u/AmericanEd

I want to start this off by saying that I absolutely do not mean to direct this at people who need to be stealth in order to be physically safe. If this is the case, feel free to ignore.

Otherwise:

As someone who was stealth, but now is not, I want to give you all one very serious piece of advice that you should consider.

If there are people in your life that would treat you differently and not respect you if they knew you were trans, those people should not be a part of your life. If you need to do a certain kind of “performance” for somebody to like you, then that person just doesn’t really like you. Real friendships and relationships are built on accepting people for who they really are. If you don’t realize this, you will eventually become completely burnt out and miserable. Ultimately, I realized that I would rather have five close friends for whom I do not need to put on any kind of performance for, and can be completely myself around, than have 50 friends who I need to constantly “perform“ in order to have them like me. Being stealth is cutting off your nose, to spite your face (to me at least)…. And then I moved to New York City and have 50 friends who actually do like the real me lol

I know that there are a lot of younger people on this sub (under 21). I know that it can seem like being popular in high school and college is the most important thing in the world. As someone that was very “popular“ in high school and college, I can 100% assure you that it is not. Honestly, trying to maintain that “status“ set me back a huge amount in my actual adult life. Most of the “popular” and “cool“ people, from high school and college, literally peaked in high school and college! They proceed to spend the rest of their lives reminiscing on their “glory days” as a teen and young adult and it is genuinely the most pathetic thing to see, as an adult.

There is, unfortunately, quite a fine line between self actualization (wonderful and positive) and pretending to be someone that you’re not (self destructive and immensely negative). Love yourself or no one else will.

Edit: the fact that this innocuous piece of advice elicited such extreme hostility tells me that it was sincerely needed. If someone here is just starting their medical transition, or their transition generally, I wish you all the best!

So I’ve been playing Skyrim for the first time in five years. I was deeply involved in the mod scene of Skyrim, before special edition came out, both in terms of using and creating mods. Coming back to the game after a long absence, I’ve built my load order around mostly visual mods (community shaders is a work of absolute genius that deserves an indescribable amount of praise) but I have also installed mods that tweak the content added in anniversary edition like AEGIS, Tamrielic distribution etc.

HOWEVER, I also installed ordinator, wildcat, Odin, and those related series of mods. In the past, I was skeptical of these sorts of overhaul mods besides maybe better vampires (this time I’m giving sacrosanct a try). But, I have run into some snags. Some of the quests in the base game, specifically ones that require you to “brawl” such as “Hired Muscle” (an early quest with the companions) have become virtually impossible to complete while on legendary difficulty!

Basically, I am wondering if this is a known issue with combat mods or if I did something potentially wrong in modding the game that is making this unusually difficult. Similarly are there better or alternative mods that I might wanna try instead of these that still maintain the sort of “improved vanilla” experience of the game. I’m 90% sure this isn’t a mistake in my load order or something like that, but just a natural result of some of these overhaul mods.

I’m also open to any mods that you think would improve this sort of improved vanilla experience. My experience in the past is that vanilla Skyrim becomes increasingly easy as time goes on, and it feels as if the game was not built for people to complete a high percentage of the game, including the DLC’s.

P.S. thank you from the bottom of my heart, as one of the few women deeply involved in the Skyrim modding scene, for keeping this game alive and creating such incredible works that seemed almost impossible 10 years ago.

EDIT: Sorry if I inadvertently insulted anyone, that was not my intent, but im getting a lot of downvotes