Same!

Charles Schulz died the day after his last strip was published, having announced his retirement ahead of time. Coincidence?

FFS just put on the damn sunglasses.

In my late 20s I had anxiety so bad I constantly walked around feeling like I was about to have a heart attack. Inspired by the movie Fame, I signed up for a community college acting class in the evenings. I forced myself to jump in with both feet on the first night. Getting through that was all it took - it turned out I was actually good at it and it was a blast. I became a total theatre guy - had big parts in a couple plays, designed and built sets, did props, ran lights, became stage manager… And almost immediately I had a thriving social life - going out in groups for food, going to parties, throwing my own… theatre became my life, my job was just something I did during the day. In all this my anxiety COMPLETELY faded away.

Besides all the fun there were other benefits. Learning to get into character transformed job interviews for me - I would just reframe the situation so it wasn’t a job interview - I already worked there, I had just been away for a while and it was my first day back. It was going to be great to see the people again! It was a great group and our manager was awesome, I couldn’t wait! So I would get into that character and walk in genuinely feeling glad to be there instead of being nervous. That’s 90% cultural fit right from the start. My success rate skyrocketed (I was a contractor doing software jobs, so I had to get new jobs quite often).

Theatre led directly to eventually meeting my wife, and gave me the confidence to become a dad. I wouldn’t be the person I am if I hadn’t taken that first step. I HIGHLY recommend it to anyone with anxiety!

Rolling multiple attacks & saves all at once for groups of NPCs or monsters. Generating random monsters and treasure items. Generating names for many things - npcs of different races, dragons, books, towns, inns, etc. A lot of the randomizing can be done with AI now, but using mine is faster, and it creates names that sound culturally consistent for my world, using parts of names and rules for combining them. I can construct a pretty decent new generator in like 10 minutes.

I also have a Discord bot that maintains parties, keeping track of everybody’s XP and level. I put in the total XP for a game session, and the bot does all the arithmetic to distribute it amongst the party, factoring in multiclassed characters and those who get a 10% bonus for high ability scores (this is for 1e/2e AD&D campaigns). I can also award individual XP for outstanding deeds etc.

Please keep your hands, feet and body fully inside the vehicle.

Not much point in telling it really - totally my fault, somehow I made a turn across in front of somebody, didn’t even see them coming. Nobody hurt and the other car just had a busted front corner, but my car was undrivable and the insurance company totalled it. It was a 2014 Nissan Leaf. I loved driving that thing - instantly felt completely at home in it, it felt like a little spaceship.

I think it comes down to subtle mathematical properties of the sounds.

Many years ago there was an article in Scientific American that talked about how most art depicts something from the world but music doesn’t really sound like anything in nature, not even birdsong. So what does it sound like? It turns out that all popular music, regardless of genre, predominately features fractal patterns, and so does our nervous system. If you measure nerve activity at the periphery like on your skin you get a lot of white noise, and as you probe closer to the central nervous system the signal gets more fractal - as if our nervous system itself is built to filter out the white noise and let the fractal components of our perceptions through. So presumably fractal patterns play a part in our processing and maybe how we do pattern matching. In addition, if you measure the difference between moving patterns in nature - like trees waving in the wind, or people moving around in a crowd, the difference between one moment and another is strongly fractal. In other words, fractal patterns could be important in how we perceive changes in the world around us.

This could explain why specific pieces of music can almost universally sound happy or sad, or stirring, or comforting, or can remind us of a specific person or experience - even if it’s a song we’ve never heard before. Anyway, my guess is that if you did the right math on metal and folk music you would see a lot of similar numbers.

Similar story - my dad got a used electric typewriter from work and I LOVED typing on that thing, so I went to summer school to take a typing class. In my 20s a coworker called me “machine-gun <me>”. For some reason my typing is shit on laptops tho.

Knowing how to write code and monkey with electronics has enabled me to do all kinds of fun things. Like create my own D&D utilities to make DMing a game easier.

Another everyday ordinary person with tons of potential, mostly being exploited by capitalists as usual.

Great except I wrecked my car.

Nobody owns culture, don’t stress about it.

Most of us make fun of the stupid everyday masses for supporting laws that only benefit people who are vastly richer than they’ll ever be. But I’m almost guaranteed to get douchevoted for pointing out that the vast majority of musicians never get famous, never get recording contracts, but make their living day to day playing little gigs wherever they can find them. They don’t materially suffer if AI includes patterns from their creations in its output, because they don’t get any revenue streams from it to begin with. Realistically they’re the people most of us should identify with, but instead we rally behind the likes of Paul McCartney and Elton John as if they represent us. McCartney’s a billionaire and Elton’s more than halfway there - they both own recording companies ffs. If you’re going to do simple meme-brained thinking and put black or white hats on people, at least get the hats right.

…and it’s almost always something entirely simple.

“Roger, alpha bravo, initiating IP address trace…”

And millions of Americans think the reason we don’t have all the things we don’t have that everybody else has, is cuz we have Freedom! and everybody else is oppressed. How did so many people get so brainwashed?

I think almost everybody who isn’t a philosopher is with the biologists.

Obviously you know my life better at a glance than I do, having lived it. Meme-level thinking at its best! Take in minimal information, make a value judgement based almost entirely on preconceptions, and scroll on to the next item. This is why we have Trump (again) - because too many people dismissed all the issues as simple good/evil decisions so they could get back to entertaining themselves.