Time spent with friends and partners.

Wrapped under a blanket with someone I was really into, playing a game together, watching a show, or just talking, was really nice.

I don’t buy a game solely because it’s the zeitgeist or whatever. A friend of mine routinely buys games that are “the new shiny” and then doesn’t finish them, or loses interest quickly. I usually wait for a sale, some patches, and/or the dlc to be bundled into a goty edition.

Some exceptions:

I bought elden ring near launch because I’m a big enjoyer of the genre, and my friend confirmed it was good. No regrets.

I bought bg3 shortly before it’s full access. I’d liked the other games larian did, and a friend told me it was good. No regrets.

Both of those were pretty light on DLC. No season pass or “goty” editions were likely.

I’m going to wait for the dragon age game to go on sale. I don’t really trust Bioware, and I don’t know if they plan to do a bunch of dlc that will get bundled up later.

I’ve been waiting for Lies of P to get cheap. The demo was just ok when I played it, but a friend tells me it’s phenomenal.

Right now I’m playing a MUD (aardwolf). It really distills some online RPG into the essence of “go kill some stuff to level up, get new skills, and kill bigger stuff”. It’s strangely satisfying.

Fine. Sometimes sad. I dated someone with a kid for a while and the good parts were good. But now I’m old so it’s kind of moot.

Right, and you shouldn’t ask a married monogamous person out on a date, either. Never came up for me but is worth keeping in mind! A lot of guys seem to struggle with “she likes me bro she smiled at me” -> “my guy she’s the cashier at work she has to smile at customers.”

You can just ask people out. You can just ask to kiss someone. I was in my mid 20s when someone told me the first one, and late 20s when someone told me the second one. Dating got a lot easier after each revelation.

Bandcamp mostly. They do writeups sometimes like “the best metal from Colorado” or “a deep dive into acid jazz”. They seem to be human written too and not ai slop, at least in the past.

Also seeing who’s playing with who. If I like band A, and band B is opening for them, well I’ll check out band B. I saw “Year of the Cobra” play with “The Well” and it was a good show, and I bought their album.

There’s a lot of like management being like “we gotta hit this deadline (that we made up)” combined with “if I hit all my targets and put in some overtime, the boss can buy another sports car this year”

I don’t want to work extra to make someone else richer. Maybe if I had a shit load of shares. Maybe. But I don’t. So I do my job with professional standards, but I’m not doing 12 hour days

I live in a walkable city so I have a lot of options by just going outside on foot.

The park. Sometimes for a walk, sometimes for a bike ride.

Grocery store or something nearby. Get a snack or something for dinner.

Thrift store, though that’s a bike ride or train ride.

Library. Just browse the stacks.

Bookstore, less often, but sometimes it’s fun to see what they have.

Record shop, rarely, because I don’t have a record player but a few friends do, and I might see something they’d like.

Sometimes I just walk around without a goal. See what there is to see around here.

I’m outside so I’m not sure how to evaluate “the room”. My phone is the most immediate at hand (pun intended) useful thing right now though.

There are other RPGs that may scratch slightly different itches, if the fantasy + combat + resource management parts of DND don’t really appeal.

I really like Fate. it’s a lot more focused on story and is overall a lighter system. it does ask more from the players though.

HR is not likely to side with the worker over the company.

There’s also a certain kind of “hr energy” that makes my skin crawl. Like if you worked at a company called AB Tech they’d be up front in the meeting going “I SAY A, YOU SAY B! A!” and I’m just like no, please stop, I’m not that excited to make charts for assholes.

The hr person where I work now seems nice, at least. My old job the main hr person gave me the creeps.

In addition to the flying Nazgûl and what not, the ring could corrupt the proud eagle. They’d just fly off with it and then you have another problem.

Switched to Mint for desktop. Been mostly fine. Getting it installed was surprisingly harrowing. Annoyed that most mod tools for games are targeting windows. I guess I have to figure out wine and its whole prefix system.

I get a small amount of joy from clicking the “request changes” button and blocking some doofus from merging lazy untested code.

Bugmenot sometimes has LinkedIn credentials https://bugmenot.com/view/linkedin.com

Don’t click any of the scam ones though

Holy shit. I had no idea.

Yeah if I take photo/video I put the camera in front of my face or chest so no one behind me can see it.

Thinking about it, a lot of things that I flag as idiotic come from putting emotions first. We’re all emotional creatures, but idiots are ruled by them. It’s idiotic to blow your rent money on candy, but the short term emotional high for an idiot is too appealing. It’s stupid to blow up at someone instead of admitting fault, but admitting fault feels bad, so the idiot can’t take that. Reading an essay is informative, but that’s boring work and the idiot might feel bad if they don’t understand it, so they’d avoid the whole thing. If the essay doesn’t agree with their worldview, that’s going to feel terrible.

I usually squash my local into a single commit, then rebase it onto the head of main. Tends to be simpler

I really liked Midnight Suns :(

I got to play video games with spider man and be in a book club with Captain marvel.

The deck building was pretty good. I wanted more cards and more excuses to use more heroes.

The fact that there’s no miss chance on attacks is subtle but a real improvement over the genre standard. And using the environment was a lot of fun, and very genre appropriate.