropped at any point. A couple people got down to about 1 HP, everyone got stat penalties from the PTSD of some magic door demanding embarrassing stories from them, and Swift got groped and thrashed about for a while by a mimic he woke up by not thinking to be stealthy when entering new rooms at first, but people pulled him free before it got too freaky with him, and his insistence on taking a shower to get the slime off when they stumbled onto a shower room gave everyone a good excuse to take a half hour break and heal up before the final boss. They also made a friend who helped tank it a bit and... frankly got lucky because the boss kept rolling 1s on damage. I could see that being a real nailbiter otherwise though.

Oh and experience is handled by GM fiat. There's a suggested point n here where everyone levels up (just before the boss fight), and some pretty simple choices (more HP/MP/get-out-of-bad-free points on the odds, HP/stats/spells/safer casting on evens).

Leaving the dungeon, the tutorializing kinda pushes the players towards heading across town and finding an inn to crash in to end things off, and suggestions on whether to have everyone walk, take the bus (a very very crowded wagon) or a taxi (AKA pay a giant to swallow you and spit you out at your destination). And here's where I hit the first real snag with the book as written (worth noting it's officially listed as a work in progress still, to be fair).

We've got price lists for taxi and bus rides, a schedule for when buses arrive, and where they stop, but for travel times, all we have is "walking from point to point on a city point crawl map takes 15 minutes each. Each district has its own chance for being Mugged (attacked by urban creatures such as bandits or fae) or stumbling into a Random Encounter." Plus this map, and its additional note on travel time that doesn't fit with that one.

The implication here is that we should have kind of a hub and spoke design. Here's the bus stops in each district and the bus route. Here's some points of interest clustered around each bus stop making it clear how many steps it takes to get from point A to the nearest bus or directly to point B (which would presumably have some extra steps strung between bus stops for extra encounter potential). We also don't have notes on the time saved if any by paying for either form of transit (I could see both still just being walking speed to be fair), and while each district does have chances listed for encounters, in a surprising omission for how detail dense the rest of the book is, we don't actually have any random encounter tables in here.

Now, the simplest solution would of course just be to say screw it, they all just take the taxi then (it's pretty cheap and avoids all headaches, but my premise is this is a GREAT game for first time GMs, mechanically, so it'd be nice to have a clearer handle on how those other options work.

Similarly, there's this whole downtime system where between adventures everyone can go party down or advance a class or whatever off camera, which I THINK everyone has the chance to do here, but sample adventure 2 IS an immediate follow-up introduced with notes being stuffed under inn room doors, so, worth double checking. Regardless I'm going to hold off on the downtime stuff for the next post here because that was a long intro.

EDIT: So funny thing about doing this with an indie project that's an active work in progress is, sometimes you wish something was in the book and then like 2 days later, bam-

Final Thoughts & Questions

Overall: This seems really solid in play like it did in my read-through. Character creation feels like being handed a prompt to work with, you can still customize what matters, it really nails that "we are squishy wimps in over our heads" level 1 D&D feel without actually being super deadly. Even without class abilities, you have a good range of options. Nice and snappy. Really like the time management rules.

With Sexy Results? Swift got grabbed by a mimic, which could have gone in kinky directions, but didn't under these circumstances. The party ran into a zombie taking a shower but the framing didn't really feel sleezy. Oh and I guess So'Ranfi just kinda came out of chargen in a very trashy form. Still all typical D&D session levels of sleaze I'd say.

Travel rules and random encounters need beefing up a little. Minor criticism, but it feels like an odd gap.

+1 Endurance feels like SUCH an obviously better deal than +1d6 HP. This is just general design advice, but, I feel like that needs a hard cap on how much you can take.

Are spell failures based on the raw roll, or after adding Smarts? I'm assuming the latter, wording's slightly vague. Also an 8 on the table is spell fails+lose an Exertion, but the Exertion rules specifically call out spell failure rolls as something you can convert to successes by spending a point, so... why would you eat the cast failing there?

Do glass weapons break when used? Feels like including it as a material was a roguelike nod.

Are these first two sample adventures meant to be back to back or is there a downtime slot between them? I'm assuming there is, but if it were me I'd mention it.

CONTINUED IN PART 2!

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Combat Free Horror Games

I just ended up playing all the way through Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, the game published (but not developed) by the same people as, well, the other Amnesia games, the Penumbra games, and SOMA, which was their very next release after this incidentally, and excellent. And like Soma, hey towards the very end of the game there's a monster here that just kept repeatedly killing me in an extremely frustrating fashion that really kind of embittered me on that aspect of the gameplay. Enough so that here I am getting on my game design soapbox and writing a blog post.

So OK, right off the bat here, game design is an art form and different people have different tastes and being objectively good or bad is rare and so on, but there's a lot of elements to games that have been pretty ironed out over the decades and I'm just going to briefly ramble about a few.

Feedback is one a lot of people don't think about, but it's damned important, and maybe the one single thing something needs to be a game. I hit a button or pull a lever or something, there's a response from the game. I hit the jump button, the little person on the screen more or less instantly jumps up in the air. Maybe with a cool little sproing sound. Maybe the character collides with something and instantly we get some kinda powerup collection effects or a death or whatever. You can make an entire game around good feedback. It's all there is with a slot machine. Or a visual novel without any choices, you're still hitting that button to advance the text and all.

Puzzle solving is another. All sorts of stuff you can do within this general space, but there's standards of how much people are going to put up with in terms of needing outside knowledge like trivia, or combinations for locks that can't be discovered anywhere, and you're probably never going to see one of those iterative step puzzles in a game where you have to do something like set 10 switches to on where the switches don't move unless you use them to count through every binary number.

Then there's lining up/timing shots, evading attacks, optimizing resource management, etc. etc. etc. Any of these can be the main ingredient in a game sandwich or left out completely, BUT, if a game is going to include one of these, there's a lot of expectations on how to integrate it well, and if you do a terrible job of it, it's probably going to be really frustrating.

Having said that, you can absolutely make a horror game without any combat. Horror is a thematic element not a mechanical element. You can convey it just with your art direction or your sound design or through really any gameplay element if you try hard enough. Every time you interact with a door to open it it's a slow drawn out thing, maybe sometimes with jump scares, whatever. There are tons of horror games that are just straight up adventure games with no gameplay beyond puzzle solving and maybe some exploration of a map.

But Frictional's games, and all the many other horror games directly inspired by them since they came onto the scene pride themselves on not having combat, but still having monsters roaming around that can kill you. It's just that you can't fight them, and instead need to book it away from them or hide for a while or just generally avoid the areas they're in. And OK, this is in fact a very well-established gameplay element. This is stealth gameplay we're talking about. So we need to talk about what people expect out of stealth gameplay.

There's plenty of games that go heavy on stealth. Hell, there's even a lot of horror games specifically with a huge emphasis on stealth. Kind of a natural fit and all. And there are two things to expect out of stealth games worth playing. Extreme situational awareness, and falling back to safety.

Easy example, let's look at the Metal Gear series. The earliest games were screen-by-screen affairs. You've got a top-down view of an area, you don't have to worry about anything not currently on the screen. You can see where every guard/camera/whatever is looking. You can probably lurk where you first came in indefinitely, and get a handle on the patterns before moving out. Later games make the areas bigger but give you a minimap with view cones. Later games still have that tagging system where you can look at everything from a distance, spot enemies, tada they're visible through the walls now. Even when in a new area, you SHOULD be able to avoid ever being seen if you're careful enough, and if there's a new element to deal with, a radio pal will talk your ear off.

And in all of these games, if you screw up and do get spotted, it's not instant death or anything. You trigger an alert status. Enemies swarm in from all over. You can fight through some of them but it's a costly proposition, and in some games won't end the alert. So you eventually need to find a hiding spot like in a locker or something, OR make your way out of the entire area by leaving the map basically, and wait out the alert until things return to their usual behavior. Or at least to the semi-alert status where you can stealth around again it's just going to be hard for a while.

Other stealth games have their own takes on these concepts. Tenchu has a danger sense showing the distance to the nearest enemy at basically all times and lets you go places they can't. Siren has the whole sight-jacking gimmick where you can literally look through the eyes of every enemy any time you want and see what they can see that way. Siren's also worth a look at in this specific context because invulnerable enemies is a big part of it. Enemies can't be killed, straight up, and while sometimes you have weapons that can at least knock them out for a minute, sometimes you don't. But you're generally dealing with basically-zombies so they're slower than you are, lose interest in you easily enough if you leave their general area and break line of sight.

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs in particular has terrible stealth gameplay. You are generally at a pretty distinct disadvantage for situational awareness. Not only do you not have any special abilities to give you extra intel past what's in your field of view, visibility is just real real bad generally, and what's generally the only light source in the area and really easy for enemies to spot. You can turn it off, but then you have a black screen, and stuff can still find you. Plus level design is just unfair. Most of the game has no enemies at all, but the ones it has are like, patrolling up and down a hallway that's your only path forward, and which you have to quickly turn two corners to even see. Practically a 50/50 shot you walk right into something's face And once you're spotted, enemies are much faster than you, so you can't run, can't hide, and the places you can hide to avoid notice in the first place are... poorly defined. I honestly wish the game just let me grab a rusty pipe and swing it around because the possibility of maybe coming out OK after being spotted would preserve some tension. As is, oh something saw me, time to eat a death.

The stuff Frictional actually develops on its own tends to be a little better. Enemies make themselves known by being real noisy as a rule, and they're real big on giving any given nasty thing a single sense it relies on. This monster only attacks if you look at it. This one won't attack if you're maintaining eye contact. This one goes off ground tremors, so just stand still if it's approaching.

But in my experience, they do a terrible job of EXPLAINING how to sneak by any given monster. There aren't really visual tells, or in-game documentation, or little vignettes where you see how they hunt before you're what they're hunting, or obvious feedback on how they detected you. And... there's still the problem that once you're spotted you're basically instant death, and the related problem that death is the lightest slap on the wrist. Kills the tension, makes it easy to just start banging your head against the wall and seeing if you luck your way through, gets frustrating. Oh and they also love punishing you for dying/being spotted by messing your vision up, which does not help with learning how to stealth around.

Other horror games with stealth gameplay that can suffer like this that come to mind, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Metroid Dread. Oddly these both handle all of this the same way. Evading enemies is only an issue in a few specific set piece areas. The enemies start in random locations. I suppose playing it cautious and staying hidden is an option, but in my experience it's a terrible choice you shouldn't consider, because just rushing through in a blind panic will probably work out, and it's still faster to try, fail, and try again than taking things slow (and probably also failing). Plus neither makes getting caught an instant death state. Shattered Memories enemies tackle you and start draining health, but you can shake them off and get a good start on running again, and Dread has similar in the form of a really unforgiving QTE (but real generous check-pointing at least).

Anyway, point is, if you're using a gameplay element, whether consciously or not, you need to implement it well. So many stealth heavy horror games seem to be from developers who don't know the first thing about how stealth games work, and yeah it just ends up really frustrating more than anything. Gimme good situational awareness and a clear plan B.

[wirewitchviolet]

Everyone hates door to door preachers.

One of the most universally hated experiences I think we're all at least passingly familiar with is having some weirdo knocking on your door wanting to tell you all about their religion. Jehovah's Witnesses are the best known for it, but they aren't the only ones who do it. Cults are big on this too, or the whole handing out flowers and propaganda at airports thing. There's a lot of variations. But it doesn't matter what they're trying to sell you on, point is nobody wants anyone to try and convert them to their religion when they're having their morning coffee or trying to catch a plane or whatever.

So the obvious question to ask is, don't the people who send them out to do this know they're just going to tick people off and these people are most likely going to just be shouted at and have doors slammed in their faces? And the answer to that question is, they absolutely know that's what's going to happen, and that's the point. Send out the fresh recruits to do something that is definitely going to make people angry at them. They come home after a day of everyone in the world besides the people who sent them out to do this telling them to go to hell so now they fear outsiders and are going to be way closer to the ones who sent them out to harass people.

Anyway, the leaders of weird religious groups aren't the only ones who know that trick. It's also the whole scam for people who claim to teach guys how to get women to be into them and various other bits of life advice. You can make a hell of a lot money selling books or ads or seminars or whatever preying off desperate lonely young men with intentionally terrible advice that's going to leave them even more isolated and lonely than helping them get happy fulfilling love lives. The former's gonna keep coming back asking for more tips since the last ones really didn't work, and the latter's gonna just be making out with their new hot girlfriends and have no reason to come back for more.

So yeah, cards on the table, I'm not here today to go off about religions weirdos, I'm here because all week long I've been seeing increasingly ridiculous discourse about "a crisis of masculinity" with grifters shouting outright lies about how mean people are to 20 year old white guys or whatever (which they're doing to scare those 20 year old white guys out of actually talking to normal people) and other people trying to say helpful things and not really getting how grifters are out there intentionally giving the worst possible advice to people.

So just to try something a little different, I'm going to try and spend the rest of this post giving actual genuine advice to these 18-30 year old straight white guys everyone's talking about as this lost generation or whatever. Teach'em how to end up with women being into you and be a proper man and all that. This isn't exactly the kind of blog that crowd is generally going to be looking at, but hey people might share this around. And again, basically everything I am going to say here is going to run completely counter to a bunch of stuff you've been hearing forever, but again, that's because con artists have been intentionally teaching the opposite of what you should do for years, I'll try to explain all the actual logic here as I go.

Now then, I already largely covered this point, but you need to learn to recognize creeps who are trying to exploit you. If people are trying to get you all riled up about stupid pointless garbage like the demographic makeup of a movie's cast or something, that's them doing the thing trying to send you door to door talking about religion. They want you to harass people, so those people hate you, and they maintain their captive audience. And like, one of the main things that got me to write this was seeing some total freak ranting about "young men going to school and having their teachers tell them they're evil and probably secretly girls" or whatever the hell. That's not actually happening, you should know that's not actually happening, and you should recognize when someone's busting out that sort of ridiculous strawman that they're trying to manipulate you.

Next point, money. The big common myth is you need to have a whole lot of money to impress women, and from there people will push you into whatever, but it's really less about having a lot of money and more about stability. Like if you want someone to marry you, and you want to be the "breadwinner" and all that, you need to show you're winning enough bread for everyone to eat every day. New fresh daily bread. If you bring me 200 loves of bread today and then none for the next 3 months that's not gonna work out. That's gonna go moldy before I eat it. This metaphor is getting away from me here but like, you want me to settle down and marry you and have kids, I just need to know this house you want to move me into is one where I don't have to worry about getting thrown out for a missed payment and there's going to be food and whatever extra cash is needed for the whole kids thing. So, have a job you're still going to have in 30 years and be making the same amount of money from. If you're trying to take big risks for more cash by gambling/playing the stock market/getting into crypto/whatever new thing suckers people in, you're risking that security and like... this is maybe the single biggest reason I see cited for breakups/divorces.

So short version, have an actual steady job, don't gamble.

Another biggie- So much BS dating advice is some variation on this concept of women never giving you straight answers or otherwise being deceptive or not even knowing what they want, or being like alien robots you can hack with this one trick and.. yeah that's all lies. Women (and everyone else) in fact very much dislike being lied to or manipulated as a general rule! This one's pretty basic!

While we're on that subject though, don't try to go places to "meet girls." There's this super dumb idea that there are Things Guys Like and Things Girls Like, and people get stuck in this thinking. So I dunno, let's say you're way into some particular video game or TV show or working on cars or whatever. You make the mistake of thinking that is a Guy Thing, so no girls will ever be into it, you never discuss it around girls, and then you go looking for girls to date in some space you otherwise wouldn't really want to spend time otherwise. That's just dumb. There are, in fact, girls who are totally into whatever it is you're interested in, I promise, and if you get into whatever social scene is attached to it, you're probably more likely to meet someone you click with, and it's MUCH more likely that should you click with someone you continue enjoying the same stuff and don't end up as one of those couples who hate each other's hobbies. Of course this does require following the trickiest bit of advice I have.

Don't be a creep. Don't use pickup lines or invade personal space or get pushy or anything else like that. Like if you're at a point with someone where you're very clearly into each other OK sure get all flirty or whatever but if that is NOT plainly the case, don't ever act around some girl in a way that'd creep you out if some random dude started doing it to you. That said...

The whole "chivalry is dead" thing? Yeah that's a lie. Again the whole pickup artist crowd rants all the time about how women don't want you to get doors for them and all that all the time, but again, as long as you aren't being a total creep about it, no please do hold doors open for women if they happen to be right behind you. Hell do it for guys too. Especially big heavy doors if people are carrying stuff. We all appreciate not touching germ-y door handles or having people offer to help carry heavy stuff. Things like pulling chairs away from tables is dumb and a little creepy because that's a trivial thing to do for yourself, but yeah, do tiny favors for people as much as you can. Nice pro-social behavior, everyone likes that.

And kind of on the same note, this is another one that really pushes hard against people teaching you to do the opposite of what you should, but don't ever worry about whether something "is gay." It's the most pathetic off-putting thing in the world and nobody wants to deal with your stupid irrational insecurities. If there's any lack of clarity here, I'm not talking about literally being gay (although, honestly yeah don't have hangups about that either, that's just not the focus of this post is all). I'm talking about all the stupid arbitrary things guys manage to talk themselves into rejecting because their brains have been cooked by peer pressure and/or pickup artist scams into thinking they aren't "properly manly" or whatever.

First of all just buying into the whole concept is just... really immature and pathetic. Don't let other people tell you what you're allowed to be into like that. Own your interests. But also, I swear, all the stuff people go around declaring is "gay" is generally good stuff that'll make you a better person, and being a better person is, if I missed it, also good for your love life, by the way. So just quick-firing my way through a few of these...

"Being kind and considerate is gay!" We already covered this one. Nah, being nice is just all positives. How is that not just inherently self-evident?

"Cooking is gay!" If you want to be treated like a proper adult, and impress other people, knowing how to feed yourself is a pretty basic thing, and if you learn to cook well, you can cook for other people, which people generally tend to agree with.

"Personal hygiene is gay!" OK so like basic sanitation stuff is again, such an incredibly basic responsible adult thing to practice and you seem like some kind of helpless baby if you don't. Also, you know, sweaty clothes stink, stains in your underwear are disgusting, and so on.

"Fashion is gay!" Not sure how people get the idea that looking cool and stylish has any sort of downside to it.

"Masks are gay!" If you are sick, or you have been around people who are sick, and therefore have potentially caught something from them that hasn't manifested yet but may be contagious, covering your mouth and nose around other people is a basic respectful and responsible thing to do and shows you are a responsible adult interested in others' well-being. And I can't think of any downside that doesn't seem like you're just some sort of whiny adult-sized baby, which nobody wants around.

"Caring about the environment is gay!" OK again, there's all the basic decency and maturity angles here, but since I'm aiming this in particular at like, heterosexual guys who want to get married and have kids and all that, let me again remind you about the importance of the whole stability thing. Whatever woman you're hoping to land and have kids with is going to want to have a stable home environment that's nice and comfortable and still going to be there decades later. If your nice home is going to flood from rising ocean levels or become unbearably hot/cold from climate change or you can't freaking eat because such and such's climate has been too wrecked to get it anymore, that's going to suck in the longterm, and if you don't care, well you're a shortsighted loser and that's a big ol' turnoff.

"Liking that She-Ra reboot or whatever is gay!" OK if you are into a show, and it seems like a "girly show" maybe find some of these girls who are into the "girly show" and you can bond over how much you both like it?

I could keep going, but the pattern should be obvious here. For real, it's always stuff it's good to like that some idiot starts claiming "is gay." It's never "driving ridiculous oversized pickup trucks is gay! Think about it, they've got this really wide stance and they're all about taking big loads in the rear!" or "liking Donald Trump is gay, look at all these dudes kissing the ass of their big strong daddy!" or something.

For real though the big dumb pickup truck thing is another one of those things where people have somehow been convinced it's manly when it's actually pathetic. Same with massive SUVs and jeeps and such. There's no actual practical reason to have one of these things. There are situations where it's practical to own a truck, if you actually have some professional reason to... well pack big loads into the rear of it to haul places, but the "manly" ones all suck at that (especially those stupid ugly "cybertruck" abominations. All those giant tailgates way off the ground do is block people's views on the highway, tall vehicles in general are just tip-prone, and while I have no interest in shaming people for their anatomy, the whole "big vehicle to compensate for a 'small penis'" in at least the metaphorical being an insecure little baby sense has been around since before you were born for a reason. If you do have a job where you need to like haul lumber around you get either an old school truck from before they started making them all oversized baby toys, or go for one of those new (or at least, soon to be approved for the U.S.) kei trucks. They're practical and efficient and can get into small spaces and get good mileage and such. Women will be impressed by your practicality. And also think your truck is cute.

Oh and that reminds me of this thing that was making the rounds not too long ago!

I don't know where the hell the idea came from that women find the bodybuilder look attractive? Like sure, everything is SOMEBODY'S fetish, and on an intellectual level I can appreciate the concept of body building on the same level as like being a contortionist or getting full-body tattoos or hundreds of piercings. Just using your body as a canvas and all. But aesthetically, no it's just really gross having a body that looks like a skeleton with a bunch of weird arbitrary round lumps stuck to it and vacuum-packed skin, sorry. And intellectually it's even more off-putting because I know that getting a body like that requires some combination of taking steroids, which have some nasty side effects, messing your diet up, and depriving yourself of water. Real unhealthy stuff you're probably doing to compensate for insecurities.

And hey, speaking of "being strong" and security, a lot of men get hung up on this sort of thing because they "want to be able to protect their families." And like, hey, sure, you want to maintain a level of general physicality where you'd be able to physically carry your loved ones out of a burning building, that's cool, that's practical. But your potential future wife is never going to be attacked by a weight bench. There's a limit to what's practical. And some guys get the idea that they need to own one or more guns, to "protect their families" from... their neighbors arbitrarily deciding to become murderous or something? That one's gonna be an active turn-off. You clearly can't properly assess real threats vs. goofy fantasy scenarios (and you might also be a massive racist or something). The only things anyone really needs protecting from these days are fascism and unchecked capitalism. And like... hey sure, personally I'm asexual but remove those threats from my life and I'll go on a date at the very least. But yeah, getting shredded? Stockpiling munitions? No, those are actively hurting you, dating pool wise.

And... I guess I accidentally saved the best for last maybe but like... don't be afraid of women? So many guys just get a weird complex where they're afraid to even talk to girls, just generally, in their day to day lives? Get out of your head about that. We are normal freaking human beings just like you. You can just have normal conversations with us with no special preparation. Really. The whole treating women like an alien species thing is one of those pickup artist lies to keep you desperate. It's fine.

[wirewitchviolet]

The problem with Gleba

There's a game I'm a big ol' fan of and don't write about enough called Factorio. It's an interesting beast of a game. There's a lot of RTS DNA in it, and a lot of grand logistics puzzle/progammer-brain game. The main appeal is that as a the player, you are running around setting up a giant tangled mess of machines, conveyor belts, and little robot arms to produce large amounts of stuff to feed into research machines, teching up to more on more complex stuff, requiring you to scale up more and more until eventually hitting a win condition, but the more you expand and produce, the more the resulting polution causes your basically-Zerg neighbors to become larger and more aggressive. There's a really great inherent push and pull to this where if you're new to the game and just kinda struggling along, you generally have a lot more leeway on enemy aggression, and if you're really confidently rushing through (or just seriously overbuilding all your production), big deadly attacks roll in super early and you'll have to be way more aggressive about defenses.

Back in October, Factorio got an expansion, which I described while streaming it as the sort of expansion that's for "real Factorio sickos only." It makes the game significantly longer and more difficult, mainly in that normally, you advance through 5 flavors of science packs, each more of a challenge to produce at the rate you'd like, then head off into space. In the expansion, you can get into space with just the first 3 science flavors, but to hit the new victory condition, you need to be producing the original 5, plus an additional 5, one produced on orbital space platforms and the rest each coming from setting up bases on 4 new planets, each of which basically require you not only to start your big setup from scratch, but have their own resoruces, tech trees, and obstacles, meaning you end up playing 5 variations of the base game, simultaneously, and an extra logistical challenge in tying their science outputs together.

As a real Factorio sicko myself, I love this, for the most part. I have long since mastered the base game to the point where it's fairly trivial for me to get a thriving base going on what's now just the starting planet, and set up defenses that won't hold up INDEFINITELY without any further input from me (places to mine up the most basic resources do eventually run dry and one must push out into the map to set up new outposts now and then). So hitting a point where I have to just step away from my primary base and spend several hours setting things up on new planets is a cool change of pace.

And of the new planets, three of them are just fine. There's a volcanic planet where there's no water with which to set up the usual early game steam power nor the late game nuclear plants, nor can you mine for the iron and copper you need to produce basically everything in the game. The big challenge is figuring out the new tech tree and how to get the basics set up, then in realizing just how incredibly generous this new tech tree is with everything, and how much more efficiently you can set everything up, and the normal enemies that would be harassing you have no real equivalent. There ARE stupifyingly large and tough new enemies, but they won't come to you. They camp out around the map, guarding their personal territory, and requiring you to essentially handle a boss fight every time you need more territory to set up your stuff or harvest finite resources (but honestly, in practice, you'll need to expand in this just once, most likely).

Another planet's main hook is that literally the only resources to work with come from setting up your mining drills on the ruins of a long-dead civilization, pulling up an odd slurry of what in the base game are end-game resources. Complicated electronics, fuel, and superstructure materials just come out of the ground, and need to be broken down in recyclers for the actual base resources, which is just sort of hilarious. And the real puzzle is you have this mixed slurry of all these resources you need to sort out, then also deal with the incredibly unbalanced ratio, and find some way to keep the resource pipeline flowing and not getting gummed up with all that concrete and super advanced electronics you don't actually need that many of. And the final planet, only unlockable after mastering the rest, needs a good interplanetary logistics network as you need to important damn near everything from elsewhere.

All of this is great. Head to a new planet, spend a couple hours puzzling out it's quirks and how to set up a new rocket platform, its required inputs for perpetual rocket launches, and how to produce each planet's science flavor to send home. Then since it's been a few hours since you've checked on your main base, you head back, do some maintenance, maybe move some mines, maybe take a moment to make upgrades everywhere as each planet also has some infrastructural stuff that can't be made anywhere else, giving you better production structures and faster conveyor belts and so forth you might want to use everywhere. But then there's Gleba.

The gimmick of Gleba is it's the biological planet. There's no metal to work with (technically). No oil. Solar power doesn't even work particularly well. So like the volcano planet, you have to reinvent the wheel with everything using a new tech tree where you harvest two types of fruit, throw them into a series of goop-filled tanks powered by "nutrients" rather than electricity, and various combinations of byproducts your tanks spit out let you make literally everything you're ever going to need. In fact, a properly set up Gleba base becomes a perfect closed system, circulating seeds back to the two fruit farms for an infinite suppy, producing all the nutrients required to keep everything running, and enough surplus production of some form or another to feed into incinerators to provide electricity for the few things that still need it (basically just the inserters moving things from one tank to another).

And then there's the downsides. First, and this is a real serious problem for anyone dealing with this for the first time, Gleba has a real serious problem of "what the hell am I even looking at?" Everywhere else, there's pretty clear divisons between flat open ground, cliffs, some sort of liquid, and whatever useful resources you can harvest, without anything else really factoring in. And then here's Gleba.

I love the visual variety, but for comparison's sake, the base game looks like this:

It is very clear where the water is, it is very clear that there is a big patch of copper you can mine up. Meanwhile in these Gleba screenshots, you can't make out where the important resources are (a bit of a cheat because I didn't actually include the biomes where either of the plants that matter grow), and it's honestly quite hard to tell where the water is (I'm PRETTY SURE there's some in every screenshot, and probably a lot more than you'd think as it looks real different when very shallow)... oh and almost all water on Gleba is shallow to various degrees so you can't even go by what's walkable, you'll only really notice an area is flooded when you try to place stuff on it. It will probably take you quite some time before you can even successfully identify what's important, where it comes from, and where you have enough dry land to set your base up. And during that time you'll probably start dealing with the second complication.

Everything rots on Gleba. Well, almost everything. Stuff you build is fine, but the two important fruits, their intermediary peeled forms, the main intermediary material you make from mashing them together, the nutrients that power everything, the bacteria that you need to breed for your basic metal supplies, the one ingredient I haven't mentioned, and even the science packs you're eventually going to be exporting decay over time. Fresh picked fruit spoils in an hour. Peeled fruit and nutrients only last a few seconds. And once stuff rots, generally, you have this completely different item called spoilage, which is going to gum up all your automation by blocking conveyor belts or the input slots of machines and it can be pretty difficult to clear out.

Also as some things decay VERY quickly, any number of problems can cause something vital to spoil in transit, like say the nutrient supply to getting fruit initially processed, or the nutrients powering your production of nutrients, and everything's going to grind to a halt. Including the little inserters that move stuff to the burners providing power to those very inserters. So it's not at all uncommon when setting stuff up on Gleba that one tiny thing will be wrong, maybe as you cut off a belt to reroute it for a change in your overall design, everything rots, the whole base dies, and you have to go around clearing out rotted gunk from literally everything by hand, hand-produce a few nutrients from said rotted gunk, and slowly manually restart everything. Meanwhile we have the last issue to worry about.

Gleba is the one planet other than the one you start on with aggressive enemies to worry about. And there's a lot more to worry about from them. As the above sizzle real shows, they're significantly tougher on an individual level, but also, having these cool stretchy legs, they ignore all terrain. So you can't funnel them to choke points with walls, and they're likely to skim over water you can't build on in their approach. So you just sort of have to have a huge amount of standing firepower where they're likely to attack, which will only be your tree farms (and the path they need to take to them) which will be two very remote locations that are more or less completely flooded out... and your defenses most likely will require a lot of electricity, which is hard to get.

Also that last ingredient you have to worry about rotting? These things' eggs. Yeah both the buildings you use to produce everything on Gleba, and the science packs you eventually export, require the eggs of the local monsters to produce. Good news is, you really just need to risk your life attacking their nests to run off with a couple to start with, since you can make more eggs from eggs without too much trouble, but if one sits around for a few minutes without being processed, it hatches, and now there's a bunch of baby monsters freaking out in the middle of your base. And more importantly, after you clean that resulting mess up, you have to go on another super dangerous safari to get fresh eggs.

Now, individually, I actually love all this. There's some delightful cruelty and the puzzle of working out how to keep everything from rotting and clogging everything up in a fail-safe way is pretty neat. But putting it all together, there's two big things here that just feel real real bad.

First there's the pollution system that makes me love the base game so much. If I'm barely mining and producing stuff, I'm not causing a lot of pollution, so enemies aren't getting big and scary. If I make some huge mistake like, oh, running my whole base on coal power, scaling up a ton, and forgetting that I'm just plain not bringing enough coal in to sustain that, and my entire base de-powers and grinds to a halt, that's pretty bad, but I am producing zero pollution until I get it back online. If some small part of my factory stops working, because I'm massively overproducing something or I'm under-producing something, some machines are just going to stop doing anything until they get what they need, or have a place to dump their stuff, and even mines will stop mining if their output backs up.

Gleba... doesn't work that way. When anything goes wrong in any way, you go from having a ton of stuff you've produced to having a ton of spoilage. Or if you have some safety valves, you are suddenly tossing a massive overproduction of eggs or science or something straight into the furnace. But you're always going to be planting and harvesting the important plants (unless all your fruit rots on the line and there's no seeds to plant) whether you're really doing useful things with that fruit or not, and that's the one and only thing that generates "pollution" (officially it's spores that smell really delicious as a byproduct of harvesting). So catastrophes that end up being more of a full reset than a pause still leave you with jacked up pollution and much deadlier attacks, and that self-balancing difficulty just doesn't happen.

The other big problem, and this may be a bigger one, is you're really discouraged from tweaks and experimentation. You really are just sort of forced to fully design and deploy your entire Gleba base, with every emergency pressure valve and contingency, and the full production line to producing the final products you're shipping offworld before you even "plug it in" and start the actual plant harvesting. You can't really slowly build it up as you go (largely because you kinda get all your power by burning overproduction at the end), making a tiny change is going to make something start starving or backing up which can cause a disaster within seconds, and you either need to really really carefully manage ratios, or commit to massive overproduction and burning everything (spiking the difficulty).

So the first time you ever set up a base on Gleba, you're probably going to spiral into a failure state and need to reload from when you first landed there, maybe several times. But once you know what a functioning base looks like, either from your own trial and error or copying from someone else, you're going to have a nice little blueprint saved of this very nice compact efficient closed-loop base you can just stamp down on future play-throughs, hook up, and basically never have to look at again, ever. I was prompted to write this because I'm doing my second run of the expansion, got set up real quick here, and it's going to be a couple hours still before my defenses even get tested. Meanwhile I have basically all the Gleba research done already. There's no middle ground here between overwhelming and frustrating and a totally dull turn-key setup. Which is a huge shame!

Of course I'm also saying that before testing my defenses. The other inherent problem with Gleba is that from the moment you set foot on it, you do inherently have two planets with a steadily increasing difficulty modifier. Plus the science rots. So you are always going to have to divert SOME mental processing cycles to babysitting it at least a little bit even after you've solved the planet, even if it's just remembering to clean rotting science out of the labs on your starting planet here and there. And that really makes it into something you're still going to want to put off visiting for as long as possible even after playtest response to it being such a nightmare lead to the developers locking all sorts of cool researchable goodies behind it.

And then thing that really bothers me about all this is I can't really think of an easy fix for it. The closed loop where overproduction gets burnt is too conceptually foundational to really mess with. The cascading difficulty spike you could maybe fix by tying it to space launches and not basic production (rockets ignite methane in the air and freak the locals out)? Make solar work OK or take inserters out of the equation maybe by just letting belts feed directly into and out of the important machines here? If nothing else it'd certainly help if coastlines were more obviously marked in some way.

Also like... I'm not an outlier griping about this. Everyone hates Gleba. I just want to be the weird contrarian who thinks no, rotten planet is super rad, you should head there first even, get all that cool stuff to use elsewhere but... no there really are problems with it that are always gonna suck.

[wirewitchviolet]

How to Deal with Suicidal People

That's a pretty spicy title I have on this post, isn't it? Pretty sure between that and the tags, most people who follow me aren't going to see this one, there's a good chance tumblr will filter it out of people's feeds too, and if I link it on other sites, that'll probably get vanished the same way. That's pretty common when this subject gets raised, and if someone says or gives the impression they're going to do the thing that's so taboo in that title that we have to hide it from people, THAT sets off flags to do all kinds of stuff like lock someone out of their own account for a while, maybe send them an automated e-mail with some weird copy-paste message about how concerned the detection algorithm is for them and the number for a hotline or two. And this is all a huge huge problem when it comes to prevention.

Cards on the table here, a big part of why I'm writing this is that a moderator somewhere just kinda contacted me out of the blue the other day to inform me, more or less, A- that I come across as something of a downer, just kinda generally, nothing specific or recent, B- I am enough of one that people are pretty generally convinced it's likely I may die by my own hand, and C- I need to go away so nobody has to watch if I do, specifically noting "no one here is equipped or trained to deal with life or death situations."

Now at this point, I had two main thoughts. Three if you count "WTF?" Because again, this wasn't about anything recent from me. I had actually been having one of the better days I'd had in quite some time, and wow did suddenly having THIS pop up just completely wreck my day. If I'd actually been in a dangerous state of mind, something like this would be very likely to give me that last push over the edge. So very much let's keep this in the "don't do this" box. But the other thought I had was "Well I mean, I'm here, and I'm happy to train people a bit on this." Which, you know, is why I'm writing this blog post. Because as I understand it I'm not welcome in that community there just now and all.

So yeah, bit of a disclaimer, I do not, in fact, have any sort of formal training from anyone in suicide prevention. Purely self-taught. But I have an inordinate amount of experience with this particular subject (I spent the better part of a year back in 2014 just sort of volunteering as an on-call up-all-night emotional support for anyone I saw that might need one, and talked a whole lot of people through some real dangerous nights), and quite frankly I don't think the sort of people with specific training on this that people are so often quick to note they don't have on hand do not actually exist. In fact, let's start off with that, because here's some more big ol' don'ts to keep in mind.

Plainly, the first thought nearly everyone has when they get it in their heads that someone is seriously at risk of doing something maybe is to shove a hotline in their face, and I am reasonably certain absolutely nobody who does this has actually called such a hotline themselves nor even really put a lot of thought into what happens when one actually calls one of these.

The reason hotlines exist... not even this specific sort of hotline, I'm talking about the entire concept of any hotline, is that if someone is dealing with an emergency, they can call this number and talk to someone about it right the hell now. Like, 911 is a hotline. If your house is on fire, you want to get hold of someone who can help with fires right at that moment. You don't want to be asking around to see if anyone you know has a big hose, you don't want to be waiting until normal business hours the next day, right now.

Thing is, there is no big hose you can hook up to a thing on the street and spray someone with a big blast of Want To Keep Being Alive Juice. The best we can manage here is "here is someone who is willing to talk to anyone who calls this here phone number we are telling people to call if they feel suicidal and need to talk to someone about it in an emergency." The person at the other end is going to be Just Some Volunteer. They aren't going to have any special secret knowledge. They aren't particularly likely to have any other resources to point you at. In my experience they aren't even given as much advice as I'm trying to give here. It's just someone who has signed on to talk to very depressed and desperate people, who have nobody else to talk to, and hopefully someone else around to pass the phone to if they can't deal with the psychic damage they volunteered to tank.

The key part of that though is having nobody else to talk to. Imagine you're having just the worst day. Someone you know died you lost your job and the top scoop of your ice cream cone just fell off right over a sewer grate. You maybe wanna cry, you definitely want someone to just be nice to you and maybe try to help with that, but you're not going to just like... lock eyes with the next person you see on the street, run up to them, and start bawling your eyes out, right? You're going to want to talk to a friend or family member, or several such. You want to snuggle your pets. This is a basic concept, yeah? This is something everyone just intuitively understands? OK, so stop telling people you know to call a hotline! Talk to them yourself! You are the superior option, and the hotline is a stopgap for if you aren't there!

And you know, since I'm trans, I can't really avoid the elephant in the room here and note that Trans Lifeline isn't even a hotline. If you tell someone to call that number, in particular, you need to know that you are setting up a situation where the person you are talking to, when in a really dangerous state of mind, is going to call a number everyone constantly posts, navigate a short phone tree, hear a ring, and then have a recorded message explain that there is nobody there to talk to and they should maybe try calling back on a weekday between 10 AM and 6 PM Pacific. Generally people who are considering not being alive in a serious way and having nobody to talk to about it are in that dangerous mental space pretty late at night, or maybe on a weekend when there's less routine stuff to stay distracted. And there are few things worse when you're desperate for someone to talk to than a recording that the anti-suicide staff don't have time for you.

The non-trans numbers of course are also really bad to push on trans people because I don't know if you've noticed this but the average person is kinda totally clueless about trans people, and will at best probably have a lot of really clueless and invasive questions and suggestions informed by terrible stereotypes and such, so I wold not recommend pushing that number on people either. The number to give people, to once again reiterate my point here, is YOUR NUMBER. Tell your sad friends they can call you absolutely any time, not to worry about waking you up or interrupting them, and really sell them on how OK it is for them to do so. Definitely do this with friends, and honestly, if you think you can handle it and aren't exposing yourself to someone dangerous, go ahead and make an offer like that to people you barely know, or people you have until that point had a one-sided relationship with, like they write a comic you like or something. Still beats a total rando at the other end of a phone who's been getting trauma dumped on them for hours by other people already.

The next big pitfall is a lot of people get this idea that if someone has been really depressed and seemed like they might do something bad and you haven't heard from them in a bit, there's that thing you can do right, where you call the police and have them "do a wellness check" on someone? NEVER DO THIS. This is a whole separate point here so I don't want to dwell on it too much, but aside from self-selecting for violent bigots who want to throw their weight around, all cops are given "training" that traumatizes the hell out of them and teaches them to expect being ambushed by people trying to randomly kill them 30 times in a given day, and then also given guns. So if you have a cop go "check on" someone it's going to lower the odds of them killing themselves only in that it is dramatically increasing the odds that some trigger-happy terrified-out-of-his-mind-at-all-times cop will freak out and murder them. And even the best case scenario (someone once "wellness checked" me because I went to bed super early and wasn't answering my phone) it is an absolutely terrifying experience just having someone pounding madly on your front door and saying it's the police.

Our final maybe questionable idea is pushing therapy on someone. Now to be clear, I do generally think that finding a good therapist is a good idea in general, and if someone is very depressed it's a particularly good idea because hey, here's this person clearing out an hour or so every week just to talk to you about whatever sucks in your life, but if we're specifically talking about the big S word, it can be dicey? Depends on the therapist, depends on the person, but there are some situations where someone will go "oh hey you seem suicidal, I'm arranging for you to go spend some time in a mental hospital" and mental hospitals kinda really really suck and are nightmarish and basically never the right plan. I'm lucky enough to have one who isn't inclined to hit me with that, but if you've gotten this far I bet you can guess what her fix is if I'm seeming disinclined to continue living. That's right! Talk to friends more!

So there's our big don'ts and our maybe-don't covered. How about the dos. There's really just kinda the one. If you think someone is maybe suicidal, be really damn nice.

Basically, people get suicidal when Stuff Is Really Bad, they can't think of anything that can fix it, and it feels like just existing is doing harm in some way to someone. If you can actually help someone with problems they can't fix, that's cool, but it's still good to just talk. Someone's clearly depressed, maybe actually asking for help? OK, pull'em aside for a private conversation. Do the real active listening thing. You have nothing else you're doing, you can talk as long as the need. You like this person, you know this person is generally well liked in whatever community/space you're both in. I'm personally against lying so if one of these things definitely isn't true I'm not going to pretend it is, but the point is, you're being welcoming, you're there for'em, you're really listening to their problems.

If this is someone you don't know, feel free to try and fix that, work out what they like to do, get'em talking about that. Hopefully it's something neat and you can say so and get'em geeking out about it. Maybe share relatable experiences to what they're dealing with. Maybe offer some nice distractions, like you go watch a movie together or play a game or something. Just get the person's brain onto any other track. And when someone inevitably has to sleep, remind them you're up for this sort of talk whenever. Maybe proactively check in the next day and a bit after that. Mostly though, yeah, just be kind, be welcoming, actively listen. Anyone can do this, it doesn't take special training, and I have never missed with it.

[wirewitchviolet]

Mrs. Doubtfire isn't real and can't hurt you.

This is a point I feel like I've made before on several occasions, but if so, it's one people haven't paid attention to, so I don't especially mind repeating myself. Bigots are really good at doing this thing where they realize if they just said what they meant outright, nobody would support them, because the things they mean are just plainly evil crap without any upside. So you know, obvious example, they hate Black people and want society segregated they never see anyone who isn't dead-worm white, but they NEVER say "everyone with darker skin than mine should be fired from every job and banned from every school," they instead do weird cryptic mental gymnastics about it. Hmm... forever ago people noticed that white supremacists routinely reject applicants who aren't white (and for that matter, men, cis, straight, this one is a bit of a catch-all) and instituted policies where you can't throw out obviously more qualified applicants in the name of white supremacy. "Ooh, what if we twist that around! Make it sound like people are being forced to take inferior people to meet fiendish quotas that don't take into account the needs of employers and schools! As long as we don't outright say we mean 'inferior races' and 'our need to only ever see fellow white guys' it actually sounds like a good thing! And of course this one has been such a winner with them for so long that many many times now people have caught onto it and they've had to change out for fresh euphemisms (Integration, Affirmative Action, Forced Diversity, DEI...)

And of course when the weird euphemism thing doesn't get any push back against it, and gets into that sweet spot where people seem to know that sure SOME people beating that drum are being bigots with it but it's plausible that that's a minor faction and most of the moral outrage, surely, is about something actually worth getting upset about, they do their best to switch over to whatever it is people are responding to and reframe all their arguing around that. They're still TARGETING whatever minority, but just straight up lie about why. The two most obvious examples that come to mind: Bigots hate queer people. They fumble around for a euphemism and settle on "sexually deviant" or whatever. They shout about that until people go "oh you mean like CSA?" They go "yeah, sure!" and just start claiming every teacher they're trying to get fired for being gay is a pedophile. Or they hate women having sexual agency. They fumble around, get to 'loose women' and move from there to sex workers, bit more workshopping and listening to feedback, and you end up with people shouting about women posting topless photos or hell writing spicy fan fiction are "part of human trafficking rings." And of course the people really pushing these things who do know what they're talking about are going to switch back when it's time to influence policies or rile up mobs.

The proper way to push back against that sort of crap is of course to break these links between the bigotry and the lies. Focus on how the accusations are just complete fabrications from malevolent weirdos. You don't start quoting statistics, you don't point out how "sometimes they even say this about straight teachers!" You don't start looking up statistics about sex offenders who teach and go "so even if he was..." That would be ridiculous, decidedly unhelpful,and actively reinforce the association they're inventing to recruit people.

Keeping all that in mind, I don't actually know if there has been one single time in my life I've ever heard a real diehard transphobe use the word "trans" in a sentence. They switched to pure lies mode decades ago. It's always calling women men and sometimes calling men women. They never have to do any work to reinforce the association because... everyone else does it for them?

Some bigot starts screaming about how there's "men in dresses sneaking into women's bathrooms!" and "men pretending to be women to win sporting events!" "Men are taking performance enhancing estrogen to win at chess and StarCraft and beauty contests!" etc. People who can understand hardcore transphobe code-talk but don't understand why they use it then correctly identify that when they say "men" they always mean "trans women" then will just jump out there, consistently, with stuff like "hey if we were really talking about a man competing here, guess what, men don't actually have any sort of advantage over women in this field!" which just strengthens the false association. Even with the people jumping in on this!

Taking this to absurd extremes for instance, here's a story from this week: A 31 year old woman apparently learned via a dedicated nazi website that a 19 year old woman she would be matched against at some point was trans, and proceeded to stage and film a stunt wherein she gave a big speech and forfeited rather than compete against her. She was rightfully disqualified for this, but was immediately given a $5000 check from an anti-trans organization for her PR service. There are so very many ways to cover this, the simplest and let's be real most honest would be "paid nazi activist forfeits fencing tournament to create inflammatory video," or something along those lines.

But naturally, everyone I've seen talking about this is just going in with this downright Pavlovian response with their "well a man wouldn't have an advantage..." spiel, but hey, thing is? I said hardcore transphobes do that "man" code-switching but this is more of an amateur. They're not calling her a man, just letting "defenders" do that for them... and the real kicker of it is the nazi pulling the stunt here regularly DOES compete against men. This is the rare instance of just naked transphobia... but again, STRONG association, people are trained.

I would say we wouldn't even be having this conversation with any other bigotry, but honestly? That "just say a man" tactic is so effective it actually DOES get deployed about other minorities pretty regularly. At least if we look at the stuff that gains traction, I swear the ratio of BS I see tossed around about girls "really being men" in sporting events is maybe targeting trans girls like... 5% of the time? Then another 5% targeting trans guys and the odd nonbinary person in a particularly confused and confusing fashion, and past that it's like an even split of claiming that someone is trans because she's Black/Asian/a white girl who regularly hits the gym and keeps her hair pretty short.

What we should all get in the habit of doing with this is refuse to do the work for the bigots, and force them to either say the quiet part out loud or fold on their absurd lies. Because wow this isn't even like the sex offender stuff. The crimes bigots keep shouting about aren't something that happens and we should do something about it, with trans women being lumped in with the real perpetrators. These are fully fictional crimes being invented and pinned on fully fictional people.

The first time the whole bathroom predator thing was making the rounds, someone bothered to run the stats and found... literally zero instances of either trans women OR "men in dresses" assaulting people in public bathrooms. That's just not a thing that happens. People absolutely get assaulted in bathrooms, but you know, generally this involves some guy, without a disguise, just walking into a women's room because like... they can just do that? There's no magical force fields, or security guards, or cameras, or even laws against it (well, laws less than like 10 years old, the panic's gotten results and all). Or a woman going into the men's room. Probably some instances of cis gay or bi people getting up to things, or stuff happening in unisex bathrooms, but... yeah this whole deception angle just Is Not A Thing.

Also not a thing? Men pretending to be women to win at sports. Women get accused of being men pretty regularly, as mentioned above. It's a racism thing mainly. People shout about it enough that various forms of gender testing have been a thing forever. Most of these historically have just flat out consisted of sexually assaulting whoever some racist creep points an accusatory finger at. More recently the standard has generally been to go by testing testosterone levels, since that's the (pseudo-) scientific basis for men having an edge (which frequently doesn't statistically bear out) and... not only does that only ever "catch" a handful of pretty clearly cis women, they tend to have to move the goalposts to get those positives. So you get stuff like Caster Semenya having "too much testosterone" for the 800 meter dash but she's still A-OK for the 400 meter, 1200 meter, or like any sort of relay? They just lowered the value to below her level because... again, straight up obvious racism.

You know what else just does not ever happen in real life? Men dressing up as women to trick other men into having sex with them. Catfishing is a real thing. Drugging people is a thing. Secretly taking condoms off is a thing. People deciding to ignore it when people withdraw consent is a thing. People making various incorrect assumptions about people they're into and asking them out is a thing. Sometimes in both ways! I know I've heard some "this guy thought I was a girl and I thought he was gay" stories and at least one "I thought this girl was a guy and she thought I was a girl" sorta thing once, but these are very much "we flirted for like 10 minutes before realizing so that was pretty embarrassing" stories. But that's about it?

Oh and the Panic Defense is absolutely a thing, but I don't know of any cases where it's ever been claimed in an honest fashion. You get stuff where some cis person decides they're going to go a bit outside their usual comfort zone and hook up with a trans person (or gay, or bi, but I feel like that's increasingly less common), so they use some queer-specific dating app to find one of the rare trans people actually willing to ever date cis people. They hook up, they enjoy it, but then either they have some kind of panic attack because whatever internalized queerphobia made this "an adventure" for them, or more likely other people they know who are significantly more bigoted find out one way or another (this was the case with that recent high profile horrific murder of a trans guy in New York), they freak out and get judgey (or jealous), and someone kills the innocent person in question, because that somehow undoes their earlier decision by some backwards bigot logic somehow.

I'm also unaware of any real instances of a man pretending to be a woman to trick the producers of a soap opera into hiring him, get cheaper housing along with a roommate, see his kids after his wife leaves him for Pierce Brosnan in the guise of a nanny, enter the service of a duke, go undercover as the female lead singer of a popular band to throw off giant space bugs looking for an accomplished guerilla fighter, attend the all-girls school their grandmother for some reason insisted they attend as a dying wish, pretend to be wealthy socialites after the real ones backed out of being used as bait for kidnappers, or uh... whatever increasingly weirdly specific examples I'm forgetting.

EVERYTHING I've mentioned I've seen in fiction though, where writers just makes up ridiculous premises and don't double check if they'd actually work. Hell the sports thing was done by both The Simpsons AND Futurama years before bigots started claiming it was really happening. So I dunno, maybe instead of playing along with hypotheticals we just say "that doesn't happen in real life, are you thinking of something you saw on a TV show? Do you think there's astronauts out there marrying genies and vampires dating high schoolers?" You know they can't reply with real examples, so just call the lie and point out how ridiculous it is.

This also works for a lot of stuff that actually IS trying to target trans people without the gender-swapping code talk. There's been a lot of recent traction trying to make bigoted declarations based on whether someone is "a biological woman" or whatnot. And like... trans women are biologically women. By any definition of "biological woman" I can think of. Again, just ridicule the premise. Ask what the hell a non-biological woman would even be, a Barbie doll? Do they, again, think Mrs. Doubtfire is real perhaps? Again just stop doing their work for them, make them say what they really mean and then point out how it's obviously nonsensical garbage with no basis in reality. We can all do this.

[wirewitchviolet]

Sudokuvania: Digits of Despair is one of the most impressive works of pure game design I have ever seen.

Before I say anything else, I am going to be talking about a game that is VERY new and has pretty terrible search optimization, so in case this blog post somehow came up near the top of results for someone, here is the as-of-this-writing-current 1.02 release, and for good measure, here is the official FAQ page with the full version history, any future patches, and an FAQ for some of the more confusingly worded stuff that crops up later into the game. Now on with the praise-heaping!

So... Sudokuvania pretty much exactly what the name implies. It's a -vania, that is, a Metroidvania, and specifically one styled after one of the ones that's actually in the latter Castlevania series so that naming convention actually makes sense. Exploring a big castle, fighting bosses, getting various items letting you explore more areas, maybe breaking out of the borders of the map to find cool secrets here and there.

Also, it's a variant of sudoku. And I don't mean someone sat down with some videogame designing toolkit and made a videogame where some of the gameplay is solving logic puzzles on a grid you fill with numbers (I mean, I guess technically I do). I mean that link to the game I posted takes you to a website with a little built in standard app for solving sudoku puzzles and weird variations thereof, and the particular puzzle it's pointing to, somehow, manages to have a big map to explore, boss fights, special items that give you new powers, NPCs, and for good measure, fog of war. It is, again, an absolutely amazing hacky thing and I'm flabbergasted at how well executed it is. Now you're probably wondering how that even works, and that's why I'm writing this big gushy blog post. Here's what you see when you first load it up:

You're going to notice there is some absurdly small and kind of important text you can't possibly read, and that's because again, this is kind of a hacky thing this site so was not designed for. So it's kind of annoying but if you access this through the proper introduction page, it'll explain that the first thing you need to do is click the little gear icon in the floating tool palette, toggle on Visuals: Draw arrows above lines and Disable emoji replacement, then scroll all the way down to Experimental and turn on Test Large Puzzle UI. That enables you to zoom in and out with the scroll wheel, and right-click drag to pan around. It's... a little clunky because again, this website was NOT built for this, but tada, now you can zoom in, read the text, and start solving at a reasonable size. Then there's a couple gameplay concepts it does its best to explain, but... most people I've shown it to myself included needed extra explanation of a couple important early concepts. So let me just do a little color coding here to make this easier to get...

The map is not, in fact, one great big grid. It's 9 squares (and one rectangle that's not quite square over on the east side). Each of these is its own 9x9 Sudoku grid (well, the starting one is 6x6 and has those mutant 2x3 cells instead of the usual 3x3, and there's that weird eastern mutant). If you're solving stuff in one square, you completely ignore everything outside that square, except for where they overlap, in which case the numbers you're placing have to fit for both puzzles. So if we look at the light grey/green intersection on the left, those three overlap cells respectively can't be 4 6 or 5 (and whatever use you deduce in the grey box, but the pure green cells completely ignore all that, you're just focusing on the green 9x9 (which is going to have the overlap as a starting point, naturally).

The next bit that through me off a ton is the way fog of war works. Let me reasonably zoom in and do a little solving here. One second...

Here's the whole starting area all marked up to hell like you do when you're kinda bad at Sudoku and don't know how to spot a starting point. Penciling in little numbers in the corners. You'll also notice a that... most of the map is covered in this dark grey fog of war. A lot of in-game stuff mentions that you shouldn't go clicking out into the fog of war, because it'll show you names of later areas and preview certain special rules and all, but that's talking about clicking WAY off from what you can see. You are 100% allowed to solve stuff out in the fog of war, and it's pretty stingy about de-fogging. Don't go blindly guessing because then you can maybe end up sequence breaking but... yeah. Sorry I'm spoiling the Front Gate, it's basically the tutorial though. Anyway, first move is obvious, only one place we can put that 6, and suddenly...

Tada, important space so it rewarded us with a little fog clearing. You can also see that this will handily point out stuff in your pencil notes that can't be true, but only if A- it's untrue for standard sudoku reasons not special stuff, and B- it's not in the fog of war (or on the other side of some. You also maybe noticed that weird green thing under that first hint 6? That's something we need a tool for, you don't worry about it until you have that tool. Solving this out some more...

Little more de-fogging, both of the puzzle area and the margins where we're getting new information on playing the game in general. Now right here if you're observant, you'll see that bottom right corner has to be a 6. It's out in the fog of war, but you can mark it if you know what it is. And...

I was cropping it out before but the big purple number pad is always floating off to the side there, and the green text box over it, which among other things has an area name and flavor text for whatever grid you're in. This won't ALWAYS happen when you place numbers in fog of war, but there was a trigger on this 6 to load in a little piece of the first real area, and oh hey, we unlocked "Guide THERMO!" That's our first tool, and it's described up in the upper left.

So tada, from here out in addition to standard sudoku stuff, you've got these "bronze Guide THERMOs" that show up here and there and have this extra rule. You basically never get free numbers in the grid past the Front Gate, it's all slow-marching into new areas using what you're bringing in plus some easy starting examples of how your new tools work, plowing on from there. The fog of war is pretty stingy but it keeps you focused. You'll also notice the rules here mention bosses, all the 9x9 ones have one. It's clearly marked, and you should PROBABLY expose it from the fog first, but any time you're in the area really you, if you scroll around in that green text box or hit the rules button when in a grid, there's a link you can click to go fight it. The boss fights are all separate puzzles (site's good about auto-saving so don't freak out if it takes over your tab and you have to hit back after). These are very themey, sometimes VERY evil (especially boss #1, feels a bit overtuned) self-contained 9x9 puzzles, probably using the same tools their area is themed around, and I don't think there's a single pre-placed number in any of them. Beat the boss puzzle, it gives you some flavor text and a number to place in its cell back in the main castle puzzle, plug that in and you're always going to unlock something cool. Usually a new item, sometimes other weird stuff, and it just goes on like that.

Don't expect to be able to fully solve a given grid in one go. It's a Metroidvania, backtracking is expected. Even if you've fully de-fogged a grid, later stuff might reward you by straight up adding new symbols you couldn't see before or doing weird stuff with fog. It IS all solvable with pure logic... but there ARE a few places that do that thing I hate in tougher sudokus where you just kinda have to pencil in in a different faction and explore 2 possible futures for a bit to see which eventually contradicts itself. And of course the last couple of grids do some really evil mind-bendy stuff.

But yeah aside from a couple gripes where the way a tool works could maybe be a lot more grammatically clear, that first boss being a lot to deal with as you're first getting your feet wet, and a particularly cruel twist later on, I don't really have any complaints. Well, it might need a cool soundtrack. Maybe play some Castlevania music. Maybe switch it up for some real proper boss music when you're nearing victory.

Again I am just completely blown away that someone made something so meaty in a standard sudoku site's normal UI, and really managed to make it feel so much like playing a DS Castlevania. Some real proof of game design being an art form here. And now you too can just completely lose a day or two to it!

[wirewitchviolet]

They sell the sizzle, but don't people need to buy the steak?

I'm seeing people passing around a video today of someone showcasing some predictive software "version of Quake" which I'll get around to, and people are having a good laugh at how they previously did a "version of Doom" with this, and now they're moving on to a newer game to try and convince people they're "improving" when the way this scam works, it doesn't matter at all how technically impressive the game it's trying to mimic works, because all its doing is looking at screenshots and trying to guess which comes next.

But that isn't entirely true. Because the FIRST time con artists were trying to wow people with this particular trick, they were using Pac-Man:

And I will admit. When I FIRST saw footage of this... weird moldy version of Pacman where dots you just ate kinda slowly fade back into existence, I was really impressed, because there was narration from a tech nerd who I hope didn't actually understand what was going on trying to explain it and just getting everything wrong. The way this crap actually works is just... looking at screenshots and active input values.

Pac-Man is a single-screen game with EXTREMELY limited inputs, and completely deterministic enemy behavior. If you look at a screenshot of Pac-Man from a video, and you have a stack of other videos of Pac-Man you can look through frame by frame, it is very easy to find an identical frame to what you are looking at, and if you look at the next one in that other video, you can guess what's next in the one I'm showing you. For instance!

I'm pretty sure you, without even having access to a bunch of Pac-Man "training data" can guess what comes in the next frame of the random youtube video I screengrabbed this from, right? The ghosts are all gonna move a little in the directions they're looking, Pac-Man's gonna continue to the left, that mouth is either gonna open or close a little more and that dot that's just a pixel away is going to be eaten. The only way that isn't going to be the case is if the joystick's getting held to the right in the next frame, in which case OK yeah Pac-Man would flip around.

Hey, look at that! I was actually slightly wrong because I forgot Pacman's mouth doesn't actually move on every single frame. That actually helps a lot to explain why in the video above anything with any animation to it looks all moldy. Because the way this works it really is just looking at its sequenced screenshots and trying to find a match, it can't quite make a solid guess on how any animated bits are going to animate and it does this gross smeary average thing. Can't for the life of me figure out why all the dots are smeary too. Maybe when they fed in the source footage like 1 in 10 videos was slightly off-center to the right and it's just averaging that in? But that's how this technology works.

And again, it also has access to current inputs. It needs that to be "playable," right? Otherwise all it would be able to do is show you a video of someone else playing Pac-Man. But yeah if we have it both looking at screenshots AND inputs, then we presumably have a pile of screenshot pairs where Pac-Man continues to the left here, and some smaller set where someone hits right on the next frame, creating the only possible situation where there is another possible result, and that is the only option there.

Assuming, of course, the source footage includes any examples of anyone turning around at that point. Which honestly might not be the case? People rarely just randomly turn around in the middle of a hallway in Pac-Man if there's no ghosts nearby, so honestly odds are really good the "AI generated version" here would just completely ignore your inputs there... or do another weird smeary thing. And it'd definitely probably start getting squirrely if you kept like partially eating rows of dots and turning around, because then you're giving it screenshots that are increasingly far from anything in the database and it's gonna toss out mud or something.

There's other old single-screen arcade games used in early demos of this, which can maybe be more impressive, but if you look at old footage of these things, you'll see stuff like versions of breakout that very explicitly have a trail of pixels behind the ball for an after-image so looking at a single screenshot let's you actually tell which way it's going. Without that, that ball's going basically anywhere.

Anyway these demos of single-screen arcade games from freaking five years ago now are something I can see people investing in. They're BASICALLY functional, for a bit, until you get to situations where there isn't an exact match in the "training data" to present the obvious followup, because really those games don't have a whole hell of a lot of moving parts.

So now that I've explained how this is working, let's see how it handles a game that isn't a simple single screen sort of thing! Actually, can I embed a bluesky post in here these days?

Sorta! Click through, unmute it, and hopefully you can guess what you're gonna see.

Yeah, so there's some stuff that's very consistent. In any recorded footage if someone hits the shoot button, a shot comes out of the gun and a number changes (do I mean the ammo count decrements? Haha no!) so that's pretty consistent. There's gonna be plenty of footage of heading down a hallway, maybe backing up, shifting side to side in this specific starting screen, so yeah, matching one screenshot to the next is consistent-ish. But the second you have a single frame of facing a wall or a dark area you're screwed, because there's no actual game running. Just piles of frames from videos. Any black screen is going to look the same, so we're looking for the next image from any source image that has one, and... the whole thing falls apart. The UI at the bottom theoretically having health and ammo also don't actually do anything, just, every frame of every video consistently has those. If you watch carefully you'll notice that firing the gun changes the health total... for a bit, and then it just kinda drifts back to 100ish, quietly, eventually. Because that's what's there in most of the footage. We don't actually have any values being tracked. It's literally just a game of, find a screenshot in any of the sample footage matching the current frame, then here's the next one best matching the currently held inputs.

Pretty sure I'm preaching to the choir that this is the most pathetic dead end. AT BEST, what this would do is correctly play back a let's play if you had a TAS recreating all the inputs from it properly, but it's probably still going to mess that up (especially if two frames of that video happen to look identical), and if you change one input, well, now we're on another timeline, and if we don't happen to have a video just like that in the pile, it's gonna break. This is why these demos always have strict time limits. Longer it runs the harder it is to find video footage matching every possible set of inputs.

So yeah, if we have infinite monkies hitting infinite inputs eventually we're going to have the footage to simulate playing Quake, as long as there's never an identical hallway or facing a wall or a shadow... but like, why not just take the copy of Quake one of those monkeys has and just play that, and have it actually work right 100% of the time?

The scam being sold of course is the "AI" can spin up a whole game without needing anyone to actually make a game first, and the reality is no, we definitely need someone to make the game first, and then also make a ton of TAS recordings to steal screenshots from (oh and we can't do any sound because you don't want to be trying to predict a "frame of sound." Recreating a music track, sure, having sounds playing over that, don't try this at home).

But here's my real point with this. People have kept this scam going for what, 5 years now? And every time they release a new demo to try and sell it as doing what they claim, it's even more obvious that this is COMPLETELY USELESS GARBAGE, requiring even less expertise and familiarity, and for that matter time, to see how it just completely falls apart.

So I have to ask, how are we still here? If you have carefully curated footage from a specific angle for 10 seconds you can maybe use this snake oil to make something that looks kind of OK if you aren't paying attention, but like... if you convince someone to buy anything based on that, they are going to immediately get their hands on... unusable garbage. And there's no way they're going to convince themselves otherwise, this tech can't do what it promises or really anything else. So I was confused for a second as to how in the world people have kept this scam running as long as it has.

But then it hit me. They aren't selling this to anyone. They're JUST making demos. And they're showing those to venture capitalists who are just dumb as a sack of rocks, and will never listen to a single person who actually gets hands on experience with what they're throwing money at. It really is the thing where you sell the sizzle not the steak, and then just... doing everything they can to make sure nobody ever gets anywhere near a steak because it will just kinda burble and blur out and fade into the ether if they do.

So HOPEFULLY the entire U.S. economy completely collapsing will at least make venture capitalists gun shy enough to quit investing in these con artists and FINALLY the rest of us will get some peace, as a silver lining, from this naked emperor shaking his junk in our faces at all hours for five freaking years at this point?

[wirewitchviolet]

Let's talk about how Ranma is trans in the 2024 anime, part 1

Way the hell back in 2018, after a random exchange with a friend, I sat down and wrote a series of four blog posts where I looked at the manga Ranma ½, which ran from 1988 to 1996, explicitly through a lens where I assumed the protagonist is in fact a trans girl. A major component of the series being that Ranma and several other characters fell into various pools in a cursed set of natural springs causing them to magically change into whatever tragically drowned in one when hit with cold water, then back to their original body with hot, and Ranma fell in the girl one, so it was bound to be a series that would crack a lot of eggs regardless, but my memory of reading it years before transitioning was that it worked on a mundane level too, particularly later. I did somehow forget a bit towards the end where Ranma honestly just kinda straight up comes out of the closet, but I'm not going to link to that panel yet again for the sake of preview links not blending together. Anyway, those posts were already the most popular things I ever put on this blog and have never stopped circulating, despite it being a pretty old and largely forgotten series at the time.

I had always had the idea that I really should go back and also watch the anime adaptation(s) of Ranma, which deviates a good bit from the manga, but that is 161 episodes, 3 movies, and 11 OAVs which are terribly terribly paced, and I don't actually get paid for this. But then lo and behold, here's a brand new anime adaptation coming out decades later, looking really nice, and surely that will deviate even more from the source material, so here I am diving in to find all new bits of gender stuff to talk about, under the fold here and-

Oh. Turns out the new anime series is actually an EXTREMELY faithful adaptation of the original manga and the only deviations I've actually noticed are that there's a little bit less nudity and the one scene with Ranma's breasts fully on display goes the route of not drawing nipples. And really that's only significant because the original anime adaptation somehow got away with that one. Speaking of the original anime run, this adaptation brings back the entire surviving voice cast, and continues the tradition of coloring Ranma's hair red in cold-water form as an extra tell for the audience. And speaking of color, one thing this adaptation does now and then that I really appreciate is punctuating certain scenes with the sort of cool pastel palettes (see above) that were used for the cover illustrations of the original manga.

Another thing the 2024 anime does is throw in a quick little vignette before the opening credits of each episode to restate that Ranma and Akane are engaged, and the feminizing water thing, which mostly feels like it's there as just a little extra emphasis that regardless of all the other shenanigans going on, those two are the one actual couple and making it clear that the rest of the tangled web of crushes and obsessions don't really matter. Something I feel like this adapatation is keen to emphasize in general. In fact, being as nearly 1 to 1 an adaptation as it is, the title of every episode is directly lifted from the chapter names of the manga, so we can just slap together a little infographic and see what's getting compressed a bit and what's getting the time it needs to breathe!

We're chewing through the extended fight scenes pretty quick and slowing down any time Akane's having an emotional moment or some time in the spotlight basically. Which makes sense since the action scenes in the manga are like all full page splash images with a word of text and need to be flowing quickly, and because we have the benefit of hindsight knowing that the Kunos become irrelevant real quick. We're also squeezing out a little early identity crisis stuff for Ranma in the process (there's an early dream sequence after first meeting Kuno, coming to grips with the whole "since I'm a girl, dudes want to sleep with me" realization that barely makes it in and a few early moments of internalized misogyny that get dropped), and we really give Shampoo's debut some space (not QUITE as much as the above suggests, most of episode 10 is wrapping up a three parter on the ice skating with her just punching through the wall as a cliffhanger at the end).

The whole thing is also paced out to nicely cover the first four volumes of the manga, out of 38. They might up the compression rate a little, but as it stands, it's going to take another 8 or 9 seasons to get through everything at this rate. In comparison, my first blog post got through three times this much of it, but the original anime covered only the first half of this in the same episode count (and then for some reason introduced Shampoo and Mousse early and didn't get through the ice skating until episode 27).

Anyway, like I said, this doesn't really change things up enough to have a lot to say about how clearly Ranma is trans. Jumping back to the start though yet again, it really cannot be emphasized enough though just how clearly, even from the very first episode, she is SO much more comfortable presenting as a girl, not at all nervous meeting Akane's family like that, then suddenly super tense and awkward and closed off when interacting with... really anyone while boy-moding. So I guess it's time to bust out some of these other lenses to look at this...

Let's talk about how Akane is gay, part 1

I mean, we've established she's into Ranma, with extra emphasis in this adaptation, and we've established that Ranma is in fact a girl, but that's just the one data point. What else do we have? Well, she's quite explicitly not a fan of guys, particularly guys who are attracted to her, and we're keeping plenty of a focus on that while not wasting time trying to pretend Kuno matters at all in the grand scheme of things. The closest she ever comes to showing interest in a guy is Dr. Kuno, and the anime here is strongly emphasizing how that's less of a real crush and more just emulating her oldest sister (Nabiki of course is also some flavor of queer, and I don't think anyone has ever questioned that) since that's kinda what you do, right? She also gets intensely jealous of the idea of Shampoo kissing Ranma while assuming Ranma is a girl, talks about how hot she is, and hell, at the start of things when everyone's assuming they've somehow gotten into a situation where one of the three sisters has to marry a cis girl, Nabiki points out how that works out perfectly for her. Because she is extremely gay.

Let's talk about how Ryoga is trans, part 1

OK so this isn't the same absolute slam dunk as Ranma turned out to be, but there is a surprisingly strong case to argue that Ryoga is also a trans girl. What do we know about Ryoga after all? Real real socially awkward. Only has one sorta-friend from childhood, who turned out to be trans later. Can we call Ryoga a furry? I'm not even talking about the pig curse, but there's this whole feral wolf vibe before that's even established. In a series where basically every guy who is ever introduced is a horny creep obsessed with rigid gender roles, Ryoga does not bat an eye at seeing women naked (which comes up oddly often), spends a lot of these early arcs hanging out with the gal pals to help practice gymnastics and skating, deals well enough with the pink heart collar and being called Charlotte, and like so many of us, Ryoga is introduced to the series indignantly sputtering about how Ranma's situation shouldn't really be called a curse and is a situation we'd be happy to be in. You could argue that Ryoga's saying this just relative to the pig curse, I guess, but I do at least get the vibe that Ryoga wouldn't be too super worried about finding hot water with that one.

Speaking of the pig curse, I feel like every time I revisit Ranma I have a different perspective on the whole "P-Chan" situation. With this adaptation, it does feel significantly closer to "it's really just this super awkward situation where I've been looking for a good moment to explain and at this point it's been so long she'll probably kill me" than "I am a loathsome sex offender using a disguise to snuggle up with this girl who thinks I am a small animal" and Ranma is doing an appropriate amount of "I'm not going to blurt it out, but you should seriously come clean already" so, glad to know we're downplaying that.

Also, the emphasis on Ranma and Akane as The Couple in this adaptation really makes it clear that Ryoga isn't so much into Akane as just kinda... incapable of conceiving of any sort of existence that doesn't involve being Ranma's rival/friend/polycule member.

Anyway, I guess that's where I have to leave this until the second season drops? Have a patreon link?

[wirewitchviolet]

Controlling the Narrative of Your Own Life

I'm thinking about a lot of things tonight. In no particular order, I'm seeing footage of Elon Musk giving straight-up nazi salutes at Trump's inauguration while he praises him as some kind of genius programmer for "knowing how those voting machines work" and other people talking like he's actually going to put people on Mars despite being quite possibly literally the stupidest and least competent person to have ever lived. I'm seeing just the worst and most badly informed takes on the whole thing with Tiktok's owner putting on a show of shutting it down for a day and pretending this is something he was forced to do but then Trump magically saved it, and that was the day BEFORE the inauguration. I nearly bumped into one of my scariest stalkers, and of course there's the big ol' incident that inspired me to sit down and write this, but I'm building to that one. The point to keep in mind here though is just how absurdly much of a difference it makes when you do and when you don't have control over the narrative about your own life.

Back when I first came out as trans, most people were cool about it and/or thought this was the most obvious revelation ever, but one close family member really could not handle it, and shouted at me, word for word, "I know you better than you know yourself!" Doesn't get much more straightforward an issue than that, does it. Here's me saying "hey, so I've actually been a girl this whole time and just have this hormone imbalance making me look weird and I need to start taking a medication to deal with that." "No you aren't." And there's so many other things like that I've had to deal with. I have so damn many stalkers with so damn many utterly absurd conspiracy theories about me, and I've lost more friends than I can count from them catching wind of those and not bothering to take a moment to verify if there's even the slightest bit of truth to them, but there's one in particular that keeps cropping up, and it sucks in a way you probably wouldn't think it would.

Once upon a time, about a good decade ago, someone who is fairly famous around the world for... reasons that have shifted over the years, had the most massive embarrassing crush on me. I didn't clue into it at the time for quite a few reasons. This guy is a couple decades older than me I'm fairly sure, was married at the time, and lived on the other side of the planet. I DO NOT share photos of myself, so there's nothing to go on visually. And this guy developed this crush RIGHT after I came out as trans, and the concept of anyone being into me was just the most alien concept in the world. And I mean honestly, after a decade on HRT, walking around as a super tall redhead with a chest so big I can't really wear a bra, I still never register that the cat calls I get when I actually leave my apartment and walk around could possibly aimed at me. Plus I'm pretty openly asexual. Everyone should know they're barking up the wrong tree.

But yeah, this guy was totally obsessed with me for the longest time. Did the Twitter equivalent of following me around like a lost puppy, quoted basically every post I made, shouted out to his followers how they should all follow me, constantly DMing me to see what I'm up to, fished for approving comments about the time he wrote a hot trans girl into a TV show of his (this is the first thing he was famous for) despite it never airing in my country, and talking about how he liked protecting girls like me from bullies when I asked why he was always fawning over me (and several other openly trans women). All of whom incidentally were constantly talking about the trans experience, and several of whom also did sex work, promoting it through the same channels.

I'm emphasizing that last bit because the next thing this guy became known for is being just a huge foaming at the mouth TERF. What people generally assume happened is trans people chewed him out for that TV episode with the trans woman I mentioned earlier, but that's straight up untrue. Like I said, at the time, he was fishing for approving comments on it, while also promoting the work of multiple trans women. Cis guys with entertainment connections willing to promote the hell out of trans women's causes and personal writings are precious unicorns so rare and useful as to be practically unheard of. The idea that any of the trans women he was talking to back then would burn their bridges with him for the sake of griping about an episode of an old TV show he's already riddled with anxiety about is such an utterly ridiculous tactical own goal that the only reason this rumor ever got off the ground is that there's this longstanding bit of propaganda that trans women are all super angry and combative... which, you know, you're perpetuating when you spread this lie here.

The actual story is a bit of a two-parter. First, he got suckered in by some other TERF writing this "feel good" work of fiction about "tough love" causing her trans son to "realize he wasn't trans." The actual story there if you read between the lines just a little, waited for her son's side of the story to come out a bit later, or even just ask her about things like two weeks after the fact was of course that she enacted some straight up child abuse until her son stopped bringing the subject up and just quietly transitioned without her input, but there was a brief window there where someone not paying attention could be taken in and talk about this heartwarming story, get rightfully called out for boosting child abuse advocacy, and get love-bombed by a hate group. And honestly, that really was the whole thing, this second part only exists because nobody's going to tell you they were radicalized into a hate group because they celebrated child abuse then kept doubling down about it.

What came next though, and the reason this creep will cite TO THIS DAY as what flipped him... not even when asked, he regularly records videos just rambling about it even, was me... kinda. Like I said, guy was crushing on me HARD at the time, and still boosting my stuff while he was still getting indoctrinated into this crap, and the rest of the hate group didn't like that one bit. Not only was he mooning over a trans woman, he's signal boosting the stuff I'm writing about the alarmingly high percentage of these people buttering him up involved in CSA crap and acts of domestic terrorism and such. Apparently talking about that constantly was my irresistible siren's song and all.

So the absolute scum of the earth set about trying to find some dirt on me to show this guy to maybe make him stop jerkin' it to my essays or whatever, and when they couldn't find anything (turns out I'm pretty boring) they made something up. That one site that does this sort of thing put together some sort of "dossier" on me that just sort of filled in arbitrary garbage for where I lived, my dead name, etc. etc. and included a photo of... mid-90s anime convention regular "Sailor Bubba" in full costume. And then of course they started bombarding this guy with it. Also me. They really don't get how the whole stalking thing works and assume people will be terrified if you "prove" you know where they live by messaging them an address in the wrong timezone and a picture of some random guy dressed like Sailor Moon.

This absolutely got the job done. He was properly horrified and disgusted by this "revelation" and... still hasn't stopped publicly freaking out about it. I kinda wish the photo they sent him really was me so I could joke about having the face that launched a thousand ships in the wrong direction. As is your guess is as good as mine whether he actually disapproved of this random congoer's appearance that much, just didn't want to picture me, the woman he's been obsessing over for like a year or two looking like that, or it's just a big act to distract people from what actually turned him to the dark side, but he was apparently so horrified by this "revelation" he burned his last bridges with decent people, lost his wife, lost his job, and lost whatever was left of his humanity. The other thing he's famous for is trying to get the British government to cut funding to a children's charity. Long story. Involves Donkey Kong somehow.

But point is, he's still screaming about this to this day. Mentions me by name, sorta. It's the one I used to use for this blog, and he intentionally always gets one word slightly wrong because he REALLY doesn't want the few TERFs who are still even willing to speak to him to look this up and see that no, he didn't ever think that woman he was obsessed with was cis, or that there's a dozen other such.

To finally get to my point though, I enjoy telling this story. It's weird, it's baffling, it's damaging to a huge bigot's ability to do harm, and it's pretty funny. BUT, this is my story to tell. It's not at all cool for anyone else to tell it, and they do. Often. I swear at least about once a year, someone with a huge platform decides it's time to rehash this loser's weird public meltdown. Sometimes they just tell the myth about the angry reactions to a TV show, which again is harmful to trans people generally, sometimes they get it mostly right, or they just stare at a recording of him explaining it himself. And these are the times when I really suffer for someone else's entertainment.

They don't know who I am. Their audiences sure as hell don't. If I'm lucky, they play a clip of this creep's disgusted ramblings about some random dude's photo and awkwardly try to say something nice like "there's nothing wrong with a woman having a big beer gut and a full beard by the way." And if I'm unlucky, things go all telephone game, and I suddenly have some unstable weirdo from halfway across the country trying to rally up a lynch mob against me because "wouldn't just take one for the team" or that I DID (never enough showers to scrub away that mental image) or otherwise hold me accountable for the sins of some creep who used to stalk me. And even if I catch these and try to offer up some corrections or bonus anecdotes, people using my weird story about this creep (or vice versa) to make jokes never want to change their material.

I don't ever want to be talked about like that, thanks. If you want to tell people how much this particular creep is a pathetic monster, I'm all for it, but you have to invite me along. You get a better version of the story, I don't get a fresh wave of weird stalkers and I get to feel like I have some measure of control over my own life for once. You know?

[wirewitchviolet]

Oh damn it, The Boys has a spinoff?

Not too long ago, I wrote about The Boys, and how I have a few issues with it. And when writing about season 4 in particular, I mentioned how off-putting it was that the right wing characters in the show were constantly shouting about the protagonists loving trans people as a dig, and how weird that is to toss out there when there don't seem to be any trans people in the show at all, let alone any the protagonists associate with. But there IS a trans character in Gen V, the weird little spin-off series they apparently made between seasons 3 and 4 that I was unaware of when I wrote that. So out of some combination of morbid curiosity, feeling the need to maybe amend my earlier statement, and let's be honest, an act of self-harm, I just sat down and watched that too.

In a lot of ways, I hate this even more.

The premise is that all the characters here are going to a special superhero high school in the setting of the main series, and there's this whole tease through like half the show about how there's a big competition where the top student in the school will get to go join the big superhero team from the primary series which feels a hell of a lot like they were trying to maybe lure in some of that Hunger Games fandom or the 5 people who haven't totally denounced those seven doorstops from the most famous transphobe in the world or something, and maybe also trying to pretend the main character from this show would end up on that show which... just does not work? Like if a character joins the superhero team in The Boys it means they're going to be revealed to be a nazi or they're going to be almost immediately sexually assaulted then killed, or possibly all of the above, and that's not really something you'd want for any of the main cast in this show here, because a decent swath of them are more or less good kids and all. Like is it even a spoiler to say it ends by going all shaggy dog story with Fascist Superman showing up for a quick cameo at the end to declare everyone remotely likable an ideological threat and them being thrown into a secret prison? Probably but look you could have stopped reading when I said how it ended.

Also the protagonists being mostly likable kids with superpowers. kinda just completely breaks the whole premise? Like the one thing The Boys does that I approve of is shout very loudly about how much right wing scumbags suck via what I'm sure they'd describe as a metaphor, but really we're just kinda largely overlapping with a theme of superheroes being inherently evil and horrible... and that's just kinda not a thing in the spinoff here at all, outside of some really limp references to the series proper and teasing out a season 4 plot threat at the 11th hour. Doesn't really seem to try and replace

All the stuff I hate is totally still in here though! Demonizing kinky sex stuff, really pushing for shocking gore and making people weirdly squishy accordingly, and trying to talk about serious stuff affecting women and minorities, but not having the perspective to do that well and coming off a bit weird. I'd almost say it is at least a little less bad and gross about women but (warning the rest of this paragraph describes really tasteless stuff) the opening scene of the first episode is the main character discovering she has blood control powers because she gets her first period, plays with the resulting blood, freaks out when her parents try to check on her, and accidentally totally explodes them with blood daggers. Because yuck girls are gross I guess. And then once we've established she has blood powers we clumsily try to make a whole thing about how she has to cut herself to get access to them like how all those teenage girls are cutting themselves these days. And to really hammer that home, her roommate has shrink/grow powers that are activated by doing the whole binge/purge thing. And no, we aren't trying to make any sort of larger point with the imagery with either of these besides "ew."

The rest of the cast besides those two get introduced as the cool popular bitchy maybe racist mean party kids who do drugs and kill random bystanders trying to show off with powers which feels like they were maybe trying to do some kind of parallel with the super hero team from the main series and then I dunno maybe got some real quick feedback that that's lazy and did a 180, or maybe they were just trying to kickstart messy teen drama because this show doesn't really have any real like... themes or point to it. This gives us the really weird setup where a character gets introduced using Magneto powers to accidentally slit someone's throat and the lead being offered up as a sacrifice to maintain his reputation and then having him just be the goodest boy for the rest of the show. And also this means that trans character we have gets introduced as a gatekeeping bigoted popular kid so... yeah...

Probably isn't going to come as any sort of surprise here, but the creative team behind The Boys doesn't handle this here trans character super well! To be fair, they do try! The character in question is eventually pretty plainly one of the good guys after spending a whole lot of time on this weirdly drawn out thing with them being this coldhearted gatekeeping popular kid who is somehow simultaniously looked down on for being "a bigender Asian," and we're at least picking and naming a flavor of trans there.

Buuuuuut OK we've got this AMAB trans character who has this vastly preferred girl form, and parents frustrated by that noting they could just always stay in boy form, and something like half of all form switching incidents are sudden ones when starting to make out with people or immediately before/after having sex, and look it is REALLY hard for me not to suspect they started with an absolutely monstrous take on a trans girl built out of a lifetime of bigoted scaremongering and misconceptions, ran that by a sensitivity reader, and tried to salvage what they could while making adjustments. Plus you know, trans character with nothing but cis friends, HRT does not seem to exist in the setting, being bi but hopping over the gender fence to keep all romantic or sexual relationships "straight."

Another thing I have to get into is that while the show ultimately doesn't have a point, and goes all shaggy dog story, there's this whole thing where the school has a secret torture dungeon and the protagonists break someone out who suffers from, if I properly recall the term used, "schizophrenia or something," and wow, get this, you're not gonna believe it, in addition to being prone to fits of violence and sometimes seeing people who aren't there and maybe they're puppets sometimes, he's a weird spongey blank slate who needs all of like 1 minute to be talked into becoming a genocidal fascist in the last episode.

But anyway the one token trans character still never once interacts from anyone from the original show and is like 4 or 5 degrees removed from the person being smeered as trans positive so turns out I don't need to correct myself with that complaint.

Also I'm just gonna go ahead and not watch any more of this when more is inevitably released I think.

[wirewitchviolet]

You ever accidentally start gang-stalking someone?

I can't recall if I've ever told this story before, but it's relevant today so I'm telling it again. While I'm less loud about it lately than I have been in the past, standing up for and supporting targets of gang-stalking has kinda been my Entire Thing for over a decade. If you've got some huge pile of horrifying ghouls doing everything they can to completely isolate you from any sort of basic compassion or support, and I find out about it, I have a tendency to dig on into the whole mess, find out what ridiculous justification the mob of the day is using to rationalize making life a living hell for the target of the day and anyone who dares defend them, expose what absurd BS it is to as wide an audience as I can, and generally do what I can to support that target, more or less indefinitely. This is something people generally know about me, and a good number of people I know (largely people I get to know FROM this thing I do) have a similar outlook, which is nice.

And I also end up going to bat now and then for some people who themselves turn out to be quite awful. Because it's certainly not like being a victim of horrific hateful pile-ons makes someone magically a good pure innocent person or anything. A lot of those people are awful to begin with, and I swear a lot of people get this weird thing going on where they convince themselves that shouting at full on nazis sometimes gives them some sort of absolute moral authority and anything else that bothers them is equally worthy of condemnation and scorched earth tactics, and... look I could write a HUGE post if i wanted to get into all the people I have gone to the mat for who went on to become really high profile horrible people. I don't particularly want to though, because I'm still pretty committed to the principle that nobody deserves to deal with gang-stalking, and I'm sure as hell not going to find myself regretting say... comforting someone who had creeps photoshopping a nazi flag into photos of her dead sister even if she did later become real dangerous and put my life in danger.

What I wanted to get into today isn't anywhere near that extreme though. Once upon a time, there was someone I considered a friend, who for the same of not wishing ill on her, let's just call Amy, because I don't think I actually know anybody by that name this all might reflect on. When we met, Amy was really going through some hardcore awful gang-stalking stuff, lead by the usual mix of out and proud Nazis and faux-intellectual transphobes and such, so I was supporting the hell out of her. And aside from the main crisis she was dealing with, she had a lot of bones to pick over various things in media, where I'd also generally try to support her with that, even when it put me in super awkward positions where I'd end up playing diplomat between her and other friends and/or employers of mine. Then one day, I got a message from her, absolutely freaking the hell out, because she noticed that in the dozen or so supportive replies to some thing or other I'd posted on Twitter, there was some positive comment from a person she Did Not Like.

Let's call this person Benjanun, because that's her name and it's a pretty unique one, and also I'm specifically writing about her here. So... Benjanun wasn't someone I followed, nor someone who followed me, and this was back when I was pushing like 10,000 followers or so, so if Amy hadn't said anything, I probably would have continued to have no idea who she was, and Amy's fears that I might start talking to her would never come to pass. But she did in fact give me a VERY stern warning that this Benjanun person was bad news and I should immediately block her. That's... less odd if you're me, the person who just kinda voluntarily gets embroiled with all the people getting gang-stalked than it would be for most people, but still pretty damn odd. Still, I take these sorts of things seriously, so when she then forwarded along the document I diligently gave it a read through.

Now, if you've ever been the victim of this sort of gang stalking, or know someone who has, you probably have some idea what I mean when I say "the document." Hell, if you follow me, odds are pretty good you remember the start of the whole Gamergate thing enough to recall "the Zoe post." That's a textbook example of what I mean by "the document" and there is ALWAYS some variation on that when someone's dealing with gang stalking. Back in the day it'd usually be some like 200,000 word blog post or whatever, these days it's more likely to be a dedicated forum post on some gang-stalking specific wiki. This story I'm telling was something like 10 years ago, so we were still in blog mode.

So here I am, at the behest of a then-friend who we can charitably say has some serious boundary issues, reading this novel-length blog post attempting to explain how this one random woman with whom the entirety of my interaction to date was someone reposted a twitter thread of mine and her responding to it with something like "yes, exactly" or maybe it was "sorry you're dealing with that." And again, I'm me, so this is not at all my first encounter with this sort of thing. It's the standard boilerplate nonsense, mostly super-dedicated to demonstrating how thoroughly the author has researched the subject in the hope that that makes the author come off like a serious unbiased objective journalist. Apparently that actually does work on quite a lot of people. I'm assuming reading this was what radicalized Amy, and all of the many other people in the years since who I have also seen freak out and post this thing when they see any mention of Benjanun in any context. To me though, this sort of thing just tells me the author is a dangerous stalker who has spent literally years obsessing over the subject, trying to find every single account she ever had on a forum, old Geocities pages, IRC channel logs from the 90s, what the kid sitting behind her in 5th grade had to say about her, anything and everything that could be painted in a sinister light. And for real, if this is the only takeaway you get from this, please internalize that when you see some variation of the document it is very safe to assume the subject is the victim and the author is the stalker desperately seeing rationalization and co-conspirators.

Still, I'm me. I know Amy has been through some stuff, dealing with some very bad people, and sometimes stuff gets weird, so I still read the whole thing in good faith, and picking through those thousands and thousands of words, there was only one actual claim of this Benjanun here doing anything objectionable, the rest was just... proving they knew (or perhaps just highly suspected) every handle she'd ever used on an internet forum. And the horrible crime that rationalized all the stalking was this:

Back when she was a teenager (which I think was like 5 or 10 years ago as of when I was first asked to read the document so closer to 20 now, I think?) Benjanun had read a book by some sci-fi author... I guess if we're continuing through the alphabet we can call her Cathy, because literally the only time I ever encountered her name was in the document and I completely forgot what it was. Part of Cathy's book was set in Thailand, where Benjanun is from, and she found its depiction to be pretty freaking racist. So in hot-headed teenage fashion, she apparently ranted and raved about this all over the internet for a few months or so.

That's it.

WOW. I mean... there is NOTHING that rationalizes gang-stalking someone for multiple decades, but that is... literally nothing. I mean, back in the 90s I used to review video games. I remember I'd have a minor complaint about a game I otherwise enjoyed and both my personal e-mail and the webmaster account for the whole site (remember when we had those? I was the one who actually read that one for this site) would get like... hundreds of letters about it. Death threats, demands I be fired, standard stuff. They'd go to the forums on other sites would try and start weird campaigns to boycott the one I worked for. Closest I ever came to reacting to any of that besides a quick laugh at how worked up people could get was when I got one of the more violent ones from a former co-worker, who I knew for a fact actually did know exactly where I lived, and even then my thought was "damn, he's worked up, wonder if he's doing OK?"

Now to clarify, even by word of the document here, which has to be the most negative possible framing on this, Benjanun wasn't sending threats to Cathy. The whole objection really was that she was besmirching the reputation of the great and wonderful Cathy by daring to imply she was capable of writing an ignorant racist take on a country she'd never been to. I'm just gonna go ahead and assume it was, in fact, accurate criticism, because I have... kinda never in my life seen any sci-fi author write about a foreign country and not have some racist assumptions creep in, nor have I ever seen fans of such authors not get real weird about it? Pretty standard stuff.

It's not like this was the start of any weird lasting grudge either. I don't know if Cathy herself was ever even aware that this was a thing and participating at all or if it's just weird fans being weird. I can say with confidence that Benjanun let the whole matter drop back when she was a teenager because after learning about this and seeing it was clearly a gang-stalking situation (and also having Amy IMMEDIATELY cut me out of her life because I didn't ban her on the spot as was requested), I went on to get to know Benjanun, and the closest she has ever come to bringing up ANY of this is that when she's particularly under attack and quite confused, she explains people have had it out for her since some time as a teen when she'd gotten upset about something in a book, nothing more specific than that, usually apologizing for having been a bit hot-headed back then. All my info on the inciting incident comes from the stalkers here.

And like, it'd be pretty concerning if Cathy WAS personally still invested in what some random teenager said about a book of hers decades ago. It's way more concerning for random third parties to care at all all this time later. And I WOULD say I don't even have words to describe people making an actual movement out of it recruiting and policing bystanders, but... clearly I do because you're reading them.

And like, I can KINDA see how an otherwise reasonable person can get roped into this sort of thing, maybe? You have a friend, otherwise reasonable and kind as far as you know, who has had their brain cooked by one of these hate groups and is a true believer. They go around all fire and brimstone about how evil the target is, and rightly get told by people who actually know the target to screw off and stop being a bloody-minded stalker. So you think wow, this person really must be some kind of evil mastermind to brainwash all these people into becoming such staunch defenders, everyone knows my friend is cool, and you start crusading too. It's the same deal as cults encouraging proselytization knowing full well that people hate it and are going to be rude as hell to the people they're sending door to door.

So my point here is again, hey, gang-stalking- never OK! Don't do it! If anyone ever points you at some variation of the document understand that that is physical evidence that a whole lot of people are trying to ruin someone's life as a weird personal obsession, and while they aren't guaranteed to be cool, you sure as hell shouldn't trust anything from that document or the person showing it to you claiming otherwise.

Also, I'm not just going over all this again for the hell of it, I'm doing it because there is presently a big ol' fresh surge of these stalkers Benjanun has had for all this time flaring up, attacking her, attacking anyone she's talking to, and I am personally compelled to support people dealing with that. As something of an expert in these things, I have noticed a very clear pattern that the people most susceptible to this sort of treatment all tend to be trans, obviously. But the next runner up by a huge margin is cis people who REALLY habitually go to bad for trans people. Bit of guilt by association there. Lot of weird divde and conquer stuff too where people seem to really try to actively recruit trans people into attacking the few actually good allies to try and get them to quit it with the support, too.

And yeah, Benjanun here is easily in the #1 spot for cis women who genuinely support trans people I'm aware of. That thing I'm always saying about how the real thing to do is just find random trans people and give them money? She's constantly doing that, running fundraisers, helping authors get stuff published, promoting the hell out of people's work, etc. She also personally writes genuinely shockingly good books herself I'd sincerely recommend, and I assume the ones she co-authors are also quite good but I still need to get to those. And past that, she's generally a pretty chill gal (I mean less so at the moment I write this obviously, as she's actively stressed out from stalkers) with interesting if a bit spicy takes on the representation of queer women in media, often covering stuff that otherwise would be completely off my personal radar.

[wirewitchviolet]

I just caught up on the past two seasons of The Boys, and wow do all the serious problems that made me drop it persist.

So a few years back, someone talked me into watching this show on Amazon about this nerdy loser getting swept up into this whole thing dealing with "superheroes" who are kind of just a bunch of violent if not worse creeps and a main storyline building in the background about this insecure Superman stand-in building towards a total breakdown. It was called The Tick and I'm still really upset that they cancelled that and started producing this other show called The Boys instead.

I'm assuming I am years late to the party when it comes to talking about this show, and I know the current discourse about it is that a lot of right wing creeps really got up in arms about it over the last couple years, because while it was ALWAYS very much allegorically going on about how much they suck, seasons 3 and 4 realized that fascists don't get allegory and started just straight up directly referencing 4chan and various Fox News hosts by name. Obviously it's pretty great that they're doing that. I approve, much like I approve of them having a character named Stormfront who played it off as a reference to having lightning powers and then later turns out no actually it's because the character is an outright card carrying nazi referencing the infamous neo-nazi website of the same name.

The problem I have with the show... well, really, there's three, let me get to the minor ones first. Like a dozen other shows that all started airng at the same time, in response to how well Watchmen did as a movie (and all based on comics that started in reaction to how well Watchmen did in its original graphic novel form), the big high concept question The Boys asks is, "what if Superman were a petty evil guy who still had all those powers?"

I think I've probably ranted about this in the past, but for real, that is the stupidest possible question to ever spend time pondering! The answer is pretty obvious, it'd suck and he'd probably kill you. More importantly though, Superman isn't real! We don't live in a world that has a good version of Superman! The regular version of Superman is already a big pontification on what it would be like if we took the at-the-time popular idea nazis were passing around of "a superman" as their nerdy power fantasy, and putting the twist on it of "OK, what if we had a guy like this, but part of him being better than everyone else was that he was like, MORALLY really good too? Just trying to help people out any way he can?" That one's a question worth pondering. What good could be done in the world if we weren't all just struggling to get by and didn't have so many logistics to worry about and all. Hey can we maybe collectively push towards some of these ideals we're spitballing? But all you can get out of pondering an evil superman is the effect he'd have on the coming book setting of the regular one. Who cares, besides comics nerds.

And the other minor gripe before my main point is that wow it is just distracting how absurdly squishy people are on this show. It's like the human body is just a blood filled balloon stored under pressure. It's not even like superheroes punching holes through people's torsos. I swear there's an episode where someone accidentally kicks a forklift and splits his leg in half. It's weird!

But anyway, yeah. The real huge problem I have with The Boys is this- This is a show that (aside from being about evil Superman) is all about hating Nazis, and if we want to draw a line here, Nazi adjacent far-right scumbags. And it comes from a genuine place of recognizing these people as terrible losers... but the writers don't actually seem to REALLY have a problem with their actual ideology.

This is, by the way, a huge problem with a ton of self-identified leftist activist types I have personally encountered, too. It is really, really easy to hate Nazis. They are innately loathesome pathetic losers who are just kind of embarrassing and sad to think about. They say really stupid things. They believe REALLY stupid things. They're just incredibly self-deluded and lonely and scared of the world, and that's all before you get into their absolutely hateful ideology. It's very easy to dunk on them. So much of The Boys is just the villains sitting around and trying to have meetings and making it clear that none of them really have coherent plans or goals, and they just keep doing horrible things during temper tantrums or having sex scandals and looking for ways to spin it. Much like a huge part of looking at social media sites is people taking screenshots of stupid things Nazis are posting and standing around gawking and laughing. And the logic goes that if someone is an evil monster, then anyone who thinks that person totally sucks and constantly makes fun of them must therefore be good, right? But... it doesn't work that way.

For instance, easily the biggest thematic point The Boys has beyond what the creators actively and consciously want you to take away from it is that any sex that isn't vanilla heterosexual man on top missionary between committed people is wrong and gross and evil. This comes up KIND OF A LOT too. I don't want to start listing examples here because I try to avoid getting this blog flagged for anything, but let me just double check here... yeah. You can just do a quick search for like, "The Boys evil sex" and get a good half dozen think pieces about many many many examples from the show's history. They are just downright obsessed with cutting to evil people with superpowers, sometimes in the core cast, sometimes one-offs, who are clearly in the writers' minds Doing Sex Wrong. Frequently just basic gay stuff, sometimes weird kinky stuff... bit of a spoiler but the show explicitly makes a point about even the sort it otherwise approves of being tainted by evil if the woman's fingers interact with the man's butt. You REALLY can't ignore it. I don't really know why everyone involved with the show thinks they're fixated on this, but there's pretty clear hang-ups on display and a clear disapproving message.

Meanwhile, particularly in the 4th season, as part of this thing the show is now doing with dropping all subtly about who they're criticizing, we have villains just directly quoting propagandists left and right, so out of the blue there's propagandists on TV ranting about... the one good pure nice woman on the show (she's blonde, she's a former beauty pageant winner, she's dating the POV character who has weird emasculation issues when she does things, again, this show is really bad like this). We get all this background shouting about the people she works with being godless trans pedophiles who hate America and love abortions and such. And I mean, yeah, this DOES match nicely with how these sort of things get shouted at various Democrats who, much like the cast of this show, never actually say a single word about trans people and don't seem to even know any of us.

But, the thing is, in real life, there very much are actual trans people out here, standing up to nazis, getting killed by them, doing the real investigative work to undermine them and dismantle the apparatus of CSA stuff that real life fascists have pretty significant ties to (oddly, something The Boys actually goes out of its way to clarify that the fascists in the show are NOT involved in, they just do like, "gay stuff"). It's really freaking weird to have this kind of scapegoating going on in a a setting where trans people don't seem to actually even exist (it's possible I'm forgetting one or more evil perverted shapeshifters, if you'd like to count such, but I sure wouldn't). The show definitely isn't quoting that sort of rhetoric to show support for trans people. It's just kind of a show of solidarity with Dems who they see as being unfairly slandered with this baseless association with trans people (who I suppose we have to conclude the writers see as gross weirdos you don't want to be around).

The worst of it though might be when the show introduces "the smartest person in the world." There's a bit where the big superhero organization is looking to get new members after a lot of gory explosions, and someone suggests this one woman whose superpower is being canonically recognized as the smartest person to ever exist, but they quickly dismiss her because she is also a black woman. Great joke! Good satire of fascists there! But then they go and make the mistake of trying to actually bring her in as an actual character on the show. The writers now have to actually portray a super-intelligent black woman, and they are just absolutely fundamentally unable to rise to the challenge, because again, the writers of this show consistently treat women like crap and only really know how to handle racism to the point of making fun of racists.

So... the "smartest person in the world" here ends up teaming up with Fascist Superman to try to set him up as God Emperor of America basically. Her stated motivation for doing this is "just to see if I could," and other than walking the villains through the same standard nazi playbook stuff they were honestly already doing for a bit, all she really does is spout some superpower supremacist garbage, eat cheap unhealthy takeout while watching TV, and give herself temporary brain damage so she doesn't feel too bad about herself having some of that Wrong Sex with the Aquaman stand-in.

And oh wow that's a whole other thing right there. Aside from just having this stuck-in-the-80s mindset of feeling compelled to pick on Aquaman (I think the big retooling the character got to kill the most-useless-Superfriends-character vibe and make him into this badass hook-handed Viking-inspired badass barbarian type happened before most of this show's cast was even born), the show basically opens with him as a stupid jock in the superhero club forcing that One Perfect Wholesome Woman to have sex with him, and then just kinda drifted around with him as this weird joke character dealing with his life being "ruined by #metoo" and sleeping around a lot, being extra stupid, and losing his girlfriend and generally getting bad press because he just cannot stop having sex with this octopus.

And you know, the octopus is a character of sorts. Talking with sea creatures and all. So she gets voiceovers, she seems really nice and sophisticated, all part of the gag here though. Because honestly, this octopus could do WAY better, and it's weird she'd even be into this incredibly stupid and misogynist loser... and ultimately that storyline just kinda leads into this scene where he smashes her tank and locks her in a closet in a temper tantrum, and we just linger on it hearing her beg and cry and gasp for breath for like... 5 straight minutes. Because... I guess we're not supposed to see her as an actual person, we're just laughing at the weird pervert dealing with the trauma of, from his perspective, murdering a screaming helpless woman?

I'd probably really enjoy a version of this show from like... actually compassionate people who understand why fascists are bad. As is though, I really cannot watch it without being acutely aware that I'm watching Nazi-bashing made by people who feel like they'd be totally on board with throwing queer people into camps and only letting white people vote, and forcing all women to be the dedicated wives and humble caretakers of men and all that. They just don't like how embarrassingly the people calling for it conduct themselves. I'm probably exaggerating the point to some degree, but I don't know how much of a degree, and that's a real problem.

Anyway, point is, try to be better in your opposition to fascism than The Boys. And the other point is bring back The Tick, damn it! It was just getting into some really interesting themes when they pulled the plug!

[wirewitchviolet]

The Big Lie of Transphobia

There is a lot of really horrifying transphobic stuff going on at the moment, even relative to the baseline. Like arrests and federal repression in the U.S. and don't even get me started on that new policy from Facebook and the propaganda amplification that's going to do. So you may find yourself wondering what you can do to help.

As always the real answer to that is to just give all the money and other material aid you possibly can to every trans person you are personally aware of. Individually. Don't look for a charity to donate to, there really isn't one. Make those patreon pledges and write those checks and empty those wallets and cosign for those houses, go!

But if what you're really asking is, what can you do that won't personally inconvenience you, the best thing you can probably do is to really internalize that the Big Lie backing up all the transphobia out there is a complete lie, and convince everyone else you can too. And what's the Big Lie behind transphobia? "Trans women are men who believe they are women." As usual with these, I'm going to expound on that a ton under the fold here.

It really is the lynchpin of everything transphobes have to push. If you don't believe it, none of the things they're pushing for makes even the slightest bit of sense, but if you DO believe it, even if you aren't all in on the other hate stuff, it's going to warp the hell out of your perspective and make you a crappy ally. And wow is it ever deeply embedded in there.

So for what it's worth, as a reminder, when people make statements like "trans women are women" that is stating an actual fact. That's not some weird feel-good slogan that "really" means "you should treat trans women like they are real women" or something. It's just what we freaking are. We aren't men who have some strange mental illness that makes us think of ourselves as women, we aren't people who start out as men and for some reason make some kind of decision to become women. We're just women, always have been, just like any other woman.

If you've met a number of trans women, you can very clearly and plainly see that's true, but the thing is, most people haven't. And the lie gets pushed damn hard. Most people's idea of what a trans woman is, and for that matter, most other things about life, comes from what they see in TV and movies and the like, and on those occasions where a work of fiction features someone they'll call a trans woman, they tend to get some dude to put on a dress to play the part, which is usually also some sort of weird crazy murderous sex worker. Movies and TV also tend to depict cars as prone to burst into massive fireballs if anything goes wrong with them, glass windows as something you can jump through without being sliced up so badly by the shards you're basically going to die instantly, police as caring helpful people who try to solve crimes and return people's stolen stuff and such, and people with albinism as having strange magical powers. None of this is actually true in reality.

So yeah, it's not even a little bit true. If you look at the people who insist the loudest that it is, you'll notice they are completely out of touch with reality and preach all kinds of ridiculous BS. Get it into your head that there isn't even a sliver of truth to it, and it's easier to get on the right side of a lot of things.

Are trans women trustworthy? Yeah? I mean, as much as the next person. Why wouldn't we be? Because some freaking weirdo is sharing all kinds of weird conspiracy theories and setting up weird freaking stalker shrines about us? Pretty clear who it is you shouldn't be trusting there.

Is it OK for trans women to play sports? Yeah? Why would that even be a problem? We don't have superpowers or anything. We're just regular freaking women. Well OK a lot of us have pretty nasty health problems leaving us a bit less physically fit than most women, but you know, doing athletic stuff should help with that.

Is it OK for trans women to use public restrooms? Yeah? Like honestly, I know a lot of guys get weird about women going to the bathroom in groups sometimes but there's nothing sinister about that, just sometimes you need to pull someone aside to ask if you can borrow some embarrassing thing or double check makeup or check if someone's date is as big a creep as they come off and you need to run interference. Mostly though people just need to pee sometimes, and society generally prefers that people do so in a toilet and not the street or whatever.

What about children being trans? Like... everyone's a child at some point? A lot of the downsides to being trans come from associated medical issues which can be totally prevented if spotted early, so it's actually very good to have kids look out for whether they might be dealing with those and get the appropriate medication, which is true for basically anything.

Well what about [whatever stupid BS derailment]? Yeah I'm addressing a group of people who actually need to have it explained to them that women are in fact women and not men, let's not go confusing people with whatever weird sidetrack you want to get onto.

[wirewitchviolet]

So I was already sitting down to ramble about something, and turns out this post and this big reply under it tie in pretty well, so, here we go.

There are enough bespoke issues trans people justifiably feel very passionate about, and enough different experiences different trans people have that it is damn easy to end up in a huge fight because one person tried to make a nice simple statement for a clueless cis audience, but viewed through another person's lens it reads like some kind of attack. And it certainly never helps that bigots are actively out there constantly trying to co-op messages and sew infighting that any statement no matter how clear and good WILL get weaponized.

Before I get into the above, the go-to example I was planning to use was "you don't have to transition to be trans." There's a ton of ways you can read that which are great and worth echoing. For instance, "hey, if you've worked out that people got your gender wrong, you are trans and can come hang out in the trans clubhouse and ask for advice and all that without proving it through medical intervention."

Or, "hey don't be a weird gatekeeping creep who only recognizes people's gender if they don't jump through a particular medical hoop like taking a particular medication or get a particular surgery, which might not be something they even want due to risks, side effects, or not seeing it as a problem to begin with, and/or might not be something they CAN do anything about, because the typical medical treatment would not work on them for any number of reasons/is prohibitively expensive/too socially dangerous to go forward with in their current situation/is only even done by like a couple dozen specialists in the world who are booked out years in advance and many of whom actively discriminate against all sorts of potential patients."

You can see how it's nice to have a short catchy phrase. BUT it's absolutely a reality that awful bigots these days are going with the wildly bad faith and not even remotely true reading of "it's OK to deny transition-related care to trans people, because they don't actually NEED it!"

And you know, regardless of where you're encountering this phrase, you should always bear in mind those points about being totally valid and welcome in the community without a signed doctor's note, and how it's completely valid to be, oh, a woman who's hung like a horse and proud of it and such women shouldn't be treated like they need to go see someone about that, give people the benefit of the doubt that they're using it in such a sense if there's any chance they are, and at the same time be on the lookout for bad faith creeps misusing it and taking whatever steps are necessary to prevent them from to or about any trans person again unless/until they somehow manage to stop being a hateful piece of garbage and somehow become a decent human being.

Phew. All THAT out of the, way, I take a fair deal of issue with seeing the comment above me saying "the 'not transgender' people in the poster are clearly intersex" because holy hell is that a bad faith reading. All the concerns regarding intersex kids following that jumping off point are super valid and worth mention, of course. Doctors are constantly looking at baby's junk, going "huh, that doesn't look right, lemme do a quick surgery I'm not even necessarily trained in to get this looking more like whichever configuration I personally prefer the aesthetics of here, that probably won't cause any long term memory problems or trauma and there's almost a 50/50 shot I'm guessing right about what this kid'll want things looking like down here in a couple decades!" And that is just incredibly messed up. As is the practice of just throwing, say, testosterone boosters at someone perceived to be a teenage boy who doesn't seem "manly enough" to someone, which is a general queer kid concern, sure.

But none of that is going on in this poster. What's going on is kids getting hit with puberty-related symptoms they do not want (specifically boobs beards and voice changes), clearly stating this, and asking for medical help to make them not happen. If we wanna play Occam's Razor with the kids plainly labelled as "not transgender," boys growing breasts is called gynecomastia and a quick Google search confirms that... it is completely useless as a search engine because it's giving me 20 conflicting reputable-looking sources ranging from 1% to 70% of teenage boys. Facial hair on cis women is also really freaking common, to a point where it being relatively rare if you're white specifically makes it feel more like a racism thing than anything.

The real thing to remember though is that the obvious reason this poster exists is to get people who are completely uneducated on any of this and have been steadily exposed to propaganda from transphobes for their entire lives to the point where they have a hard time imagining trans people as actual human beings to consider the concept of HRT from a clear perspective by taking us out of the equation for a moment and just making them try to empathise with kids dealing with some of the same stuff, and it has to make that point in less time than it takes someone to finish walking past this telephone pole or wherever else someone might place this. And... OK if I'm really honest it's probably still too wordy and reliant on people having SOME idea of what being trans even means, but it's pretty good within those restrictions! Don't overthink it! Really don't project stuff that absolutely is not actually on there onto it! Focus more on actual bigots and doing something about what they're doing than nitpicking people who are doing good effective activism work you'd phrase differently!

This is the first time i’ve seen a pro-trans poster in a long time and i hope whoever put it up is having a good day, it made me feel a little less alone.

Hamilton, New Zealand