majestic

It is also hard if you have to analyze people actively, instead of intuitively knowing body language and the subtleties of verbal communication. That takes a lot of effort, really, and it will only get harder with age. You really should examine yourself and answer these questions: is ist actually hard to make the effort to attend social gatherings, is it actually exhausting to be there, or is it really just exhausting to agonize over what has happened and what you have missed? From that answer, you can begin to deduce a number of things. You aren't very likely to be able to solve the first two just by accepting yourself. That much I can tell you from experience. If it is just the latter, then you really need to follow the advice I gave her a long time ago: feel a little more, think a little less. :) I'll give you two models to work with here. Or maybe three, depending on your point of view. First is going all nerd-metaphysical and quoting Stargate: If you immediately know the candlelight is fire, then the meal was cooked a long time ago. Second is what she would do, assuming for a moment that she would care enough. She'd say something like: Look for someone if you want someone. Don't look for nobody just so you can congratulate yourself when you find them, doofus. :P and then proceed to bat you over the head with a mallet and kick you when you're down, because you're combining a foregone conclusion with the idea that someone can do all the emotional work for you. Reality doesn't smell of sunshine dust, dear. Third, well, the more explicit telling: if you already expect to find no one, then you will not. However, you're not going to find anyone that will make putting in the effort not feel like putting in the effort. You can find someone who makes you feel that it is worth putting in the effort, yes? That is not the same as finding someone who makes it easy to put in the effort. If that is actually the block, then you need to identify and remove it - and that is also something you really need to put your back into. Because, in the end, at the moment you simply don't have anyone to hit you over the head with a mallet, or else someone who is patient enough to tell you what you already know, for like, the seventh time. I realize half of that makes no sense without context. I'm sorry. But not really. :P It's been a wild three days now.

Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor hat the best bug ever. You uninstalled the game, which was very likely because it was pretty bad, and it would kill your entire Windows installation with it. For the sake of reproducing the fun of the original, perhaps it would be good to include that particular nasty as well. :p

The first thing you probably need to understand is that we were both broken and damaged at that point in our lives. Now, unless that applies to you too, you probably should not be envious of a connection that was both incredibly loving and nurturing as well as destructive and cruel. I know I said she could be mercurial, but I wasn't above testing our bond either, at times (it is so easy to guilt trip people when you know what strings to pull and which buttons to press). You'd also need the patience of an angel. You know, like me, but that's because I'm awesome. :p That said, one thing you need to keep in mind is that you cannot force connections. You can also very safely ignore self-help comments like love yourself, otherwise you cannot love. That is utterly poitnless drivel, one can love someone else to the point of sacrificial self-abandonment while thoroughly hating oneself. I am living proof of that, therefore simple logic dictates that it cannot be true. What is true, though, is that self-hate makes it hard to accept love, and being loved the way you are. At worst, it makes you interesting for people with a savior complex who see you as their project to fix. Now, it's not impossible for that to lead to lasting, stable and deep connections, it is a potential minefield to navigate and can end badly if you're not very careful. The other thing is, well, you do have time, and if you are not unhappy and do not feel any psychological strain, then there's no need to change things, and no need to let society dictate how you should live your life. I'm saying that because I know that culturally, that is still much worse in the Balkans than it is in the western world. I know a couple of people through my wife who actually had their parents set them up with someone to marry and have children with just to fulfill societal and cultural expectations. Honestly? Don't do that. That's terrible. It can work, but more often than not it just leads to affairs and a divorce with kids being hurt, or being miserable all the time for the sake of the children. If you think having a relationship just to try how it is to have one is unfair, imagine how keeping up appearances for decades might be. Lastly, if you find that you consistently have problems reading people, then you might want to really look for help. There's nothing wrong with getting a psych-eval. I had one forced on me at the age of six. It did not actually do much good in terms of finding a diagnosis (well, but it did prevent the school system from lumping me in with the other retards and downies, zing, now if you can't take that statement and get all offended, then kindly go f*ck yourself - not talking to @Sarex here), but we have come a long way since the late 80ies. You're not guaranteed to find someone else with over two years worth of time to work through your issues, locked into a constant intellectual and emotional back and forth.

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