Next up on Worth Reading: The other team should just fucking let me win when I play baseball.
well this isn’t necessarily a bad point. there are games with great stories and really awful shoehorned fighting sequences. then you also have handicapped/disabled gamers who don’t necessarily have the dexterity to finish a game but would still like to be able to.
optional “cakewalk” modes aren’t that bad of an idea.
what if i want to just see the story of the game and dont want to actually play it? like??
as it is i would never pay for a bioshock game or a fallout game but i am very interested in the story. so i just watch youtube videos of it. they could get money from me if they sold the skip combat mode
i’m a games developer and an avid gamer and i really really think games should let you skip combat
honestly one of my favourite things about la noire was when you failed a sequence twice the game was like “yo do you just wanna skip this bit?”
the gaming industry/community has a huge problem with accessibility tbh. like, thank god for standardised control schemes (although bring back full customisation jfc not enough games have that anymore) but fights require time, literacy in both that type of gaming & in the individual game, you need to be able to navigate the system which can be anywhere from slightly difficult to hellish for people with visual/audio processing disorders. and tbh sometimes you just wanna enjoy the story and not get stressed the hell out doing the sAME FIGHT 700 times. it’s why i always put a game on easy/casual when I’m replaying unless i’m specifically going for difficulty based achievements.
not to mention SO MANY GAMES have either poorly designed battles or fights that have been shoved in for no reason other than to pad out the game (dxhr & da2 come to mind immediately) that sometimes it’d honestly improve the gameplay to just skip them altogether
Imagine if you were a gamer with arthritis or MS or some other disability that took away your ability to click buttons quickly, and every fight became as frustrating as THAT GODDAMN DA: ORIGINS OH FUCK I’M ON FIRE SLIDE PUZZLE.
Yeah. Skipping combat might seem like a not bad idea then.
Mass Effect 3 has this:
[Screenshot from a Mass Effect 3 menu, with title: “Choose Your Experience”, showing the options ‘action’, ‘role playing’ and ‘story’.]
‘Action’ makes most story choices for you and conversations become straight up cutscenes. ‘Role playing’ is the default experience, both challenging gameplay and character/story building. And ‘story’ has the roleplaying but very easy combat, letting you breeze through it. (You also have a ‘casual’ difficulty setting that’s a bit more rewarding but still pretty easy.)
The thing about video games (particularly RPGs or in general games that allow you to explore or direct the story) is that the interactivity is what makes it different from movies or watching LPs on youtube. And I’ve played games that got FAR stronger emotional reactions out of me simply because I had to carry out the actions myself rather than just watching. And that experience should be more accessible.
Because SHOCKINGLY: games aren’t always about winning, or being good at it. It’s about having fun. This is kindergarten education here.
Yeah, it always baffles me when I see people react so negatively to a perfectly reasonable suggestion like this.
Why the hell shouldn’t games let you skip combat if you want to? Why shouldn’t there be a super-duper-easy-peasy mode for everything? No-one is gonna force YOU to play it like that if you don’t want to! Continue to be as hardcore as you like!
I just don’t understand the resistance at all. What we’re talking about is simply having more options for gamers. You’re adding something that would make games more accessible and fun for loads of new fans, and you’re not taking ANYTHING away from existing fans.
Like…do you…not want more people to enjoy these games?? Do you really hate the idea of other people having fun so much that you’ll rile against it even when it literally has no effect on you or your experience whatsoever?? Are you honestly that selfish??
I am *horrifically* bad at gaming, but it’s a genre that I’m intensely interested in and very desperately want to be more immersed in. I would HAPPILY buy so many more games if combat was a skippable option.
Not to mention one of the best indie games out right now is pretty much telling you if you want the best ending, don’t fight.
Yeah, I hate the elitist mentality that only those ~*~*hardcore*~*~ enough should be allowed to enjoy video games. I mean, gaming should be an experience to be had and not just an obstacle to clear, right?
Then again, my poor mental health situation and chronic pain+mobility issues on my right hand means that my gaming options are severely limited nowadays. So I’m all about making gaming accessible for everyone in the first place.
Anyone who thinks gaming will be ruined by making it more accessible need to realize that they have already ruined gaming for many.
Anyone who thinks gaming will be ruined by making it more accessible need to realize that they have already ruined gaming for many.
I’m so grateful for things like story mode and being able to skip if you die a couple times. Like, I have a lot of experience playing games and have no disabilities that would hamper me doing so, but I still really appreciate the ability to skip or make things really easy. Sometimes you just don’t want to play the same mission 50 times to finally beat it. Sometimes folks just need a frickin break. And that’s okay.
I’m just amused that the second commenter is totally confusing single-player with PVP.
Anyway…
Games are for fun.
Games have lots of ways to make playing them be more fun than tedious, starting with the option to save and going on to tutorials, multiple or infinite lives, instant healing, unrealistically large inventories, automatic mission notes, autocompleting maps, in-world GPS, hints, highlighting interactive objects, key prompts, ability to replay dialogue, buffs and power-ups, undiscardable mission items, easy to parse HP bars for the player AND the enemy, blocked friendly fire, selective damage from weapons….the list goes on.
This is all to enable FUN via INCREASING ACCESSIBILITY. Yes, the term applies to everyone, not just the officially disabled. You want to strip your average game of all the stuff I mentioned above?
No, you don’t, because while insanely difficult games with permadeath and no save points used to be the standard and are a valid subgenre, they are not what most people want to be limited to when choosing their entertainment.
So, really, an option to skip combat or puzzles you’re not able or willing to do is not exactly out of line with the concept of making a game enjoyable, is it? Which would be the priority, since it’s…you know…a game?
Skipping gameplay is not accessibility.
So, really, an option to skip combat or puzzles you’re not able or
willing to do is not exactly out of line with the concept of making a
game enjoyable, is it?
Those make playing the game easier, by skipping you’re not playing the game.
video games are for fun, but they’re also the artistic vision of the people making it and they have a specific gameplay feel and goal of the game overall in mind when it’s in development
thanks for making me realize why single player games keep getting worse over time lol
That artistic vision can and often does include accessibility. It doesn’t have to be elitist to be good.
You can also campaign for the option to turn off things that make games easier for you. 🙂
gamers just need to chill a little a bit. Why should I have to choose whether to play a game that’s too hard or watch a movie?? I want to fluidly adjust the difficulty level of my game at hand to my current level of acuity and alertness.
on a tangent: Fallout 4 let’s me run around in Very Hard, but also let’s me change anytime to Very Easy if I just don’t wanna give a damn. I’m still bitter I can’t do the same with the built in survival mode, cuz I’m a sucker for survival games, but trusting a Bethesda game to not crash until you can save at a checkpoint is absolute folly. And made me quit that safe game in frustration cuz I can’t quickly jump to Normal mode to safe if I realize the goddamn game hasn’t saved in an hour and I just rearranged my inventory.
long story short: videogames are an interactive medium, so let people take charge of how they interact with it
Trunign difficulty up and down and skipping gameplay aren’t remotely that same thing.
I would skip a lot of the fights if I could, at least in very easy mode I can outrun the raiders without dying. since I am not given the option, the choose the next closest thing to skipping. I also played mass effect 1&2 on the easiest mode cuz the fighting system is just boring to me.
again, videogames are an interactive medium; let people take charge how to interact with them. I don’t see why people need to die on the hill trying to defend elitism. To me, games are about fun, and sometimes that means tackling the hardest difficulty at hand, and sometimes that just means immersing myself in a virtual world in super easy mode.
Because it affects how games are designed.
You play mass Effect? Great. In ME1 there’s a cult, if you kill the leader everyone fights you, if you just arrest him nobody attacks you and everyone lives. If you skip the battle your choice of killing the leader has no consequence, no meaning, because you as the player are not paying for the choice of killing somebody.
In the section where everyone is being mind controlled you can choose between using a knock out gas or killing them. Again, if you skip the fight you remove any message that the game is trying to say.
Another quest has you choose between arresting a criminal or letting her go, if you try to arrest her she’ll fight back. If you were skip it you’d have your cake and eat it too because you’d choose the moraly right opinion but with no hardship coming from it.
These are just examples of how skippable gameplay can make games lose any message or meaning they try to transmit.
I don’t know what you want from me man, giving this super specific example as if there was no solution to it even if the gameplay doesn’t make the player fight. I want games to be fun, and games are fun for different people in different ways, and Mass Effect 3 is a prime example that you can make both groups happy, those who want to enjoy the fight mechanics and those who simply want to enjoy the story.
I suggest that you take a hard look on yourself and ask yourself why you are so eager for games to be played only one single way, which is your own way. Videogames are art and entertainment, there is no single one way of enjoying and interacting with them.
I am not willing to discuss this with you any further, if you want to learn more you can read up my tags on elitism and gatekeeping.
Wait but those two examples… you’re missing the fact that skipping fighting manually does not have to mean skipping the choice of fighting. The computer can run the fight for you. The choice remains, the message remains, the story runs as planned, the only difference is the player does not have to be skilled enough to complete the fight by themselves.
The ‘hardship’ that makes the message work is not mashing buttons in the right order, it’s making the choice.
The player is still not dealing with the consequence of their choices, they’re just letting the game do it for them. “It doesn’t matter if you took the easy way out in an imoral manner, someone else will deal with the consequence of your actions”
It’s hilarious how you’re simplyfying to “mashing buttons” like it’s a mindless, stupid task for morons. Have you considered you don’t like playing videogames?
It heavily depends on the genre of the game to begin with, something like a true to the rule rpg, where your actions directly affect the story could not allow you to skip gameplay because the gameplay is part of the story, while something like an adventure fantasy or a looser rpg where the story is laid out and you play as the same time as it unfolds would have sense in letting you skip the game in order to just enjoy the cutscenes.
Then again most games I enjoy are about the challenge of surpassing them, so I would never ask to skip the gameplay and I felt insulted when Mario for wii suggested me to do so, but hey, different strokes for different folks, if y’all want an interactive movie there’s those overrealistic western versions of Visual Novels, like Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human.
Can I add: for many games, adding a combat-free version would make them much more accessible for the purpose of litarary/artistic study. Video games as an art form have not been studied much, and I think one of the big reasons is the time committment that goes with them. You’d need to balance it with mechanics, but for instance, I’d love a version of Planescape: Torment where you don’t get attacked by random thugs, worms, and tropacapacas or whatever they’re called and the only meaningful combats are the ones that matter to the story.
“Gameplay is not worth studying and has no artistic value” okay gotcha.
No you dont get it. Gameplay can be varied and accessible while retaining its artistic value. If this was not so we would only have one type of game with the exact same gameplay.
Accessibility is in no way an enemy of art.
Skipping gameplay isn’t accessibility.
Difficulty modes are
accessibility. Custom controls
are
accessibility. Colorblind options and subtitles
are
accessibility.
They make playing and interacting with the game possible for those who can’t, by skipping you’re not making the game portion accessible, just the cutscenes.
Videogames should not be a mechanism of simply delivering cutscenes and text where the “pressing of buttons” is a secondary aspect, a chore and ultimately disposable.
Wrong.
Hi, actual academic that had written cultural studies papers before.
I don’t want to sink thirty hours into a game for analysis purposes if half of that is going to be artificially bulked up with random encounters that don’t drive the plot.
Gameplay is worth analyzing, but if I have to slog through it I’m going to focus my attention elsewhere.
Moreover why does it matter how people enjoy things? Put in accessibility features and move on. This is a stupid hill to die on. You can have your fun and someone else can have theirs.
Exactly. It’s like getting mad that some people skim parts of a book they don’t like, or miss an episode of a series. What’s it to you?
But I think, @alexxdz, that you are confused about what skipping actually means. It doesn’t mean you just turn the game on and then go directly to the credits screen without playing.
It means developers anticipate people needing assistance with certain parts of the game, and allowing them to move forward regardless of skill. For example by automating certain parts, user’s choice. Or providing alternative ways of progressing- such as displaying symbols instead of colours for the colourblind. Why not argue against this as well?
Accessibility is already being implemented in so many ways in games- the line you want to draw is arbitrary and has moved back so many times already, at no loss to the art of game creation, despite what you think. In fact, it’s BECAUSE games can be more and more complex that they’re more and more accessible. You don’t notice it as long as it’s useful to you (minimaps, save points, highlighting, skippable dialogue, respawns, all of that increases accessibility), but the minute you don’t need it, you’re upset that it’s going too far.
But videogames are not catered only to you. Your outrage is fueled by a desire to be part of an elite, to be able to cut somebody, anybody off and say ‘that person is NOT a true gamer like me’.
Like you’re trying to do to me right now in another reblog by claiming I don’t like videogames. You have no way of knowing this, in fact you made it up in direct contradiction to what I said- you just really need to believe that I am someone who is not part of the same group as you, that elite group who plays videogames the right way.
Buddy. That group is a myth. Your elite does not exist. I like videogames. 😛
‘Videogames should not be’ is ultimately only your opinion. Videogames are a vast genre that range from pressing buttons quickly to typing in text based commands. They can be whatever people want them to be, and videogames whose creators choose to make them accessible to the disabled are to be celebrated. Those who decide not to do it despite having every possibility- well, they deserve the criticism they get.
Just enjoy the damn games the way YOU like, and stop worrying about who else plays them and how. It doesn’t even affect you.
Are you saying that self harm and massive blood loss are. Healthier. Than being spanked by a partner in a controlled fashion because. I.
There’s.
There’s so much happening here. Do you think mentally ill people can’t fuck? Do you think doms are rapists? Do you think hitting someone is rape? DO YOU THINK CONSENSUAL SEX IS RAPE????
I don’t even know where to. To begin so just.
Listen.
Listen, okay.
Step one on the staircase of “stop trying to punish your body for being sick,” also known as “stop self harming,” is to replace high risk forms of self harm like trying to kill yourself with much lower risk ones that still provide you the sense of control, relief, or physical grounding that you are seeking.
This NECESSARY INTERIM MEASURE is what allows you to begin dealing with the extremely painful, difficult process of healing.
Also, did you just fucking say you would rather your friend RISK DEATH than do kink??????????????????????
Just.
Like.
I would rather risk death than deal with you right now, holy shit.
Hey, anon, here’s a quick guide to how to deal with being in your situation:
1) Evaluate your discomfort. Are you uncomfortable with the situation because you’re worried that your friend is being taken advantage of, or because it’s something you don’t understand or have built up an irrational sense of righteousness about? Hint: if you’d rather your friend risk extreme personal injury or death, it’s probably the latter, and you should probably just deal with that on your own.
2) If you are actually genuinely concerned about your friend, the first thing you should do is go talk to them, and let them have a say in how the situation gets handled. I mean, if you really respected their agency, you would probably not be so willing to label a situation they’re in as “definitely rape” because you have some vague idea about what they can and cannot consent to, but hey, maybe shit is really bad and you just don’t know how to deal with it. It’s possible.
3) Don’t drag your friend’s situation out in front of a bunch of strangers on the internet as a way to support your moral superiority. That’s taking advantage of them and speaking over them and it’s gross and just don’t. If you need support or advice, that’s one thing, but bringing it up as a talking point with someone you disagree with is not that.
Also notice the anon’s wording.
“my friend has her bf whip her ass”
That’s clearly someone who WANTS to be spanked, it’s not even a case of where the guy has a spanking fetish himself (which, y’know, is just as valid) but it’s clearly the woman who has the impact play kink, and her boyfriend is participating in it at her request, not the other way around. So how is it possible that he’s ‘taking advantage of her’ ?????
Also
How is impact play ‘rape’? Not that there’s anything wrong with consensual noncon play either but ????? They’re two completely different things.
Anon, do you think that throwing out a million buzzwords and hoping that one will stick is any good way to create an argument? Because it’s pretty much the opposite of that. Please lay off the swerf kool-aid and pet a cat or something.
“at least if she was cutting”
Holy shit, anon, you are a terrible friend just for thinking that.
I want people to look at this and examine this. Because of out of all the miserable fuckery in that post (such as equating consensual sex-acts with rape, but let’s face it, that’s just standard radfem modus operandi) the absolutely chilling part is that anon outright admits they would see their friend do permanent damage to themselves and put their life in danger, purely because the boyfriend wouldn’t be ~*~getting off~*~ on that.
I repeat – this person would rather have their friend commit undeniable self-harm, rather than engage in a relatively danger-free kink, purely because there’s even the slightest possibility that the boyfriend might be deriving pleasure from that kink (how very interesting that they make no mention of the friend’s own pleasure).
This shit is the logical end-point of the rabid demonization of deriving sexual pleasure from non-normative sexual practices (impact-play, in this case) that this place is marinating in. This is how you also end up with nuclear-level hot-takes such as ‘abuse’ (defined in an incredibly loose manner, to the point where consensual BDSM ends up falling under the umbrella) being somehow worse than murder.
Just Anti Things: actually self harm is better than participating in kink
also, what that friend does is literally a tactic used to stop self-harm practices? It’s the same as “rub an ice cube where you want to cut” so you feel something painful but don’t do serious damage
Also, from what the anon said we actually don’t even know if the bf is getting off on the spanking, or if he’s getting off on being of service to his gf and doing as she asks. There is such thing as a service top, and there is such a thing as a dominant masochist. Assuming that the boyfriend is a dom who likes inflicting pain isn’t even a conclusion one can certainly jump to (let alone the weird bullshit like “rape fantasy” because being spanked is obviously no different from being raped and oh my god the stupid, it burns us.)
Like, if he is a dom who enjoys inflicting pain on a partner who enjoys receiving pain and being submissive, that’s ok! Nothing wrong with that, if everyone’s consenting! But “woman has man beat her to satisfy her personal urges” does not require that the man be a dom or like inflicting pain. As long as he’s a man who likes doing for his partner what his partner wants him to do, it works.
Even putting aside the way anon is acting like cutting is better than impact play – they’re putting the focus entirely on the boyfriend being aroused by it. It’s not about the friend, or being worried about the friend, even if they think it is. It’s about someone finding the “wrong” thing arousing or appealing. It’s about the idea that this boyfriend is inherently an untrustworthy, abusive rapist because he enjoys consensually beating his girlfriend.
It’s like people who say that nasty fiction is just as bad as reality, because bad people are getting off on it. It’s not about the negative impact, it’s about the positive impact on people who are seen as undeserving. People who like bad things don’t deserve happiness or orgasms. If you go by that logic, it makes sense to equate consensual kink to abuse, or underage fanart to child rape: the end result, a bad person getting pleasure, is the same, which makes them equally bad.
This is fucked up beyond all reason.
However, it pretty much distills the mindset behind a whole bunch of other really awful stuff: it’s the philosophy that it’s better to deny solace to someone who needs it than to give satisfaction to someone who “doesn’t deserve it”.
This is the same mindset that has people putting up drug tests and cuts off certain foods for food stamps– because what do they care if a thousand kids go hungry so long as one person doesn’t use food stamp to eat steak while they feed their drug habit?
The same mindset has people put obscene barriers on those seeking abortions– because what do they care if the person seeking abortion is a victim of abuse, or if the pregnancy could kill the patient, so long as abortions are impossible for one irresponsible nymphomaniac?
The same mindset has people put barriers on seeking gender-affirming surgery– because what do they care about the lives and safety among trans people, so long as that one “bathroom predator” is denied?
This is why there’s such a big pushback against actually effective drug treatment programs and needle exchanges, etc, because they don’t care about the lives they could be saving– they care about that one junkie who would just take advantage of these programs to keep getting high.
And the thing is? That One Person that they’re trying to catch? They don’t have to actually exist. In fact, a lot of times they absolutely do not (like the “bathroom predator” and the “irresponsible nymphomaniac”).
That One Person is a worst-case scenario built up around their own fears and anxieties and then projected onto somebody they don’t like, the way a rape fantasy was projected onto the boyfriend in the original post. And that only really serves to justify why they can continue to hate this person that they don’t like, because that person could potentially be That One Person that they’re so afraid of.
“um OP don’t you know you’re supposed to have blankets on your bed that you never come into physical contact with” I’m sorry that you live in Actual Real Hell my friend but here in the world of the living I like to be able to rest comfortably without worrying that shifting in my sleep will cause my skin to explode by coming into contact with the Blanket of Forbidden Texture
See this is the kind of thing I was wondering about when posting about why making the bed could take so long. What are you people doing with your beds? I tried to Google this, but it still makes no sense.
Do US people not use those sheets that go on fully around the blanket? And why not? Is the top sheet supposed to function like those sheets, only fifty times worse because there is nothing holding it in place?
Sheets that go fully around the blankets? What the heck are you talking about.
With me you got your fitted sheet (or top sheet that gets tucked in), 5 Soft Blankets and then a comforter.
Do people even use top sheets anymore? I have only seen them at h/motels. Maybe in a very hot climate it would be better to use them versus a blanket? Anyway I have only seen them in-between the fitted sheet and the blankets?
What kavesinisukka means is a sheet that’s like a pillow case for your comforter.
Here we have the sheet that covers the mattress, then you, then a comforter that’s in a comdforter-sized pillow case and that’s it. That’s all the blankets and sheets you need.
You can get an extra blanket on top if you’re Cold but out comforters are designed to keep you warm all through icy winter.
So it’s basically a giant sleeping bag for your comforter? Do you crawl in with it or do you just go under the comforter and comforter case thing???
Huh i just learned a new thing
Heh I suppose that description works. A very thin sleeping bag made of sheet for your comforter. You don’t get into the bag yourself. The sheet is there as a protective and decorative casing around your comforter, protecting it both from dust but also from you, so that you can take it off and wash it every few weeks, because the comforter itself is not supposed to be washed.
This strikes me as something rich people do that needlessly complicates things. I barely have time to make my bed after changing the sheets, you’re telling me people spend time wrestling a giant bulky blanket into a sleeping bag sleeve every so often? It’s hard enough getting the fitted sheet on the mattress!
Why on earth would I own something I use daily that I can’t wash.
But… it’s the opposite… the sheet stays on the blanket/comforter the whole time. When you wash your linens, you only wash the sheet and you just put a new one on the blanket. It’s less work, not more
How I make my bed: mattress cover, fitted sheet, flat sheet, blankets stacked on top depending on the season.
How I think you make your bed, after reading this thread: mattress cover, fitted sheet, flat sheet, stuffing a blanket inside a sleeping-bag wrapper for some reason.
And you never wash this blanket, you just wash the wrapper? Why don’t you have blankets that can be washed? What are these non-washable blankets made of?
After wrestling the fitted sheet on, all I gotta do is stack blankets on over the flat sheet. I don’t have to stuff a blanket inside a special wrapper. If I had to stuff one of my blankets into a special blanket wrapper, that sounds like more work to me.
Hold up, I think they’re using a Duvet cover? When I do my linens, I tend to use a duvet cover so I can air out my down blanket and then wash the cover. It’s also hella warm, so I only use it in the cold seasons, but it’s a way to let my blankets get washed without needing a full wash because they’re heavy and I always worry they won’t dry or fluff up properly. So it goes: Fitted Sheet, Flat Sheet, (layer thin but plush blankets if needed for ++ warm), and then down comforter inside of a duvet cover.
what fresh hell is going on here
….
Apparently Americans as a group don’t know what a doona (or duvet) cover is.
And that’s terrible.
Yes. They’re so much easier to wash than a whole duvet.
Possibly gross: I use a comforter cover because allergies mean I sneeze very often. If I didn’t cover my comforter with something it would be rather covered with sneeze residue in pretty short order, which would be difficult to remove because you’re not supposed to wash comforters.
I’m continually baffled when tumblr acts like (thing some people do or use because they need it to more easily solve problem x) is “a rich people thing”
Like, I’m bougie because… I sneeze a lot?
Tumblr has this horrifying strain of incuriosity that I find really troubling. Like, no one can know everything, and if you’ve never used a duvet cover then you’ve never used one, but “I’ve never heard of it, so it must be a stupid rich people indulgence with no purpose” is a deeply flawed line of reasoning that I see on this website all the time.
Yeah, I mean, apparently I’m bougie because I do my own laundry.
The whole point of a duvet cover is that they’re easily washable…
Hang on, are these people actually just sleeping under thick fluffy comforters that have actually never been washed!
….I think OP may have been talking about something like this:
my late grandma used to make blankets like this for all her grandbabies at every major life event. it was a very sweet and thoughtful gesture, and I still have one of the ones she made me.
the trouble is… especially if you use cheap yarn to make them… these things feel like concentrated death. they’re scratchy. they’re full of holes, so they’re not really warm unless you’ve got at least another sheet under there. it’s hard to get comfortable under one without stretching the blanket out to the point it might unravel.
so they’re really more for decoration than anything else. I suspect OP was complaining about blankets like these.
Looking at that example and imagining certain yarns, I’m kind of glad my family has tended more toward gift quilts 😕
The OP was referring back to another post about sensory issues with a specific type of (not so decorative) hotel blanket–and people feeling a need to wade into notes with comments like “you just don’t know how to properly use a blanket”.
I remembered that series of posts, mainly because I’ve had about the same reaction to those scratchy blankets to the point of phantom itches looking at them. A normal top sheet usually isn’t enough to keep the horrible blanket material totally away from your skin all night. A duvet cover might actually do it, as long as you got someone less bothered by the texture to wrestle it into the cover.
OTOH, a lot of Europeans don’t use layers of top sheets and blankets at all, just duvets with the easily washable huge pillowcase type covers. Sometimes with a separate top sheet too as mentioned here, sometimes not since you do effectively have one built in. (Source: I married one of them.) Across socioeconomic groups, as far as I am aware with not knowing anyone who is wealthy.
I personally burn completely up without adjustable lighter layers, thanks to some other sensory issues, so we keep separate covers. I’ve actually dragged some less horrible-textured blankets back from US to get the kind I wanted. But, if you do like comforters? The washable covers are a great way to go, and it’s a shame they’re not more common back home.
Coming from the US, I wasn’t aware how common the duvet approach was until I moved where that is How To Do Bedcovers. So, I can totally understand some confusion about what people are even talking about on both sides there. The leap to “a rich people thing” is what really confuses me, though.
I’ve just been thinking how glad I am to not be part of the culty feminist circles I was in back in the day (nota bene NOT ALL FEMINISM IS CULTY AND I KNOW THIS)
Not just because I don’t know if I would have felt okay making the Zamii posts I’ve made, but also because something dawned on me this morning:
We had things we would say, like, “don’t say patriarchy hurts men too, it’s a ‘derail’” and there was even a handy acronym, PHMT. I remember we said something similar about talking about women abusers, though I don’t remember that as vividly. I think it was WDIT, “women do it too,” and it was also “a derail.”
I think people were usually assuming men who trolled would say these things. The kind of MRA who is more interested in starting a fight than in actually discussing. And I do think these people exist. Whenever you’re in an extremist group you attract trolls and Argument People who just want to rile you up. I HAVE A COUNTEREXAMPLE AND I DON’T REALLY UNDERSTAND HOW TO USE IT BUT YOU YELL FUNNY WHEN I WAVE IT AT YOU WOOOOOOHOOOOOOO!!!
But here’s the thing. Both times that I’ve been treated abusively, it’s been by other women.
And it dawned on me today, and I don’t think I’d ever even thought about it like this, that an environment where “WDIT” is “derailing” – talking about my experiences is against social norms. Semi-forbidden, because being frank would mean I just WDIT-ed. Bad move in The Discourse.
How invalidating was that?
How used to invalidation was I that I could be a part of an environment that said that, and *not even notice that that invalidation was already something hurtful to me?*
That an environment that did that was specifically not a good one for me to heal in?
Every time I’m in a feminist women’s safe space and I try to talk about abuse I’ve experienced; people tell me to shut up because I’ll encourage MRAs.
I’m still feminist but I really have to ask myself why, sometimes.
I’ve quite vocal about my criticism of specific feminists or writings from feminists, but here, like on the racism in Brownmiller’s book, I fear that it is not better outside, and that some of the best criticism of those failures comes from other feminists or progressives.
I have found that the best support on these issues comes from other people with disabilities, who may or may not identify as feminist but don’t use much if any critical theory in their analysis of these issues.
Which is not centered around criticising problems in feminism, because it’s not revolved around feminism; we’re coming from somewhere else.
I find the same thing, which is probably why I find a lot of groups oriented around various identities I have (woman, queer, bi, gender nonconforming/trans for certain values of trans, etc.) much less safe or relevant than I find the disability community and related activism.
Yup. Feminism doesn’t have space for women who’ve been abused by women; feminism is reliably pro-abuse as long as the abuser is female. And that’s the one-sentence version of why I’m not a feminist anymore.
I’m also not really sure if I believe in “derails” anymore. Because there’s things that seem pretty clearly like derails but are forbidden to call out, like, “Women ought to have access to abortion services” “Hey, some men get pregnant!” cannot be called a derail without being labeled a TERF.
But “We need to punish men who rape” may not be responded to with “Women rape too” without it being a derail.
It was very jarring to go from being (seemingly) a female victim of abuse to being a male victim of abuse. Especially when it was abuse from women.
Not only you are expected to shut up and stay quiet, but while a female victim is perceived as wounded and fragile, a male victim is perceived as even more dangerous and predatory, because so much of the male abuse narrative is about how “a lot of abusers have been abused in the past and that’s why they do it” (especially when it comes to rape). It’s like you’re a walking ticking bomb.
I am terrified of being potentially abusive in a way that I probably wouldn’t be if I was a woman. And that paranoia doesn’t come out of nowhere. I didn’t get the idea that as a male I was “inherently more dangerous” out of thin hair.
Not a derail to me 😛
Yeah, the differences in treatment of victims based on gender is really horrifying.
What you say has actually sparked me to have some interesting related ideas; that what we see as “abuse” and “victims” is often based on gender, race, class, status, that kind of thing. And part of the problem with this kind of prejudice is to see the ingroup as safer than it actually is. Women think that other women are “safe” more than they ought, Whites consider other Whites “safe” when they really shouldn’t.
Yep. I stayed with an emotionally abusive exgf longer than I should have because my community kept saying “lesbian relationships are wonderful – there aren’t power dynamics in them like there are in heterosexual ones.”
I reframed what was happening to me over and over, because the one thing it couldn’t be was a power dynamic.
When I was going through my whole gender identity thing I kind of thought a lot of the awful treatment I’d gotten pretty consistently from girls and women in my life was because they knew I wasn’t one of them, so they must have been reacting badly to me for their own safety.
And part of my gender identity crisis was caused by the idea of The Sisterhood. Because girls and women had pretty much always treated me like an outsider, I figured that I couldn’t really be a woman, because I didn’t fit in with girls at all. And because I didn’t have the “real woman” experiences of fearing all men. I generally felt safer around men.
The whole attitude about abuse and gender basically really fucked me up for a few years.
My college epiphany actually sprouted from feminism. When my last paper for the year essentially boiled down to “write about oppressed women in America”, I had simply refused to write the paper because I had just been informed we weren’t oppressed at all and then dropped out.
Up until then I had just sort of went through the motions of being a girl, which included feminism. Now I’m a dropout. I’m not necessarily content about it, but at least it’s better than being inculcated into something I simply didn’t believe in.
They had you write a paper about how women are oppressed in America? Wow, that’s not okay in the slightest. I’d refuse to write something that’s pretty much untrue as well if put in that situation.
I think it actually *is* true, but… assigning you a paper and not even allowing you to defend your actual views in it (unless the point of the paper is expressly “argue for a view you disagree with, as an exercise in critical thinking) sounds distinctly Not Great.
If you say ‘men doing x to women is not only bad, but it’s sexist and an example of how society itself is built to oppress women’, how is going ‘wait, but actually it doesn’t seem to be a gendered thing and women do x just as often or almost as often to men, how is it sexist?’ a derail?
the thing that made me go off feminism was finding out that things that i thought were almost exclusively perpetrated by men based on what feminists were telling me were actually super not. and that bringing it up got you shouted at. (even if it isn’t 50/50, if previously i had the impression that it was 1/99 and then it turned out it was actually 35/65 that’s still a big moment of finding out you’ve been mislead).
That particular example wouldn’t be, it’d just be an argument.
I’ve seen a lot of the sorts of derails described, where someone is talking about women on/in a website/forum/group focused on women only for someone to pop up and get angry that they weren’t also talking about men. I watched over the next few years as “talking about men is a derail” moved from those narrow situations where someone actually is derailing a focused discussion to basically any situation where feminism is the topic at hand. Pattern matching is a hell of a drug.
I never really got off feminism for a number of reasons, most of which comes down to a) I never really expected it to be perfect, and b) I’m still firmly convinced it’s done more good than harm, and in particular more good than anyone else at the table. I don’t even think it’s feasible to do more good than feminism at this point, since every viable successor to it liberally lifts tools, analyses, and modes of thought from feminism.
I think it depends what “feminism” is. If it’s “you’re either one of us or a misogynist, and we’ll inform you if you adequately perform ‘one of us’ at a later date,” then fuck it sideways.
If it’s “I actually believe that studies indicating that resumes labeled with female names do get rated lower than the same resumes labeled with male names, and that this is connected to a history of limiting women’s rights which we have made strides to dismantle but is not yet totally gone,” then I am a feminist.
The second thing is why I’m leery of MRAs. I would understand a men’s rights movement if we had clear evidence we’ve overshot and the men’s resumes are widespread getting binned, say, but I… never seem to see that. The closest thing I see are some claims about girls succeeding better in early academia.
Which may be a problem, and there may be things we should be doing about it that we’re not doing, but I don’t feel like I see nearly enough to prove we’ve identified the problem correctly AND weeded out confounders.
Once the children were asleep, Sajjad headed out on an urgent shopping mission. “We are Muslims and we’d never had a Christmas tree in our home. But these children were Christian and we wanted them to feel connected to their culture.”
The couple worked until the early hours putting the tree up and wrapping presents. The first thing the children saw the next morning was the tree.
“I had never seen that kind of extra happiness and excitement on a child’s face.“ The children were meant to stay for two weeks – seven years later two of the three siblings are still living with them.
this is a beautiful article and i just want to include a few other highlights from the above family as well as another profiled:
…she focuses on the positives – in particular how fostering has given her and Sajjad an insight into a world that had been so unfamiliar. “We have learned so much about English culture and religion,” Sajjad says. Riffat would read Bible stories to the children at night and took the girls to church on Sundays. “When I read about Christianity, I don’t think there is much difference,” she says. “It all comes from God.”
The girls, 15 and 12, have also introduced Riffat and Sajjad to the world of after-school ballet, theatre classes and going to pop concerts. “I wouldn’t see many Asian parents at those places,” she says. “But I now tell my extended family you should involve your children in these activities because it is good for their confidence.” Having the girls in her life has also made Riffat reflect on her own childhood. “I had never spent even an hour outside my home without my siblings or parents until my wedding day,” she says.
Just as Riffat and Sajjad have learned about Christianity, the girls have come to look forward to Eid and the traditions of henna. “I’ve taught them how to make potato curry, pakoras and samosas,” Riffat says. “But their spice levels are not quite the same as ours yet.” The girls can also sing Bollywood songs and speak Urdu.
“I now look forward to going home. I have two girls and my wife waiting,” says Sajjad. “It’s been such a blessing for me,” adds Riffat. “It fulfilled the maternal gap.”
[…]
Shareen’s longest foster placement arrived three years ago: a boy from Syria. “He was 14 and had hidden inside a lorry all the way from Syria,” she says. The boy was deeply traumatised. They had to communicate via Google Translate; Shareen later learned Arabic and he picked up English within six months. She read up on Syria and the political situation there to get an insight into the conditions he had left.
“It took ages to gain his trust,” she says. “I got a picture dictionary that showed English and Arabic words and I remember one time when I pronounced an Arabic word wrong and he burst out laughing and told me I was saying it wrong – that was the breakthrough.”
The boy would run home from school and whenever they went shopping in town, he kept asking Shareen when they were going back home. She found out why: “He told me that one day he left his house in Syria and when he had come back, there was no house.” Now he’s 18, speaks English fluently and is applying for apprenticeships. He could move out of Shareen’s home, but has decided to stay. “He is a very different person to the boy who first came here,” she says, “and my relationship with him is that of a mother to her son.”
So Scientology has recently been purchasing ad spots on social media sites including Twitter and Facebook. Scientology has always worked hard to recruit young people it seems like they’re investing in social media as well now. I know most people think Scientology is a joke but it’s a seriously dangerous cult which uses fear, extortion, violence, vandalism and various other unethical actions against those who oppose them both inside and outside the church. Here is key information on the abuses committed by Scientology:
•Scientology uses a form of pseudo-therapy called auditing which focuses largely on embarrassing and traumatic memories. Scientology collects the information you share and uses that information to threaten you if you oppose the church. They also charge huge amounts of money for auditing sessions (which is why they really are doing all this).
•They are extremely anti-psychology and psychiatry and pressure you against taking any antidepressants, anti-anxiety medication or any other drugs for mental health.
•They believe homosexuality can be “cured” and are blatantly homophobic. •Enemies of the church are labeled “suppressive persons” and it is forbidden to communicate with such people. This isn’t just to limit the negative press they receive but also is a manipulative tool. If you are in the cult and decide to leave or criticize the church you stand the risk of being completely cut off from your friends and family. “Suppressive Persons” are often also harassed, stalked, or threatened.
•If you’re new to Scientology and your family or friends are worried about you being in a cult you’re instructed to cut them out of your life, increasing your reliance on the support system (though there’s nothing supportive about it) the church give to you.
•Scientology’s doctrine includes the concept of “Fair Game”. This basically says that those who are judged a threat to the Church can be punished and harassed by any and all means possible.
•Because of this, they have no moral qualms about having their members lie in court which they use to defend themselves from lawsuits or charges that they’ve broken the law and also to help win lawsuits against their enemies. •They essentially spied on and stole information from the IRS and tried to frame the mayor of Clearwater Florida for a hit and run.
•Scientology filed 50 different lawsuits in one year against the Cult Awareness Network, an anti-cult organization. Using false testimony they won one of the suits and because the organization couldn’t pay the fine Scientology took the organizations name and logo so if you were calling to get out of Scientology you’d be unknowingly telling Scientology of your intentions. (For full transparency my mom was a member of the Cult Awareness Network before it was taken over and was sued individually by the Church of Scientology)
•Scientology has an official branch known as the Sea Org, a mixture between a paramilitary group and slavery, comprised of their most dedicated members including many children/teens who’ve been raised in Scientology. This is where some of the most rampant and terrifying abuse in Scientology occurs.
•Sea Org members often work over 100 hours a week for Scientology for around 2$ per hour.
•Sea Org member’s living conditions are terrible; they live in overcrowded communal rooms with up to 12 other people, are not given healthcare unless there is a free clinic in the area, often are forced to miss meals or sleep in order to successfully completed their work.
•Several former Sea Org members have accused the church of physical abuse. •Sea Org members may not have children and women who have become pregnant have reportedly been forced/coerced by their higher-ups to have abortions.
•Leaving Sea Org without permission automatically makes you a suppressive person, so young adults who’ve been raised in Scientology who want to leave are cut off from everyone they’ve ever known with no money or job and getting permission to leave can require 3 years of hard labor, social isolation, and group pressure.
it’s one of the scariest “religions” you’ll ever meet if not THE scariest because it was PURPOSELY created to make money. unlike most cults that do have some seed of genuine belief however twisted and off base the founders are, scientology was never a belief system – it was a get rich quick scheme for a terrible hack author who saw that there was more money to be made in manipulating people into a cult and then not letting them leave. higher and higher levels of scientology, which you have to take to be truly “clear” aka free of evil spirits, will cost you thousands and even millions of dollars. they will literally hook you into a billion year contract and then pursue you for any money you “owe” them, thousands of “back fees” for their religious training, if you try to leave.
stay the fuck away from anything marked scientology or dianetics. narconon (NOT the same as narcotics anonymous, the 12 step program) is also their thing. never even step FOOT into one of their free dianetics “auditing sessions” because they will use it to manipulate you into joining. they are incredibly persistent and will use every trick in the book to get you on board.
scientology: not even once.
Off the top of my head, a non-exhaustive list of “Brand Names” used by Scientology:
Narconon
Dianetics
Associate of Better Living and Education (ABLE)
Criminon
Applied Scholastics
Delphi Schools
The Way to Happiness Foundation
Author Service Inc.
Bridge Publications Inc.
Golden Era Productions
New Era Publications
Citizens Commission on Human Rights
The National Commission on Law Enforcement and Social Justice
Do not join any of the organizations. Do not work with them. Do not use their materials. Do not give them your money. Do not sign any documents.
^^^^
I can add nothing to this post except to say that this is true. I’ve crossed paths with these people several times. It’s a fascinating and terrible psychological control.
Took notes on Scientology from a public speaker and regrettably this is very true, based on the research done afterwards. But I think the obvious tell is the fact that the speaker began by explaining for 20 minutes straight about how “Scientology is not evil. It’s not a cult. People are just wrong and stupid.” Anyway if you have to preface your speech with a multitude of reasons why people shouldn’t think your belief system is god awful, then you may have a problem.
I fucking heard a commerical for them on a fairly popular radio station and am absolute appalled
I’ve heard them, too, and they’ve set up their own TV channel as well.
Particular PSA for the Tumblr crowd as I know there’s a lot of creators on here: They’re also behind the “Writers of the Future” and “Illustrators of the Future” contests, which are run by “Author Services Inc” and “Galaxy Press” so beware of those if you’re looking to submit anything to contests
Gonna add a lil’ something. In my town, they have their “church” set up right near a college campus and right near the main strip of places to eat, get coffee, etc. It’s a very non-descript building and they have a sidewalk chalkboard that says “free personality test.” Then you look up and see “Church of Scientology” on the building high above the sign. If you never look up and you’re interested in stuff like Myers-Briggs and stuff, I can see someone getting sucked in very easily.
I literally did not believe this was a real thing until I just tried it.
Holy cow.
I have spent the last two weeks increasingly irritated with (what has seemed to me) the dramatically alarmist attitude about the shit that’s going down with tumblr but….damn.
Like, I still don’t think it’s over. I still don’t think this is the end. But that’s a far larger speed bump that I anticipated. Tumblr, what the fuck.
“Dick pic” is also gone. “Pictures of dicks” gets you Dick Grayson.
“Fuck” and “fuck off” will get blogs with those word in the description, but no posts.
Several slurs are gone – fag, slut, whore; probably others. “Dyke” is still in, though, as well as “fag hag.” (I’m aware that whether or not those are slurs depends on the community.)
This is a sign of a platform that Does Not Care about its users. Not because they’re blocking terms they’ve decided are offensive or connected with illegal activity – because they won’t tell you that some terms can’t be searched, won’t tell you why the posts have been removed from search, won’t let you know whether or how your blog will be affected.
Chronic pain, as mentioned, is gone. “Pain” gets this result:
Followed by normal search results. (Note: 7 Cups of Tea, at least, is a commercial site; the “trained active listeners” are random users who’ve completed a few questionnaires.)
@thebibliosphere Joy joy joy joy joy…. If your wondering about a sudden slow down on your traffic
My traffic hasn’t slowed down because I use my own tag for my chronic health stuff, though a couple of my posts about chronic pain are gone.
Other than that my nsfw stuff is still intact. This purge has been random as all hell.
The fact that it’s been over a week and they haven’t even addressed the many many unfairly deactivated blogs is pissing me right off.
I highly doubt at this point that I’m getting my blog back at all. Despite the fact that my only crime was to write a lot about having chronic pain and what it was like to live like that
Also of fucking course one of the blocked tags is the one discussing their screw up
I’m feeling very bitter at the moment
If it’s anything like the mass censorship LJ started employing, then I very much doubt this is even the tip of the iceberg, or that they’ll make it a priority to restore unfairly banned blogs.
Meanwhile I continue to block upwards of 50 pornbot blogs a week from my follower list, and I can’t turn my inbox back on because it winds up with a bunch of neo-nazis sending me suicide bait.
But sure. Deleting my posts about being disabled is helping. Thanks Tumblr.
i don’t understand what’s being said. you can type ‘chronic pain’ in the search box and get results. is there some other thing that’s being blocked? i know absolutely none of my posts are showing up in tags now, even though my blog is not set to nsfw.
Some are showing and some are not, several of my posts are just gone. I spent hours going through my archive manually looking for them and I knew were to look cause I keep track of my chronic illness posts for reference purposes.
Several of my friends who blog about their chronic illnesses and conditions have had their blogs straight up deleted. The reason they were given was for talking about chronic pain.
The reason for this is unclear, but there’s some thoughts that it might be because the word “chronic” used to be/is slang for weed and they’re somehow trying to crack down on drug use or something. Heck only knows though. All I know is tumblr used to have one of the best spoonie/chronic health issue communities online and a lot of folk are either gone or their posts are.
I might believe that @thebibliosphere about the “chronic” tag, but the tags “cocaine”, “meth”, and “weed” all still work so its not a drug issue
Welp. There goes that theory.
@thebibliosphere could it be because “chronic pain” and “child p*orn” start with the same letters and their algorithm sucks?
Hell if I know but it might be, though from what I’ve been told it’s the full phrase tumblr is taking issue with for reasons unknown.
I’m planning to contact them asking why such an important aspect of the disabled community is being flagged as inappropriate, but feck only knows if they’ll actually reply.
Maybe they’ve lumped it in with “opioid epidemic” as being a problem somehow? (Which, if the case, is likewise a terrible thing to do – making it a verboten topic doesn’t help the situation.)
For me “chronic pain” search yields two blogs and no individual posts.
I don’t expect antis to learn anything from this, but if any are reading now… THIS is why us “gross adults” were so adamant about not censoring content. Not because we secretly desperately wanted to read things you think are gross for sexual pleasure.
Because we’ve seen purges before, and EVERY ONE OF THEM WE’VE LIVED THROUGH has involved something that no one would find offensive and some people need just… going poof.
Yeah, we’re old. Yeah, hearing that we know better because we’re old has GOTTA be tiring. I remember it pissing me off too when I was younger.
But sometimes the reason old farts say it is because we’ve actually noticed patterns, and sometimes it’s worthwhile to listen carefully to why the old farts feel so sure it can and likely will happen again.
Santa is on strike due to global warming. All presents this year will be delivered by Sasha the Christmas Tiger. Milk and cookies may not be sufficient.
Sad update everyone, Tama recently passed away… An estimated 3,000 people, including railway officials, attended Tama the cat’s funeral on Sunday, days after she died of heart failure aged 16. [x]
For those who haven’t read articles about it, the local shrine elevated her to a god. She’s now the Eternal Stationmaster and patron god of the station.
Beautiful.
Now I’m crying thanks
and a new cat was hired right?
yep! her name is Nitama (essentially ”second tama” or “tama II”) and she served under Tama as an apprentice before being appointed her deputy
she works very hard
Everytime this crosses my dash, I reblog. It is the law.
Law
I’m crying at 11pm over train cats
Nitama, already now a mature cat (born 2010), has a protege named Yontama (fourth Tama, b. 2016). There is no information available for either the physical befellment or tragic self-disgrace which has removed Santama from contention.
^Nitama majestic, and below with Yontama
Yontama.
a legacy
okay but actually what happened to santama (or sun-tama-tama, which is her name because it’s a pun on santama) was that she was basically sent to train for the position in okayama and they liked her so much they refused to send her back
“Sun-tama-tama” (a pun off of “Santama”, lit. “third Tama”) was a calico cat sent for training in Okayama. Sun-tama-tama was considered as a candidate for Tama’s successor, but the Okayama Public Relations representative who had been caring for Sun-tama-tama refused to give the cat up writing, “I will not let go of this child, she will stay in Okayama.” [25]
As of September 2018, Sun-tama-tama is working as the stationmaster in Naka-ku, Okayama and appears occasionally on Tama’s Twitter account.
Every time I see this post there’s new info and it gets better
Medical expenses? Car maintenance? Gas money? Childcare? Hygene supplies? Water, Natural gas bill, Dental, Cleaning supplies? Student Loans? If we’re talking a normal household and decent life, veterinary care and clothing? And if you get sick and can’t work ya two jobs?
They didn’t budget for FUCKING FOOD.
Okay, I’ve seen this going around for a while. Let’s break this down even further.
National minimum wage is $7.25. For the sake of argument, we’ll say this person is working in a location that uses that amount. Let’s also assume that both this person’s jobs pay minimum wage, because that’s usually the case in a multiple jobs situation.
To make $2060 a month on minimum, someone would have to work 284 hours. That is 71 hours per week. This budget suggests that a person should expect to work 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, without ever taking a break, to survive on a budget that includes no food, only about half the utility bills an average human has to pay, no allowances for child or pet expenses, no internet, a price for health insurance that no one would ever be able to pay ever, no allowances for any medical expenses that your shitty $20 insurance doesn’t cover, no household supplies, no gas or bus fare, and no heat for your home.
And they thought putting this shit out was going to make them look reasonable and wise.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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