The headline is misleading. A vacant secondary property that is maintained but boarded up is not the same as a family's primary residence, which "family home" implies. No one has become unhoused due to the demolition.
Doesn't change anything about how messed up it is to demolish the wrong property, though.
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.
Admittedly, I probably could write more consistently if I had some kind of outside force making me, but where do I find that? I both need structure and avoid it at all costs because it feels so suffocating. I could maybe get an accountability buddy, though I hate having to be accountable, but I doubt that would be enough.
I realize this is like 2 months later, but I read your posts and wanted to let you know about an online event/community called NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). It's an annual event/challenge (traditionally in November) to write 50k (or your own goal) words in 1 month, with an explicit quantity > quality approach. I'm an aspiring writer in the same boat as you and participating in NaNoWriMo is the only thing that ever worked to get me putting words on paper, even during college. It provides some structure (daily or weekly goals) without being suffocating, and it adds a bit of a gamification/friendly self-competition element to the experience of writing, but the community itself is really laid-back, casual, and inclusive. There are also sometimes in-person writing get-togethers that can be very helpful to get that extra dopamine boost for writing. If you've already tried out this or something similar and it wasn't for you, no biggie, I just wanted to highlight a potential writing aid that you/others reading might not have heard about.
I subscribed to Dropout earlier this year after I exhausted the free episodes on their YouTube channel. Definitely a fan of GameChanger and Make Some Noise! I recently started watching Um, Actually as well. One of these days I'll have to get into the DnD side of things; I know I'll like them, it just feels like more of an undertaking to watch, you know?
Finished up a refreshingly boring week at work and this Sunday I will be traveling to Manhattan for employee training! I visited Manhattan last month and did all the classic NYC tourist stuff but I feel I missed out on the food side of NYC; the recommendations I got at the time were subpar. If anyone has tips for worthwhile food spots to check out nearish to Moynihan/Penn Station, lemme know!
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.
The whole transphobic claim of being seen as our AGAB by future archeologists is especially ridiculous considering that modern ones are already saying things like this:
While the skeleton’s biological sex is not in dispute, Gowland cautioned that nothing is known about the Ivory Lady’s gender identity, and scholars shouldn’t impose modern gender norms onto past populations.
As an American, there isn't any official paperwork I've ever seen in the US that requests, let alone requires, my skin tone or race, with the sole exception of the US census and the occasional optional and anonymous EEOC questionnaire that some job applications have, neither of which record anything to do with skin color or appearance.
Can we get a transcript/archived copy of the survey questions? Not the answers people provided, but just what questions were and the answers available to select from. Also an image transcription of the graphs would be helpful; the text in the images is difficult to read on Jerboa.
I'm curious where the decision to separate nonbinary and genderfluid into different categories came from. In the various queer communities I'm in, genderfluidity is considered to fall under the nonbinary umbrella, so breaking it out as a separate option while not breaking out other nonbinary identities looks a little odd to me.
I would be interested in knowing the trans/cis demographics as well; if, for all we know, Beehaw has equals numbers of trans men to cis men, this survey wouldn't reveal that or any other notable proportions.
I also want to include myself as another person who found the white/non-white question a bit uncomfortable. If it had asked me about being a person of color or some other phrasing, I wouldn't have blinked, but there is something unpleasant about being asked where I stand in a racial dichotomy as a biracial person. I don't know a better way to phrase the question that still captures the intent, though.
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.