Great idea dipshit, who’s gonna foot the power bill, you?

I’ve been pretty much exactly where you are now, but we’re not the same person. I’m drawing a lot from my own experience here, but I’m going to try to keep it as detached from myself as I can.

First thing, I want to really acknowledge here that you were right. You cannot become an independent person while you are being managed by other people. Unless they intended to do this for you your whole life, you were going to have this issue at some point. Usually it’s done earlier on, when the consequences for failure are less, but this is the situation now, and you will have to deal with it as it is. I think you were wise to set those boundaries with your parents, and I think what’s happening now are just the first growing pains, an adjustment period. It will get better after this, I promise. Do not let them take the reins back if you can help it, this is an important developmental milestone in your life.

There’s a possibility that there’s some mental health issues here, exactly what I’m not qualified to really diagnose. It sounds exactly like how I fell apart at University because I was independent for the first time, with undiagnosed ADHD. While that might be a possibility for you, I think that’s best something you should think on. It may help getting a diagnosis with whatever might be going on, but that’s something you can pursue if you feel the need.

Even if you don’t have that kind of mental health issue though, you might have a mental block of some kind due to your past or even current experiences. It might be worth talking to a councillor, or even to a trusted friend about what’s going on, it might help unbottle your feelings and help you realise what’s going on inside your head.

Beyond the clinical stuff though, make sure you are unwinding a little. If you’re constantly pushing yourself you might have these kinds of issues as well. You have needs, and you’ll need to figure out how to keep yourself and your body happy and healthy. It should be easier now you have more control, but there’ll be an adjustment period, like everything else.

The real meat of the issue sounds like the loss of structure and maybe purpose, because you’ve never been in a position to organise yourself before. That’s only natural. The first thing I would advise is maybe take a day to reassess what you truely want. If your parents have been in control all this time, you might not have had the opportunity to really decide for yourself what you want to do, and sometimes your brain will retaliate by self sabotaging, substance abuse, anything to take back control or help with the discomfort. Instead, really think about how sure you are you want to continue on this path. If not education, maybe try working for a bit, if you can. Focus on where the path will take you, focus on moving out eventually if you haven’t already, think about the life you want beyond this. How you achieve these things is entirely in your own hands. Having this sense of purpose will help everything else fall in place, so it’s important to maintain it.

If you’re 100% sure this is what you want, you’ll need to start building good habits for yourself. It sounds like sleep is a big issue, so focus on that. Figure out exactly what you need to be up for, set that alarm, and stick to it 100% of the time. It’ll suck, but then it will get better. If that’s not working, as it sounds like it might be, it could be down to some other issue. I have delayed phase sleep, I couldn’t maintain a normal sleep cycle despite decades of trying. If that’s the case, or something else, you might be able to work around it.

This goes for everything, but don’t try to just force yourself to act the same way everyone else is, because it’s not possible if you aren’t the same as everyone else. Instead, work with what you have, your own needs and limitations, and your body and brain will thank you for it.

Beyond the specifics you’ve described, you’ll likely come up against issues as you adjust to your new way of living. You’ll stumble, there will be minor failures, that’s okay. It sucks, but those failures are part of the learning. I know people that never put those boundaries with their parents, it’s not a good look in the long term.

I want to stress this, if you fail a bit, it’s not a sign you should stop. I stopped my degree because of issues like these, and it has not been helpful, though I have done well despite it, because working helped me get my brain together. I have a friend that took a decade to get a teaching degree, but now he’s teaching at one of the better schools in the state. Persistence does pay off, and it does get better.

I know it probably really sucks right now. You’re doing the right thing. Keep going.

Sort of, but those let you use the pre-existing codebase for each game as is. This lets you play with the inner workings. You could do something drastic like implant rollback netcode, add new classes, wild shit.

For sure. I can at least give them the benefit of the doubt when they say that shadow organisations are trying to control them. Like that can happen, it does happen, it’s kind of happening. Motivations can range from societal change to world ending prophecy. However when they say shit is explicitly for making money, that’s a very clear cut goal you can easily prove or disprove.

I did something similar to what this article describes a bit back. For me it was turning off my phone, the effect was staggering. Anxiety etc dropped immediately.

For me in particular, it was being constantly available to anyone in my life, but also the doom scrolling, and knowing there’s a vast ocean of infinite content at my fingertips. Sure, I could curate my experience, and block people, but overall the phone is still functioning largely the same as it ever does. I can always turn those features back on. By changing how the device works externally, you’re disconnecting those people from the decade and a half of reinforcement and whatever they have associated with their phones.

To get similar results I was able to just turn off my phone, but that might vary for some. Anyway, it seems reasonable for the experiment at least.

See I don’t follow that one, because how are they actually making money in this theory?

In the real world the ai bullshit is just another grift that’s a giant money pit. While I recognise people that follow these kinds of theories probably don’t have critical thinking skills, I wish they would following thinking to it’s conclusion. It’s a stupid hope I know.

Anti sematic behaviour is unfortunately part of the internet and general historical data, which means it could very well be an undercurrent in training data. AIs then could exhibit subconscious biases, no matter how many times the creators tell them not to be racist.

Idk dude, we already have the sun and wind but they hate that stuff too, despite it being very close to free. Hell they’ll probably bitch about fusion causing a surplus of power outside peak loads.

If it doesn’t perpetuate the broken ways we currently do things it doesn’t give their buddies money, so it’s woke or something else bullshit.

Fucking DLLs

Seconding this. Anecdotally from my last job in support, every drive failure we had was a Seagate. WDs and samsungs never seemed to have an issue.

I’m sure this is real, but I see a headline like that and I think of schoolyard talk. Like, nuh uh, my armour has 100 trillion bonds, you can’t shoot me.

I actually respect the hell out of the dev here. Owning up to past wrongs, growing as a person, clear and concise communication, honestly that’s all huge progress.

Amazing game, recommend it to anyone and everyone. Presentation, puzzles, story are all top notch. Love it.

Hell yeah, time to get gored by a dear or something

New factorio dlc felt comically long, and yet I’m having to force myself not to make a new save.

Can’t believe you forgot New Zealand smh

All good mate, I like being able to go through this stuff from time to time because it helps me refine my own thoughts about stuff.

I definitely feel the same way about Abby, though I think it does get off to a rocky start by kind of cliffhangering the end of Ellie’s story. Still it did totally work in the long run.

I did have empathy for Ellie going into the game definitely. I think the game using that as a starting point and was incrementally raising her actions so the audience would naturally come to the conclusions she does at the end of the game regarding violence and vengeance. How effective this is might be dependant on the point the audience comes to these conclusions. I think it might just be the exposure to these kinds of stories I’ve seen, but I kind of got what the game was going for pretty early, and it felt like it just kept kind of bludgeoning me with the moral the longer it went on, like it wanted to bathe in the horrible mess Ellie was making. That was partially why I was hoping for it to be a subversion at the end I think? Kind of have it be a tragedy of character, kill Abby, and the forgiveness that she couldn’t give to another also means she deserves no forgiveness herself. As it stands it’s kind of there, but feels like it stumbles at the end, at least for how it hit for me.

I don’t think the narrative made too many mistakes honestly. The world building in general is great, the characters are believable, maybe just didn’t resonate with me personally.

I might actually replay it at some point to see how I digest it. I feel like I might be sort of out of step with this series anyway, I know people love the first game but I can’t get over the idea that the fireflies were just going to crack open Ellie immediately, like characters we know besides, that seems like an extremely bad idea to jump immediately to that conclusion. That’s something crazy mad scientists do, not actual medical experts or researchers. I try to just assume that it’s logical somehow in the logic of the world, I think the rest of that game is actually great, but that one thing keeps nagging at my brain. Anyway, tangent over. Hope you have a good day as well!

Yes, but as a theme goes it’s like putting too much salt in some food, at least for my taste. Don’t get me wrong, I do like a good flawed cast of characters, the theme in general is good, but the execution just didn’t land for me.

I think if I could empathize with the characters a bit better it might have landed a bit better? As an interactive medium I think the character you control and yourself needs to have some level of shared goals, or at least the ability to understand their actions. I didn’t feel that for 90% of the game, it was like watching a soap opera where the characters don’t act like people. I can forgive that of the main two in concept, who are powered by bloodlust, but frankly they don’t act enough like maladjusted revenge golems to make it believable to me that they’d continuously make these terrible decisions.

Something else was that the theme got a bit muddled towards the end in terms of revenge. The theme is that revenge bad, violence begets violence, violence corrupts you etc, but after Abby does her thing she gets such a glow up over the course of her campaign, both as a character and in her situation, that the theme feels mixed. Hell, for most of the time you could kind of forget that it’s Ellie doing all of this because there’s the internal politics and fighting completely unrelated to what’s going on. Very little of Abby’s issues actually revolve around the revenge issue. Without the theme being clear on this stuff it becomes muddy exactly what the point is, and it feels like violence for violence sake. Like someone was out to prove that humanity is garbage, instead of being a warning against doing garbage things.

I also can’t help but feel it pulls the assassins Creed 2 problem with forgiveness being learned. I think it’s a good theme in concept, but after spending an entire game mercing a bunch of people both tangentially related or unrelated, it’s a little hollow. Even then though, I could see it working, but the fight at the very end kind of ruins it for me. If she lets Abby get on the boat immediately, that works better because she made the conscious decision to forgive. If she actually kills Abby, funnily enough I think that also works. Seriously, for where the game has been the entire time I think her doing it, but the audience knowing it was wrong would actually go a long way towards making the game as a whole feel more cohesive. Hell you could have done a player choice at that point, and even that could have worked.

It’s something I’m still kind of thinking over to this day because it’s such a unique problem to encounter in a game like this. Again, I do want to like the game, it does a lot right, it’s a good game. But yeah, bit of a yuck thinking about it.

The entire game is largely about deeply flawed people continuously making incredibly bad decisions that are violently consequential. It’s not necessarily bad writing, and I completely get the theme that’s trying to be gone for here, but by god it’s a frustrating mess of a situation that only gets worse. I want to like the game a lot more than I do, because technically and gameplay wise it’s incredible, but I don’t know if I ever want to go through that storyline ever again. It fills me with a deep uneasiness just thinking about it.

Ah good, a whole new group of people get to experience this good but also wildly uncomfortable game.