NevelioKrejall

And if my grandmother had wheels she would be a bicycle!

I do not share your paranoia and I feel less despair than you seem to, but I am right there with you about AI art being a real problem. You don’t have to be a flawless human being to be right about that.

Just… Don’t stop? Keep walking. They legally can’t stop you and they know it. It’s a psychological barrier, not a physical or legal barrier. Make direct eye contact, smile, say “No, thanks” and keep walking. It’s worked for me so far.

Not remotely. If you feel like you’ve seen everything, it might be time to consider a (literal) change of scenery. There are too many places to go, different people to meet and try to understand, books to read, flavors to taste. Seeing it online isn’t the same as seeing it in person with your own eyes. You could go a day’s walk in any direction and likely find something you haven’t seen before. You just have to be looking for it.

Humans will take any chance to reduce complex and nuanced psychology into rigid, prescriptive labels. It’s all astrology, only the flavor of the meaningless noise changes.

This is how assholes test your boundaries to see how far they can push you. It wasn’t a joke until you pushed back.

This was my favorite game as a kid. Doing fan-art and a D&D campaign about it for years got me hired on as an artist for the new one! It’s gonna be wild.

Mine isn’t this bad, but I can relate to the first-day-on-Adderall thing. It was wild when I walked into my messy bathroom an hour after that first dose and my brain just went: “It is possible, even reasonable for you to clean this bathroom, in a finite amount of time, without every moment filling you with dread. This task will not consume your whole life day.” My brain had simply never done that before. I could just choose to do something and–perhaps more importantly–to stop doing something. I remember I was hyperfixating working on a hobby project at 11 PM on a work night and my brain went: “If you stop working now, brush your teeth and go to bed, this fun project will still be here for you to work on tomorrow. You don’t have to keep at it until 6 AM and then go to work without sleeping.” That seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. It was weird to hear that from my own brain, not in a “you’re being bad” way, but in a “it’s going to be okay” way. There was a lot of happy crying those first few weeks.

Just wish I’d been diagnosed in college instead of in my mid-30s. I might have graduated.

People like to throw around the word ‘lazy’ but it’s more like I can’t turn it on OR off unless I’m medicated. Once I’m in the zone I will work until I grow a beard, then wither away, then my crumbling skeleton grows a beard. It would be a powerful thing if I could aim it.

If I’m not the farmer?

I would follow a pre-scripted path depending on the day of the week and season, and refuse to accept more than two gifts. I would be a romance option, but the annoying kind that stays inside most of the time so it’s hard to build rapport.

For extra credit, I would post ads inexplicably asking for someone to bring me a topaz to rub on my sore knees.

I mean, anything? That’s got to be close enough to 100% to make no difference. Rocks in space hit planets, pieces break off at escape velocity, they become the space rocks that hit other planets. I doubt there’s a solid body in the inner solar system that doesn’t have at least a little bit of Mars on it.

I think you’d be surprised just how many people don’t. I didn’t until I was in my 30s, mostly because my parents never taught me how and it seemed like an ‘extra’ step. I tried a couple times but couldn’t make a habit of it.

Weirdly, It finally clicked for me when a dentist patiently explained that you don’t brush your teeth, you clean your teeth.

Brushing and flossing are not two different tasks. That would be like sweeping the floor and then just leaving the pile of dirt on the floor instead of sweeping it into the dustpan. It’s not done if you only do half of it. She also suggested tools I could use to make it less painful (I have TMJ). I have only missed a single day since, and that was because I was unconscious for a surgical procedure.

This isn’t stupid, it is righteous

I think I may be an outlier here. I really don’t want to die in a sudden ‘didn’t-see-it-coming’ kind of way, like getting hit by a semi or a freak accident with heavy machinery kind of way. The idea of going from living, thinking, feeling, person to chunk(s) of meat in an instant terrifies the shit out of me. Especially if it’s caught on video and people watch it for laughs or whatever possesses them to watch that kind of thing.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to die in some slow, painful way either, but something I had some agency in would be worlds better. Like taking a bullet to save a loved one, or punching my own ticket after getting a terminal diagnosis, or even just taking a deliberate, calculated risk.

The best horror film for Halloween isn’t a horror film, exactly. It’s a cartoon miniseries called Over the Garden Wall. We put it on for the Halloween party every year.

Two approaches. Mixed success with both.

1. Choose games that don’t make you feel bad. This can mean playing more cooperative games, or it can mean offering to referee or sit out games you know will just piss you off. For me, the chance of winning isn’t appealing enough to outweigh the chance of ruining the game for someone else. It helps to identify what exactly it is about losing that makes you so sour. I have a hard time with games like Cards Against Humanity because the card combinations that are funny to me usually aren’t funny to anyone else because they didn’t go on the ADHD field trip with to make those connections. It starts to feel like a popularity contest that I’m losing because my brain is wired wrong, and it’s hard not to take that personally.

2. Set different goals in the games you’re playing, and define ‘winning’ for yourself based on those goals. I used to get annoyed every time my friends pulled out settlers of Catan. I would do what made sense to me each turn, but I’d always lose anyway either to random chance or just not having enough RAM in my brain. Even on the rare occasions I won I often wouldn’t have fun with it because I spent so much of the game being frustrated. So I decided the only thing I cared about in the game was getting one of the bonus goals, usually ‘longest road’. That was much easier to focus on, and it took all the pressure off me to win. After a while it became kind of a running joke.

It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. Sore losers often have anger issues they’re not dealing with (I know I did!) and figuring that stuff out will help in more areas of your life than just board games.

Your mileage may vary.

Good luck!

Two approaches. Mixed success with both.

1. Choose games that don’t make you feel bad. This can mean playing more cooperative games, or it can mean offering to referee or sit out games you know will just piss you off. For me, the chance of winning isn’t appealing enough to outweigh the chance of ruining the game for someone else. It helps to identify what exactly it is about losing that makes you so sour. I have a hard time with games like Cards Against Humanity because the card combinations that are funny to me usually aren’t funny to anyone else because they didn’t go on the ADHD field trip with to make those connections. It starts to feel like a popularity contest that I’m losing because my brain is wired wrong, and it’s hard not to take that personally.

2. Set different goals in the games you’re playing, and define ‘winning’ for yourself based on those goals. I used to get annoyed every time my friends pulled out settlers of Catan. I would do what made sense to me each turn, but I’d always lose anyway either to random chance or just not having enough RAM in my brain. Even on the rare occasions I won I often wouldn’t have fun with it because I spent so much of the game being frustrated. So I decided the only thing I cared about in the game was getting one of the bonus goals, usually ‘longest road’. That was much easier to focus on, and it took all the pressure off me to win. After a while it became kind of a running joke.

It’s not perfect, and it doesn’t happen in a vacuum either. Sore losers often have anger issues they’re not dealing with (I know I did!) and figuring that stuff out will help in more areas of your life than just board games.

Your mileage may vary.

Good luck!

Absolutely not. Discomfort isn’t a thing to be avoided, and contentment too easily becomes complacency. Everything I’ve ever done that materially improved my life was motivated by not being content with the status quo. Each positive change was (physically or emotionally) difficult, unpleasant, or even painful to make, but it always made life better afterward. Pain is a fantastic teacher. I would rather struggle than sleep, and I don’t want rich assholes doing my thinking for me.

Looking back, I understand it. At the time, it was devastating. I was depressed, had lost my job, and hadn’t learned to enjoy my own company yet, so I hung around constantly needing his attention. He didn’t sign up to be a therapist. He was as gentle as he could be about it, but it still hurt to be abandoned at my lowest point. I needed the wake up call though. I’m doing much better now.

There is a shocking lack of Star Control 2 in here. Easily the best game I have ever played, period. It frequently gets name dropped in lists of game developers’ favorite games of all time. Later space epics like Mass Effect stood on Star Control 2’s shoulders to reach the heights they did.

Good news! The devs released it to the open source community under the name The Ur-Quan Masters. You can play it now for free! And they’re developing a sequel as we speak over at Pistol Shrimp Games