The last video game I bought was based on Rudyard Kipling's Kim. (Thought I could use it to bone up on my late 19th century Indian lore (which is very useful as a Scout Leader)). Seems like there's a shared universe with Tevye to be re-exploited.

@Mr.Bultitude it could be a text based adventure, a dating sim, a platformer, a dance battle game, an unmitigated vengeance quest, and one of those apps where you poke a cow. There's literally unlimited potential. Ship it!

@Nathaniel I don't have much hope that they will. You'd need an electron scanning microscope to measure what hope I have left.

They are avoiding the real issue(s) at every turn and doubling down in their actual position even while placating a lot of people's outrage.

In fact I think they are burying and marginalizing what I and a few others with principled but moderate approaches have been saying on purpose now.

I've watched them nuke half a dozen comment threads from meta that were making serious positive progress, and yet left some of the more flagrantly confrontational posts that actually wok against the cause they claim to support because they are so easily criticized remain. They've removed clarifications that carefully avoid triggering other issues and leave the bad caricatures of our position untouched.

twitter.com/Iguananaut/status/1181535732512501760

@Caleb Lovely...

That's one word for it.

I've actually caught quite a bit of vitrol in my email box this last week, some of it much more lovely than that. I don't understand why it's generally accepted from that side of the fence and even genuine attempts at respectful are labeled bigotry if they disagree.

I can't get used to this world where words have no meanings — except when they can be construed against you.

....that after I said I had no issues with it being used for singular.

Chesterton where are you?

I'm glad to see that there is some representation for our views on MSE, even if it's not being particularly well-received

@Nathaniel Sort of, not really. All my comment threads like this have been getting nuked.

I'm tempted to dust off my blog just so I can say some things that actually stick — at least to my name if not into anybody elses radar.

@Caleb You said that you were happy with using it to leave gender non-specified. Your wording left open the interpretation that you are not comfortable with people who prefer they as their own pronoun. I suspect that Zoe was responding to that reading of your words.

At least Ian's answer hasn't been deleted yet.

But I'm also burning out on trying to be sensible. I can roll with a lot of punches but it is stressful being picked apart and ragged on.

Will have to see what happens to this and this...

@TRiG I can't figure how you're reading that, Zoe keeps going on (here and elsewhere) about language changing and defending singular usage as grammatically correct. Given that (unlike Monica) I use it all the time anyway even when I do know the referent's gender it's pretty meaningless to demand I use 'they'. I don't even know how to make that more clear without opening up the other end of the worm can.

@Nathaniel True, the post is there. My comment under it is not.

A blast from the past:

@Caleb There is so much going on here, and I've certainly not been able to keep up (I suspect that no one has). I was just looking at that immediate interaction right there, and that was the only way I could make sense of Zoe's response.

@Nathaniel Same link both times.

Bah! I can't edit

Try #2

Pet peeve number 547 this week: The SE network profile comment activity pages render simple italic text in comments in a bold italic font face.

nordic.ign.com/hearthstone-heroes-of-warcraft/29943/news/…

@TRiG I responded to the text as I understood it, not by guessing intent (because I'm not capable of that)

@Caleb I honestly don't care what you mean, I care about what you're defending. You can defend something without personally having a direct problem with it, and still get into a discussion purely about the topic.

@PeterTurner ROFL! I'd play all of those.

@Caleb Ugh. House can you tolerate any effort put into Twitter?

> But perhaps the shortest and most lucid way of putting it is to say that one must be pretty far gone when one abolishes one of the parts of speech; and that Communism abolishes the possessive pronoun. If there is really no such word as “my” or "yours" or “his,” it is apparent that we have come to a pretty queer place, as Nicholas Nickleby said.

> But we have come to a much queerer place when numbers, which are in the nature of things and not a human growth like language, can quite casually be thrown about or thrown away. The mind of a society must be in a strange state when it feels no surprise at the railway people shifting and shunting the idea of Two as they shift and shunt a railway carriage,

> G.K. Chesterton - WHERE ARE THE SECOND-CLASS RAILROAD CARRIAGES, May 29 1909

@Caleb there he is

@PeterTurner Quite cogent. Thanks for sharing. If @Caleb had a different Chesterton passage in mind then I'd love to hear that one too.

@Caleb If they're operating in such blatant bad faith then that might seal that I'm done with this place. How confident are you that they've been doing that sort of thing deliberately?

@PeterTurner I too would play all of those. Truth be told, Fiddler on the Roof is one of my favorite things in the entire world. Oddly, I've yet to read the short stories it's based on.

@PeterTurner Hilarious that the quote you found contains the word queer. Did you just search for "queer+pronoun"? Lol