Only one lonely braincel
BlemboTheThird
joined 2 years ago
This isn't about trans people specifically, but the very existence of gendered bathrooms dates back to hilariously sexist 1800s ideas about how men and women should only be allowed to coexist at home. No surprise that religious fundamentalists continue to weaponize private spaces against anyone that doesn't fit their norms.
Same with people who blast music in public. There's a bike/pedestrian trail near me I use a lot and people are constantly riding or running while blasting the worst music imaginable to everyone nearby. Maybe someday I'll build up the courage to tell them to shut the fuck up... or at least teach them what headphones are. Maybe I could buy a bunch of cheap ones and just chuck them at the heads of anyone who apparently needs them.
My advice if you have a cold house: turn the oven on its lowest settings, let it warm up for a few seconds, then turn it off and let the dough rise in there. You can also cover the dough with a wet towel or put in a tray with some warm water to keep the air nice and moist; the yeast looooves that. But if you go with the towel method just be aware that if the towel is actually touching the dough it will get very sticky and you'll be picking chunks of dough out of the towel
I guess we're all too busy watching number go up to actually manage anything. For them it's their stock prices, for me it's my seed ratio!
They also care about ruining trans people's lives in any way possible. I'm sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven't thought the bathroom thing through, but don't forget the other reason they'd be happy to put passing trans men in women's bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women's toilet, you think they're going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that'd just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they're least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.
They do often talk about "it needs to be new," but for the most part the things they release don't actually follow that philosophy. Artifact was trying to follow the likes of Hearthstone. CS2 is a glowup of CS:GO. DOTA2, League. Deadlock is the closest they've come to something genuinely innovative in at least a decade, but even that is still following on the heels of MOBA/FPS hybrids like OW and Paladins, just taking more elements from MOBAs.
And the "not caring about money" thing wasn't true in 2008. They were probably getting to that point around 2012, as Steam began to turn into a money printer and their microtransaction games took off, but that wouldn't have been until after HL3 had been cancelled at least once. At some point Valve talked about the difficulties in selling Portal 2 (I think it might have been in the dev commentary? Idk it's been years) and one of the points they bring up was how even a huge success like that game wasn't living up to their other titles. They tried to implement microtransactions with the co-op mode, but they learned lessons about how that model only worked in bigger multiplayer games. One of the big stories they tell in both the HL1 and HL2 documentaries were the troubles they ran into with funding, and I guarantee they were not looking to repeat those experiences by continuing work on a game that had far less potential for return on investment. Again, that might have changed by 2012, but by then the momentum was already gone.
I'm not sure I believe that Valve ran out of ideas for HL3. That's clearly the image they want to project, and maybe even what they tell themselves, but judging from the ideas they did have for Episode 3 they showcased in that documentary, there was more than enough to justify releasing a game. Certainly there was as much or more new stuff than there was for either EP1 or 2. I think it's much more likely they simply decided their other projects at the time--CS:GO, DOTA 2, even TF2--had way more moneymaking potential. And I mean, they were right! They made a ton of money off of lootboxes and cosmetics for their multiplayer titles. I don't think Steam had totally taken over the market yet, so they were hedging their bets on multiplayer microtransactions.
I dunno. The whole "it needs to be new" philosophy they constantly espouse to hasn't really been true at least as far back as Portal 2. Even Alyx wasn't particularly revolutionary as far as VR titles go. Maybe doing that type of design was new to Valve, but the only standout features that distinguishes Alyx from other games are the graphics and the (genuinely very good) grabbity glove object pickup system. Pretty much everything else is several steps behind other VR shooter games in the name of Accessibility™, from movement to weapon selection to the painfully dumb AI.
They didn't run out of ideas. The movement FPS genre is alive and well for a reason, even today: there's lots to be done. They just lost interest in it themselves, and I believe the reason for that is primarily monetary.
If it were that simple they would have done it by now
... It took me a minute to realize this was meant as "yeah that's why we're friends," not "what gave you the impression we were friends, go away"
I see you posting this constantly. You're a woman. Whether you're allowed to live your day-to-day as one is a different thing. Would it be more accurate to say you wish you could present as femme?
At a guess, they'll stop tracking the data?