
I have this Top 100 Games list that I update twice a month both as a fun exercise and so I can constantly make jokes like "oh that's my 46th favorite game!" while pulling up the list on stream. What this has forced me to do is to put more thought in how much I "love" a video game compared to another, and naturally the big thing that stares me in the face now is "why?" The reasons I love SaGa Frontier, Legend of Mana, beatmania IIDX, and Mega Man X2 are completely different.
SaGa Frontier is an extremely interesting setting with incredibly fun mechanics, stellar music, and multiple stories with some being quite moving. Legend of Mana gives a surreal experience with action RPG gameplay that is both easy and what I'd affectionately call "loose," but most importantly explores love and all of its various forms. Beatmania IIDX is an arcade rhythm game with incredibly strict timing, keysounding, fantastic and varied music, and a skill ceiling with no actual ceiling that will test your limits forever. Mega Man X2 has you jump and shoot and it feels really good when you push the buttons and X jumps and shoots.
As you can see, these examples I've plucked from my top 10 are all wildly different and I love them for completely different reasons. Some get me emotional, some are an experience no other medium can give me, and some are just....fun. Absolutely no emotional profound statement, just fun. So when ranking these things, what ends up mattering more? Which aspects mean more to me, and how do I rank them among each other? You can argue its a pointless exercise, and I mean it is one I just do for fun, but it got me thinking away from the "Top 100" and just in general: what do I care about in a video game?
If you're surrounded by people who call trans people by their deadnames, you're most likely in a hate group. But a possible alternate explanation is that you're in academia. And it's not because that many academics are openly transphobic -- they just don't know that the site they fully trust, Google Scholar, is telling them to do it.
Google Scholar was developed in 2004 and has changed very little since then. It supplanted a lot of hard-to-use library search indices by providing a Google-style interface with a single search box. Now it's the most name-recognized site for searching for almost any paper by almost anyone. One aspect of the design was, authors are just a kind of search term. An author is a cluster of different ways to abbreviate a name, like Firstname Lastname, Firstname M. Lastname, and F Lastname, and you might see different forms in different places, but the underlying name will never change.
This is because Google Scholar was built by, and for, cis men with unchanging Western-style names. The "almost anyone" who you can search for excludes trans people, among a lot of other people it represents poorly. And because Scholar will not change, it should perish.