The tumblr of the purple chicken

i miss hunter. what's more iconic than manipulating and leading to their death like a dozen intelligence agents from one polity in order to try to get your hands on another intelligence agent who seems more "fun" and has "mind control keywords" and might be able to help you out with some "superweapons". also you just permanently live in whatever face and body happens to be most convenient for your deep cover so you've slipped out of any sense of self. and also you exist in the cutscenes for a very poorly animated mmo written by committee and also by bioware so all of your lines are in response to other characters going on inexplicably centrist rants

to describe the political storytelling of swtor as "having problems" is to make a profound joke but the imperial agent storyline is particularly fun because the head writer so clearly was like i am doing JOHN LE CARRÉ. you can trust NOBODY. your polity is EXPLICITLY EVIL and you are EXPLICITLY FORWARDING THE GOALS OF EVIL, and also the alleged good guys usa rah rah ALSO SUCK. the only reward of espionage is YOUR OWN DEATH. [+10 light side points! You must now save Makeb!]

imagining one of those annoying "the real revolution is compassion" guys but for other ideologies

You know what? In a world designed to isolate us and make us cruel, simply being kind to each other is genuinely the biggest act of incremental evidence-based redistributive policy reform there is.

Hi if you ever find yourself in a relationship saying anything along the lines of "well I can't leave cause I would never be able to find something better than this because I'm trans/fat/aging/antisocial/unlucky" I beg of you to run. Please. You can find and build better but in order to do that you have to take the first step out the door. You do not have to endure abuse, mistreatment, or just plain incompatibility for the sake of a fraction of happiness. You don't.

This post has ended multiple shitty relationships. Reblog it to end even more

Also if you find yourself thinking "Sure, I'm unhappy, but they would be sad if I left and haven't done anything to deserve that" then TELL them you're unhappy and see if you can fix things, and if you can't do that or it doesn't work then LEAVE.

Either they are fine with making their partner unhappy, in which case they suck and DO deserve you leaving, or they don't realise and would be horrified, in which case they deserve better than being stuck with someone who's unhappy to be there. And in either case you deserve better, whoever you are and whatever your flaws.

And either you can discuss your problems and successfully work on them as a team, or you can't.

If a relationship is unfixably broken then, regardless of why, it needs to end. There's no situation where a 'bad' partner is obliged to stay miserable in service of a 'good' one. And anyone who is fine being the 'good' partner in this sort of situation is in fact very very bad.

(Also, wrt the original post: there's plenty of other trans/fat/aging/antisocial/unlucky people out there who would love a partner who understands them)

I was thinking about how I have grown to value mandatory voting over a system that allows allegedly more freedom. Because in country, mandatory voting means I just have to send in a ballot. It can be empty or filled with the write in ballot "pickle farts" if I want.

If I go to the voting station all I have to do is get my name checked off. I don't have to vote if I don't want to.

But it means it is much more difficult for the government to try and suppress voters. Because voters have a legal obligation to go to the polls, so you can't restrict them or try tactics to dissuade them.

Voting polls are open long hours with access to food and water being a fairly standard staple. You don't need any form of ID, you have to be given time to go vote in work hours without penalty if you cannot do it after work hours.

Every now and then a politician tries some small way of voter suppression but it isn't as easy. And so I have learned to appreciate it.

But when I googled, out of curiosity, if the USA had ever had anything like that I was met with a barrage of websites talking about freedom and justice and the absolute liberty of Americans. I thought an eagle was going to bust out of the screen.

Going through some of these I noticed they were think tanks connected to billionaires, one of them was funded and created by the Koch brothers.

Gotta love how often the American "freedom" is actually used as a way to further deny actual freedoms, both linguistically and politically.

In Australia, mandatory voting was introduced because unions were bringing people to polling stations, and the conservatives wanted to undermine the working class voting bloc.

Almost as soon as it came into effect, they realised their mistake and have been trying to get rid of mandatory voting since.

Genuine question I can't remember if I've asked before: Could you not have more protections for people's ability to vote without making it compulsory? Like for a start, making it happen on a weekend, but also something like the ADA, where the onus is on the people providing the service to make things accessible (here in the broader sense) and if they don't there's legal basis to sue. I can see how voting being compulsory would make it harder to get away with making voting difficult to do, but they still feel like two separate things, and Defending People's Ability To Express Their Right To Vote seems more important and less offensive to American sensibilities.

But I'm neither a political expert nor from the US so there's plausibly some reason compulsory voting is the best solution here that I'm missing.

probably my most powerful interpersonal communication hack is to, whenever possible, ask either/or questions rather than yes/no questions

for example, when chatting with coworkers, i’ll often ask if they have any fun weekend plans. but let’s be real - we all feel like friendless losers when someone asks that question and we go “uhhhhh… no.” so instead, i phrase it as “so, do you have anything fun planned over the weekend, or are you just going to enjoy having some time to relax?”

phrased like this, there’s rarely any awkwardness. you’ve presented two options & given both equally positive connotations, so your conversational partner has an automatic “out,” so to speak

but it works for higher stakes conversations too!!!! my mom was saying this weekend how she and her neighbor both like walking around the neighborhood & that she wanted to suggest they take a walk together sometime, but was worried about how to approach the conversation

so i said “how about you just say ‘i’ve noticed we both like taking walks! would you be interested in going for one together, or do you use walks for some precious alone time?’”

now Walking Neighbor has an automatic “get out of jail free card” if she wants to say no!!!! which means my mom doesn’t have to worry about the conversation being uncomfortable, because she’s set it up to go smoothly

either/or questions rather than yes/no questions. it is really like magic

yeah, well. I bet that bitch in the other room couldn't pass the mirror test either

staring up at the minrathous panopticon floating security fortress and thinking hey maybe when fenris said he didn’t see oppression in the gallows he just had very different standards for what that kind of thing was supposed to look like

fenris: [derisively] they don’t even have spotlights

hawke: fenris what the fuck is a spotlight

Ask Polly: How Am I Supposed to Make Friends in My Late 20s?

selected paragraphs (speedrun) of an ask polly that changed my life a little bit // Ask Polly: How Am I Supposed to Make Friends in My Late 20s? by Heather Havrilesky

new dnd character: the former omelas kid

the omelas kid background doesn’t give you any special bonuses apart from being able to shut down a lot of arguments by bringing up the fact that you used to be the omelas kid

nothing special happened to make you stop being the omelas kid. you just lived through it long enough that you reached like 14, 15, 16, whatever age it is that kids stop being cute, and once you were no longer the archetype of innocent victim the magic just kind of fizzled out. by the time people figured out what had happened it was too late to replace you with a new kid. maybe they tried to keep you in a hole a while longer and pretend that nothing was amiss, but then the cholera outbreak hit or somebody found pieces of a girl stuffed inside a suitcase and the pretending got too difficult.

omelas adapts. once you’re out of the hole, it’s still a damn fine place to live. it’s still got universal basic income and great schools and an unparalleled social support net and a life expectancy of 104. if you introduced yourself as the kid from the hole no doubt you could ask for anything and everything you wanted and people would give it to you. you still have to leave. maybe other cities have more cholera and more little girls chopped up in suitcases, but at least you can look at them without feeling somehow responsible.

now and then you wind up at an inn. someone asks where you’re from, and you tell them. they suck their teeth and shake their heads and give you a look and say “omelas, huh? I heard it was powered by a forsaken child” and they all agree that they should have known, of course it was, they’re not surprised by this in the least.

later someone sidles up to you and gives you a long look. they almost seem to recognize you. “I was born in omelas,” they tell you, “but I walked away from it many years ago.” they seem to want something from you. you don’t know what they expect you to say.

also whenever one of your party members asks you to create a distraction all you have to do is stroll up and say “hey there everyone, I’m the former omelas kid. AMA.”

sometimes people recognize your omelas accent and get all weird about it like “oh you’re from omelas? stayed there until the forsaken kid magic ran out, huh? real piece of work you must be. I woulda busted that kid out and ditched the place.” and you’ve gotta decide whether it’s worth the trouble of convincing them that you are in fact the omelas hole boy or listen to them discuss at length what your trauma says about them.

ID: A hand with sesame street bandaid on the thumb holds a little bowl, inside the bowl are the words I GOT THIS THING TO PUT MY KEYS IN BUT MY KEYS ARE NOT IN HERE. FUCK.

ID: You've been turned into a vampire. BUT YOU AREN'T SENSITIVE TO GARLIC AND SUNLIGHT. INSTEAD, YOUR VAMPIRE KRYPTONITE IS THE OBJECT TO YOUR RIGHT. WHAT CAN KILL YOU?

reading tags like

ID: A wide eyed priest in a confession booth

The world exists in such a baffling state of simultaneous sex-aversion and sex-hegemony. Every social platform on the internet is trying to banish sex workers to the shadow realm but I can't post a tweet without at least two bots replying P U S S Y I N B I O. People are self-censoring sex to seggs and $3× but every other ad you see is still filled with half-naked women. Rightwingers want queer people arrested for so much as existing in the same postal code as a child and are also drumming up a moral panic about how teenage boys aren't getting laid enough. I feel like I'm losing my mind.

I still vividly remember sitting at a bus stop downtown scrolling through endless Tumblr discourse about kink at Pride and whether leather daddies were appropriate. To my left, there was a giant ad that took up the whole side of the bus stop advertising a bag collection for some high-end brand. It was a black and white shot of a model who was completely nude, sitting on a chair, her legs spread wide open while she clutched a bag in front of her crotch and positioned her arms in just the right way to cover her nipples.

Nobody even batted an eye. No discourse was made about this. Life just went on.

Very important corollary: You can't fix this by pushing for either Less Sex or More Sex in a simplistic way. You can't decide if something is progressive based simply on whether it leans towards Sex Good or Sex Bad. You have to actually consider the specific context of any given situation, or you'll just end up contributing to the problem.

(And no you can't escape having to consider context by just going "Sex is bad when (cishet) men do it and good otherwise" etc)

Write zeta as a different squiggle every time.

This is less a suggestion and more an inescapable reality.

For the record I feel like saying "Dreadwolf is going to suck because they laid off Mary Kirby" is like... really dramatically missing the point of what's going on here.

The next game has been in alpha for nearly a year now. Kirby's work on the game as a writer was probably mostly finished. Which does not make this better. If anything, it makes it worse.

The layoffs aren't terrible news because a game we're looking forward to might be worse because of them. They're terrible news because people who have devoted years of blood, sweat, and tears to making the game good (including the person who wrote one of the two characters on which they've been hanging the entire marketing campaign for said game thus far) have been axed now that the company has decided it can probably get by without them.

The quality of the game when it finally comes out is irrelevant here. If it's amazing, it won't make this any better, and if it's awful, it won't make it any worse. What matters is the people whose labor made it exist at all are profoundly undervalued, the industry as a whole is broken and frankly abusive, and I wish everyone in it some good labor organizing.

Yeah I've seen some "Don't let the typical Dragon Age fandom negativity bring you down!" posts and like... there definitely are plenty of the usual petty complaints happening too, but there are also legitimate issues around this game entirely separate to shipping discourse etc. I hadn't articulated it to myself, because my first reactions have focused a bit much on Will It Be Good, but yeah, I think one reason I feel pessimistic about DA4 is I'd feel bad enjoying it even if it is good.

But of course I'm sure the new team (which includes some of the old team) is also working very hard and have their own EA and Bioware management related struggles, so while there's value in criticising the work conditions, putting the game down doesn't fix any of this mess (though ofc it can be critiqued on it's own merits as a game).

Thinking about it, I don't think I've seen anyone list the various new creative endeavours around by people who left Bioware over the last few years (many quit rather than being fired, but I get the feeling they had very good reasons to leave)

I'm familiar with:

Mary Kirby doesn't seem to have started any new projects yet herself but I'll be keeping an eye out!

EDIT: It occurred to me I should say explicitly that I don't think we should give individual people crap if they DO straightforwardly look forward to and enjoy the game.

All throughout childhood, while my peers were socializing and making friends, I studied the blade read so many books that I am now almost legally blind, which left me with vast and deeply instinctual understanding of English grammar - and next to no ability to explain how it actually works. Friends will often ask me to proofread their writing and then get very mad when I say things like, "You need to completely reverse this sentence and cut this clause entirely; no, I'm sorry, i don't know why, I just know that the way it is now ITCHES 😭"

Now, what I want to see is a fantasy story where this plays out with MAGICAL grammar. Someone from a backwater town deeply steeped in folk magic arrives at Wizard Uni where all their fellow students are like "What do you mean, we should add another '𝞯∘⋇𝞿' to the incancation because it 'sounds better'? What do you mean, 'it could just be a regional thing'?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN, 'THIS SPELL JUST FEELS LIKE IT NEEDS A LIVE RAT'????"

You should include intersex people in your activism not bc we prove bio essentialists are wrong but bc we are people who deserve rights 👍