You know, growing up I always thought it was super odd for the 'gamer guys' I knew to talk about gaming as a hobby that boys and men are into by default and girls, and especially women, just wouldn't understand.

They mentioned or assumed it so casually in all kinds of contexts, as if it was just a fact about the world everyone knew or agreed upon.

Meanwhile, most of my girl (and later, women) friends played games. And not just the type of games the guys would look down upon, like mobile games, but established major gaming franchises like Final Fantasy, SimCity or Legend of Zelda. They wrote fan-fiction about Sephiroth, they snuck their little DS lite under the school desk to finish a section of Majora's Mask, or they spent weeks at a time meticulously crafting a storyboard in Sims 2. I never understood why the cultural image of gaming at the same time only included guys and maaybe one pick-me-esque 'gamer girl', when most girls and women around me actually were super into some games.

I eventually realised that these 'gamer guys' just never interacted with the girls I knew. Their entire world view came from the internet, from movies and other cultural sources. That was an eye-opener.

It makes me angry and sad to see games with a traditionally female userbase, such as The Sims, to be lumped into 'casual' genres, when I never knew a single Sims player who had a casual relationship with that game. They were typically much more intense about these games and fandoms than your average male FIFA/Call of Duty/Battlefield players, but the latter count as 'real gamers'. It's really just misogyny.

I loathe JKR as much as anyone else, but I do wonder why the whole "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing seems to end exactly at Harry Potter and nowhere else.

No trans person I know who goes nuclear about everything related to consuming or discussion Harry Potter has any issues with the endless promotion of 'approved' products and companies that are often even an integral part of online 'trans culture', like…

• Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook/YouTube et cetera (pro-queerphobia, pro-fascist corporations actively funding and supporting alt-right movements across the world and helping alt-right actors make databases of queer people)
• Discord (surveillance company working with ICE, handing over trans folks' personal information to the cops, the age verification scandal et cetera)
• Minecraft (created by alt-right figurehead Notch, owned and operated by notoriously evil company Microsoft)
• World of Warcraft (Blizzard, notoriously anti-union, pro-sexual harassment corporation)
• ... and so on.

Of course not all of these are directly equivalent to JKR and HP in terms of tangible impact on trans people specifically, but the scale is definitely off. Why do folks cut off friends for discussing Harry Potter fanfiction but not for ordering a skirt on Amazon or encouraging vulnerable trans folks to hand their data to Discord?

The older I get, the more it seems like a teenage in-group out-group peer pressure thing than a real world view. Hating on Harry Potter signals you're a good person, and that gives one a feeling of belonging in the community and having an identity that stands for something. It's more of a rebellion thing than anything. At the same time, being a 'Discord trans girl' has an 'uwu cute' aesthetic and therefore must be good and desirable, no matter the implications.

It's a vibes-based world view.

Of course JKR is evil and I want her prosecuted for what she's been doing to hurt us. I just think shaming random people for enjoying Harry Potter is ineffectual and hypocritical when practically nothing else is so heavily policed; and while 'mainstream trans culture' online promotes and supports so many other evil companies and their products.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz

Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.

There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It's also closer to Israel, and it's partly under Iran's control too.

And there's too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.

Perhaps you should spearhead an initiative on turning existing letters into digraphs.

For example, 'x' should probably be 'ks'. 'w' very much yearns to be 'vv', and 'm' looks like 'nn'. 'Y' is obviously just 'ie'. 'q' is a failed letter – make it 'kh' like in all the bad science fiction. In fact, all the harsh consonants like 'k', 't' and 'p' should be digraphs: 'gh', 'dh' and 'bh'.

Do ieou lighe mie eghsannbhles?

Have you tried talking to him?

Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really 'obvious' about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you'd get, and partly because there just isn't too much to talk about that you can't already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you'd get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it's pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn't modded it to shreds and hasn't spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I'd say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending "it's a kid's toy" type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.

Lwaxana, not even a contest.

Most of the hobbies I unexpectedly enjoyed had something in common: I learned about them in real life rather than online.

Online hobby communities seem fun to participate in, but they suck the fun out if it very quickly because you're immediately interacting with and comparing yourself to people from all around the world who live and breathe that hobby.

You suddenly find yourself in the midst of a dedicated community where you're a nobody. The pride and sense of identiry you felt about being the only one in your social circle who could do The Thing is gone, because now everyone does it, and everyone is also better than you. You get overwhelmed with tips, tricks, a whole roadmap of how to improve, and tons of inspiration everywhere that just suck the individuality out of the hobby.

For instance, I really, really enjoyed sewing recently. I took an old pair of jeans and a terrible flannel shirt and crafted custom bunny ears for a hat I had lying around. I was so proud of myself! I even figured out on the fly how to make them look more thick and organic – I used some cotton pads I usually use for my make-up to stuff them.

It also felt really good to show off my spontaneous little crafts project to everyone I know. Nobody else had sewn stuff before, so I felt like I truly came up with something cool and unique! It was part of my identity for a brief moment, something that I came up with.

Then I briefly checked sewing communities online to see what others were doing – big mistake.

I was so proud of my ears and was planning on finding inspiration to work on similar projects in the future, but suddenly I felt like I was on step 1 of a 300 step ladder to climb to "get better" at sewing. Even though I wasn't comparing my own to others' work, it suddenly felt like a chore: I would eventually have to 'graduate' to new stitching patterns, good quality fabric, more complex projects, I'd get helpful tips and techniques, fun projects to put in a 'backlog'.

It made it all feel so exhausting.

If I had not figured out the trick with the cotton pad stuffing on my own, I would have probably read it somewhere online captioned "if you're just starting out, here's a hack" and it would have felt like I was settling for something suboptimal someone else came up with. It would have been utterly unrewarding. No creativity involved, just copying what others laid out for me.

It's like a cogitohazard. If you want to enjoy a hobby, block its online communities. Don't look it up. Try to invent it from first principles. Learn about it yourself.

Why moderate when you can embrace the woosh?

Welcome back, 2007, close enough!

what a notification to receive!

glad it was on this post, LOL

I always used to enjoy staying up late too, but the older I get, the more tired I become around my regular bedtime.

It's not just sleepiness, but genuine exhaustion that I cannot ignore that leads to awful symptoms like paranoia, eye strain, derealisation or anxiety. I just physically can't stay awake longer.

I understand where this is coming from, I think. Both are distinctly different and bittersweet in their own way.

I just don't think having experienced unrequited love from both sides fully encompasses knowing the full spectrum of love.

I have had about ten relationships in my life, and every single one of them was different in a meaningful way. Every person in your life is a wholly unique experience, whether it's unrequited love, a short-lived relationship or a deep friendship. I am an amalgamation of everyone I've ever known and loved, and I appreciate that this is what life gives me.

Win at what?

But have you considered buying a Steam Contr–… oop, it's gone.

Man schläft irgendwie besser, wenn man bemerkt, dass alle solche antifeministischen Artikel von jungen Männern bzw. Teenager-Jungs geschrieben wurden, deren einziger Berührungspunkt mit Feminismus irgendwelche aus dem Kontext gerissene Narrative aus rechten Online-Foren und YouTube-Videos sind. Niemand von denen hat sich tatsächlich mit feministischer Literatur oder Tradition auseinandergesetzt geschweige denn irgendwelche feministischen Texte gelesen.

Deshalb beschränken sich diese Leute in ihrer Argumentation auch völlig auf dieses kindliche Bild, dass das ganze Ausmaß feministischer Lehre "Frauen sind gut, Männer sind böse" sei. Deren Weltbild ist ja ähnlich simpel, wie könnte es also anders sein?

My father is declining, my father's declining, my fathers are declining, my fathers' declining.

Aye, 'tis my father's declension.

Oh my god, he looks so sad about his diet. :( Poor bun. Hope health is going to improve.

Asparagus does sound like a convincing argument.

I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can't believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.