I'm officially a Woman International Master!

Despite its anti-trans regulations, FIDE had to recognize me as a WIM!

I'm happy to have shown that it was possible, to have paved the way for my sisters. Girls, I don't wish you to do as well, but to do even better. 🏳️‍⚧️💜 pic.twitter.com/DtKnRgnUik

— Yosha Iglesias (@IglesiasYosha) April 29, 2024

Proudly stolen from Autodrama

additional OP comment in thread:

I can imagine sticking with transition for 10 years if you don't have a nice pre-transition life to look back on.

My life before transition wasn't like that. I genuinely enjoyed being my male myself before all this. I loved being alive. I had hobbies, friends, passion, traveled a lot, was in good physical condition, felt great when I looked in the mirror and at pictures of myself. I had a great career and was proud of everything I had achieved up until that point.

All of that is gone now. I lost everything I liked about myself. My career is gone, my good looks are gone. My basic comfortability with my own body has been ripped to shreds, my relationships with other people were wrecked, my very basic will to live and ability to enjoy life to it's fullest... Transitioning blew it all up, ripped it all from my hands.

I wouldn't have lost any of it if I hadn't transitioned. I can't blame it on anything else or pretend like some of this would have somehow happened anyway, if I hadn't transitioned. Transitioning is what directly ruined my mental health. And I can't just chalk it up to discrimination or transitioning being too hard. I might have gotten discriminated in the first 1.5 years but nobody is discriminating me now. So if I'm accepted by the important people in my life and by employers, why am I still miserable? Am I not supposed to feel "gender euphoria" now or whatever? Or some kind of appreciable mental health improvement? I don't feel any improvement because it's simply not there, and likely never will be. I don't think I'm one of those people the studies talk about when they say transitioning improves people's lives. Im the outlier or the 1% who don't improve. I went through all of this for nothing.

>Note that honesttransgender is one of the chuddier (more realistic) of the 1,000,000 trans subs on Reddit.

Iz overu (speaks in Korean)

the other downside to this is that now it's even harder for talented people to find secure and remunerative work so what on earth are they gonna do now

finance died in 2008, if tech goes (and consulting is dead) what's the fallback

pray for AGI i guess https://t.co/1JfszY9ZBp

— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) April 29, 2024

learn to do things other than code lmao

What are you playing currently?

!g*mers

Previous Iterations:

2024

2023

Other rDrama vidya content

Last week's game: SpaceChem

Final Score: (10*0+9*4+8*3+7*2+6*0+5*0+4*0+3*0+2*0+1*2)/(0+4+3+2+0+0+0+0+0+2) = 6.91

All Previous Games:

Game to Discuss?

Instead of discussing any specific game, let's discuss classic flashkino !oldstrags . The greats, the misses, the bizarre newgrounds pornography -- all of it. Pour one out for the golden age of hobbyist game creation. Anything effortposty will get some MB (~200, but I'm not a paypig, so that's pretax) for their efforts, so discuss away.

carp, capy, geto, donger pin please

The problem with “Great Replacement Theory” is that it fails to address the foundational issue of low birth rates.

Record low birth rates are leading to population collapse in Europe and even faster population collapse in most of Asia. Immigration is low in Asia, so there is no… https://t.co/ddGM5R6vWh

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 28, 2024

Sneed:

Kind of an neurodivergent rant so feel free to ignore, but I really hate the cute twinks on /g/ and here on rdrama that plaster the language of God onto their jap paraphilia.

Exhibit A (see the attached picture). An anime girl holding the Ritchie Kernigan C book. This is a beginner-tier book that describes how if statements and for loops work. At the time, it was ground-breaking because programming was so much more primitive. Nowadays, it's completely unimpressive. Not only is it very basic, but it is flat out wrong in some places, since most people use C99 or C11, not Ansi C nowadays.

So what would be a good C book to photoshop onto all our favorite cartoons for undersocialized men? There isn't one. Even something "official" like the ISO C99 or C11 standard diverges from reality significantly. Books like "modern C" are written by hucksters who write C at the level of an undergraduate who just finished their first C programming course. The way to tell if someone is a serious C programmer or not is if they use libc stuff like malloc or not. If they do, it means they don't really care about the underlying hardware and operating system primitives. Ironically, the x86_64 reference manual Volume 1 is probably a better source for learning how to write good C code than any C book that currently exists.

The sick truth https://t.co/ctVXoxUVFu

— Alex Jones (@RealAlexJones) April 27, 2024

https://twitter.com/GarbageHuman23/status/1784362470561522145

https://twitter.com/news24tvchannel/status/1784406262123278814

Work for us or you won't have s*x inkwell

May your husband be darker

Now hear me out, the other day I was wondering in my sleep if champions were real and Rito would remove this "polite" filter in lore so that would make champions feel more real.

For example I am 100% sure that Sett calls his opponents "r*tards" every single time just because it suits him as a character. For the same reason I am sure Draven and Jax would be spitting racist remarks on each second (RPS = racism per second). For no other reason then the fact that it fits their characters. Kled, I will not even mention that one. That mf would be collecting offences and criminal records like Yu-Gi-Oh cards.

Whenever I play league I have certain picture of each champion how would they act in real life.

What do you guys think?

wtf a redditor made a funny shitpost?

yes I'm baked

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40171125

If you feel threatened by Khyami James, you have probably been just as affected by the culture of victimhood and grievance as left-wing student protestors. He/she/they is a perfect representative of the gayest generation. https://t.co/oltVSnjmZ1 pic.twitter.com/TSd8Fyp0Fd

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) April 27, 2024

https://www.richardhanania.com/p/too-gay-to-rebel

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1cdqd3m/lessons_learned_after_3_years_of_fulltime_rust/?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1cdqdsi/lessons_learned_after_3_years_of_fulltime_rust/?sort=controversial

Article is too long to copy & paste, so here's the link https://loglog.games/blog/leaving-rust-gamedev/.

!codecels

Escape From Tarkov is an extraction shooter developed by Russian studio BattleState Games (BSG). It's somehow been in "beta" for 8 years. Players enter a game, find loot or kill players/AI and take their loot, then if they can exit the map they keep the loot.

The game has a weird monetisation model. The developers promised no microtransactions, no pay 2 win, the usual stuff that makes gaymers smile. Instead the base edition is $50, going all the way up to the Edge of Darkness edition at something like $150. What do you get for that? Basically extra space to store items between games and a season pass for all future DLC.

A few months ago BSG stopped selling Edge of Darkness and suggested they'd offer the features to other players as microtransactions instead. G*mers were less than pleased, but it all blew over in a few weeks.

Arena

Meanwhile, BSG released a seperate standalone game called Arena, which is basically a Team Deathmatch mode for Tarkov aimed at being an esport. Like most "esports ready" slop it flopped, probably because Tarkov doesn't do balance. There are good guns and shit guns, it's ultra realistic. Guy with the better gun and better bullets always wins.

So, 8 years after initial release BSG dump their money into a new, failed game. It's given out for free to Edge of Darkness owners as a "DLC" but still fails. People suspect that this might mean that BSG is running out of money.

PvE

Perhaps the biggest thing the players want is a non-PVP mode. A big part of this is because the game is hard and most players suck, but to be fair Tarkov also has a massive cheater problem.

I mean massive btw, cheaters can see every item in each game. If you enter a raid carrying good gear, the 3-5 cheaters in each map will immediately charge you down for it without fail. BSG supposedly bans these players but does little to stop it, probably because most cheaters sell rare items for real world cash and use the profits to buy a new copy every week. That said, it's been worse in the past. There were times when cheaters could just teleport all the loot in the game straight to them. Fun.

So naturally, players really want to get away from the cheating and play offline. BSG insists it's not possible, although somehow modders were able to reverse-engineer things and create their own Single Player Tarkov (SPT) mod. Someone is lying there, I can't tell who.

Unheard Edition

This week BSG announced a new edition of Escape from Tarkov - Unheard Edition. In this you get all the Edge of Darkness features plus a special knife, woo.

Just kidding, alongside the knife you also get a character with bigger pockets to carry more stuff in game, extra gear and a bunch of other utilities. Naturally gaymers are mad about these more blatant Pay 2 Win features. It's not too bad though, right?

To sweeten the deal these paypigs also get access to a new coop pve mode. Yay! The devs insist that this isn't DLC, but a unique game mode. Edge of Darkness players don't get it.

Oh, and they get a special item which makes the AI not shoot at them.

The best part? The new edition costs

$250

Cue rage.

Drama

The Reddit jannies open the flood gates and promise to be less neurodivergent than usual. Just don't use naughty words.

The devs have been caught repeatedly editing the website to remove promises they just broke. At this point you can just look at /r/escapefromtarkov and see a dozen threads full of seethe.

Highlights:

Big seethe thread

Lawsuits incoming

The devs give in and offer Edge of Darkness owners a 6 month trial of PvE mode. Redditors even madder.

The lead developer gives an interview where he shits on all the complainers, apparently "True Believers" will buy the new version.

Oh, and you know how Edge of Darkness players got a "season pass" for DLC?

"No dlc planned"

This is ongoing. Will BSG give in or let it all blow over? Only time will tell.

Update

BSG studio head doubles down again. PvE for Edge of Darkness will come later, for now you're paying for a preview before full release. They're also going to offer a 50% discount on upgrades for top tier paypigs. Oh, and if you already paid full price you can have a second game key for the shit-tier edition, but you're not allowed to sell that.

Redditors are still mad

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what's to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot's ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I've ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji's 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji's ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco's government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations': outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who's attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherlovers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You're a fellow Gray.”

The Grays' shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman's banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That's, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon's building?”

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building's exterior. But in Balaji's dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they'll march through the city together.

!clinklickers MOAR WORDS...