paddirn

tl;dr long rant, I don't care if anybody reads it, I just want to get it out because I've been depressed and suicidal for months now (not so much suicidal now, I'm not in any need of immediate help, but it's scary how my brain was working through the logistics of getting it done).

42 M, I've been through breakups in the past, I've been through plenty of failed relationships for a variety of reasons, but I'm coming out of a ~10 year relationship now with somebody whom I have a kid with and we've been partners through alot of shit together, but I think I'm just done now and it's tearing me up inside.

It started a few months ago, she was finishing up nursing school, which I had been supporting her for the past year through it financially (paying her rent) and helping her with most of her classes. It was supposed to be a big achievement, but the week before her final exam, she told me she it was over, that she'd been seeing somebody else for a few months and that she didn't want to have anything to do with me anymore. I was devastated, but stayed around like a pathetic dog because we have a kid together and her being successful would help everyone out in raising him. Even though I had just had my heart broken, I helped out with some post-graduation things, thinking maybe it was just a temporary thing, maybe things would turn around once the stress of graduation and her nursing board exam passed, but nothing really changed, I just got more and more pathetic and suicidal.

Her behavior though after graduation started becoming problematic though, she hadn't passed the state certification exam (the requirement to actually becoming an RN), but she'd basically just checked out at that point. She was more stressed about planning for her graduation party than she was for studying for the exam. She failed the exam and essentially has 45 more days until she can take the exam, but still she doesn't seem to care that much about studying for it. Things apparently broke off with whoever the other person was that she was seeing, or so she said, and then started talking about traveling across the country to Seattle to work some nursing jobs out there, as if she was basically just tossing 2 years' worth of schooling down the drain.

Things briefly rekindled for us the past two weeks and things seemed happy again, though in my mind I suspected I was just being used again, but I was tired of being depressed. She wanted it to be an open relationship though, no strings attached, and I stupidly agreed, just telling her that I didn't want to know anything about anyone. else. On Wednesday, she wanted me to watch our son while she said she was going out to study with a girl-friend from school. Thought nothing of it and was glad she was applying herself. The next morning, I stopped by her place to pick up something for our son before he went to school, she wasn't there, bed was empty (she normally sleeps in). When I called to ask where she had been at, there was no response, just dodging the question, it was obvious she'd gone out with somebody else and stayed the night with them, and she hung up on me.

I know I had opened myself up to it by agreeing to a NSA relationship in the first place, and I thought maybe I could distance myself emotionally from it, but I couldn't do it, I felt betrayed, after all we had been through and all I had done to help her over the course of our relationship, I just couldn't go through with it, I can't willingly go along with that with somebody I care so deeply about (even if it's not reciprocated).

In a way, I was glad it happened, because it gave me the anger I needed to break things off between us for good I think, but I'm so pathetically lonely and touch/attention-starved that I don't know that I'd be able to keep myself from falling back into the relationship if she tried to start things up again. One of the big complicating factors is that we have a kid together that we co-parent and we're constantly picking him up back and forth between us, so it's not like I can completely cut myself off, but it's painful to think about her moving on with somebody else, I don't know how co-parenting couples get past things like that.

And so everything just feels pointless to me now. Life feels empty. All my future plans had revolved around our relationship and plans together, it all just hinged on her getting through nursing school and then we were going to start building a life together, and now it feels like I have nothing to look forwards to. Obviously I have a son I love very much, but I just feel a big emptiness inside that I can't get past. The events of the past week with the election have further compounded things, but I'm at the point where I just don't care about that even. I don't care if the world burns.

I noticed this Summer I started transitioning my morning walks to pre-sunrise hours to try to escape the heat (since even mornings in Ohio are getting to be hot). Since global warming (or climate change in general) is happening and there's apparently nothing to be done to fix it in our lifetimes, it made me wonder if our overall society might move towards more nocturnal working hours instead of the standard 9–5, just to escape overheating during the day?

There's probably no incentive currently, since workers aren't dropping like flies yet, but I could see it coming into play as global warming gets worse over time and it causes legitimate production issues. Probably some jobs wouldn't have the option, but most I think would be able to benefit from it. Does this sound like something realistic, or are we cursed to have to endure extreme temperatures because we've always worked in the daytime and we can't/won't change now?

Whether it's a sense of superiority or just to be funny or asinine or out of a genuine need to spread the truth, people online generally try to be contrarian as often as possible because it gives them some sort of personal gratification or a sense that they're correcting something wrong in the universe.

prompt: "generate an image of Patrick Bateman as Batman"

Copilot: "create a picture of Marvel's Fantastic Four in Leonardo's the Last Supper painting"

alternates:

Streamer Perrikaryal uses an electroencephalogram (EEG) device to play games

I settled on using Zotero (meant for academia, but whatever, it does what I need) for cataloguing/organizing my ttrpg pdf hoard and I'm trying to set up some top-level tags to make it a bit easier to sift through what I'm looking for. One set of tags will be genre tags (fantasy, sci-fi, horror, etc), with another level below that for sub-genre (cyberpunk, supernatural, low fantasy, post-apocalyptic, etc).

Another set of top-level tags will focus on the actual types of books/products one might see for an RPG. These are just all the terms I've come across before, setup in a hierarchy that makes sense to me, though sometimes terms aren't used consistently across different RPG lines. Since some products can straddle multiple genres/categories, I'm hoping tags will help make it easier to sort through everything. Does this set of categories/sub-categories make sense? I'm still at the early stages of just importing everything into a library, so I'm sure there's categories I've not thought of or considered.

• Core Rulebook (books required to play)
  • Player Handbook (this might straddle the line between core and supplement)
• Supplement (books that expand the rules/setting)
  • Sourcebook
  • Bestiary
  • Splatbook
  • Adventure/Scenario/Module
    • Campaign
  • Setting
• Accessory (mostly non-book related items)
  • Cards
  • Maps
  • Fiction
  • Music/Audio
  • Screens
  • Sheets
    • Character sheet
    • Rules/Cheat sheet
    • Misc sheet
• Resource (more for general books on RPGs, system-agnostic)
  • GM aid
  • Player aid
  • Educational
  • Tables

I've been searching around for a way to organize my TTRPG collection of pdfs (numbering in the thousands to tens of thousands) and haven't really found a silver bullet for it yet. Everything I've looked at has some sort of weird thing that's off about it that doesn't seem to make it ideal. Is there something out there that others are using that works well? Here's what I've looked at so far:

• Folder system: This is what I'm already using and it's serviceable (PC), but it really doesn't give me any tagging function and so it's hard to organize based on genre or come up with really any categories outside of just alphabetically naming folders based on the RPG name, then putting whatever subcategories I need as folders below that. It just feels so clunky going about it like this. Being able to organize/search via tags just seems like the way to go.

• Calibre: This gets recommended everytime, but honestly I'm not interested in duplicating my library of +10,000 pdfs and following their organization system. The desktop app looks ugly (which is apparently fixed with Calibre-web but still requires the desktop app).

• Jellyfin: Really not geared towards books in general, it's functional but not great for it. This may end up being what I fall back to if I can't get anything else working.

• Kavita: Looks nice and works nice EXCEPT it has some weird ass naming convention with regards to numbers in the folder/file names. Only top-level stuff can contain numbers, everything below has to have roman numerals? Such a weird thing that just breaks it for me.

• Komga: It looks nice and works nice, but is more geared towards comics, and thus doesn't work so hot with RPGs with multiple categories (Core rulebooks, Scenarios, Settings, etc), since I tend to break those out into different folders. It ends up treating sub-folders as a different series altogether, so it sort of demands that you just keep everything in the same folder.

• Ubooquity: Tried it, it ran like ass on my machine and didn't seem to do as good a job. Making updates in the folders themselves took awhile to propagate and it just overall didn't seem to work well for how I wanted to use it. I just didn't particularly care for it.

• Zotero: It's actually more meant for academic journals and such, but it could be used for organizing TTRPG pdfs, though not sure how well it scales up once you start throwing thousands of pdfs at it. Downside though is that it's not as flashy as some of the others, it doesn't display book covers and you have to create additional objects for each item. You also can't just add tags to the PDFs themselves, you have to create an additional 'Book' object and attach the pdf to that item, then add whatever tags/notes/metadata you want to add. I haven't figured out how to automate the process and the one item I tried where it automatically found it, it created a 'Journal Article' and renamed it based on the authors of the book (which it did correctly find), which is not ideal for going through thousands of items. I just want it to keep the file names in most cases as I've already gotten most file names where I want them.