Random Thought of the Day

[Nyctophilia]

What's with the trend of making existing conventionally attractive female video game characters uglier, less feminine, and lesbian? Lara Croft is also getting this treatment

lol shoeonhead:

idc about the lesbian part but the defeminizing is because people naturally see masculine = strong, therefor empowering or whatever. and traditionally feminine features as weak, bad and pornographic. and for some reason to many this is seen as progressive. its goofy.

I bet you don't. 😏

To be fair every image I'm seeing people post of Lara Croft's supposed redesign looks completely different and like they're from different games:





I'm pretty confused but the last game I played was one of the prequel games years ago (Tomb Raider 2013,) and I didn't finish it. I've played several earlier games though (Tomb Raider I, II, Legend, Underworld.)

I also think they're going for realism more because her previous look has always been fairly cartoonish. I find her femme look more attractive than some of the images I've seen. I also liked playing this level:



(I downloaded a bunch of her outfits from that game for The Sims 2 lol as a teenager.)

The juxtaposition (I really need to stop using this word,) is cool too and I like motorbikes.

But I don't think video game characters have to be attractive to me, god knows none of the men in Western games are lol. The west likes to emphasise masculinity and Eastern games like to emphasise femininity as a rule (or at least a different kind of androgyny in male characters,) so they basically just do the opposite of each other. As everyone has decided to post conspiracy theories I'm going with they're secretly in some kind of bizarre arms race lol.

Most of the discourse is transphobia directed at trans lesbians. Probably because there are many game developers who are [BEEP] trans women. It's kind of crazy the amount of comments that are like that. Also homophobia and assumptions about 'angry lesbians' not liking the original Lara, complete bi erasure of course, and complaints about unattractive women who want to kill our waifus, it's an antinatalist conspiracy to stop certain races from reproducing, etc. Very normal twitter as usual.

And then this:

STOP MAKING EVERY FEMALE VIDEO GAME LEAD A LESBIAN!!!!
...
No seriously, making a female lead a lesbian was stunning and brave 25 years ago. Now its just a sad commentary on cultural decay.
Besides, where are the gay males leads? 🤔

OK calm down dude. It's not like being straight was integral to her character. Maybe to your fantasies lol. I haven't played all the games but I don't remember her sexuality ever coming up. Besides that she might be bisexual because all I'm seeing is 'has a romantic scene with another female character'

I think the only character I thought she had an interesting dynamic with was Alistair in Tomb Raider Legend but it's been a long time so I don't know if I'd still think that. I remember looking up fanfiction and couldn't find much lol. That happens about 50% of the time. These days more like 95% of the time.

Personally I usually play female characters as lesbians if given the choice or bisexual. That was never a conscious choice either lol just noticed after a while that I would do that disproportionately.

Ironically though I do remember reading a liberal article years ago about 'strong female characters' or something which complained about Lara Croft's personality being too masculine essentially like a genderswapped man or something.

Life was simpler before social media when you just locked the butler in the freezer and visited Stella's Tomb Raider site haha.

[Nyctophilia]

This comment lol:

The more partners a woman has had, the less likely she ends up with her first choice.

Most women can sleep with an 8-10 man if they try, but they can't keep him because to him she is casual or a side chick.

She holds out this idea that she can get that level of man long term

'but she can't and by early 30s she starts to realize it's not going to happen. But by then men start to see her as less attractive due to age / lower fertility and her options decrease even more.

So she either settles and is less happy or stays single and you get this chart.

It's such a messed up system that every society since the Bronze Age instituted arranged marriages to avoid this.

Excess male sex drive was absorbed by prostitutes, which were between 3-5% of the female population.

It worked sooo much better.

This is cute but I strongly doubt white women are more likely to be single than black women given the rates of single motherhood, yet that chart is just white women with a massively inflated rate of anti depressent use (it's also I believe misleading but they do still have higher rates,) so probably something else is causing that. Middle aged white men are also more likely to kill themselves so just seems like white people are miserable or have more mental health issues. Non-white people are also less likely to seek mental health support though too but don't think that's the only explanation (since so many white guys kill themselves.)

Even this guy was confused about how often the white students he knew, especially guys, killed themselves at this one school he taught at with a bunch of poor white kids (talks about it in the 'Touching Grass' section):



The research on whether women are happier single is mixed I think. Some research actually does show that women are happier if they're unmarried. That might be because a lot of women end up in marriages they're not happy with I imagine it's like happy marriage > single > settled and unhappy.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeands...ppiness-expert

"We do have some good longitudinal data following the same people over time, but I am going to do a massive disservice to that science and just say: if you're a man, you should probably get married; if you're a woman, don't bother."

Something's not going to work here lol... Unless a lot of men are willing to date/marry men.

Mixed race people are also likely to have more mental health issues because being mixed race is socially difficult, same with bisexual people and trans + non-binary people. I think these groups have higher rates of substance abuse too. If you transcend some kind of boundaries with your identity you're probably not going to have a fun time it seems. I'm actually not that unhappy given my life + various issues but I'm actually only 32 so there's still time haha. I have a general fear of death and disease etc so that's only going to get scarier.



Just like mr fr. (lol no seems like an exaggerated stereotype.)

Literally do get followed by cats though lol



Also they don't like prescribing meds here I've been told twice my issues aren't extreme enough to warrant meds since I'm not depressed + my anxiety isn't bad enough (even though it's part of the reason I'm a hermit hah! Yeah mental health care in the UK is a bit [BEEP] in the opposite direction of the US lol.)

I don't know if she was joking but shoeonhead said she was prescribed 4 different meds but only takes one of them and how does that even happen lol? America.

edit: Also it's funny when someone makes a claim that something worked better in the past when there's no research to compare back then.

[Nyctophilia]

Steven Crowder is an abusive chud. Wow. So shocked.

Lol.

---





People will criticise and talk [BEEP] about people who self diagnose but always remember getting a diagnosis that's recorded somewhere in 'the system' is a bad idea if you can avoid it as it may be used against you at some point to limit your autonomy. If you think you might have some condition, you can follow advice online. There are some therapists on YouTube who make videos too.

genuinely surprised how little personal testimony and witness accounts there seems to be of conversion therapy before the process evangelicized around 1973. the modern conversion therapy memoir always suggests the blame is in religious orthodoxy, not psychiatry

moreover the modern victim of conversion is pretty much always depicted as a child who is inducted involuntarily -- before 1973 it was the adult who entered voluntarily. a lot was different

Yeah an ideal goal for most societies is to shame people who have undesired traits into hating themselves and trying to fix themselves so they don't even have to use force.

Do the current crop of "butch/femme is for lesbians only" biphobic twitter lesbians know we went through this on Tumblr several years ago and their predecessors either apologised after actually reading some bf texts or became violent TERFs? We cannot keep doing this my loves

It does get a lot less frustrating when you realise all they have to do is swallow their pride and read their own history to learn they're being ridiculous but I do feel for the non binary/trans ones who don't realise the people they're siding with hate them just as much

I think it's like interesting how suburban middle-class internet lesbians have a vested interest in ignoring urban working-class origins of our vocabulary. such gay men & lesbians & queens all hung out together which is why we have shared -- if somewhat divergent -- vocabularies

this becomes super obvious if you look at a rarer term like "kiki", which means a lesbian who doesn't know yet if she's butch or femme, but also means two drag queens that date each other (kai-kai), but also means a ball for minors in ballroom, but also means

Yeah I'm pretty sure gay men have been using 'femme' for ages also trans people have way bigger issues. I mean they've literally banned medical care for neurodivergent adults in Missouri and it won't stop there which just makes this even more fucked.

edit: looks like they've temporarily blocked it. The requirements would essentially ban it for almost everyone since it blocks transition for minors and then blocks it for people with anxiety + depression (which is almost all trans people,) forces doctors to screen for autism (but unclear if it then blocks you, but you can't treat autism so based on the wording of the bill I assume autistic people would not be allowed to ever transition or people with ADHD etc,) and then there's the vague 'social contagion' thing again so I guess they can just arbitrarily say you're suffering from social contagion if they don't want you to transition and none of the other things happen to apply.

A leading Olympian has said it was "wrong and unfair" for Glenique Frank, a biological male identifying as a woman, to have been allowed to compete in the female category of the London Marathon.

Oh no:

Glenique Frank placed 6,160th out of 6,315 in her gender category.

I can't anymore:

[Heelsbythebridge]

Most mothers hate their daughters. Just resentful, jealous contempt... like Christ why are you competing with your own daughter? Are men the same way towards their sons?

[Heelsbythebridge]

Dragon slayer

It's a GREAT day for an exorcism!!!!

[Heelsbythebridge]

Stop bringing us into the conversation

We are not as cursed as you are. It's bad here, but not remotely close to what your situation is

[Heelsbythebridge]

I just like hearing your voice

[Heelsbythebridge]

This is too much stress for too long

I can't do it

[Nyctophilia]

Females don't have independent thought. They don't come up with anything. They're just empty vessels, waiting for someone to install the programming.

Andrew Tate forgets we can all listen to his rap music (which is very poor quality.) And then we can all listen to Ashnikko.



You should get fuckboy tattoo'd (I think this everytime I read something dumb he's said lol.)

This used to irritate me a bit because obviously she's leaning into toxic masculinity but it works very well in this exclusive situation.



You hate me cause you hate yourself.


Oh did you make a lot of money pimping out women because you're not hot enough to sell sex yourself either? You talk a lot of [BEEP] for someone who has less than 0 to offer Humanity. At best you're a muse for someone like Ashnikko. (And not even literally, but Andrew Tate's are ideologically dime a dozen.)

Also to be clear he preaches that women should be feminine but he's raising his daughter like Myra Hindley.

My daughter got in trouble at nursery for hitting a little boy in the face with a toy car when he tried to hug her.

....

😏

Did she KO him?

She better have or no dinner tonight.

Hindley's father had served with the Parachute Regiment and was stationed in North Africa, Cyprus and Italy during the Second World War.[20] He had been known as a hard man while in the army and he expected his daughter to be equally tough; he taught her to fight and insisted that she stick up for herself. When Hindley was aged about eight, a local boy scratched her cheeks, drawing blood. She burst into tears and ran to her father, who threatened to "leather" her if she did not retaliate; Hindley found the boy and knocked him down with a series of punches. As she wrote later, "At eight years old I'd scored my first victory".[21] Malcolm MacCulloch, professor of forensic psychiatry at Cardiff University, has written that Hindley's "relationship with her father brutalised her ... She was not only used to violence in the home but rewarded for it outside. When this happens at a young age, it can distort a person's reaction to such situations for life."[22]

Watch this space in 20+ years.

edit: He's complaining a lot about 'The Matrix (tm,)' but he should probably be aware that he's technically getting off lightly in the modern era.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journ...31A5426A1D1577

Social media summary: Planned killing of antisocial individuals occurs only in humans, and helps to explain why we have prosocial tendencies.

Unlike other vertebrates, humans (Homo sapiens) have long been considered to be more cooperative and prosocial than expected from theories of kin selection or mutualism. [...] I call such evolved propensities 'groupishness', characterised as a tendency to cooperate and be prosocial in ways that appear to transcend genetic self-interest. Groupishness in humans includes spontaneously helping unrelated group members, having a social conscience, accepting and enforcing a moral code, conforming to group norms, sharing resources, and being concerned about fairness and reputation. In this paper I suggest that the evolution of human groupishness was strongly influenced by a unique human ability, targeted conspiratorial killing.

Evidence that the most recent evolutionary phase of human self-domestication started with H. sapiens, whereas earlier Pleistocene Homo species showed no signs of a self-domestication syndrome, suggests that the period shortly before 300,000 years ago marked the beginnings of intensified selection against reactive aggression. Subsequent acceleration of gracilisation trends from archaic to modern H. sapiens suggests that self-domestication has continued to the present at an increasing rate. A critical question therefore is: what happened before 300,000 years ago that would explain why reactive aggression was selected against much more strongly than previously?

Based on Boehm's execution hypothesis, the answer might seem to be that this was the first time that human ancestors developed an ability to safely kill alpha males. While I will argue that this answer is correct, it is also inadequate because other species are also known to kill adults in their own group. The problem is particularly severe for chimpanzees because, according to Boehm (Reference Boehm2018 ), chimpanzees have a human-like capacity to remove a disliked despotic male by killing him. Boehm reported that in chimpanzees and humans 'bullies are singled out for lethal attacks' [by coalitions] (Boehm, Reference Boehm2018, p. 693). Therefore, 'It is very likely that our chimpanzee-like ape ancestors ganged up on disliked individuals to temporarily or permanently eliminate them from the group' (Boehm, Reference Boehm, Muller, Wrangham and Pilbeam2017, p. 763).

Those claims might be taken to suggest that there is no important difference between the propensities of chimpanzees and humans to kill an alpha male. Yet domineering behaviour is an invariable feature of alpha male chimpanzees, so it has not been reduced in that species as it has in humans. This suggested to Boehm (Reference Boehm, Muller, Wrangham and Pilbeam2017, p. 769) that there is a feature of human coalitions that makes them into 'a special, social selection force'. The critical question can therefore be reformulated: do differences in the nature of within-group killing of adults explain why, by 300,000 years ago, reactive aggression was selected against in humans but not in chimpanzees?

Andrew Tate: 'Please stop Human-ing and ignore my constant signalling of my antisocial traits. I'm a popular influencer with a wide reach due to modern technology/social media and you're supposed to just ignore that and like me.'




Also just noticed this:

Oooh.

13. "Dying Star" (featuring Ethel Cain)

I am intrigued.

(It's also crazy that their debut album is coming out this year like I've been listening to their music for several years now on YouTube and had no idea they hadn't released an album yet.)

This was 5 years ago lol:



Also 2 million subscribers now. I got there early #hipster

[Heelsbythebridge]

Maybe I'm the wrong one.
Being atheist is hard. Life is hard and it's why people turned to religion in the first place... to believe any of this is for anything.

I stopped believing when I was like 18-19 but maybe I should try again

[Heelsbythebridge]

Why is history repeating itself? Again and again and again

That one moment was amazing and all but it's not a situation I want to ever be in again

[Heelsbythebridge]

I fucking hate this
I need another blackout period where I didn't follow this godforsaken game

I don't need any more factors ruining my life, I'm done like dinner

[Heelsbythebridge]

Slaying the dragon is a once in a lifetime kind of event.

Living through it a second time will actually kill me. I have a blood pressure of 150/100. I might die tonight

[Heelsbythebridge]

They slayed the dragon

[Heelsbythebridge]

Have some smile