Furi Review

Boss

If I were to describe Furi to someone simply, I'd probably say it's a very tough boss fighting game with bullet hell thrown in. Yet that doesn't properly convey what makes it unique, especially given that it easily is a sum of parts of different popular games - Shadow of the Colossus, No More Heroes, and Bayonetta to name a few. Furi gets the boss fights and obscure story from SotC, a proper sense of style and boss personalities from NMH, and the easy in theory but tough in practice gameplay from Bayonetta. Regardless of easy comparisons, it manages to stand on its own and be a game worth thinking about once you're done with it…if you ever finish it.

From when you fight the first boss, The Chain, all you know about your purpose is that you are a prisoner, and you must defeat a series of jailers in order to gain your freedom. As the player, you don't even learn the name of the character you're controlling (it's not Furi), or the person aiding you in your escape, oddly garbed in purple skater pants and the top half of a costume rabbit's head. The Chain, who's title you learn from the trophy you earn for defeating him, acts as a tutorial for your limited tool set.

You have a four-chain sword combo, the ability to do a charged sword attack, a chargeable dodge move, a laser gun with a charge shot, and a parry move, which can reflect energy attacks, restore health when successful against melee attacks, and occasionally leave the boss open when timed perfectly. No matter how far you get in the game, these will be your moves for the entirety of it, but you'll need all of them to survive without exception.

Shortly before fighting the fifth boss, The Hand, you're told that he and a hundred of his men took you down to imprison you. But there's something I find a little unbelievable about that. The bosses, on top of melee combos, execute a lot of energy based attacks — charged shots, wave rings, thick crescent waves, massive targeted lasers, etc. Furthermore, their last lives, for the most part, comprise of them freaking out by filling the screen with tough-to-dodge bullet hells while remaining invincible. It would be nice, given that you are supposed to be so formidable, if you could do anything similar. I'm making a small complaint there, sure, but you'll be impressed with what your foes can do that you can't while they insist they cannot let you leave their confines.

Still, it's a lot of fun to learn the strategy for taking down each boss, even if it's only by the skin of your teeth. Unlike the aforementioned Shadow of the Colossus, each boss fight is separated into lives of sorts. With some variation for each character, lives can involve a distance round, where you mostly shoot and dodge projectiles with a few openings for your four-hit combo, and a close-quarters round, where you have a lot less space to dodge melee combos and area-of-effect attacks. You, personally, have three lives. If you lose one, you must start from the beginning of whichever boss life you were on. If they lose one, you gain one back. Thus, for a seven-life boss, for example, you could technically "die" eight times and still be able to defeat them, though I wouldn't recommend it.

I really enjoyed this system, particularly because I've never seen it before, and also because it turns each boss into a chapter of their own. Between each, you walk what the game calls a Path. The only thing you can do is walk while your accomplice talks at you about your foes and your prison, slowly eking out a story in parcels. Controlling your character during these Paths can be a little wonky as the fixed camera shifts as you cross certain markers, but this is made easier by the auto-walk feature attached to the X button. For real, you can push X to meander to the next enemy.

Anyway, these Paths manage to set up their beautifully designed environments while also staging the essence of your feud with whomever is next to be felled. But the multi-level facet of each battle really drives home the desperation each enemy feels towards stopping you. Commonly, boss battles in games serve as short tests of your skills but boil down to figuring out the one or two patterns and exploiting them. They are memorable on their own, of course, but unless you've interacted with the boss before that point, they serve as fairly meaningless obstructions to your progression.

Furi, on the other hand, gives you time to form a relationship, however adversarial, as they taunt you and demonstrate just how many patterns they've devoted to ending you. So that last life, where they go all out, becomes, in a way, the real boss battle because you are trying to survive a gamified distillation of their anger, fear, hatred, sadness, and in one case, elation. This elevates the experience above the trope of the cautiously dismantled robot. Your fight becomes a war, and it gains meaning that would otherwise be lost in a one-off challenge of "Find the Opening."

That said, this approach makes Furi absurdly challenging on its default difficulty, Furi, for someone like me. Unless you're particularly good at adapting to games, which require as good defense as offense, you will perish a lot and often before you even see your foe's third life or beyond. I spent the better part of two week's worth of evenings on the seventh boss, The Burst, if that's any indicator. Also, later bosses force you to change your approach in ways that will make you regret not thinking of doing so for early bosses. So many needless deaths.

Each fight requires that you stay on your toes continuously, and when it becomes a struggle, your heart may pound through your chest just by making it to the second round of a life. Killing your enemy is always immensely satisfying, a great marker of your improved skill, but the amount of defeat you suffer on your way may feel empty. Plus, defense can be so timing-reliant that you'll be entirely unsure if your mistakes are your fault or not.

Accessibility is also a major concern. Though I rarely comment on that aspect of a game, I eventually found my hands contorting in ways that would be unimaginable to physically handicapped players. First, the controls, at least on the PS4, cannot be customized. Next, as I said before, the default difficulty, which is the lowest that you can earn trophies on, requires a near-constant state of alertness and quick reflexes that may also prove to be a challenge.

And last, the final boss, The Star, requires that you shift your hands on the control so that your right thumb is constantly pushing on the right thumbstick (to shoot projectiles) while the remaining four fingers can tap Square, X, or Circle more like a keyboard. Otherwise, you can leave yourself open to projectile attacks while you move your thumb, or you'll have to press the face buttons uncomfortably with a curved index finger. This control scheme actually comes in handy for earlier bosses, but it obviously requires a range of motion that is not available to a certain sector of gamers. Luckily, while there's no colorblind mode, projectiles are brighter than their backgrounds and are visually distinct, and enemies have easily identifiable visual cues before executing melee moves.



Those visuals are vibrant and exciting, which should come as no surprise from the Afro Samurai creator, Takashi Okazaki, a surprising addition to an otherwise all-French team at Game Bakers. And the music — forgive me but OMFG is it good. The soundtrack is replete with super hard trance music that'll really work your subwoofer. In-game, it is procedurally played as you progress in each fight, but it's an engrossing treat on your MP3 player, too. If I may be so bold, it's easily the best video game soundtrack I've listened to since both Journey and Papo & Yo of 2012 despite the obvious stylistic departures from either. I cannot stop listening to it on repeat.

Quick digression: I'll need to spoil a few aspects of the story to properly dissect it for this review.

The story is honestly quite intriguing and tough to grasp entirely with only one play through, but it suffers some pitfalls. As I take it, you are, to put it softly, a foreigner who actually poses a humongous threat to the people of this land. You were caught and imprisoned in this series of floating prisons with jailers, each of whom has either volunteered or been forced to be there. The man who freed you, The Voice, has his own story and motives for being in jail and helping you escape, but one goal is to turn you, convince you not to finish your plan. So you're actually a bad guy who, via the story, will be given a few opportunities to be better. I mean, you do have to kill at least nine people to get there.

In terms of execution, I like the bits of plot you learn during the Path sections as told by The Voice. However, because of the intense focus you'll devote to defeating your enemies, some of whom may require days depending on your skill level, it's very easy to lose track of the story. By the time I reached the end, I understood about as much, maybe more, as I vaguely wrote in the previous paragraph, but all the intricacies and nuance to the story beyond that were lost. I ended up watching a developer play through on YouTube to fully understand what I witnessed.

To Furi's credit, it's obviously meant to be replayed. When you defeat the final boss, you're given a grade based on the amount of time you took, the amount of lives you lost, and the number of hits you took over the course of the entire game. Also, defeating each boss opens them up in Practice mode so you can try to hone your skills for the next round. Improving your rating for each, in any game mode, will reveal developer artwork explaining their designs, another reason to keep playing, which I'm currently doing. Finishing the game also unlocks a Speedrun mode and the Furier difficulty if you, I assume, hate yourself. Although I lost track of the hours I poured into just finishing Furi once, the fact is that you can, with sharper strategies, beat it in two hours or less.

The game also features multiple endings, one of which is worth discussing and criticizing here. Halfway through the game, the sixth boss, The Song, offers you the opportunity to live out your remaining years in something of a floating garden haven. You can reject her offer by proceeding to the exit platform, which flips her kindness into fury. To accept, though, you need only stay still for a few minutes.

Having seen the ending, her plan to stop you is blatantly foolhardy. Although you, the player, would not know any better at that point, the threat your people posed to these people is not necessarily diminished by you being in prison, only delayed. (Actually, one of the bosses proves this point — he is one of your brethren who was also caught.) But taken as it is, in ignorant bliss, The Song's offer reinforces a rather bum treatment the women get in this game.

Furi features four female bosses — The Strap, The Song, The Burst, and The Beat, which is almost half if you exclude the genderless final boss. That's great in terms of numbers, but breaking their characters down further reveals other problems. The Strap is a bound psychotic prisoner whose breasts are free and accented and whose outfit is basically flesh colored. When released from her confines, she basically crawls around like an animal or a demon from The Grudge. The Beat is easily the weakest boss and employs almost no physical attacks herself, basically begging you to stop as you kill her. And The Song fulfills a feminine trope of appearing as an Angel of Mercy/Death in battle. Thankfully, I've nothing ill to say of The Burst, who is portrayed as every bit as deadly as her male counterparts with just a flair of extra allure.

Back to The Song, when she pleads with you, she states, "I will take care of you." But when you do accept her offer, she explicitly states, "I will be yours," after a clearly doting grasp of your wrist. Although I appreciate that Furi offers a sort of non-violent way out of completing your deadly campaign, that someone as powerful as The Song is written to be given to her prisoner with an obvious suggestion of sexual servitude undermines her character's strength entirely. It is just not a believable setup for someone as capable as she, and it turns her into a commodity for no clear reason. I'm sure there could've been a way to offer the player character a life of happiness and wealth in that garden that did not include indentured sex, and it would've also eschewed an unfortunate display of heteronormativity and cissexism on the part of the developers. (Your character skews male-presenting via signifiers, but their gender and sexual identity are otherwise unknown.)

All told, despite the frustration it cost me and some cringe-worthy aspects to the story, one of which is technically wholly avoidable, Furi is an excellent, challenging game. Its appeal, for a number of reasons, can really only extend so far, but as something quite niche, I think it could easily be used as a gameplay reference for years to come. I look forward to whatever else it inspires. Regardless of whether or not you choose to buy the game, please buy the soundtrack.

Headlander Review

*head-related pun*

I imagine that I have a different relationship with Double Fine than others do. I never played Grim Fandango or Day of the Tentacle as a child despite my love of adventure games. And regardless of the serious fandom surrounding it, I've also never touched Psychonauts. I have played Stacking and The Cave, the former I won from a Game Informer contest and the latter was a free download on Playstation Plus at some point. And I enjoyed both of them. The game I did pay for, enough to get my name in the credits, was Broken Age, which started well but ended poorly. So it was with a reserved fascination that I found myself taking advantage of a code for Headlander, sent to me by the publisher, Adult Swim Games, unsolicited.

Headlander takes place in a retro-futuristic setting where the universe is no longer populated by humans but rather by semi-conscious robots. You, the player, are a head. Where your disembodied head came from or why it has been detached is left for the final act — your whole being is contained in a remarkably utilitarian helmet. Awakened on The Starcophagus as it is falling apart, you make a hasty escape towards adventure while learning what your helmet has to offer. Initially, your only defensive ability, though a good one, is vacuuming the heads off of robots and assuming control of their bodies. And this is the basis of the gameplay.

As you progress, you gain other abilities, of course. As just a floating head, you can eventually form a shield to reflect lasers, charge into robots to behead or destroy them, and even slow down time. Attached to a body, you can transfer your regenerative healing abilities, enhance melee strength, turn bodies into bombs, and more. The bodies of ordinary denizens, however you'd interpret that in this setting, don't do anything special and are rather fragile, though pressing the button for melee will make them dance. (There's an achievement for seeing all of these, and they are all wonderful.) Instead, your goal is to inhabit the soldiers of various colors and utilize their laser guns to attack, defend, and progress.

It's just so retro and beautiful.

The massive space station you land on after the tutorial is explored much like any Metroidvania-style game. As you gain access to new abilities by finding upgrades hidden about or by possessing higher-echelon colors on the ROYGBV scale, more paths open up. The soldiers can only open doors of their colors or below, as determined by a sassy security system by the name of ROOD, and they can do so by walking in front of them or shooting their colored lasers at the doors. These lasers reflect and bounce around, characteristics you must take note of, and as you make your way through the game's ten-hour campaign, shootouts with other robots become almost nonsensical as bright line segments fill the screen in criss-crossed chaos.

Throughout my time with the game, these shootouts never got particularly good, though. Although I enjoyed finding soldiers with more useful guns, some shooting three or four lasers at once and in different angles, sitting there and trying to shoot an onslaught of enemies felt tiresome. Shooting from the hip felt careless, especially since the most efficient way to finish an enemy is to behead them, but the time it can take to use the aim assist mode from behind cover somehow dampens the immediacy of the situation. Instead, upgrading my vacuuming and shield abilities proved to be the most useful, often finishing off a room by flying from robot to robot with my Hoover on high. During times when I needed to stay connected to a particular body, I would often leave it in a corner while the tiny head did all the work. Obviously, this makes Headlander seem to lend itself to anyone's style of play, but I personally cannot imagine anyone wanting to waste time with guns. Sucking heads off is honestly more fun, and it can be amusing to watch your opponents try to resist.

Attention to detail: vacuum robot porn poster.

Reservations about the combat aside, prevalent as it is, traveling about the environments is a treat for a myriad of reasons. Mainly, the visuals are just delicious. Not only has much care been poured into maintaining a cohesive style, reminiscent of sci-fi movies and TV shows from the 70's, but little details are abound. Almost every room is littered in logos, pictures, decorations, and furniture in a diorama-style presentation, making each seem like a nostalgic collector's fantasy dollhouse. But it's not just about looks. Shag carpet crumples under your feet as you trample it, ordinary citizens make varying comments as you pass them, and there are computer terminals with no purpose but to amuse you upon interaction. Put simply, the world of Headlander has occasional brushes with realism when its labyrinthine maps hint at a plausible ecosystem, greater fiction notwithstanding. Much like Remember Me, rooms often felt like they served some purpose, and the game offers many reasons to stop moving and bask in the goings-on.

The story feels like a swing and a miss, exacerbated by a vacuous couple of acts at the end, where you're left to explore aimlessly across a huge section of map. The underpinnings of the story relate to the aforementioned semi-consciousness of the robots. Humanity is apparently long dead thanks to a dictatorial supercomputer, Methuselah, and your actions predictably act in opposition to it, even aiding in outright rebellion. Taken lightly, the whole idea of liberating the free will of the people because you're So Darned Special™ is facile and done to death. But more seriously, your existence as the only human, albeit just a head, and free-thinking being in a world of robots waiting for your help kinda sorta reeks of common colonialist and imperialist undertones we find in much of Western fiction. That you are eventually required to aid a faction of robots who have already developed free will somehow, beret-wearing feminists really, but just cannot overcome their oppressor adds that extra shake of spice to the formula. It's mundane.

Seriously, look at all this!

Delving into the sub-story, that of your head's identity and origins, there's still much to be desired. The explanations given for who you are and why you were even resuscitated are shaky at best, and you are not properly given much payoff on your quest. Ultimately, your struggle is inherently tied to the greater fight, that of defeating Methuselah, while your personal tale takes an unfortunate backseat. Even in an often humorous story like this one, I felt there were matters of identity and purpose that should have been addressed in such a manner that one could feel a spiritual victory over the present circumstances. Coupled with the post-finale world — that is, after you've defeated the final boss — being roughly the same save for a few thankful robots, your quest feels fruitless and worthless.

Thank goodness for the work put into the environment! Headlander is authentically a delightful game to play if only for the joy of discovery it facilitates. While combat could use some work, and the story is thoughtless, I loved my time spent seeing new things, engaging with funny characters, and marveling at the sparkling, mod world created for me. But it would be nice if other aspects were given as much attention. It just can't get a-head.

Last Week Was a Shitty Week…in Games

At 2 AM Eastern Time on Sunday, June 12th, Omar Mateen approached Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, and began hours of absolute terror on their Latin-themed night. Utilizing legally purchased weaponry, he murdered over 49 people and injured 53 others, involving some in a hostage situation before dying from police gunshots.

At 4 PM Eastern Time on Sunday, June 12th, after a brief, unbroadcast moment of silence, Electronic Arts (EA) began their yearly official Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) press briefing, showcasing new video games in jovial fashion.

Gamers, but most notably, LGBTQIA and Latinx members of the gaming press, were given 14 hours to find a way to cope with the violence their communities and those communities' intersections had suffered earlier that morning. But those had been a busy 14 hours. As is common for any mass shooting, social media and the press were alight with input. With each new detail — body counts, details about Mateen himself, the weapon of choice — opinions flowed in like water, and, to keep the simile going, washed over us as we tried to make sense of it all.

I woke up at 8 AM to prepare for a flight to LA, where E3 is held, in the afternoon. Scrolling through social media before really getting up, I learned of the shooting. I had to get ready. I tweeted out a continually updating Buzzfeed article at 8:30 AM, expressed foreboding displeasure at having the validity of the lives of my community being debated at 8:38 AM, and got up to take a shower right afterwards. I didn't say anything to my husband at the time, mostly because I did not want to distract myself from what I needed to do — because I didn't want to cope yet.

In the car on the way to the airport, I was absolutely glued to Twitter, retweeting other people's commentary, occasionally making my own. The politics had begun well before my plane took off at 12:30 PM. Folks were debating increased gun control versus "good guys with guns" theory; was it likely at all that queer and trans' lives would be the ones to inspire Congress to increase regulations? I saw debates, even, about what is and isn't an AK-47, y'know, besides the rifle model used to slay and maim so many people that morning.

I witnessed erasure as politicians, including the Florida Governor, Rick Scott, appropriated this tragedy into the greater American population. I called him out in what is likely to be my most popular tweet for this month (as opposed to the shitposting I'd rather be known for) because the lives of the LGBTQIA community, people of color, and immigrants are barely considered American 364 days out of the year by conservative politicians that I couldn't see what made them American on this one all of a sudden.

And 13 minutes later, I was in the air. And I felt alone and maybe a little scared to be cut off from the constant feed of information. Maybe as long as I kept learning more, I'd understand more. Maybe I'd stop being so angry and tired and upset while feeling physically unable to show it in an airplane full of strangers. Why did this happen?

***

Each E3 press conference featured some show of support, though some were not shown on camera. Except for EA, the telecasts featured prominent figures at each company wearing LGBTQIA pride ribbons. Ubisoft, Sony, and Nintendo included broadcast moments of silence or respect for the victims of the Orlando massacre, whereas the others did so before turning on the live feed.

I was in the audience for the Microsoft conference on Monday morning. As people finished taking their seats, all the music in the theater stopped without any explanation. Was one needed? Many of us didn't think so. This was a moment of silence. But before Phil Spencer, head of the Xbox division of Microsoft, emerged amidst the sea of fluorescent green and reflective black to tell us what was going on, numerous members of the press took the music stopping to mark the beginning of the upcoming show. The discomfort was palpable as those who did not get it cheered and whooped in excited anticipation of what was to come. Less than one second after Spencer terminated the silence, Microsoft's flavor video started playing on the screen. I felt an offense I barely understood.

Between Sunday and Monday, thus excluding Nintendo's long internet-only broadcast, for at least five uninterrupted hours total, members of the gaming press were asked to give a shit about games — games that were not even out yet. No doubt, many of those in attendance wanted to do so, myself included. Though I was not emotionally prepared for E3 by the time I touched down in LA, I actively sought the distraction.

Yet for how much I would manage to keep my mind off the tragedy, basking in a sea of lights and sounds, my favorite medium in this world, I would receive sobering reminders that life is not so simple. How many times across those telecasts did we see an assault rifle? In fact, at least seven of the featured games across each of the conferences, by my count, featured militarized violence during a time when people were feverishly arguing why anyone but the military needs an AK-47.

To anyone not dealing with the ramifications of the tragedy in Orlando, especially those who are not members of either the LGBTQIA or Latinx communities, I'm sure this doesn't seem remarkable. I mean, every year, we see violent games with guns glorified at these presentations. And without arguing the merits of violent video games — I do enjoy plenty of them — I still feel the need to express this circumstantial dissonance that comes with seeing these games featured minutes after paying respects to victims. We're sorry about gun violence, they said, but let's worship the gun violence.

Ubisoft, about three minutes after Aisha Tyler's touching expression of sympathy and solidarity with the victims of the Orlando shooting and only several seconds after suggesting Ubisoft's teams have been "flexing their creative muscles," introduced yet another Ghost Recon game. Dubbed Wildlands, this entry, according to lead game designer, Dominic Butler, asks "What if a Mexican drug cartel moved in" to Bolivia, a country whose economy runs on coca leaves? Butler's answer, unsurprisingly, is that armed Americans covertly invade and kill a ton of Latin Americans.

The day before, an armed American did the same.

***

For a time spent running through the gamut of emotions — from enjoying myself to questioning my enjoyment of gun-focused games to feeling deeply saddened by the loss of my siblings in Orlando — I had a nice time. I focused as much as I could on my work, writing articles with much better timing and skill than I had the previous two years. (And, for the sake of acknowledging this blog, I cannot believe that less than four years of writing my first article here that I'd be attending my third E3.) 

And I felt comforted by sharing a hotel room with my queer friends from Game Revolution: Nick Tan, Jessica Vazquez, and Kevin Schaller. These were friends with whom I could express joy in seeing folks wearing pride ribbons for us, even those working at Nintendo, who expressly suggested that same-sex couples weren't fun or families a few years ago. I cherish them for keeping me company and making me feel like there's some sense in a world that felt like madness.

Also, I valued the good, messy cry I had on Wednesday in the hotel room. It was the first time since I found out about the slaughter in Orlando that I had been completely alone in a room. I received a voicemail from a client checking in on me and my husband in light of the violence, and I just lost it. Almost halfway through the week, I finally let myself find emotional release that wasn't by taking violent action on someone else in a video game. What an odd instance of gratitude I felt.

***

That's it. This is your rambling thinkpiece that's supposed to find a way to relate real-world tragedy back to games somehow. For how much some gamers like to pretend that video games are these apolitical safe havens for meaningless fun, the worlds in games and the world of games are inextricably related to our lived realities. And sometimes, when it hits close to home, when you authentically worry that you will die because you're attracted to people of the same gender, your mind takes a highlighter to the events of a week that you would otherwise like to be apolitical, a safe haven, meaningless, and fun.

But VR does look like cool tech.

A Guide to Gil at Game Events

Inspired by the inimitable Tanya DePass, I decided to take a stab at explaining a bit about myself and how I like to engage in public. In no particular order, here's stuff worth knowing about me to help you engage with me so we're each happier people.

• Gil Almogi is my real name, not short for anything and not a nom de plume. Gil is pronounced with a hard 'g' sound: ghil. It means, "joy," in Hebrew. Almogi contains a long 'o' sound and a hard 'g' sound: ahl-MOH-ghee. It means, "coral," in Hebrew.
• Identities: homosexual, white, male (he/his/him), Israeli-born, Israeli-American-raised, agnostic, atheist, gamer.
• I do not work full-time in the game industry yet. I've also never made a game.
• My favorite video game genres are adventure and RPG. I'll happily play games from other genres, except I don't like sports, tower defense, turn-based strategy, or endless games. At home, I prefer single-player games and avoid online multiplayer. With friends, I enjoy some multiplayer games. I actually do not inherently care for tabletop games; some can be fun, but I don't seek them out. I love watching people play games, especially single-player.
• I'm not well-versed in anything! I didn't own an Atari, NES, or SNES growing up and missed out on a lot of "classics." I'm also not well-read, haven't watched many popular films, and don't like a lot of popular music. That said, I'm very interested in listening to people talk passionately about stuff I haven't experienced.
• I can be very social with people I like and trust, but I can also find it taxing. I have a hard time introducing myself to people I've never met. Also, I am not comfortable in huge crowds of people I do not know, and I typically won't go to huge parties. When I do, it's usually because there's free food. If you'd like to invite me to a party you're going to, I hope you're offering to hang around me for the duration. Oh, and I have a lot of trouble understanding people over loud music or a lot of ambient noise, so I'm sorry if I ask you to repeat yourself or nod blankly.
• I love hugging folks I know, and I may even be willing to hug you if I don't know you that well. That said, if we're not already there in our relationship, please ask if it's OK. I will try to do the same for others. Also, I generally do not assume people want a hug unless I feel that it's been communicated that it's desired. I'm OK being touched in a completely platonic way (head on shoulder, sitting close together, etc).
• I love to eat, and though I am a pickier eater than many, I love a variety of foods. The most welcoming thing you can do is to invite me out for a meal while at an event. My favorite cuisines are Indian and Mexican. Lately, I've been really into curry.
• I generally do not drink alcohol unless I feel completely comfortable, and the drinks are free. (I had maybe three drinks in all of 2015.) I also do not drink to get buzzed or drunk, and I prefer not to be around others doing so with a few exceptions depending on my comfort level at the time. I will politely reject invitations to events where I believe people will be drinking a lot, such as those with an open bar.
• I don't and have never smoked or ingested marijuana. I also hate the smell.
• I subscribe to intersectional feminist beliefs, and I strongly believe in diversity in gaming and society at large, however that manifests. I'm happy to talk about these issues, but not with people who are disingenuous and want to be devil's advocates.
• Please do not ever use "retarded" in front of me. I will ask you to choose another word to convey your thought.
• Whether or not we know each other, if there's something I can do to make you feel safer, please do not hesitate to come to me. I'd rather foster a safe space than worry about the above bullet points.
• Whether or not we know each other, if there's something I did or am doing that makes you feel unsafe, I hope you can talk to me about it privately or with someone to moderate and make you feel safer. I'd rather foster a safe space than worry about my pride.