Yeah that's a possibility, I also suspect he believed that trans women would need/want as high a dose as possible and didn't seem to believe a lower dose would have any effect.

There are possibly more relevant examples than Hades, it was just the first that came to mind. It is not a complete departure from typical male character design, don't get me wrong, but I do think there's a greater variety than most games - Hypnos, Sisyphus, Orpheus, Icarus, Apollo, Hephaestus, and Narcissus are who I'm thinking of more specifically. The general character style does still lean on muscular definition (and they're generally still pretty unrealistic bodies for irl humans) but there's more room for a variety of builds and not everyone is portrayed as particularly strong or lean. You are correct that a lot of it comes down to outfit design, but that is still part of the overall character design and it does still feel like a step outside the norm.

the difference is that the bodybuilder aesthetic isn't usually what women are into. Nothing inherently wrong with it of course but it's still built for the male gaze. If you ask a gym buff IRL about it they'll tell you most people who notice their physique are men. The shredded video game dude can instead be thought of as a signifier of masculinity and sometimes as a fantasy for men to project themselves into while playing.

I don't think the washboard abs and boulder shoulders would disappear entirely if male characters were designed more for the female gaze, but we'd probably see some more dad bods and smaller dudes too. Hades comes to mind as an example.

hugs back! I'm sorry you had a similar shitty experience, thanks for sharing it here so I could get mine off my chest :)

oh my God I'm sorry that happened to you :( HRT management is so fucking simple, I'm honestly shocked at how many doctors just wing it based on their own conceptions instead of doing the very easy very standardized processes most everyone follows.

had kind of the opposite situation happen to me, my primary care prescribing my hormones was an older dude with trans folk on his staff, everything seemed like it checked out, all I really needed was prescribing the same regimen I'd been taking with some occasional hormone panels.

for a while it was "too early" to get hormone panels, though he was taking blood draws for liver/kidney panels every time I saw him (oftentimes without even making clear that's what he was doing) 6 months later I was not feeling great and asked if we could do a hormone panel to rule out some things, he explained that he felt like "the online trans community" focuses too much on the numbers and his plan was to increase dosage until it showed up on my liver/kidney panels. I wasn't really sure but giving me enough estrogen for my liver/kidneys to start filtering it out of my blood seemed wrong and so I insisted on one anyway.

a week later he sent me an email basically saying "so because you were complaining about it so much last time, I went ahead and did it anyway and LOOK it's fine!" Attached were lab results that were not at all fine - it was waaaaay high out of range and it wasn't even a trough reading! (somewhere around 2000 pg/mL IIRC) I was confused at how this happened, given I didn't even think we changed my dose?

So then I looked through my records and it turned out he's been silently increasing the vial concentration without changing the amount drawn - pretty much the ideal way to increase my dose 8x without me noticing. I shoulda paid attention to the listed concentration on the vials I was getting, but we didn't discuss a dose increase at all so I didn't really have any reason to suspect a change.

So I bring all this to him alongside the physical symptoms I'd been feeling and ask for an explanation. Once again he started into the "you're just too focused on the number" stuff. He also said my physical symptoms sounded like anxiety and that he could prescribe an anti-anxiety med. Immediately stopped seeing him and just did DIY for a while instead.

This is a context where what works for different people tends to vary a lot, so experiment with a few different strategies and find what you like best! As long as you're pushing yourself close to muscular failure for a couple sets, you probably will see an increase in strength regardless of the particular loading strategy.

Usually it's best for warmup sets to not be fatiguing at all - you want to save your energy for the heavy working sets close to failure that will provide the most stimulus. So I'd go for 6-8 reps at about half the weight you want to do in your first working set. Warmups are just to get comfortable with the movement and make any adjustments before you do your working sets.

You may like "wave loading" - progressively lowering the reps and increasing the weight over the course of your sets. All sets are performed within a rep or two of failure, but e.g. the first set is failure after 8-10 reps, second set is failure after 6-8 reps, third is failure after 4-6 reps, or something similar. You can use a 1RM calculator to estimate what difference in weight would bring you down from one rep range to another.

It may or may not also be helpful to bring yourself completely to failure in the first set to ensure you're stopping only when you cannot possibly do more reps, and not due to sensation of weakness, slowing of the movement, or moderate reduction in range. To do this, you'll want to keep doing reps until the cable absolutely will not move - you might have a few more reps in the tank on your first set than you realize. Raising the rep range a bit can also help with this.

(also, re: another question from the original post, you can do less than 6-7 reps of a movement and get stronger if you're getting close to muscular failure. I do a lot of sets in the 3-5 rep range, not all the time, but especially for big compound movements it can be great.)

Might just be the flare of the pant legs, but it looks like her knees are hyper extended way beyond fully straight to me lol. The stretch itself doesn't have to be too hard on your knees though!

knee crunching noises

It's pretty much a standing pancake stretch, a common stretch for people working on flexibility in their splits and straddles. I was unaware it's seen as a horny pose lol. It's pretty intense in your hamstrings and adductors. Definitely possible to train past 30, but requires starting light and doing it consistently over many months.

I was just about to say this too!! Seriously so good. The gameplay is an understandable turnoff, personally I love it but RPG NBA Jam probably won't do it for everyone. but WOW the story is incredible. The personal stakes of each liberation rite make each feel like a must-win; the fact that the story continues if you lose makes it all the more nerve-wracking.

And that's not even considering the revolutionary bent of the whole thing, too, or the beautifully realized world with deeply strange history, or one of the best goddamn soundtracks I've ever heard... deserves some more love as a cult classic imo.