“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

-Gandalf the Grey / J R R Tolkein

I know the feeling. I payed for a new computer with specs higher than needed for any new release game at full settings, and yet the main game I have played on it so far was built for Windows 3 and is best played in a web browser.

I’ve been thinking the same thing. While I like the idea that publishers are responsible for maintaining the needed infrastructure, I can only see that resulting in even more predatory pricing to cover the costs and unreasonable pressure on smaller publishers leading them to fold and leave behind the greedy ones

Or the even more frustrating OP reply “fixed thanx” with no details on how they fixed it leaving everyone else in the dark.

Saying that out loud is the quickest way to curse yourself to be adopted by the most chaotic till fur gremlin imaginable.

Brilliantly said. Chasing those “higher highs” can feel like an obligation at times. But I think it’s important to understand that it’s a feeling that is coming from yourself and your own deeper needs as a person. And not, as I believe the person I was replying to was thinking, some sort of societal pressure to conform and “do the right thing.”

Both interpretations of the word “obligation” are technically correct. But I think that it’s one of those things in life where the only way to truly understand the intended interpretation is to have been a parent for yourself. Somehow it can be both a great chore and burden sometimes, but it’s one you choose to put upon yourself because the rewards are sooooo worth it.

As a parent myself, I love this. I feel that the single most important thing you can do as a parent is to actively tell (and show) your kids that you love them. Everything else can grow from there.

“I’m not feeling in the mood right now but I am aware that every moment is precious and pushing through this momentary feeling will result in a far greater feeling of happiness for both me and my child into our future when the opportunities to just play together become few and far between.”

Sometimes you have to look past the choice of words to see the message being conveyed. The point wasn’t that they were dreading playing with their child, it was that despite other factors in their life, they wanted to cherish the moment. And that is the wholesome message you think it is.

No. They would rather effective age verification that doesn’t negatively impact the privacy and liberties of their users. They want a solution, not just a ham fisted excuse to start building the foundations of a social credit system

All three corporations involved are scumbags trying to game the broken legal system to profit at the expense of the consumer. None of them deserve your support. You should be able to buy what you want and emjoy, in a manner that’s convenient for you, at a reasonable price, without having to navigate a labyrinth of corporate deals and user agreements.

There’s heaps of psychology research into therapeutic approaches and all that stuff out there if you’re willing to essentially do a degree on the topic, but personally I like to keep things as simple as possible so anyone can start applying it straight away.

I usually start with the picture story book The Huge Bag of Worries by Virginia Ironside (there’s a read along of it on youtube) to frame the conversation. It helps to set up the idea that the “worries” are real and are having an effect on the individual. Also that many people struggle to know how to deal with them and end up giving bad advice, often because they are carrying their own bag of worries. I also at this point remind them that we are unlikely to get rid off all the problems, eg I can’t cure your depression or rebuild your brain to make it neuro-typical, but we can make it so they are the only things in your bag making it a lot easier to carry.

Then I’ll talk about a Catastrophe Scale. This is where we take a worry and rank it on a scale out of 10 of how bad is it really. 1 is a minor problem that will go away on it’s own, and 10 is an extreme issue that will have a permanent impact on your life. Like in the book, many problems stop being an issue once you realize they are only a 1 or 2 on the scale. This is the “just get over it” point. Other’s need some attention but can easily be solved or passed on to someone else in your support network to handle, but once you’ve spent that small amount of energy, it’s gone. This is the where we see the value of another piece of despised advice, “stop worrying and just do it” or “have you tried going for a walk outside today”. Once again, often spouted advice by people who think of it as the only thing needed without understanding how it fits into a complete treatment plan.

Finally that just leaves the real problems, the ones that are less easy to deal with. But without having to carry the weight of the whole bag of worries, we now have a capacity to take those worries to therapy or a doctor to medicate etc, and just generally do the more difficult and complex work that’s needed.

The problem is that a version of this advice can be very helpful. As someone who has suffered from ongoing mental health issues and also work in an industry where I regularly support people with mental health issues, one piece of advice I often give is to identify what traumas are you unnecessarily holding on to, which are contributing to your depression/anxiety etc.

When you can let go of some of the more mundane stresses in your life, you have more energy to tackle the real issues you’re facing. Of course this is much easier said than done and has to be used as part of a more wholeistic approach, but sometimes the advice to just learn to let it go is very good advice.

Unfortunately, many people don’t understand that intricacy and so just repeat the surface level comment which is far from helpful. And this in turn also leads to a push back in the other direction where people who could genuinely benefit from letting go of some of their stress refuse to do so because they have spent so long being told that’s all there is to it.

I’ve personally been replaying Chrono Trigger recently on PC using Reshade with the CRT-Royale settings for exactly this reason.

Of course there’s also a setting in most emulators to do the same thing.

And my toddler throwing a tantrum at bed time is the user arguing with IT that they did turn off the power and rebooted when they just closed the laptop and opened it again

Not me personally but related. American Truck Simulator has started displaying in-game billboards for an irl truck driving recruiter.

I’m usually pretty strongly against in game advertisements, but this one just kind of makes sense to me.

It will be interesting to see how the existence or lack of a downvote option affects communities over time. There’s some interesting arguments to be made both for and against. And now we actually have a way to easily test and compare between comparable communities on different instances.

I agree about not using it just to disagree with an opinion, but I do think the ability to downvote is very important. It just needs to be clear that it’s supposed to be used to reduce the impact of stuff this is either harmful or just distracts from the conversation.

If I’m in a thread talking about what the best flavor of milkshake is, I will absolutely upvote someone claiming that chocolate is the best even though they are “objectively” wrong. They are however engaging with the conversation. On the other hand, someone who comes in saying that they hate milkshakes and prefer lemonade, while they’re not exactly wrong in having that opinion, it would be worthy of a downvote because they’re in the wrong place for that comment.

And then there’s the bots/people that if they lost the ability to ever talk again, the world would be a better place. Never feel sorry for downvoting them.

He got better

From memory it was several months between Frodo arriving in Rivendell and the actual Council of Elrond. Maybe that’s what you’re remembering.