So with Darths and Droids ending (relatively) recently, I am once again wondering how this brilliant webcomic (you should read it!) could possibly have been inspired by DM of the Rings ^_^'

Ignoring for a second that I find DMotR utterly unfunny while D&D is brilliant and very often got a chuckle out of me, it's incredible to me how different the fictional players in both comics are.

In DMotR, they're obstinate assholes I wouldn't want to have one gaming session with. They do not seem like they actually want to be there.

The DM is antagonistic towards players and seems like the kind of GM I always felt was the major problem with the hobby. Again, it doesn't seem like the DM wants the players to have fun. He wants to get one up over them.

The players in Darths and Droids are sometimes annoying and they're agents of chaos, but they genuinely engage with the campaign. Their shenanigans are silly to the extreme but I'd have a blast running a game for a group like that. I'd be tired and exasperated much of the time, but I'd have a blast.

The DM in the story, similarly, runs a balancing act between letting the players have some agency (something the DM in DMotR never seems to even consider) and reining in some of their wilder ideas. He does a great job of herding that bunch of cats.

And everyone has fun. There's a reason that fictional group of people plays so many campaigns together and stay, it seems, close friends.

I think stories need compelling characters that are likeable in some way. Granted, people don't always agree with me, people did like Seinfeld after all.

...ok, I promise I won't turn this into another "Seinfeld sucks" rant.

Any current or aspiring GM should read DMotR and Darths and Droids, compare and contrast, and try to be like the GM from the latter and not the former.

Or just read D&D, because DMotR sucks xP

Coming out as a woman freed me to be feminine.

And to my shock, it freed me to NOT be feminine, in a way that felt actually good.

It just hits different to act in masculine-coded ways as a woman.

(people who think us trans people reduce gender to stereotypes have no idea what they're talking about xD I get to be me. And there's so much more complexity to "me" than I ever realized before transitioning)

I'm pretty sure my boobs are a little larger, again.

My wife says that at the very least they're much rounder and more filled out. Previously, she says, they were shaped "like this" and then she made a gesture like someone manically conducting an orchestra.

I love my wife and the way she expresses thoughts xD

she's not wrong tho

So I'm back to #weightlifting , after a break due to sickness and other stuff.

My routine is deadlifts, weighted hip thrusts, overhead presses, dumbbell rows, goblet squats, high bar squats. In succession, with about a minute or two rest between exercises and a few breaths' break between sets.

I lift basically to failure although I have weak will so the term "to failure" is doing some heavy lifting (pun very much intended) here.

I train once a week.

I go up in increments of 2.5 kg for every exercise where I do the final set with enough extra reps.

I was thinking I might add another exercise day on the opposite end of each week. But the prospect of going all out twice a week is a bit too daunting. So I'm thinking of that second day being two "steps" (so, 5 kg) below my current level. I just wanna watch my form, get a little sweaty, but not overexert myself. I do need some time to regenerate.

If that's relevant, I do no other exercise on the regular that demands strength, but I do up to about 4 hours of roller derby, and about 5-8 hours of bicycling per week.

Is there a point adding that extra bit exercise? Will it even affect the pace of my progress in any meaningful way?

Sorry if my question is dumb -_- I don't know much about weightlifting, and I never really talked to people who are into it because they tended to be toxic gym bros in the past =(

Any additional advice or suggestions or comments or ideas are welcome, anything you think I'll find useful is useful!

I know we are currently in the time of increased nostalgia for 2000s-era video games, but those games took such a TOLL on actual visual design.

Like, by no means all of them. Don't misunderstand me. There are games whose look is truly brilliant.

But early 3D was ugly, and worse, the goal was to add more polygons, more graphical fidelity, more bells and whistles at the expense of y'know, actually thinking about how to make the game look good.

Just look at the graphics in a lot of early-1990s games. They were made with purpose. The pixel art usually still holds up. The relatively obscure Sid Meier's Colonization (a spin-off of the first Civilization game that I to this day say was VASTLY ahead of its time in terms of game mechanics, but I digress) is still something I'd hold up as a game that achieves so much personality with so little. The visual clarity is incredible, the icons for the little dudes and resources are, well, iconic despite being like 14 pixels tall.

Just, look at this screenshot. The color palette, the shapes of the buildings, the interface - these things are designed with purpose.

And OK, I am the one person on the planet that can't help but gush about a game no-one remembers. But my point is, there's plenty of games like that. I am not saying the Playstation 1 and Playstation 2 era didn't have games with stunning visual design. But between like 1997 and 2007 the main push really was "more graphical fidelity no matter what". I mean, it still is nowadays, I guess. The more things change and all that.

And I think people understand that nowadays, at least smaller and/or indie developers. I may not like Metroidvanias, but Hollow Knight has that very same clarity of purpose in its visual design that games of old did. As a result, it's quite simply beautiful despite being y'know, just cartoony images.

And games do not even have to be beautiful to have this visual identity. Undertale is not that pretty to look at, but everything about its graphics is iconic. So is, to pick a weird example, Into The Breach.

I mean... take a popular indie game from the last 10 to 15 years and you'll probably have an instantly recognizable look.

It is a slight annoyance to me when written posts or media strip foreign names of diacritics (for obvious reasons it annoys me for Polish specifically). It happens a surprising amount.

Those little dots and lines and squiggles and whatnot are not there for decoration. They're part of the word, they mean shit. I am not asking you to pronounce these, but write them out. Everything online is in Unicode, it's not a huge ask.

Your keyboard doesn't allow these characters to be typed in? So what, it's literally a matter of copy pasting that letter into your text. MS Office and OpenOffice have those characters available, and there are actual websites for lists of Unicode characters, complete with a "Copy to clipboard" button on screen.

You can spare the extra 15 seconds. I'm not asking you to write in the ancient tongue of R'lyeh there.

(and those statistics likely underestimate the gulf, because a lot of trans people who have not started HRT will not show up AS trans in statistics, for all sorts of reasons)

Like, this is not a metaphor or an exaggeration. HRT prevents death in a statistically measurable way.

Look up suicide rates for transgender people not on HRT and transgender people on HRT if you don't believe me.

Oh, by the way, for those (especially cis people) who have not caught on:

HRT literally is life-saving medicine. Anyone who says otherwise is ignorant, stupid, transphobic or some combination of the three.

So when asked, I say that I've been on feminizing HRT for three years.

...but have I, really?

It was nearly two years before my E levels started consistently hitting 50 pg/ml and above. I've only kept my levels above 100 for less than a year now.

20-50 pg/ml is the typical range for cis men. For premenopausal cis women it's theoretically 10-300, but cis women do not experience high levels of testosterone since puberty, so I've seen many trans women that seem to know their stuff say that keeping the levels consistently above 100 is optimal for trans women. Which I tend to agree with.

And my Prog levels have been low for most of these three years, including recently.

So I think it's fair to say that I've only been going full throttle on feminizing my body and brain for at most two years, and more likely about one year.

What I'm saying is, girls, consider DIYing things if able. Doctors tend to be cautious, and with good reason because it's their job to be cautious. But that can hamper progress.

EDIT: and my T has hit worryingly high spikes as recently as June of 2025. It's properly low nowadays, but again - this is recent. I am starting to suspect my hormonal transition is basically just starting. Which does make me excited for what else it can still do!

Reading Posteo's FAQ and they are scoring some brownie points for referring to LLMs as "so-called AI". They know what's up xD

I want to de-Google, for a variety of reasons that are probably obvious.

Part of that entails getting a new e-mail address. Won't be my main one for a while because Google was actually very smart making it possible to log everywhere with one click, so I have a lot of accounts set up in a lot of places without a normal login/password combo. Untangling that may take a while.

But I have to start somewhere!

So I went to one of the bigger and more prominent options that I was aware of, Proton. Then literally within the next day I read that it's basically in full AI slop mode, and I noped out immediately. Like, I deleted my account within 48 hours of creating it xD and such a shame, I managed to snag a pretty decent username.

So now I'm looking for something else.

My requirements are small. I want an e-mail address, I don't want the company to go full AI psychosis, I want it to be reasonably secure, the provider to be reasonably established so I don't have to shop around a few years from now, and... yeah, everything else is just gravy.

Ideally I'd like not to pay, but if it's very cheap and offers a yearly subscription that's even cheaper, that's OK with me as well.

Hit me with your best suggestions! And Boost please if you can.

Congratulations, Americans.

Are things about to be perfect? No.

But this is better than could've been reasonably expected.

And since I don't see anyone mentioning it: this was the midterms. Midterms tend to receive less energy. That can end up biting Dems in the ass on presidential election years, because the US Senate has a lot of inertia.

And this advantage in the Senate will have echoes for the next 6 years. I personally think it might be more important than the fact that Dems will *currently* control both the House and the Senate.

What I'm trying to say is, 2028 may be very good, if y'all keep your elected Dems accountable and focused for the next 2 years.

"My Chrysalis Highwayman" is one of the most indelibly iconic music tracks from any video game soundtrack, of any era. It's up there with songs from the Undertale soundtrack, or the original Mario theme, or "Those Who Fight" from Final Fantasy 7.

Listening to the ambient soundtrack from Fallout 2.

And boy oh boy, did the newer games (including New Vegas, which is otherwise a masterpiece) drop the ball with music.

"Maybe" is used in the opening/closing cutscene in the first Fallout for ironic juxtaposition. The soundtrack of the first two games is otherwise droning, moody, dark, a bit twangy, with some musical *ideas* from country music.

It's not all cheeky country and old timey tunes. Like, I get what Fallout 3 and onwards are going for, but Fallout 1 and 2 are an actual post-apocalypse.

And it has been too long since the apocalypse that nobody in the Wasteland remembers the old time. Yes, the idea is that the alternative universe of Fallout had a world frozen in the Cold War era culture, but that's how the world was BEFORE the war. Not after. Afterwards nobody remembers the old world.

Like, you can pick up dessicated, basically fossilized pre-war food items in Fallout 1 and 2. And the items' description basically goes "you have no idea what this is".

And Fallout 2 has moved on from the postapocalypse proper and into a new era, a new world rebuilt on the ashes of the old. But while it borrows from it, nobody really "gets" it.

I miss the old direction of the franchise. Fallout 2 had its share of goofy shit, some argue that it had too much of it. But it was not all 1950s wackiness.

No hate to enjoyers of Fallout 3 and 4 and even 76. These games have their own interesting worldbuilding. But they are so desperate to be instantly popculturally recognizable that they lose something in the process.

And the soundtrack is such a perfect encapsulation of that. F1 and F2's soundtrack sounds like it's covered in grime, grease, rust and a heaping layer of dust.

Today I learnt that the US military is planning to design and deploy a new class of battleships. They're to be named Trump-class battleships, because of course.

You don't have to be a military buff to know why this is stupid. I'm not. But in case you don't know the first thing about modern warfare, battleships are firmly a relic of the past. The last time they were a decisive force was im World War 2, and even that was debated at the time. By the 1960s, they were relegated to secondary fire support, if that, but were notoriously expensive and inefficient and required hundreds of people to even operate. In the 1970s and beyond, they were basically irrelevant. They were rendered more or less obsolete by aircraft carriers.

And the last time *any* navy in the world had even a single battleship in active service or reserve was in 1991.

Battleships have not been part of warfare for longer than a lot of people reading this post have been alive. Battleships have not *mattered* to warfare for longer than most anyone living today has been alive, period.

You might as well build new military blimps, except blimps are kinda cool. Battleships are the most spectacular waste of resources, money, construction time, and manpower you could conceive of.

How accidentally appropriate they're naming a project which will do nothing but waste untold amounts of money for no advantage after Donald Trump.

Talking to a young trans girl beginning her transition.

She's the kind of depressed girl who sees no chance of ever looking like a woman, and spends her time reading doomerist memes and whatnot.

I'm sure some of y'all know the type.

So I got to talking to her, and once I managed to wrench her out of the self-pitying rhetoric and actually get her to think about why she feels she "can't" transition, we went to like, practical stuff.

You know, not magical "oooooh I want to be a cis woman or have full passing" but rather "what can I change for things to work for me".

And we of course got to the subject of shaving. She was surprised (she's seen selfies of me) that I have very thick facial hair, it grows fast and much of it is very dark.

Apparently she thought facial hair is an insurmountable problem without laser or electro.

(and for the record, she describes me as a "regular looking older woman". She doesn't find me particularly clockable based on selfies)

She doesn't know disposable razors are shit, and that shaving with safety razors gets MUCH better results.

Which fair enough, a lot of trans girls do not know that.

But when I asked "OK, so what skincare routine do you have?", she had none.

We're talking a girl who instantly jumps mentally to the point where she's basically done with her transition, and starts despairing that that is impossible.

Younger trans girls, I'm begging you. Think about what is actually achievable and to be done RIGHT NOW.

I can guarantee you if you start taking care of your bodies the way cis women your age already do, you will be a fuckload more feminine.

I guarantee you that any good-looking woman who takes care of herself has some kind of facial skincare routine.

Cis women do not magically look feminine. Start from the basics before you start comparing yourself to cis supermodels.

*sigh*

It's kind of incredible how much #Godot #GodotEngine has grown. I am not a professional dev so obviously my opinion is not worth a ton, but I have some idea of what it can do vs Unity with which I am a little familiar. And it's a lot. While also being much more approachable and simpler in many respects and (I feel this is important) being much faster to work in on my ancient potato of a PC.

And also it's free, it's extremely customizable and it's - holy crap I had to look it up and it still feels weird - only 12 years old.

It's kind of incredible. Like, I'm sure professional developers can point to a lot of limitations it has, but for free and open source software it kind of blows my mind. Like, open source software can very often be very hostile to new users, limited in functionality and sometimes honestly kind of half-baked. Godot is none of those things in my personal experience.

Like, the only other open source software that I have more respect for is Blender, and Blender has had over 30 years to arrive at where it is now.

So I'm a woman. But a non-binary one.

But I wish people used it/its pronouns for me while also knowing that I am, in fact, a woman.

But that's easy stuff. In Polish, I'd love for people to apply the Polish equivalent of "it/its" (i.e. "to/tego"). But, Polish is more gendered than that. Adjectives are gendered and so are verbs in a lot of their grammatical forms.

But I don't like the the established neutral grammatical verbs, especially in first or second person. It's a long story but while I'm glad others can use them, I don't think they're for me. I refer to myself using feminine forms and I want others to do that.

Easy!

Except I want others to ideally use neutral adjactives to describe me, because they don't sound off.

But people don't.

And at this point, I usually don't either, it's extra cognitive load even though it causes me euphoria.

So it's just feminine forms all around, I am a woman after all. It's fine.

But I do want people to use "ona/onej" pronouns for me, not "ona/jej" which is the default.

It's the same, just a bit differently conjugated. And it's not neopronouns. The opposite, actually. It's female pronouns but a bit archaic and literary.

Point is, it's easy and it's established in the Polish language.

Does anyone ever remember to refer to me as "onej" as opposed to "jej"? Nope!!

So I just default to female grammar, because I can't be bothered. It's officially Close Enough.

But I want more, and I know it won't happen. Not when even I can't be bothered with the neutral adjectives.

So yeah, cis people and especially speakers of English, please tell me again how a binary trans friend of yours coming out is "confusing".

I laugh at your petty confusions xD

And don't get me started on people not calling me "it", my pronoun of choice, because it has dehumanizing connotations to THEM.

Bitch, I think it should be my call which pronouns I find affirming xD

Randomly thinking about how S. John Ross, a white cis (and straight, as far as I'm aware) American Gen Xer with enough influence to own a profitable business and notable enough for his own Wikipedia page, when I said that I hate early ttRPG culture for being toxic and dominated by gatekeepey cishet white Western men, called me out for being a, uh, bigot.

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.

Not to play the marginalization Bingo, but I'm absolutely gonna play the marginalization Bingo. I'm an Eastern European neurodivergent transgender lesbian woman, unemployed and with a handful of mental illnesses (not that he has any way to know that, but I'm listing things for completeness' sake).

Other than being white and living in the global North, which are both characteristics he shares with me to my knowledge, I don't have much room to build my bigotry on. Especially when calling out behaviour by mostly straight, mostly white, mostly men.

Being an asshole is not the same as being a "bigot". ffs. I'll happily own up to being an asshole.

(the ttRPG culture being almost exclusively a toxic boys' club until at least mid-2000s is true, though. I've been in the trenches. Heck, I've BEEN in the role of the bad guy in that culture.)

The sad thing is I like some things he's made in the past, a lot.

Oh well. I've heard anecdotally that he's apparently, let's say controversial, in general.