Edda

What are some more words for specific activities that certain animals do when they are happy. Like how cats purr and dogs wag and rats brux and boggle. Help me fill out this set

Hi! I like watching basketball. It turns out sports way more fun when you aren't boxed into a particular unwanted gendered relationship to them. (Go Cavs!) I like trading card games too, but I don't play them much. TCG play cultures often feel a little too huge and impenetrable for me, or a little too financially fraught. They're a little bit like sports in that way. I'm also an analog game designer, and, well, some design ideas collided for me last week, so I guess I'm making a little wacky basketball TCG? Or at least, I'm pretending to until I can get myself to think about anything else. We'll see where this leads. Probably nowhere. Alas. Have a devlog.

To start, here are some of my goals and design principles for this project:

• Aim for quick, decisive play: A sports game should feel snappy and urgent in action. Decks should stay really small, game procedures should be relatively simple.

• Say no to arithmetic, yes to geometry. Let's avoid numerical ratings and treat cards like the pieces in tile-laying board games: I want emphasis to be on on a card's layout, where it is in the play area, and how it's oriented, not values like "HP" or "Cost" or "Power".

• Don't let reality interfere. Who's my audience? What's my final product look like? What about art? Isn't card manufacturing a nightmare to deal with? These are great questions that I will not be allowing myself to answer. I have no real intentions of completing this game, let alone selling or printing it. So why not go wild? Circular cards. Full-court play-mats. No art, and no logistical considerations.

• Think local. Okay, reality-denial aside, the ideal play culture for this (imaginary) game is probably a handful of self-contained leagues organized by small groups of friends, likely online, kind of like how fantasy sports work. I don't need a global card-list, just a way of generating them. Artificial scarcity is my least favorite thing in TCGs, but trading with your friends to build a deck is fun. This way, you get the latter, and the former exists only in the hands of the (imaginary) players themselves.

• Sports aren't fair! Is it truly sports if you can know with certainty whether or not your shot will fall while the Ball is still in your hands? I'd like to find fun ways to incorporate randomness & oracular decision-making here, and if that means sacrificing any semblance of "game balance", so be it. Hey, there's always next season.

• Honor only the Ball. Here's something you may know: in basketball, there exists a Ball. Surely then, in my game, too, there should exist a Ball. Furthermore, play should include Ball Movement. As for other elements of the real sport, like the basket? Well. We'll see. Only the Ball is sacred.

That's all for now! I have a heap of more concrete pieces coming together right now, some of which you can see in the image at the top of this post. I'll go into more detail soon. Probably.

Or, maybe, I'll move on with my life and never think about any of this ever again. It really could go either way.

Bye! :)

–– Edda Mendes

anyone who drinks water knows the special taste that water has

LEVEL 1: Only trans people can get dysphoria! Dysphoria is when you feel bad about your body while being trans! Cis people only say they have dysphoria because they wanna be us sooo bad.

LEVEL 2: No, if a cis person underwent the experience of feeling hormonal mismatch, and was legally prevented from doing anything about it, they would feel dysphoria as well. Saying it's a trans-specific emotion is a form of pathologization that obscures the role of the state in causing dysphoria.

LEVEL 3: But if a cis person felt dysphoria, what excludes them from being trans? In your fear to prevent dysphoria from being pathologized, you have enshrined transness as an ontological state.

LEVEL 4: No, a trans person claiming dysphoria and a cis person claiming dysphoria have intensely different pragmatics. A trans person is relating to their transness, and to their status as marginalized by their state and community; a cis person is relating only to their own feelings.

LEVEL 5: Foolish it is, to believe that the boots that crush us crush only us. Again, once we recognize that there is no particular ontological or neurological state that entails transness or cisness, we must realize that how we are punished is also a spectrum that includes those deemed cis. It does not diminish our pain to generalize our suffering to include all those perceived aberrant.

LEVEL 6: Dysphoria is a pathological term. It is a strange rhizome of medical-speak, trans intracommunication, and our interface with cis people; but ultimately like all legally laden words it will change with the state and its whims. The term must be obliterated, and in its wake the sentence "Cis people can get dysphoria" must be vacuously true.

LEVEL 7: In order to use the word "dysphoria" justly, in order to even conceive of a world where a cis person might make good use of this interface, we must first slay the state and all its heads.

LEVEL 8: obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obliterate. obl

LEVEL 9: Praise the machine of the universe, for the All-Tide has come! It crushes buildings as easily as limbs, statues as easily as their sculptors. My body yearns to be swept in it, to be obliterated; my body yearns to join the Locus Of All Things, to be free of its heavy name, and it tires of achieving enlightenment in its lifetime, with so much time wasted to sleep and sickness. I yearn to shout: "Crush me, O Storm!", for I trust its wrath and its might. But I cannot shout this, for even this, the indiscriminate smattering of all atoms, rendered free from their objects and into dust, is not enlightenment. So instead I shout: "O Storm let me meditate in your eye! Let me see the whirlwinds about me, suspended inside you, and let the beauty of objects-become-rubble inspire me to become a poet and prophet!" And even still my organs ache to be free of tissue specialization, to be free of their names. This, too, is dysphoria, homotopic to all others.