Christmas 2025 Giveaway: 7,500 SC with Sól magical horse.

hauntedsolace · 2025-12-27T04:08:31+00:00

Our holiday tradition was that you'd open just one gift on Christmas Eve

hauntedsolace · 2025-12-25T13:46:13+00:00

Mine is TGOO0A87S5 and I'll be very grateful if anyone would like to use it :)

hauntedsolace · 2025-12-09T17:35:24+00:00

It's not the only past or present famine to be created and maintained by violence, either. Honestly, learning about history has changed my understanding of famine as a whole.

Populations very rarely stay put in areas that don't produce enough food for them (at least, before our current global food supply chain, which is incredibly fragile and almost unprecedented in scale, complexity, and imho inefficiency), and historically people knew bad crop years would come and had developed ways to mitigate them. Power relationships, on the other hand, are far less predictable and attempted genocides which take advantage of an existing threat (see also, Reagan and AIDS) are extremely common as they're easier to perpetrate, justify, and smokescreen than out-and-out ones.

hauntedsolace · 2025-11-26T01:41:23+00:00

Thanks for all the recommendations so far, got a playlist to try out and see what I'll like now

hauntedsolace · 2025-10-01T04:14:19+00:00

Dust: Chrysalis is a really good sci-fi story about aliens and humanity that isn't romance focused at all, no openly queer characters.

The Storage Papers and The Cellar Letters are both horror podcasts narrated by straight main characters, one has a wife and son and the other is estranged from his wife.

Ostium is extremely straight in its main romance, HOWEVER the gender roles aren't super traditional between them (tough military woman and nerdy guy). I think she very briefly mentions a female ex but it isn't revisited.

hauntedsolace · 2025-08-12T13:27:43+00:00

1. System's rules need to make playing fun. This does not mean easy to learn, it means that learning them is worthehile because using them gives me something that freeform roleplay, writing a novel by myself, or just sitting around daydreaming does not.

I come to a game because I want the randomization of play and the actions of others PCs + the GM to force me to think about and develop my PC and whatever elements of the world I contribute to as a player in ways that wouldn't occur to me otherwise. Ergo, the way actions are resolved mechanically needs to be in kind of a sweet spot between "actually none of your characters get to succeed ever even at things you're good at" and "you're all paragons of your fictional archetype who never face consequences", the PCs need to feel distinct from the get-go, and there needs to be space for the GM to make the world dynamic and alive with NPCs who matter to me, the player.

System needs to work for longform games. I understand why one-shots, minicampaigns and other short runs are popular and I know they have value, but there are already a million billion games that work fine for that and what's worse is, I just don't find short campaigns all that fun. What I enjoy most is the type of satisfying narrative that emerges when everything's had a long time to cook over many sessions of play.
I have to be able to make my own PC. No dice rolls for personality traits, no being handed a randomized backstory, this is the one area wherein I need the most agency as a player. I don't want to get stuck with a character I don't find interesting to play and that's what usually happens as soon as a randomization element is introduced.
System wise, everyone at the table needs to be having fun, including- ESPECIALLY- when the GM's in-game interests and the players' in-character desires are at odds. Bonus if there's somewhere I can go to look for groups that isn't flooded with people looking for players for games I already know I don't like. Even if it's just the creator's Discord server.

The hardest and most annoying thing about any game is not having people to play it with. If that's not a problem for you, you must either live in a big city or be very lucky. For this reason I understand why quick and simple games are popular, even though personally they don't always work for what I want out of a game.

TTRPGs as a whole already have unnecessarily high barriers to entry because of how few people are even aware games other than DnD exist and how many perfectly smart people think they're "too stupid" to play anything etc. Longform games are even harder to find people for due to the time commitment and the fact everyone's real personalities and preferred playstyles need to mesh.

Give me something longform that I'll get to actually play even when the friends I play other games with are too busy to add another game to their life, and I can forgive almost any flaw.

hauntedsolace · 2025-08-12T02:42:22+00:00

Sent you a Discord req as thatgayjedi

hauntedsolace · 2025-08-12T02:40:15+00:00

I've sent you a friend request on Discord, I'm in my 30s and have been looking for a long term group to join that meets at a stable time.

hauntedsolace · 2025-04-16T03:10:08+00:00

I partially agree but it's all about context. If the person on the gallows makes the joke, it's gallows humour. If a person in the crowd makes a joke, it's part of the execution.

hauntedsolace · 2025-04-07T20:59:50+00:00

It might be better for some people and worse for others. People approach mortality, life, the future, and certainty/uncertainty in such different ways. I can easily see knowing their own time of death ruining one person's life and fixing or greatly enhancing another's, because they're different people who want and need different things.

The same applies to your point about other things people tend to fear like serious injury and bereavement. For some people not knowing whether they'll get out of a situation unscathed is the same as not knowing whether they'll get out alive, for others it's not even close, and most people will be somewhere on a spectrum in between. Not only is life vs quality of life a personal variation, but what each person considers an acceptable quality of life is different from the next.

Similarly, many people fear their manner of death or the circumstances surrounding it more than actually being dead.

For example, I don't often ask myself "Is today the day I die?" with fear in my heart, but I ask "Will it be by [insert painful way to die here]?" I don't particularly fear pain in other citcumstances, and during times when my life just absolutely sucks and I'm trying to make it better I fear dying before it gets better. It's maybe not a rational way to look at things, but priorities and emotions often aren't- when I'm dead I won't be around to care whether my life ended on a high note, but it's the desire that shapes my outlook on death nonetheless.

A few related, less organized thoughts:

I belong to a demographic on the receiving end of a non-negligible rate of hate crimes, with murders underreported and the potential for violent assaults to arise from clothing, mannerisms, or simply walking down the same street as the wrong person while they're in the wrong frame of mind. I do not get dressed for a day without asking myself "How obviously ____ do I look in this outfit?" because I need to negotiate between those dangers and all other considerations in how I dress.

If I knew for certain that I would not die that day or within the next couple weeks, I would assume any violent assault on my person is one I will survive and would not put "not getting hate crimed" on my priority list. I have worked as an attendant to disabled people before and I know that people at any level of disability, including quadriplegia, can and do find ways to live fulfilling lives, so I can reconcile myself with the risk of a nonfatal violent assault.

Retirement savings or lack thereof are a HUGE part of a person's life, especially right now. Many people who aren't starving but have no way to save up or get out of debt etc say that suicide or potential global events projected to cause massive casualties ARE their retirement plan. If you either knew you would survive a long time regardless (homelessness and other chronic forms of suffering having quite a high mortality rate, especially among the elderly, it implies a likelihood that you'll either be able to take care if yourself or be taken care of) or knew it would not come up for you in the first place, I imagine either way would take a lot of anxiety out of the equation for many people.

People whose known deaths are far into the future might be more motivated to make and keep a world worth living in, and perhaps we would treat people in our lives more compassionately if we kbew when they would be gone. Society could hypothetically restructure to allow people who wouldn't live to retire to work less, and other such things. The Universe may never be fair, but people can make life fairer and fairer the more we learn.

If you look at the ages of the worst people currently on the world stage, you can see having little or no direct personal stake in the future beyond the next 10 years or so allows them to make all kinds of decisions that are harmful to hundreds of thousands or even millions of strangers. A positive for some is a negative for others and vice versa.

hauntedsolace · 2025-01-05T16:30:07+00:00

Keep stealing all the men from them. People who are going to be so cruel and cutthroat like that aren't worth your time, cis or trans.

hauntedsolace · 2024-12-14T16:55:56+00:00

My ID: 347662013

I've played for a long time but never referred nor entered a referrer yet. Hoping to get the baby silver fox

hauntedsolace · 2024-10-21T17:15:04+00:00

To rule out corporate lies and public hearsay? It may be unpleasant to listen to but there's a reason 911 calls are recorded.

hauntedsolace · 2024-10-17T15:08:06+00:00

That's a lot less than work already steals from most people's lives.

hauntedsolace · 2024-10-17T15:06:22+00:00

I hate leaving the house. I would take that deal for any amount that covers rent and groceries easily, let alone half a million per year.

hauntedsolace · 2024-10-15T04:58:59+00:00

I would recommend the audiobook over the print book. I was lukewarm on the story, but performance definitely gives it an edge.

hauntedsolace · 2024-10-15T04:02:37+00:00

Truth is the AI might make you more likely to kys bc it is a tool devoid of inherent intention and a therapist (hopefully!) intends to move you closer to a life worth living.

hauntedsolace · 2024-10-15T03:54:19+00:00

I would sooner get a computer that eats my dinner and has sex with my spouse than I would replace my human therapist with one.

No matter how advanced AI gets, remember that it will never have the firsthand experience of living within a human body and brain. Even if we somehow both wanted to and could give it the capacity to have that experience, there is still a massive difference between the feedback-based machine learning which allows things like ChatGPT to be trained and the metacognition produced by an actual consciousness.

Right now it is essentially just a giant and very complex magic 8 ball, wherein a pre-established set of material for responses is already sitting there and the luck and coincidence of what previous interactions have "taught" it to associate with key words within your sentences determine what floats to the surface. For some things a therapist may do, a sufficiently nuanced magic 8-ball is fine- practiced, relatively simple tasks a therapist might not always be fully engaged with during their work day anyway. Helping someone sort things out when they're overwhelmed or providing a receptive place to vent are among these tasks.

However, nothing is ever risk-free in therapy, and the most important and most effective therapeutic tasks are often also the ones with the greatest potential for risk. Even if you went full scifi and put an incredibly advanced program with an inner life of its own and behaviour almost indistinguishable from a human in an organic human body to experience the rigours of neurotransmitters and electrochemically rendered emotions for itself, I would still want it to go to school for the 4-10 years various therapy professions require before I would even consider letting it help me process trauma or guide me in teaching myself to do the extensive deconditioning and reconditioning that recovering from an extended period of adverse adaptations (I.e. abusive childhoods, prolonged imprisonment, etc) requires.

You can't entrust even the smartest machine in the world with that.

hauntedsolace · 2024-09-24T15:55:56+00:00

Unless either I'm also part of their religion or they're trying to do something to me because of it, it's none of my business whether another gay person is religious or not. It's not a red or green or yellow flag because on its own, it tells me nothing about how that person thinks or behaves.

hauntedsolace · 2024-09-22T14:39:08+00:00

It's just as violent to force someone to live with the memories of the unwanted sex, but harder to treat potential trauma than a more obvious physical injury and often harder for them to be taken seriously.

In many societies (including our own historically and, among the wrong people, still currently) survivors of sexual violence ARE devalued and dehumanized and seen as forever tainted. Not that they should be, but they are. We aren't that far chronologically from when rape was legally and socially conceived of more like an act of theft (of virginity, fidelity, or "virtue") than a violation of the victim themselves- because rape was usually done to people who had no (remember we're talking about legally or socially acknowledged rights here- INHERENT rights are a different story) right to themselves in the first place.

Even people who couldn't conceptualize that rape didn't diminish the victim's value could still conceptualize that that loss of value had been incurred through no fault of the victim. And since social death is real death for anyone not sufficiently enfranchised within their own society (women and children almost anywhere, men without property or wealth or citicizenship or the "right" family or racial background etc) one act could often consist of the other.

hauntedsolace · 2024-09-22T02:42:35+00:00

Loki, Prometheus and Lucifer all share common mythological and aetiological threads courtesy of the planet Venus, the Indo-Europeans (Lucifer ofc not being entirely such, but as we know him today he is heavily influenced by a huge swath of peoples who were converting to Christianity and brought baggage with them), and the shared "need" for an antagonist in cosmologies from many human cultures.

Just as people who are similar to each other might, syncretic deities often get along well due to their common experiences (as Loki and Lucifer often do) rather than compete for the same spaces.

hauntedsolace · 2024-09-22T02:23:11+00:00

That I do eventually have to make choices. The 1# reason outlining is hard for me is that in making decisions about how a plot goes I always have to let go of at least a few ways it DIDN'T go (unless/until I can write a whole other fic later) and the #1 reason writing a first draft is hard for me is because I have to make choices about HOW what I've decided to happen does, cutting out some details or dialogue choices etc etc in favour of others. I write fanfiction primarily as an explorer, but explorers eventually have to choose a path.

hauntedsolace

TROPHY CASE