Honeysizzle [parallel arc]

• kawaii culture is a nationwide fawn response
• content warnings are triggering by association
• liking someone more than they like you makes you a creep. liking someone less than they like you makes you abusive
• optimizing a job or career out of a society [through technological advances, cultural changes, economic changes etc] means optimizing the people with that job or career out of that society. whether this is a good thing or a bad thing is a matter of political alignment
• discomforting concepts [tangible or abstract, created intentionally or otherwise] are inherently ableist and/or anti-neurodivergent
• if you have to stop yourself from doing a bad thing you're still a bad person. good people think good things
• non-rivalrous goods do not exist, e.g. "you should have to prove auditory impairment to use captions because otherwise you're wasting transcribers' efforts on your own laziness"
• consent isn't real. suggesting sex is manipulation by social pressure
• attraction to women is unethical ["women" are defined as things cis men might be attracted to]

i feel like not being able to search/sort/filter the member list is more proof that discord servers were not meant to hold more than a couple hundred people
i love scope creep i love when programs and platforms outlive themselves and metamorphose i love when the tool that worked really well becomes ten that don't
[i don't actually feel that strongly. i'm not capable of strong emotion]

[i do wish discord had better infrastructure for large servers that act as community hubs. by which i mean i wish five-digit communities would go back to forums and subreddits like The Good Old Days]

and i always treasure it when i find one because the thing is that with every place i stumble across where im like "oh wow i've never been here before" that's like, diminishing a finite resource. i can only walk so far so the range of places i could walk where i havent explored them thoroughly increases each time. i would have to walk further to find a brand new place

but the thing is, that at least with areas of the map that are far away, exploring them thorougly is harder, because i already have to expend a bunch of energy to get there, so i'm less likely to go there and i have less energy to just walk around for a long time once i get there. so the edges of my map are always fuzzy and full of new things.

but the EXTRA SPECIAL THING is when i find a cool place that was well within my so-called "thoroughly explored" walking radius; a nearby alleyway i just havent gone down in all of 3 years, a little piece of art i've never noticed before, a cool shop i'd never been inside. those are extra rare and so have to be cherished

(i also love when i explore an alleyway i've never been down and i come out the other side and suddenly realize where i am and its like i've discovered a shortcut)

Excellent question, Tati. Let me tell you a story.

Here is the start of a game between Petkov and Nikolov, a common position reached after 1.d4 Nf6 2.Bf4 d5 3.e3 c5 4.c3 Nc6 5.Nd2 Bf5 6.Ngf3 Qb6:

The queen tentatively dips her toe into the game. What's important about this particular move is that the queen can't be easily be counterattacked by a knight or a rook. Since any other piece would love to trade itself for the queen, the queen must step where the only piece that can easily attack it is another queen. This caution is a kind of sapphic identity. (I'm reminded of a lesbian I knew who said it was easier to develop a resting bitch face than develop the ability to defuse horny men.)

A pawn is attacked, and white should defend it. The black queen has bared her throat. To a knight or rook, this merely means weakness-- but the other queen understands a bared throat as something to gaze at, an invitation. So she follows her into the fray:

The subject of the game is now the tension between the queens. If black's queen simply captures the white's queen, dissolving the tension, then white will recapture with the pawn-- and with a newly-free rook and a pawn ready to fling itself at the opponent, white will have the advantage. The same is true with colors reversed. This means that the queens should not be traded-- they must stay on the board, continuing to stare at one another. The tension is unbearable. Black tries to break it apart.

Two women meet in a forest and, under cover of thicket, discover the sensation of fingertips on palms. A voice calls for one of them. What happens next? In many games, white's best move is Qc2. The girl should say goodbye, if only to promise another rendezvous tomorrow. The tension will survive the broken eye contact. But here, the bishop is eyeing the c2 square. The white queen is running out of spaces to go that don't give up the pawn.

White played Qxb6, capturing the queen. A kiss, but an ending, and therefore a concession. Black would go on to win this game elegantly.

For a moment, that opening revolves around the brisk eye contact between two queens, forbidden to resolve that tension. This, too, is yuri.