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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • When Twitter was bought by Musk I rushed to create myself a Mastodon. My hope was that most of the interesting, thoughtful people I followed on Twitter would eventually end up on Mastodon as Musk slowly ruined the platform. I kept my Twitter up just to keep tabs on them and grab their Mastodon handles as they shared them.

    In the end, around half of them created Mastodon accounts that I follow to this day. All of them are inactive now.

    At the same time I noticed more and more of them creating BS accounts. I think around 80% of them ended up in it. They’re still quite active in BS to this day.

    I open Mastodon and BS once daily. Former rarely has new posts, latter always has.

    I really wanted all of them on Mastodon. I don’t trust a corpo like BS. But the particular type of crowd I followed on Twitter (progressive essayists/humanities people, game journalists, artists, non-dev hobbyists, etc) seems to have mostly gone to BS, stayed on Twitter, gone to Cohost or back to Tumblr, or abandoned social media. I did find some interesting people active on Mastodon, mostly accesibility advocates, a couple of devs of games I loved and a few non brainrotten IT people. But the level of activity from my spheres of interest seems much higher on BS right now sadly.




  • We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it’s guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).

    When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There’s gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it’s more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there’s not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there’s not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.



  • There’s technically not a single wrong word with your comment in my opinion. But, respectfully, don’t you feel it reads as a bit condescending and admonishing? Especially when rereading the OP and then your comment in succession. The OP said they just wanted to vent a little here but then go on to barely vent at all: they just say they ‘wanted to go into “fuck all men” mode’ but didn’t since they know it’s not true or helpful. As I read it they just felt the (understandable) initial frustration but immediately worked through that feeling like an adult.


  • Hey, since you asked to share wins we’ve had in this regard:

    Not a woman, but something that has occasionally worked for me is sharing this one article. It’s called The magical thinking of guys who love logic.

    It sometimes works with those guys that believe that men are inherently more logical than women like the one you mentioned. Though in my experience this article is most effective with atheist men and not so much with religious men, since it has a bit of a focus on criticizing a type of militant online atheism (a superficial type of atheism I might add and one that paradoxically reproduces a sort of puritan mindset masked under progressivism, much like TERFism, sex-negative “progressives” and some other current mindsets). It also works best if the guys on question are already a bit open to criticism (or at least like to pretend they are open-minded) since the article starts with a tone of criticizing right-wing ideologies.


  • 1) Hybrid visual novels (ie visual novels with some gameplay element, be it some basic adventure/exploration/mystery mechanics like the Ace Attorney series, RPG or Tactical RPG elements, management, deckbuilding or whatever) that have very good writing (think something like Roadwarden or Citizen Sleeper) and/or a loveable cast of characters (like Ace Attorney).

    2) Sci-fi and/or fantasy books that have good writing (by which I mean not that hollow, mass-produced, repetitive, overly simple YA-style prose —don’t want to offend YA lovers, I’m just tired of it). Bonus points if they have some elements of social criticism, and even more bonus points if they have very compelling worldbuilding and characters. I’m thinking of stuff like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness and Rocannon’s World, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life”, most of Jorge Luis Borges’ short stories, Angélica Gorodischer’s Kalpa Imperial, Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, Dino Buzzati’s short story “The Seven Messengers”, Ursula Vernon’s webcomic Digger, Winston Rowntree’s webcomic Watching, Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, etc.

    3) Logical puzzle games that have the same quality of atmosphere and setting as Return of the Obra Dinn.

    4) Turn-based videogames (they can be RPGs, roguelites, management games, visual novels, text adventures or whatever else as long as it’s not action-focused, based on reflexes or time-sensitive without pause) that have very strong setting, atmosphere and writing (if they don’t have a traditional story, at least good writing in the occasional dialogue lines). Some preferred settings are:

    • Decadent worlds (like Darkest Dungeon, Dredge, Fallen London, Sunless Sea, Cultist Simulator, Book of Hours, The Shrouded Isle)

    • 18th to 20th century history/alternate history (like The Great Ace Attorney, The Lion’s Song, The Last Door, Amnesia: Rebirth, Return of the Obra Dinn)

    • Sci-fi in general —can be cyberpunk but not necessary— (like Citizen Sleeper, Tacoma, Soma, The Talos Principle, The Red Strings Club, Chrono Trigger, 2064: Read Only Memories, Subnautica, Stellaris)

    • Very current (as in 2020s or close) focused settings (like Unpacking, Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You, one night hot springs, missed messages., What Remains of Edith Finch)

    • Traditional and/or generic fantasy but well written (like Roadwarden, Wildermyth, Final Fantasy Tactics, Legend of Mana, The Banner Saga, Suikoden II, Terranigma, Grandia, Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, Alundra… many of these I played young so their writing might not be as good as I remember)

    • Other historical/alternate history settings previous to 18th century as long as they’re well written (like King of Dragon Pass, Landnama)

    But I’m also open to anything I’m not used to in videogames as long as it has those elements (strong writing, setting, atmosphere), like urban fantasy/new weird/fantastic realism type of stuff like Disco Elysium, whimsical settings a la Undertale/Deltarune or ambiguous mindscapes like in Celeste and Gris.

    5) Mechanically speaking, something that reaches the same heights as Slay the Spire. I don’t know what it is, I’ve played many other deckbuilding roguelites and/or roguelites with a tree-style map chasing that same high. And some were better than others (I guess shout-out to Monster Train, FTL, Pirates Outlaws, Griftlands, Roguebook, Iris and the Giant, Dicey Dungeons, Star Renegades). But none have absorbed me like it did despite it having uninteresting (to me) writing and visuals. Maybe it was just because it was my first with those ideas.

    6) I was exposed to a lot of anime/manga when I was a teen and even if I never feel like I want to watch/read most of them these years, I still have some lingering weakness for some of its tropes and aesthetics when applied to videogames. I’m talking about trainwreck-style games that are awful and strangely compelling at the same time, like Danganronpa and Zero Escape. Or, to speak of one that feels much higher quality while still having some puzzling choices, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. It’s hard to describe this vibe (maybe “anime aesthetics, very ambitious in some ways but messy and still beholden to certain clichés, occasionally managing to be deep but usually just coasting on pseudo-philosophical anime bullshit”) and I really never feel like actually playing these games but once a year or so when there comes a day I just don’t feel like doing anything I don’t mind laying in my bed watching full no-commentary gameplays of these kinds of games. So if you know of something similar to those I’d like to bookmark that for the future.




  • Yep, I know antisemitism has a long long story, my great grandparents came to my country running away from it at the start of the last century. And islamophobia is going really strong right now too. But I do think there’s higher chances of things like that happening between the years 2000-2500 than between 1000-2000. If the recent pattern with Christianity also happens to Islam and Judaism, fervent religious feeling might diminish in the long term (even if there’s occasional flare-ups here and there) and that coupled with sheer time/centuries might help ease the tensions.


  • I didn’t took it to mean “Israel will be erased” but “Israel and Palestina will be fused”. So maybe it won’t be named Israel but Israel-Palestina (kinda like Bosnia-Herzegovina) or something like that. Of course that seems impossible today but who knows, maybe there’s a timeline where that’s the name of the country 500 years into the future.


  • People here are just gonna tell you to leave (I have done so myself) but if you can’t for whatever reason something that can help is an extension like Blue Blocker which automatically blocks (or you can set it to mute) blue check marks as you encounter them. That way you don’t give them money for their horrible baits. While I was at Twitter waiting until the people I followed shared their new socials (sadly most went to BlueSky instead of Mastodon so I lost them anyway) I used Blue Blocker in that manner. You can set exceptions for certain accounts tho I didn’t, it mercilessly muted all checkmarks from my feed and revealed the bare Twitter behind. The result was somewhat like old Twitter at first but eventually it does get kinda slow as most of the valuable accounts become inactive. On the bright side that made leaving so much easier, so if you want to leave but need a motivator there’s one that might help you.



  • I just cook stuff that basically cooks itself. Crockpots, pasta, certain veggies and meats on the oven. After doing them many times I already know the timings for everything so I just put alarms to remind me of turning the fire off/flipping them in the oven once and that’s it. Doing something else in between. Technically speaking you spend only a couple minutes actively cooking for each meal that way. Just don’t forget to set the alarms or it’s burnt (and move the particular meat from the freezer to the fridge the night before)