Notices by Gemma ⭐️🔰🇺🇸 🇵🇭 🎐 (gcvsa@mstdn.plus), page 4

@youronlyone I cannot tell you the number of web forums and Facebook groups from which I have been banned for exactly this reason.

Somehow it's not "politics" if a cishetwhiteman attacks queer people, trans people, people of color, or women, but its "politics" that gets you banned if you stand up to homophobia, transphobia, racism, and sexism.

@youronlyone The way the word “monster” is used in #gaming #RPG #TTRPG culture is really just a shorthand for “creature we can morally/legally harm with impunity because we are not obligated to regard it as a person with rights we are obligated to honor and protect”.

@youronlyone That’s why a certain subset of the culture is so enraged when we insist on the idea that a species with intelligence, language, community, and culture is not and cannot be “monsters”, they are “people”, and aggressing against them is inherently evil, why they are so enraged when we point out that regarding all individuals of a people with stereotypes is inherently racist in nature. That’s why The Lord of the Rings is undeniably racist in its treatment of orcs, from the beginning.

@youronlyone There is a museum in the city of Philadelphia, called the "Mütter Museum", which is part of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It was founded in 1858, but was not open to the public until the mid-1970s, and it contains what might be called specimens of medical oddities.

One of the things that struck me hardest when visiting the museums collection was the preserved specimens labelled "Monster". I won't go into any more detail, because it's frankly quite gruesome.

And the idea that there would be caves and ruins littering the countryside filled with monsters and treasure, enough to support the idea of "adventuring" as a profession is even sillier.

If you notice in Japanese Fantasy, it largely revolves around videogame tropes, where dungeons magically appear, monster corpses evaporate upon death leaving behind treasure, and all three are magically replenished periodically. Because that is what's needed to make the genre make sense.

If there are two things about #DnD Dungeons & Dragons that I dislike that aren't the class-based character development system and the nonsensical magic system, those are the very concepts of "dungeons" and "dragons", in the first place.

A dragon, were it real, would be a gigantic solitary apex predator that would require a vast amount of sustenance, and so there would necessarily not be many of them.

And that's even before we get into the racism that is literally baked into the ideas underpinning Western Fantasy, in the first place, particularly the very idea of "monsters", which is a word that has a very dark history in human culture.

That's why I've always preferred to have the enemies in my #fantasy #RPGs and #TTRPGs be other people.

Dear @Mastodon

In no circumstance would I ever find it useful to have the entire body of a post selected when I click “Edit”, and then tap on the text to position the cursor, so that I need to then tap outside the selected area to deselect it, so that I can then tap again where I wanted the cursor in the first place.

Please have people test the functionality of your website prior to release.

The thing about #cars that people have completely forgotten is that it's not cars that enable you to live, work, shop, learn, and play wherever you want, it's the fact that we as a society dedicated countless trillions of dollars and a century's worth of our #productivity into building our #roads and #streets and #highways for cars only that enabled that. We did and do have a choice in this matter.

If you want to get out of a hole, first stop digging.

#BanCars #urbanism #architecture

I have just had a startling revelation that I cannot believe has never occurred to me before.

For some reason, I have a black aluminium Planet Bike water bottle cage. I have recollection of purchasing it, so it may have been a freebie with an order?

Anyway, water bottle cages make excellent wall hooks for reusable shopping bags or outerwear or whatever. I'm going to screw this to my wall. #BikeTooter

@steter I really love the Seymour Duncan Apollo Jazz Bass linear humbuckers. That's what I want in my next bass.

@owa This might be the only thing that will retain me as an Apple customer. The browser issue is my number one most hated aspect of using my iPhone and iPad, and I have resolved to replace the iPad with a Linux laptop and the iPhone with a Graphene OS phone.

Because I cannot run adblockers and content filters freely on iOS and iPadOS, they have lost 99% of their utility for me, due to obtrusive advertising and surveillance.

@youronlyone Tocino Spam isn't sold anywhere near me, so Amazon is the only option. I've wanted to get some for a long time, but the price was too high. I jsut happened to look at Amazon for something else early this morning, and they had dropped the price drastically.

OMG. Tocino Spam for less than $3 a can ($32.92 for one-time delivery of 12 cans)?? BUY IT NOW! #FilAmFood

@youronlyone It honestly surprises me that #SquareEnix apparently hasn't figured out how to use username filters during the character creation process.

#FFXIV is currently plagued with RMT activity that is coming from one particular website, and the accounts their bots create always have either 3 or 4 letters in the given and surnames.

They ban hundreds and thousands of accounts every week for RMT activity, but most of them could be immediately halted at account creation.

There are three aspects of our society that have dramatically changed since the mid-20th Century: sexism, racism, and homophobia/transphobia. Many of the seminal early works of #ScienceFiction were written during a time when things we now see as sexism, racism, and anti-LGBT sentiment were more acceptable to readers than they are today.

Star Trek, in 1968, was the first televison show to ever show a kiss between a white man and a Black woman. Ellen DeGeneres only came out on TV in 1997.

When #reading older works of #ScienceFiction, I find it helpful to bear in mind that they are often products of their times, and that ideas which we find distasteful now may have been commonly acceptable then, and ideas which seem commonplace to us now may have been considered wildly radical then.

Then there is the fact that many famous works have been grossly misinterpreted to the point where the popular understanding of them is complete nonsense (cf: Starship Troopers). #books

@kc @youronlyone The circumflex over a vowel in French indicates where a following "s" was removed, so the original word would have been Middle French "goust", from the Latin "gustus" (taste). The French Academy revised the spelling, so post-1990, it is officially just "gout".

@skinnylatte The ones that get me are the ones who think "being into and buying tech gadgets" is the same thing as "understanding technology and how it works and the consequences thereof".

I have always* maintained that the legitimacy of any state extends only insofar as that state protects the rights of those it claims the authority to govern and those whom it claims to be under the jurisdiction of its laws.

No state has a "right to exist". No state *can* have any such right, because no state has any claim to *rights*, in the first place. Rights inhere in and belong only to the individual, solely by virtue of their existence.

States have powers, not rights.

#politics #law