An array of mini-takes - TERFs abound, I'm afraid
Fuck this transphobe-led pseudodemocracy
This really deserves more words, but I'm not in a great position to do so eloquently. The UK Supreme Court has thrown its lot in with the TERF ruling class](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g27n80lnjo), undermining any claim they could ever have had that they were some kind of underdog. Decades of work expanding and refining our collective understanding of how biology, psychology, and culture interact has been reduced to a handful of literal Lords and Ladies putting their thumb to the air and going "well you're not really a woman, eh?"
Actual scum.
The ruling is pretty clear in its text that it isn't defining the concept of "woman" any more widely than the specific case it claimed to adjudicate - the Scottish Government's attempt to formalise the legal womanhood of trans women, but this falls down for 2 reasons - first because that's not how literally fucking anyone is reporting on it including the Equalities and Human Rights Commision, and second because the case they're adjudicating is very explicitly about the broad legal status of trans women. You can't just claim that's narrow! This is all tiki taka procedural lib shit, but it's also true!
I am furious beyond measure about all of this, but more than anything with the EHRC immediately going around all goverment organisations and warning them that if they don't start fucking up the lives of trans women immediately, they're getting fined.
I have so much anger, and fear, and sympathy for trans people in the UK, this whole thing sickens me and I hate that it's going this way.
York is nice though
Right, to bring the mood back in order - we went to York last week! Very nice city, a ton to see and do and the weather was downright resplendent. Most of our time was spent in museums, restaurants, or walking about - I can recommend York for all three.
| Yorkshire Museum Gardens, and the ruined abbey
It's a shockingly walkable city, really. Just the right size for an aimless wander and always something to see or do. The history really is very cool, with a ton of Roman and Viking stuff around.
Museum ranking:
- Yorkshire Museum (Free, by the way)
- Jorvik Visitor Centre
- York Minster
- Clifford's Tower
- York Castle Museum
Clifford's Tower isn't really a museum, but it has some cracking views for £9. The Yorkshire museum is just a massive highlight for me - free entry as a National Museum, nice variety of exhibits - dinosaurs, maps, books, people, a ruined abbey, romans, vikings - a bit of everything, really nicely paced, and with lots of space for kids. It doesn't feel perfunctory, they want kids in there. And the gardens outside (pictured above) are just a delight in the sun.
The Jorvik viking experience is a classic, and the ride through viking York is an absolute delight.
The only downer really was the York Castle Museum. Not cheap, and very "this is what museums are supposed to have" in its tone. It felt a bit flag-shagger, with a lot of military stuff and those dungeon exhibits that are like "oh wasn't the past terrible, aren't you lucky to live in the now?"
York Minster is just spectacular tbh. A gorgeous building to look at, which is handy because you can see it from fucking everywhere. The prayer-adjacent stuff does nothing for me, but you can see why folk thought a god was involved 700 years ago.
Overall though, top notch city. Far from cheap, but with how much you can walk it you do end up saving a fair bit on day-to-day travel. They do a full museum-pass thing for £65 a head, which is about what we ended up paying across all the stuff we paid to see.
Definitely worth visiting!
Started playing AC:Shadows - crock of shit so far
Look, I've been ill and AC games are like comfort food - I know they're bad for me, but I don't have the energy to prepare vegetables.
I've only played the first hour or so, but what a pile of dross. Just incredibly by the book storytelling, very little interactivity, and that classic Ubisoft "you'll enjoy yourself when we're done queuing up tutorials" pacing.
Yasuke's prologue was fine I guess? It jumps through time a lot to get to the point, which I at least appreciated.
Naoe's prologue section comes after Yasuke's, and it was just a comedy of incompetence to me. Her dad sending her to get the macguffin then immediately showing up after it's stolen, the "I won't send you to get hurt, but here infiltrate this fortification" medicine lady, the utterly disconnected details around the white mask - I hate this sort of nitpicky stuff normally because you can kind of gloss over it and enjoy, but it's relentless! Nothing makes sense unless you just accept that nothing is true until a character says it, ignore what the camera is telling you at all times.
There's a moment in the stealth tutorial bit where they demonstrate light and shadow, and how you can put out lanterns to make more darkness to hide in. Cool, they used the title! Then 30s later you go into a room to check if the box is there, and there are candles flanking it. You walk over to the box and an interaction pops up - you can extinguish the left candle. Aha! Time to make shadows!
No, of course not you fucking buffoon. You can only interact with the left one. The right candle is fucking eternal, obviously.
| Eternal flame
This sort of thing is extremely forgivable in a small game, or like 60 hours into a big budget one like this, but we're in the shadowy stealth tutorial!
Then after the big villain reveal, we finish the prologue then immediately of course we jump to a flashback for some more tutorial. It was in media res all along! Haha! Fucking hell just tell the story in order, I assure you I'll care more about the tragic happenings of the prologue if I know who the characters are first.
Honestly, I don't know why I do this to myself.
Getting back into Binding of Isaac - what a game
I've been playing BoI a ton in the last few weeks - low energy and the need to listen to podcasts rather than music have me back on the grind. Honestly, few games are better suited to pairing with podcasts or audiobooks. I've listened to entire Peter Hamilton books while playing Isaac.
I never really got hugely into Repentence when it was new - I'd already 100% afterbirth+ when it came out and the stuff I needed to do was a bit repetitive, and I never really clicked with the tainted characters.
Coming back to it I've cleared a bunch of them, and got really into Tainted Lost - I only have a handful of megabosses to do - Mother, Beast, Megasatan. My last run would have easily handled Megasatan if I'd managed the key pieces, but so it goes.
I dunno, there's just something about Isaac that keeps me coming back time after time. They really nailed the roguelite balanced-imbalance thing.
I hate the modern game ecosystem - Eternal Strands has a Free Content Update
They just released a free update with a whole new late-game area and boss, and I just don't understand who this is for. I loved ES but I'm not coming back for like 2 hours of stuff they felt they could give away for free!
| Cool bird, I guess?
The game only came out about 3 months ago, and it's hard to avoid the feeling that Yellow Brick are committing hard to doing things "The Modern Way" immediately after releasing an extremely old-school kind of game. I haven't played since Feb, but they've apparently "tightened up movement" which I hate the sound of, added a tips-and-tricks hub which kind of removes the fun of looking at what other people are doing, and they just added the ability to dye gear to any colour.
This last one seems mundane, but I absolutely loved how the colour of my gear reflected what it was made of - it's such a rare thing to see that done well, and now they've undermined to (presumably) stop people whining. It was a really fun late-game activity to go hunting for a good farming spot for rare materials, and they weren't actually particularly slow farms once you found them! It feels like they've just made that part of the game pointless, idk.
I just don't like the idea that ES is now a completely different game than the one I fell in love with at launch. And not all the changes are bad! The inventory/death system seems way less silly now. But my review from launch is now not really reflective of the game as it is now, and for what? Who's still playing? What do you even gain from more players?
The modern games industry is built around these signifiers of a game being "alive" and "supported" by the devs, but this feels like a slavish supplication to those expectations. "We are releasing new content so that our investors will see the positive article on gamesradar" just doesn't sit right with me when you've made a medium-length single-player action game. No, it doesn't help that it was designed by a Final Fantasy guy.
This is just wasted effort when they could be working on something more substantial, but I suppose it probably didn't require much involvement from the writers? idk man, who's this for????