for some reason in my (cursed? blessed?) sims game i am able to invite the grim reaper to parties, and now he regularly shows up even if i don’t invite him. he often brings ceviche. normal quality. he’s a decent party guest except for the fact that the only interaction you can have with him is to slow dance. naturally i made one of my sims slow dance with him, which gave him the notification ‘we have a lot in common! id love to get to know you better’. so anyway, a couple of days and parties later, it’s 6 am and my sim gets a phone call. it’s death. he wants to know if i want to go on a date.
naturally my sim accepts. death takes him to the school stadium in the rain and stands outside, unable to be interacted with, while a thought bubble containing my sim’s face pops up over his head for a simlish hour, over and over again, carrying a rainbow umbrella while my sim sits on the ground and considers the hollowness of life.
remembering that all i can do is slow dance with him, i drive him to moonlight point, where there’s a couch and a record player, and i slow dance with him for about 5 hours. every 2 seconds he steps on my sims’ foot, to the point where it was hard to get decent pictures of them actually slow dancing.
after a while my sim got hungry so i let him go drink some juice, and death went and started reading a book on a couch. i went and sat next to him, wondering if there would be any new interactions since you get different ones when you sit on a couch or bench, and lo and behold i discovered, not only can you slow dance with death, you can also cuddle with him. naturally i did so because the quality of dates is determined by the number of positive social interactions you have with someone, and slow dancing unfortunately doesn’t give you any of those, but cuddling does. anyway, once you start the cuddling animation, you get fancy new options like kiss and make out, so my sim spent the next six hours making out with death on a shitty couch at the beach in a thunderstorm while listening to sim!bastille.
after a couple dozen make out sessions, a single option appeared under the Romantic… heading: ‘take a romantic photo together’. this only shows up once you’re a romantic interest of someone. i have now successfully wooed death. knowing that selecting this option would make death stand up from the couch and i likely wouldn’t be able to get him to sit again, i decided to end the date at the tender hour of 3 am (i guess death doesn’t sleep) with a kiss. it takes a while- death can’t seem to figure out where to stand or how to walk around a foosball table- but eventually i get my picture.
but apparently death doesnt like having his picture taken.
i try to slow dance again with him, but the option has disappeared. i have committed an irreparable social faux pas. i sit on the couch again in the hopes that death will resume reading his book and i can cuddle with him again, but instead he stands in front of the bookshelf for an hour. i take a break, leaving my sim to his own devices for a while while i check in on my other sims, since one of them just went into labour. i deal with that. when i return, i find my sim drinking juice in silence with death still standing in front of the bookshelf, but he’s changed into this sick new outfit in the interim.
beekeeper chic. finally, at 6 am, death decides he’s had enough. he will never forgive me for my social blunder of taking a selfie while lipping at his shadowy veil. he opens up his rainbow umbrella and leaves.
the date doesn’t end until i get home. i receive no date notification. death doesn’t even deign to let me know how badly i fucked up. all i have to remember my 24 hour gay liaison with one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse is a single selfie. i hang it over my sims bed, a constant reminder to him that he has achieved ultimate goth status, and a warning to the others he dates: i have kissed death, and he never called me back.
I just heard my mom tell my brother, “when you die, you will go outside and garden until your father says you’re done” and it took me a second to realize that my brother was playing a videogame and this was not a theological discussion.
My mom is very proud that her misinterpreted words have been witnessed by the internet. My brother is disappointed that I didn’t post a picture with it so he could become a meme.
Wearing men’s deodorant and watching the straight girls I work with faces’ become Confused and Attracted because I smell like a Hot Guy™ (their words) is a bisexual power move and you can’t tell me otherwise.
Plus, for the first couple of days you also feel constantly Confused and Attracted and where is the Hot Guy™? And then you realize that the Hot Guy™ was you all along.
ok so there’s a game me and my friends play called “don’t get me started” and basically someone gives another person a random topic and they have to go on an angry rant about it and it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us at parties and car rides so I highly recommend playing sometimes with your friends
I love this idea. We used to do things like this in Improv.
Related game: “THINK ABOUT IT.” You’re given a random topic, and your job is to build it into an epic conspiracy theory, the crazier the better. You end your rant with a serious face and the command that your listeners “Think about it.”
Another related game: Illuninati. Similar to Think About It except you are given 2 completely different topics and you have to connect them to each other in a wild conspiracy rant
My boyfriend is trying to explain cricket to me again. “He’s only got two balls to make 48 runs”, he says. The camera focuses on a man. Underneath him it says LEFT ARM FAST MEDIUM. A ball flies into the stands and presumably fractures someone’s skull. “There’s a free six”, my boyfriend says. 348 SIXES says the screen. A child in the audience waves a sign referencing Weet-Bix
The first time he showed me this I assumed he was pranking me
if people haven’t been exposed to cricket before, here is the experience. The person who likes cricket turns on a radio with an air of happy expectation. “We’ll just catch up with the cricket,” they say.
An elderly British man with an accent – you can picture exactly what he looks like and what he is wearing, somehow, and you know that he will explain the important concept of Yorkshire to you at length if you make eye contact – is saying “And w’ four snickets t’ wicket, Umbleby dives under the covers and romps home for a sticky bicket.”
There is a deep and satisfied silence. Weather happens over the radio. This lasts for three minutes.
A gentle young gentleman with an Indian accent, whose perfect and beautiful clear voice makes him sound like a poet sipping from a cup of honeyed drink always, says mildly “Of course we cannot forget that when Pakistan last had the biscuit under the covers, they were thrown out of bed. In 1957, I believe.”
You mouth “what the fucking fuck.”
A morally ambiguous villain from a superhero movie says off-microphone, “Crumbs everywhere.”
Apparently continuing a previous conversation, the villain asks, “Do seagulls eat tacos?”
“I’m sure someone will tell us eventually,” the poet says. His voice is so beautiful that it should be familiar; he should be the only announcer on the radio, the only reader of audiobooks.
The villain says with sudden interest, “Oh, a leg over straight and under the covers, Peterson and Singh are rumping along with a straight fine leg and good pumping action. Thanks to his powerful thighs, Peterson is an excellent legspinner, apart from being rude on Twitter.”
The man from Yorkshire roars potently, like a bull seeing another bull. There might be words in his roar, but otherwise it is primal and sizzling.
“That isn’t straight,” the poet says. “It’s silly.”
“What the fucking fuck,” you say out loud at this point.
“Shh,” says the person who likes cricket. They listen, tensely. Something in the distance makes a very small “thwack,” like a baby dropping an egg.
“Was that a doosra or a googly?” the villain asks.
“IT’S A WRONG ‘UN,” roars the Yorkshireman in his wrath. A powerful insult has been offered. They begin to scuffle.
“With that double doozy, Crumpet is baffled for three turns, Agarwal is deep in the biscuit tin and Padgett has gone to the shops undercover,” the poet says quickly, to cover the action while his companions are busy. The villain is being throttled, in a friendly companionable way.
An intern apparently brings a message scrawled on a scrap of paper like a courier sprinting across a battlefield. “Reddy has rolled a nat 20,” the poet says with barely contained excitement. “Australia is both a continent and an island. But we’re running out of time!”
“Is that true?” You ask suddenly.
“Shh!” Says the person who likes cricket. “It’s a test match.”
“About Australia.”
“We won’t know THAT until the third DAY.”
A distant “pock” noise. The sound of thirty people saying “tsk,” sorrowfully.
“And the baby’s dropped the egg. Four legs over or we’re done for, as long as it doesn’t rain.”
The villain might be dead? You begin to find yourself emotionally invested.
There are mild distant cheers. “Oh, and with twelve sticky wickets t’ over and t’ seagull’s exploded,” the man from the North says as if all of his dreams have come true. “What a beautiful day.” Your person who likes cricket relaxes. It is tea break.
The villain, apparently alive, describes the best hat in the audience as “like a funnel made of dove-colored net, but backwards, with flies trapped in it.”
This is every bit as good as that time in Australia in 1975, they all agree, drinking their tea and eating home-made cakes sent in by the fans. The poet comments favorably on the icing and sugar-preserved violets. The Yorkshire man discourses on the nature of sponge. The villain clatters his cup too hard on his saucer. To cover his embarrassment, the poet begins scrolling through Twitter on his phone, reading aloud the best memes in his enchanting milky voice. Then, with joy, he reads an @ from an ornithologist at the University of Reading: seagulls do eat tacos! A reference is cited; the poet reads it aloud. Everyone cheers.
You are honestly – against your will – kind of into it! but also: weirdly enraged.
“Was that … it?” you ask, deeming it safe to interrupt.
“No,” says the person who likes cricket, “This is second tea break on the first day. We won’t know where we really are until lunch tomorrow.”
And – because you cannot stop them – you have to accept this; if cricket teaches you anything, it is this gentle and radical acceptance.
“Imagine knowing that every aspect of your physiology, from your height to your cup size, was chosen off a menu — not by nature but by doctors and family members.
From the second I was born, decisions were made by medical professionals about which of two gender categories my body should fit into. For me, surgery to remove my gonads as an infant was the first stop on the track to female — but the train didn’t stop there. My family was consulted about how 5 feet 8 inches seemed like an optimal height, and informed on how hormone levels and sequences could be measured to achieve just that. The ideal breast size for my frame was also discussed; I can still remember the male doctor nodding approvingly. I was also given a dilator before even hitting my teens, so my vagina would be ready for penetrative sex.
“Disconcerting” would be one — euphemistic — way to put it.
I was born intersex, with XY chromosomes but Complete Androgen Insensitivity. If you’re not sure what that means, I don’t blame you. By some estimates, almost 2 percent of the world’s population is intersex like me but is still living in the shadows because of societal stigma and shame. Stigma knows no borders, and neither did my body, apparently: I didn’t respond to androgen hormones in the womb, and thus stopped developing at a certain point — a point between what we consider to be the binary sexes, hence “intersex.” I was ultimately born with female anatomy on the outside but with internal testes instead of ovaries. As a result, doctors, alongside my parents, decided when I was still a baby that I would be raised as a girl. This decision has shaped the course of my entire life but was made without my consent.
I woke up Sunday morning to the news that the Trump administration is planning changes to federal civil rights laws that would define sex “as either male or female, unchangeable, and determined by the genitals a person is born with,” and that any confusion would be clarified through genetic testing. Most people have interpreted this effort as a blow to transgender rights — and it is. But amid all this, the fate of intersex people seems to have been forgotten.
Where would such a change leave me? My body would throw this Trumpian test for a loop — my naturally occurring genitalia don’t match the “correct” genetic code in this forced-binary paradigm that seeks to override biology.
Here’s another curveball: What Trump’s memo defines as “unchangeable” is anything but. I know this because the process of realizing a gender via hormones and surgeries, analogous to the process the administration is seeking to marginalize and discourage among trans people, is one imposed on intersex children all the time — but in our case, it’s done before we can understand or agree. It’s not just the government that is forcing an unnatural gender binary; medicine has been doing so for ages.
The gonadectomy surgery performed on my body was internal but opened the floodgates for a sequence of physical alterations that would affect my appearance and identity. Any subsequent decisions made about my body that involved me, at an age of informed consent, were constrained by this first choice: to render me traditionally female. Regardless of my liminal genetic code — or rather, regarding it as a threat to societal norms — the train to my idealized gender presentation had already left the station. Why were all these decisions fast-tracked onto my body? Not because they were medically necessary — I would have been perfectly healthy just living and growing as little old me — but because they were vital to “normalize” me.
The desire to force-fit people into societally conditioned boxes has led to sterilizing children and enacting medically unnecessary surgeries on them. These surgeries are irreversible, lead to physical and emotional scarring, and their subjects are un-consenting. They are, to put it bluntly, the coercive application of Western cultural ideals to everyday human bodies.
Now the Trump administration wants to make these ideals the official preferences of the state.
I’ve experienced firsthand the consequences of the gender binary in what’s often a non-binary world. It isn’t good for anyone. Certainly not trans people, but also not for a population that’s larger than many think — and that has spent years trying to convince people that our bodies are good enough as they are.
Even though the administration is calling for clearer lines, we can use this as an opportunity to explore the beauty of the blur. And while our current administration proactively works to enshrine a false binary in our laws, we too can take action and give agency to those whose bodies don’t adhere to it. Until this point, we’ve lived in a state of defense — fielding constant assaults on our existence. This is our opportunity to mount a strong and overdue offense, rooted in love and understanding. One day, maybe soon, they will give up the game of trying to erase us.”
callanswall 