boys as girls; girls as boys

Chasing random links, the things you run across...

Here's an interesting article on cross-gender play in online games, from the point of view of a female wondering... why is it that you don't see too much in the way of FtM cross-play?

[ addendum: As comments have pointed out, and as I realized myself, you do see FtM cross-play online. But nobody ever writes about it. It's scandalous to imagine that that elven gal might have a cock iRL but somehow it's cute when it turns out the burly he-man has a girl behind the keys... ]

More from the perspective of MMORPGs than the social/RP mucking I'm used to, and she only does it for a single day, but it's interesting. I mean, I can't imagine playing a male character any more, when given the choice. My initial reasons for genderbending online were mixed, and part of why I initially stuck with it, on the surface, was that it's just more "fun" to be female, socially - a grumpy guy gets kinda ignored, people try to raise a grumpy gal's spirits.

I'm not sure I agree with her conclusions (be sure to read the second half of it, where she looks over her day-o-man-gaming and compares with her two years of girl gaming on the same MMORPG), but... I dunno. Something to think about. I'm quite aware I'm currently in a space where I'll always prefer a female identity to a male one, because of the effort I'm going through to push that away from who I am; I kinda need to be damn sure I'm playing a role as a male character, and not backsliding.

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I've found myself disinterested in video games recently for a number of overlapping reasons - too broke to buy them, sameness in what's out there, my priorities changing at many levels as I change. But the site this is on is still kinda interesting to delve through; it's an attempt at some serious thinking about video and computer games...

a moment of nerdiness

Okay, there's this new 'quick comments' thing on LJ. If you like to use the user icons as part of the grammar of your replies, or if you semi-regularly reply from a secondary account, this is really annoying, because neither of these are options, and it means you have to wait for it to rehack the page, and then hit the 'more options' button. And there's no switch to turn it off, except for using a browser that simply doesn't support the Javascript hooks needed. Or turning off Javascript entirely. Or other similarly blunt-instrument solutions.

[ addendum: There are less... geeky... ways around it in the comments. Each has their own upside and downside. I added a filter to my chosen ad/popup/evilness blocker because it's what I already had running, and Privoxy works on MacOS, Linux, and Windows. Hopefully there will be a response to the suggestion that a switch be added. ]

( Here's a relatively precise, if super-geeky fix. )

[ Addendum 2: In other LJ feature news, the ability to export comments has been implemented; now it's the turn of the people who write clients to begin implementing this on their end. Wow, having a local, fully-searchable copy of every LJ entry I made, complete with comments will be rocking. ]


[ Next day: Here's an improved hack, to make 'quick reply' a new option after the normal 'reply to this' URL. Use this instead of 's/<a onclick='return quickreply\(.*\)' /<a /ig':

s/<a onclick='return quickreply\((.*)\)' (.*)>Reply to this/<a $2>Reply to this<\/a>\) \(<a onclick='return quickreply\($1\)' $2>Quick reply/ig

You'll now have the (Reply to this) replaced by (Reply to this) (Quick reply), with the first link acting the old way.

]