Fellow Travelers

A mutual on Bluesky borrowed one of my Rooks from Dragon Age: The Veilguard for Rookanis fanart purposes! 💕

She had a specific art ref as a brain worm and needed to borrow someone else's Rook to use it on, so I got some lovely art of one of my Crow Rooks, Gianna de Riva.

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

I've participated in the National Consumer Panel since January 2014, which involved scanning my grocery purchases and doing the occasional survey in exchange for gifts cards and such. Unfortunately, I've finally had to break down and delete my account due to their continued transphobia.

When participating, you have the list the demographic information of the shopper, and the only gender options listed are Male or Female. Which, you know, is an issue if you're legally nonbinary. Especially since X is a valid gender option on US passports as well as driver's licenses in many states. In addition, they have an annual demographic survey each year where you provide more information about yourself, and - once again - the only gender options are Male or Female. If you want to participate, you have to intentionally misgender yourself, or you cannot proceed forward through the survey.

I've been reaching out to the National Consumer Panel about this issue since 2021. In both 2021 and 2022, my messages were acknowledged, and they point-blank stated that the issue was that their parent companies (NielsenIQ and Circana) dictated what gender options they were allowed to list.

In December 2022, I received the following email:



That email? Was the last communication that I received from NCP one way or another. I've continued to reach out each year when the annual demographic survey goes out with only Male and Female as the gender options listed, but I haven't received any response from NCP at all since 2022.

It's very clear at this point that the blatant transphobia of forcing nonbinary individuals to misgender themselves to use their site is intentional and won't be changing. Maybe it is the parent companies that are to blame, but the fact that NCP sent me an email in 2022 saying they were working to fix the issue and then ignored every single message that I've sent since then? Well, that says a lot. If nothing else, they're the ones who chose to simply stay quiet.

At this point, I'm done. I deleted my account earlier today, and I sent them an email making it clear why I've done so. With the current state of the world, I can't in good conscience continue to participate with an organization that's not even pretending to try to not to be transphobic.

I honestly doubt this post is going to do much of anything in the grand scheme of things (and the same's true of the thread that I posted over on Bluesky). Still, I wanted to at least make a public post about it just in case it lets even one person out there know that the National Consumer Panel shouldn't be trusted if you're LGBTIQA+.

The more they release about the upcoming fourth campaign of Critical Role, the more excited I am for it to start. CR3 was very much dragging for me by the end, mainly because it felt almost as if it was more a sequel to CR1 and CR2 with the CR3 characters taking the back burner at times. There's a reason that I don't, for example, like the big crossover events that Marvel and DC like to do, and that's what it reminded me of for the last six months or so of the campaign.

Everything I'm seeing about CR4, though, has me optimistic that the fresh start in a brand new world it's promising will be a good thing. I can't wait to actually meet the characters and see how many of them I properly mesh well with.

I wanted to take a minute to type up my plans for the weekend while I'm thinking about it. I'll probably type up a proper to-do list sometime tomorrow (well, I suppose it's technically today at this point) so that I can mark things off as I do them, but I thought it would help to at least come up with a summary of sorts.

( More under the cut. )

In general? I'm really hoping that Monday will mark a new beginning of sorts. That's the plan, as long as the universe cooperates. 🤞🏻

Life has been exhausting even without all of the stuff going on in the US in general, and I'm just so fucking tired. I need a new beginning, even if "autumn is finally here" is a relatively arbitrary one.

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.

Yuletide nominations are officially open, which means I have to get my ass in gear and actually figure out what I want to request and nominate this year.

A couple of my usual requests are almost always nominated by other people, so I can hopefully scratch those off the list. That doesn't help narrow it down a lot, though, because I've written down a frankly ridiculous number of fandoms this year that I've been considering requesting.

Right now, I'm leaning towards the following for my nominations:

Black Ships - Jo Graham OR Hand of Isis - Jo Graham OR Stealing Fire - Jo Graham
Home Alone (Movies) (mainly because of this post)
Hornblower (TV)
Peacemakers (2003)
The Witch Wolf (Webcomic)

My other requests will depend on what does or doesn't get nominated, but some of my ideas for fandoms that tend to show up in the tag set regularly are:

Gargoyles (Cartoon)
Jurassic Park Original Trilogy (Movies)
Justice League International
The Martian (2015)
The Scarlet Pimpernel (1982)
Titanic (1997)
Treasure Planet

Of course, there's always a chance that I'll see something in the tag set that I wasn't expecting that calls to me. That's definitely happened before, and it'll probably happen again.

D&D is cancelled tonight so that the DM can drug herself into a stupor and try to get more than 3-4 hours of sleep for once. As for me, I think that I'm going to take a short nap for the next hour or so and then settle in to play video games all night.

I'm leaning towards playing more of that Mass Effect: Andromeda playthrough that I started last weekend, although I may switch over to Baldur's Gate 3 or Dragon Age: The Veilguard for at least a while. We'll just have to see what my brain seems most interested in tonight.

In tonight's game, ( the rest under a cut for those who don't care. )

And that's where we left off.