The Old Hack

Certainly so. But while I agree with you in principle that one should not judge oneself solely in order to punish oneself, that is not what I have been doing. I have been taking a long hard look at my life and realised that the very culture I grew up in is immensely racist and that this has had its inevitable effect on me. I am now fighting this and I refuse to employ weasel words while doing so. And in fact, it has been an immensely powerful tool for me to make progress. I take pride in this progress rather than allowing guilt to bog me down. And in fact, I found that once I admitted to myself how wrong my old behaviors were -- why, then guilt disappeared altogether, replaced by an intense desire to do better.
The opposite is more often the case, I am sad to say. I have met any number of people online who say "I am not really racist" while continuing to be so, the excuse being used to assuage the guilt they feel.
 
Of course the man isn't aware that what he is doing is wrong! He loves his son and has time and again demonstrated the lengths he will go to to aid and defend his loved ones. He got himself fired through the intensity of his feelings when Nanase and Ellen were endangered by Abraham. He would never dream of deliberately hurting Tedd -- which makes it just that much more tragic when you think about the pain he is unwittingly piling on the son he loves more than anything else in this world.
But he is nonetheless doing it. In this world, it is the results that ultimately count the most and good intentions in and of themselves are worth little when improperly guided.
That is of course your privilege. I disagree strenuously with it, however. I have a long history of calling a shovel for a shovel and there are times for diplomacy and times for presenting hard facts. We are not dealing directly with Mr. Verres in person and even if we were, different people respond in different ways to information.
Here and now, I stand by my choice of words. Mr. Verres is transphobic. That he cannot help himself is irrelevant when it comes to his actions and their consequences -- the pain inflicted on Tedd is not lessened by his lack of knowledge of the harm he is doing. When one is speaking of an injury, the intent behind inflicting it does not reduce the damage when it comes to the injury's effects and consequences. Tedd knows that his father is acting in a transphobic manner and as a consequence has lost trust in him. And this is truly tragic, but arguing about guilt or lack thereof will not in any way change Tedd's position and problems in this.

I understand your reluctance and sympathise with your desire to establish a demarcation. I simply do not agree with it. In part it is due to the way I judge myself: when I look back at my life, I can see clear patterns of how I have acted in ways variously racist, misogynistic, homophobic and ableist. And these behaviors were not due to ignorance alone. Much of them came from taught cultural behaviors and prejudices. I am working hard on them these days but simply knowing that they are wrong is not enough. Not only do I still slip up, I also have to constantly and actively watch for patterns of behavior I have never recognised before and sometimes only discover are harmful when someone victimised by them so informs me.
Was I racist, back then? In fact, was I all of these things? To my mind, yes. Without question. Trying to soothe myself into thinking that it was 'just ignorance' becomes a mere justification for my own actions, a palliative for my conscience that tells me that what I did wasn't so bad. The problem is that my actions were that bad. Keeping that in mind gives me motivation to work hard on improving and always be on the lookout for backsliding.
Therefore, yes. I judge Mr. Verres to be transphobic. This is not the same as saying that he is irredeemable. He is not, but it will take work from his side to overcome it and a lot of it. Trying to explain his behavior away as 'ignorance' is not enough: it assumes that simply informing him that what he is doing is wrong, and him understanding this, will be enough to set everything right. And it won't be. He has a lifetime of learned behavior to overcome, and he can't do that in a day or a week or even a year. It will be an ongoing process and it may take him the rest of his life.
I certainly expect this to be the case as far as my own learned behaviors go.

Unfortunately, it is not always a three for three in the real world -- or for that matter, in games. I could certainly envision a gun you loot off some bandit or mook being in an atrocious state of maintenance, for example. What is that term, a Saturday Night Special?
One of my own favourite comics about how to handle guns may be found in the first panel of this Grrl Power comic.

I lost a stepfather due to metastasized brain cancer many years ago, so I have some feeling of what the two of you may be going through. Both of you have my sympathies.

Don't know, never stole anything around the Brahmin. though you get a Karma loss whenever you steal an item.
Though what I meant is there are hostiles located at most locations with loot. 

Nonetheless. While I will concede the above, I have yet to be convinced that any of the mentioned characters have done anything like betray Mr. Verres' trust in them. The closest I have seen any of them come to that is Tedd who is deliberately withholding information about his own magic from his father -- and he has the massive provocation of his father's transphobia and numberless microaggressions against him.

Geese are usually recognized as the best poultry guards.
From ancient Roman Legions to modern nuclear reactors.  Put a flock of geese  between the inner and outer fences and you will know if anyone enters that area.

Philip K. Dick is very hard to get around when it comes to science fiction. You could say that many of his ideas are ubiquitous.

Unfortunately, it is not always a three for three in the real world -- or for that matter, in games. I could certainly envision a gun you loot off some bandit or mook being in an atrocious state of maintenance, for example. What is that term, a Saturday Night Special?
One of my own favourite comics about how to handle guns may be found in the first panel of this Grrl Power comic.

A decently well-made gun in good condition being competently handled, the chance of that happening is negligible. Something, you know, about not having a finger on the trigger - and with some guns, where the safety is easily reached, having the safety on - unless you positively intend to fire the gun in the next couple seconds.

I doubt there was that much conscious analysis.  More likely whenever she'd think of going to the dojo, or even of resuming the sparring/kissing tradition, it just felt wrong, like something she just wasn't into anymore, didn't feel right to go back to doing it.  Ellen acts on instinct a lot, but her instincts usually come to the same conclusion thoughtful analysis would.

Philip K. Dick is very hard to get around when it comes to science fiction. You could say that many of his ideas are ubiquitous.

SECONDED.
The very minimum that should be required of ANY gun owner should be knowledge of basic gun safety. And while I do not belong to the school that says that video games are the cause of all of today's violence, I do feel that it could improve the genre a lot as a whole if shooter games became more aware of this. Not necessarily to the degree of being sermonising -- but it would be nice if gun owning heroes got small reminders of the fact that it is not necessarily a good idea to wave your gun around like a bollocking toy.

I'd agree with this.  The issue isn't "betray trust", it's "keep the circle at 8" that the problem now.  Depending on how you look at it, we could be as high as 12...

I think it would be better to try kind words first before including a gun.

about 15 years ago I was working in a produce facility that handled silverskin onions, they'd come in off the field and get the greens and roots removed by machines and then be sorted by size onto shaker tables where we'd have to pick out any imperfect onions. Normally I'd be at the ends of the tables handling the barrels for brining or boxes for fresh pack, but there were times when we'd get a load where the majority of the onions are similar size and so it floods one or two of the shaker tables, so I'd get up there and help pick through them, this involved a large amount of arm flailing trying to get all the bad ones before they go into the barrel or box. There were many nights where I'd wake up with my arms going as if I had been dreaming about being at work.

Yeah, I can understand that, I just thought it was odd that Nanase being there wasn't a strong enough, I guess we can assume that Ellen weighed the pros and cons of it and felt that she was spending enough time with Nanase already and didn't want to make Nanase feel smothered?

If there's a page every MWF, then one month is at least 12 pages (most Februaries), usually 13 pages (most other months, plus a February about once every ten years on average - leap years where February begins on a comic-release day), and, twice a year on average, 14 pages (a 31-day month beginning on Monday or Wednesday).
It doesn't take much to make 13 pages take more than a month.

I love the Philip K. Dick reference.
 

SECONDED.
The very minimum that should be required of ANY gun owner should be knowledge of basic gun safety. And while I do not belong to the school that says that video games are the cause of all of today's violence, I do feel that it could improve the genre a lot as a whole if shooter games became more aware of this. Not necessarily to the degree of being sermonising -- but it would be nice if gun owning heroes got small reminders of the fact that it is not necessarily a good idea to wave your gun around like a bollocking toy.

Agree fully. While I'm not a programmer,  such features should be able to be implemented without much trouble. Perhaps have the character lower their gun automatically when the crosshairs are pointed towards a friendly NPC (many games have something similar in which you simply can't fire your gun if it's pointed against someone friendly).  Or have character refuse to talk to the main character unless they holster their weapon first.

on that note, supposedly intelligent characters in games doing trigger-guard-spins of pistols and revolvers as an idle animation is equally stupid.

SECONDED.
The very minimum that should be required of ANY gun owner should be knowledge of basic gun safety. And while I do not belong to the school that says that video games are the cause of all of today's violence, I do feel that it could improve the genre a lot as a whole if shooter games became more aware of this. Not necessarily to the degree of being sermonising -- but it would be nice if gun owning heroes got small reminders of the fact that it is not necessarily a good idea to wave your gun around like a bollocking toy.

Characters pointing their guns at each other willy-nilly is something that tends to annoy me in video games. If you are not going to use your gun, don't point it at something ( a rule that every reasonable user of guns follows). So it's nice to see Grace have a reasonable reaction to it in panel one.