I'm sure I'm not alone in spending more time building structures to be productive than actually producing. I'm always trying to find ways to "trick" myself into getting things done, with varying levels of success.

For me, it's always a struggle to keep going with anything once the novelty wears off. Finding new ways to structure and gamify work helps for a while, but very few things stick more than a few months. That said, every once in a while I find a thing that does become an actual tool in my toolset. I'm thinking specifically of Pomodoro timers for me. If I don't want to spend too much time hyper focusing, the intervals help me break out and evaluate, rather than working for 9 hours and forgetting to eat.

It's been useful and I remember to implement it, I don't have a ton of tools of strategies like that. What tools or strategies both work for you AND you seem able to actually implement them reasonably consistently?

So I missed out on anime for the most part growing up. In the last 6 months or so I have immersed myself in the medium, mostly because some friends wouldn't shut up about Dungeon Meshi. (They were correct in this action, btw). In that time I have mainlined a bunch of shows, and my life is much richer for it.

I fell in love with Bocchi the Rock and Girls Band Cry, so going back and watching K-On made sense. I think the first two are arguably better shows overall (BTR might be my favorite anime), but late in the second season, K-On might have gotten the most visceral reaction out of me so far. If you've seen the show, you probably know what I'm talking about.

I watched this ep last night and I just couldn't handle it. Like full on sobbing, ugly cry. I'm tearing up again just thinking about it.

I'm not 100% sure why this hit me so hard. This season has had this theme in the background throughout. Even though they mostly eat cake and crack jokes, this has been bubbling just beneath the surface, only occasionally showing up with Azusa's concern about the band fucking around instead of practicing, and Yui and Ritsu not having plans. But for like the last 10 episodes, it's been all I can think about. I have been legitimately worried about these moeblobs and their fictional future.

I think the fact that this show doesn't often swing the emotions hammer, as well as the high highs of the episode followed by catharsis for this simmering issue is masterfully done. It's both textual and meta-textual, because the viewer also knows the show will end soon, and we also will not be with our friends anymore. They manage to do this without it feeling emotionally manipulative too. It's clever and bittersweet and so in line with the themes of the show and so incredibly well executed.

Nothing was resolved, nothing materially changed about their world or their characters, and they didn't really learn anything new. But damn if it isn't affecting. I've spent a lot of time with these girls now and I'm invested. I'm not sure if you could do this as effectively in a show with more plot; slice of life shows really let you live with the characters and get to know them.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk I guess. Needed to get some thoughts out. What shows have had the most emotional impact for you?

So it's made of shit, right? And shit is an animal product. But barring a night of drinking or a particularly aggressive burrito, shitting does not harm the shitter; it's beneficial and required. Also the animals in question can and do consent, does that make it vegan?

MAL and Nerdfonts conspiring to slander our ever-compiling friends.

So I'm no expert, but I have been a hobbyist C and Rust dev for a while now, and I've installed tons of programs from GitHub and whatnot that required manual compilation or other hoops to jump through, but I am constantly befuddled installing python apps. They seem to always need a very specific (often outdated) version of python, require a bunch of venv nonsense, googling gives tons of outdated info that no longer works, and generally seem incredibly not portable. As someone who doesn't work in python, it seems more obtuse than any other language's ecosystem. Why is it like this?

So. This is something I've never talked to anyone in my real life about, but for whatever reason I'm more comfortable asking a bunch of strangers on the internet for advice. Deep breath.

I am coming up on 40yo, and since I was 16 I've mostly been in dedicated heterosexual relationships. I have always considered myself a cis male and maybe a little bi but things are... changing rapidly, I guess. I am single for the first time in years all this freedom and time means I'm doing some long overdue introspection. I don't think I've ever been particularly happy with my body or my gender. I am finding myself much more attracted to people with penises, and more importantly, I am finding myself wanting to play a different, more submissive maybe, role in the bedroom. I finally have an opportunity to try new and different things with all sorts of different people, and that's sort of exciting, but I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing or even what I'm feeling.

I see a lot of trans folks self-actualizing and I'm super happy for them. I envy them for knowing what they want. I don't know what I want and it's driving me a little crazy lately. I would kill to have that level of knowledge of who I wanted to be. I am not a particularly masculine man, but I don't think I feel like I would be more comfortable being more traditionally feminine, though that doesn't necessarily repulse me, either. I would certainly be happier with less body hair. When I was I kid I wanted to be a robot. Now as an adult I maybe just want to be a robot who fucks occasionally, gender irrelevant. Fully functional, you might say. I don't really know what to do with that feeling, though.

Any advice on how to navigate literally any of this would be awesome. I feel like a teenager again, no idea how any of this works or where to even begin. I don't have the knowledge or the language to talk coherently about any of this stuff, and certainly no experience. I am doing my best you guys but all of this is confusing as fuck.

Never in my life have I felt so used by a game. Feels dirty. The video game equivalent of emotional abuse.

5 stars, would recommend.

I assume it has something to do with the sound cancelling. It uses white noise or something, right? I'm running out of nails to test this.

So I'm reading The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell and I'm quite enjoying it. I don't really have anyone else in my life who shares my game development interests so I thought it might be fun to put together some kind of regular discussion. I've got a pretty long reading list, would nice to have someone to talk to. Thoughts?

So I've been using Linux now for a while, and am looking to migrate my dev environment to vim and spend more time in the command line. I'm fairly comfortable with bash but by no means an expert. I've used zsh with some minor customization but just recently learned about fish. I'd love to hear people's opinions.