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I was in a situation not long ago on the only discord server I frequent. This angry American guy kept posting women hating content that he thought was hilarious. Called him out on it and he tried to justify that women and men need their own community spaces. On a discord server owned and run by a woman for a video game we all play together.

He tried to go off on unrelated tangents but I stuck to my main point. I made it clear that his type of behaviour is what makes women feel unsafe in many communities and spaces. I also made it clear that his approach to mental health care was deeply flawed and did so by a long string of questions and statements all pointing out his hypocritical actions. I think that worked?

He kept going off on trans people, I asked him why he kept thinking of trans people. He kept saying women and men need their own spaces, I told him that if he is so desperate for men’s only spaces, there’s gay bars and clubs to go to. He kept bringing up other groups of people he hated in response to mental health questions, I asked him if he cares about his mental health or just looking for someone else to blame for his hate filled behaviour. When he deflected a question about why women feel unsafe in so many spaces, I brought it back around to challenge him to ask women why they feel unsafe and find out himself. The more he talked, the more he cornered himself. His actions never matched his words so I had a year+ catalogue of his hypocrisy to throw back at him.

In the end he agreed to stop posting hate content and then disappeared for a week. He came back briefly to privately talk to the discord server owner, she laid into him with a couple paragraphs regarding his hate towards women. He never responded and has disappeared again. I’m hoping he is reflecting real hard about himself right now, but I’m low on hope.

The biggest issue I have in dealing with hate filled people is that they have what feels like an infinite source of energy and their hate completely burns out all the good people they surround themselves with. Some of us are just exhausted and only want to play games, share stupid memes and post cute pet pictures. Don’t bring your hate trash everywhere you go, please. It ain’t funny.

I’m so tired.

My future allies for the future water wars kindly disagree :)

I’ve never understood why people think wasps are so aggressive. At least where I live. They are curious like a bumblebee although slightly more persistent in hanging around.

If I am eating food, I leave a bit for them just within arms reach so they feast on that rather than what I’m eating.

They seem pretty chill if you’re willing to share your space and food with them.

I’ve found myself lately a lot more interested in games that don’t focus heavily on graphics but instead allow other parts of the game to speak for itself. This allows for the imagination to fill in the gaps, as you mentioned.

I’ve been playing a lot or Caves of Qud recently. It’s a rogue-like game with tile graphics and colourful text. Somehow this menu simulator game has drawn me into it’s harsh and unforgiving world. The tile based graphics actually allows for an amazing amount of creative freedom both from the developer and player point of views. The developer has created this futuristic planet with mutants and cybernetics roaming the planet trying to survive. The player has the freedom to play as they like and create the most unique characters they can imagine. My current character has two hearts, a scorpion tail, a fanged beak, two dagger wielding claws and a habit for stabbing.

I think the rise of constantly better technology has inadvertently encouraged a focus on better graphics over other aspects of video games. While there are some absolutely beautiful games with higher hardware demand, I think as of late, I’m yearning for games that focus more on story or gameplay. Games where you can feel the developer’s passion. Games with polish and attention to details in the most unexpected ways. Games that attempt to push boundaries within certain limitations (think hardware or graphic styles for example).

I think what I want is a game that feels like I’m reading a fiction book in a way. What I mean is that when you read a work of fiction, your imagination is filling in all that visual information. A game can provide you more than just text, but if it can balance graphics, gameplay and story, it can really transport and immerse your imagination into that world.

There’s no greater shock to people who lack empathy and an unwillingness to treat people with dignity than a person willing to put their foot down to prioritize their own dignity.

Fucking with manipulators would be more fun if they weren’t such scary and dangerous people.

I found the best way to walk through a crowd of geese is to avoid eye contact at all costs. Pretend it’s an empty field and you’ll most likely be safe.

It’s like an extreme sport but without the price tag. Although I would not walk through a crowd of geese if babies are present, no matter how cute, fluffy and snuggly they look.

As with many travelers in Australia, we both had work/holiday visa’s that allowed us to stay in Australia for 1-2 years. This wonderful comment was thrown at me within the first week of arriving at a hostel in Sydney.

Fortunately they left a month or two later but I still avoided them when they did still live there.

Amazing. Layers of ignorance for an already dumb thing to say.

I’m a person of colour who has a white step parent and has grown up in Canada in a fairly mixed area.

My family history would have started in India but my parents were born in South America and migrated up to North America (both Canada and the US) where my sister and I were born. I grew up “white.” My voice, appearance and behaviour are “white.” I was born and raised Canadian. I’m far from proud of this country where I have spent my life but I will identify myself as a Canadian. My family history had been thoroughly white washed and erased.

I say all this because for all this history I have behind me, it means nothing to most people.

The majority of Indian people here will look at me one way until I speak and then promptly ignore me because I’m not “Indian.”

West Indian people want to be my best friend until they find out I’ve never visited any West Indian country. Then I’ll be treated as an idiot for not embracing a culture I have no real knowledge of and have not been immersed in.

Then there are the white people… No matter how white I act, I will never be “white” enough. I’ll always be the colour of my skin. I could look, act and behave as awful as a white cop and still not be on the same level.

In fact, I have a “friend” who is a cop. He’s not really my friend, more of an acquaintance I’ve known for 10+ years through another more decent friend. This guy is just fucking awful and every molecule in his body is racist and vile. He looks at me, arms full of tattoos and tells me I’d be a perfect “UC.” Undercover Cop. My only value to him is to be used to incriminate fellow people of colour. I’m just not a person or anything close to equal. Always something less.

I’ve never really had a place where I felt I belonged while growing up. Hated for being me from multiple angles for reasons beyond my control while doing nothing harmful to anyone. There are good people out there who treat me as a person first but they are few and far between.

Another quick story, I once had a Dutch guy in Australia tell me that his last name Hoffmeister means “House Master.” You know, from the times when they used to own slaves. Thanks for telling me that to my face, you absolute weirdo.

After finally getting fed up, I went on a 10 month campaign against mamagement calling out all the sexism, racism, poor management and absolute disrespectful treatment of apprentices and contractors. I made it very clear that the work culture was awful in every way.

I got predictably fired but I secretly was working with corporate to deal with the the awful HR manager who was enabling this work culture.

Without going into much details, After my company fired me, I put in a complaint to the government labour board over a wrongful termination case. A month later after my submitting my case to the labour board, the HR manager was forced into early retirement. A month after that I settled out of court and got my severance plus a little extra to cover lawyer fees.

My coworkers knew, most got upset at me for challenging authority, some respectfully supported me at an arms length and even fewer people actually supported me.

What was undercover hate wasn’t very hidden by the end of my time there. Although I doubt they fully knew how much I couldn’t stand them. I still had to maintain the peace somehow.

I used to work in the trades. I was surrounded by straight-acting men. There’s nothing more gay than a group of straight-acting men.

Unfortunately it’s the creepy, repressed kind of gay that would make a tolerate person’s skin crawl.

I feel awful for their wives and children.

I always find it interesting when someone states they don’t enjoy an activity and one of the first responses are to subtly guilt the commenter for not enjoying an activity.

I’ve been losing interest in movies for the past 15-20 years and being guilted into enjoy something I no longer enjoy for someone else’s expense does not sound like fun.

Fortunately there are plenty of activities to do together. As you mentioned, cooking together sounds great to me. So does walking in nature. I especially love playing music for each other because I love hearing what other people listen to.

Humans are wonderfully complex and there’s plenty in the world to for us to enjoy.

A long time ago I came across a game that was part of a 1mb challenge. It’s called A New Zero. I played it quite a lot, just flying around and dive bombing boats was entertaining enough for me.

I was impressed with 1mb but 13kb and 96kb is pretty amazing. I really enjoy seeing stuff like this.

I’ve had stocks in a couple forms over my lifetime and after a while, both times I have pulled all my money out.

The first time was shortly after the 2008 crash. All those reassuring words my investing manager person told me were simply sweet nothings. I decided that taking the hit of losing half my money was a life lesson and used the remaining half to go travel and live a life for myself. That investing manager later went on to have a covid party out of defiance for masking requirements, caught covid and died. Felt good knowing my stranger-danger alarms were working even if I didn’t understand my decisions fully at the time.

The second time I simply put my money into a low risk, government stock option for a few years. After watching global leaders fumble the handling of a global pandemic, I lost faith my own government to have my best interest in mind. I pulled my money out again.

I personally feel super uncomfortable allowing other people to make money off my money that I am risking. Even if it is low risk. It make me feel exploited.

Ultimately, I decided I don’t need my money to work for me because I don’t even want to work. I hate the concept of money. To me, money just disconnects us from community and nature.

If you are curious to how I live, it’s with very little. I spent a number of years of my life living out of a 34 liter sized backpack. Living minimally while making sure what I owned had meaning, purpose or intention transfered over to when I finally started settling into a certain location.

I try to remind people that doing nothing is not a bad thing and something you can enjoy. Productivity can be quite addictive for some people. For others, it can be so ingrained into their mindset that they are driven by guilt to remain productive.

In a couple years from now when the sun finally decides to kill all life on earth for shit and giggles, all that progress and productivity won’t mean anything. I’d rather chill the fuck out and enjoy the nice views with the people I like around me and I only have one life to do that.

Some men are so desparate for love from their male friends but can’t handle the idea of showing any form of sincerity towards another man.

Instead of calling it love between male friends, respect becomes a currency for love and takes on some pretty toxic and abusive traits. Name calling, belittlement, insults, questionably aggressive forms of physical touch and more just to avoid giving a compliment or a hug.

That underlying love never gets expressed in a healthy way and you get the strange, hypocritical and mind breakingly confusing behaviour. Why do they hate everything about me but want me to go out for drinks after work tonight?

I think all this unaddressed love disguised as respect is more gay than the time I walked into the bathroom at a gay club and saw two guys giving another guy a blowjob.

Go give your buddy a hug, it ain’t as gay as the 50th dick joke of the day that you have to say. Hell, it’s not even lunch time yet, my dude.

I think I meant gardening instead of farming in my first comment. I’m drawing comparisons from the majority of my life in the suburbs. I have strong feelings about industrial farming that I’m not interested in going into at the moment.

I do believe it’s important for us to learn how to rejuvenate our land as a step towards a sustainable future which is why I’m interested in learning and sharing such things. Food is quite important to our lives.

Not being able to till or use synthetic fertilisers makes it a lot harder to scale up production.

This is exactly why I believe we need to start relearning soil health care among many other things. This is why we need to bring food back locally into everyone’s yard’s and parks. This is why we need this knowledge now to help future generations.

It’s hard to imagine another way of living life but we’ll never know if we don’t collectively try.

I’ve personally drawn a lot of inspiration from Australian indigenous peoples and their approach to land management which is why I feel so strongly about learning soil health.

I’ve only had a year experience with growing crops but learned a lot about how important “living soil” is from having a bioactive terrarium.

Bioactive refers to making an active ecosystem with plants, insects and even microfauna. In mine I had plants, isopods (land shrimp) and springtails. The isopods break down fruits, veggies, poop and decaying matter like fallen leaves. The springtails eat fungi and mold that forms from constant moisture. The plants thrive off the nutritious bug poop.

Learning about this cycle was important to me understanding that creating a garden means creating a home for all the insect and microfauna first, the resulting crops were the tasty bonus.

Clover is amazing for ground cover. The roots will help losen soil. Along with underground insects, this helps create air pockets in the soil for all plant roots to breath. It helps prevent moisture loss, keeping enough moisture for roots to gather nutrients with less watering. The roots also act as a home for bacteria, fungi and anything considered microfauna really. The flowers attract pollinators which is so important for both crops and local pollinator populations. It may also bring nitrogen into the soil providing food for other plants or crops. I’m recalling most of this from memory so there may be outdated or slightly misremembered info but that was my take away from my initial research into healthy, living soil.

My first year of crops grew amazingly and I hope for more of that. This year I’m adding walking planks and a few large stones to my garden. Between the clover ground cover, stones and wood, that should give even more protection for my tiny insect\microfauna friends. I even went as far as to add a layer of fallen leaves over the soil to help protect it during the winter.

I can never look at “traditional” western farming practices the same again. Soil health is just not given the attention it truly needs.