I don’t normally dream much about other people anymore. Maybe it’s because I’ve gotten more isolated over the years, but the rare occasions I dream about people, it’s usually an immediate family member. A while ago (maybe two or so months ago?) I had a dream that was out of left field.

When I was a kid, I was frequently a loner. Not by choice, but because I just lacked any social skills, confidence, or extracurriculars that gave me a connection to kids my age. This persisted from when I was pretty young up through high school. I never really stopped being weird and most people still thought of me as a net-negative to any social situation, but not all of them. I ended up with a group of friends. Not just people who were my kind of weird (which I was very self-conscious about and essentially avoided like the plague) but more varied. Some theater kids, some athletes, some boys, some girls. In the mornings before the bell rang, as well as during lunch, we’d sit out in this side area between the auditorium and the cafeteria. It was all concrete-floored, partially covered by the sides of the auditorium roof and partially under a covered walkway. There was a picnic bench and two small concrete cubes adjacent to the wall of the auditorium to sit on. That place ended up meaning a lot to me, I think, because it was the first place I ever really felt like I had friends.

In my dream, I was sitting at the bench alone, eating lunch. A friend who I had a crush on for a long time, I mean for years, sat down across from me and started eating with me like it was the most natural thing in the world. I haven’t talked to this girl in close to a decade now, hadn’t thought about her at all in a long time. I tell her “I’m sorry I acted sort of weird for a while before we ended up losing touch, and I’m sorry I never just let us be normal friends.” She tells me it’s okay, and that she forgives me. We keep eating. A moment later come two friends of mine who I had been close with a while back. Lost contact with them as well, and was pretty unfairly disappointed in them when I last knew them. They got married the other year, not that I had ever heard anything about it from them. I apologized to them for expecting more than was fair out of them. They accepted, told me it was water under the bridge, and started eating. The four of us were talking amongst ourselves about I don’t know what, along comes another friend. I had, at times, been unfair to them, too. Nothing dramatic or out of the ordinary, but I had definite hangups born from insecurity around him. Another apology, another acceptance. This kept going for a while. People I knew would keep joining the group. I would apologize for however I wronged them. They would forgive me, grab a seat somewhere, and talk amongst us. People ended up having smaller side conversations as more people showed up and it felt almost like a big picnic. I knew as I was apologizing that none of this would bring these people back into my life. This quiet lunch on a beautiful afternoon would end, we would go our separate ways. I think somewhere in there, I recognized that it was all a dream. The mass of people became more than just the friends I had lost across the years. It was everybody I had ever wronged in my life. Even strangers I had met only for a minute when I accidentally cut them off or inconvenienced them. Every last mistake was accounted for. The scores had been settled and every debt was freely forgiven. I felt an overwhelming feeling of love. It was the warmest, softest, and kindest sensation I had ever felt, and maybe the first time in my life feeling fully and totally at peace. Like I was enough, and the world was enough.

Soon enough, I woke up. I’ve never experienced a dream like that in my life. Nothing so vivid or so coherent, or that I felt so deeply. I just had a peace that washed over me. It reminded me of something I heard once from somebody whose thoughts have deeply impacted my own: that all cruelty in the world, even sadism, comes from fear. Fear that we will not be forgiven for the things we have done or the things we might do. It is a belief that there is no escaping judgement and punishment for the things we have done and the things we might do, and that on our deathbeds we will be in agony because of it. That when we die, we will have to pass into the terrifying unknown alone, in pain and fear. And lastly, that in becoming that punishing agony for somebody else, we escape the punishment looming over our own heads, or at the very least that we will not be the only ones punished. This fear of judgement is in everybody, to some extent, and can make all of us cruel, even in small ways. Living with this gnawing fear is what it means to be in Hell. Heaven is something we must build. It is not a place that can be entered by an individual, it must be built by many hands. It is the understanding among people that everybody is human and shares the fundamental human experience: we are small beings, cast into a world that cruelly gifts us with a body that feels pain and wants and needs that can never be done away with, and it will never be our fault. We do not choose our faculties or our environments. None of us do. If you believe that of everybody, and you believe that they think the same of you, it all falls into place. We come to understand that, having felt those pains and injustices, nobody would ever choose to punish each other. It would be like choosing to hurt themselves. The fear melts away, and we feel forgiven. When we feel forgiven like that, we conquer our manic fear of death. When I heard all this, it sounded like absolute woo-woo bullshit to me from a guy I normally thought of as one of the most clear-minded and well-meaning people I had ever seen. I had given it thought, rolled it over in my mind, and decided it made some sense, but was far too sappy and optimistic to be anything real. But it all felt true after that dream. I understood what I think it feels like when you have been forgiven for everything, and it’s something I wish for everybody.

I teared up a little bit after the dream. I certainly cried a bit writing all of this out. I hope I didn’t sour it with something incoherent at the end, but that’s it. That’s what it meant to me.

There’s not even a full podcast of us.

Honestly, I don’t dislike coding, but I don’t like it enough to do it over most other hobbies. It would definitely fall more into the category of unpaid work than something I do for fun. I suppose it’s mostly something I have to deal with. The suggestions here seem to lean towards contributing to an open source project or, if I really can’t do that, keeping up with my game dev. Appreciate the encouragement. I’m sure I’ll keep chugging, I just feel like the frustration boils over more easily the longer this keeps up. Being able to post stuff like this and the encouragement people give in response genuinely do help me keep from like I’m trapped in an asylum.

I don’t think it’s prudish to focus on cool before sexy as the default, especially in games where you’re creating an avatar of yourself vs playing a pre-defined character. Maybe I’m out of touch but I don’t make characters I’m attracted to, I make characters to represent myself. I want to see me looking cool, not me with my cheeks spread.

FFXIV’s high-end content is, without a single question, something that you’ll want a regular group for. I basically quit because I couldn’t convince my friends to keep playing. Partyfinder isn’t usually toxic, but it’s always draining because high end content doesn’t really let you “carry” somebody and if a single person leaves then you’ll most likely be starting fresh with another person who has never done the encounter before.

Most of the friends that I have that are into DnD are in at least two games. Some people like doing it more than one night a week and it’s hard to find two days out of every week that everybody in the group is cool spending on it.

I think it’s a frame of mind. Generally, people are not trained to view media as art, nor to interact with art in any meaningful sense. If you see a video game and subconsciously think “this exists solely for my gratification” then yeah, you’re not gonna be thinking about it much.

Idk I just have no idea what the hell else to do with my hair. Long all over/short all over just looks bad to me and anything else is too complex for me to do right. It’s not shaved on the sides, but it’s generally a number 1~2.

This is one guy, one single guy, has made a statement as powerful as a protest of thousands. You can say it’s suicide, but not that it’s meaningless. You can say martyrdom is not something to aspire to, but cannot say that it did not take an incredibly rare level of devotion towards a cause that is just. Writing him off as out of his mind is an insult to his determination. I don’t think self-immolating is the most productive thing he could have done, but at the end of the day, if it was, I know I wouldn’t have the guts to follow through on it.

Understanding video games or not, you’d hope they’d at least understand the basic economic reality that addictive products make more money than non-addictive products. That’s why it was banned: it encourages unhealthy usage habits.

Oh I’d absolutely prefer somebody going all in something like that to the exasperating hack. My point is that if your goal is to avoid getting “owned” or whatever you want to call it, the only way to do that is to never actually enjoy something. I guess I’m trying to get across that I think a lot of the cringe discourse is less about what people think is embarrassing and more about avoiding ever feeling embarrassed, which is simply not a realistic thing unless you make yourself miserable.

My copium take is that there’s no way that the government wouldn’t understand banning “”“player retention mechanics”“” would cause a big divestment. They’re used because they make shittons of reliable money! Did they think it was just because devs are too lazy to come up with actual games? That seems like a pretty basic idea that would come across with even cursory investigation into what’s being regulated. Under this hopeful line of thought, it’d probably be a firing for messaging failure rather than a lack of will to follow through.

At the end of the day one person’s cringe is another person’s cool. There’s an impulse to try to avoid being seen as cringe by anybody and that can only lead to being layered in an unsatisfying ironic detachment. That’s the only way to avoid ever being cringe: avoid being genuine. Understand that this watch is definitely not for everybody, but nothing is. If it doesn’t put off the people you actually respect, who cares?

I would say that, under a strong implementation of democratic centralism, assassination is not a significant issue. Previous democratic centralist implementations have a history of being heavy on the centralism, light on the democratic, but if the party line really does come from the bottom up, the leader is only the most effective organizer. They do not need to be a visionary so much as a logistics nerd.

I feel safe on this website. I know there’s no point to all of you being feds because they already have microphones in my walls.

The Dark Age, a time of backwardness, illiteracy, and decline. Also, when books were invented.

Christianity (and other organized religions) are vestiges of a very effective way of packaging culture. Replace “God” with “the community” and things make lots of sense. It’s not a terribly new observation that an individual’s perception of reality is constructed by society. Why not simply call that process of construction God? Yeah, when it’s stripped of all forms of communal relations and obligations as all things under capitalism are, you’re left with a very dumb kernel of “imagine a really big wizard” but the fact that it’s endured at all goes to show how deeply woven religion was into the lives of people before us. The difference between religion and superstition is the order: religion is about understanding the world as we experience it. A ghost dog telling you to sell the organs of children is not religion, it is, charitably, superstition.

Why are pixie cuts paired with dark green highlights and wavy black hair the hottest thing ever? Why are they so elusive? Why are we here? Just to suffer?

If there’s arguments that solar is better, sure, I’m sympathetic to those. I can understand if nuclear technology is not safe enough yet for widespread use. I think that arguments about nuclear being inherently unsafe are not convincing, though. As long as each reactor is safer than the last, we can minimize that inherent unsafeness. To take an example from programming: the only bug-free program you’ll ever write is a hello world program. Introducing complexity naturally increases the amount of unaccounted for states. Cutting-edge medical technology is invariably going to have an astronomical amount of unaccounted for states and the bugs that come with them. That doesn’t mean computing has nothing to offer medicine, only that its use must be weighed against alternatives. Fusion might be less inherently unsafe but AFAIK it’s not on the table right now, and we need energy today. China’s investing in nuclear technology, but it hasn’t been neglecting wind and solar, either. Putting feelers around each solution just seems like the no-brainer thing to do.