Split between either housing or bureaucracy

Housing is… not actually about affordability, but rather the plain difficulty of even getting a rental. I’m living in supposedly a part of Europe with a good housing market, but even here every decent rental on the market would instantaneously get 20+ applicants, so it’s quite competitive… not as bad as NL, but still pretty rough

Bureaucracy because of expat/immigrant/etc shenanigans

I don’t know if this is spooky, fucked up, or just really funny (in my twisted sense of humor)

In college. I was a workaholic and didn’t sleep a lot, and I lived in a student dorm (layout was like a hotel, each student had their individual room) that was fairly well-liked by upperclassmen. Anyways there’s a random girl I know outside of class with a friend group. Generally a bright and upbeat person, quite well put-together, also an international student, etc…

There was one night when I was just passed out on my dorm bed. And at 3am in the morning, I saw that particular girl standing in front of my dorm room with the door open. Crying, being really sad and all… Later was escorted away by the RA.

What I still couldn’t comprehend is… First of all, why the heck was my door unlocked. Second of all, why was this random person standing in front of my door. Did she want anything from me. Also later I never heard from that girl again, what happened to her

• Getting a good night’s sleep
• Getting a nap in, for those who can fall asleep quickly
• Drinking a nice cup of hot/warm tea or water. Seriously it works surprisingly well for relieving stress

I’m using mailbox.org with a custom domain. German company, all of their email services seem pretty industry standard, so the biggest advantage for me is that it works quite well with 3rd party mail & calendar clients. Forgot when I switched but so far I have no complaints

Don’t think it’d be more tilting than other games with ~50% win rates. Just one example, Tekken is also ~50% win rate that is nearly completely skill dependent, but on average it involves even higher amounts of adrenaline

Personally the games I found the most tilting are perma-deaths: Minecraft/Terraria’s hardest difficulties, Noita… Losing a 10+ hr run after making one bad decision really gets you. I think I stopped playing this type of games for that reason

Seriously though please don’t tilt. Tilting reduces the fun of the game and makes skill improvements in skill-dependent games slower

Thanks! Just for the record I have close to 1000 hrs on the first game lol, not to mention a good number of YouTube streams that I watched, No way I can clear StS2 this quickly without some pretty extensive experience

Yeah… sly is cracked. The two sly cards from StS1 were already so broken that I often snap pick them in the first game. With the new Master Planner card and the whole slew of sly support it is wayyy too insane. Even if they nerfed Prepared+, Hidden Daggers can still pop off

I had one run with a vulnerability deck on Ironclad; still haven’t fully figured out how to build around it, but it does seem like a pretty reliable draw engine if done right. Also he has the silly ancestral card that is only 1 mana for 20 damage + 5 stacks of vuln 😂

Necrobinder… a bit embarrassing, but she is actually my weakest character now, since I haven’t quite figured out how to play her outside of the Souls archetype. Hopefully I get the hang of it soon

Regent seems to rely much more heavily on leaning into certain archetypes…? I haven’t gotten the full hang of it yet, but star gain/loss + support power is very strong, big sword go vroom is strong but requires specific combo pieces… not sure of the colorless archetype but maybe I just have to experiment more

I… prefer to play single player games due to reasons, but yeah I should give co-op at least a try. I’ll keep it in mind, thanks!

I actually went to r/slaythespire after playing a while for tricks & tips, so I kind of figured out what went wrong

I seem to have a bit of this in me as well as I grew up in China, but Chinese players seem to have a penchant for “exploiting” the game so to speak… as in, finding infinite or broken combos. Seems like a lot of Chinese-made mods for StS1 tend to focus on super high-difficulty content too. And allegedly StS2 on launch had a couple of very easy infinites, but that’s the point of making it early access first… so you can go and balance it. Guess some folks didn’t take if very nicely lol

Also I did not know this before, but apparently StS is wildly popular in China for whatever reason

In general: I like combos that involve playing a ridiculous amount of cards so… yeah. Thankfully only two Act 2 encounters punish this playstyle

• Ironclad: I once built a “Thrash” + “Howl from Beyond” combo deck, which was absolutely hilarious! Howl from Beyond un-exhausts itself (while doing big number AOE), and the big damage numbers buff Thrash a lot, then use draw engines to replay Thrash
• Silent: shivs, just shivs. Fan of Knives is quite funny
• Defect: “Voltaic+”, one card combo that does… everything, and has crazy scaling. I think this card has to be nerfed though, since it is way too strong; maybe instead make it cost 2 & exhaust or something
• Necrobinder: “Souls” deck, draw a gazillion cards & finish off with “Death March” or “Soul Storm”. This is actually reminiscent of the Jockey booster pack from the Packmaster mod in StS1, which is one of my favorite modded contents in StS1
• Regent: “Decisions, Decisions” + “Royal Gamble” is insane, then hopefully having 27 star energy would be enough to finish off the encounter

Keep going! I don’t think I really cleared the game until like 40-50 hrs in… Roguelikes are brutal, and StS is not easy even by roguelike standards

Kind-of. Researcher in EU, the funding source on paper mandates 7.6 hrs of work per day, so with lunch breaks it is almost exactly 09:00 - 17:00

Depending on whom you ask academia may or may not be considered a real job though… and my hours may be nice, but the folks who do experiments rarely get the 9-5 as stated on paper, and there are other aspects of the job that are much more fucked up

Now that I’m thinking about it, I mainly have a gripe with people getting addicted to gambling. Can be in many different forms IMO; can be spending too much money at the Blackjack table (which is somewhat skill-dependent), whaling on lootboxes/gachas (where you’d literally never “win” money back), or even day trading (which is technically positive-sum)

In theory everything is fine in moderation, but then most gambling systems reward people to whale whether they intend it or not, so…

25-26. I’m not joking; several ppl I follow on Mastodon are openly Autistic, which is when I started suspecting… I would have been diagnosed much, much earlier had my home country have a better psych support system though

I don’t play that many but I generally 100% games I play. So… a bit embarrassing, but Dicey Dungeons. The later chapters are genuinely difficult & are more puzzles than roguelikes… so I just gave up at one point

If specific endgame challenges count, I’ve never beaten Dead Cells BC4 boss rush, or the fabled Noita 34 orbs run (was very close though). Oh and every other rhythm game if you count skill analyzers/Dan courses, but most players don’t clear those

I just had my quarter-life crisis and was starting to have a very FOSS period of my life. Forgot from where, but I heard someone mentioning Mastodon so I joined; this was months before the Reddit API fiasco

Oooh nice!

Something I am very curious: how do the guitar controllers compare against each other? I’m saying this as someone who has been buying and reading up on quite a few rhythm game controllers (DDR/ITG, Taiko, more esoteric things) and knew of the whole slew of comparisons/tierlists between controllers… I knew close to nothing about Clone Hero controllers for high-level gameplay so

So far, my phone, a Google Pixel 6a bought and promptly Graphenified 4.5 years ago that is still going strong. Not perfect but it does it job

Steam Deck is a close second, it has rotated between being my primary/secondary gaming device and even my primary desktop for varying amounts of time, and it served every single role well. All while being dirt-cheap for the specs it have

As someone who had a poorly-paid yet high-stress job for 6 years straight (thanks grad school!) and still recovering, I have a lot to say on this!

I honestly don’t know if what I did could even count as cooking, especially since cooking standards where I grew up is quite high… I just go to the store and buy a bunch of meat + random assorted vegetables and throw them in a pot. Meat is almost always chicken since it’s cheaper, and the local supermarket used to sell massive packs of chicken legs for just $5. Veggies… used to be just some type of cabbage or cauliflower. Recently I’ve been switching things up a bit, but it’s mostly still just these. Usually somewhere between 30-60 minutes is the sweet spot where things don’t cause food poisoning, so within 60-90 minutes of very easy prep, I can get food that would be good for a long time, depending on how big the pot is. Back when I lived in an apartment with a big fridge I sometimes store up to 3-4 weeks of food… Current accommodation only has a mini-fridge, so 4-7 meals max. I cook whenever I run out of food. This is usually the “meal prep” part, which I can then store in the fridge/freezer.

For eating. I’d just make some type of carbs, reheat the mix a bit, and just place them together and eat. Throw in some spices and olive oil (or one of those funny Asian spices if you are into it!) and almost everything would taste just fine. The entire prep almost never exceeds 10 minutes, half of which can be spent showering which cuts down on the morning routine. Probably even faster (1 min?) if one pre-cooks rice, but unfortunately I really don’t like badly cooked rice so it is mainly spaghetti for me…

Recently I did start to cut down on the total number of meals that are prepped though. Recently for breakfast I’ve started to make fried eggs + bread + mayo (which is also 3-5 min cap, although a bit less hands-off), and have been going to the workplace canteen for lunch. But yeah, still pretty much depression meal so to say

Not much. Reason… is exactly as the meme suggested, why worry about something that is largely out of my control?

OK I do worry about it just a little bit when looking for jobs but that’s it

I do it sometimes, but mainly for music I really enjoy or have a keen interest in. Technically I also did it for a music competition a few months ago but that probably doesn’t count…

There is research on this btw! I had to dig a bit, but this is a 2011 research article (might be paywalled, I can try & help if anyone is really interested in) on why people (psych undergrads, but still) listen to music. They identified 6 mostly independent factors, one of which (“personal identity”) may be more linked to ppl listening just for enjoyment; one of their experiments showed that 75.66% of participants listen to music as “background noise”. So music as primary activity is probably relatively uncommon (but not non-existent). Funnily enough I rarely use music as background distraction these days

Probably more like a super well-guarded secret than just an aspect at this point. There was one anime series that was both my favorite and quite foundational to my personality for a long time. I legitimately have never told anyone about it; not even my parents

And no I have no intention on disclosing it here. Probably not too hard to infer for hardcore anime fans who would know me in person, but still