Nerd is my Gender
What's yours?
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But will #Arkh be a good game?
A few people have expressed that “they don’t want a game to cater to their sexuality, but to be a good game.”
First, I should mention that the team is made up of gamers and developers. We’ve played games. A lot of them. We’ve done smaller scale hobby development in indie games, and we’re hiring people who are experienced in working on top-level shipped titles.
We ALSO want this want to be a good game. That is why we’re raising a six figure budget for this game. Does money guarantee goodness? No. But it helps. It helps a LOT.
While #Arkh does put the focus on new types of main characters, the story is not about marginalized identities in and of themselves. We’re not writing a yaoi manga, here, where the entire plot is about two gay people who are gay and then they gayed and by the way today is Gay Day and then they get gay married.
This story is also not about PoC living in some hood being kept down by the white man and singing old negro spirituals while raising their hands to the sky in their desire for freedom.
The gameplay isn’t about which dildo, or which binder, or which breast enhancer you can attack your enemies with.
Arkh is about a young deity who gets caught up in love and finds that not everyone is as happy with it as they are, much like in real life. Arkh is about someone who bites off more than they can chew, runs away from home and ends up stranded in some lifetime with only partial memories, who travels the cosmos to get them back and figure out what the hell their own original goal is. Arkh is about travel and adventure, seeing things you’ve never seen before, talking to people you’d never talk to otherwise, trying things you never tried before.
Arkh’s about seeing the stars and intergalactic travel to different fantasy lands, each with their own unique set of problems, problems that you have to help with to advance. Arkh is about building up, but repeatedly getting knocked back down and having to start over, having to make very difficult decisions between your items and your weapons and your money so you have enough to last you a level.
Arkh is about reincarnation. It’s about having different lives, having different friends, and experiencing life from every angle of the coin and every side of the die.
It’s about taking action even when people are being really annoying and getting in your way. It’s about having to pay attention to the way people see you to get by and get ahead. It’s about giving the player numerous options about what kind of fighter they want to be.
That said guys, the design for Arkh is not completed yet. We want to spend a lot of time going over it repeatedly to make it perfect. We would love to take ideas from other gamers on the play, but as a grassroots project, there will be limitations on certain parts because of the cost. But within that limit, we want to do the best damn game we can do, both in story, and in gameplay.
The game DOES feature PoC and queer people. But what the game IS? It’s a story about a deity who needs to reincarnate numerous times to avoid a pursuing enemy, to live something of a decent life. It’s about having multiple enemies, some of whom are your friends, and not knowing which to go after. It’s about trying to live even when there are unseen ghosts all around.
Please be patient. As we finalize more prior to beginning programming, more will be revealed. Arkh does have a complete lore behind it, the world is multi-dimensional. We’re looking into making new levels downloadable so that even when the the game ends, it’s not really over.
We’re going to do our damndest. We just ask that you keep supporting us even if it doesn’t seem perfect at first.
Reblogging this to make it easier to reference. It will now be searchable from the FAQ tag.
“The gameplay isn’t about which dildo, or which binder, or which breast enhancer you can attack your enemies with.”
I’m going to say RIGHT NOW that this ^ actually sounds like a pretty damn fantastic idea for a video game. I want to play a mario-style lesbian game. RIGHT NOW. Princess Peach? More like PRINCESS LICK MY PEACH…pit.
well if I ever learn how to use flash properly, i will make a cheapie flash game and put it on new grounds in which you’re some queer trans person and you have to decide which dildo, binder and breast implant you want to throw at the evil cis straight whites
Give me this thing that I may play it!
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“Slaves, obey your masters.” Colossians 3:22
What could be racefail about that verse? If you accompany it with an image of a black slave and then stick it in the middle of a neighborhood full of people of color, a lot. This is what happens when white people don’t bother checking their privilege, or even worse, don’t care to. As opposed to the intended reaction of “gee, maybe those atheists have a point, the Bible is full of bigotry”, what they got was this:
The billboard, which says “Slaves, obey your masters,” a quote from the Bible, was paid for by the groups American Atheists and Pennsylvania Nonbelievers. It went up Tuesday morning at 13th and Paxton streets in the Allison Hill neighborhood, the city’s most racially diverse section, angering some African-Americans, including clergy, legislators, the mayor and the president of the local NAACP branch.
“It’s offensive,” said Homer C. Floyd, who was director of the Human Relations Commission for 41 years. “They’re trying to ground it in the Bible, but I think it borders on a hate crime with the slave’s iron around his neck and tongs sticking out, with no clothes on the top half of his body.”
“It’s a disgrace and it’s very disrespectful to the black race,” said Steele, who’s from Mississippi. She said she never saw anything as racially offensive there.
Mayor Linda Thompson called the group Antichrists. “I’ll continue to pray for the atheists, that they may find Jesus Christ one day,” she said.
Douglas “Jake” Jacobsen, distinguished professor of church history at Messiah College in Grantham: “No one today believes they should own slaves because the Bible talks about slavery just as no one today believes the sun revolves around the Earth,” he said. “It’s sort of a wooden interpretation of the bible. It’s not an effective strategy for whatever they’re trying to do.”Ralph Robertson of Allison Hill: “Their opinion means nothing because they don’t see me as a brother in Christ,” he said. “You shouldn’t call yourself an atheist. You should call yourself a racist.”And how do I know that this wasn’t even a simple mistake?
The groups knew the billboard would be offensive, said Ernest Perce V, who designed it.
As of yet, there are no intents to take the billboard down, though a representative of the group (in a private conversation on Facebook) has indicated that he’d prefer to see it go back up without the image. That unfortunately is in American Atheists’ control, not the local group’s.
Edit: An eyewitness reports on FB that “Lamar has replaced the torn billboard with some other billboard at this point.”
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What Not to Say to Radical Atheists/Humanists of Color
- We are all Africans—so don’t you (people) know that race is just a social construct
- I don’t see color
- How do “we” diversify the “movement”
- I don’t understand why black people identify with the religion of the oppressor
- There are no legal barriers to equality anymore
- “We” still have a lot to do on “race” but “we” are mostly anti-racist
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It’s not marginalized people’s responsibility to make everything sound nice for ignorant, insulting privileged jerks. Anger can be, you know, justified.
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Neither Black Man Nor Black Woman: Living On The Outside
Toi talks about being black and genderqueer. An excellent opportunity for white and/or binary-gender people to shut up and listen, and for non-binary people of color to join in raising their voices.
And skating the ice between the two genders seems like it will get me in trouble in some spaces as well. The trans men want to know why I still have breasts, why I don’t take hormones, why am I so *gulp* feminine looking. Why do I still identify with women of color, healing women?
The feminists want to know why I pack, why I bind, why I consider myself (or is it, let myself be considered) masculine of center. The men want to know why I even hang out with the women when I am so obviously one of them (male). Why I don’t buy into (some) of their hypermasculinity. Why I don’t like talking nonsense about women and flaunting privilege.
I am an outsider to them, too, because I can identify with women’s plight intuitively and in a way that they can’t. I know why their girlfriends, wives, sisters are feeling what they are feeling. But this goes both ways because I have always understood men’s thinking patterns (no matter how irrational it may seem to women at times) and while women have appreciated that I can do this it has really put me on the outskirts when I myself do not possess the same ways of communicating and thought patterns and “socializing tendencies” of a woman. I just can’t go there. I don’t get it, if you will. And it’s not about me trying to be a man. It’s just how I am and how I think, act.
I am not completely any of them. I am not LGBT, I am not a woman, I am not a man. I flirted with the idea of being bigendered but then there goes that whole gender binary again. Agendered? Meh. Andro? But I’m masculine of center. I see myself on the interior as a boi.
Basically there is no label for who I am…except Toi. And maybe I feel guilty for being this unlabeled entity that moves through these circles with my fluidity.
I really want to quote the entire thing, but I won’t, so go read the rest here: http://www.racialicious.com/2012/03/19/neither-black-man-nor-black-woman-living-on-the-outside/
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Interactions of Latina Transgender Women with Law Enforcement
At the intersection of being a woman, trans, and Latina in Los Angeles County:
Drawing on information provided by over 200 Latina transgender women living in Los Angeles County, findings of the report indicate staggering amounts of harassment, abuse, neglect, and targeted profiling on the part of law enforcement. According to the report, two-thirds of the transgender women surveyed experienced some form of verbal abuse from law enforcement, while 21% experienced physical assault and 24% experienced sexual assault. Of those who attempted to report such misconduct by the police, two-thirds said their report had been handled “poorly” or “very poorly.”
Among Latina transgender women who had been jailed, 30% said they were verbally assaulted by other inmates, 11% said they were physically assaulted, and 10%said they were sexually assaulted. After reporting these incidents of mistreatment by fellow inmates, 70% of transgender women reported that law enforcement either responded negatively or did not respond to the incident at all.
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What is White Nationalism?
White nationalist, white supremacist, white separatist - these phrases get tossed around a lot, but what do they mean?
- White nationalism is a political ideology which advocates a racial definition of national identity for white people.
- White separatists seek a separate white nation state.
- White supremacists add ideas from social Darwinism and National Socialism to their separatist ideology.
So, if you’re USAmerican, even if you think that the USA is a “melting pot”, but you also are concerned that more babies of color are being born than white babies in the USA, you probably are a white nationalist. -
Cis-splainin’:
Transgender\transsexual activism is something I have been engaged in for more than fifteen years, I don’t believe that the Latino or black trans community experiences any more or less discrimination and violence than any other group of transgendered individuals in this country, or worldwide for that matter. Currently nearly half of all transgender individuals will have been murdered or commit suicide by age thirty because of that violence, discrimination and social rejection. Although I think GLAAD is a good organization that has made huge strides for the LGBT community, I often find their studies and reports to be a little too skewed. Transgenderism and Transexualism is the least understood topic by most people because of it’s complexity. Right now I think it’s best that Activism should focus on making the topic simple to understand and reasonable for most people to understand. Right now splitting up the transgender community into smaller groups and claiming one group is more deserving of attention to another subgroup or the whole is counterproductive towards the end goal of acceptance. La. has made strides and is one of the few police departments in the country teaching it’s officers to treat transgender individuals with dignity and teaching them to treat trans people as the gender they perceive themselves as and not what it says on their drivers license. Furthermore they have just opened up a wing of a local jail there just for transgender individuals so as to keep them out of general population and harms way, that’s a lot more than all of the other major cities in this country have done. Gays and Lesbians are far from gaining full social acceptance right now and are still being denied rights, it’s going to be a long time before transgender rights are going to be addressed, it’s best that the transgender community remain unified at this point so that those rights can be attained sooner.Apparently reality is determined by beliefs now. -
If there were a magazine called “Ivory” for white culture
…what would you put in it, seriously?
Genderqueer with a touch of happy humanism.
