Leave the World Brighter

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demanding that every single wheelchair user treat every single stroller, rolling bag, etc is also a “what if it was a mobility aid?!?!?! CHECK MATE!!!!” ensures that wheelchair users will never get priority on the bus, on the train, on elevators, or anywhere else. it guarantees wheelchair users being left behind for hours of their lives, in the cold, in the dark, in hallways and in parking garages. it gaurantees wheelchair users get drenched in the rain, get pushed out of the way, and get excluded from events and places

no your stroller for your abled child is not a fucking wheelchair. no your rolling bag is not more important than a human fucking being. wait your fucking turn and let wheelchair users board elevators and buses and public transit first you self obsessed fucking asshole

two cents time

we frequently get pushed out of the way by entitled abled parents w strollers at the apartment elevator if there's one there. we have been literally injured from this sort of thing. other abled people have gotten themselves injured from trying to push past me while we are actively moving in our ~300lb powerchair. other abled people have gotten themselves injured from trying to push past me to get on the bus while the ramp is lowering.

we literally had to *stop bussing completely* because it was taking up to an extra 1-2 hours to get to our destination. because of this. because people are coddled around needing to be patient. because people dont see us as human beings.

and they scream at *us* for it when we try to correct the problem. ask the stroller owner to move it, politely. move luggage out of the way with our footplates.

sorry to soapbox but we *literally* cannot leave our apartment without something like this happening

i have straight up had entitled people with strollers tell me that BECAUSE I AM A WHEELCHAIR USER, I HAVE ‘NO RUSH’ TO GO SOMEWHERE.

i only leave the house for doctors appointments, i have somewhere VERY important to be. like sorry you’ll get to the park or whatever a few minutes later but when you have the audacity to assume that disabled people don’t have places to be makes me not give a shit at all.

you’re so right about them not seeing us as human beings.

Finished designing my bull angel concept! for my friend's TTRPG

I'm not sure what I expected

Just not

This

I have like 21 tiny complaints

Do share

I'm gonna try to smash my complains into bigger issues because I'm sure some things will be explain as I do the story. OR I FUCKING HOPE SO. But for now, those are the main ones I have issue with:

do the world quests :D

(and further story)

I started to appreciate Natlan a lot more after a work trip to South America, to be honest. the visuals started to make sense

I have a suspicion it suffered from how tight Hoyo release schedule is

Latin American culture is so foreign both to Asian devs and to most of the playerbase (despite seeming familiar or similar to some western stuff on the surface) that the usual Hoyo strategy of hinting at familiar tropes and character types just didn't work

personally, I'm not very happy with Natlan, it mostly does nothing for me, but I stopped thinking it's Objectively Bad. I just think Hoyo tackled a context that's extremely hard to do well because there are no cookie-cutter solutions. they fared much better than my beloved FF XIV (that also struggled with a South American expansion) and FF XIV team failing at something says a lot about how hard it is

anyway

please have a photo of a completely average street in Valparaiso

I think Natlan captured this style pretty well

I am not gonna argue if it's good or bad. My main issue is that it's incoherent. Natlan is confused about what Natlan is. And like it's been an issue before. But the fact the issue repeats just makes you throw hands in the air and ask why. I would explain it as 500 years of warring with Abyss makes people lose it a little, makes them put cultural preservation and development into the back burner. Except the story makes no indication that's the case. Like in Genshin in general you have to suspend the disbelief for a few things, Natlan just really pushes it to its limit. It's giving burnout, honestly. It's giving "we've worked on this game for almost a decade without break".

I totally buy the "this flying gun was supposed to be an animal companion". I don't buy the lack of time. I think it's poor ass planning. I think they thought they'd figure it out by the time Natlan comes out, allocated inadequate resources, and when Natlan time came they realized they didn't not, in fact, solve the issue.

"Like in Genshin in general you have to suspend the disbelief for a few things, Natlan just really pushes it to its limit."

Yeah, I agree.

Considering how good Nod Krai crumbs seem to be, I'm thinking more of "this was a task too ambitious for the team" rather than burnout. Genshin relies a lot on borrowing already working solutions from other media and we just... don't have world popular media that deals with South America from a decolonial perspective. So Natlan deserves to be appreciated as one of the first attempts.

Do I personally care about anything there though? No. Apart from a few Fatui things it failed to appeal to me. Precisely because of the suspension of disbelief thing.

I dunno why HOYO thought they could. Like ambition is great. And trying something is better than not trying at all. But what gives the audacity. And like I would have accepted this if it gave me an impression that an attempt was made with care. A sincere effort. But the thing, it just doesn't give that. Especially with the writing of the Archon quest which is supposed to encompass a nation in its most (it's goals, it's struggles, it's strategy to achieve those goals, the methods of fixing the problem). Did they want to? Clearly. Did they give the impression that thought and research and care was put into this rather sensitive ambition? Not to me, no. Especially considering their colorism issue. It doesn't not add to their credit, in fact, it withdraws credit. It's pushing the balance into the negative. I'd happily hear from someone whose cultures were touched upon in Natlan and if they feel like it was a sincere attempt rather than audacious one.

I can't believe Capitano died for this.

They did an incredible amount of research actually. Wayob is probably the best media representation of what culturologists clumsily call totems. Character design makes my LatAm friends and acquaintances go "hey, I know that type of person/that specific person they are referencing".

(even as a person of a different background I'm amazed by Citlali, she's an incredibly accurate depiction of a type you never see in media but which very much exists)

What they failed is to integrate it into a form that is appealing to outsiders.

So I haven't played any of the world quests, really, but it's specifically because the archon quest sucked so hard that I don't want to even if they're good.

The thing that I don't like about Natlan is that it feels too kiddish. I also really, really, really hated that the Traveler was the Integral Key Hero when it feels like the whole point of the region was "Natlan people band together to solve Natlan problems." Like, give us some resentment that the rest of Teyvat seems blissfully unaware that Natlan is single-handedly holding off the Abyss. That they ASKED for help and were denied. Or, make it an angle that they've been offered help and rejected it? Something??? You can't just make the point that "isn't it impressive that they've been managing this absolutely bonkers insane apocalyptic task for so long?? ALONE?!" and then be like "Great thing we have this random foreigner to come fix everything." Like, I get that that's what the protagonist of this kind of story does, but Fontaine handled it way better? Everyone had their own shit going on and we're just there as a catalyst. Even Inazuma made more sense bc Sangonomiya was like "Hey we're getting our ass kicked in this war and you're a great wildcard. HELP."

It feels like a disservice to everyone that's been working their ass off to have Super Hero Alien swoop in and fix everything through the sheer power of their specialness. Like, just make Traveler an anti-Abyss aura battery or something so the actual heroes of Natlan can shine. It felt like 40% of the archon quest was Celebrating the Traveler at the detriment of everyone else's development. Like, yes! Have feasts! Celebrate victories and the good days! Make it a huge cultural event that shows how everyone interacts!! Can you please stop talking about me for five minutes.

I got to the point I literally just let dialogue run on auto and left to make dinner or something. I've never done that at any point in the story before, not even the Aranara quests. And the worst part is more often than not I'd come back to someone praising the Traveler again as;lfdj

Idk I think Natlan had the absolute worst telling instead of showing of any region - the actual meaning of that phrase. Chasca is supposedly a freak who can't make friends because she's a feral little abyss child - proceeds to have a few tame arguments with her sister and be a well-liked and respected member of her tribe. Kinich is supposedly cold and calculating and so used to living on his own that other people find him extremely offputting, on top of having a very poorly viewed job hunting out of control saurians - he seems perfectly fucking fine unless you go digging in his story quest. Mavuika... really doesn't have anything going on? She's just perfect and also boring and she barely gets to participate in her own story besides walking in some neat cinematics. Can you at least explore how her viewing herself as a god/tool first and not really as a person would affect her and the people around her

I've heard the world quests are good but I genuinely think, if the main story is THAT bad, it doesn't really matter that much asldfj

Like I want to be fair! I think AGGRESSIVE positivity in the face of the apocalypse would be so interesting! If they! Did something with that!!! And I do think valuing their cultural history because they don't have a future without it was GREAT! That sacrificing the past just *wasn't* an option! There's a lot of really good concepts and, while I love the game overall and want to rate it highly, I can't give the execution here anything more than a 2.5/10.

reblog if you have skilled writer friends and you're damn proud of them

the rapid disintegration of rainbow capitalism pretty much encapsulates the problem with rainbow capitalism in the first place: it is and always was performative fair-weather allyship that evaporated in the face of any real political pressure

Problem? It was never a problem, unless you had unrealistic expectations for what it meant. It was a symptom, and a good one. — Be strategic and think about this deeper for a minute.

It was absolutely performative fair-weather allyship. But it was a bellwether that the pink dollar was worth taking over any hypothetical backlash a business might face for supporting the queers. For some, and at some times in the past, it was a reassurance that they would do business with you even if they knew you were gay, and that was a huge issue if you eg. wanted to buy a house or a car. And it helped make queerness both more visible and more normalised in society, instead of trying to sweep teh gays back into the closet.

You’re not going to get rid of cynical cash grabs so long as capitalism is around, so you might as well be clear-eyed about it and recognise that while rainbow merch is totally unreliable for actual support, it was a sign that the smart money was betting in your favour.

You can always trust a business to find a sort of middle space that's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and sit there avoiding all controversy in the absolute most craven and soulless way possible.

This means that a business is in fact a very good indicator of what's vaguely agreeable to most of its customers and what counts as controversy.

Don't think of them as allies. They aren't people. They can't be. Think of them as a barometer. If the barometer is up, you've probably got sunny skies. When the barometer starts dropping, prepare for heavy weather moving in.

Dude, where’s my kissy. Where is my fuckin snuggles bro

why did i think it was a good idea to make one of the characters a mathematician

i made up her up so she can only really know as much math as i know

🤍 chilumi date

[Do not repost]

Imagine if a zombie apocalypse happened and nobody cared. It didn't really effect wealthier areas because guards would shoot them down. There's some paranoia that zombies would overrun humans but society never really breaks down.

You'd hear about infested areas out in the rust belt, where entire towns were overtaken by the undead. And mabye you'd see a zombie or two when you're in a really bad neighborhood and you have to cross the street. Most undead are harmless outside of large groups, but it's always good to stay safe.

And if you go to an area that's completely overun things really will look like the apocalypse. And there's something exciting about that. Society is interested in those ghost towns, not as a tragedy, but as a spectacle. You've seen reality TV where people will head into the worst of the outbreak with nothing more then a knife and a camera, all while the locals look on wishing someone could take them back.

Most people don't think about zombies. They're just another thing in the world that sucks right now. Occasionally there's a reminder of them, but eventually you forget why anyone is even afraid at all. It seems so normal.

One of your coworkers was attacked the other day by a zombie. Nobody really knew her well. The main thing people were talking about at the office when it comes to her is how lucky she is the be in the hospital having her wounds treated and disinfected, instead of stuck at work. Someone as young as her is expected to be able to fight one off, mabye she did it on purpose. Nobody was still making jokes when they realized she died, people aren't supposed to die that way if they're rich enough to work in an office.

The apocalypse isn't enough to end society. Society is meant to be more resilient then reality, that's the point.

If Cthulhu can be summoned by humans who are so far beneath it, why can’t humans be summoned by ants? The answer is they should be.

Well if a bunch of ants formed a circle in my house I’d certainly notice, try to figure out where they’d all come from, and possibly wreak destruction there.

That’s why knowing and correctly pronouncing the true name is so important to the ritual. Imagine how impossible it would be to not go take a look if the circle of ants started chanting your name. And they’re like, you can’t leave because we drew a line made of tiny crystals - now you have to do us a favor. And you’re like, let’s just see where this goes “yup, you got me… what’s the favor?” and usually the favor is like, “kill this one ant for us” or “give me a pile of sugar” and you’re like… okay? and you do, because why not, it isn’t hard for you and boy is this going to be a fucking story to tell, these fucking ants chanting your name and wanting a spoonful of sugar or whatever. And SOMEtimes you get asked for things you can’t really do, one of them, she’s like, “I love this ant but she won’t pay any attention to me, make me important to her” and you’re like… um? how? So you just kill every ant in the colony except the two of them, ta-da! problem solved! and the first ant is like *horrified whisper* “what have I done”

This is the best explanation for higher powers I’ve ever really heard.

*scaramouche internal monologue about gender* I think the human gender binary is so stupid & doesn’t make any sense. I’m literally above all of this human gender stuff bc I exist outside that binary as a puppet and that makes me better than all of you. I have decided to “transition” into being a “man” not because I believe in human gender but because I do NOT want to look like my mother and I will Not be unpacking all of that. Its sooo funny whenever people think being a man is my end goal for being transgender like none of you humans would ever understand becoming a man is only one step in my ultimate transition goal: becoming a GOD. That’s right. If you want to respect my identity you CANT just stop at the right human gendered words and “pronouns” you have to view me as a God and Above You In Every Psyhical and Emotional Way. HAHA! I am so insecure and agonized about my sense of personal identity I hope we all DIE!

*wanderer internal monologue about gender* been thinking about growing out my hair a bit lately tbh. I’m literally like if some guy was a puppet

i was playing pokemon blue on stream earlier at 350% speed and i got to thinking

what if the reason nobody in the pokemon world has any good teams is because its considered a dick move to have a proper team comp

like culturally everyone is like “haha pick the pokemon you want! if you’re happy with three geodudes, thats you and your life!” and then you’re supposed to just have a friendly battle with any other pokemon trainers and whatever pokemon they just happen to have

like the average trainer is probably just walking around with a growlithe because that’s their pet, or a hiker has three geodudes because the geodudes help him with hiking. and if this pet owner and geodude hiker meet, you’re supposed to have a friendly battle but nothing too serious

now imagine the 10 year old kid that has six pokeballs on their belt comes up. you’re like “haha, we’ll have a friendly battle!” and you throw out your geodude 

and they throw out a fucking gyarados, and it one-shots your geodude 

and then you throw out your pidgey you have because the pidgey helps you navigate mountains because you’re a hiker

and then electricity crackles around the gyarados and a thunderbolt flies off of this giant dragon and evaporates your pidgey 

so you’re down to your last pokemon. you tell them you’re gonna send out your bulbasaur. the ten year old is like “oh okay in that case i’m gonna pull out my vulpix.” like not only is this kid walking around with an amped-up super dragon, but theyve also got multiple pokemon specifically for making type advantage counter-picks?

this kid’s a fucking asshole! really, kid? what are you trying to prove here? this is a friendly match between strangers for fun! why are you composing real-ass competitive teams? what a fucker! 

i mean if you look at how npc’s talk about their pokemon, they’re service animals mostly. some of them are just pets. apparently they really enjoy sparring, so you let them battle other people’s pokemon for socialization, it’s like going to the dog park.

hell yes i’d be mad if i took my chronic pain support chow-chow to the dog park and some asshole with four rottweilers and a husky was like SIC EM THUNDERNUTS even if my dog enjoyed the tussle at first.

look, kid, the paras helps me weed the garden. it’s not a special forces attack paras. it’s just a bug that eats dandelions. please calm down.

This is precisely why Cooltrainers are exiled to the mountains

It’s not the trainers’ fault, they’re going about their god damned business trying to get badges and go to the Pokemon League and stop legendary Pokemon from fucking shit up and save the world, but they’ve got fuckin’ Hiker Willy stopping them on the path and running over here like;

“PLEASE WILL YOU STOMP MY TWO GEODUDE INTO THE EARTH!”

Like, fuck off, if Willy didn’t want my Swampert to one-shot his hiker helpers then he shouldn’t be trying to harass unaccompanied 10-year-olds halfway up a mountain. I mean, at some point, ya gotta know what a trainer looks like, and the majority of them are little tweens running around by themselves. These are little twerps trying to go up against the Elite Four, they’re not messing around.

Hiker Willy is asking for it. He’s asking me to kill his Pokemon. 

The notes on this post are an absolute joy.

This is more of a martial arts thing but here at least if you show up at a new gym and annihilate every partner you spar with, either nobody will spar with you anymore, or one of the strongest fighters at the gym will wipe the floor with you to take your ego down a notch, and I feel like that’d transfer over fairly well culturally

Like yeah it’s all fun and games dropkicking noobs and exchamging nothing until Brianna, 36 year old brown belt in the women’s 180lb division, makes you eat your own elbows

Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don't need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it's enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn't do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it's a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.

This is also a habit I built up from emergency response training. If I say "I need you to bring me a first aid kit and an accident report" and you bring me just a first aid kit, it's so much more efficient to say "thanks now can you bring me an accident report" than "I asked you to bring an accident report why didn't you bring me one".

Once you've internalized "a person bleeding out is one of the worst times to start an argument" you start to wonder what other tasks could get accomplished without arguing

I sorta love EMTs sometimes, they're focused on results in a way many people are not.

Man, everyone should be. "What other tasks could get accomplished without arguing" indeed!