The funny thing is that it wasn't even an intentional stance taking. They just forgot to code a check to make sure characters genders "matched", resulting in that characters could get into relationships regardless of gender.

What the hell are you talking about? They didn't forget anything. A programmer for the sims 1 was a gay man who programmed gay relationships into the game and they kept adding it back, intentionally, in each game.

Actually, you’re both correct. It was an accident and a deliberate decision by one gay developer:

“During The Sims’s protracted development, the team had debated whether to permit same-sex relationships in the game. If this digital petri dish was to accurately model all aspects of human life, from work to play and love, it was natural that it would facilitate gay relationships. But there was also fear about how such a feature might adversely affect the game. “No other game had facilitated same-sex relationships before—at least, to this extent—and some people figured that maybe we weren’t the ideal ones to be first, as this was a game that E.A. really didn’t want to begin with,” Barret told me. “It felt to me like a fear thing.” After going back and forth for several months, the team finally decided to leave same-sex relationships out of the game code.

When Barrett joined the company, in October, 1998, he was unaware of the decision. A fortnight into his new job, he found himself with nothing to do when his supervisor, the game’s lead programmer, Jamie Doornbos, took a short vacation. Jim Mackraz, Barrett’s boss, needed a task to occupy his new employee, and he handed Barrett a document that outlined how social interactions in the game would work; the underlying rules for the game’s A.I. that would dictate how the characters would dynamically interact with one another. “He didn’t think I could handle it with Jamie off on vacation, but he figured that at least I’d be out of his hair,” Barrett told me. “Neither he nor I realized that he’d given me an old design document to work from.”

That design document predated the decision to exclude gay relationships in the game. Its pages described a web of social interactions, in which every kind of romantic relationship was permitted. That week, Barrett confounded the expectations of his disbelieving boss. He successfully wrote the basic code for social interactions, including same-sex relationships. “In hindsight, I probably should have questioned the design,” Barrett, who is gay, said. “But the design felt right, so I just implemented it. Later, Will Wright stopped by my desk,” Barrett said. “He told me that liked the social interactions, and that he was glad to see that same-sex support was back in the game.” Nobody on the team questioned Barrett’s work. “They just pretty much ignored it,” he said. “After a while, everyone was just used to the design being there. It was widely expected that E.A. would just kill it, anyway.”

In early 1999, before E.A. had a chance to kill the design, Barrett was asked to create a demo of the game to be shown at E3. The demo would consist of three scenes from the game. These were to be so-called on-rails scenes—not a true, live simulation but one that was preplanned, and which would shake out the same way each time it was played, in order to show the game in its best light. One of the scenes was a wedding between two Sims characters. “I had run out of time before E3, and there were so many Sims attending the wedding that I didn’t have time to put them all on rails,” Barrett said.

On the first day of the show, the game’s producers, Kana Ryan and Chris Trottier, watched in disbelief as two of the female Sims attending the virtual wedding leaned in and began to passionately kiss. They had, during the live simulation, fallen in love. Moreover, they had chosen this moment to express their affection, in front of a live audience of assorted press.”

- from The Kiss That Changed Video Games by Simon Parker

As if to mock me directly, they are now going out of their way to have sex in front of her while she just floats there like

I've turned off the light so that maybe they'll include her by accident. 🤫

Free fish!

(Created by accident in the dark.)

I need you all to know, I sat on this news for 72 hours, closely monitoring, waiting for more to be born and this is it. There are 4 of them. 😂

Asdfghjkl

"Accidentally discovered straight sex while confused in the dark" is like. The opposite of a porn premise.

all this being said I still love this friend a lot; I don't necessarily agree with him on everything but it's mostly a product of how he was raised and I think fundamentally he is a kind person who doesn't fully understand. however it does make everything extremely funny because if nothing else he loves that I'm like this and is actively determined to make me More like that. but like. in the most 18th century way possible. like he wants nothing more than for me to spontaneously start liking beer and get drunk with him. it is a goal of his to get me as obsessed with pipe tobacco as he is. he is constantly encouraging me to drop large sums of money on flintlock weapons I cannot afford. I am being platonically forcemasced by a revolutionary war era british soldier

OP, if your mother is physically able to do the following, I strongly suggest it:

Get her into a fibercraft. Sewing, knit, crochet. Because here’s the thing:

At first, you can pitch it as “we’re all still gonna need clothes and these idiots with their doomsday bunkers can’t even thread a needle.” But after awhile—let this take a bit of time, not so long that she gets bored but long enough that she’s like “I’ve DONE this already”—introduce her to a slightly more advanced concept. She was practicing on circle skirts? Check out how to make darts. Crochet blankets? There are SO MANY cool stitches.

And then when the craft has a decent grip as a hobby….THEN you introduce her to a crafting social group.

One of the best ways to stop people falling down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole is to make sure they have active and diverse community, and being able to make tangible things has been shown to have a positive influence on mental health. If cost is a concern, I literally have spare crochet hooks I could send you to get her started and all I’d ask for them is cost of postage, which is like. Maybe three bucks. You can even find halfway decent yarn at the dollar store now. It’s not amazingly high quality, but it’s good enough for practice and learning.

I cannot recommend the above enough. My dad is a prepper and was falling in with a militia. Like the white supremacy militias.

So I started casually mentioning i wanted to do Search and Rescue- knowing my father is incredibly competitive and will try and out do me.

I was all "but we can't rely on the government to find people!"

Now he has been on 6 different tours in the US. He is a field commander and the most successful in state history.

He independently made a partnership with a Black and Missing coalition and partners with them on searches for Black Ohio and.

He called me the other day so proud he has " a Trans and a nonbinary whatever that is" on his search team. So is he perfect? No. But now he isn't toting a gun around and threatening people.

He's getting better. Sure he built a secret bunker in the basement. But he's recovered multiple bodies and reunited people with loved ones.

Sure we still can't have a conversation without him divulging into some bigoted speak here and there.

But he's been lead in recovering teens trafficked from our state and successfully recovered them in Georgia in 10 hours.

Sure he isn't perfect. But he didn't fall completely and maybe he will become even better on his own.

The secret is: is they aren't going to become themselves again but you can help them not crumble completely. You can still have your parent even if they are a bit.. ahhhh.... hurtful. But they aren't hurting anyone and that's the important part.

We are what we become. So help people become in a good direction.

Part of the reason people (particularly white people) of a certain age fall down the doomsday preparation hole into conspiracy theorist is

there is very little community for non-churchgoing white folks.

There is such a push in white culture to get your kids out the door and settled in their own home after you've raised them nearly exclusively alone for 20 years. Your work friends are your work friends. You retire and they don't see you anymore.

You don't go to church? All of the church groups don't see you.

Because the prevalent culture among white people is go it alone. If you're lucky and not divorced, you get your partner, but usually the go it alone is so pervasive that even working as a team with one other person is usually too hard, not to mention the stress of only having one person and how you have no place to vent about that person when needed (and everyone sometimes needs to vent about their loved ones no matter how good the relationship.)

So you get to this place where your culture has led you and you have grown-up kids, no spouse, no friends, and a whole lot of undefinable resentment about your life that you're not supposed to feel.

And this person on youtube comes along and says "Fuck them all, society will collapse any day now."

And you nod along in agreement.

But if you have a hobby, and start making friends from that hobby?

Suddenly that support system vents all of those icky building resentments and you can depend on people and make friends and have relationships and the world doesn't feel so bad.

Honestly, white culture takes a pack animal and puts it in a cage alone and then wonders why so many white people are miserable, racist pricks.

I highly recommend amateur radio as another community-building hobby. My Dad has been involved in it for decades, and he’s told me about the various right wing prepper types who join the chats and slowly become better people.

I've just joind a writer's group in my city. It is REALLY helping with my stress and anxiety and that's saying something because I am NOT a social person unless Pisces is in Gatorade or some shit and this one specific blade of grass is EXACTLY 47.2mm long on a Tuesday when the day of the month is a prime number. But being surrounded by a bunch of other writers talking about how my current WIP made them all VERY excited for chapter 2 is making me feel things. GOOD things like anticipation instead of dread and maybe even something kind of like hope? We're talking about doing a "smut night" where everyone brings a short smutty story to read out loud while we all drink.

They said Chapter 1 is "amazingly well written" and "I get vibes of Star Wars, The Fifth Element and Star Trek:DS9 and I'm REALLY into it" and "This made me anxious in a good way!" Got some good notes so I will work on that tomorrow, but when everyone starts talking at once you KNOW you're on to something. It's like entering a cake baking contest and catching a judge on a hot mic saying "This is one of the best damn cakes I've ever had, the other entries don't even come close" and having ALL of the other judges nod in agreement and fight over the remaining pieces.

Why didn't I do this sooner?! Ah, right, because I'm awkward as hell and it's not a Monday and this one very specific turtle in Tanzania is sitting on a rock aimed precisely 13.11° southwest and Jupiter is in my Moon House under Saggitarius contrapost to Mars.

Find a group, it really helps!!

me: truly a well crafted tragedy is such a bittersweet pleasure to take in and serves a purpose, not just as a sad story but as a reminder that even that which ends badly might not have happened in vain or for nothing. The love, the grief, the actions still meant something simply for having taken place and for us partaking in it.

me when said tragedy is about to actually unfold, sweating: ok but consider this. i dont want this to happen