Yeah, it does

It’s client dependent, but generally if you see it on the profile, it means they’re banned from your instance

Well, that article succesfully turned me off even trying the game… It’s a list of immersion breaking stuff that makes it impossible to forget it’s just a computer game…

I’m fascinated with them all. New Zealand has been seperated from other contintents for a long time, and until mankind arrived here (only around 1000 years ago), there were no large mammals on the islands, and for the land birds at least, the only predators were other birds. So the birds here have adapted to fill niches normally filled by mammals, and they also tend to be large, long lived and flightless (or poor flyers), because flight didn’t help them escape predation, but size, strong legs and camoflage did.

Unfortunately, they died in large numbers when mammals were introduced (mankind as well as their companions/stow aways) and many have gone extinct.

New Zealand is leading the way in establishing completely predator free spaces (initially mostly islands, but now mainland areas too), so you have spaces where rare birds are flourishing again.

I’ve been in New Zealand for the last couple of weeks, and honestly, my favourites are the North and South Island Robins. They appear fearless, because they follow larger animals around (like people), and hunt for insects that they stir up. What it looks like though is this friendly little robin comes right up to you and starts following you! I also love the Kererū (New Zealand pigeon). They’re big clumsy birds, but so gorgeous! And speaking of pigeons, it’s interesting that rock pigeons don’t dominate city spaces here. They’re around, but mostly, the niche normally filled by pigeons is filled by gulls and house sparrows…

Like a phone book?

New Zealand birds

It used to be 60Hz. Then I played at 144Hz. The change in responsiveness of the mouse converted me

No p zombies here!

It means that the person you are talking to believes that you’re just making polite conversation because you’re uncomfortable with silence. They are letting you know that they would prefer you didn’t make conversation, because they prefer silence to idle chatter.

I have very good spatial awareness, but it’s non visual. I can navigate my way mentally through a spaxe and “feel” where the walls are without seeing them. I have a sense of how big something is compared to something else and where they are relative to each other in space, but all non visually.

And I can rotate objects in my mind and change my perspective around them, but all without any visual elements.

I can sense the mental cube, but I can’t see it. It has no colour, no texture etc. Imagine a sort of mental bat sonar?

No, I don’t get a sense of awe or beauty from reading things. I can appreciate when the folks I’m reading about experience those emotions, but I don’t feel them, because there is nothing to inspire them in me.

Which is why I tend to prefer books that go in to more depth about what people are thinking and feeling than books that go in to lots of visual detail

Yeah, that’s it in a nutshell :p

I’m sorry it played out that way for you, but even so, what you’re advocating for hurts people too. Even if that’s not your intention, it still does, and I think that’s something that should be part of your consideration when approaching this topic.

I’m sorry it hurt you, but I’m not going to ignore stuff that hurts my community

The words have no sound. No volume, no pitch. They’re word ideas not words. I don’t hear anything, I just understand the words.

I can think of words, I just don’t think I’m words. And when I think of a word I can run them together in a sentence. But they have no “sound”. They don’t have volume or pitch, they don’t sound like anyone, they’re just the idea of words. And because the words are after the fact, they don’t exist without me willing them in to existence. So no monologue in the way people describe it, and the idea of a conversation in my head doesn’t make sense. It would be more like writing a script for a conversation

Like most folk with aphantasia, I thought that people talking about “seeing things in their imagination” were just being dramatic and using common language. It never occurred to me that they could genuinely see things in their minds. And the whole thing where people would be upset when a character in a TV show or movie didn’t look like how they’d imagined they would look, never made sense to me. And shows where people could recall the details of peoples faces for police sketch artists…

Basically, moments like that started adding up over my life, and then about 10 years ago, I read an article from someone who had discovered they had aphantasia through a similar path, and it all just fell in to place.

I have aphantasia and no internal monologue, and a side benefit of that is that intrusive thoughts aren’t really a thing

The first half of your post is you talking about trauma you’ve received from other people, telling you that you’re wrong/evil/broken/perverted etc.

The second half of your post is explaining how you think it’s ok for you to do the same thing to others, because you do it “for the right reasons”

When you confront a bigot with transphobia pushed to the extreme, what you do is add to the trauma that every trans person already has to deal with daily. You don’t magically convert someone from bigotry. Bigots aren’t bigots because they reasons their way in to bigotry, and so you can’t stop them from being bigots by reasoning them out of it.

Folks like you and the hundred other people also “just asking questions” or playing devils advocate" and expecting trans people to engage in a debate as to whether or not we actually deserve equal rights is exactly why this shit never works.

It’s interesting to you because it’s purely intellectual. To the person having to endlessly argue that they do in fact deserve equal rights, it’s a shit fucking experience that we actively seek to disengage from when possible, because it’s all around us, all the time.

You see, I’m an anarchist. I trust in the power of people to self-organize, self-regulate, and self-police. I am philosophically opposed to whole instances making the call to defederate from another no matter how Nazi or capitalist that instance is.

That’s great, but it’s not for everyone. What you’re saying here is that when bigots appear, every member of the minorities they target needs to individually block the troll, which they can only do after they’ve been exposed to the bigotry, and which doesn’t help them at all in the future when the troll moves to a new throw away account.

Counter intuitively, what you’re asking for is exactly how you create spaces that actively discourage diversity.