An uncomfortable pattern I’ve noticed in workplaces and relationships over the years is that even (what I believe to be) genuinely well-intentioned men (I only see it with men) find themselves resorting to gaslighting at the drop of a hat in relatively low-stakes situations. Specifically, I see guys trying to resolve tension by inventing a prior misunderstanding, notionally the source of the tension, and resolving that. The other party is surprised and relieved to learn of the misunderstanding until later, when, sitting with it, they realise it never occurred.

some canon new Star Wars thing should address midichlorians by acknowledging them as a whole-cloth pseudoscience and gatekeeping device. qui-gon has the right kind of dadvibe to have honestly believed in it. if there’s a reestablished jedi order or whatever they should view midichlorians the way we view, like, physiognomy. the only people who still ever mention them in earnest should be the sith

speaking of target audience (which i just was, somewhere else) when i was ~15 i had to interview someone for a school project so i emailed the questions to gabe newell and one of them was about target audience and he said “it’s hard enough making something good without trying to figure out how to target an audience”

whether that’s a feasible attitude when you aren’t valve is another thing but it remains pretty much my feeling on it and i’m never convinced any of the concessions small time folks make to marketing concepts genuinely yield anything

once when i was 10 a teacher put me and another computery kid, mark, in charge of helping other kids change their passwords. it was literally “type your new password and press enter” but mark insisted on us pressing enter. wanted the other kids to think it was more complicated

i was like “yeah just type your new password and press enter” and mark got mad and went SSSHHHH. it was real funny

anyway i think of that whenever a recalcitrant or insecure programmer barfs jargon like an octopus inking

as in, “the melbourne writing community” or “the perth gamedev discord” or “the hylian ornithology forum”. all you have to do is use that format to name your website or forum or discord and everyone seems to go with it, as though all of a sudden there is a single canonical “Hylian Ornithology Community” or whatever, that you can be “in” or “out” of.

one of the least pleasant parts of running a conspicuously lefty online community of some sort is when someone who’s ostensibly all about empathy and kindness comes in looking for a fight

this happens in my discord a couple times a year. someone busts in and starts making garden variety political statements everyone agrees with, but reframing everyone’s agreement as dissent, light-heartedness as spite, and any further discussion of the topic as outright hostility. eventually they’ll declare the chat to be full of conservatives and storm out (or be banned), and then they will go on a farewell tour of the local internet and tell everyone your ostensibly progressive space is actually, like, super right wing so don’t be fooled!!