tegan

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Content count

    4990

  • Joined

  • Last visited

Posts posted by tegan

  1. Posted

    About a month ago, I had a job interview with Sears. They told me almost immediately that I got the job, then spent weeks waiting to get back to me about when I'd start training. I finally started just last week, and just this morning I got fired before even working a single shift. Apparently I didn't ask enough questions during training and decided that I "have no personality."

     

    I have some suspicions that they might have looked at my medical records and fired me based on my sexuality or clinical depression, but obviously that's just speculation.

     

    It took me months to find this job and I was counting on it to get me out of debt. The only income I have now is from my Patreon. I'm way behind on my rent and bills and I don't know how to explain this to my landlady. I just wanna cry.

  2. Posted

    I have a whole lot of things on my plate that I'm stressing over, and yet all my little insecurities keep bubbling back up anyway.

    I came out to a friend the other day, and even though it went really well, deep down I feel like I've ruined it, and now it's just a slow familiar wait for everything to go wrong. Every single person I've ever told has eventually come to hate me. My own parents couldn't bring themselves to love me, how could anyone else?

  3. Posted

    So I bred this shiny Drifblim but didn't fully flesh out what I wanted to do with it first. Here's what I've got so far:

     

    Drifblim lv. 100

    Bold

    EVs: 252 HP/252 Sp.Def/8 Def. 

    Unburden

    @Red Card

    -Recycle

    -???

    -???

    -???

    Available Egg Moves: Memento, Destiny Bond, Disable, Hypnosis

     

    It didn't get perfect HP, sadly, and I deliberately bred it for a crappy Attack stat. It pairs well with things that set hazards, but can't set hazards itself. Suggestions welcome!

  7. Posted

    I'm feeling pretty upset and stressed about some stuff lately and a break from some of the internet might be good for me. I dunno.

     

    Also, still looking for a job. I've done two job interviews this week and I have another next week. I'm not really sure how I feel about the one I'm interviewing for next week though. It's probably the one I want most, but it comes with some huge caveats.

  8. Posted

    P.S. I know, poor straight white guy (and ad hominem on my part) but it's not a little mean-spirited to just straight up attack an unrelated picture of her and Matthew? Why was it necessary to link this Tumblr post of any of the chain? It adds to the overall feeling of the entire thing being unnecessarily vindictive to me.

     

    I agree, but I linked that because it mentions some shitty things that are in that very comic and relevant to the situation at hand. I probably should have just typed up something myself though. Sorry.

     

     

    It's fun finding out that literally every person I'd heard of with any kind of influence in social justice is too questionable to listen to. Erika Moen, now?

     

    I'm looking forward to finding out how Apple Cider's co-host on Justice Points did a shitty thing once and therefore must be purged because she is impure.

     

    You know Merus, I really hope that you eventually reach a point in your life where you realize that it's possible to assess multiple facets of a person before you come to a conclusion about their character, or decide that no conclusion is needed at all, because this shit gets real old. I don't have some grand list of who I'm "allowed" to like and who I'm not. I straight-up said that I "didn't know how to feel about her," not that I like or dislike her. I can like Moen's Oh Joy Sex Toy comics without liking some of the shitty things she's said.

    I'm pretty sure we've had this exact conversation before in private, and it's still downright childish to stick your finger in your ears and ignore that pretty much everyone can and has done bad things and don't really need your help to whitewash them as perfect angels. A week ago you defended Hugh Fucking Hefner as an ally.

     

    I dunno if it's just me, but your "argue with everyone on every point" schtick has gotten really irritating.

  9. Posted

    Maybe put that in a NSFW spoiler, Smart Jason. I'm also not really sure how I feel about Erika Moen, generally.

     

    Here's The Mary Sue with a good write-up of the situation, citing and dismissing interpretations that the characters isn't strictly a lesbian initially. I wish the author of the article hadn't explicitly wished for the game to be "censored," considering how loaded and misinterpreted that word's become. I'm sure GamerGate is ready, if the content is localized, to apologize for it in context and declare that SJWs have once again hysterically attacked free speech.

     

    I'd like to make note that the guy who wrote that fucking laughable defense of the game is a Gamergater, tagged the original post with Gamergate, and has been calling for Gamergate to defend Fire Emblem. Ethics in journalism, guys.

  12. Posted

    That's the fucking worst. Good lord. What kind of attitude does Japanese culture in general have towards being gay? I'm totally unfamiliar with that.

     

    Mediocre at best. There's no religious opposition against it like there is in the west, but you can't get married and things like hospital visitation rights and co-renting are only being considered in any part of the country as of this February. There's also no laws against gay sex, but the law also considers gay people unable to have real sex, calling it "an imitation." Transgender rights go so far as being able to legally change your gender, but there's still huge problems with it. There's a mention on that wiki page of a transgender woman prisoner who, even having had sexual reassignment surgery, was still being held in a men's prison and treated as male.

     

    Culturally, Japan is really weird about representation. Someone I knew once positioned it as "Japan is fine with putting gay people in fiction, because Japan regards gay people as fictional." You see a surprising number of LGBT characters in things, but their sexuality is often played for laughs, treated as a teenage phase, considered perversion, or fetishized for a straight audience. I'm a sucker for trying almost any LGBT-focused Japanese media I can get my hands on, and I can count on one hand the amount of times I've actually seen a happy adult gay couple in anime, manga, or Japanese games. In terms of public figures, homosexuality is the kind of thing that is seen as sort of a... personal quirk? Not necessarily disliked, but you don't want to be gay or have relatives that are transgender or otherwise be connected to it. There's very much an idea that being LGBT is a novelty. The only LGBT celebrity mentioned on that wiki page is Matsuko Deluxe, which is kinda like if the most prominent LGBT celebrity in America were Divine.

     

     

     

    I wanna stress though... Japanese culture be damned. This is a Nintendo thing, not a Japan thing. There's been big strides in LGBT rights in Japan in the past little while, Nintendo is an international company, and regardless of the situation it's not really a matter of their intentions being misunderstood due to a cultural barrier, it's a case of their intentions being fundamentally fucking disgusting.

  14. Posted

    Man, I really wish I hadn't mentioned the Fire Emblem thing here in any sort of positive light, because basically the way Nintendo is handling their first openly gay characters is utterly reprehensible.

     

    TL;DR: in Conquest version, one of your squadmates is openly lesbian. Female player characters can't romance her, but male ones can. See, she feels that her lesbianism is a weakness that makes her less of a woman, so dudetagonist drugs her drink with magic powder that makes her temporarily see men as women and women as men, which is used as the cornerstone in what is essentially magic gay conversion therapy. In the end, she falls for him, because of course she does.

     

    This might actually be the worst thing Nintendo has ever done.

  16. Posted

    So I know this place skews a little older than me, so it's likely that none of you have the nostalgia to care about this, but really want to see a postmortem on Neopets.

     

    For those who don't remember, Neopets is an online RPG-ish, Virtual Pet-ish, Gaia Online-ish thing launched in 1999 and meant specifically for kids. It's still going after sixteen years, and has generally aggregated to be one of the largest spaces meant for kids on the internet. And I mean for kids. There's a larger discussion to be had about making safe spaces for kids on the internet, but like... if you're under 13, you need to have your parents sign and in fax a form in to use the chat features on the site.

     

    Anyway, last year, Neopets got bought by Knowledge Adventure, the company that makes all that Jumpstart edutainment software. They severely downsized the staff without warning, firing community leaders who had been with the site for years as well as the entire creative team, leaving the site running on a skeleton crew. Site features also began breaking in ways that still haven't been addressed. As of yesterday, a server move turned off most of the word filters and kept the moderators from logging in, and within about fifteen minutes the entire site had become an amazing flash mob made of porn and people looking to score crystal meth.

    A bunch of people I follow on tumblr who were just the right age to still have fondness for the site began to break down everything they knew about what's been happening at Neopets, and it sounds like exactly the kind of trainwreck I'd love to read a book about.

  18. Posted

    "Queer" is mostly a catch-all, in my experience. I occasionally use it as a self-description, but not often. It's also one of those N-word deals for me, where I don't like straight people using it to describe me, but that might just be because it was my parents' slur of choice.

     

     

     

     

    In other news this week:

     

    Bad News: Remember how Facebook added 56 non-binary gender options to the dropdown list a while back and got universal praise for the decision? The former employee responsible for the decision, a transgender woman, has been banned from the site due to their "real names" policy. Ugh.

     

    Good News: Scott Lively; the pastor who helped pass America's first anti-gay legislation, created Uganda's infamous "kill the gays" bill, and wrote a book about how the Nazis were founded by gay people; is being put on trial for Crimes Against Humanity. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

  20. Posted

    I need to grab some of Boss Fight Books' stuff. Really looking forward to the MGS and Spelunky ones from the season 2 collection.

     

    The Bible Adventures one is amazing.

     

    But was there a book in it?

    Hard to say when I got my answer. Maybe it was when game developer Dan Burke told me that nearly everyone who made these games was atheist or agnostic. Maybe it was when fellow developer Roger Deforest told me about the nights he programmed music for Christian games and then went out with his boss and coworkers to a strip club. Maybe it was when I read the old Warp Zone interview in which interviewer Dave Allwein politely tells Wisdom Tree founder Dan Lawton, "Well I really appreciated talking to you. I really like [your] games a lot," and Lawton replies, "You can't be serious."

  21. Posted

    I looked around, but couldn't really find a catch-all thread for sharing books and other writing about games.

     

    StoryBundle is currently doing a big bundle of great books about games. It's all DRM-free and sold in the same beat-the-average price structure as Humble Bundles. Oh, and you can donate a portion of what you spend to Pixelles, a non-profit initiative for women in games.

     

    SOhMZEb.png

     

     

    I picked it up last night. There's some stuff in there that I'm really looking forward to reading (having peered just a little bit into the abyss of Wisdom Tree, I'm very interested in jumping into that), but the real standout here is Ray Barnholt's Scroll magazine, which I'd been wanting to nab for years now after hearing him talk about it during his many appearances on Retronauts. If you beat the average, you get all 12 issues for half the price of the ebook edition of the magazine, so it's great value anyway, and I love Barnholt's dedication to covering very off-the-beaten-path games and companies. You want an interview with the My Summer Vacation guy? Got it. You want to know more about Japan-only original Xbox games? It's covered. You want to read about Artdink, the developers of No One Can Stop Mr. Domino for the Playstation? There's a whole dang issue about it. Really great stuff.

  23. Posted

    Oh, there will be years of lawsuits over this probably. But it's a big step.

     

    To be honest marriage has never been quite as important as issues that are harder to rally behind and make changes to, namely protection against LGBT-focused hate crimes and domestic abuse, and I can't help but feel like it's going to be a lot harder to finally get that stuff taken care of.

     

    Sorry for shitting all over this; I really am super stoked.

  25. Posted

    I feel like Cuphead knows what it's doing. It's got sort of a Mega Man or bullet hell feel to its gameplay, and those games are all about having slow, predictable character movement rather than trying to embellish it with extra frames of flourish that can mess with your timing. Having a character that moves like something from an era where everything was like that seems like a choice that they made very carefully in service to their gameplay.