#starbtag

(for those who don't know, HRV stands for heartrate variability, and refers to how quickly and efficiently your nervous system is able to signal your heart to speed up or slow down in response to stimuli. a lower HRV than usual means your body is struggling to pump the brakes and slow your heart down after a round of exertion is over or a stressor is gone; it's impacted by/an indicator of heart problems, acute illness, PEM crashes, anxiety, PTSD, lack of sleep, etc. and it's a good idea to keep an eye on it if you can.)

.....and recently i noticed. that i was starting to get better scores than i have been for a while.

like 'within the last week or so' recently. as in, after i took the plunge and started talking publicly and at length about starb, with an eye toward nuance and articulating what about it was so upsetting and how that differs from good-faith portrayals etc etc.

and after looking back over my records, i realized that every day i have done that--even with other major stressors still going on in my life, in the background!--my HRV has SPIKED, and my baseline heartrate has been like 10-20bpm lower than usual. we're talking levels of improvement on par with, or surpassing, factors like 'hydrating really really well' or 'getting enough sleep.' that is INSANE.

it's almost.... and hear me out here..... it's almost like hiding and repressing your feelings for the sake of ~building a positive environment~ is really really fucking bad for you. it's almost like it has an actual measurable lifespan-altering impact on your health, and insisting people cause themselves lasting harm to make your fandom experience more comfortable and convenient instead of having good-faith discussions about how to share your spaces is selfish, inconsiderate, and cruel.

(in particular i am reminded of the kind of grace and leeway you need to be willing to give the continuity of, say, a tabletop session/campaign, and the magic that happens when you strike the right balance of working with what you've got vs retconning or moving away from what doesn't work.)

but with starb they AREN'T being done in good faith, and they AREN'T an unavoidable necessary evil of the game's medium, and they AREN'T being honest about the fact that that's the approach they're taking.

starb isn't going 'hey so we're trying to find our footing here, and we might change things up a little if something fun occurs to us or we realize we fumbled the direction we were going, bear with us. :)' it's trying to pretend the things it retcons were The Plan All Along, either as a way to discredit criticism of its previous writing (see: 'noooooo you've got it all wrong that bit wasn't about hating jews, it was about hating capitalism!'), or warping the symbols it's using to obfuscate the nature of the commentary it's making on them (see: the constant, CONSTANT bait-and-switch between symbols of oppressors and symbols of the oppressed, in the style of 'actually the homeless guy this cop beat up was ELON MUSK IN DISGUISE planning to SIPHON ALL THE JOBS OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD, and the cop is Akshully a saint and tireless champion of queer and worker's rights who spends all his time off the clock running a soup kitchen, and he turns off his bodycam before beating up homeless people because he respects their digital privacy. bet you feel like a real idiot right now for jumping to conclusions instead of waiting for the information you didn't have (because i just now made it up to run PR for cops) uwu').