Got my assessment today, and the diagnosis is confirmed.
There’s a ton of information there about me, but I’m kind of disappointed that it was mostly stuff I already knew. Not a ton of new solutions. I suppose at the very least I might feel more confident in saying “no” to things.
Also journalists, many of whom didn’t grow up with videogames.
Difficulty used to be seen as a way to adjust the play time, which was tied to the value proposition for the customer. A lot of older games used to have a gigantic difficulty spike 3 or 4 levels in specifically for rental markets. The Lion King and Battletoads are famous examples. The idea is you get the players hooked with a couple of reasonably challenging levels, then put in a wall that eats up the whole weekend they rented the game for so they want to rent it again next weekend to try to get past it.
If you give journalists cheat codes then they can go and get screenshots of the later levels and write about how cool they are, further incentivizing players to keep renting or jjsy buy the game outright and push past.
My router (GLI.net Flint 3) makes it really easy to set up Wireguard servers on it, and from there all I needed to do was get a domain name to use. Set up Wireguard on my phone, and I can access my local network remotely without needing to pay for a VPN subscription. I still use Mullvad, but that’s for privacy not remote access.
I think a LOT of people require external validation to feel good about themselves. Its why we see places like Facebook and Reddit fracture into echo chambers, and why humans separate themselves into social groups based on similarities. Groups then can outcast the “others” which creates a social floor. As long as you’re within Group, you know you aren’t as bad as those Others over there. At the same time, the people within Group build each other uo and reinforce their common behaviors. Dissimilar behaviors within the group leads to either note fracturing within the group, or leads to people changing their behaviors and homogenizing.
When I was last in a band, I noticed the pattern. The 3 of us would each write things on our own that sounded unique, like our individual selves. When we brought the pieces together, or wrote songs together, the result was bland and generic stuff. All of our respective rough edges that made us interesting were rubbed smooth to make room for each other. And the songs that seemed to do the best with crowds were the smoothest ones (not that we had a ton of success- we played a handful of gigs before the pandemic hit and they ended up moving away).
I’ve noticed a lot lately that introverts in media are often portrayed as broken. Evangelion is one of my favorite anime, but its guilty of this. Shinji is often used in memes and internet culture to represent an introvert, but pretty much every scene where we see him alone he is miserable and craving some external validation. When I’m alone I usually just feel at peace.
I think a lot of people fear themselves, their own thoughts. They consider “being in your own head” a bad thing, like your own thoughts are scary.
My older sister is autistic and we were recently talking about traveling. She said that she prefers to travel alone so she can just wander around a new city at her own pace without having to consider the needs of her husband or children or friends kr anyone else, and I related to that a lot. I may also be autistic- I’m waiting for my assessment results lol.
Thr unsavory businesses are paying a premium for being unsavory. There are SOME people who will not work there, which reduces the size of the labor pool and drives prices up. There are others who can be bought, for a price, and that also drives prices up.
Industries with neutral or beneficial impacts on society do have this pressure, so the wages are lower. Simple supply and demand.
I did it today. Actual legit assessment with a psychologist.
Still need to finish the at-home portions and wait a few weeks for the results.
Last year, at the behest of some people in my life, I looked around for casual tests. Found this community and embrace-autism. Did pretty much all of their tests and more leaned toward autism than not. I put off getting an actual assessment because I thought I knew myself, I thought I didn’t have problems with it.
And now the doubts are surfacing. As I am against reviewing the literature on autism I’m wondering if I’ll get diagnosed with social anxiety disorder instead. I’m trying to focus on the relief of having the question answered rather than anything else.
I started last year, for several reasons. Most of which werr related to my wife and I creating a polycule with another couple a year earlier. After 1 year in I did some evaluation and realized I needed to make some changes, and journaling was an answer for a lot of those.
Being in a polycule means that I both have much less time for that meditation and much more stuff to remember. I also was a mild THC user before, mostly for my knee pain or jjsy because getting high on occasion is fun. But ibstatted leaning on it more heavily to deal with the stress of constant socialization.
So when I found myself in conversations remembering that I had been told things, but unable to remember what they were. Like my girlfriend’s home town or my boyfriend’s favorite Zelda game. Not stuff they even necessarily expected me to remember, but stuff I felt bad for forgetting.
My wife also has a medical condition that derailed her career, so a while ago we decided it made more sense for her to stop working and be a homemaker. So I became the sole income earner, and she took over the chores we used to split(laundry, cooking, dishes, cleaning, grocery shopping, etc). I would still contribute on occssion: I am not some boomer stereotype of a man who doesn’t know how a laundry machine works, and I like to cook on occasion. But as she spent more and more time with our girlfriend and boyfriend she also did less and less of those chores. It led to a lot of Saturday mornings, which are supposed to be so e relaxing time off work for me, but instead I need to spend time cleaning or scooping the litter or getting groceries because she didn’t do it, and with our gf & bf coming over that night I want the house to be respectable.
I FELT all of these things, and discussed them with her a little bit, but journaling gave me the confidencd to talk to my wife about it, provide details, and help her to see what she was doing too. When I said that we never did anything together anymore, her first reaction was “wait didn’t we just watch that TV show like a week or two ago?”. And because of journaling I was able to say “that was 5 months ago”.
Working through feelings. For most of my life I have done this without needing to write anything down. I would just spend some time alone and, well, think. Let the thoughts and feelings flow naturally and sort them out. But with so much less time to myself I wanted to take a more direct and active approach. I still think I prefer my natural approach- doing it through journalling feels forced and rushed. But its better than just struggling.
Monitoring health. I weighed 207lbs when we started this polycule, and now I’m down to 161. Largely due to a couple stints of low-carb dieting.
Also, not to get too graphic but group sex is very different from duo or solo. So having a record of how things have gone and how I’ve felt about things has been nice.
I should also note that for the first 6 months, I just logged narratively. I tried to remember to write down important things, tried to predict what my future self might want to go back and check later. Using keywords I would know to search for (digital is better for me- I use Joplin). After 6 months, I decided to pull out some key measurables and use a separate app to log those. My weed and alcohol use, exercise, and sexual activity.
Both versions (original + Special Edition) were among the first games I installed on the Deck when I got it, and habe stayed installed for years since. I still go back and play one or the other a bit every couple months.
The only issue I can remember is just dealing with the stupid launcher screen before you get into the actual title screen. I think I might have had to change the launch options for one of them to be able to access the graphics settings?
Interestingly, the original version is still listed as Playable even though tbr Special Edition is Unsupported.
Oh you’re just shifting the conversation towards violence against women in particular. Ignoring violence against men and using that ad a cover fke your own thinly veiled racist dogwhistles. Cool stuff.
Poor men, because the rich men have written tbe was so that their violence is not considered criminal.
The go-to example I always think of for 2nd person is Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, the boss battle against the Tyhrranoid Mother. You cycle through phases of the boss, and one shifts the camera’s perspective to the targeting system of the boss, while you still control Ratchet.
I’m interested, but I think the Dev woukd need to find a way to incentivize “normal” driving.
I think back to my youth playing Driver on the PS1, and it was a lot of fun just… Driving around. Exploring the world. Even dealing with traffic was fun when I was only a kid who could nkt drive myself.
I tried tk do similar in GTA3, and I even had a wheel and pedlas I would use for it. Unfortunately GTA3 is incredibly unlrealistic. The physics are cartoonish, the AI behavior is dumb, the pedestrians are dumb, the cops are dumb. The game incenvitcizes chaos.
The question is: how do we make things likr speed limits and stop signs and pedestrian crossings fun?
My instinct is to model off the real world to an extent. Could involve delivering things that are fragile and cannot handle a bunch of G’s. Could be fines or a karma system of some kind for rolling stops. Could be that a realistic damage modeling system makes dents and scratches look terrible and lead to rust, and repairs are just as expensive as they are in real life. Maybe a LOT of the car is consumable or wearable. Not just gas and tires, but all the fluids too, and brake pads. Maybe taking a turn too hard damages the suspension. Crashing into something means you not only need to repair your car, but also whatever you hit.
The more I list this out, the more this seems like a punishing and tedious slog. It seems really hard to design a game that incentivizes something like this, at least with most of the current mechanics in games today. Maybe a multiplayer social component would help? Like a virtual parking lot and drag strip for people to meet up on the weekends and check each other’s virtual rides out? I would not be interested in that, but my uncle might be.
Maybe it could be heavily story-based. I would go noir-style, where as you drive around either you see things or your driver character provides some narration. Something like “that abandoned building over there used to be an ice cream parlor. That’s where I had my first kiss. I wonder what ever happened to Suzie? I drove a '69 Cobra that night. Lovely car” and then the Cobra is available in the shop. Maybe there is a mystery about stuff going on in the world. Maybe it is a post-apocalyptic world and you’re scavenging, mostly alone and unchallenged, in the ruins of a city, slowly learning what led to this. I think about how Detroit’s population went from ~1.8 million to 0.6 million in ~50 years and what it would have been like to stay there and experience that.
Maybe a parody of Crazy Taxi called Sane Uber where the main priority is ride comfort?
I don’t see Steven Universe mentioned anywhere. That might be my all-time favorite, and slots right in with the likes of Adventure Time and She-Ra.
Sticking to the Adventure Time-related ones, Over the Garden Wall is great and very autumnal. My wife ans I try to watch that every October. Gravity Falls is also great, especially for the summer since it takes place over the course of one summer vacation. Bravest Warriors is okay- not a must-watch, but decent. Bee and Puppycat is pretty solid and chill.
For slightly older crowds (I see yoy have stuff like Gurren Lagan on here), Midnight Gospel is pretty good and also from Adventure Time’s showrunner.
For other anime, there is always Fullmetal Alchemist. Saiki K if you can get past the fast editing. Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple is one that’s probably just “okay” but I like a lot.
Centaur World was surprisingly good.
Your “ask Grok” comment is particularly relevant because this day seems to be the turning point researchers cite for when Musk decided to fully support Trump.
I could only speculate as to whether it was staged and Musk was involved in that, or if it was Musk’s genuine response, or what exactly, but its highly suspicious.
The best way to win the game is to not play.
Reddit had a lot of issues and I am glad I left, but one sub I really liked and wish Lemmy had was r/anticonsumption. You make a great point about razors, but that already relied on the assumption that you have decided to shave.
That is not to say that shaving is bad, but to recommend that all individuals think about it. WHY do they want to shave, and how much time and money do they want to put into that? How much of it is mere societal expectation, and is that really worth it?
Look at the Got Milk campaign as another example. That was not promoting any particular company, just the concept of consuming dairy, and led to disastrous health, environmental, and economic consequences in the US today.
The problem is that downvotes do not work. They do not function as an incentive for these users to stop posting, because they do not matter at all.
It can work on larger platforms, where thousands, or even tens of thousands of people vote. There the users form roles based on how they sort the posts. People who sort by New are well aware that they are going to have to sift through a lot of trash, but their reward is that they get to have a more active role in setting the taste for the entire community. Because then you have people who sort by Hot or Active, which tends to be the majority of users in most communities (and is often the default). So in communities with dozens of posts, hundreds of comments, and thousands of votes every day, the things the community doesn’t like gets buried.
The Fediverse is too small for that system to work. There simply is not enough posts, comments, and votes to make any of that meaningful. The same users can just spam the same authors over and over again, and it doesn’t matter whether the post gets 100 upvotes or 100 dpwnvotes- the whole community is going to see it in their feed regardless. And it’s not as if having negative "karma"really matters.
One of tbr systems Reddit had to combat this was that karma occasionally mattered. Some subreddits would require karma to join, or ban if your karma dropped. I’m not sure if the tools exist for something like that here or not. There are a lot of different t ways you can slice up the numbers, but basically looking at post history, ratios of up/down votes, total down votes, etc. Effectively letting community feedback drive the moderation process.
That’s still not perfect because users can block/mute other users. Doing so would effectively be abstaining from voting, and that’s not the healthiest system. But we shouldn’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
They are getting downvoted because other commenters here who have actually read the article have found and quoted the definition of cash, which includes savings.
As it pretty much always does in any financial reporting has in the past 50 years. This same story keeps getting re-reported on every 5 years and the conversations around it are always the same.
The stroke was before he took office. For his first 18-24 months in office his voting record was pretty much along Dem party lines.
Similarly, what about wishing for another linear and stoey-focused 3D Zelda?
I smoked weed and went progressively harder for the last few years.I really enjoyed it a lot: my joints felt better, sleep was easier, I found more joy in movies, TV shows, music, food, and sex. Exercise was easier and I lost weight.
Starting last fall I noticed my memory was getting bad, and at times my mind woukd just shut down. So at first I cut back, then stopped it entirely. Been completely off for 3 months nkw, which should be more than enough time for all the THC to be out of my system and my canmabanoid receptors to be reset. I never used it until my 30’s so there should.be pretty much no risk of long-term issues.
Since then, I’m proud to report that those same problems just got even worse AND I’ve lost all of the benefits! Yay!