Dark Souls 2 is fucking amazing

I'll be honest, I've never really felt the same way about The Death of the Author after learning its origins (Barthes was angry over a Balzac story about a chaser, written over a century prior, for referring to a character as a woman instead of a femboy no I'm not making this up)

i was talking about this on my server earlier but i really think "cozy" is one of the worst genre labels out there in the gaming space. like people dunk on the terms "metroidvania" and "first person shooter" a lot for being uncreative or limiting but at least those are like... falsifiable descriptors. you can look at a game and go "yeah this game's mechanics and core gameplay loop generally operate like metroid/castlevania" or "yeah this game primarily uses a first person camera paired with some sort of projectile weapon" so i don't think they're completely useless. but "cozy" is just nonsense. fully subjective. i see a lot of games popularly labeled as "cozy" that share almost zero mechanical features between them and don't even always match in tone or aesthetic. hearing a game described as "cozy" doesn't tell you anything about what to expect as a player beyond maybe giving you a sort of forewarning about the fanbase and their discomfort tolerance. "cozy" is not a quantifiable metric. like imagine if someone offered to buy you takeout and asked you what kind of food you'd like and you told them fully unironically, and with no further elaboration, "i want to get yummy food." that's what hearing "cozy games" sounds like to me

i especially chafe at the way "cozy games" just seems like a "woke" way to say "girl games" and conflate certain game mechanics or aesthetics with a non-cis/het/male identity (to equally useless effect from a buyer's pov). gender stereotyping by any other name is still gender stereotyping. i'm not cis het or male, but i've spent decades enjoying pvp shooters and feel bored to tears by cutesy cottagecore farming sims. and i find those pvp shooters very "cozy" to play, too! @_@;

This is complete and utter nonsense. The world at large encourages misogyny to women both cis and trans at every level. The idea that verbal expressions of misogyny or misogynistic jokes or even just expressing hated to (cis) women is met with boos and wide condemnation is a denial of misogyny at the most basic level, anti-feminist, and completely divorced from reality.

it comes off as complete and utter nonsense to you because you interpreted it a holistic statement about the world at large rather than a complaint how rampant misogyny is allowed to exist uncriticized within even supposedly feminist spaces so long as its being perpetuated against trans women, like say, for example, responding to a woman's joke with a long tirade about how she doesn't understand something she experiences every fucking day.

tme people go 2 seconds without condescendingly explaining misogyny to trans women challenge

"oh your annoyed jokeventpost about how even in nominally progressive spaces its still considered ~funny wacky~ to say that you hate trans women if you call them women while you do it failed to account for every single possible condition? are you saying misogyny doesn't exist?"

I hate the "early-transition trans women are always wearing amazon basics skirts" stereotype so much lol

it's the amazon that really does it in for me. when cis women wear basic clothing it's the "clean girl" aesthetic, when trans women do it it's shallow, consumerist, mass-produced, "basic" in all the wrong ways. "clean girls" don't get made fun of for having walmart-ass wardrobes do they?

a cis woman's choices about her wardrobe are always conscious, intentional, well-considered. a trans woman's are unthinking, dumb, she just grabs the first thing she sees

this post posits a utopian world where either of these parties would support feeding schoolchildren, making it a masterclass in "hopepunk"

I've seen some posts trying to make fun of former gifted kids by comparing them to former student athletes who insist that they could have gone pro if not for a specific injury, and those posts always backfire, because my reaction to them is "You're right, we should treat former student athletes with more compassion than we currently do"

the tweet pretending to be a japanese person going to a mexican restaurant is not a "milkshake duck" you are just stunningly racist and willing to believe basically any caricature of an asian person that's presented to you no matter how racist if it reconfirms your orientalist and chauvinistic biases