“JN: The public don’t see celebrities as real people. This can’t be something that just settles and is forgotten. I’ve seen so many people campaigning, a petition to take it to parliament to stop the media from publishing stories that aren’t true. I think it’s so vital. It’s something we struggled with in the beginning, we’d read so many stories written about ourselves and they weren’t true and we’d think, ‘what the f**k?’ It’s so frustrating because when I wasn’t in the industry, I know for a fact that whenever I was in the Co-op or Tesco or the hairdresser’s and I’d see a story about someone, I’d believe that. I didn’t know. It’s so damaging to peoples families, their mental health, and it shouldn’t be allowed. PE: What makes it worse, is you’re also told to sit quiet. You’re told to read that false information, and you’re not really supposed to bring light to it, so then you’re even more frustrated. JN: So many people are dying, shy is nothing being done about it? I wish we could go back to the days of no social media. JT: Say the Spice Girls had someone hating on them, they’d send you hate mail, but you didn’t have to read that. Rip it up! You could avoid it. You can’t now. PE: If people had to go down to the post office and sit and physically write a letter of hate then lick the envelope, put a stamp on it, send it off, then sit and hope that they’re gonna read it… It wouldn’t happen, because who the f**k has the time? LP: The curse is overriding the blessing at the minute.”
—Little Mix about Caroline Flack and online bullying.
I’m so fucking tired of Autism Parents™️ and I want back those three hours of my life.
I’m so fucking tired of swallowing my anger, being just as polite as any neurotypical and having those neurotypicals spit down on me anyway and tell me I’m being condescending to them. They always do this when I don’t give them the response they seem to want no matter how much I validate their anger or pain or whatever else they’re feeling.
I took a metaphorical bullet today, and I guess it’s better that it was me than someone in a much more fragile mental state. This really made me spiral.
So what happened?
I had a three hour Twitter DM conversation with an Autism Mom™️ about why Autism Speaks is a dangerous, bad charity. I was polite to the point of saccharine (while she treated me like scum) as I put forth the emotional labor necessary to answer her questions as thoroughly as possible and give links to back up what I said.
I tried to put on a positive face of help rather than coming at her with the anger she kept venting at me. I didn’t comment on how damaging it was for her to talk about her autistic child’s diapers or meltdowns in public like she was. I was focused on teaching her about Autism Speaks and linking her to resources that could help her better help her child.
And after those three hours of sounding like she was on the verge of changing her mind, she abruptly said, “you know what? I hate how patronizing and condescending you are. You autistic freaks are all the same, and I hope you all get wiped out. I’m going to march in every walk and light it up blue till autism is gone because assholes like you shouldn’t exist. Thanks for reminding me why I support Autism Speaks, it was the right decision” and then blocked me.
I was stunned.
Then I cried.
This shit is making me lose faith in any parents being able to listen or care about autistic people, including their own children.
We’ve made so much progress and yet, I’m reminded that being autistic is still seen as a reason to hate people. It doesn’t matter how polite we are or how deeply we conform, we are still Other and treated as less.
I’m white, I hate to think of what black, brown, Asian and indigenous autistic people have to deal with.
I tried my hardest to change a single mind, and it didn’t work.
Don’t ask me to name names, there’s no convincing this person and harassing them won’t do any good either. I reported them for hate speech and I’ll let the Twitter mods decide what to do about it. Probably nothing, but eh, my faith in people giving a shit about autistic people is down to zero right now.
I tried and it wasn’t good enough. I let everybody down, so I’m sorry.
To parents like that mom: fuck you for eternity. You are teaching other neurotypical adults how to treat your children like shit. Your kids will grow up to receive the same vitriol.
I hope, someday, when your child cries in your arms after trying to have the same conversation with another adult, that you remember how you treated me.
I hope your child cuts you out of their life, forgets your face and never sees you again.
You didn’t want the child you got and you don’t deserve any children after treating another human being like you treated me. I fear for your child and what horrors they must see and hear from you every day.
You said you want to eradicate autism, that includes your own damn child.
You fucking monster.
Next year, I will fight harder because of you.
Because autistic people of all abilities, races, ethnicities, religions, classes, orientations and genders deserve to be heard, especially the most vulnerable autistic people who get silenced the most, and I won’t let people like you stand in their way of living a better life.
I’m immune to Typo In the Group Chat syndrome because if I ever make one that’s really worth ragging on I’ll just write a tabletop RPG about it, and now every time you give me shit about it you’re promoting my work.
I love shipping parcels to Ireland because every individual premises has a unique postal code, so the entire rest of the address can be whatever the fuck they want. I once sent a parcel someplace whose listed street address was literally just “The Yellow Door”. I looked it up on Street View and it was in fact the yellowest door I had ever seen.
Concept: inverted metroidvania where the environments are full of things that move you around in various complicated ways, like every screen is a Rube Goldberg machine of cannons and jump pads and teleporters and things that grab you and swing you around like a reverse grappling hook and such, and all of your “mobility” upgrades are things that let you selectively interrupt specific types of movement in specific ways in order to fuck with where you ultimately end up.
For example:
The cannon sabotage is an inertial damper that causes you to instantly lose all momentum and fall straight down when activated
The teleporter sabotage is a little EMP widget that makes you pop out of hyperspace equidistant between your starting point and where you were supposed to end up – and yes, it’s 100% possible to telefrag yourself in this way, though in other cases (e.g., when the teleporter’s default destination is inside a wall) it may be necessary to avoid a telefrag
The thing-that-grabs-you-and-swings-you-around sabotage is literally just a knife that lets you cut the cable mid swing, sending you shooting off to gods-know-where
It would be extremely frustrating to play.
okay, I haven’t played a lot of metroidvanias, but I loved Portal… yeah, I would play this. what would the story be for this? Zero gravity might make a good explanation for why momentum matters so much.
You absolutely don’t want it to take place in zero gravity, because that removes too many opportunities for Fuckery. However, even with the general emphasis on forced movement and the negation thereof, it may not occur to the average player that gravity is, itself, a form of forced movement, so of course one of the final late-game upgrades is a device that lets you selectively switch gravity off.
The actual end of the game is the normally easily accessible room to the right of the 1st screen, but the game starts by you trying to open the door before a 5 minute long journey throughout the whole game as you get launched and teleported around until you get to the proper “level1”.
Behind the door is the off button.
I feel like this would be an absolutely fantastic tongue-in-cheek but unexpectedly hard-hitting metaphor for retaking control of your life. Like this hypothetical game is basically making autonomy of movement- one of the things often consideredthe basic of basics in video games- a highly contentious resource.
Your character cannot choose where they end up. And the only salvation to their predicament is to basically, invest as much as possible in being spiteful in response; I’m just imagining that the earliest tutorial is a series of three devices that no matter what you do keep launching you back to the start platform, but one of them is conveniently in disrepair- so if you keep banging your head against the wall, it visibly gets weaker and weaker until it breaks and lobs you towards the first upgrade, which you can use to come back and sabotage it, starting your path forwards.
Like it would inevitably be a frustrating game but I feel like with clever design and just enough incentives and other fun aspects threaded into it, you could make it a pretty fun puzzle-platformer that uses said frustration to tell a story. Especially if there’s multiple viable solutions incentivizing you to mess with stuff- possibly even to the point of, like a ‘true’ metroidvania, there’s multiple routes, if you can just figure out how to get there.
[Image description: a reply from Tumblr user @mkoookm reading “Every boss eventually self destructs but you game over when they die so you have to stop them from killing themselves to progress”]
Suggestion. The base upgrades is the ‘nix this effect in mid-go’, but the boss-battle victories are ‘shut off this effect in it’s entirety’ which means it stops certain effects from blocking paths, and allows you to change how the chain effects go.
As an upgrade scheme, that does have the virtue of allowing for very simple controls: every ability is on a single button, with the context of what you’re interacting with and the timing with which you press said button determining which upgrade is activated. Just for fun, let’s make it the same button that’s used to cancel out of a menu.
As an aside, something I wanted to expand on is that this premise isn’t just an inverted metroidvania in terms of its mechanical gimmick – it’s also inverted in terms of its basic thesis of what a metroidvania is. I had a very particular theme in mind when I made the initial post, and all of the comments in this thread have built on it in various ways.
Basically, your standard metroidvania is about gaining agency. You begin with access to only a small portion of the game world, fenced in by obstacles designed to tell you “no, you can’t go here” and “no, you can’t do this”. Because the prototypical metroidvania is a 2D platformer, that “no” is expressed in terms of limiting your ability to move about.
As your ability to move about improves over the course of the game – running faster, jumping higher, whatever – the world’s “no, you can’t” progressively gives way to your own “yes, I can”.
Here, that equation is turned on its head. Right from the start, you have access to an enormous range of fanciful ways to move about the game world, but never on your own terms. You can cross the world in a single step, but you can’t walk into the room next door. “You can” becomes “you WILL”. Everything that isn’t forbidden is mandatory.
There are still upgrades, of course – it’s a metroidvania, in spite of it all – but those upgrades don’t give you the ability to do things: they give you the ability not to do things. The sole agency the player character is afforded is the agency of refusal. Each upgrade confers a new way to say “no, I won’t”. No to velocity, no to gravity – it will be on your terms, or not at all. Even the boss “fights” play into that; the only way to make progress is to say: “No, you don’t get to have an epic battle to the death. I will not be party to this.”
And that button at the end that turns the whole crazy contraption off? That’s the player character saying “no” to the whole damn game. They will not participate in this horseshit any further. There’s no fancy ending cutscene – just the resounding clunk of the main power going out and a smash cut to black. Roll credits.
(Honestly, it would be more thematic if you press the button and the game immediately does a hard exit to desktop, but then folks would think it was broken!)
Concept: inverted metroidvania where the environments are full of things that move you around in various complicated ways, like every screen is a Rube Goldberg machine of cannons and jump pads and teleporters and things that grab you and swing you around like a reverse grappling hook and such, and all of your “mobility” upgrades are things that let you selectively interrupt specific types of movement in specific ways in order to fuck with where you ultimately end up.
For example:
The cannon sabotage is an inertial damper that causes you to instantly lose all momentum and fall straight down when activated
The teleporter sabotage is a little EMP widget that makes you pop out of hyperspace equidistant between your starting point and where you were supposed to end up – and yes, it’s 100% possible to telefrag yourself in this way, though in other cases (e.g., when the teleporter’s default destination is inside a wall) it may be necessary to avoid a telefrag
The thing-that-grabs-you-and-swings-you-around sabotage is literally just a knife that lets you cut the cable mid swing, sending you shooting off to gods-know-where
It would be extremely frustrating to play.
okay, I haven’t played a lot of metroidvanias, but I loved Portal… yeah, I would play this. what would the story be for this? Zero gravity might make a good explanation for why momentum matters so much.
You absolutely don’t want it to take place in zero gravity, because that removes too many opportunities for Fuckery. However, even with the general emphasis on forced movement and the negation thereof, it may not occur to the average player that gravity is, itself, a form of forced movement, so of course one of the final late-game upgrades is a device that lets you selectively switch gravity off.
The actual end of the game is the normally easily accessible room to the right of the 1st screen, but the game starts by you trying to open the door before a 5 minute long journey throughout the whole game as you get launched and teleported around until you get to the proper “level1”.
Behind the door is the off button.
I feel like this would be an absolutely fantastic tongue-in-cheek but unexpectedly hard-hitting metaphor for retaking control of your life. Like this hypothetical game is basically making autonomy of movement- one of the things often consideredthe basic of basics in video games- a highly contentious resource.
Your character cannot choose where they end up. And the only salvation to their predicament is to basically, invest as much as possible in being spiteful in response; I’m just imagining that the earliest tutorial is a series of three devices that no matter what you do keep launching you back to the start platform, but one of them is conveniently in disrepair- so if you keep banging your head against the wall, it visibly gets weaker and weaker until it breaks and lobs you towards the first upgrade, which you can use to come back and sabotage it, starting your path forwards.
Like it would inevitably be a frustrating game but I feel like with clever design and just enough incentives and other fun aspects threaded into it, you could make it a pretty fun puzzle-platformer that uses said frustration to tell a story. Especially if there’s multiple viable solutions incentivizing you to mess with stuff- possibly even to the point of, like a ‘true’ metroidvania, there’s multiple routes, if you can just figure out how to get there.
[Image description: a reply from Tumblr user @mkoookm reading “Every boss eventually self destructs but you game over when they die so you have to stop them from killing themselves to progress”]
Concept: inverted metroidvania where the environments are full of things that move you around in various complicated ways, like every screen is a Rube Goldberg machine of cannons and jump pads and teleporters and things that grab you and swing you around like a reverse grappling hook and such, and all of your “mobility” upgrades are things that let you selectively interrupt specific types of movement in specific ways in order to fuck with where you ultimately end up.
For example:
The cannon sabotage is an inertial damper that causes you to instantly lose all momentum and fall straight down when activated
The teleporter sabotage is a little EMP widget that makes you pop out of hyperspace equidistant between your starting point and where you were supposed to end up – and yes, it’s 100% possible to telefrag yourself in this way, though in other cases (e.g., when the teleporter’s default destination is inside a wall) it may be necessary to avoid a telefrag
The thing-that-grabs-you-and-swings-you-around sabotage is literally just a knife that lets you cut the cable mid swing, sending you shooting off to gods-know-where
It would be extremely frustrating to play.
okay, I haven’t played a lot of metroidvanias, but I loved Portal… yeah, I would play this. what would the story be for this? Zero gravity might make a good explanation for why momentum matters so much.
You absolutely don’t want it to take place in zero gravity, because that removes too many opportunities for Fuckery. However, even with the general emphasis on forced movement and the negation thereof, it may not occur to the average player that gravity is, itself, a form of forced movement, so of course one of the final late-game upgrades is a device that lets you selectively switch gravity off.
The actual end of the game is the normally easily accessible room to the right of the 1st screen, but the game starts by you trying to open the door before a 5 minute long journey throughout the whole game as you get launched and teleported around until you get to the proper “level1”.
Concept: inverted metroidvania where the environments are full of things that move you around in various complicated ways, like every screen is a Rube Goldberg machine of cannons and jump pads and teleporters and things that grab you and swing you around like a reverse grappling hook and such, and all of your “mobility” upgrades are things that let you selectively interrupt specific types of movement in specific ways in order to fuck with where you ultimately end up.
For example:
The cannon sabotage is an inertial damper that causes you to instantly lose all momentum and fall straight down when activated
The teleporter sabotage is a little EMP widget that makes you pop out of hyperspace equidistant between your starting point and where you were supposed to end up – and yes, it’s 100% possible to telefrag yourself in this way, though in other cases (e.g., when the teleporter’s default destination is inside a wall) it may be necessary to avoid a telefrag
The thing-that-grabs-you-and-swings-you-around sabotage is literally just a knife that lets you cut the cable mid swing, sending you shooting off to gods-know-where
It would be extremely frustrating to play.
okay, I haven’t played a lot of metroidvanias, but I loved Portal… yeah, I would play this. what would the story be for this? Zero gravity might make a good explanation for why momentum matters so much.
You absolutely don’t want it to take place in zero gravity, because that removes too many opportunities for Fuckery. However, even with the general emphasis on forced movement and the negation thereof, it may not occur to the average player that gravity is, itself, a form of forced movement, so of course one of the final late-game upgrades is a device that lets you selectively switch gravity off.
Concept: inverted metroidvania where the environments are full of things that move you around in various complicated ways, like every screen is a Rube Goldberg machine of cannons and jump pads and teleporters and things that grab you and swing you around like a reverse grappling hook and such, and all of your “mobility” upgrades are things that let you selectively interrupt specific types of movement in specific ways in order to fuck with where you ultimately end up.
For example:
The cannon sabotage is an inertial damper that causes you to instantly lose all momentum and fall straight down when activated
The teleporter sabotage is a little EMP widget that makes you pop out of hyperspace equidistant between your starting point and where you were supposed to end up – and yes, it’s 100% possible to telefrag yourself in this way, though in other cases (e.g., when the teleporter’s default destination is inside a wall) it may be necessary to avoid a telefrag
The thing-that-grabs-you-and-swings-you-around sabotage is literally just a knife that lets you cut the cable mid swing, sending you shooting off to gods-know-where
Concept: inverted metroidvania where the environments are full of things that move you around in various complicated ways, like every screen is a Rube Goldberg machine of cannons and jump pads and teleporters and things that grab you and swing you around like a reverse grappling hook and such, and all of your “mobility” upgrades are things that let you selectively interrupt specific types of movement in specific ways in order to fuck with where you ultimately end up.
I had a heat stroke a couple days ago so I’m not doing so well? I mean, I’m not in any danger but I need to recover. I’ll be back soon. Hopefully without this bullshit.
Using psychiatric medication doesn’t make you weak or unmotivated. It doesn’t mean that you are using it as a crutch (a phrase that is ableist, btw). It doesn’t mean you’re “co-dependent” on medication, whatever that’s supposed to mean. It means you have an illness, and are treating it in a way you see fit. And anyone who criticizes you for treating your illness in the way you choose, without harming anyone, can fuck off.
