u/chaucer345

All power comes from the capacity of those with power to hurt those without it.

For a brief moment in history, some people with power were restricted from doing whatever horrible thing struck their fancy, but that moment is over. The monsters learned how to play the game better and have dodged all accountability.

They are too entrenched in their positions with their machine eyes and propaganda networks now, so that moment of hope where the common people who care for others had a say in their fates will never come back.

This is an attempt to determine if astroturfing has taken place in support of this rule. They make a strong argument that it has.

You, bigots reading this, is this really what you want? For a woman who wouldn't hurt a fly to be humiliated as she tries to go on a god damned business trip?

For someone who no one would ever know was trans to have her private medical history outed because you just can't fucking deal with someone like her existing?

How do you fucking sleep at night?

I despise my height, my male bone structure, all of the things people say give me an insurmountable athletic advantage over cis women are things I absolutely fucking despise and never would have chosen.

Seriously, hearing them talk about how disqualifying all that stuff is feels like people in a social club for virgins rejecting me for having been raped.

I didn't choose this.

So, this is one of those things where I find myself being a bit of a lazy rebel. Shaving your legs and underarms is one of those things that was basically just brought to us by advertising firms trying to sell shaving supplies, so I don't really do it. Especially because it's a lot of work and I get ingrown hairs easily.

And yet, when it gets really hot, sometimes I'll shave my legs so I can wear shorts without showing off hair in public. Even though it's perfectly normal to have hair there and I recognize it's all just some BS marketing stuff that changed the beauty standards in the 1910s I still feel like I'll be judged if I show it off and find myself wearing leggings more often because of it.

I don't know, how do you folks handle the stress?

Like scientific racists before them, scientific transphobes take papers with small effect sizes and low-quality evidence that say trans people are bad or wrong in some way and just beat you over the head with it them

The trouble is, I was in the research world for a bit, and I still try my best to question my assumptions and preconceptions all the time when approaching new papers and data. Which is a double-edged sword when dealing with "scientists" who's goal is to exclude trans people from life.

Sometimes they'll give me a paper that says trans people have a higher incarceration rate than cis women (explainable by enforcement and poverty), or a higher than the general populations suicide rate even after transition (explainable by discrimination and trauma), or that we just exploded onto the scene relatively recently (explainable by legal victories, better knowledge of our healthcare and the growing panopticon making it harder to hide your past) and I just don't know how to respond to their bad faith interpretations that say we're some sort of inherently violent aggressively recruiting cult of lunatics pretending that HRT helps us when really it does nothing.

They're determined to see us in the worst possible light. I get that. But they are very good at twisting data to support their narrative. And it creeps me out when they claim I do the same. Because I really want what I say to be as accurate as possible and cite sources that hold up to scrutiny and when they tell me that my data isn't good enough no matter what I do I just feel miserable.

I fear my own biases too much, and do not sufficiently weigh theirs when speaking with them.

It keeps coming up and I hate it. I miss being in the Overton Window.

I'm looking for recommendations. Comedy and RPG podcasts especially.

A 16-year-old trans kid died from suicide. Pretty obviously because of how trans kids are treated in this country.

So, this is a weird, but important distinction that I feel doesn't get picked up on in the source books very much. And it makes sense that the terms "Bound" and "Sin Eater" are used so interchangeably given it's the default role of the player characters in a Geist chronicle, but... the term Sin Eater is kind of distinct as far as I can tell.

A person who dies and gets resurrected by a Geist is a Bound.

A Sin Eater on the other hand is a Bound who goes out of their way to help the undead and grief stricken community around them.

The average ghost who knows what a Bound is isn't going to assume the average bound is a community organizer here to help them out for nothing. In fact, the Geist core book shows ghosts frequently distrust the Bound. And that makes a lot of sense because it also talks about Bound who are isolationist assholes or trying to profit off the dead. The core book generally makes it clear that being a Bound like that is very much not the same thing as being a Sin Eater.

In fact, if I was a ghost in that universe and some random Bound walked up to me and told me they were a Sin Eater I would be extremely suspicious of them. Sin Eater is something between a Rebel, a Healer and an Action Hero to the Underworld community and any ghost who's been around the block is probably going to wonder what someone calling themselves a Sin Eater is trying to sell.

For that reason, it probably doesn't make sense for your Geist character to introduce themselves a Sin Eater very often. And a ghost honestly calling them a Sin Eater for helping them out should really be a moment with weight.

Just my two cents.

Ceremonies, for the uninitiated are magic spells literally anyone can learn (The Man just doesn't want you to). Any Chronicles splat or mortal can pick them up and some of them are really cool.

Here's a few of my favorites:

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Skeleton Key (••)
Locked doors can’t keep death out, and they’re no better at keeping out the holder of a Skeleton Key.

Subject: One key

Duration: Permanent

Symbols: A key whose lock no longer exists. Purified water and mercury. A VHS copy of 1961’s The Cat Burglar.

Rituals: Soak the key under the dark of a new moon. Dip black thread in your own blood and wind it along the length of the key, then wait for the blood to clot and harden. Leave the key to bask in the light of the climax of the movie, projected on Charles Peace’s gravestone.

Dice Pool: Resolve + Investigation

Success: The key opens the first lock it’s used on, even if the key shouldn’t fit the lock — it will even open electronic locks. The magic is permanent: Until it’s destroyed, the Skeleton Key will always open the lock in question. Attempts to make copies of the key automatically fail, due to mechanical errors or similar mishaps.

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This one takes a while to perform, but with prep time your heist or even (I would rule) grand theft auto got a lot easier with this 4 XP

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Maggot Homunculus (••••)
Temporarily summon a ghost, even from the Underworld, and give it something approximating a physical form. Reapers really don’t like this Ceremony, but since it temporarily creates a new Anchor, they technically can’t do anything about it. Technically.

Subject: One ghost, who may be in a different world from the ritualist.

Duration: Scene

Symbols: Blood, sweet bread, or liquor for the dead. Meat and honey — a whole lamb carcass that a swarm of bees has made a hive in is best, but a lot of steak and a plastic bear will do in a pinch. A protective circle drawn in 11 colored powders, representing the Rivers of the Underworld. The target ghost’s jawbone.

Ritual: Place the meat and honey in the circle and sing a hymn in Attic Greek. Fill a trench with blood, rum, and gunpowder and perform an ecstatic dance, leaping over the trench again and again.

Dice Pool: Presence + Occult (vs. Resistance + Rank if the ghost is unwilling to be called)

Success: Maggots boil up from the ground, swarming into a roughly humanoid shape. The subject ghost is drawn from wherever it may be to inhabit the maggot homunculus (treat this as though the ghost used the Materialize Manifestation). When the Ceremony ends, the ghost returns to wherever it was summoned from.

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Do I even have to explain why this is cool? It's an excuse to give your necromancer some truly ludicrous and disgusting muscle and the PCs who use it have an easy out for calling up dead anyone.

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Extended Checkout (•)
16 Centuries of witch-hunting has sent untold volumes to the pyre, cures and theories to the embers. The Librarians of Salem, inspired by their hometown’s history of communal panic, defend the texts they find from the fires of hunters and the ravages of time alike.

Subject: An item up to size 5, or a location that has the Boneyard Condition (Geist: The Sin-Eaters, p. 305).

Duration: Permanent.

Symbols: Destruction, purification, the North Star, nails

Rituals: Stick a nail in the item or location and bathe it in pure water, then burn an item of equal Availability above it, praying to the North Star for permanence.

Dice Pool: Resolve + Crafts

Success: Once the item has lost all of its Structure, it becomes a Rank 2 Castoff.
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Castoffs are ghostly objects for the record. This ritual is how you either build yourself an underworld doom fortress in twilight, bribe a ghost by murdering a cheeseburger for them, or give your friend missing an arm a ghost gun to wield with their phantom limb.

...

Those are my favorites. What are yours?

I run into this a lot. Sometimes I'm glad my mom beat me a few times because it feels like all of the other stuff flies over their heads.

Like, listen to this shit:

My mom was a devout existentialist so when I told her I was trans she asked probing dehumanizing questions about how I could even have a gender identity or any form of identity.

She stabbed a horse she was angry with. Then she wrote a short story about her stabbing me that she had me proofread before she submitted it to a magazine for publication. It was rejected, but she did self-publish a book about me getting forcibly drugged by the school system, which she also had me proofread.

She told me that I must never get too close to our parrot because, while she loved the parrot, she said if I lost an eye to the parrot, she would be forced to murder him in retaliation.

I finally stopped talking to her when she called me to ask about another story she was writing, then at the end of the phone call promised to explain to me why she was no longer inviting my brother to Thanksgiving next proofreading session. When I finished the proofreading and called her again, she bragged about using that emotional conflict to manipulate me into providing her with proofreading feedback more quickly.

You see how this is too weird for most trauma survivors to relate to?

Pros:

1. You would learn magic ghost powers
2. You would potentially be able to find lost loved ones
3. You would have a community that would have your back
4. You would be able to find magic items and treasures from the underworld

Cons:

1. You would have a community that would expect you to pitch in
2. You would make yourself a target for a lot of things

-Reapers

-Asshole Ghosts

-Solo Necromancers who don't know what they're doing

-A well funded Secret Society called the Council of Bones

What do you think? Would it be worth it to you personally?

So, a lot of US prisons have been implementing a policy of taking away trans people's HRT and forcibly detransitioning them.

There are two options here for why people would support this.

Either you think, in spite of the current medical consensus, that transition is not crucial for trans people's mental health and that your brand of conversion therapy is going to work when there is no known way to make that happen.

OR

You know it will hurt trans prisoners a lot, but you want to inflict cruel and unusual punishment on them.

There is a subcategory of that where you think all prisoners deserve to die rather than cost you any money so they should be deprived of all of their basic needs.

That's it. Medical experimentation or torture. Nothing else.