If you wish to discuss the controversy, feel free to make a post or link to an article. I’m personally not interested in hosting a link to these weirdos.

I find NFC stickers often require an annoyingly close connection (unless it’s a rather large antenna) and can be particularly finicky with certain cases and other attachments people put on phones. Realistically they both take approximately the same amount of time and it’s way cheaper to print a tag than it is to buy a single NFC sticker

You’re welcome to have your own beliefs.

You are not, however, welcome to use those beliefs to invalidate someone else’s lived experience.

My fav application is scanning with a phone to immediately get on wifi

Last weekend was Folsom weekend, so right now I’m eepy and recovering from staying out far too late each night.

Started and finished 1000xResist over the course of a few days. In general I often find myself turned off by games with aging graphics, not for any good reason but more that I just find less of a pull towards them. I have more trouble being engaged or immersed, unless there’s a really strong art focus. This is one such game that I was worried I wouldn’t get pulled into, and in fact one that sat on a list of “maybe I’ll pick it up” because it was so highly reviewed but I was worried about that facet. It did not take very long for the game to grip me, however, because of it’s excellent storytelling. In fact, the game is almost entirely about storytelling, so there’s not a ton that I can share other than to say that it deals with a lot of difficult themes like intense trauma, bullying, having a tough childhood, extreme ideologies, and the long term effects of violence. It also deals with more societal and human issues like protests, fascism, extreme duress, how self-interested and powerful individuals can cause serious problems and inflict violence, being optimistic or nihilistic in the face of overwhelming odds, and the threat of extinction.

While it isn’t a very long game, consisting of maybe a dozen hours of gameplay, I found myself putting it down for a while after certain chapters in order to process what just happened. The story throws a lot of curveballs and reveals information that can easily change the way you frame entire chapters of the story from earlier, but it never feels like it’s done in a way that inspires whiplash - nothing ever feels like a ‘sudden’ realization and I’m honestly not sure how much of it can be attributed to such a difficult story (if everything is fucked, what’s one more thing?) and how much is because they do a masterful job at slowly unraveling the enigma of the story that very few pieces of information ever really feel out of place. There’s unfortunately only so much I can write without spoiling the story, but I will say that it was one of the best stories I’ve heard or played through and I’d thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes a good story or wants to explore the themes I’ve mentioned above. Also, if anyone else out there played through this, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the story… what did you think? Do you have any lingering questions left over? Were there parts of the story that irked you or that you found particularly moving?

As @alyaza@beehaw.org already mentioned, completely open to making changes here, but I’m curious to gather some more of your thoughts. People includes human in the definition, are there not some who would disagree with its use because of this? Sapient is a word derived from the Latin word for wisdom. Wisdom is most certainly a human concept, and I doubt many would consider non-human life “wise” and certainly some might withhold that designation from otherkin because of their beliefs. While sapient has been used in science fiction as a way to somewhat dehumanize the concept of intelligence, I’d argue that humans might not be all that great at determining what intelligence is. Over the last 100 years our concept of what life on Earth are intelligent has changed drastically. Sentient is perhaps the least problematic of these suggestions, however even it refers to the ability to experience feelings or sensations, which are both also ultimately human concepts - whether someone would consider the ability to detect magnetic fields as a feeling or sensation is much more debatable than the senses that humans have (sight, hearing, etc.).

I know some who identify as otherkin and plenty of folks who might be closer to that constellation of identities than I am, but I’ve never had a discussion around this particular topic - how to best refer to you and others like you when creating documents meant to apply to them. I think we want to do our best to accommodate your needs as well as the needs of those similar to you, but given the issues I’ve raised above I could see how accommodating you might not accommodate others and we could easily get trapped in an endless revision cycle. I don’t know that you have an answer for me, but if you get a chance could you share your thoughts on the above? Is there a path forward in which we can still create a document which is clear enough that anyone who possesses the ability to read and understand English will understand our intentions? Or is there a cutoff point at which “enough” comprehension is acceptable because an attempt to widen the language will make comprehension more difficult?

I didn’t expect much moderation from variety but dang

It is specifically targeted at folks who are not purely a binary gender (arguably by definition not cis, but I’m not going to enforce labels on anyone). Their preface/definition can be found below:

Who can take part?

The gender binary is a societal model that classifies all humans into one of two categories:

Woman/girl – always, solely and completely
Man/boy – always, solely and completely

If you feel like that doesn’t fit your experience of yourself and your own gender in some way, you are invited to participate. This includes, but is definitely not limited to:

people whose genders change over time
people whose genders fluctuate in intensity
people who experience more than one gender at a time
people who don’t experience gender at all
people whose gender is neither male/man nor female/woman

We also welcome anyone who:

rejects gender altogether
feels like they’re outside of gender
feels like they transcend or move beyond gender or the gender binary
doesn’t really understand gender as it applies to them
is questioning whether their flavour of trans might be binary or nonbinary

It’s completely up to you whether you feel you fit any of these. This survey leans on the side of inclusive.

Love watching this each year. Shout out to the kiddos for reclaiming slurs