I found a group of people who actually give a fuck about each other. I am never letting them go. They are stuck with me now.

Until recently I would have said 0%, but probably 95% of my current friends would rush me to a hospital (if it was physically possible) the other 5% are perpetually busy and would probably find someone who could.

That’s only true if you don’t look under the covers.

Spoilers: there’s a furry orgy hiding beneath.

I find it really amusing that furries are probably the most unique American subculture, yet we get shunned by most Americans. Go figure lmao.

It’s forcing an agenda or an “ideological war” in the same way the civil war was about states rights.

Yeah, it was about states rights: the right for non-slave states to choose not to return escaped slaves. That’s a huge reason why the south got so pissy at the north, the north decided they didn’t want to return slaves to the south; slavery wasn’t legal in the north and so being an escaped slave in the north effectively meant you were a Freedman. The south didn’t like that because they saw slaves as property that was basically “stealing itself”.

Something similar is going on with trans rights, only it’s even more complex than the factors leading to the civil war. It’s about the right to do what you want with your own body. The right to be seen how you want to be seen, and treated how you want to be treated (yanno, within reason; I’m not gonna bow down to someone who claims to be a princess and kiss her feet, but I will call her a princess if she asks). These are, in my opinion, basic human rights and as such, attempting to state anything else is “The Agenda”. Unsurprisingly, history repeats itself and the bigots are now attempting to force their agenda and ideology on others while claiming the other side is the one doing it (this, btw, is called projection).

Note: there are a ton of different cultural factors that make bigots believe that they are right and everyone else is wrong. Tbh, I don’t really want to get into that because I’d be writing pages instead of paragraphs. However, a lot of it in the US specifically has to do with religion and adherence to tradition; and how as life gets harder, people adhere more and more strongly to tradition. Well, life’s getting hard for the average American. They’re feeling increasingly squeezed for time and money, so out goes rationality and empathy, and in comes tradition and religion.

It’s hard to accept change when you feel that change brings more bad than good.

Btw, if you and your sister are both AFAB then, for the love of god, support her. As a trans woman who didn’t start transitioning until she was 30, it would have meant a lot to me and radically changed my life if I’d had friends I was comfortable truly being myself around; and it means a hell of a lot more if the support is coming from your peers (in this case, female classmates, especially cisfem classmates).

It’s scary as fuck being trans, and I won’t lie, cis women are intimidating. I don’t really give a shit about how cis men see me. In my head, cis-women are the ultimate judge of who gets to be called “a woman” and it makes me feel like a little part of my soul dies every time I’m rejected. Like, I’m sorry I wasn’t born pretty. I’m sorry I was born with a penis, and I have wide shoulders and narrow hips and my tits are still tiny because I just started hrt. I can’t help it and there’s only so much I can physically change. Anything else is too expensive.

I just want to be myself and be accepted for it.

Treat her as her preferred gender. Make her forget she was AMAB and the bigotry of the world around her. Invite her to girls nights, let her try on clothes and do a cute little spin when she puts on a skirt. Help her do make up and braid her hair (if it’s long enough). Play games together, watch movies together, treat her as one of you. Be her friend’s “cool big sister”.

And when life kicks her in the balls for being “a man”, make sure you and your sister give her a shoulder to cry on. Remind her that, when it comes to human anatomy, a penis is almost literally just a huge clit. No, seriously. Fetuses start out with female genitalia regardless of chromosomes, and then the female genitals turn into male genitals before birth (if you have XY chromosomes, usually). So she doesn’t have a penis, just has a very well endowed clitoris.

Do that and you might also find other trans gals (and possibly trans guys and non-binary pals) congregating around you. Your sister’s friend may feel like they can be more open about being trans, but not everyone does. For every trans person who lives out of the closet, there are probably 5 more who are too scared to be their best selves out of fear of rejection. Publically showing acceptance will help others feel accepted themselves (and in turn, help them to accept themselves, because that’s a really hard thing to do). Public acceptance also helps normalize being trans as being “Just A Thing Some Humans Do”, which helps fight against bigotry itself.

Join the revolution, fight against bigotry, hug a tr*nny.

Edit: also, if she’s old enough, make sure knows she still needs to use condoms if she wants to top (or her partner if she’s a bottom and likes penises). Just because she’s a girl doesn’t mean she can’t get other gals pregnant, and STDs are still very much a thing. You gotta be on hrt for the sperm to stop swimming and even then it takes a little while for that to happen. I personally wouldn’t take the risk (and that’s ignoring the possibility of STDs).

Edit 2: oh! I almost forgot, this is one of my favorite resources to send people who are questioning or want to understand more about what we go through. Give it a read and consider sending it to your sister and her friend as well. There will be kids who use it against your sister’s friend and other trans kids at her school, so keep an eye out for people getting bullied; buuuuut it’ll tell you about the different ways dysphoria can manifest, why gender affirming care is important, and the kinds of changes hrt can bring for those questioning.

No, she’s just a bully and an asshole. If you sister can’t kick her ass, kick her ass yourself and help your sister find better friends. Your sister probably needs the support, otherwise she probably wouldn’t be “”“friends”“” with people like that.

shrug Idk if it’s really that insane. Tbh I’m not convinced the hype isn’t being manufactured. I have a cousin who’s a pretty bog standard, flavor-of-the-month gamer, and he’s said nothing about GTA VI.

Not saying you’re necessarily wrong, I guess, just that something seems off.

No, I’m honestly surprised. I’ve barely heard anything about GTA VI. Seriously. I don’t care about it, none of my friends have talked about it despite being the kinda game that they’d be into, and I’ve only seen one or two articles on it.

You sure it’s that highly anticipated? My observation is that people have gotten really sick and tired of AAA games, and this is a shift that’s occurred since RDR2 came out. Very few of the people I know still regularly play AAA games, and those who do almost never buy them on launch. I haven’t seen anywhere near the same amount of hype for GTA VI as I saw for GTA IV or GTA V.

You’re accusing me of being disingenuous? Maybe you’re the one who’s buying into the hype and overestimating public interest. Or perhaps the true answer is somewhere in the middle. Who knows. I was not intentionally downplaying your favorite series though.

Wait, do people still get excited for GTA? I thought GTA V online killed a lot of goodwill for the series.

The number one thing I’ve been missing are Spotify jams. Spotify also has a wider selection of music, but tbh it’s rare for Spotify to have something that Qobuz doesn’t. Spotify also has lyrics, playlist folders, and audiobooks; though tbh I haven’t checked to see if Qobuz has the latter.

I love Qobuz. Also for those of you trying to boycott US goods, it’s a French company. I just wish it had the same adoption and features as Spotify.

I mean, they could introduce a new character who takes shelter in a mysterious, dilapidated research facility during the 7 hour war and finds themselves in a hellish labyrinth of puzzles. Maybe said character finds Chell in the field and helps release her (there’s some speculation Chell never made it out, but was actually in some kind of biosphere based on some in-game hints).

It’s wild when you look into how many different languages are “Chinese”. It’s like if someone were to say that someone from Germany spoke “European”.

Note: unfortunately these are all on PC and don’t have couch coop unless specified otherwise. I also don’t think they have DRM aside from normal steam stuff (or require an internet connection for actual gameplay purposes), but any steam DRM should be easy to remove.

Warframe: space ninjas: the game (though it does require an online connection since it’s basically a coop mmo, and it is third-person as opposed to first-person)

Payday: basically cops vs robbers. You’re the robbers.

Killing Floor: Lodesemone! Dosh! Grab it while you can, lads! Money, money, money! Coop zombie survival. I hope you love blood and gore.

Abiotic Factor: what if you were a scientist in the Black Mesa GATE Cascade Research Facility and you had to survive? Can be played single player or multiplayer.

Halo: MCC: Halo already has a reputation for being the ultimate coop shooter. The MCC adds and expands coop for the games; however the PC version lacks split-screen. This can supposedly be added back with a mod, but I haven’t tried it so I can’t attest to how functional it is.

I’ve heard Sven Coop is really good if you like Half-Life stuff. It’s a coop Half-Life mod.

Risk of Rain 2: technically third-person, but a very good coop shooter.

There’s a mod for that now, so you don’t have to do the Nucleus Coop bullshit. I haven’t tried it, so I dunno how well it works, but ye.

Fyi, afaik Halo MCC supports 2 player coop on Halo: CE, and 4 player coop on the other games. That said, they removed split-screen on the PC version. Supposedly they keep saying they’ll add it back eventually but, well, “eventually” has yet to happen.

That said, I’ve read there’s a mod for native split screen now so you don’t have to do the awkward Nucleus Coop stuff. I haven’t tried it though, so ymmv.

It makes me sad that I was born in a country that doesn’t give a fuck about the environment when I read things like this. I’d love to do projects like this for a living, but… no, wrong country lmao.

Edit: lemme know when a place like Norway takes trans refugees from the US. I’d love to spend my time walking in forests and building birdhouses.

I mean, they have closed caption devices you can borrow. They fit into the cupholder and display captions for you.

Eh, I personally think it is, but you have to temper your expectations. It’s absolutely not Artificial General Intelligence, nor is it as flexible or capable of rapid learning as human intelligence (or likely most forms of living intelligence in general). However, I’d challenge the notion that it lacks intelligence entirely.

AI still “learns” from what you shove into it; it’s still creating algorithms to adapt to the information stream(s) it’s being exposed to which is not unlike how the human brain is believed to function. As such, I personally view it to be intelligent, but not anywhere near as intelligent as people think it is, and absolutely not in the way people want it to be.

One of the big differences that I see is that, afaik, AI is unable to learn while it’s running. You have to train it, run it, train it again based on user input, run it, train it again on more user input, and so on. Humans are more efficient at learning when they sleep and take breaks, but are still capable of learning things without “shutting down”, so-to-speak (not that we ever truly shut down outside of death, but that’s tangential).

Another difference is that, unlike “natural intelligence”, AI ends up being hyper focused on a specific task. It’s a bit like grabbing an ice cream scoop and removing a very specific part of the brain, let’s say the part responsible for imagining images, and then letting people interface with that alone. Yeah, it’s not gonna be good at parsing text because that’s not what it was designed to do. That’s a different part of the brain. The one you’re playing with right now is only good at visualizating images, so you’re gonna get pretty images, but good luck with getting it to do proper text, understanding proper body language, etc.

Finally, AI hallucinates like crazy. This is one where I’m not sure if we’re really that different from AI (I’ll explain in a moment); but it is a big issue when it comes to try to get AI to factually report information or perform logic tasks. You can ask an AI what 2+2 is and get 4 one day, 5 the next, 3 on Saturdays and then -2027346 on Christmas.

But wait! Doesn’t that make it unintelligent?

No.

Going back to the previous statement about AI being hyper-focused, it just means you’re not interacting with a part of the brain capable of logic; you’re interacting with something else. Maybe the speech center, idk.

However, there’s another element to this where AI doesn’t have a persistent “reality anchor” like we do. To an AI, fact and fiction are purely conceptual because it doesn’t truly exist in our world, it’s off in its own little digital world. Furthermore, the experiences it can gain from the training set are heavily limited compared to what living creatures experience. We have a constant stream of information that reminds us about what is real, who we are, what things look like, how things move and so on; and we get that data stream in 3 dimensions (arguably 2.5, but I digress) instead of 2. It’s like expecting a plant to thrive when given a trickle of water when it normally grows exclusively in a swamp. We ourselves tend to begin hallucinating when our senses become cut off from the outside world because our brains make up stimuli when the expected stimuli is missing. So… I’m not sure if the hallucinations are totally unreasonable, unrealistic or all that different from how we’d behave if subjected to the same environment; but at the very least it’s something that makes AI appear unintelligent.

That’s not to say that AI is a good thing or that it lives up to the hype. Fuck AI for being wildly overhyped, overused, and destroying people’s livelihoods in a world where “earning for a living” is still required for some god-forsaken reason (just a reminder that the phrase, “earn a living” implies you don’t deserve to live if you aren’t able to make money or have someone doing it for you). At the same time, however, it kinda is intelligent. I think people are just expecting way more from it that it’s capable of doing. It’s like people expect intelligence to manifest in grayscale when it’s more like RGBA or something.

Edit: sorry about the massive wall of text; I was fascinated with AI and its potential for a while, which meant it lived rent-free in my head at a series of philosophical questions about things like intelligence and what it means for humans that something designed to function as a series of virtual neurons would behave so similarly yet differently to humans. These were the kinds of conclusions I came to.

Same. Like, it honestly wasn’t terrible, it was still fun and I still enjoyed it. It just wasn’t as amazing as the intro.

With Valerian I’d say you should watch the intro. Then turn it off. Unless you feel like watching some half-baked sci-fi eye-candy. The intro sequence with humanity’s first contact and everything was beautiful and made me sniffly. The rest of the movie was pretty, kinda fun, but ultimately nowhere near as amazing as the intro.