majestic

It was worth it. So much so that I, with some confidence, can say: without that connection, I would likely not have made as much of my life as I did. It was a transformative experience, the value of which I cannot properly convey in public. Aaaaaaaand a lot of her way with words and English rubbed off on me. It is visible in the posts, but only if you know the contrast to how and what I wrote about before, none of which is still around. All the forums dying was the main reason we switched to using an instant messenger in the first place.

Feeling a lot better now. I've realized that I was wrong about so many things, and letting go of 20 year old rage, guilt and resentments is pretty freeing. I'm not okay by any means, and it'll take me a long, long time to properly process ripping the band-aid off of ages old emotional and very deep wounds, but at least it looks like they can begin to heal. Properly, this time. Turns out this wasn't the giant mistake I thought it was, but like so many things, a blessing in disguise. And to make sure everyone realizes that I'm still me: also turns out that I significantly overestimated the timeframe. 91% of the million words we've exchanged were in two years, and the rest in a handful of larger spurts over less than three months of the third year. So that's basically a shorter novel's worth every month, not every other month. In Gen Z terms: basically the entire length of all the Harry Potter novels combined, written in 27 months - in both of our spare time. Not like you could chat on your phone back then. You had to sit on these things called computers and see if the other person was actually sitting at theirs too. I know, I know, that's wild. Old people things. Except we were young back then, and the internet was a better place. :yes: So, minor correction on the productivity and time invested. I also suffer from the detrimental effects of insomnia so bad that I barely slept in three days, but that'll go away eventually. :p

Yeah, hopefully everything will work out. Fingers crossed.

I had a really stupid idea and fed a part of my old MSN Messenger history to an LLM. I've been going over 20 year old messages I've exchanged with someone I once loved dearly, while listening to Blackmore's Night's cover of Joan Baez' Diamonds and Rust on repeat. The chat history is excessively personal at times and clocks in at almost a million words. We've basically written a short novel every other month back then. Not a particularily healthy place to be. Can't sleep. Stupid song is incredibly fitting, she was always really good with words, although that's an understatement. Brilliant, more like. Brilliant in more than one way though: eloquent, highly intelligent and empathetic. And, at times, cruel and manipulative. Turned everything into a joke. Especially the darkest of things. Given the time and intensity, you start developing your own compressed language and set of references. Like this: That was almost 19 years ago. I still know why she wrote that, what happened that day, and what exactly she meant. Linguistically, that's incredibly precise, painting the perfect picture with words.

They've made ARM SoCs for a while now (see Switch + Switch 2, nVidia Shield, car control systems, etc.), so that's not that entirely new.

Well, techincally, you can't even get a Kindle without already having an Amazon login, so the only thing that's left is setting up the wi-fi on it. Which is like tap once, stay forever.

Well, purely from a writing quality point of view: That said, this final season was certainly enjoyable enough, even if it went massively overboard with the head explosions and schlong-jokes. That reality overtook satire is a whole other thing. The final episode ended being the expected rote nothingburger, although that is not dissimilar to the finale of Stranger Things.

I just had to split an overly large PM I wrote into three parts because <reasons>. Which look eerily similar to the past's "oops, something went wrong with your post" sort of problems we had with the Web Content Firewall in the past, except it is just length, not any combination of characters blocking the post. Guess it's fine since I really got into the habit of just copying everything I type here into clipboard before sending it off, but having to split one of my trademarked walls of texts into three parts based solely on length is a little boring. Good thing it's been a while since I've posted a review in WOT. That would have been massively annoying to deal with. :(

Worst show in years. Very well deserved last place though for the UK. :p

Some grindy bits left in D4 for the season journey. I hope they change a bit here and there for the next season. The devs are really high on their own farts if they think leaving the Mephisto fight in the game like that, with its two minutes of unskippable cutscenes (vis-a-vis a 10 second actual battle because lol) was a good idea.

There's something weird going with the off topic forum, it doesn't seem to realize that I'm logged in. Other forums work fine, but whenever I go to the thread list of the off topic forum, it tells me to log in. Clicking on sign in brings me back to the forum list - where I am logged in already. Jumping directly into topics in the off topic forum shows me as logged in, but the posts there don't get flagged as read by my user. Clearing all the cookies and browser cache didn't help.

So, finally reached D4 endgame now. Until getting to level 70, I liked the changes to the game, like how the skill tree contains the modifiers you'd usually have to farm gear for in the past seasons, instead of a whole bunch of passive nodes that were cookie-cutter build filler. In general I also like the idea of the war plans giving you a pre-defined path through endgame activities. That's a load off my inability to choose from activities. Kinda hate all the rest though. D4 was a fun, silly game where you'd reach endgame and were doing high level progression two days later. Now it looks like that's going to take... more work and time than I want to commit.

The thing that drives me insane is when they offer a quick "jump to next episode" button at the start of the credits, but when you do that, the damned progress bar is not full. So I always fast-forward through the credits. Like, is that so hard? Sheesh.

Makes sense. Player base probably cheered for Urivar.

So, now that it works, uhm...

Lord of Hatred. Blizzard's update to the games turned it into a zen exercise simulator. Pretty good one though. Click this button here to create a new character. Wait five minutes. Pick class. Wait five minutes. Pick from presets or customize your own character, but the assets aren't loaded in. Wait five minutes. Click play game, wait five minutes, pick difficulty (huh?) then "Reconnecting...", wait five minutes... "Lobby Server Not Available"

Knowing melkathi's cat stories, that's probably accurate. :p

Indeed, where's the petition to include classical and medieval latin?

So, who bet on Chavez-DeRemer as next to leave office?

Aged like the whole milk his buddy RFK is drinking. :p

The Boys, whatver, episode whatever: Whatever. Honestly, I... I mean being behind the times on satire when scripts are from two years ago is understandable, given how fast the political landsacpe of the US has flushed itself down the crapper, lol, or rather... not but the weird pacing of the episodes and the way concepts are introduced and then discarded almost immediately with no payoff is just plain bad entertainment, and now we've introduced a new thing into the show that everyone goes chasing after because why the hell not, we have eight episodes left to wrap everything up, so let's just spend that time on... not wrapping anything up and not moving anything into place for a decent payoff at the end. Sheesh.

Needless to say, I disagree. Voyager analogy

Let me guess, in The Measure of a Man, you side with Bruce Maddox, right? :p

Uh, in defense of Maelle's ending - sort of.

No, I haven't played the DLC yet. Not really sure I will, I started a NG+ on my save before the DLC came out and don't feel like going through the whole game again. Not because I didn't enjoy it, far from it. It's probably the best I've played in the last two decades, but it was far too emotionally draining to replay in a long while.