The headline is misleading. A vacant secondary property that is maintained but boarded up is not the same as a family’s primary residence, which “family home” implies. No one has become unhoused due to the demolition.
Doesn’t change anything about how messed up it is to demolish the wrong property, though.
One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
I subscribed to Dropout earlier this year after I exhausted the free episodes on their YouTube channel. Definitely a fan of GameChanger and Make Some Noise! I recently started watching Um, Actually as well. One of these days I’ll have to get into the DnD side of things; I know I’ll like them, it just feels like more of an undertaking to watch, you know?
Finished up a refreshingly boring week at work and this Sunday I will be traveling to Manhattan for employee training! I visited Manhattan last month and did all the classic NYC tourist stuff but I feel I missed out on the food side of NYC; the recommendations I got at the time were subpar. If anyone has tips for worthwhile food spots to check out nearish to Moynihan/Penn Station, lemme know!
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.
This is purely my own speculation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it is partly to do with the reasons that cis people get the same operations. If a cis teen gets breast cancer (which is rare but does happen), there needs to be a legal and medical process to authorize a mastectomy as soon as possible, since waiting will allow the cancer to spread. A cis teen with a genital injury won’t be physically harmed by waiting until adulthood to get reconstructive cosmetic surgery. Whatever authorization process that exists for these purposes is probably the baseline that processes for transition surgeries are built on.
Edit: typos
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn’t be half-bad, branding-wise.