It’s working out great! I’ve been openly polyamorous for a few years now. Romantically engaging with multiple people has allowed for the longest-running, most secure relationships I’ve ever had, with basically no downsides except the fuCKING work. It complicates the logistics (my shared calendar is a nightmare) as well as the emotions. (recognizing when I am jealous is a nightmare)

But the payoff is so worth it. We make the best use of the time we have together, because we have to. We communicate effectively, because we have to. Through many intersecting relationships with appropriate boundaries we’ve weaved a cohesive family unit, one that achieves a lot of mutual aid needs around housing, food, and mental health support among local queers. I’ve grown a lot as a person through having to communicate my insecurities, sort out my trauma, and think more clearly about the people in my life.

I think some people on the internet have heard of insane polycule drama at some point and declared it categorically unapproachable. But idk, we don’t write off monogamous relationships because a cousin’s friend’s marriage exploded. Polyamorous relationships run the same spectrum of great to dogshit, but with less rules that monogamous relationships demand, we have so much more flexibility to solve problems when they come up.

glad it worked out for y’all! It seems rare for a monogamous relationship to be successfully opened up, rather than it being the expectation from the outset. I can imagine it being a big challenge and test of your compatibility + ability to communicate. Was that your experience?

for me I just… couldn’t stand either of the main characters and thought the reviving-their-dead-marriage arc was really trite. I didn’t believe these were people that “should” be together and around the time they dismembered that elephant (???) I was fully checked out.

The game was wonderful when we were actually playing, probably the most fun I’ve had in a coop puzzle game since Portal 2. I really wouldn’t need much in the way of story to convince me to keep playing, but there were so many goddamn cutscenes! I’m glad others enjoyed it more than me, and did enjoy a lot of the gameplay, but the characters really soured me on the game eventually.

This was one of the more baffling experiences in coming out - seeing some of the most scientifically minded, media literate people I know suddenly shut off all of those instincts when they encountered “the trans debate.” Like someone with a healthy amount of skepticism around statistics linking me bullshit “average number of sexual partners” figures from a conversion therapy lobbying group. Or someone with an active dislike of sports suddenly deciding that the sanctity of women’s sports is more important than their relationship with their daughter.

The best explanation I’ve been able to come up with is that gender is regimented by complex trauma, often when we are children, and these are the types of cognitive distortions that occur when we’re in fight-flight-freeze-fawn responses. Flashbacks are often thought of as vivid sensory experiences i.e. re-experiencing the traumatic event, but it’s a spectrum of responses. Many are more subtle and feel extremely normal in the moment, while our ability to reason is actually overtaken by our need to feel safe in the face of a perceived threat.

I think this kind of statistics vomit can sometimes be a “flight” response to a perceived threat of someone being trans in proximity to them. Flight responses are characterized as attempting to avoid a threat by throwing oneself into action not to overcome, but escape the threat. Perhaps a wall of text with nuanced-and-reasoned set dressing and lots of links and numbers feels like a wall between them and “the problem.”

I picked up a $10 cane at random last year and it helped me walk enough to realize there was a chronic issue at play. Definitely worth trying if it seems like something that might help, worst case you have a walking stick.

definitely seconding this - I used it the most when I was using Unreal Engine at work and was struggling to use their very incomplete artist/designer-focused documentation. I’d give it a problem I was having, it’d spit out some symbol that seems related, I’d search it in source to find out what it actually does and how to use it. Sometimes I’d get a hilariously convenient hallucinated answer like “oh yeah just call SolveMyProblem()!” but most of the time it’d give me a good place to start looking. it wouldn’t be necessary if UE had proper internal documentation, but I’m sure Epic would just get GPT to write it anyway.

more complex yes, but more hands in the family unit and structure between the other two can be a really nice perk too. when conflict happens, you have someone else you love who knows your partner and relationship who can bridge the gap and give perspective.

astrology nft or son daughter?

I have two sets of beliefs here. There’s what I rationally believe based on what I know, and there’s the story I’ll be telling myself for comfort if I know the end is soon (and I think benefits me in day to day life too)

The experience of death and if anything comes after is inherently kind of unknowable and if there was a truth to know I don’t think human minds could comprehend it. Even if the answer is nothing, I can’t comprehend experiencing nothing. When consciousness lapses we only have what we experience before and after to contrast it to. So I have to live life with the understanding that I will die and I can’t know what that will be like until it happens.

That being said, we really don’t know anything about how consciousness is connected to our physical forms, and we don’t know that experience ends after death, either. Especially when you consider time may not be linear in the way we perceive it. The closest thing I have to a belief would be some form of reincarnation, where consciousness would resume in another life in another time. Maybe every life is the same consciousness reborn an uncountable number of times. I can’t say I believe this per se, more that it’s just as possible as any other theory, and it’d be a comfortable delusion to pass on with. it helps me feel closer to others too.

I guess my main point is go play Outer Wilds (and its DLC) if you haven’t gotten to it yet. It helped me grapple with a lot of this and even if I’m still scared of the end, I no longer find it overwhelmingly distressing.

idk this gave me the mental image of someone whacking it and muttering “jake jake jake jake jake” in rhythm to themselves through the whole thing

definitely helps to bow out instead of talking down to a beginner. “it seems you’re having an issue with X, I would recommend reading up on Y and Z because [how they relate to your problem]” is helpful, a very natural stopping point, is useful to people who search and find the thread in the future.

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and for anyone who’s played the base game - make sure to check out the DLC, it’s essentially a sequel! and I found it even more fascinating and affecting. an improvement on all fronts to an already very special game.

It sucks because I know a lot of people referred to as SJWs, myself among them sometimes, and my read is that what pisses people off about them is not exclusive to minorities or the left wing, but the label tends to just apply to people advocating for the oppressed, and the behavior often comes from pain and vulnerability.

A lot of marginalized people lack the space irl to be politically active in a meaningful way. This goes double if you’re trans or closeted or showing up irl is dangerous in any way. Online, you have a platform and can speak your truth, but that’s about it. Social media platforms are incentivized to put a bunch of chuds you don’t agree with in front of you to keep you engaged, and so people end up angrier and angrier, stuck constantly responding to bigotry but never able to actually do much about it, or even hold a good faith conversation. Pet peeves become big sore spots because people keep poking at them and it feels like there’s nothing that can be done to change how anyone feels. Small disagreements over language become big blowouts because it’s probably the tenth time it’s happened today and it might not feel like anyone’s on your side.

Funny enough the person I know who fits this description the most is a right-wing incel, marginalized in some ways due to neurodivergence. He’s prone to big conspiratorial blowouts at the mere mention of climate change or queer people because he sees it as necessary to “educate” people. I don’t think most would call him an SJW yet his engagement with politics and the ways in which he pisses people off are exactly the same.

my main beef is that “too fat” is a wildly varying scale from person to person because everyone stores and processes fat differently. and if you’re “too fat” that may not in fact be your most relevant health concern. my experience with health providers that focus on BMI during intake is that if you’re “overweight” many other health problems will be seen through that lens even if they’re unrelated… in my case, lots of dieting advice, being told to exercise more come to find out decades later I had an undiagnosed nervous/muscular condition. now that it’s treated somewhat, my weight stays pretty much in “normal” BMI with the same or lower activity. I’m kinda pissed it took this long to get treatment for an underlying condition because the ruler said “too fat.”

I was getting ready to come out to my sister in like late 2021, she had a really bad motorcycle accident and we were catching up and it seemed like the right time to tell her.

then she started talking about how a near death experience made her start re-evaluating some things, and then she came out to me and it was the fucking spiderman pointing meme. Both of us moved to WFH after covid hit so the timing makes sense, but it was such a wonderful coincidence.

“hey wanna come hang out this weekend?” “sorry but-”

The Internet has provided us a wealth of information. In fact… maybe too much information, with questionable veracity. Social media has provided viral ways of spreading this information to people finding a truth that fits their existing beliefs, not necessarily finding the truth from an objective set of facts.

This isn’t just about Trump, the GOP, or even just fascism. It’s a complete breakdown of our trust in shared reality. It’s an indication that humans are not as smart as we think about applying technology we’ve invented, or maybe not as capable as we think about connecting with as many people as the internet allows us to.

it’s true and honestly really inconvenient. I keep trying to kiss my gf but we’re always interrupted by tornado sirens. How are we supposed to groom any kids into our satanic sex cult under these conditions??