Time travel/alternate dimension stories that don’t just use infinite dimensions as a cheap way of avoiding complexity. Once you have infinite timelines, it’s all meaningless, because whatever story you’re trying to tell loses all sense of importance, because whatever didn’t happen in one version still happens in another. Who cares if the character saves their family, when there are an infinite variety of worlds where they’re not saved.

It’s possible to tell stories about infinite timelines, where the weirdness of having infinite duplicates is an important part of the story (Dark Matter).

It’s possible to tell stories where there are alternate timelines, but only a finite number (The Peripheral/Counterpart/Alice)

And it’s possible to tell stories where there is only one timeline, and gracefully navigate the paradox (The Pern Series/All You Zombies/11.22.63)

I can’t get enough of stories that handle it well!

I haven’t got this game yet, but if I’d have known it was the same folk that were behind Telltales Walking Dead, I’d have grabbed it weeks ago! That game was one of the most powerful experiences I’ve had in gaming, so I’m looking forward to this one much more now!

If only it wasn’t so cold! :)

I’ve never seen snow except through an airplane window

It depends on what those opposing viewpoints are. If they involve actively targeting and harming vulnerable people, I have no space at all for those viewpoints or the people that hold them.

For the other stuff, maybe a 7.

Well, in that regards, they’re similar to blahaj, as in, our instance doesn’t just have trans communities. Our user base is focused on trans and gender diverse folk however. Hexbear, similarly, has all sorts of communities, but their userbase is focused on shared politics, even though their areas of discussion are not restricted to that.

Hexbear is very protective of it’s trans users and it has a lot of them. But its “specialist area” is politics.

I think it’s a good thing, because it discourages centralisation. If we end up with a bunch of specialist instances, then diversity suffers, because everyone looking for a specific area will end up on the one single specialist instance dedicated to it.

And I say that as the admin of an instance focused on the trans and gender diverse folk. There is a reason that we don’t enforce specialisation on those topics in our instance communities though. Even so, we still tend to be “the trans instance”, when I’d much prefer it if we were just one of many, like we are on the microblog part of the fediverse.

Sorry, I was trying to be outright hostile, not passively.

There are no widely federated edgelord instances at this point in time

I use Kagi. Paying for a search engine isn’t something that I ever saw myself doing, but I do honestly believe it’s the only way they can exist that means the users are the customers instead of the product.

The thing that makes them right wing is the exclusions they place on their “progressive” policies. It’s always the vulnerable

Swedish right-wing populist party Sverigedemokraterna explicitly support that:

They don’t support housing for everyone because they don’t believe that non western foreigners should be allowed in to the country, and they don’t believe that people who aren’t “culturally Danish” are citizens.

So they don’t believe in housing for all

German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland is led by a lesbian who calls her party "the only real protective force for gays and lesbians in Germany

They’re an explicitly transphobic party who doesn’t extend queer rights to trans people, even if they’re gay or lesbian. They actively practice discrimination against LGBTQ folk.

The distro I find easiest to recommend to folk in my life looking to move to Linux is the distro that I’m using/most familiar with, because it makes it easier to help them out if they run in to an issue.

I use CachyOS, and previously, I was trying to support Mint etc, but having zero experience with the way the way Mint handles packages, with its default apps, update process etc, I found myself having to research an OS I don’t use, and offer 2nd hand advice. I moved them over to CachyOS, and even though technically, it’s not as beginner friendly, my day to day familiarity with it meant that it was easier to help out when troubles arose.

To answer it seriously, for me, it’s not specifically cis, but more broadly, queer. I need someone who has faced the assumptions that society forces on them and knows how to exist in the world anyway, having faced those assumptions, questioned them and found their own relationship with themselves.

tl;dr I need people who have had to question who they are and find themselves, rather than someone who has never had to answer those questions.

In my experience (as a trans woman who has experienced both sides of this coin), I can no longer get away with being topless in most situations. However, I can get away with wearing less in more situations. It’s acceptable for me to wear a short cut, sleeveless tank top or boob tube in situations where it would be difficult for a guy to wear a singlet or other sleeveless top.

The term threadiverse to describe the “reddit like” fediverse network predates Zuckerbergs latest bigotry factory.

The instance stance is that we don’t allow people to undermine other folks identities. Transmeds think they’re doing the “right thing” for trans folk because they think that they’re protecting the “real” trans folk. People who want to undermine non binary identities, people who want to undermine therian identities etc, people who want to undermine neopronoun users, will always have a reason for it, often based around acceptability in the eyes of broader cishet society.

Just because you think there is a good reason to undermine those specific identities doesn’t make it ok. You and I, and anyone else is not the arbiter of anyones identities except their own, and the moment you feel that you do get to have an opinion on the validity of someone elses identity, is the moment you have put yourself above them.

There are absolutely trolls who will misuse this kind of acceptance. But even that doesn’t make it ok for you or I to install ourselves as arbitrators of other folks identity. The answer to the trolls doesn’t change just because they’re trolling by bad faith use of identity. The answer still remains that you remove them when they’re trolling becomes apparent. But on this instance, that removal is done in a way that doesn’t empower folk looking for excuses to invalidate others.

I have complete aphantasia. No mental sounds, imagery, etc.

But even so, I think I probably didn’t word my reply as well as I could have.

Stuff with genuine interpersonal interactions, with characters that have personality and feelings, that stuff I can read. But that’s because it doesn’t rely on the visual.

But if the erotica is just a verbal description intended to help picture a scene, then it’s not of any interest to me

So my intuition is wrong there, thanks

Maybe, maybe not. Your own intuition about your experience of gender may not be wrong. There’s not really any way to know. What we do know though is that at least some cis people have a strong sense of their own gender, that can cause dysphoria in certain circumstances.