#magpiebridge

Generally the only con is that there's no video chat. It's very frequently updated so usually if there are a issues they're resolved quickly. Gifs and YouTube videos can be viewed inside of the chat client. There are separate channels for group chats, in case you want to keep topics separate or something, same thing with voice channels. Full emoji keyboard plus commands for emoji such as :eyes:, and custom emojis.

strider-manpain replied to your post “So ok…whats the deal w discord, what’re the pros/cons”

Not sure how good the blocking system is. Custom username colors in-chat, ability to set roles and nicknames, bots that do stuff like play music in specific voice channels, text to speech using /tts command

magpiebridge replied to your post “So ok…whats the deal w discord, what’re the pros/cons”

I find it pretty useful for group chats--I can mute channels, entire servers, specific parts of servers, mute anything that isn't an @me, or mute everything, which keeps me sane, since skype kept blowing up my phone every time someone spammed a reaction gif. it also has a nice dark theme so it's not an eyestrain. I don't have a lot of people I hit up individually but for those I do, it also works fine for one-on-one chatting.

switch to Discord instead! it's got all the functionality of Skype, but it's not jammed full of ads and broken features.

messages like that rile me up on two levels… one, that they assume it is somehow empowering to depict a woman performing ‘femininity’ in an unsafe setting, as if her natural state of being must be to desire the makeup and the bangles and the affectation, and secondly, that they have obviously never listened to anyone in my position–that of NOT performing 'femininity’ adequately in a professional setting and getting a lot of backblow for not meeting those expectations.

Sigh yeah I think it’s a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation with the latter...it seems like there’s a v narrow path between too-feminine and not-feminine-enough that’s considered “professional” (and even smaller for the “competent and masterful” zone). I can understand frustration on both ends, but at this point we don’t need to rewrite femininity, but attitudes about it (eg it’s obviously not women that are the problem--we need to broaden that zone, not try to reframe either side of it). There’s way too much emphasis on how femininity “should” be represented and not nearly enough about how there should be enough representation to accommodate a variety of different professions and uniforms and expressions of femininity (or lack thereof! Women in their own skin are still women!) 

I am so sorry you had one of these too. I assume there's a cave somewhere that they shamble out of, fully formed, ready to make someone's life more difficult.

not personally but this is a thing I've looked for and http://www.gameenglish.com/ brought up some simple possibilities! This is something I'm interested to know as an EFL/ESL teacher, too.