katt, migrating 🌟 🌈 @starkatt@awoo.space

Taking a fast-acting benzo to try and counteract anxiety feels like slowly flushing our your veins with slightly-too-salty saline solution instead.

Having an anxiety attack feels like having my blood replaced with the sound of two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together.

Second most useful thing: blown air hand dryers are disgusting.

Most actionably useful thing I learned from watching Mythbusters: to accurately drive a car in reverse, turn your torso all the way around and prop yourself up as close as possible to the centerline of the vehicle.

Works.

Got a chance today to play The Captain is Dead, a cool cooperative board game.

Premise: the captain of your starship is dead and you are under attack. Try to keep systems online, repair your warp drive and gtfo before you explode.

The core mechanics are kinda similar to Pandemic -- role specialization, card-swapping. However the board state is a lot more complex, you need to manage damage control, and threats are more immediate. Triage is super important.

Endorsed.

@neonNeptunian I am 100% down for this when you get back into town <3

@aprrrl@witches.town She's pretty active (and cool) on bird site :)

@aprrrl@witches.town You should definitely read the next two -- they expand on the themes in really interesting ways.

Also I think it's a mistake to try and assign gender to Radachi at all. Despite that, my brain kept trying really hard to do so.

I wish in the first Leckie hadn't given signifiers that people latch on to as representative as gender/sex, and my reading of the subtext of later books is that she even regrets having done so.

I said I was gonna make a necker cube expanding brain so here you go

https://awoo.space/media/bctnFPDIWc9ojJqe-EM

@aprrrl@witches.town Anyway, the trick with writing alternate rigid gender roles is to make sure the players parse it as gender and not as caste or something.

@aprrrl@witches.town Dunno if you've read the Ancillary series, but one of the primary cultures in it doesn't have gender. In one of the books, a character from another culture asks "but how do you have kids??" to which the very sensible reply was "You go see a doctor and get the necessary adjustments made."

@aprrrl@witches.town I once decided for an RPG that dwarves reproduced socially. They don't have gender roles, and the colony will semi-regularly just have giant sex parties and any resulting children are cared for collectively without any real focus on specific parents.

@green Wait why do you try to scare raccoons?

@TipsyTentacle@witches.town Also relatable.

@shoofle 100% go with Linear A.

@Longwing I can super understand power fantasy but uncritically applying it to relationships still feels kinda not-great to do universally.

@Longwing There's usually more than one romance option, so getting rejected by one person isn't the same as getting defeated in the main plotline.