Aeva's Trash Can

 I would consider myself to be Left of some sort. But there are several hangups that make me want to separate myself from most people that take on this mantle: Mask Authoritarians: I believe in Western medicine, vaccines, geeks with beakers. But I also believe in neurodivergent Hypochondria when I see it. Even in that, in current year, pushing for mask mandates is plain authoritarian. This is always a deal breaker for me. It also signals to me that the person doesn't value being about to move about freely, doesn't give a shit about their appearance, and wants to force everyone to do the same. I simply can NOT get along with these kinds of people. Sex-Negative: Leftists that don't ask for representation in media, be it video games, movies, what have you, be EQUAL, instead they want to censor anything sensual/sexual, if the character is 'conventionally attractive,' and stupidly equate 'the male gaze,' as if A) Lesbian or Bisexual women don't exist B) There...

  I'm not proud. I wish I could be... Out of fear, out of disgust, out of shame, I hate this aspect of myself, to the best of my ability.  I don't want to be a stereotype, I don't want to succumb to everyone's implicit bias before they even get to know me.  I don't want to be assumed to own a Blahaj, wear programmer socks, talk with a strange tic, have a this ugly flag tacked onto my bedroom wall (I've always hated the colors; it reminds me of baby colors). I don't want assumptions about my dating pool. I don't want to all the unattractive, not sexy, awkward, gross burden that comes along with people tacking this label onto me.  I don't want be in sports, or any circumstance where I might be in the spotlight and the differences in my body are apparent, reminding me of my disposition and also putting myself and others in the political crosshairs. I don't want to be forced into the 'queer' category. I hate that word. I'm not interested ...

 "We used to go online to get an escape from the real world. Now we go outside to get an escape from the internet."  It rings true. The pace of social media, technology has vastly outpaced our brain evolution's capacity to handle: " More specifically, what if the reason social media seems to cause so many problems is that our brains just haven’t evolved to cope? That’s the contention of evolutionary anthropologist Dr Anna Machin, who believes that the convenience social media has brought to our our lives fundamentally misunderstands why humans have become the dominant species on Earth." “You can contact 200 people at once. You don’t have to see them – you can tell them what you’re doing, they are in your life,” she said on stage at  New Scientist Live , highlighting the appeal of Facebook. “The problem is relationships aren't supposed to be efficient. If we try and have efficient social relationships, the quality goes down, and the costs - particularly in re...

 I write this as someone who is old enough to have witnessed the very beginning of video games, high speed internet, social media at its infancy, and the evolution of gaming PCs.  First and foremost, I am NOT a supporter of Gamergate. I've been a fly-on-the-wall, witnessed how an internet movement/trend evolved into criticizing a game journalist (who I also didn't agree on everything she was about), morphed into a misogynistic hate campaign, and contributed to a rightwing cultural shift, especially in America.  My point of view comes from a place of being sex-positive, alternative. I happen to be LGBTQ.  I want to call out a recent controversy over a Korean RPG game, Stellar Blade. I acknowledge the fact that bad actors were weaponizing the release of this game as some kind of cultural backlash against "woke culture/DEI." I understand the desire, when things like this happen, to pray for the downfall/failure of said games. Simultaneously, consider, that there are peo...

The older I get, the more I'm beginning to realize that this is a (supposed) subculture for people who are very surface-level thinkers. It's a subculture for LARPing, being contrived, boxing yourself off to fit a certain mold.  I've wondered in recent years why these spaces tend to delve in extremist positions: On the Leftist fringe, purity spirals, having a one-dimensional view about global conflicts and conceding no middle-ground, being on a constant conquest of 'cancelling' 'problematic' musicians with NO FORGIVENESS (ironically many of the people I've know over the years who were actual bigots are now hopping on this bandwagon and LARPing as super progressive/"woke"), for some of the smallest infractions. And this is not in the good faith way of wanting to better the lives of people, it's a cliqueish group of people that are weaponizing turbulent political issues as another disengenuous way to be Mean Girls in their niche social cirles....