gattsuru
2d ago
Noita is a fun roguelike with a ton of deep exploration component, and regularly invites you to jump in well over your head. Very much a game for masochists, though, even compared to Dark Souls: I think I was in the low hundreds of deaths before I 'finished' the game, every death puts you back at the start,
gattsuru
2d ago
The adjustment screws on those controllers are almost always simple multi-turn potentiometers, so it's a little weird to see voltage wobble even if one breaks off entirely. Lower-end buck converters can sometimes act up if you try to calibrate them without a load. Putting a 2.5-5k ohm resistor (for 12v, this should keep under 1/8th watt) on the output side may be worth a shot.
gattsuru
3d ago
Itch is still majority non-smut. With, admittedly, its own issues: they owe the Vintage Story people six figures worth. But they’re no more a smut peddler than Steam or Patreon.
Since one itch processor is/was Stripe, the rules there have also changed: itch signed onto them back before Stripe went category no on smut.
gattsuru
4d ago
I can't find records of any associated prosecutions.
Tbf, one of the CHAZ murderers was prosecuted and convicted, total sentence 14 years. Most of the others don't seem to have been prosecuted or seriously investigated. Nor were the various efforts to block police and medical first responders, or to destroy evidence, punished.
gattsuru
4d ago
One of the possible explanations for the timeline here is the UK's Online Safety Act implementation and related age-gating, which would actually explain why the hammers came down for itchio in the way that they did, and which the administration is actually pushing on (if for unrelated and kinda stupid reasons).
These rules also get applied where chargeback rates are very low, and related rules get applied by Mastercard against the high-risk payment processors that are supposedly the market niche for managing higher levels of chargeback fraud.
(And these rules are less reasonable than they look at first glance: "non-con" here is not talking about just or even primarily real-world rape, but is so broad as to include hypnosis kink.)
gattsuru
4d ago
Visa and Mastercard have always been happy to have payments for mainstream smut on their networks.
gattsuru
4d ago
They exist, but a good deal of the problem is that many are also pinch points, here. Stripe, for example, once would proudly proclaim their happiness working with adult product merchants until WellsFargo teabagged them; today, their policy completely bans all adult content and services.
CCBill used to be the transaction provider of last resort for a lot of adult businesses on the edge -- and you'd pay a pretty sizable penny for the privilege -- but they've had the screws turned on them, too. Not tied into that ecosystem enough to know if there's a new meta; most modern stuff in the circles I move have found it more effective to work in gray-compliance for more 'mainstream' sellers that are too big to notice them.
gattsuru
4d ago
There's also a D) of "it's really, really hard, and if you fuck up in the slightest amount, you don't just lose your business account, you get blacklisted from every mainstream credit card processor and bank in your personal capacity".
gattsuru
4d ago
The wounding is the key part, imo, and the resulting reverse expression of concern. I remember conversations when I was younger where the boys all agreed that the ideal dream was for a woman to gently touch the scars/wounds you'd heroically earned and dramatically gasp. I feel like I've seen that moment in a hundred action movies, and it's the pivotal one for establishing the relationship between the love interest and male protagonist. It a moment where a man is allowed to be vulnerable without it ever counting against him.
Yeah, that sounds right. There's a lot of that out there, but it's kinda hard to separate from women-coded hurt/comfort, especially when trying to find examples that aren't aggressively porn-brained (or, alternatively, so sexless than the trans guy is just A Dude, or buried behind a few hundred hours of lore in a gatcha game/mmo). Will see if I can find any better examples.
Altogether, it makes this code as a female fantasy to me, because the locus of concern is on her...
That's interesting; I'd assume that the locus of concern falls on her because she's a goal for the fantasy, rather than the target of it.
I might post those three images together without any explanation, and just ask the boys what they make of it.
If you do, I would be interested to see the results.
I don't have enough personal experience to say anything particularly relevant aboout their internal states. I'll just say this: observed from a distance, though clips and articles and the one "boy" my daughter was friends with, the way they approach masculinity/manliness does not seem congruent with my own experience (which I often find to be broadly applicable when conversing with other cis men).
Yeah, that seems more reasonable. Even trans guys who were very tomboyish before transitioning do have to work at it in ways cis guys don't, and many either intentionally aren't aiming the same place as standard guys (either 'nonbinary', or coming across as a tomboy-with-a-masectomy), and many of the remainder are either aiming at presentations that they're not going to get (tbf: me neither) or they're not really interested in doing or learning about the necessary steps to achieve.
Honestly, I figured this was a lot of it. The few transmen I've encountered IRL had a strong tendency to an unfortunate "It's Pat!" type of presentation. I assumed there was a fair bit of "You can't fire me, femininity, I quit!".
Huh. Pre-transition, or post? I've seen a decent number who struggled to get out of Pat-mode post- and especially mid-transition, but less so beforehand, and I wouldn't expect the transition to be motivated by something that only showed up after the transition did.
I've triangulated that I'm at the far high end of male tenderness and romantic shyness, and those examples strike me as painfully unmasculine. The rat character just feels hunched over, passive, depressed. Maybe a desire is there, but if this resonates with the trans masc community than I don't know if they really get what men aim to be like.
Fair. I think some of that's because (especially younger and coastal) people have a more limited framework of what's 'acceptable' masculinity rather than douche masculinity, and I think an unfortunate number of cis men have reframed or had reframed for them 'being a foundation' into this sort of more passive literal man-of-stone thing. But it is a far way from the patriarch or trailblazer mold.
I'm not sure that being more gynophilic than you means a whole lot, particularly when we're talking about people who are exclusively attracted to women. Do you have a preference for women?
I'm a bit male-leaning in my interests, fair. But I've been in a real-world relationship with women, I'm not exactly bisexual-in-theory, either.
I'm more trying to motion around how the mouse character is pointedly and almost stereotypically feminine -- not just the pregnancy, but the homeraising and the dress and the shoes and how she moves around. At the risk of improperly channeling erwgv3g34, it's not even the doth-refuse-too-much of tomboy breaking or similar genres. And she's clearly attractive to the artist, and to no small number of transmen.
That's not really compatible with a general retreat from femininity. Even if they were just cripplingly attracted to women sexually, there's ways to do that without this level of feminine stuff showing up.
my ingrained mental image, which is hard to shake, is that you're twink who likes wearing programmer socks. I guess I've known too many geeky MSM or furries that fit that frame that I slotted you into it. And I genuinely want to know how wrong I am.
Ah... off by a good bit. Even when I was younger I wasn't able to pull off twink, and while I try to keep myself to some exercise regimen, the years have taken their toll in a good few ways.
((I do own a pair of programmer socks, but I haven't worn them and don't even spend that much time programming in Rust; I'm afraid I'm a basic bitch C++/C#/Java/Python/Shell Script guy when it comes to my workday operations.))
The "trans men are really gay" thing actually contributes to the point you're refuting: if you're flying from femininity, what is less feminine than being gay?
My apologies, I mean that more in a) the sense that regardless of what framework you treat trans men as 'really' being, there's going to be some FtM/F or FtM/M that's either so stereotypically 'gay' or 'lesbian' that it's going to overwhelm any other useful understanding available from the media for people not used to the conventions of those genres, and b) the sense that most of the examples are likely to be unsettling or unappealing to straight men (which I expect most people in this discusison thread here are), regardless of how prurient they might be.
For an example, I would expect few straight men that think FtM/M is just "straight with extra steps" would find Pantheggon's Vermuda character being in the middle of what's pretty intentionally drawn to parallel a conventional gay orgy as interesting, and that's still pretty far on the feminine side ('misgendering' kink, breeding kink) of things as it goes that direction. There's what I think is information here, but it's not really going to be accessible because everything else layered on top of it being either very loud or very offputting or both.
You're right to say that many of these cases are often feminine, especially by male standards and sometimes even by female standards. But I'm not arguing that these people are flying from femininity in general; I'm disagreeing with primaprimaprima's framework where that's the "key issue".
It is also slightly humorous that the rat character throws a party to interview candidates for impregnating his girlfriend, which seems, well, like something a lot of men would find somewhere between uncomfortable and enraging.
Yeah, that's true. It's still portrayed as uncomfortable (cfe the 'voicemail'), and I don't have a good understanding for how much so it'd be for typical straight men, but I can give a rough guess about it.
In particular, the initial sex scene in the comic features the rat character pulling a strapon out of his everyday carry bag (as one does) and then insisting on putting a condom on it, because ????. This is a contradiction to the stereotype that men won't wear a rubber.
The strap-on probably makes a bit more sense in context; the rat's moving back in town after a trying to move to the city didn't work out. The condom, fair. It's probably meant more to be joking, but I've seen a few transguys who treat it like a 'guys ritual', and there's definitely a 'glass trying harder to shine than real gems would' issue.
Then, during the sex scene, he asks the female character, "how do you like to do it?" and she responds by saying, "Nobody's ever asked me that before!" Again, this is a contradiction to the view that men don't give a damn about women's sexual enjoyment, which is puzzlingly common among women. The point is that the trans masc rat is a Better Man (TM) than those dirty cis rat boys who didn't treat her right.
Maybe that is how a lot of men are, I don't know. But the idea that I'd have a sexual encounter and not aim to make it a good one for my partner is like suggesting that I set my pizza sauce-side down.
Eh... this might be a cultural thing, rather than just a gender one, but I've seen a number of guys who think women's sexual enjoyment is important, but that it's Wrong to not take the lead and pick up what your partner wants or enjoys from body language. At the risk of TMI, it's something I struggled with a decent amount at first (uh, with both genders).
But it's not necessarily something that I'd say reflects an internalization of maleness so much as a desire to perform proper maleness for women, or in other words to be the butchest lesbian who ever strapped on a dildo... I did definitely enjoy the transition from "we literally just reunited on the street randomly" to "we are having sex, we can separate physicality from emotions, right?" to "we are now madly in love," which took all of one evening. Can I make a u-haul joke?
Fair and fair. I'll admit I've seen that sorta thing in a lot of porn written or drawn by (cis) men for men, but there's definitely some humor to it. I still think "perform proper maleness for women" is probably a better description, if still incomplete, of what's going on with trans men who like FtM/F than "rejection of and flight from femininity", but it's reasonable to say that it's not achieving the same thing.
Also... it really does seem like the "main character" in the sex scene I read was the female character. It was all about her.
Hm. It's possible I'm reading it in a pretty different perspective than you are, but I'm pretty used to porn where the person who's in focus for the camera is the one viewers are supposed to be attracted to, where the person who's reacting to them is the person the viewer (or creator) wants to be. In 'conventional' porn this goes to the extreme of PoV or gonzo works, or in hentai the mysterious floating dicks syndrome, where only the characters the viewers are presumed to be attracted to appear in the camera's lens.
But that's admittedly not universal, and something hard to discuss in detail further without linking a ton of porn (tbf, mostly straight: ruaidri and dont_jinxit have some pretty good examples of the differences between 'standard' male and female frameworks), so dunno.
gattsuru
6d ago
Being a protector and provider, a rock and the firmament. Do transmen dream of defeating villains and being dashingly wounded in an act of heroism?
Yes? Specifically for mouseworld the nearest example doesn't involve being dashingly wounded, but even ignoring outright hurt/comfort, it's a pretty common thing in RP and fanwriting circles (to the point where no few FFXIV groups have jokes about it). I don't think it's going to be a good argument against the 'was driven by an urge to "self annihilation"', but it's present.
Whether many trans guys actually do it, to the extent achieving anything so much more a process than a single event, is a more complicated question.
I gave at least a token effort to reading the trans-mouse erotica comics and I could not figure out what the hell was going on. Consider my comment to be a fully general take that does not relate to those specific pieces of media at all.
Fair, and my apologies.
To give the more general argument: if you believe "FtMism = rejection of and flight from femininity", how does this explain the presence of transman who present (perhaps depressed) masculinity, but like femininity in others around them, such as by having (cis, femme) female romantic and/or sexual partners, close female platonic friends, or (if sexually attracted to men) liking feminine men? Is there an explanation that can separate itself from the trans-internal claim of just not liking being/being seen as feminine?
gattsuru
6d ago
Are those six kids from the past partner? Or from several past partners?
The backstory is one past partner, but I think it's intentionally a little ambiguous about whether the set that show up are from that litter or from a timeskip after a second more-intentionally-'donated' litter.
To be fair, I do not get furrydom at all.
That's fair.
And it doesn't help that a lot of the most visible stuff is yiff, and things like "snake women with breasts" which just makes me go "no!" If you're going to be an animal, why be unrealistic?
Uh, a lot of it's just 'if you're giving them hands...', but if you want a serious answer for that very specific example:
But, for instance, in what I suppose we can call classic 'anthropomorphised animal literature', there is no sense that Mole and Mrs. Otter can get together and have cute hybrid babies, because species are not cross-fertile like that.
Yeah. I think a lot of it's come from comedy works, with The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) as one of the better-known examples, but it's definitely a newer convention where present. Barring really old mythology-style stuff where mainstream belief supported a lot of bizarre cross-fertility, I don't think there are many examples pre-1900s. There are a pretty sizable number of modern furry settings that go with the more convention, either to explain all of the consequence-free sex, or for other kinks (eg 'full-service sperm donor' as a kink can range from threesome to mild mdom to extremely cuckoldy).
I'm curious what you'd be willing to bet on the condition that such a bill never makes it to the House and Senate floor for a final vote, conditional on Trump surviving (and not being comatose, Biden-esque, yada) to January 2029? Because at 80% confidence... well, I won't call it free money, but I'd be willing to bet at greater odds the opposite direction.
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