megane-kun

And the other way is distasteful too! Going around helping people because you want to “fish for friends”? Yeah, you could do worse things, I suppose, but still pretty icky.

Some people though, they can be pretty classy about it and if done that way, and no one is harmed, why not?

attach yourself (politely) to the person who comes to help

This probably explains some of the interactions I’ve had when all I wanted to do is to help someone in need. Not in the gym, but mostly in the streets. Like someone getting lost, and offering to show them the way. Or offering my seat to the elderly.

But really, being helpful sometimes is all it takes for give someone the reason to talk to you (and vice versa). Not that I managed to be in a relationship with this kind of a start.

Either way, I’m in a bad situation. I’ll act under the assumption been framed for the murder.

Do not touch anything, don’t leave anything that would indicate my presence in there. Do not attempt to even rearrange the scene to make it seem I wasn’t there. It’s already too late for that. All I can do now is to minimize any additional traces of my presence.

Drink some water. Find some random container that won’t be missed and won’t be conspicuous, maybe something from the rubbish bin, and fill it with drinking water. Do not take anything from the fridge. The point is to minimize any evidence that could point towards me.

The clothes might be a problem. Washing it could work, but it might be easier to just tear the bloodied parts or otherwise just go without the top layer of clothes. Do not throw them away inside the house, but be prepared to scatter them later.

Don’t leave at night. It’d be too conspicuous. The middle of the day, when everyone is either at work or busy having their lunch, works better. Take just enough water to not die of thirst. The point is not to attract too much attention.

When ready, leave. Don’t take the car, just walk. Don’t look too suspicious, but don’t act too casual either—better yet, don’t act at all. However, be cautious. There might be someone watching, following. Don’t take any drastic steps, just walk. If choosing to dispose of the bloodied clothes (or portion of clothes), casually dispose of them in pieces in different garbage bins I may encounter.

I will be walking until I reach the nearest urban area, but basically assuming that:

• I’m being framed for the murder, and so going to the police isn’t going to help
• I’m basically a “dead person” from that point on. My options are down to
  • try to survive being a beggar. there might be a way to claw my way out of this but being a wanted person makes it nearly impossible. staying a beggar, and hence invisible from the rest of society might be better
  • find a way out of the situation in my own terms

Thinking about it, maybe it’d be easier if I just join the dead guy.

I’m a guy, and if a girl sits down next to me and talks to me in a park or even in a bar, hundreds of red flags will be raised that there’d be an impromptu Soviet parade in my head.

Sure, I’d respond politely, but I’d be constantly wondering what she actually wants from me: recruit into a sus MLM thing? recruit into a sus cult? recruit into a sus MLM cult thing? And I am sure that if the genders were reversed (a guy hitting me up, a woman, all of a sudden), it’d not be a Soviet parade, but an all-out scramble for the bunkers. That’s not to say all women think the same as I do, though, but just echoing the OP’s sentiment, which I somehow agree on.

There are far safer avenues for talking to the person of your preferred gender (or non-gender), where flirting is tolerated more, than out in public.

I mean, yeah. Somehow I’m aware of that. But also, we haven’t bought a TV for almost a decade now, and my biggest mistake is letting it update to the latest version. If there’s something these adverts have done is drive me into consuming even less than ever before. I actively don’t buy stuff now.

“Smart” TVs.

I just want my TV to show pretty pictures with sound thrown at it by the digital receiver. If I want, I can attach a computer for streaming. How is that such a big ask?!

A wallpaper of a wall with the center lighted.

I think “What is the meaning of (my) life?” is not a question that we should be focusing on. It assumes that there is meaning to life. Neither is saying “Life is meaningless,” as it assumes exactly that. Both approaches presupposes an answer.

I’d rather think about “What can I do today/tomorrow/this week/this year/in this life?” That is a lot more digestible than chasing a meaning, or dismissing what could be meaningful about my actions.

I’m already here, so… What is it under my control that I can do something about? What can I do about it? Something along those lines.

PS:

The overall tone of my response might be nihilist, or having shades of stoicism, but I am personally biased towards Epicureanism (not the present-day meaning, but the more classical meaning) which gives emphasis to ataraxia, or put very loosely, that state of contentedness. It’s not about avoiding pain and preferring (temporary) pleasure, but rather a more stable state absent of pain and having pleasure that is brought about by mindful actions. I am not exactly learned in this so please take my words with a pinch of salt (or several).

I’ve used to like grids, but I’m now very partial to lists. I used to like how grids enable you to scan thumbnails quickly, (like in games, music, images and files), but now I find them to be quite distracting. In lists, if I know what I am looking for (name, file type, etc), I can quickly go to where I need to be, and only need to scan a few items.

Of course, if the list is incredibly long, it’d be more difficult, but even more so with a grid of thumbnails. The only possible exception here is images. Knowing when a photo was taken can give me a clue, but hell do I remember what I took that got saved as IMG_20230303163333.jpg is and how the content differs from IMG_2023030316303030.jpg

[email protected] for an instance-agnostic link.

I can count to ten in seven languages. Not as many as some of the others here, I suppose?

Yes, I sometimes count in one of my target languages.

I always found the Gilgamesh -> Holy War conversion far more useful for the Omega Weapon fight, especially if the fight is over before I even manage to use half of the 10 items the conversion gives me.

With a low enough level, and a powerful enough junction setup, every single fight (even the final boss fight) is complete child’s play. Too bad I didn’t already know that on my first playthrough.

That comment about phone apps is so true! One time my SO tried playing Outer Wilds in JP, I had my phone out ready to to decipher kanji via JP handwriting support. We competed on who can get to a definition of the kanji or word the fastest, and I won almost everytime. Whereas I tried to do it via handwriting, my SO tries to sound out the word first, and then search it via romaji.

A huge difficulty with those JP SNES games is that

• if a word (or a part of one) is presented as kanji, I have no idea which stroke or strokes a bunch of pixels is supposed to represent!
• if a word is presented as kana, I have no idea where the word starts or ends, especially if it is part of a sentence I can barely recognize any words in.

It is a measure of how your actions get you closer to your goals.

Hence, if my goal is learning Japanese, and I spend time in reading raw manga, I can argue I’m being productive. However, if my goal is to learn Rust, then reading raw manga is not being productive.

Productivity does not have an end goal other than what you set for yourself.

EDIT:

Edited the last sentence to make it say what I meant it to say. “Productivity has an end goal…” isn’t it. 😅

Reminded me of that time I tried playing JRPGs in Japanese to shore up my target language input. In between the pixelized kanji and lots of uncommon vocabulary, I gave up thinking I was just too early for that kind of thing.

I suppose playing Chrono Trigger and FF8 in JP was not a very good idea. I also have my doubts since some of the earlier consoles had JRPGs using kana exclusively (due to the state of character encoding at the time), and reading all-kana text is just a headache I am not prepared for.

EDIT:

Reworded some stuff for clarification.

I’ve never fished at all, but I’ve seen some people do some sort of fishing (with a fishing pole) along the coast. I haven’t really stayed long to observe what they do, but I saw that it involves a lot of waiting, and I feel increasingly awkward watching a guy do some fishing so I left. It might be that the spot that guy chose (or the area in general) just doesn’t have enough fish, being in the city and all. That, and pop culture (including some anime) characterizing fishing as needing patience and the capacity of being incredibly still while being capable of incredibly fast movements. Like a ninja meditating, only to do intensely quick movements to pull in the fish even before it had the chance to react.

Thanks for clarifying the misconceptions I had. I’ll look forward to having an opportunity to do some lure and fly fishing.

I can’t really explain it, but it is akin to tuning it out. Basically ignoring it as it it were tinnitus.

Of course it can only be done if you can afford not to engage it (or engage in it such that you can fake engaging in it). IDK, it’s really hard to explain.

Oh, I know! 😅

In my current playthrough, I used just a few of the techniques I know to get 3×100 Flare for my party to junction to STR and 3×100 Thundaga to junction to Elem Atk (you can get two of them, and the Siren has the third IIRC–it’s been a while since the SeeD exam and the playthrough proceeds at a snail’s pace) before the SeeD exam in order to defeat the “Crab Mecha” on the first available opportunity. All that, while keeping my levels at a minimum (under lvl 10, ideally).

I have the patience for it, but it still gets incredibly tedious and dull.

Disengagement.

If I can physically disengage, walking away from the situation, I’d do it. If not, I’ll mentally disengage. Enough times of this, I’ll just default to it: not giving a shit because apparently, no one does.

If I must engage in it anyways, maybe I’ll return to it once I’ve calmed down. If I must do it there and then (so, no time to compose myself), I’d do minimum I can get away with.

In real life? Nope. I don’t think I have the patience for that, sitting perfectly still for hours on end. I would probably enjoy the scenery and the vibe though.