Rabbit Cube

shout out to all the trans men on this site that are normal about trans women

shout out to all the binary (+non GNC) trans folks on this site that are normal about nonbinary/genderfluid/multigender/GNC/etc trans people

shout out to all the perisex trans people on this site that are normal about intersex (and intertrans) people

the biggest hurdle honestly is probably just that at a certain point the rate of a device results in qualitatively different capabilities as you ascend the power-law curve. babbage could envision a general purpose computation device in the early 19th century, and the biggest conceptual leap from that to a cell phone is orders-of-magnitude improvement, but this gets you from "a way to speed up tedious by-hand computations for mathematics" to "a complete modern information-technology ecology," which is qualitatively fundamentally different. there are people who do grasp the Implications of that sort of thing intuitively (ray kurzweil predicting AI in the 2020s just based on increasing computational power) but there are a lot of smart people who have trouble with that sort of thing. and then of course "at a certain point of computing sophistication you can use statistical methods to train a machine on the whole corpus of human language and get a computer program that has enormous general-purpose capacities starting from nothing but blobs of random numbers" is also deeply counterintuitive. i still have trouble with it!

but i wonder how far back you can go and still find somebody smart you could Explain The Smartphone To. you would have to explain a lot more about the basic operation of electricity and magnetism to newton, hooke, and huygens; but they seem like they'd get there pretty quick. certainly newton would. and you don't have to delve into relativity here or anything that's really going to cause a philosophical headache: newton might be quite relieved that you can point to specific physical waves as your medium for electromagnetism, especially if you mention as an aside that that model works for gravity, too. i guess if you go back too far and you lose symbolic algebra--and concepts like "the square of the distance" become principally about geometry, and not a free-moving mathematical abstraction, you lose a major conceptual tool for the formalisms. and once you hit the 15th century you might lose inertia, momentum, and the idea that terrestrial and celestial matter all obey the same rules.

up until that point, during the day lily continued to dress in masculine clothing and even attended galleries showing gottlieb’s paintings of her. which was kind of iconic. she got to stand in a room full of people who were marveling her beauty, not knowing she was right next to them. it must have been such a cute little secret for them as a couple.

here’s gerda and lilly together

not to mention that for most people there is no real “after” to a transition. especially for these trans historical figures who had to balance identity and safety at all times.

i think having a wife paint these portraits must have felt really amazing for lily. to be able to see herself through the eyes of someone who loved her. i’m very much seconding op on the getting teary eyed.

here are some of my favorite gottleib lily paintings

If you hung out on sites like Jayisgames a decade ago, this was the mountain to climb. “Can I make a game as respected as No-One Has to Die?” I look at games like You Can Save Everyone and go “Yeah, this is trying to be No-One Has to Die.” And if you weren’t on those sites, you’re probably going “WTF even is this?”

I’m sure better people than I have speculated about it but,,, it really feels like the events of the game were kicked off by Sylvia Seafoam and Felicia Stonetop finding and bringing the Silversnake to Silkwirm-on-sea.

I mean for starters we know this was what led to Sylvia beginning the construction of the then Seafoam Submarine; she, after taking care of the creature since they’d found it injured, had become so enamoured with it she wanted to go with it back into the sea - and take her entire family along, through the submarine. Of course, she died before it was ever finished (under afaik unexplained circumstances), and ‘some people’ came to take it away (the Ambassadors, perhaps?) - leading to it sitting unfinished in the shipyard for however long it was before it was eventually reconstructed into the Mortuga submarine we know and love.

But this also, supposedly, brought a lot of tourism to the town; since the news broke, interest in nautical adventuring and whatnot had a sudden rise - which Godrik himself mentions, explaining that it was right around this time he rebranded his father’s old, rather… dry sounding business into “Mr Gripp’s Emporium”, mentioning that it was right around this time he ‘hired’ Cornelius Cane. I’d like to speculate that this period was also what solidified for Godrik his want to get out there and see the world himself, since he’d been miserable running the business, although he was apparently very good at it.

And this theory I know I’ve seen other people bring up, but - Felicia was shown to have knowledge about the Mermaid’s Tongue, presumably from her parents/mother Selena, who had the map. Popular opinion/speculation seemed to say the mask granted the user the ability to contact something ‘beyond the veil’ or ‘speak to god’ (or rather the Mermaid) and so on. Felicia had a somewhat recently departed friends. Perhaps she was so insistent on seeking out the Mermaid’s Tongue because it might afford her the chance to communicate with Sylvia again? Or something like that.