One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.
This is purely my own speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is partly to do with the reasons that cis people get the same operations. If a cis teen gets breast cancer (which is rare but does happen), there needs to be a legal and medical process to authorize a mastectomy as soon as possible, since waiting will allow the cancer to spread. A cis teen with a genital injury won’t be physically harmed by waiting until adulthood to get reconstructive cosmetic surgery. Whatever authorization process that exists for these purposes is probably the baseline that processes for transition surgeries are built on.
Edit: typos
I’ve definitely used vector space to conceptualize my gender identity before, but definitely 3 axes is too limiting. There’s a difference between the presence/lack of genders and the “method” in which they are experienced, after all. A binary woman and a genderfluid person who is currently a woman have the same (current) gender, but their fluidity is obviously different.
For me, personally, I would need at least two additional axes for genders; I’m bigender, but neither of them are man or woman, so your scale would look like (0,0,1) for me, which would match a mostly-agender person which I’m definitely not. Other people would probably want an axis for gender intensity i.e. how much presence of a gender one experiences. Some people feel their gender very strongly while for others it’s just sorta there in the background. Some people would definitely want to use negative numbers.Then there are all the people who describe their gender as “orbiting” or “parallel to” a binary gender, introducing the possibility of using vectors to describe gender rather than points in space…
I’d probably describe myself as (0,0,1,5,6), where the 4th axis is juxera and the 5th axis is mavrique. I have felt gender fluidity in the past but it’s been pretty solid for a few years now.
I feel like this is an article that tells me more about the author’s mind than it does about the thesis topic.
The introductory concept—that people who travel treat it as a virtue—rings false immediately to me. Everyone I know, myself included, treats leisure travel as a luxury to be enjoyed, not a virtuous activity to be lorded over others. Most people I know do roughly the same thing in travel destinations as they do at home, whether that’s museums, hiking, golfing, or sight-seeing.
Ultimately, the whole argument seems to be that “travel doesn’t improve you as a person the way you think it does” which is not an argument against traveling so much as an argument against inaccurate self-perception.
My parents are in their 50s and do not view video games as an unusual hobby. My father regularly plays games with his friends (aged 30s to 50s) on Friday nights and the weekend.
The only person I’ve met who viewed video games like what you describe was a mid-60s gentleman who struggled to believe that I played video games regularly and had a good GPA in college. His hobbies were golf and walking, though, so he wasn’t about to call anyone else’s hobby “boring.”
There is no age or demographic for whom video games are an unacceptable pastime. There are merely individuals who have their own weird hangups regarding the hobbies of others.
Edit: wanted to add that I love to hear of parents gaming together with their kids! Some of my favorite childhood memories are playing games with my family and we still sometimes get together to play a co-op game.
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn’t be half-bad, branding-wise.