I disagree with FEAR simply because I’d say to play it on the hardest difficulty and go balls to the wall because the AI will fuck you over if it gets the chance; and the longer you take to clear a room, the more time the AI has to organize and execute a plan. If it weren’t for the fact that I’ve seen plenty of people get stuck on FEAR because they tried to play it like a cover shooter, I’d fully agree with you.
Yes! Return of the Obra Dinn 100%. You can still watch other people play it on YouTube later and have a blast seeing them figure things out. And read Lucas Pope’s excellent devblog later as well.
I am super intimidated Return of the Obra Dinn. But it looks so cool, and I feel like it uses a lot of lateral thinking and makes you smarter for playing it.
No need to be intimidated. Just pick it up in a sale. Definitely a brain teaser but there are spoiler reduced guides out there in case you get stuck. But you should be able to finish the game even without guidance.
I went into Oxenfree completely blind after picking it up for next to nothing on the switch store. Great story with choices that actually matter. OP, do yourself a favor and play this without a guide.
I’m saying that a lot of people would consider it to start with “L”. I think it’s common to say “Legend of Zelda”, and even LoZ to refer to the series.
Cali is a hit or miss, the Cali privacy reg has been so watered down compared to the GDPR it feels like the ad industry got it in to prevent future harsher regulations.
While I agree having more options is always a better thing, I really can’t see body type A and B with pronouns choosing anything other than more inclusive, a good thing, and not something that deserves getting up in arms about.
I don’t really see how it could be seen as not more inclusive. Sure it’s not more inclusive than having full blown sliders that let you change every bit of a character’s body, but it’s adding more pronouns and not forcing those pronouns on a certain body type. If we look at number of options, it is more than the previous “male and female” options. Thus including a broader set of people
My issue is how half-assed the measure is. What’s the point of letting me pick between “He/Him” and “She/Her”, if it’s going on a character that looks like a stereotypical brodude or a model in a fashion magazine? Is it really doing anyone any favors?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him? If there was more variety or perhaps something like Cyberpunk 2077 or Baldur’s Gate 3 where you can have a masculine build with feminine features or vice versa, I could see the point… but for most games that are only going to give you the most common denominator as your only two options?
It just feels like throwing a coat of paint to make it look like the studio cares about making their product more accessible, when really it’s just trying to check a box to appease HR.
It’s a step in the right direction, but it’s so small that it’s insulting to everyone involved.
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
I think so. Why not? There are as many valid genders and identities as there are people in the world. Who am I to judge what people want to be referred as? Also even if there wasn’t people like that, I can almost guarantee there are people who would want to put a “they/them” to those body types, which seems to be the main point of this body type trend.
I don’t see it as a bad faith thing to be like “hey, we should include the ability for NB people to have their preferred pronouns”
Again, I agree that having more options would be better, but why does perfect have to be the enemy of good?
Edit: I also want to say that NB does not equal androgenous. Sure many NB people may desire or have an androgenous look. But I also know people who like to look and be feminine but are still NB, and the other way around
The reason why perfect is an enemy of good in this particular circumstance because the message it gives off now is “We care about buzzwords”, with just a little more effort, it could be “We care about inclusion.”
As it stands now, I’m just left rolling my eyes because game studios see me as not a woman, but as “Body Type B”, but if we had some more androgynous options alongside itl, it’d come across more… “Oh I CAN have a feminine build if I WANT to.”
I guess I just really don’t see it that way. Man and woman and “she/her” and “he/him” are so much more than the way a body looks. Like someone could be the most traditionally culturally masculine looking person and go by she/her. That’s valid, that’s fine.
I don’t see it as the studio not seeing you as a woman. I am somewhat confused by that statement. Like you get the ability to choose she /her with a couple body options. The she / her is the woman here no? They recognize it as a thing. You can look however. I mean fuck I certainly don’t have a body type B, but I’m still a woman
Thing is I definitely don’t look like the “Type B”, but my other option is “Type A”, which is something so blatantly masculine in every way that it would be insulting for me to represented as such, and I guarantee any other trans woman would feel that same in that scenario.
As another trans woman, I just have to say you do not speak for all trans women. I have met sooooo many trans women whose idea of transness are much different to my own. It’s so broad and expansive there are no absolutes here
@HawlSera@chloyster I mean, I absolutely know people who use she/her but present very masc, and vise-versa. They may be relatively uncommon, but so are trans people in general and we're still worth representing. Not to mention non-binary people who have relatively binary gender presentation. Your experience is absolutely not universal.
I am a tomboy, I present very masc, and it does annoy me when as a consequence people mistake me for a guy despite the fact that I obviously have breasts… But that is what it is…
But what I’m getting at is most Body Type A options don’t allow me to play a masc-presenting woman, but a masc-presenting man as in “Someone who looks like Leonidas on Steroids”. If Body Type A regularly allowed you to play as a masc-presenting woman I’d see your point.
The option to play someone like Zarya rarely if ever exists, whereas the option to play as someone who looks like Kratos is overwhelmingly what Body A refers to.
@HawlSera I do recognize that tomboys, buff women, etc are worth representing, (and we should push for their inclusion) but that's not what I'm talking about - I mean people who look like "men" but use pronouns other than he/him.
In agile development. You do a little, release. Otherwise it is too big and may never be done. The fact they committed resources to improve this is a positive. The hope is they build on it and add more options.
However, if they get trashed for trying, they and many other companies may not try. Why spend money to get a bad reputation when the spending nothing creates less I’ll will to the company. That is ultimately the decision Product Owners and Designers will weigh up.
I think for progress, the best approach is maybe “positive first step but more options are needed for non-bonary for this to really make players feel comfortable”.
From a technical perspective, separating pronoun hard coding from the models gives more scope to give more options in the future, however, as someone mentioned, there is a lot of art work needed on assets and animations so the new shapes function the same in all cases.
To be clear, your stance is it’s such a small step in the right direction, you’d prefer no step at all? Keep it cis-only or invest time/money in extra character models?
I’m not saying keep it cis-only, I apologize if that’s implied, pronoun selection is fine and I don’t have a problem with that. My issue is if we’re not going to offer more options than simply two body types, both based on super idealized and gender stereotyped versions of the male and female form… Can we have a less awkward thing to call it than “Body Type A/Body Type B”?
Would anyone in good faith, with only two options “Stereotypical Brodude or Fashion Magazine Cover Girl”, is going to play the former with she/her or the latter with he/him?
Not sure what you mean by “good faith” here, but I can assure you there are some he/him dudebros that play female characters bc if you’re gonna be staring at someone in 3rd person the entire game it might as well be someone attractive to you.
Also it’s perhaps a minority of gamers, but people with fewer identity issues don’t need to see themselves as a self insert for their character, so why not play someone totally different from you?
I basically mean, who intentionally picks an overly masculine character unambigiously male character with female pronouns? Because that’s really only a thing in transphobic far right political cartoons.
I could see people picking the “female” character with he/him pronouns if they wanted to play a femboy and there wasn’t really an option to make the male character look “pretty”, but the “male” character with she/her, I dunno about that one chief.
WhatbI don’t get is why they are using body type A/1 and B/2. One is clearly feminine and the other masculine, regardless of the gender of the character, why not use those words? They are describing the physical form of the body, it says nothing about gender.
Unless you’ve installed some very particular mods, the body types in most video games do not contain genitals, and therefore are not definitively male nor female.
I have boobs and a butt. My body looks like “Body B” from these games. It is not a female body. It does not have a vagina. I have a surgery planned, and that surgery will not result in a vagina. What I’m hearing right now is that you think my body is female. And that makes me feel uncomfortable because I do not want a female body. A feminine body, I am happy with, but not female. I choose “Body B” in these games because it looks like my body, which I am happy with. I do not choose it because it’s “female”. I feel a little bit of pain every time I have to click on female.
…they literally said “feminine” and “masculine”, not “male” or “female”. Specifically using language you say you’re okay with, but still prompting this response. What exactly is your problem with what they said?
No, but we still see models that largely either have bulges or camel toes.
Seeing a buff, hairy, bulge-having individual labeled “she/her” is typically only done in transphobic alt-right political cartoons and it feels a little tone deaf that game companies actually expect transpeople to unironically go with that…
What I’m hearing right now is that you think my preference to have a character that looks like me in video games isn’t worth pursuing because of camel toes, and because a troll might conceivably use the same features that help me, to make a character you don’t like. I already told you the nonbinary perspective on this issue. I’d just like to take a moment before I offer counterarguments to ask… what on earth is your intention with offering these arguments?
Now, as to camel toes: I cannot remember ever seeing a visible camel toe on a character in a video game. Maybe this is just because I don’t make a habit of staring at the crotches of women and femmes in games. But if I did notice a camel toe in a video game that was not about sex, my first thought would be “what the fuck game developers” and I would immediately be on the look out for misogyny in other aspects of the game. Maybe I’m completely off base here and I’ve actually been playing characters with camel toes this entire time and not realised it because I’m not a creep. But in that case, revealing this information to me would increase the gender dysphoria I feel in these games. Why do you want to do that?
And as for trolls? I saw someone in this thread respond to you say they like bearded ladies. You might have read that as a joke, but it wasn’t. Popular streamer JoCat is also a fan of bearded ladies, and I know this because he was cancelled by a bunch of TERFs for playing one in Baldur’s Gate while singing a controversial song. He decided to quit making his YouTube videos because of the harassment. JoCat is not a transphobe. He’s used his platform to raise money for LGBTQ charities in the past, and he was previously embedded quite firmly in the queer D&D youtubers community, friends with a lot of queer people who had nothing but positive things to say about him. I think that you’re confusing your trauma around transphobic representations with other genuine queer people who just wanna live as themselves, and you’re circling back around to transphobia as a result.
While I don’t personally agree with OP, I still believe that they are discussing in good faith. I see nothing here that says they think NB people are “alt right trolls”. Our rule here is to be(e) nice. Please don’t resort to unfounded personal attacks
Actually if you read what I said, I’d say part of my problem is that having two character models one that is “Unambiguously Male” and one that is “Unambiguously Female” while claiming “Oh you can just choose your pronouns, and we didn’t actually say Male or Female! So it’s fine” is a lazy solution that does more to annoy than to assist.
And that if they were actually serious about being more respectful to the wider gender spectrum that exists in real life, they’d have more than just those two options. But the concern dev studios have is not in helping gender non-conforming individuals be more immersed in games, it’s to say “I’m with the current trendy thing, upvotes to the left.”
We need to be critical of what’s called “Rainbow Capitalism/Pink Capitalism” or we’ll be stuck without any real meaningful change.
It should be fine. You’ll have to be thorough in removing personal information. I would prioritise giving it to someone I know rather than a complete stranger.
Everyone else seems to be very concerned about the terms of service, but I don’t know why ToS is of utmost importance to everyone suddenly. Anyone would gladly share their streaming service passwords, would previously rip CDs or DVDs, use VPNs to circumvent porn restriction laws in their country, lied in sites/apps to sign up as a teen, etc…suddenly Steam ToS is somehow sacrosanct.
This came up recently when Steam confirmed your account cannot be left to anyone else when you die. The conclusion everyone seems to mention there is: if you leave your username and password in your will, how would Steam ever know or enforce this?
I don’t think it’s so much a concern about violating the ToS as it is the consequences of violating it. Valve may be able to lock the account or close it if they have good reason to suspect the account has a new owner. An example of solid evidence of this may be changing the payment method for purchases, such that the name on a credit card doesn’t match the previous cardholder name on the steam account.
But if the new owner doesn’t plan on making new purchases on the account, it would probably be more difficult to confirm the account was transferred.
I never gave out passwords for my accounts that I paid for no one is getting access to shit I pay for because if something goes wrong and the account is banned then I’ve pissed money down the drain.
They’re talking about giving away their account. They don’t care about what happens to it, except maybe in the sense they’d prefer someone who wouldn’t waste it.
Came here to say Outer Wilds. That game is a masterpiece and I encourage anyone and everyone to try it. Only two things I’ll say are this: The less you know about it going in, the better the experience. The DLC is also worth it.
It’s one of those I downloaded, played 10 minutes of, and then got distracted by something else. I’ve done a good job avoiding spoilers, I’ll check it out next.
That’s actually very ironic, the game needs about half an hour to get you hooked and yet so many people quit it beforehand. You’ll understand what I mean when you play it
Interestingly enough, I did the same thing. When it launched, I was big into piracy and had a shitty job to pay for games with. Played until I could fly the ship, flew into the sky, then promptly lost control of my ship and didn’t touch it again for at least half a decade. So glad I bought it and played it without spoilers!
The less you know about it going in, the better the experience.
This includes the knowledge that it’s good. You should forget that people praise it everywhere because that has a potential of ruining the experience. It did for me, somehow.
Came here super late to ask: how? I played it and after discovering most of the things in game I couldn’t continue without guides (not good with puzzle games). I also don’t get attached to characters that can’t move with a few lines of dialog (no I’m not a psychopath, OneShot’s endings always give me mixed emotions for a few days). I’m not looking to argue I just want an answer
It’s funny how people overestimate what a person that never gamed can do. OP, Factorio is constant precise clicking with an unintuitive UI if you haven’t played any games. So is Satisfactory and similar others.
Start with things casual gamers play. There is a reason Sims is so popular. If you want to later (muuuch later) introduce her into the FPS genre - Portal 2. It has very little controls to remember, and very rarely is there any action that needs to require dexterity in aiming. Also, Valve invisible tutorials are awesome for new gamers.
Yeah, I played It Takes Two with my gf last week and she had trouble with the most basic jumps because she couldn’t use the keyboard and mouse at the same time. It might be easier with the controller, but moving a character and the camera at the same time is surprisingly hard to learn for beginners.
The best recommendations here are the games with extremely simple controls. I think Vampire Survivors was a good pick since you only need to use the keyboard for most of the time. Adventure games was another good recommendation since it should only require the mouse.
Good that she likes organizing, but Factorio is way over the head of any non-gamer. Doubt it would keep her entertained for long. Its only great if you like micromanaging and meticulously playing around with game mechanics. Which usually only happens after being exposed to gaming long enough.
It Takes Two is much better for a beginner since it isn’t a punishing game.
Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is an other great couple game.
Yeah, I played It Takes Two with my gf last week and she had trouble with the most basic jumps because she couldn’t use the keyboard and mouse at the same time.
This is probably a stupid question … but it was an actual mouse right? Like we wasn’t using a touchpad?
So many OSes default to the touchpad being disabled while typing and that causes big issues for WASD keyboard and mouse games.
If you like randomly made stories, you can try Rimworld.
You will quickly find yourself asking very difficult questions. Is taking on the cripple something you can afford to do? Is using medicine on a less valuable colonist smart? Do you let some of your colonists starve, or start a war with friendly neighbors? Cannibalism will make your neighbors hate you and some of your colonists might rebel over it, but that’s better than some of them starving… right?
If you’re into colony Sims Rimworld is amazing! Biotech and Idology are also great DLC expansions that give you a lot more options. IMO Royalty is the weakest one so if you’re just starting out I might recommend passing on it unless you really love the game
Epic is the worst of the 3 platforms for a user. It is a drm like steam, but with less games on it, and even less optimized (so even more wasted resources and time loading useless advertising).
Steam has it that is makes game run on Linux smoothly, and the biggest library of games. Gog is drm free. Epic has absolutely nothing a user may want, except for free games so that you are now captive of their shitty platform.
Epic doesn’t have to be as good as Steam; it has to be better than Steam. People don’t up and leave platforms they like for new platforms for no reason. Epic can take a smaller cut on games but if that doesn’t carry to the end user why should I care.
At this point, I don’t know if Epic can get better than Steam in the ways that matter simply because they are clearly trying very hard to gain a dominant market position in ways that make it seem like they would abuse such a position, while Valve has had that dominant position for decades without abusing it. Valve is one of the few companies I trust these days. That trust is Valve’s to lose, not any other competitor’s to gain, though I am open to other adjacent providers (like I’ve got an xbox game pass sub, a ps5, and switch).
I have zero experience with epic or gog, but steam got incredibly bad lately. It’s not uncomon for it to consume 2 entire CPU cores just by animating some store page background.
Minecraft / Terraria, 100%. Both games have available co-op, so they can play with their friends, and allow quite a bit of creative expression. Terraria is made by some of the best indie devs ever, if it helps, having been getting free updates for years, even though the devs said they had finished the game years ago.
For a more socially open experience, I could also recommend Sea of Thieves. It’s a game about manning a pirateship and collecting loot, where you can sometimes run into real people on their own adventures (or get your ship sunk by them, after all, they’re also pirates). There is co-op, too. A cash shop is available, but all items are strictly cosmetic, with many items available through gameplay alone.
I will say it sounds like a lovely lawsuit waiting to happen though, especially in countries with good consumer protections. I wonder how Canadian law would feel about this? 🤔
Microsoft is a trillion dollar company. Unfortunately I doubt any country is going to meaningfully harm them over accounts like this. (I am one of the people that cant migrate because the email I had associated with it is gone and the game was gifted to me so long ago that I wouldn’t be able to easily prove it was mine)
You’d be surprised, EU fines and consequences to shitty anti-consumer actions like this are built to hurt. There’s a reason why the new iPhone has USB-C, and it’s not out of the kindness of their heart.
Yes, but in this case? The users are being migrated to a new authentication account and have been notified for many years that they needed to move over - it’s been like 5 years, right? The servers are staying up. And if you’ve got a Mojang account, any possibility of this still being under even the most generous warranty is long gone.
If you want to participate in a community where you control the software, you should be getting into open-source games. Minetest is great! It has a better modding system than Java edition! But ultimately, if you’re playing commercial games, you have to deal with a reality that the company owns it and there’s no guarantee what will happen to their servers after the warranty is expired.
I contend that there are more games out there now that are made for the sake of making them than ever before. It’s just that fewer and fewer of these games are AAA titles. The indy scene is really what are making these games nowadays.
That or modding. Modded Minecraft is done purely because someone wanted to have the functionality of magic wands or engineering or resource processing in their lego game. It’s completely unmonetized and gets extremely involved very fast. I fondly remember my nuclear reactor exploding and having to work around the irradiated zone. Good times.
the indie scene may be greater for that but is also filled with the same money making trite and on top of that constantly copying each other and barely doing anything new.
Youtubers are inheritor by the virtue of their existence just are a little to biased like the gaming magazines, I also find text much easier digestable than 2,5 minutes of invideo ads, sponsors selfplugs, like button smashing.or whatever else they want to subject me to
I spend far more effort trying to find gold than one really should have, there shouldnt be a need to spend so much time
Take a genuine hard look at this industry, an industry full with exploitation, lootboxes, micro and macrotransactions, the same 5 ideas ad naseum, where for every cuphead you have 10 slendermans, (thats just the tip of the iceberg)
you mean to tell me in THAT industry its ne with the problem? Cause thats a fair assassment and ill support whatever conclusion you may or may not draw
I have hundreds of games in my steam library with no in game purchases or lootboxes which I have enjoyed for between 50 and 2000 hours each. If you really have that much trouble finding games you can enjoy playing, then you need to change your habits.
I think it’s more that, in absence of a gaming social circle, games discovery in the indie scene is hard. So, the easiest way for a lot of us is to find a gaming content creator who played games we like and play whatever they’re playing.
There’s a YouTube streamer I’ve been following for over a decade and every single game he plays is a 5/5 for me. At least ½ of my gaming is just games from his channel. It’s super easy; I don’t even watch him on Twitch much, but I can scan his recent broadcasts for gaming suggestions, and watch him play for like 30 minutes to figure out if it’s for me.
Not directly to your point but your overall experience just reminds me: we really lost something when the sexual liberation movement was largely erased. People so often dismiss it because we’re conditioned to dismiss taking sex seriously (outside of a very narrow and specific context) but there’s a lot we lose from that.
Was it erased? We are more comfortable with porn than ever (which I wouldn’t say is okay, but definitely not prudish), and after the jews, the biggest boogie man out there is the gender lobby.
I say we’re in the next phase, and moderators (Visa, Mastercard) need to buckle up for what’s coming.
Are we (edit: 'hope that doesn’t sound antagonistic; I more meant it rhetorically)? No-Nut November has only recently dipped in the general consciousness and goon is currently trending as a pejorative. I think we’re comfortable with pushing the boundaries and with nodding and winking towards it but outright normalization has a fierce backlash.
But part of what the sex. lib. movement was about was both normalization and healthy interaction with sex, not just sexual content being prevalent. There’s plenty of unhealthy ideas and performances that the mainstream porn industry perpetuates, much of it relying on satisfying a normative and patriarchal outlook; feminist porn, for example, was/is a much more sex. lib. approach to porn (from giving women more active participation in the sex portrayed (rather than just the receptive of it) to also having the performers express their emotions more (even if minimally) and how the sex they were having made them feel).
These goals are much more in line with the emotional experience OP was describing, where it’s not just sexual content but a more healthy engagement with that sexual content as well, such as experiencing emotions and attachment. That’s part of why OP’s descriptions reminded me of it.
Mainstream porn, driven by capitalism (which isn’t to say all of us aren’t in some degree, even indie creators; sadly, that’s just the reality, right now), doesn’t care about these things.
And sex. lib. has a distinct history and activism, much of intertwined with gay liberation and…I think most people don’t know that or, like, the battles that were fought for information about safe sex, etc. I mean, it’s not unique (most people aren’t aware about disability history, for example, or events like the Capital Crawl) but it’s still deeply unfortunate.
I do appreciate the time and effort you put into the comment, but I am not arguing against what you are saying.
Since Kinsey &co and the summer of love, the movement didn’t evaporate, it perforated society and mutated. I don’t think I’d be going too far by stating, that the sexual revolution couldn’t have happened without the suffragettes. I see the queer movement as a spearhead in the same direction.
I only had qualm with you saying anything has been undone (sorry if I’m paraphrasing). Yeah, using ‘woke’ as a pejorative for anyone craving progress is a thing now, but that doesn’t mean most of us want nothing more than to love each other freely.
Mmm, I get what you mean. So often, I find myself in conversations (not ours but in general) that have certain presumptions that have been addressed by movements such as these that I feel like there’s this gap in knowledge that shouldn’t really exist but…
I think your point’s a fair argument, though; I’d certainly prefer that, at the very least.
I do understand. I find myself having to regularly check myself to look for miscommunication instead of malice (or stupidity for that matter).
The whole thing is whack, and anyone with two cents of mind and some compassion is just gaping at the horrors being casually thrown around and equally horrifying misdirections.
Thanks to the internet the only way to hide stuff is to drown it out, but we all have our trusted sources (who in turn distort reality in an infotaining world, but that’s where we’re at). This means we can more or less put the big picture together (or at least the players) and make fairly solid guesstimates.
I tell myself this is an all or nothing attempt by the ruling class to legitimize a strangle hold before any major resource wars break out and that people are really wisening up to their shenanigans. I feel ‘doomerism’ is an aspect where they can easily get me. Don’t let them win.
Tycho, of Penny Arcade, actually had some words on this subject around the time the PC version of Stellar Blade came out and people were up in arms about it. I’ll quote it here because I think it’s a good passage.
I used to say that I grew up Christian, but I think it’s probably more accurate to say Evangelical, especially now that more people might know what I’m talking about. Sex was VERY naughty and we needed to be constantly on the lookout for incursions of this secular, demonic, but also somehow worryingly inherent force…? Breaking that pernicious notion down and enabling people to express themselves was the project I thought I’d more or less seen completed. Now it’s come around some weird bend, with precisely the same energy as before, except now it’s being done for the correct reasons. It can’t possibly be this dumb. And yet!
It’s incredibly fucking boring to have the tail end of the revolution you saw win shame the tools that gave them victory, dust off a bunch of regressive shit, and then have the pluck to feel righteous about it.
It sort of mirrors my own experience (minus the evangelical upbringing). I definitely recall a period of general sex-positivity that has now come around some strange turn whereby the very same voices are admonishing people for daring to enjoy sexy things.
It’s because both sides were always divided on sex. The “beer, titties, and jesus” crowd and the anti porn feminists had been the lesser voices of their side for a while. But in the fallout of the sexual revolution, in the 70s and 80s second wave feminism developed a really anti sex stance, especially towards deviant types of sex. This was the feminist sex wars, and its the era of a lot of the more batshit bits. But it did begin with reasonable criticism. There was fighting back however, from lesbian feminist sadomasochism groups like Samois to owned porn cooperatives where radical ideas wete tried like having the entire crew be naked so the performers weren’t the only ones exposed.
People like to blame third wave feminism for the swing back, and I disagree. The third wave was the movement born of the critiques of the second wave, and the renewed push for sexual liberation in the 90s ans 00s was quintessentially third wave. And it got far, it did a lot, and it also left us with a lot to criticize. Whether it’s media criticism like Sarkeesian was harassed for daring to do, or it’s the unfortunately common stories of women being pressured into sex acts they don’t want with feminist language critiques had been mounting in the early 10s.
The theoretical fourth wave is often called twitter feminism, and i think it’s best to consider that the first real thing it did that impacted anything was the metoo movement. I believe metoo was a good thing. It’s next to the Arab spring as among the few things Twitter ever did that are good. But it and the late third wave criticisms gave room for the sex negative side to return to prominence. That’s where we are now, but I dont think it will last.
Because I think we need to remember that while there is an internal back and forth, there’s also the realpolitik of the fact that you can pull horny people if nobody else does. A chunk of gamergate is straight up that. Shining feminist media critiques through the worst possible lens to horny boys and men. Anyways the right has dropped their horny-prude coalition recently and is all in on prude, which is coinciding with chunks of the left getting tired of the dominant position of our prudes.
Anyways free the nipple, and what 20 consenting adults do behind closed doors is their right to do.
Since you seem knowledgeable, maybe I’ll bug you about something I’ve wondered about?
Did you notice a significant (huge by my measure) increase in attempts at polyamory for a period of time? As in, that trend seemed to have almost a start and an end, and a real big swell in the middle. And if so, any comments on how that fits into your timeline overview above? Some of your thoughts sound like they may point to this but I certainly don’t want to put words in your mouth.
Anecdotally, it seems to me like I watched a huge chunk of my (significantly) younger sister’s generation get themselves into plural relationships, then realize after a year or two of various attempts (often including some serious abuse) that actually they didn’t like that idea at all.
And don’t get me wrong, I absolutely encourage people to try what they are curious about, it’s a tragedy to spend a life never exploring what one might like. But that phenomena with polyamory / plural relationships in particular stuck out to me, largely because many of the people I saw try it had never previously indicated even remote interest in similar, some behaved fairly jealously toward their partners actually. It felt like a strange societal motivation, some kind of soft cultural pressure among peers, to go for it. And I personally never witnessed a positive outcome, either (which is not me saying that no one should live that way if they enjoy it, or that no one can find it genuinely fulfilling, healthy, and preferable). And for those with clear gender lines in the plural relationships, it was always polygynous - never polyandrous (please let me know if those terms are offensive). Felt like weaponized sexual liberation, frankly, by horny dudes, but that’s me making some possibly unfair leaps and introducing my own bias into the interpretation.
I guess more than anything else I was just struck by what felt like a wave in popularity, followed by an accompanying wave of “oh, nah fuck that actually, forever”. Was interesting to watch. Any thoughts?
(Disclaimer: this can be a thorny topic, anyone should feel free to correct anything I’ve misrepresented, misunderstood, or just been unkind about, I’m not a jerk on purpose usually).
Kinda, I’m actually polyamorous myself and most of my social circle still is. But I’ve heard of what you described. In my circles it’s been a lot more women lead and queer though. I think a lot of people jumped in without breaking their mental monogamy as well. Polyamory can be difficult, and for a lot of people especially those who jump in without thinking or who began their relationship monogamous it can be a spectacular shitshow, much like many relationships where incompatible desires are present or where people go in without knowing how to do it well.
I once had a relationship that I think a lot of my ex’s friends probably see as exactly like you described. We began monogamous, it was my first relationship and it was in the mid 10s, and within a year I realized monogamy wasn’t for me. So we opened up, then did full poly, got engaged, and she realized she couldn’t do poly. She pressured me into monogamy (I had been willing to call it quits) and I hated it. It was an ugly breakup that she likely blames on me pressuring her into polyamory. Funny enough a few months after the breakup when I wasn’t looking for anything serious I met someone else who’d recently had a breakup over wanting to stay poly, and we’re happily married with a clear mutual understanding that neither of us is open to closing the relationship.
Well thanks for the interesting perspective and I’m very glad to hear it wasn’t so one-sided everywhere, and that you’ve seen a lot more positives! Everything you said about causes of strife makes perfect sense to me and I would imagine those feature heavily for folks who try it out due to simple curiosity or pressure from a partner.
I would imagine, too, that sexual trends exhibit regionality and that they diffuse across regions over time and at uneven rates, much like any other cultural trend. Though of course a lot of cultural diffusion has gotten effectively instant thanks to tech - I remember “back in the day” you could travel from a (US) coast to the Midwest and find everyone basically 10-20 years behind cultural trends, from slang to hairstyles, to dress.
I wonder if relationships and dating and such, being a much slower process in general than changing styles of dress or speech, still have some of that interesting old-school slower diffusion, or more regional pockets anyway.
Anyway, enough baseless speculation from me - cheers and have a good one!
(Edit: I hope it didn’t sound like I’m calling your chosen romantic style itself a trend - I would never, when I call polyamory a “trend” I am referring exclusively to folks who did behave exactly as if it were any other fad that came and went, just with way heavier consequences)
Yeah I think a lot of people’s perceptions of polyamory come from it being different from what people are used to resulting in things like frequency biases (watch someone do something they don’t have the skills for and have 3 bad breakups at once rather than over 3 years, even though each lasted the same amount of time), differing points of failure (boundaries of monogamy are assumed natural even though there are disagreements and therefore monogamy is assumed unrelated to the failure, meanwhile if rather than cheating being the cause of failure its someone neglecting an existing partner for a new one, then polyamory gets blamed), polyamory giving people enough rope to hang themselves, and the tendency for it to be a mid relationship change in the basic expectations and rules of the relationship which is something always fraught. I also think people go in not realizing that most of the good ones are already polysaturated and it’s largely the train wrecks and partner hoarders that are constantly seriously looking.
And yeah I think it may be geographic but I think its less that and more subcultural. Being involved in queer and kinky irl scenes led to be being in communities with people who’d been nonmonogamous since well before it was cool and who’d already had expectations of high communication skills.
Like, I don’t think central ohio managed to just be way better at polyamory than most places, though I do think some local cultures still remain
And there’s the problem. It wasn’t so much they refused to acknowledge the city existed. The company refused to acknowledge they had to provide support staff beyond seeing a ticket and closing the ticket.
The customer support center was probably locked from accessing any website except a tightly controlled set of pages and tools. Even Maps is too easy to turn into a game. Look at Geoguesser.
I remember in high school we would use MS Paint and an eraser tool to make a game where you had to trace over a similar sized line and whoever had the most erased without backtracking won. Point being, people will make a game out of anything so petty tyrants managers have to lock that shit down to focus their people on the work.
Check out place names in Newfoundland, Canada. We’ve got Dildo, Placentia, Conception Bay, and many more. We’ve also got Heart’s Desire, Heart’s Content, and Hearts Delight, not necessarily inappropriate names but I could see someone flagging it as a fake name nevertheless.
bin.pol.social
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