anna

Is the game different on Switch 2 or is it the exact same game? I’ve been holding off on getting it for the original Switch because I wasn’t sure if I was going to miss out on better performance, customisation options, online features or whatnot.

I got three too!

catfishing.net

#685 - 3/10

🐈🐈🐟🐟🐟

🐟🐟🐟🐈🐟

To be fair, there’s the Red Sea on the other side, that connects a lot of the oil-producing countries to the sea too.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz

Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.

There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It’s also closer to Israel, and it’s partly under Iran’s control too.

And there’s too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.

Hmm. How would I check that? Did my instance defederate?

Edit: Apparently we’re federated. Still can’t see any recent posts, though.

Lwaxana, not even a contest.

Win at what?

Is that one still active? The most recent posts I can see are two months old.

I totally want to get it now.

Thank you!

The beautiful thing about polyamory after all is that we can have both :)

I think the whole rigid concept of ‘asking a stranger out on a date’ -> ‘dating phase where every wrong move means goodbye’ -> ‘proposing going steady’ is antithetical to the spirit of polyamory in a way.

Almost all my relationships just gradually and naturally grew out of friendships. My latest one was originally a friend of a friend, and our first conversation was me excitedly infodumping about European emergency vehicles. She was super hooked and interested and I felt like she was pleasant to interact with, so we hung out more often. We talked almost every day because it was just fun to communicate about our hobbies and special interests, and we became friends. Eventually it got to the point where we talked about some deeper topics, trauma, relationships, kinks and such. And that’s usually where we get romantically or sexuall involved just by casually being like ‘ha I wish’ and ‘hey I’m here anytime’, you know? No official Big Date That Needs To Go Perfectly, no playing pretend, no charades.

I just don’t really like making hard cuts between labels such as ‘friends’ or ‘relationships’. They’re limiting and simplistic. By implying they’re completely and wholly separate, you kind of set yourself up for failure: you have to ask someone out and go on a date, which is a really scary and anxiety-inducing, awkward process. Instead of developing a relationship naturally, you come to someone with a full business proposal of long-term commitment, sex, love, unquestioned support and making living arrangements. And if anything goes wrong, the whole thing is irreparably impossible. Of course that’s scary.

I had spontaneous sex with some of my friends, and it doesn’t throw us for a crisis because of any ‘implications’ mono cishet people would associate with that ‘step’. It doesn’t mean we suddenly have to stare into each others eyes and feel our hearts beat with love. It just meant we had sex. Having sex once in a while can be an activity among friends and it doesn’t imply we need to love each other or stay committed to anything.

And similarly, you can love someone or be in a romantic relationship with someone without the expectations of typical ‘partnership’ things like them meeting your parents, you moving together, you being committed to each other for life. Likewise, you can have all of these committed partnership aspects in your relationship but not be up for sexual contact because you don’t feel like it with them. Without labels, this is all possible.

The most natural way of starting relationships is just to make good friends and just doing what you want with them until you happen to find yourself in a relationship one day and laugh about how this happened.

Good friendship and romance are practically indistinguishable anyway.

Part of why I am polyamorous is that I enjoy experiencing all kinds of connections people can make. I like short-lived relationships and commitment for life, loose and casual ones just as much as deeply connecting ones that end up intertwining my life with someone else’s irreversibly.

I like not having to go through the hoops and motions of ‘standard’ traditional relationships with a clearly defined dating phase, ‘going steady’ and all that. My partner(s) and I just do what we want and what we like, whether that’s a deep friendship with a romantic component, a loose kink adventure or a non-sexual but highly romantic marriage-style commitment. We just do what works for all of us.

It’s a difficult situation to be sure.

Blanket exclusion from romantic relationships and friendships is insane, and that says way more about the existing polycule than the person with HIV.

Sexual relationships are a different topic of course. I think the whole ‘we’re going to make a blacklist database of people you have slept with’ is creepy and abusive. We have readily available STD testing in this part of the world, we have safer sex, and we have agency over ourselves. An HIV-positive person is not a rabid animal to protect your loved ones from, they’re a person one can talk to and communicate with.

Of course everyone can set limits about their own sexual activity and even feel uncomfortable with sleeping with someone who has had sexual contact with an HIV-positive person – even if it was with protection – but I think such a bureaucratic process like you described seriously dehumanises the person in question. I generally dislike the tendency of some polycules to become bureaucratised cliques with tribunals, evidence lockers and subterfuge. I don’t want to date the equivalent of an HR investigative board.

I think the best way to handle this is to rely on the person with HIV to be responsible about disease management, and set your own boundaries for your own sexual activities in addition. If you can’t trust them to responsibly handle their infection status, why would you consider bringing them in the polycule in the first place? And if you can trust them, why the humiliation and dehumanisation of a high court process and privacy-violating ‘investigation’?

I wonder if there’s horse oil for snakes.

I don’t think this is a list of priorities like the title claims, it appears to be ordered by disapproval, unless I’m missing something.

My father is declining, my father’s declining, my fathers are declining, my fathers’ declining.

Aye, 'tis my father’s declension.

Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.

I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can’t believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.

I would also want to add that many of these terms are regional and subculture-specific.

In the specific part of Germany I grew up in, a ‘joint’ was any smokable rolled cigarette-like object with cannabis in it. Nobody used any more specific words like ‘blunt’.

Then talking to people one town over, they looked at you as if you were from the moon if you called anything a ‘joint’ that didn’t have tobacco in it. To them, a ‘joint’ was exclusively a mix of cannabis and tobacco, and a ‘blunt’ was cannabis-only.

Then there’s people who add weed to pre-bought cigarettes, people who insist on using leaves, filters and no filters, tobacco or no tobacco, and so on. Most of these terms are really regional.

I came here to suggest Urbek City Builder too. It could be right up their alley.