so, did I ever tell you guys about the time my roommate accidentally simulated gender dysphoria in VR?

too bad, i’m posting it anyway

My roommate is a cis man who sometimes makes lady characters in video games because why not? So when he started a new VR game and made a lady character, he didn’t think anything of it.

But then he heard the NPCs talking about him with fem pronouns. He got miss/ma’am’d - and indeed, milady’d. This had never bothered him in non-VR games, but in VR it’s much easier to feel like you are actually in the room. They’re not talking about the avatar you control; they’re talking about you. They’re looking at you.

Then he happened across a mirror. He saw his pretty lady character instead of his internal picture of what his body looks like. He moved and saw his avatar’s body move in sync.

And it was so unsettling that he started over with a new character. He asked if that was what dysphoria was like. I told him “yeah, that’s def in the ballpark” and he was floored, like, “HOLY SHIT, how does anyone deal?”

And sometimes I wish I could shove people into a VR headset and give them that experience. 

also yes, of course I tried the game with a male character. I went straight for the mirror and it sounds silly but I was honestly awe-stricken and almost cried. Yet another “yep, definitely trans” moment.

reblog to give a strawberry to the person you reblogged this from

idk what dm needs to hear this but you arent getting that done in a single session

This is what happened when a fanfic site is profit driven. Wattpad sucks 😞

The email from Wattpad is so condescending imagine pressuring writers to update and work while they are doing it for free and fun. Also the discovery? Algorithm? Of Wattpad looks like a stressful popularity contest 😑

Hey I just wanna quickly say that you only get these if someone reports the story. I've barely updated on Wattpad in the past two years and haven't gotten any of these, mostly because I don't even have an audience over there who has the potential or drive to report my fics. So, corporate greed is bad, yes, but it's also readers being buttheads

Hmm, that's interesting! You know what happens if someone reports a story for being incomplete on AO3? Jack shit, because not churning out content for your fun little hobby is not a reportable offense on AO3! And that's because, unlike Wattpad, AO3 isn't profiting off of your work, either directly or indirectly, and so when readers are buttheads, the AO3 abuse mods ignore them, instead of sending out weird automated messages harassing writers for daring to have a wip.

Wattpad has gone to the dogs with greed. paywall and restrictions are also stupid insane, I used to love Wattpad until I couldn't read without an add every two chapters, and having to go offline just to avoid the unskipable minute long adds when Im trying to read to decompress, not to mention the library restrictions without a subscription is insane, I use AO3 for everything and AO3 has a working app now too!

And I stopped writing on Wattpad because I kept getting DMs constantly about how my updates weren't fast enough or my OC should have a different character trait to fit the readers likes, the ranking and rewards system also felt like it was turning the writings into a competition rather than being able to just do it for fun.

hey I'm sorry I know this is about wattpad, but I'm using this as a moment to make a public service announcement. this not solely directed at prev (although it is also partially directed at prev) and I want to be clear that there is 100% no reason that you're expected to know this, I am not blaming anybody for being fooled

AO3 doesn't have an official app

AO3 is optimized to run in your mobile browser, because they don't really have the people, time, money to spare developing and maintaining an app.

if you're using an app on your phone or tablet to access AO3 it's 100% an unofficial third-party app, and not by the Organization for Transformative Works.

if it says 'official' app, its still not one. it's an unofficial app. they are lying. they're using the logo and everything, too, but they are not an official AO3 app. I found two like this, and I had to look to find the 'we are an unofficial app'.

for the sketchiness of that alone, I would recommend deleting the app and changing your AO3 password. I'm not your dad, I can't tell you what to do, this is just advice that's intended to be helpful and friendly.

I know a lot of the internet doesn't work well in the mobile browser but I swear AO3 works great! You can even make your own skins to change how the page looks for you! (Or use skins that other people have made, there's lots out there!) Or you can download the fics and use them in an ereader of your choice, if you prefer.

just be really careful, because this AO3 app situation comes up every now and again. sometimes it's well-meaning fans, sometimes it's not.

if AO3 ever does put an app out- which is not on the roadmap as far as I'm aware- you'll be able to find lots of information about it on the AO3 website, confirming that it's genuine will be easy-peasy.

okay, love you, bye!

The thing about wanting to write smart essays is you truly do have to read books to do that, and the thing about reading books is that it is way harder now that I am not 17 and smartphoneless

Genuinely humiliating to read in 25 minute chunks because a decade of having a feelgood device in my pocket has turned my brain to cheese

I am once again thinking about digging holes

It's so fucked up that digging a bunch of holes works so well at reversing desertification

I hate that so much discourse into fighting climate change is talking about bioenginerring a special kind of seaweed that removes microplastics or whatever other venture-capital-viable startup idea when we have known for forever about shit like digging crescent shaped holes to catch rainwater and turning barren land hospitable

(Twitter source)

Old headshots of the TNG crew

Sauron: “I like your Silmarils”

Morgoth: “Thanks, I stole them from the president”

hold on i have to read the Silmarillion real quick

yeah this is funny

braver than any US marine

I love the new timestamp feature. Instantly see that it did indeed take nearly a month to reply.

fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.

i feel like a lot of the 'i hate kids' crowd would be more tolerant if they understood that due to a kid's limited experience of the world that 4 hour flight might just be the longest they've ever had to sit still for or that trapped finger might literally be the most pain they've ever felt in their short life or they might not have ever seen a person with pink hair ever so of course they want to touch it or nobody's told them yet that they can't run around the museum and they only just learned cheetahs are the fastest animals so of course they want to put that to the test. how were they supposed to know etc etc.

some of you in the notes.. i would say read the room but you didn't even read. the post

« Homo sapiens have evolved a particularly weird life history, with a much longer childhood and old age than other animals. […] It appears that there’s a kind of symbiosis in the human life history: a long childhood allows exploration and learning, while a wider set of carers, including elders, allows that childhood to unfold. […] Both childhood and old age appear to be critical periods in the life history of our species when it comes to the transmission of human culture – another thing that is distinctive, if not unique, about human beings. More than any other animal, we pass on information and knowledge from one generation to another. […]

[Our] vulnerabilities [in childhood and old age] are intimately related to some of our greatest human strengths – our capacities for learning, cooperation and culture. […] Just as the impulsiveness, curiosity and noise of children might contribute to exploration and compensate for their other inabilities, the older humans’ expertise, patience and storytelling skills might compensate for loss of speed and strength. It seems that all these life-history developments interacted to create the coevolutionary cascade that led to the remarkably swift emergence of Homo sapiens. A longer, smarter, more social childhood, as well as an extended old age, lets you develop more skilled adults. […]

So, childhood and old age – those vulnerable, unproductive periods of our lives – turn out, biologically, to be the key to many of our most valuable, deeply human capacities. They nurture and facilitate our exploration and creativity, cooperation, coordination and culture, learning and teaching. In some ways, we are at our most human before puberty and after menopause. Caring for those vulnerable humans at either end of life lets all of us flourish. The dance of love and lore between grandparent and grandchild is at the centre, not the fringes, of our evolutionary story. »

— Alison Gopnik, “Why childhood and old age are key to our human capacities” in Aeon Magazine