Stepos Venzny

There’s not really any value in determining whether labels like good person or bad person apply to you. Either option tends to end in the same result: an end to the process of introspection and a continuation of the same behavior you’re already doing. “I’m a good person so I don’t have to change” or “I’m a bad person so there’s no point in trying to change” but change is the only thing that will actually affect the feelings that are inspiring you to ask the question.

The update looks like a step in a healthy direction. You felt scared so you looked for support and you felt guilty so you looked to apologize (and reimburse). Stay focused on the process of feeling better and stop stressing about absolutes.

A while back I set out to watch the entire Disney Animated Canon. (Not in a binge-y way, like a movie per week.) When I reached Frozen II and started looking up trivia about it, I read that the four note sequence Elsa keeps hearing calling to her is something a lot of composers like to reference: Dies Irae.

A couple other examples were named and it reminded me that I had sort of noticed this once before; I remember playing Aria of Sorrow and noticing that the Clock Tower theme had those four notes repeating in the background and I kept hearing “making Christmas making Christmas”. I had thought it was a coincidence at the time but now knew they were both making the same allusion. Neat.

Cut to a few years in the future, Dies Irae is my fucking Number 23. It’s EVERYWHERE. I can’t escape it.

I don’t actively recall smell or taste being a feature so I guess probably not. Every other sense I definitely have, though.

On the general subject of things people say can’t happen in dreams beyond senses, I can also read, feel pain, see color, urinate without doing so in real life, and die.

It’s absurd to give any amount of power over people, however trivial, to a thing which is incapable of thought.

There’s always going to be more dust but more than zero isn’t as big a problem as more than a layer.

For me, the answer is vacations. Not in the sense of “time off work” but in the sense of “travel somewhere special during your time off work”. There is nothing less relaxing than being pressured to spend your free time correctly.

That rule was designed to discourage you from faking it.

Oh, you mean you’re a cook. I thought you had a custom burger.

Arby’s, ironically enough. Not having burgers used to be their whole identity.

I’m interested in also having it your way. What’s the burger?

Sour grapes.

There is nothing popular fiction hates more than somebody doing something everyone wants to do but can’t. Impossibility, when possible, becomes cast as immorality or immaturity or otherwise something arbitrarily undesirable.

To be a ghost is depressing and/or monstrous because when we die in real life we don’t stick around. Time travel overwrites reality with a worse version of the present because in real life we can’t change the past. Resurrection brings people back as monsters because in real life we can’t have our lost loved ones back. Immortality is sad and lonely and often requires you to do evil things to sustain it because in real life we can’t live forever. Traveling to alternate lifetimes where you’re more successful is emotionally hollow because you had the most important emotional stuff in your life all along and you wouldn’t trade that for the world.

These and other speculative crises always have to be fixed by making the fictional world abide be the limitations of the real one. Aren’t we so lucky that our world is randomly already like this?

Everything except pants. My legs are apparently within the bounds of normality but my head, hands, feet, and spine are simply too big.

You wouldn’t think being six feet tall would be such a hindrance to shopping. It’s not big enough to stand out in a crowd, so why is it so big as to be incompatible with mass production?

Either humanity gradually grows to despise you for your ancient morals

or they don’t ever meaningfully surpass where we’re at today.

I’d always suggest being direct instead of waiting for other people to take a hint. Tactfully, mind you. Phrase it in a relaxed, emotionally neutral way that doesn’t single him out. Something like “Really, I am doing fine. When I’m at work, I just prefer to focus on the work itself instead of talking with people. I’m more at ease that way.”

That being said, is this the kind of work situation where you’re one of many options to make friends with or is it more of a you and him stuck in a room together all day type of thing? He sounds like a lonely person and if the two of you are stuck together then the best idea might be to seek a social compromise between you two’s preferences, like designating some specific portions of the day as times when it’s appropriate to have a conversation. You try to be sociable for him when it’s on, he tries to be quiet for you when it’s off.

I’ve only met two people I would describe as narcissistic and they don’t align on this subject.

What they had in common was not feeling differently about cats than they do other animals, which is also true of almost everyone I’ve known that isn’t narcissistic.

Content, when referring to media.

I don’t mind people using “literally” to refer to things that they don’t literally mean because that’s just perfectly normal exaggeration.

What I hate is that the dictionary definition changed to formalize the nonliteral meaning as a literal meaning.

I’m playing Dragon’s Dogma II, taking the suspended tram into Bahkbattal or however you spell it. One of my pawns failed to make it into the basket before it started moving but they’re not a ranged fighter so they’re no use in driving off harpies anyways and I don’t bother turning back since I know from previous antics that they tend to find a way back to you.

A few minutes into the trip, dangling precariously in a rickety wooden contraption over a canyon, I hear the cry of a griffin. I spot it over the horizon, its eyes locked with mine. I am forced to watch helplessly as it approaches, drawing an arrow as if it could accomplish anything. The griffin slams into my tram, shattering it instantly and dropping the three of us to our doom.

That pawn that didn’t make it on the tram catches me in a bridal carry and sets me gently down on my feet, completely unharmed.

That’s why the game’s fast travel systems are made to discourage you from using them, because adventures don’t happen during loading screens.

That sounds apocryphal.

Training it on research papers wouldn’t make it smarter, it would just make it better at mimicking their writing style.

Don’t fall for the hype.

When they stop feeling clean. Why are you all counting days?