Heather

Blue sky smiling... bsky.app/profile/itsxia…

@scottjohnson You unlocked a memory from my childhood of playing Descent! I need to check this out, I remember having fun playing it

Know what's great that not NEARLY enough people played? 'Overload'. A banger of a love letter to Descent 1 and 2. Came out in 2018. Some of the devs worked on Descent. Fantastic game. And it's $5.99, 80% off for the winter sale on Steam. NO BRAINER! store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Ove…

@scottjohnson Genuine question - Do you think it changes based on which country someone lives in? Or has he just become that notorious?

It’s kinda wild that no matter who you are, no matter how you’re aligned, if you hear the sentence, “is he dead yet?”, you know, universally, who they’re talking about.

@scottjohnson I hope everything is all right! That's really unfortunate news

As if 2025 could get any worse, a good friend went in for a simple surgery, and then ended up finding a load of tumors. Now the extended stay and tests start. Ugh.

@Jaythebard Oh gosh this transported me - Friday night feeling

The perfect day! #worldofwarcraft

@scottjohnson Yes! "Alive As You Need Me to Be" is one of my favs. So good.

Have not seen Ares yet, but that new soundtrack predictably slaps real hard.

@BerzerkerRage Congrats on your big 10! Thank you for your camaraderie and help in putting good things out into the world. ♥️

Somehow, someway, the little podcast that could turns a big ten years old. A crazy decade all around to be sure, and while I’ve seen many contemporaries (probably smartly) leave for other waters, I’m still happy to be here and giving you all my Warcraft and metal madness!

@Ceraphus We can be fake adults together! I'll ride on your shoulders in a trench coat any day

Holy shit I never realized how bad scam / account impersonators were until complaining about a company on X 😵‍💫 be careful out there

@supprtchat_6_ Here's another one looking to scam. I feel like the @FBI could catch fish all day just pretending to be upset @BreezeAirways customers

@BreezeAirways any chance of speaking to an actual human? Just got to check-in to find this after thinking we were leaving at 12:30pm. No updates were sent otherwise. Unacceptable and this is the first experience I am having with you all

@Treuilsblasted @BreezeAirways On the other side in Louisville trying to fly back to RDU. Livid. Heads up that it looks like there are some fake accounts on here trying to take advantage and scam out of more money. If anyone wants you to download Lemfi, report it.

@BreezeAirways so you've got about 50 of us still stranded in Raleigh holding onto a lie that two pilots are driving in from 4+ hours away to fly us out at 1am and a staff that won't help in a small airport that's shutting down. #DoBetter

@Help_HubRespo @BreezeAirways Also, this account is impersonating your CS team and tried to scam me

@Help_HubRespo Sure thing! Thank you. DM okay?

@CNviolations I believe this is Stephen's crew from Goats on the Go in Raleigh. They have some before/after pics (but agreed, would love to see the after for this one!) instagram.com/raleighgoats?u…

This is brilliant 👏

@dieworkwear Beautifully written!

ON RESPECTABILITY IN DRESS Every once in a while, people here will get mad at me. And it often involves the same issue: respectability in dress. Or its related cousin: dress codes. Judging someone's deeper, more important qualities based on attire often feels so natural; people get upset when I refuse to engage in the same judgment. To them, it feels as though I'm denying something so obvious, I'm dishonest. I've written about dress respectability no fewer than half a dozen times in my 15 years of writing about menswear, but never so thoroughly and comprehensively on Twitter. This post will be long, but I hope it is engaging. And I hope you stay with me because I find this sentiment to be so noxious — so antithetical to any notion of "good," whether religious or secular — that I hope I can convince a few people to resist such temptations. What is respectability in dress? It's the idea that you can show respect through clothes, such as wearing a suit to a wedding. Or the idea that people in certain clothes are more deserving of respect, such as a man in a suit versus another man in a hoodie. I will address each in turn. I believe dress is a form of social language. And thus, you can signal certain things through clothes. For instance, if I were to attend a wedding, I would wear a suit as an outward expression of a sentiment in my heart (e.g., "I'm happy for my hosts and wish to honor them on this day"). The suit is simply a representation of my sentiment, which already exists, even if I was in jeans. However, if I arrived at a wedding and saw someone not wearing a suit, I would not judge the person's more important qualities based on their attire. Perhaps they didn't have time to buy a suit. Perhaps clothes shopping gives them great anxiety. Perhaps they can't afford a suit that fits. If I wanted to know whether that person is of good character, I would judge this off their more direct actions, such as how they treat the people around them. Are they genial to guests? Are they considerate of service staff? Do they make the hosts laugh and glow? There are two distinct acts here. The first is how *you* decide to dress. Since you hold a particular sentiment in your heart, you may wish to dress a certain way to express that sentiment. The second is how you judge *others* based on dress. If a coat-and-tie is supposedly connected to "gentlemanly" behavior, however tortured that term may be, then judging someone's deeper, more important qualities is ungentlemanly by definition. In 1852, Cardinal John Henry Newman penned an essay, initially delivered as a university lecture, titled "Definition of a Gentleman." A gentleman, he says, is someone gentle and kind, considerate of others, humble in social relations, and respectful of boundaries. He compares a gentleman to "an easy chair or a good fire, which do their part in dispelling cold and fatigue." He writes: "The true gentleman in like manner carefully avoids whatever may cause a jar or a jolt in the minds of those with whom he is cast — all clashing of opinion, or collision of feeling, all restraint, or suspicion, or gloom, or resentment; his great concern being to make every one at his ease and at home. He has his eyes on all his company; he is tender towards the bashful, gentle towards the distant, and merciful towards the absurd; he can recollect to whom he is speaking; he guards against unseasonable allusions, or topics which may irritate; he is seldom prominent in conversation, and never wearisome. He makes light of favors while he does them, and seems to be receiving when he is conferring." There is notably nothing in his essay about clothes. It's impossible to judge a person's deeper, more important qualities based on clothes because people are often just following social conventions. To go back to the wedding example, many people wear a suit not because they hold a particular sentiment in their heart, but simply because a suit is protocol. A friend who works as a wedding photographer revels in telling me stories about suited guests getting into fistfights—certainly not a way to honor your hosts. The irony of dress codes is that the stronger the enforcement, the less you can tell about someone's character based on dress. Let's now turn to the idea that people in certain clothes are more deserving of respect. The sharpest, most pointed counterargument for this is Pierre Bourdieu, who in his 1979 book Distinction, pointed out that our notions of "Good Taste" are often nothing more than the habits and preferences of the ruling class. Edward Carpenter, a gay British reformer in the late 19th century, understood this a century earlier. He hated suits. In an essay about the "simple life," he compared suits to coffins, as they have "stiff layers upon layers of buckram," which he believed prevented people from getting enough sunlight and air. But more importantly, he hated suits because he recognized that Victorian dress codes weren't about dress codes at all — they were about status signaling and social hierarchy. In May 1889, Carpenter wrote a letter to The Sheffield Independent about how 100,000 of the city's residents were struggling to find sunlight and air, enduring miserable lives, and dying of illnesses because of the thick, black cloud of smog arising out of factories like smoke from Judgement Day. Meanwhile, as Melton-clad plutocrats nattered on about proper dress codes, they concealed their cruelty and vulgarity under refined manners. They weren't concerned with virtue, but rather with showing their supposed higher moral status. And then those socially under them aped those manners to seem higher class. (A dynamic that German sociologist Georg Simmel recognized in his 1902 essay "On Fashion.) Our judgements of dress are often more about the person underneath the clothes, rather than the clothes themselves. We see this with the pre-war British Guardsmen, who dropped their Edwardian-inspired fashions as soon as they were adopted by the "ruffians" known as Teddy Boys (and some Teddy Gals). Or how the slacker hoodie became a symbol of meritocracy in the New Economy when (white) coders wore it in the early 2000s, but it symbolizes criminality when worn by black teens. Clothes indeed signal certain things. If you're wearing a Lakers jersey, I will assume you're a fan of the Lakers; if not, at least sports. But deeper, more important qualities — such as intelligence, honesty, kindness, and so on — should be read more directly from the person's more meaningful actions. If you want to know if someone's intelligent, pay attention to what's in their head, not what's on top of it. I'm fundamentally opposed to any notion of respectability in dress, as I find it antithetical to a fundamental moral principle: you should treat everyone with respect unless they behave in a manner that suggests otherwise. And so, if John Fetterman lumbers through the halls of Congress in hoodies and shorts, you should object to him based on his politics, not his dress. If a student shows up at Oxford Union in sweats, you should consider his ideas, not his pants. I am perfectly fine with saying certain outfits are ugly. I'm deeply uncomfortable when people make moral judgments based on clothes. A person is not more or less deserving of respect based on dress; they can only do so based on more meaningful behavior. My guess is that you know this in your heart. As you travel through the world, look around you. Are your poorly dressed cousins and uncles bad people? Do shabbily dressed teachers or nurses on the train not actually serve society in positive ways? Do suited politicians not occasionally commit crimes? The idea that appearance doesn't always match character can be found more melodically in Fela Kuti's 1973 album "Gentleman." If you are already interacting with someone on a meaningful basis, you've hopefully already gotten enough information about them to form a judgement and thus can ignore dress. If you haven't interacted with them in meaningful ways, you can simply withhold judgement. I will end with an excerpt from Stuart Hall, a Jamaican-born British cultural theorist. In an essay about pluralism, he made a distinction between "common culture" and "common society," encouraging us to embrace differences. "It should not be necessary to look, walk, feel, think, speak exactly like a paid-up member of the buttoned-up, stiff-upper-lipped, fully corseted and free-born Englishman, culturally to be accorded either the informal courtesy and respect of civil social intercourse or the rights of entitlement and citizenship. Since cultural diversity is, increasingly, the fate of the modern world, and ethnic absolutism a regressive feature of late-modernity, the greatest danger now arises from forms of national and cultural identity — new or old — which attempt to secure their identity by adopting closed versions of culture or community and by the refusal to engage with the difficult problems that arise from trying to live with difference. The capacity to live with difference is, in my view, the coming question of the twenty-first century." There are many forms of dress in society, each connected to a person's background, identity, and lifestyle. While these things can tell us something about the person, they don't tell us their more important qualities. Wearing "refined" clothes doesn't make you "refined" or "respectable" any more than rugged clothes can fashion you into a rugged man. Clothes can be a lot of things, but once people attach notions of virtue and respect to them, we enter very dangerous territory.

@Ceraphus Gift that keeps on giving

@Ceraphus OMG I need this in my life. Like I read this and felt it in my bones

@Ceraphus Blue sky? I've been seeing it pop up more frequently and was thinking of checking it out...

@scottjohnson "Disingenuous wreaking piles of hardened zombie semen", now that's an insult! Hell yeah!