u/fesnying

The cylinder must remain unharmed.

Or you select physical products only, but then the price it shows you is for a digital version, and it's only when you go in and select the physical product that the real (much higher) price shows. :') It's something I'd expect from AliExpress or Temu or something that's very high-pressure. Then again, I do get tons of "you got offered a lower price!" notifications from Etsy.

May I ask if you meant the /r/Piracy subreddit? I do see the username, so I don't mean to be a jerk. Also, I want to put a word in for /r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH as well.

I know there are many flavors of "good," but I also always really struggled with feeling like I had to be on point at all times with hard work, schoolwork, self-sacrifice, "morality," etc. It was a lot!

These days, I have part of the Mary Oliver poem "Wild Geese" as a tattoo. Here's the full poem if anyone has an interest.

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

If you're in the US, this will show where you can stream it legally, and you can select a different country at the bottom of the main page if you're not. Looks like it's on some of the services free with ads, but on its way out of a couple libraries in a few weeks.

Wow, this is rough. It looks like a lot of AI-generated content, including a cutscene where a full-sized image is squeezed into like 1/4 of the screen for no apparent reason. In the boss fight footage the boss is so far away that their sword doesn't even make contact with the player when they're taking damage.

I appreciate the dev's candor/creativity with sending this email, but... Oof.

Oh no, this comment made me go check the date.

Oh yeah, this is my sister's MO. She often hung up without telling me she was upset. One specific time I didn't realize my mistake and thought the call dropped, but couldn't get ahold of her. Within a few minutes my phone started blowing up. For like a week afterwards there was an endless flood of calls from seemingly everyone I'd ever met, and many people I did not know, telling me what a horrible person I was.

I finally figured out she'd called all these people and told them I'd told her she was a bad mother. In reality I'd said something that was awkward and dumb, but not malicious. It was like a week before her wedding and she had been talking for like an hour telling me about drama in all her stepmom groups on Facebook, and I was young and worn out by thirdhand play-by-play stepmom drama and trying to avoid telling her how exhausting it all sounded. I made some dumb joke about how she was gonna be an Official Stepmom (TM) soon, thinking we'd transition from there to her excitement about the wedding and whether or not she thought married life was gonna be different. So... Thoughtless? Yes. Malicious? No. I'm just awkward. That's not a surprise to anyone at this point.

And yet she told everyone I'd specifically told her she was "a bad mother," and eventually other lies got added as I tried to defuse the situation over the next week. I didn't go to her wedding and everyone was surprised by that somehow, and very angry at me for not going. I no longer speak to my family, and it's largely because they were so intense about backing every terrible thing my sister did.

Yeah, she had some serious audacity. The rules of peopleing kind of just didn't apply to her -- I couldn't expect her to act the way other people did. Some people are just harder to handle, I guess.

Yeah, she did stuff like that a lot -- usually only directed towards me. Thankfully it's not something I have to deal with anymore, so that's good. I can spoil myself with chocolate covered things -- though I probably won't because it's so much more work haha.

I think she was! She just did that kind of stuff (hence me no longer speaking to her). She would go out of her way to upset me for no reason. Everything would be fine and we'd be getting along and hanging out, and then I'd find out about some awful thing she'd said or done without warning. It was exhausting. Life is much quieter now, and my problems are my own. That's an improvement!

My sister was once saying how her favorite food was chocolate covered pretzels but doesn't often buy them because they're expensive premade, so for Christmas I made her chocolate covered pretzels. I did use almond bark, but it was a ton of work nevertheless. I had different colorful drizzles I made, and I had picked a few kinds of candy to crush up for some candy-covered ones (though most were plain, just in case it wasn't her thing). I had a few people taste-test to confirm they were close enough to store-bought, to my friends' and neighbors' delight.

I was so proud, and so excited to give them to her. She never even thanked me. A couple weeks later I asked if she liked them and she said that she'd given them to her husband instead. Her husband hates my guts (and I found out later he's been saying really bigoted things about me for years, to the point where my 5yo niece started repeating them to me).

When I asked my sister why she regifted, she said "oh, I don't eat things like that." This shouldn't have been surprising. She publicly claims to be a huge health nut when really she would often drag me to Wendy's, sometimes on the way to and from places, but then she'll make me sneak out of the car with the evidence shoved in my bag so nobody sees her near a Wendy's container. I don't know why I still made the effort.

A few weeks later she even amended her story to claim her husband also doesn't eat candy (despite her always complaining that he's a candy fiend!) and that he brought them into his work and gave them to his coworkers, who did not like them and threw them away. Suuure. We don't talk anymore; it's not because of the chocolate-covered pretzels per se, but I never thought a pretzel would open my eyes to just how much a person sucks.

Yeah, I started trying to get into it and a few people I know just kind of buried me in their old collections, telling me that even if I didn't stick with it I could keep them. As it turned out, I did not stick with it, and had a mountain of cards between what I was gifted and what I bought (mostly the former). I ended up spending many hours organizing them and then entering the bulk of it into Archidekt, and then finally called it quits, but it blew my mind how much it was worth.

Eventually I listed some stuff on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist, and that included the cards. I included photos of the cards, a screenshot of a spreadsheet of the more valuable parts of what I had catalogued in Archidekt (there was a photo limit), a breakdown of what kinds and rarities, and a screenshot of the estimated value, and I offered to share the full spreadsheet with anyone who asked. I had listed them for like 60% of the lowest vendors' value, and wasn't even including the various binders and card boxes and dice in the price.

I figured people would lowball me and I was planning to sell them for less, but wow. It was essentially the same situation as when I tried to sell my car, only it's a lot more believable to think someone is desperate for a vehicle. The number of people trying to get one over on me blew my mind. I was getting walls of text about how their dog died and their kid was sick and crying and that they needed Magic cards to heal them and would I please take this amount, it was like 10% of the lowest vendor's value but they needed these Magic cards for the child, you see. One person kept making alt accounts to keep messaging me and yelling at me for not accepting their offer. It was rough.

I absolutely heard this in a Simlish voice.

Ohh, that is super awesome! Yeah, sometimes I'll hear people say "what do you mean he's pregnant? He's a man." It's not always that they're questioning the person's gender, but it's like people have this weird massive blind spot about who has the ability to get pregnant, so it just... doesn't compute. I hope eventually we'll escape our hangups and preconceived notions around all this, but I also feel like it can't happen fast enough to prevent more people from suffering because of it. It's such a relief to know that paper was getting it right! That's progress.

Thank you so much! Yeah, she's really the reason I've kept going for sure. Can't bail on this little weirdo! I just got her a toy and she's actually playing with it, which is wild -- she's always hated toys except one felted penguin Christmas ornament she stole once years ago. I guess we're all moving forward in our own ways.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate that. I am moving forward! And she is doing extremely well, especially for her age. You'd think she'd paused time. She's still floofy and energetic and chirping at birds, and still has boundless enthusiasm when the Treat Ball TM comes out.

Yeah, it was mindblowing. "You need that." "No I don't, I do not intend to get pregnant." "But it's important." "Not for me." "But it's a part of you." "Not for long."

Oh my god, I did not think about this and now I'm even more alarmed.

Ohh wow. It would certainly be nice -- I would love more people to have more options to get what they want. I wish it were that simple! I am working on getting rid of mine and it's a doozy. People will more or less tell me that it's the last thing they can use as an excuse to not see me as a man, and they don't understand why telling me so wouldn't make me take their side and cancel my efforts to get surgery. It's super weird.

Thank you so much! I appreciate that. :) There's not much I can do about it now except be happy I've finally taken that space for myself. And I am!

Thank you so much! I appreciate that. Yeah, it's not that I'm not hurt or angry, but that I'm kind of floating for the moment in what's now and what's next. In therapy I sort through it in little bits, and it's so much easier now that when I was still all tangled up in it, so it's really nice to feel that I finally have some perspective on it all. I guess I just can't waste this opportunity that I've suffered to create for myself, because that would just mean causing myself and everyone else a lot of misery to just sit and do nothing. That would be kinda lame.

It's a slow process -- a therapist once told me I had to live to see high-res images of pluto, so I took that approach and adapted it for things I've never had the confidence or mental energy to try. It started with a list of random things I've thought about learning to do, like soldering or basic car repairs or learning more about various philosophical and spiritual perspectives, just any can to kick down the road and keep me interested in life. Assembling recipes I wanna try, and making lists of books I wanna read, starting work on a Jellyfin server, etc. It's just little things to make me think, "well I can't lose yet, I haven't made my own sushi. Lemme keep going for now."

Mostly I guess I just felt really bad explaining to my newish therapist that the only thing going for me was, "an elderly, unfriendly, and entirely loadbearing cat." That felt like kind of a hard place for us to get me out of without me getting a tiny headstart on imagining any kind of future lol. He's great though (the therapist, though the cat is also lovely) so we're in good shape thus far.

Thank you for your kindness, and here's to great days ahead of us!

This is validating but I also feel bad! Looking back it was also really unpleasant having to remind myself via explaining to her that there's this disadvantage I cannot yet overcome without scientific advances... or presumably just gobs of money to throw at the issue, as I have heard there is technically the possibility to fertilize eggs without sperm but I can't remember the details of what I've read about it. I just know it was very much outside the realm of possibility then, and remains so now. I hope you and your wife are well! It's a jungle out there.

I feel like I have a mental hall of fame for the weirdest interactions I ever had with her, to try to make her seem more goofy (because she is) instead of just terrible (which she also is). And sometimes it's just funny to remember the person who's treating me like garbage is not nearly as serious as she'd like to be, because people have depth and also life is just really, really strange. There's whimsy out there! Maybe too much sometimes.

Yeah, I suppose it was a little validating while also being super concerning haha.