I don’t know who wrote the characters. Some developers in Ubisoft in the early 2010s, I presume. Looking at the extensive credits, I never found a name that I recognized.

It could all be coincidence, but there’s a significant amount of similarity.

In Watch Dogs 2 the initial hackerspace is in the basement of a game store in the lower Haight in San Francisco, which smacks smartly of Gamescape on Divisadero Street between Oak and Fell. It’s still there according to Google, even though everything around it was gentrified out of existence, including the cheap flat I lived in.

I’m pretty sure my years as a Gamescape regular inspired the character Josh Sauchak. I lived with the woman who probably inspired Sitara Dhawan, and we are pretty sure of the identity of the guy who inspired Wrench.

In March 2026, I learned I’m not just ASD but spectrum AF according to a psychiatric assessment. It explains a lot, including why I find dealing with people super awkward. Right now I’m isolated where I live trying to figure out how to make friends when I super-suck at making friends or even being social.

I’ve been thinking of starting off with Don’t mind me, I’m spectrum AF as soon as the flow of conversation stops because I said something awkward (or didn’t say the expected thing, or whatever).

I suffer from major depression and have since I was a kid. I was diagnosed at fifty to be ASD and a recent assessment in March confirmed I’m spectrum AF.

I worked for a few years and was nearly driven to suicide and have been on disability ever since. Not a bad thing. All my career hopes either required education and credentials I couldn’t ever afford to acquire, or had spirit-crushing consequences (e.g. crunching, which practically all video-game developers are required to suffer).

We often have better perspective regarding other people’s troubles than we do our own.

We’re also often still wrong about it, anyway.

To paraphrase Bill Nye, eye protection on; if you raise the cost of fossil fuels, fewer people will use them; eye protection off.

When you’re sixty and hang around with any of the more recent generations…

I succumbed to a psychotic break in November 2024 when my wife of twelve years left me and the US voted Trump into office. Mind you, I’m spectrum AF and suffer from lifelong major depression, but the turn of circumstances was a doozy.

I spent 2025 on the med-adjustment carousel trying a variety of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics. In all cases the physiological side effects were too extreme, but more than that, they persisted months after I stopped taking the med.

For a while it took a confirmation by the Senate for me to pee. Sometimes it was excruciating. Months after stopping the culprit med, I got the ability the pee regularly and then on demand.

An early one drove me to sleep all day. I still sleep for 11-13 hours a day.

At this point I’m only on a dopamine reuptake inhibitor and nothing else. I’m trained in DBT which helps, but with practice I might actually be able to manage my depression.

My hypothesis: Youth pastors are supposed to counsel teens in order to woo them into the fold. They’re there to help, but not for sake of the teen but for selling the teen Jesus. It’s dishonest work for an allegedly good cause.

But someone who can sustain that kind of dissonant duality in their relationships can do so for other causes. If they can be equivocal for Jesus, they can be equivocal for their own libido as well.

Hence the nickname given to YPs by the kids The freak of the week.

Incest is strictly about blood relations. The step-sibling / step-child porn genre is shorthand for fantasies about getting it on within the cohabitative family or close neighborhood. While there have been some movies that have explored actual incest (porn or otherwise), usually blood incest is regarded as a much more serious matter.

IRL, relationships between steps are verboten not because of the problems with breeding risks but because of how it complicates familial dynamics. It’s the same reason fraternization within military units or within work groups is restricted, or at least frowned upon.

Really, we’re still expected to ride on a raid to another tribal settlement and kidnap one of their coming-of-age womenfolk the way Hades abducted Persephone¹ Modern alternatives such as singles bars and mixing parties continue to prove wanting.

¹ According to the late Hellenic mythology – Persephone is queen of the underworld before Hades was ever around, and her abduction is more about pissing off Ceres and justifying why she’s sad every six months so we have winter.

The flip side to this is an escalation of break-ups that happen on or around Valentine’s Day every year, since the holiday encourages those en-coupled to have serious conversations with themselves about their relationship and if they actually like where they are and with whom. Surprise! Not so much.

Valentines day is about the tragedy of romance, either not having it or not getting it or finding out it was wrong all along.

And day-after chocolate sales.

I robbed a bank full of dinero
A great big mountain of dough
So it was goodbye companero
And cheerio
I couldn’t stay and face the music
So many reasons why
I won’t be sending postcards
From Paraguay, from Paraguay, from Paraguay

–Mark Knopfler

So I wasn’t the ONLY one telling Hector not to fight Achilles and being laughed out of my own family.

I’ve gotten comments about the various far right wolves and dogs organizations as if they defined all furries. They’re ruining it for the rest of the kin.

It isn’t the first time a subdemographic’s reputation extends inappropriately to the rest of the group.

December 7, 1941.

How to tell the techs you’re lying without telling the client

…And they’ll still win because some essential minority bloc will believe their promises of free beer and butter.

🗄 or 🗃 come to mind.

In my culture we had nothing but roadkill and weeds to eat, so we got really good at making stuff palatable. << Most cultural food legends.

I assume it was Christmas like Narnia Christmas; not quite the same holiday.

This is not a solution it’s a workaround. Sleeping in cars is typically hard sleeping, which is still the problem.