BudgieMania

When I go back to read the stuff I write I think mostly “damn that guy sounds like a psycho”

I had some difficulties like these in the past, and what helped me was looking into amateur theater. There are part time (2 to 4 hours a week usually) amateur theater/drama schools that form closed groups and that group stays together over the years as they progress (with some inevitable degree of turnover obviously). I still talk to and meet with some of the people I met through that even though I left a bit after covid hit.

These kinds of spaces are good for people in our situation for multiple reasons:

• It puts us in an environment in which everyone is a newcomer, which helps when you struggle with that feeling of being the outsider.
• A lot of the people that go to that kind of space are people that struggle with shyness, loneliness or difficulties opening up, which means you are dealing with similar people to yourself.
• It inherently helps with shyness and closedness because the activity is all about opening up and being vulnerable. It’s very shock therapy because you don’t get any time to be nervous or second guess yourself, if it’s anything like mine was, they throw you out straight into the water.
• You meet people of all ages and walks of life, which enriches you if you open yourself to it.

You will however have to look into the details of what kind of options are in your area for that and how they work and when the groups are formed and what levels there are and all of that jazz because I can’t assume that it will work the same as it works here. If any of them are like my school was, then they offer smaller experiences (like a weekend or a month in the summer) so that you can dip your toes and get a feeling of how things work.

With all of that said, you should still look into regular therapy sessions while you are going through this. For people like us, our own brain is our worst enemy in this situation, and we need an external, specialized perspective that recontextualizes things for us. It will help more than you can imagine if you stick with it somewhat regularly.

Lord of the Rings Conquest without the stupid magic, without the stupid fire effects and with combat that doesn’t suck.

Also Lord of the Rings Total War but you can argue that it sort of exists through mods

Hey, it’s technically an auto-fix troubleshooter thingie included with the OS made by Microsoft!

Well, this is very specific, but the Windows 3D Builder repair tool is probably the best error fixer for 3D printing I have encountered, so at least they got that one right… I couldn’t believe it when I saw it actually worked as intended lol

It’s fascinating in a certain way. Massing dudes armed with the spear, one of the most basic concepts for a weapon possible, remained viable for millenia; but massing tanks and planes, which are marvels of advanced engineering, has been made obsolete in a century. XX and XXI century progress has been absurd.

Point after point after point, this is it exactly. The supposed “lowering” attention span is just a natural response to the greater amount of options available in most aspects of modern life, and making the most efficient use of them.

People were already channel surfing their TV in the 90s with a remote flick every other minute, the current situation is just a natural evolution of that when we go from 100 available channels to literally every conceivable content past and present known to man at a press of a button. Extrapolate that to a similar degree of evolution in most aspects.

But Doctor, I Am The Friend Who Is Very Into 3D Printing

But you don’t understand, I totally need that 30$ Oceania expansion for my Wingspan that I will play maybe twice a year

3D modelling. It’s impossible to get into 3D modelling and not get eventually sucked into 3D Printing… Which as other people have explained on the thread, is it’s own money sinker.

Beware my answer is extremely practical and “Vulcan” so to speak. With that said…

My rule for this and other things is “will I remember/care about this in a couple of days?” If the answer is no -and for most, if not all online interactions, the answer is absolutely not- then why let it occupy your mind now if it’s gonna leave it soon anyways. That’s why I don’t bother interacting with any response that is even mildly adversarial… why bother? Both you and the other person will have forgotten about it the day after tomorrow.

Like, try to remember an specific adversarial online interaction you had from like a month ago… it’s probably hard to come up with a particular one. It’s just a matter of looking at it from that future perspective in the present.

But maybe, even when trying to adopt that position, you are still overwhelmed with the feeling that you need to prove that you are right or the other person is wrong. In that case, remember two maxims for internet discussion:
1 - Everyone has already chosen their position, and is not changing it.
2 - There is no price for being right.
So, from a practical perspective, you will just be wasting your time trying to prove anything, since it won’t change anyone’s mind and you will not gain anything from it.

For me looking at it from these perspectives helps me to be “oh well, whatever”

They are offering me a ~40% raise to be in a 50/50 system and I’m considering taking it so… Apparently, that.

I’m reminded of the story of William Davis getting hooked on cigarettes because he insisted on smoking real cigarettes instead of props in the first episodes of X Files

Frustratingly, yeah, by a lot. Anyone who put money into a non-renewable energy etf at the lowest point of their prices in 2020 would have more than 2.5x their money by now.

Three additional things that you have to keep in mind are that:

1 - Enterprise storage is much, much denser (as in, capacity per physical space occupied) than you would expect.
2 - These systems have capacity recovery features (primarily compression and deduplication) that save a lot more storage than you would expect.
3 - The elements in the infrastructure are periodically refreshed by migrating them to newer infrastructure (think of how you could migrate two old 500GB disks to a single modern 1TB disk to save the physical space of a disk).

As an example about point 1, this is what IBM advertises in their public whitepaper for their Storage Scale systems (https://www.ibm.com/downloads/cas/R0Q1DV1X):

“IBM Storage Scale System is based on proven IBM Storage 2U24 hardware that can be expanded with additional storage enclosures up to 15.4PB of total capacity in a single node and 633YB in a single cluster. You can start with 48TB using half-populated flash nodes or create a fully-populated NVMe flash solution with 24, 2.5” drives in capacities of 3.84TB, 7.68TB, 15.36TB or 30TB. Using the largest capacity 30TB NVMe drives, up to 720TB total flash capacity, in a 2U form factor, along with associated low weight and low power consumption. Adding storage enclosures is easy as up to 8 enclosures (each 4u with 102 drives) can accommodate up to 816 drives of 10TB, 14TB or 18TB or 14.6PB of total raw HDD capacity.”

In short, you end up packing a stupid amount of storage in relatively moderate spaces. Combined with the other two points, it helps keep things somewhat under control. Kinda.