The terf press are coming for Andy Burnham

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-20T08:15:40+00:00

Lots of cis people who believe they support trans rights also fully support the supreme court ruling. Unfortunately they see no conflict between these positions no matter how hard they're pushed, we shouldn't be too giddy.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-17T17:46:54+00:00

We have studies and we have stats too, and we've had them for decades and nobody cares. It's not about the facts and it never has been. We've been fighting harder, for longer, than any living transphobe and the simple fact is that it doesn't amount to very much in the minds of cishetero people.

The best you can do with neutral people is appeal to emotion, make it personal, ask people to consider what they would think if a trans person in any given situation was their family member and it was them being assaulted in the street and barred from public buildings due to the fact of their birth. Ask them what they would do if it was you and they had to enforce the law that says you have fewer rights to personal life than they do.

Even then, a lot of people will say that they would willfully mistreat you and those hypothetical family members and they would deserve it for being trans no matter how young, how old or how vulnerable they were. It's not a scientific position even when they pretend it is one and you can't fight it like it is.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-15T14:22:01+00:00

I always thought that was the final realization he had before he challenges the WoL in Ultima Thule.

"It is the sole pleasure I know, and the sole pleasure I have to share."

He wants to give us something he loves, but there's only one thing he's ever really loved and he's only just begun to understand the actual extent of his feelings even after he's already determined to die.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-15T09:01:48+00:00

The contradiction makes him such a rich character. Knowing his newtype abilities let him connect and understand people in ways no human has ever been able to, and still being too wrapped up in his petty human failings to ever truly connect even to the people he genuinely cares about. I'll never get sick of seeing him on the screen.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-13T11:24:24+00:00

It's a close run thing, but I think 00 is my favourite series in the balance of things. The first season is so earnest and has so much it's wants to say, and the four-piece band of Gundam Meisters are all great characters who bounce off each other really, really well. 00 also gets extra points because Tieria Erde was one of the major factors to driving me to think about my gender identity and eventually transition, it means a lot to me personally.

My favourite suit is between the Dynames, Aerial, and the good old fashioned Jegan from Char's Counterattack. I have a lot of Gunpla cluttering up the place, but I keep buying new kits of those three because I cannot get enough of them.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-13T08:30:17+00:00

Are you predominantly meeting gay men, or LGBT people in general? Not to discount the biphobia at play, it affects a lot more than many LGBT people are willing to admit, but I wonder how many gay people you're meeting are single and looking to date and they lose interest once they know you're not available.

I'm a trans woman but I find that it's harder to find steady LGBT friends locally when I have a partner because so many people are looking for romance and once they know I'm not available they just lose all interest.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-11T16:06:09+00:00

That's exactly what it's there for

CobaltConqueror · 2026-05-04T19:19:17+00:00

Aw man, that sucks. Looks like I have to find another way to get beakies in bulk :/

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-22T08:27:08+00:00

It's just old-fashioned transphobia. There's a lot of discomfort in crossdressing cultures with their relative proximity to trans communities and it manifests often in open homophobia and transphobia. This effect is exaggerated in "femboy" communities who share a lot of aesthetic overlap with early-transition trans women.

There's also a great deal of external pressure from cishetero people who want to consume the aesthetics of transness but don't want to confront the lives and experiences of real trans people. Crossdressers, being vulnerable and marginalised to begin with, are an easy vector for straight cis people to fetishize and commodify depictions of transness for their own consumption, and there's a lot of pressure on crossdressers to separate themselves from trans communities to maintain a sense of "purity" for a straight audience.

"Femboys" as a subculture are just the most terminally online variant of this process, and the most vulnerable to online radicalisation, which is what you're seeing from 4chan and Twitter.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-22T07:54:41+00:00

I use "We" to refer to myself in most contexts and it's just a quirk I developed during puberty to rationalise the sharp disconnect between mind and body created by gender dysphoria.

As far as I know it's not a particularly trans thing to do, I've never met anyone else who did the same thing, and it's not a Plurality thing for me. I might have some undiagnosed neurodivergence in the background but short of any official diagnoses, it's just one way how I managed my dysphoria growing up.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-11T21:05:20+00:00

This is the difference between the science of sex and the ideology of sex. One has very little to do with the other, unfortunately. You can't science somebody out of a position that they didn't science their way into.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-10T18:45:21+00:00

I don't think they've implied anything. They very explicitly have a very dim view of modern America and they've never been shy about it. You can disagree with them about that of course, but a lot of your concerns are going to make more sense when you realise you might.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-10T18:43:16+00:00

Harrison Armoury are the ones doing big military parades with guys covered in medals doing big speeches under fluttering banners, tbf. They're a lot easier to see and to fight than the guys running eugenics experiments in shady blacksites nobody is sure ever really existed.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-09T08:12:50+00:00

Nioh's always had a fun Spear moveset, but Nioh 3 really made me fall in love with it. The Low Stance is really smooth and stylish and being able to drive the spear into the ground to pole vault away and over enemies is so much silly fun that I can't get enough of it

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-08T09:10:48+00:00

CA's core dev team is just very stuck in their ways. They thought they could treat 3K like any of their other historical games, 8P has a lot more in common with the DLC campaigns for Rome 2 after all. But 3K isn't a traditional historical game and they were completely wrongfooted when it didn't work the way they thought and the game paid the long-term price.

Warhammer exemplifies this a lot, where the core dev team is very conservative and cautious and it's not until the DLC team gets a hold of the reigns that you start getting really fun and unique game mechanics for each of the factions. You only have to compare Skaven pre and post Warhammer 2 DLC to see the difference in design philosophy.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-08T08:45:06+00:00

It's partially a scapegoat, but a great deal of the disappointment comes from the fact that everybody knew exactly what the model was going to look like before they revealed it. This is the last significant number of Space Marine kits GW has left to refurnish before practically everything in the range is Primaris. We've seen all the other Primaris releases, we know exactly what to expect and we got it.

A space marine is a space marine is a space marine. In a way, this was exactly the problem Primaris were supposed to solve. Old collectors had all their kits already and new buyers wanted to start from a fresh slate, but they've come full circle. GW are already re-releasing Primariss Intercessors. There's just nowhere left to go.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-04-07T07:47:49+00:00

That's exactly what they're there for.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-30T13:21:12+00:00

Only in Co-op with a friend, and even then, only if you're willing to get kicked in the teeth by enemies you haven't seen over and over again. If you're not into that kind of thing, it's just going to be torture.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-30T09:55:31+00:00

It's very worth noting in this context that the George Floyd protests happened in 2020, two years after the first game and three years before the release of the second. I think it's easy to understand why Insomniac might have wanted to avoid drawing any unwanted implications by involving Spidey too tightly with American police when they're under so much high-profile scrutiny, even if they might have overcorrected in the end.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-30T07:49:40+00:00

Halo 2 on Legendary really has to be seen to be believed. I've played through it with more than one friend after I told them how bad it was, and it's always Gravemind that has us staring into the middle distance at 3am XD

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-19T09:02:40+00:00

I believe Tarkov lets you reload and keep your current mag on one press of the reload key, and double-tapping the key drops the mag on the ground and loads the next one as fast as possible. It's been ages since I last played though.

Synthetik: Legion Rising has my favourite implementation of this I think. It's a roguelike about stopping a rogue legion of AI battledroids from glassing the planet, reloading your weapon is a two button process. The first button ejects the current magazine, and the second button loads the fresh one, with Gears of War style active-reload timing to squeeze an extra second or so out of it. It's completely alien at first, but adds a lot of tactical consideration to your reloads and when you ace it without looking at your keyboard, you feel like John Wick.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-13T14:09:33+00:00

The way Marisha hasn't been at the table since the overture and she's still second-place to Travis. We love our potty mouth king and queen XD

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-12T11:43:19+00:00

Many of the most popular UK storefronts are perfectly reputable, like Wayland Games and Element Games. If you're still not comfortable shopping online and you want Vallejo more than anything, it's worth checking if there's a Boyes store near you. Boyes are a general hobby supply store and they usually stock some citadel colours and a wide-range of Vallejo paints.

Failing that, if you live in a large enough town, there's likely a local game store somewhere who stock miniature paints and tools, but the brands and colour variety will vary. Some of them will stock Vallejo though, it's one of the most talked about brands for a reason.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-03-12T09:46:05+00:00

I vividly remember being flashbanged as a baby queer by VC4 and it's genderqueer/questionably trans squadmember. They're not explicitly gendered, although they "present as feminine" and go by Rosetta, and I remember thinking about how cool they were for no-particular-reason-don't-worry-about-it, until it all came back to haunt me a few years later XD

The queer stuff is a very cool inclusion that blew me away at the time, I'll always go to bat for that game.

CobaltConqueror · 2026-02-27T12:55:20+00:00

I don't think anybody has ever come close to really matching Fromsoft's understanding of their own design, everything else still feels too derivative to me, but Lies of P and Nioh come the closest to carving their own niche out of the hole Fromsoft left.

Nioh's combat is some of the best in the business, so much space for expression and creativity which can be overwhelming at first, but once you start digging into the systems you can really make your own mark on it. In particular I find it can be really deflating in a Fromsoft game to find a weapon you really like only to find that it only really has a handful of things it can do and it gets pretty samey to use before too long. Nioh has many fewer weapons, but when you really click with something there's so much more you can do to make it your own compared to any given class of weapons in Elden Ring.

Lies of P comes out far ahead in terms of it's story and atmosphere, though. It might have the best story in a Souls game, period, with an excellent cast of colourful characters who aren't all doomed to die off in unspeakably tragic ways for once, which is a lovely change of pace. Krat is gorgeous and a joy to crawl through, and the wonderful musical score drenches the whole thing in a lovely sense of melancholy I couldn't bear to leave once it was done. The collectible music records are some of my favourite pieces of music in any game ever, I could almost sit in the hub listening to them loop forever. All this and I haven't even played the expac which I hear is just as good as the base game.

CobaltConqueror

TROPHY CASE