anna

The world is healing.

Is the game different on Switch 2 or is it the exact same game? I've been holding off on getting it for the original Switch because I wasn't sure if I was going to miss out on better performance, customisation options, online features or whatnot.

Most of the hobbies I unexpectedly enjoyed had something in common: I learned about them in real life rather than online.

Online hobby communities seem fun to participate in, but they suck the fun out if it very quickly because you're immediately interacting with and comparing yourself to people from all around the world who live and breathe that hobby.

You suddenly find yourself in the midst of a dedicated community where you're a nobody. The pride and sense of identiry you felt about being the only one in your social circle who could do The Thing is gone, because now everyone does it, and everyone is also better than you. You get overwhelmed with tips, tricks, a whole roadmap of how to improve, and tons of inspiration everywhere that just suck the individuality out of the hobby.

For instance, I really, really enjoyed sewing recently. I took an old pair of jeans and a terrible flannel shirt and crafted custom bunny ears for a hat I had lying around. I was so proud of myself! I even figured out on the fly how to make them look more thick and organic – I used some cotton pads I usually use for my make-up to stuff them.

It also felt really good to show off my spontaneous little crafts project to everyone I know. Nobody else had sewn stuff before, so I felt like I truly came up with something cool and unique! It was part of my identity for a brief moment, something that I came up with.

Then I briefly checked sewing communities online to see what others were doing – big mistake.

I was so proud of my ears and was planning on finding inspiration to work on similar projects in the future, but suddenly I felt like I was on step 1 of a 300 step ladder to climb to "get better" at sewing. Even though I wasn't comparing my own to others' work, it suddenly felt like a chore: I would eventually have to 'graduate' to new stitching patterns, good quality fabric, more complex projects, I'd get helpful tips and techniques, fun projects to put in a 'backlog'.

It made it all feel so exhausting.

If I had not figured out the trick with the cotton pad stuffing on my own, I would have probably read it somewhere online captioned "if you're just starting out, here's a hack" and it would have felt like I was settling for something suboptimal someone else came up with. It would have been utterly unrewarding. No creativity involved, just copying what others laid out for me.

It's like a cogitohazard. If you want to enjoy a hobby, block its online communities. Don't look it up. Try to invent it from first principles. Learn about it yourself.

Perhaps you should spearhead an initiative on turning existing letters into digraphs.

For example, 'x' should probably be 'ks'. 'w' very much yearns to be 'vv', and 'm' looks like 'nn'. 'Y' is obviously just 'ie'. 'q' is a failed letter – make it 'kh' like in all the bad science fiction. In fact, all the harsh consonants like 'k', 't' and 'p' should be digraphs: 'gh', 'dh' and 'bh'.

Do ieou lighe mie eghsannbhles?

They did look more like pimples than pools, yeah. I am glad they changed them.

Sulfur cubes have triggered one of the biggest renaissances in technical Minecraft, and the update isn't even out yet. How can you seriously say nobody is using them as intended?

They add new gameplay systems and fundamental mechanics all the time, including entirely new weapon types, a new tier of tools, weapons and armour kn the form of Netherite, the ability to leash entities together which changed technical Minecraft entirely, a new type of 'wireless redstone' triggered by sound events in the form of Skulk Sensors, and entities that can interact with redstone literally last week.

They're also moving the entire game to Vulkan right now, and datapacks are basically a vanilla modding API now. The game's changing rapidly.

I don't get why people want Mojang to fundamentally change the game into something it is not, or turning it into some kind of RPG, breaking backwards compatibility and risking upsetting large sections of the community. The game is perfectly fine as it is and I am happy about the exact kinds of updates they've been making to it.

I feel like a lot of the criticisms against the game updates come from people parroting common YouTuber's claims or folks who basically gave up playing ten years ago in their childhood and now mourn their childhood wonder, not people who actually experienced the updates or who play the game regularly. "Why not add seasons or something" can only really come from an armchair fan who hasn't played the game in a decade, since it ignores entirely how that would fundamentally change every mechanic most builds depend upon, including observer-based machines, anything working with leaf decay, natural builds integrated into the environment, art pieces. Such an update would absolutely skewer the active community.

I will never understand why people think it makes them look cool to be so full of vitriol about fun updates to a really good game. Is life not more enjoyable if you let yourself enjoy things?

That sounds like such an oddly specific interaction and I kinda love it.

To be fair, there's the Red Sea on the other side, that connects a lot of the oil-producing countries to the sea too.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz

Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.

There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It's also closer to Israel, and it's partly under Iran's control too.

And there's too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.

I loathe JKR as much as anyone else, but I do wonder why the whole "there is no ethical consumption under capitalism" thing seems to end exactly at Harry Potter and nowhere else.

No trans person I know who goes nuclear about everything related to consuming or discussion Harry Potter has any issues with the endless promotion of 'approved' products and companies that are often even an integral part of online 'trans culture', like…

• Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook/YouTube et cetera (pro-queerphobia, pro-fascist corporations actively funding and supporting alt-right movements across the world and helping alt-right actors make databases of queer people)
• Discord (surveillance company working with ICE, handing over trans folks' personal information to the cops, the age verification scandal et cetera)
• Minecraft (created by alt-right figurehead Notch, owned and operated by notoriously evil company Microsoft)
• World of Warcraft (Blizzard, notoriously anti-union, pro-sexual harassment corporation)
• ... and so on.

Of course not all of these are directly equivalent to JKR and HP in terms of tangible impact on trans people specifically, but the scale is definitely off. Why do folks cut off friends for discussing Harry Potter fanfiction but not for ordering a skirt on Amazon or encouraging vulnerable trans folks to hand their data to Discord?

The older I get, the more it seems like a teenage in-group out-group peer pressure thing than a real world view. Hating on Harry Potter signals you're a good person, and that gives one a feeling of belonging in the community and having an identity that stands for something. It's more of a rebellion thing than anything. At the same time, being a 'Discord trans girl' has an 'uwu cute' aesthetic and therefore must be good and desirable, no matter the implications.

It's a vibes-based world view.

Of course JKR is evil and I want her prosecuted for what she's been doing to hurt us. I just think shaming random people for enjoying Harry Potter is ineffectual and hypocritical when practically nothing else is so heavily policed; and while 'mainstream trans culture' online promotes and supports so many other evil companies and their products.