One fun thing about the mod is that it doesn’t disable crawling on the walls/ceiling or descending from a web, so sometimes you’ll wander into a cave and a massive bear will just roar at you as it slowly floats down from the ceiling before it can charge at you properly. All the cobweb/spiders’ eggs items were replaced with “Cave Bear Honeycomb,” too.
Definitely it doesn’t need to exist for every phobia or in every game, but for phobias that really are only present audio-visually (blood splatters, certain noises, monster models, etc) and not narratively (quest-lines and dialogue), I think it is simple enough to have a model-swap setting or similar. I don’t mind the ludo-narrative dissonance of an NPC telling me to go fix their spider infestation in their cellar and then finding a den of cob-web surrounded werebadgers or whatever. Games like Don’t Starve already let the player fully customize the spawn rates of difference monsters, while other games let the player disable their character drowning or burning, for example.
Phobia-friendly settings/modes. There are so many games that I can’t play or have to find a mod for because the fantasy genre is obsessed with giant spiders. The only way I could ever play Skyrim was with the Arachnophobia mod that replaced all spiders with bears. I haven’t played Grounded, but I know it has an arachnophobia setting that can simplify/cartoonify the spiders or replaces them with floating orbs. I’d love to see these types of settings in more games, and ideally similar settings available for other common phobias/triggers besides spiders and blood.
I subscribed to Dropout earlier this year after I exhausted the free episodes on their YouTube channel. Definitely a fan of GameChanger and Make Some Noise! I recently started watching Um, Actually as well. One of these days I’ll have to get into the DnD side of things; I know I’ll like them, it just feels like more of an undertaking to watch, you know?
Apparently your comment really got to them, because the blogpost now contains a direct quote of you and a response.
The whole transphobic claim of being seen as our AGAB by future archeologists is especially ridiculous considering that modern ones are already saying things like this:
While the skeleton’s biological sex is not in dispute, Gowland cautioned that nothing is known about the Ivory Lady’s gender identity, and scholars shouldn’t impose modern gender norms onto past populations.
Following that concept, a platform called Ripple where individual posts are called Pebbles and responses/reshares are called Waves wouldn’t be half-bad, branding-wise.