The Cavalier of Winter's Tides

(source)

Bonus:

I am in elementary school. I have discovered something in myself that is different from my peers. I have no words to express this feeling, so I instead live in discomfort for years and years and believe it to be normal.

I am in seventh grade. I have lost my entire friend group because a rumor was spread that because I am queer, I must be a creep. My last sleepover with those friends was spent sitting in the same room as them while they texted each other talking shit about me.

I am in seventh grade. I have endured homophobic bullying from snarky comments to food being thrown at me in the cafeteria, and today finally swing back. I get one of the bullies on the floor and the teacher breaks us up. I get in trouble for fighting while she continues to bully me. Nothing is done about the bullying when I speak up about it.

I am in seventh grade. I am being outed to my entire classroom by the people I share a table with. They are walking to every single desk and telling each classmate I am queer. I watch as every head turns to look at me in disgust. I am completely alienated from that class and spend my days working alone.

I am fourteen or fifteen. The discomfort I have lived with my entire life finally has a name: dysphoria. I have come out to my family as trans. I am in my room alone on my birthday, crying because every card has "girl" on it.

I am fourteen or fifteen. I get a tone with a family member because I am tired of her excuses for continuously misgendering me. Her husband corners me outside and threatens to hit me if I ever talk back to her again, and tells me my identity is made up. My family sides with him.

I am fifteen and sixteen. I wish I could die instead of living in stagnancy.

I am seventeen. My country is passing law after law to restrict my community. Trans people are going missing and being murdered, and their lights are snuffed without so much as a whimper. I am disgusted and afraid and grieving alongside my trans brothers, sisters, and siblings.

I am twenty. I do not speak to much of my family anymore, my mother has only ever called me my birth name, and I have lost every single friend I ever had except one, and had to rebuild myself and my circle from the ground up. Family holidays are hollow. I have self harm scars permanently etched on my skin, purple half-moons under my eyes that are like stains at this point, and I will never forget how I have been treated and what I have endured. My heart breaks knowing millions out there experience the same things and worse.

I am twenty. I am crying in my boyfriend's arms about not feeling like a real man. I am hearing him reassure me that he sees me for me and he loves me as the man I am. My small friend group strictly calls me by my chosen name and pronouns. I am in love, I have more support than ever, and for once, I'm starting to feel glad I'm alive, glad that I held on. For once, I have hope.

(The best of this post and its reblogs, but with links that work)

Here is a website where you can scroll down to all the different levels of the ocean 

Here is a website where you can see the future of the universe

Here is a website where you can press a ‘make everything okay’ button, over and over, until things really are okay

Here is a website that you can read if you feel like a burden

Here is a website where you can look at strobe illusions (TW strobe/flashing)

Here is a website where you can cut stuff up (TW blood/sh)

Here and here are websites where you can play with sand

Here is a website where you can draw with macaroni and other fun foods

Here is a website where you can paint someone’s nails

Here is a website where you can grow a garden with emojis

Here is a website with hundreds of videos of people hugging you (rightfully dubbed ‘the nicest place on the internet’ because it really is, y’all, it made me cry)

Here is a website that will take you to other useless websites

Here is a website where you can make a tiny cat play bongo drums (and other instruments!)

Here is a website to help give you gentle reminders <3

Here is a website where you can grow a tiny farm

Here is a website where you can take a bunch of scientific personality tests

Here is a website of calm rain noise

Recalling this post across my mutuals’ feeds again!!

Questionaut has been one of my favourite indie games since my childhood. From what I remember, this was back in primary school (nearly 1.5 decades ago now) when we’d have “e-learning” days. Questionaut, for some reason, was one of the lessons from BBC kids iirc.

It is a comfort game for me. The visuals, the zany music, the miniature peoples, the adorable and intuitive designs, a wee bit of stimulation and chill dopamine hit, the adventure of it all. Could be fun and relaxing for other peoples if they wanna give it a go. (Especially if you’re neurodivergent, or just want a pick-me-up.)

It is no longer supported on any other platforms BUT the Internet Archive thankfully!

You can play it here. There’s also Samorost which is similar to this, and free. Although Samorost 2 & 3 aren’t.

Plantation Simulator was, I am sorry to tell you, exactly what it sounded like when it launched. It’s a top-down sim game in which you play as a Southern plantation owner forcing a number of Black slaves to grow crops under threat of being beaten. That’s it. That was the game. The game had an actual mature content description appended to it from launch until roughly midday yesterday that read, verbatim: “In this game, you will be whipping black people to keep your farm productive. If you whip your black person too much, they will die.”

...Posted later in the day yesterday, the 1.2 update changed the Black slave characters in the game to white people. A further update not long after changed the whipping animation to a string of hearts, put bikinis on the slave characters, and updated the mature content description to, “In this game, your friends wear bikinis and you can give them little kissies.” Since that update, the user reviews have entirely flip-flopped, with a cascade of negative reviews complaining now about a lack of diversity and a deceptive product. Again, most of these reviews have an hour or less playtime, and basically all of them include racist remarks.

....What’s really baffling here, though, isn’t that some troll is making racist games to both attract and then troll racist people. No, what’s throwing me is: where is Valve in any of this?

"And so well arrive there in about 2 days," he has the model of the tau -ceti system in hand, "and then-"

Random stranger with long dark hair and bandages walks past in the background, not even acknowledging the camera, just walking by.

"we will- oh and that's Simon. We picked him up on the way- anyway so then we-!"

Meeting a fairy alien in the hallway of your house space is certainly unexpected, but if it happens, well, people have yet to discover all secrets of the universe. A fairy alien showing to some random place is strange, but not entirely out of question

STOP IT’S BEEN MONTHS. MONTHS!