Ethereal87 @ Ethereal87 @beehaw.org

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I think the flaws of the characters decisions either come from gambles that don’t pay off or there are levels and movements they don’t see happening (and sometimes both). Their failures feel…earned if that makes sense? To be fair, it’s been a few years since I started the series so it can mush all together in my head :)

Alright, we've got some overlap here, let's see...

• The Red Rising Saga. I'm working through book 6 right now as an audiobook and I'm sneaking in a few minutes wherever I can. Definitely expands its scope as the series goes on and while I feel like I'm losing context for some of the new/returning characters at this point, I can follow enough to go along with it. The main character is born into the lowest caste of the society and works to infiltrate the highest caste. It's a long ride and ebbs and flows from hopelessness to triumph throughout the course of it.
• The Combat Codes Saga. Probably closer to science-fantasy then fiction, but an interesting idea about nations using hand-to-hand combat to settle wars, territory, etc...I have only read the first book so far but I enjoyed it a lot.
• Alex Benedict - I would encourage this more as a filler or inbetween books series. Binging all of the books can make them feel very samey. The core idea is that all of the books except the first one are told from the perspective of a colleague/assistant/"jill of all trades" woman who works with one of the most famous artifact hunters in the far future. Each book is essentially chasing an archeological mystery of some sort.
• The Jubilee Cycle - I found the first book a long time ago at random in one of those discount bookstores and picked it up based on the cover alone. It's about a future where everything you do costs you money, to the point where political parties debate whether or not autonomic functions like breathing should cost money. The prose is a little dry and the author works as a translator, but I enjoyed the world that he built up as the main character peels back the layers of this society after he gets essentially bankrupted by a mysterious and unknown transaction.
• Teixcalaan - Can't link the series for some reason. The main character is an ambassador to the ruling empire of the galaxy, trying to figure out who killed her predecessor and a conspiracy surrounding him. It felt very dense when I started it but I enjoyed it a lot!

Totally could see that being the case. I think it was a combination of seeing the difficulty curve and not having a consistent group to play with that probably did me in. I’m happy to lose and learn, but not maybe as much as it seemed like I would playing solo!

Given more time, definitely something I’d want to get into more.

The marketing for Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and The Man Who Erased His Name seem to have worked on me because I decided to start playing Yakuza 0 on my Steam Deck. Sticking to pure easy mode and mainlining the story. It's got some weird jank to it but I also kinda like it? If it hooks me, maybe I'll take the plunge on the others. Yakuza: Like A Dragon looked like a lot of fun so I'll probably stop and smell the roses when I get to that one.

Otherwise, Fights in Tight Spaces is my current non-story focused game I'm making my way through.

I don't think I played any truly bad games, but I do have a list of games that I bounced off of for one reason or another. Maybe I ran out of steam to play them, maybe life got in the way and I couldn't come back to it, or I just didn't want to "git gud" with the limited time I have. I basically deemed them not worth my time when I did manage to sink a ton of hours into Spider-Man, Cyberpunk, and Talos Principle.

So that abandoned graveyard consists of...

• Tunic - I hit a wall at one of the bosses and just couldn't progress. Ran out of juice unfortunately.
• Mr. Sun's Hatbox - Such a weird quirky game. Didn't get close to beating it but I got enough out of it and called it quits.
• Hunt: Showdown - This one was a bummer. It's been on my "need to try" list. I tried it, solo, and died right away. I could tell it was one of those games that needed a time investment to make it work and I just don't have it in me.
• Cult of the Lamb - Something about the roguelike aspect of it didn't mesh with me, which is weird because I feel like that's really become a genre I like.
• Overwatch 2 - I played poorly as Lifeweaver, was griefed in chat, and quit :)

Man, there really was rampant voter and electoral fraud!

It's astounding how much the Right projects onto their political enemies the stuff they're already attempting. They can't not tell on themselves.

Anyone have good advice for making friends in one’s thirties? Online or IRL?

Assuming you're cool with meeting up with strangers in person, meetup.com was a good way to find people of like minded hobbies (like board games). You'll get a wide range of folks depending on the group itself but it can be helpful if you're trying to "refill" your own social needs at least in the beginning and hopefully make some friends as a result. Helped me out of a rut when I found myself alone with no friends far from home!

Piggybacking on the awesome response you have above here...

I'm classic ol' middle management for someone just like yourself. My team is comprised of individuals where they're in their first IT job and/or first professional job. A lot of my job when they come onto my team is to make sure they have the support they need via coaching from my end or connecting them to the right people to help them answer when I can't. I try to keep the communication line open and stress that they can ask ANY question/there's no such thing as a stupid question/etc...because everyone has to learn somewhere sometime regardless of seniority.

You need help defining scope and objectives basically to try and right the ship for the customer. If your firm can't provide you the right support, specifically your direct manager talking to the customer to pull this info out of them, you can try to broach this with the customer's Project Manager. Let me tell you though that bringing this to the PM is probably going to be an uncomfortable conversation. They're likely to then going to question what you've been doing this entire time and you'll lose some trust with them in the short term. Based on what you wrote here about breaking down as a result of this pressure, a hail mary pass might be the right answer and just get the lack of progress out there. Then you can hopefully get some structure/plan/goals to build up going forward.

Your manager really SHOULD be the one handling this on your behalf and a good manager can probably pull the requirements out of them w/o making it super obvious that you've basically been spinning your wheels. If you feel like your manager can't/won't provide that support, bringing it to the PM might force their hand to get involved.

Echoing a lot of other comments here, find something new. Job hunt on the side. It sounds like you're not going to get the support you actually need so start working on an exit strategy. Having been in your shoes at one point, this reads very much to me like one of those things you'll learn from and know what questions to ask next time because of how strongly this has impacted you. We all have these kinds of stories or situations and they help shape our gut feeling of what to say and when to say something if it's off. Happy to help out if there's a way I can as well!

I think I'm almost done with Cyberpunk 2077. Cleared all Scanner Hustles and Side Gigs, most Side Missions, so I think I just have the main story, the Phantom Liberty story, and whatever Side Missions might need a day in-game to complete. When it's done I think I'm going to find something much lower impact to just veg out in for a bit, but Cyberpunk has been a lot of fun to dive into and I can see myself coming back to it in a few years.

I also took the plunge into a gacha game for some reason on my phone. Reverse 1999. The art style was intriguing and I'm enjoying it a lot so far. We'll see how long it sticks around.

I thought this was a really interesting dive into some of the problems plaguing Marvel, how Covid derailed things, and the pursuit of money overall. Like, the idea that a film makes less than half a billion dollars is a failure? Yowza.

The sprawl is also real and I think it crystalized some of my own feelings about watching Marvel content more on the spectrum of being closer but not entirely on the side of obligation vs. excitement. It all feels aimless right now. Individual arcs are interesting, but Avengers: Endgame was four years ago.

For some context with the Infinity Saga...

• Phase One: 2008 to 2012 (four years), culminating in an Avengers movie across six movies total.
• Phase Two, 2013 to 2015 (three years), with an Avengers movie basically at the end (and Ant-Man two months later) across six movies.
• Phase Three, 2016 to 2019 (three years), across 11 movies and ended with two Avengers movies and a post-script with Spider-Man. So our average is about six movies to one Avengers.

And with the Multiverse Saga...

• Phase Four: 2021 to 2022 (two years). across seven movies and eight seasons of television, ended by Black Panther 2.
• Phase Five: 2023, with currently two movies and two seasons of television (one of which is a Season 2), with one more movie and a second season of What If coming before the end of the year.

Just the movies alone make that ten movies in 2-3 years with no Avengers team-up to tie everyone together.

The shocking thing to me as I confirmed dates/counts on Wikipedia is that I forgot we're in "Phase Five". I have all these individually good stories but there's no buzz about a "big" team-up movie anymore. Heroes are just doing their thing and stopping world-ending events on their own or with minimal assistance.

Maybe they'll prove everyone wrong about this strategy when they do another Avengers movie in two years after another pile of movies but it feels more like they're trying to force another Endgame "Assemble" with characters we're not as connected to when the time comes.

It was nice to get an over-the-air update to the microchips they put in my Covid vaccine at least!

And if you listen at 1.5x speed, does that just burn your 15h faster or can you fit in more time?

It's an interesting idea, but I think the only way I'd use it is a "try before you buy" and go out to Libro to make the purchase. At least that's the only way I could realistically see using 15h/month.

I might have just turned to dust and blown away in the wind reading this!

Seriously though, it's nice how just simple they are. Even times I've fired up my PS3 it's got just a little bit of friction in ways you don't expect there to be. The trade off for all that simplicity though is you get what's on the disc/cartridge and that is it. No patches, no DLC or expansions, and you lose/break/give away that disc you're out of luck. It's weird even now feeling like those games could be "lesser versions" because they can't be updated in any way, but as a kid at the time that wasn't even an expectation.

Probably the hardest thing at this point is remembering you need that ADC to connect it to a modern TV!

Of course! One thing I'll mention since you said you have a Steam Deck: I split my "want to plays" into a Steam Deck and PC category (some games may be Verified/Playable but I'd rather play them on the PC, others may be unsupported but ProtonDB says they're fine). When I got my Deck, I did a pass through my Want To Play list on the Deck itself with DeckyLoader and the ProtonDB Badges plugin to determine if a game I wanted to play was better there or the PC.

To add on to starting and stopping games at will, take some time to just organize your library of games too! I have mine sorted into several categories...

• Forever games that I'll come back to over time
• Loved games that I may come back to should the mood strike
• "Next Up" games that I want to play soon
• Games I want to play eventually
• Games I'm done with, either I played it for 10m and I wasn't interested or I finished it and got a resounding "meh"
• Zero interest games or duplicated games (ex: the original version of a game when the remastered version was given for free and is in one of those other categories, free VR versions, etc...).

It takes a lot of focus and work at first, and a LOT of flipping between the page in your library and the store page to see if you want to play a certain game. I axed stuff pretty liberally and at different points in my life, I've gone back and pruned that list of what I want to play and see if I realllllllly still wanted to play it. I also found organizing my library a bit of that kind of "mindless enjoyable" that you can just get into a flow state to go through.

Once it's done though, when a new game gets added to my Steam Library, I can immediately "triage" it into one of those categories because it's the only thing not categorized. It's taken my library of what is now almost 1300 games acquired over 15 years and given it some more structure. Of that list, today I have ~250 in some version of "want to play", ~400 in some version of played, and ALL the rest in that zero interest/duplicate category.

If it's something akin to How I Met Your Father, I could be on board. Not so much in style or tone surely, but taking the same skeleton that worked in the original and applying it to new people (and in this case, to a new location too). I think it would be a bummer to just go back to Dunder Mifflin Scranton and rehash all those characters. Workplace comedy isn't so far out there, real workplaces have become even more absurd over the last ten years, and if it has light callbacks to the original but can do its own thing too, then I'll check it out.

That's the optimist in me. We'll see how hard he gets bodyslammed when this comes to fruition!

Ahh nuts, you're right. It was harder to find the right one than I expected and didn't even realize it was an April Fools joke. Thanks for the correction!

Here's kind of your easiest parallel thread from Reddit at the time to see if anyone's interested what overlap might be there.

scrapped

(go use Hot Saucerman's link instead!)

Yes, that has helped out a lot too. It may not work for OP since they're feeling like these systems are creating a genre just for you, but this works if you're not looking to jump to something too different from what you already enjoy.