Stepos Venzny @ SteposVenzny @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

30 is acceptable for most games but stuff where the gameplay is mainly the movement itself (platformer, racing, first person shooter) needs to hit 60. I could go lower than 30 for the visuals on a lot of games but that’s the threshold where the interface starts feeling unresponsive and that really gets to me.

“Because I can’t cope with the world unless I believe the bad people will go to Hell.”

Trans people’s very existence requires the rest of us to question our own upbringing. There are a lot of childhood experiences that boil down to you doing something or not doing something on no basis other than the fact that you were told.

You were told by your family, you were told by your friends, you were told by random strangers, you were told by the media, and they were all telling you the same thing. So you listened, even though you didn’t know why they were saying it. Surely EVERYBODY can’t be wrong, right? Some people might have told you something contrary but they were the losers, the outcasts, the villains. You don’t want to be any of that, surely?

For someone to transition, they are required to do the exact opposite of what so many told us all. They embrace the very outcome we were threatened with when we failed to conform, that we would not actually be the gender we were failing to conform to.

To accept that they are valid in doing so requires us to admit that many of our own guiding forces were actually just bullshit. We have to question why we are the way we are anew. If what they’re doing is strong, what we did, what we’re continuing to do, was weak.

When confronted with the idea that we were all just raised wrong and that much of what we collectively spend our time and energy stressing about is stupid and pointless, how many people do you know that will just shrug and say “oh well” and then move on with their lives? Easier to find an excuse to keep doing what you were already doing. “They’re just lying because they’re perverts that wanna cheat at sports.”

Some of these rich people are insidious and manipulative, no doubt, but the loud ones are usually just idiots no different from the uncle you don’t want to talk to except that being rich means they’re able to yell louder.

There's not really any value in determining whether labels like good person or bad person apply to you. Either option tends to end in the same result: an end to the process of introspection and a continuation of the same behavior you're already doing. "I'm a good person so I don't have to change" or "I'm a bad person so there's no point in trying to change" but change is the only thing that will actually affect the feelings that are inspiring you to ask the question.

The update looks like a step in a healthy direction. You felt scared so you looked for support and you felt guilty so you looked to apologize (and reimburse). Stay focused on the process of feeling better and stop stressing about absolutes.

Flick targeting ruled, people just didn’t give it a chance because it was unfamiliar.

I tend not to play extremely similar games back to back so my head’s usually not in the wrong place. Maybe try a palate cleanser.

To a degree it's just reflexive, a knee-jerk reaction to being told things without proper explanation. I struggled with that since I was very young. People told me what to do, what to think, how to feel, and I tried to obey but the stress of that obedience in the face of reason would always eventually end in meltdowns and by the time I was a teenager I was so worn down from that that I could barely function as a human being.

I was within a few years of twenty (pretty bad with dates) when the world showed me I had permission to think independently. There was a perceived familial obligation that I was too hurt to weather, an invitation to visit a relative that I found annoying. You're told that you're supposed to love your family, all of it, no matter how physically and emotionally detached they are from your life. But the act of trying to love a stranger that you can't stand the company of and who cannot stand your company in turn, themselves only really trying out of this same sense of obligation that society pushes on them, there's nothing in that but stress for all involved. And then you feel like a failure as a result, because you stressed them out and you're supposed to be making them happy. It was a very small thing being asked of me and something I had always capable of weathering on previous occasions but this time I was too weak from the rest of life and, shamefully, I politely declined. I was kicking myself for the next hour, until somebody actually close to me caught me alone for a moment and praised that show of strength.

In my mind, she had always been stronger than me because she was better able to meet expectations. In that moment I learned that, in her mind, she was weak because she was unable to stand up for her own mental health needs and that I had just surpassed her by doing this. That realization changed my life. I let go of this obedience that my bones had always told me was wrong. Other people wanting something doesn't mean I have to want it, other people feeling something doesn't mean I have to feel it, other people doing something doesn't mean I have to do it. Success at attempting all those things is exactly the same amount of suffering as failure, the very same action is both strong and weak. There's no winning that game. Neither of us felt what we were supposed to feel and neither of us would be happy in the other's shoes.

Society tells you that disobedience is arrogance, selfishness, but I'm a better person that I was before it. It made me more humble because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be right, now I want to be right and that means learning where I'm wrong. It made me more generous because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be good, now I want to be helpful because helping people feels good to do. It made me happier because I no longer felt that I was supposed to be happy, and now any instances of unhappiness don't cause me the shame that negates future happiness. And it made me more tolerant because, fuck, I'm not about to start enforcing arbitrary standards on people when arbitrary standards caused me so much harm in the first place.

Now that there's not an internal struggle against prescriptive conformity in the way, I'm freer than I ever was to do most of the same things everyone wanted me to do in the first place while also being able to set boundaries about those few things I know would be harmful to do.

It's not at all frictionless to think for yourself, mind. People can be frustrated when you ask more justification of them than others do. If they're doing what they're told is right, saying what they're told is right, believing what they're told is right, it can feel threatening to ask them how any or all of that is right when, deep down, all they're doing is playing their assigned role because they never had your epiphany. And the boundaries you set can also be at odds with the genuinely felt desires of those you care about because sometimes peoples' desires are simply incompatible.

But that friction is nothing next to the cumulative psychic weight of total obedience. Mutual somewhat-grudging acceptance of each others' limits is better than any one person's permanent unhappiness.

In terms of actionable advice: follow your logic, follow your feelings, follow observable reality. Recognize it as a red flag when people discourage you from that, and recognize the importance of hearing out people who are talking through their own logic and feelings and observations and scrutinizing each other.

I got an idea for a fictional TV. It’s a black rectangle with a moving picture in the middle. There’s a logo on it that almost says the name of a real TV brand but in a slightly different typeface than they use and one or two of the letters is changed.

This is a revolutionary idea that nobody has ever had before, which if implemented will actually negate the need to use AI to create fictional TVs for us.

A while back I set out to watch the entire Disney Animated Canon. (Not in a binge-y way, like a movie per week.) When I reached Frozen II and started looking up trivia about it, I read that the four note sequence Elsa keeps hearing calling to her is something a lot of composers like to reference: Dies Irae.

A couple other examples were named and it reminded me that I had sort of noticed this once before; I remember playing Aria of Sorrow and noticing that the Clock Tower theme had those four notes repeating in the background and I kept hearing “making Christmas making Christmas”. I had thought it was a coincidence at the time but now knew they were both making the same allusion. Neat.

Cut to a few years in the future, Dies Irae is my fucking Number 23. It’s EVERYWHERE. I can’t escape it.

I don’t actively recall smell or taste being a feature so I guess probably not. Every other sense I definitely have, though.

On the general subject of things people say can’t happen in dreams beyond senses, I can also read, feel pain, see color, urinate without doing so in real life, and die.

It's absurd to give any amount of power over people, however trivial, to a thing which is incapable of thought.

He’s never trying to distract from crises, his personality is just naturally like this.

I like a name that can be broken down multiple ways to convey things about tone and relationships dynamics beyond the binary divide of formal name and nickname. Indiana Jones jumps to mind; practically no two people in a movie call him the same thing. He's got two different titles, a given name, a surname, a chosen name, a diminutive of the chosen name, and whatever you call the category "Junior" falls into. And no two of those names or name components have the same mood when you hear them next to each other out of context.

I look at Harrison Bach up there and I'm feeling like, out of this cast, he in particular doesn't really give you that freedom to play. Harrison and Bach are equally easy to say, equally serious sounding, and Harry is like the least informal classical nickname. But it is cute that him and his best friend have rhyming nicknames. Me liking the Harry part of it in particular but in light of your discomfort with his sharing the name of Harry Potter, maybe change his given name to Laurence and nickname to Larry? You preserve the rhyme and now all three of his names have a significant tonal difference from each other.

Terry is great, no notes.

Minthe and Minty sound almost exactly the same as each other, so I don't buy Minty as even being her nickname. Minnie or Thee could work better as diminutives but might I suggest breaking the mold here and giving her a nickname that isn't derived from her name at all? I don't have a suggestion for one, though, not knowing anything about the character that might have inspired a nickname.

Adulphine "Alfie" Mordred. In terms of that Indiana Jones factor, these are the three most sonically different names any of these characters have and I love that for her but you're not wrong about it being kind of a lot. The question isn't really whether it's right to be kind of a lot in a vacuum, though, it's whether it makes sense for this character's name to be kind of a lot diegetically.

This curse she carries, what's the nature of it? Is it because she comes from a family of evil aristocrats? Because I have to assume any Mordred who willingly names their kid Adulphine has to be one, even without those names having associations. Frankly, if I met an Adulphine Mordred in real life, my first thought would be "vampires are real" before I registered what other famous people/characters those names sort of/do belong to. If the curse is supposed to be bad luck that could have happened to anybody and her origins are otherwise unassuming, you gotta go back to the drawing board and give her the most incognito formal name out of the whole crew with only an evil-sounding nickname, and a recently-acquired one at that.

There's always going to be more dust but more than zero isn't as big a problem as more than a layer.

For me, the answer is vacations. Not in the sense of "time off work" but in the sense of "travel somewhere special during your time off work". There is nothing less relaxing than being pressured to spend your free time correctly.

That rule was designed to discourage you from faking it.

Oh, you mean you’re a cook. I thought you had a custom burger.

Arby’s, ironically enough. Not having burgers used to be their whole identity.

I’m interested in also having it your way. What’s the burger?