BougieBirdie

Not to be flippant, but if you want to alter the way you think, then therapy is probably the answer.

The good news is that in my experience, the valuable part of therapy is totally free and you could start today.

I’ve had success with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The model for CBT says that our automatic thoughts initiate our feelings, and while our feelings are valid, our thoughts can be bullshit.

Our brain is like an overgrown field, and each thought is like a person passing through it. Each time a thought passes through the field, it wears down a groove which will become a trail or a road. Our thoughts want to take the path of least resistance, so they follow the well-worn paths. However, we can create new paths with better thoughts that lead to more positive feelings, and eventually the negative paths have more resistance than the positive ones.

The key technique is recognizing Cognitive Biases, which are common ways that our brains lie to us, and then restructuring our thoughts through journaling exercises. Common biases include assuming other people think poorly of us, making predictions of the future with limited information, or thinking that because we feel bad we must be bad.

Now on the flip side, therapeutic techniques are not a one-size-fits-all solution. What’s worked for me might not work for everyone. And that’s okay because there’s plenty of tools in the toolbox left over.

I got a lot of mileage out of CBT. It’s logical, there’s a process to follow, and it improved the quality of my life to a point. It didn’t happen overnight, and I still have bad times more often than I’d like, but there was improvement

Whether you have access to a therapist or not, the greatest impact from therapy comes from doing the homework. It’s lame, but there it is. But if you really don’t vibe with a technique, the good news is there’s a zillion other techniques you could try a web search away.

It’s interesting that the phrasing here is that the younger people shouldn’t be allowed to date the older people. The issue with this kind of age gap is the imbalance of power, and whether you realize it or not you’ve just placed the stigma at the feet of the person who’s most likely to be victimized.

Anyway, banning this kind of thing doesn’t work. It happens at a scale that would likely be unenforceable, not to mention that rebellious people will do things because they’re banned

A better approach to harm reduction is education. Meet people where they’re at without shame and explain the risks realistically. And even then, some people just won’t learn until experience teaches them

At the end of the day, if your daughter wants to work out her daddy issues by getting railed by an older man, no amount of pearl clutching is going to prevent that

You’re gay people, is she tired of seeing you in her feed?

This has all the makings of a non-apology

I’d argue that racism is a symptom of some of these other things.

An imbalance of societal power leads to - or is caused by - manipulative politics. Those politics are increasingly being pushed through addictive technologies, and indeed, are using racism to divide us at the cost of democracy.

Racism is a symptom, but understanding where it’s being pushed from has value. It’s like saying someone died of heart failure - just about everyone dies of heart failure, but it can be more useful to know what caused the heart to fail

Twice more than I would have liked to.

Very fortunate nobody was hurt

Every time I’ve been hit by a car, it’s been when I’ve had the right of way. You have to be super defensive as a pedestrian because you can be thoroughly solidly right and follow all the rules… and still end up dead.

So it bothers you when people vocalize their question marks, eh?

Only on the fediverse can I expect to see someone explain how to manage their kitchen with a computer analogy and not the other way around

It’s good advice though, I have no notes

Unfortunately, it looks like drawing a big rectangle is the only method to calculate area that’s baked into Godot. You could get the Area2D’s CollisionShape2D children, and then for each child you can child.shape.get_rect().get_area()

Now, if you’re getting each shape anyway, and you know what kind of shape it is, you can use the appropriate formula to calculate area. For instance, if it’s a CircleShape2D, you can check the radius and get something like var area = shape.radius * shape.radius * PI

For a polygon it becomes more complicated. You can get the points of the polygon and then use Geometry2D.triangulate_polygon() to get an array of triangles inside that polygon. You can then calculate the area of each triangle and sum them to get your total area. There’s no built-in way to do this, so it’s left as an exercise for you.

The question I have to ask: from a design standpoint, is the exact size of each country truly important to the game? For the sake of argument, Canada is a really quite large country, but it’s sparsely populated. A lot of the land is frankly not very habitable. If I was going to abstract a surrender-factor, I’d think about “population” filling a role that you’re thinking of for “area.” If that were the case, you could just attach a property to each country manually. Maybe a little more work upfront depending on how many countries or regions you’re including, but it’s definitely cognitively simpler.

It’s a common turn of phrase that people use when explaining something to someone who seems unclear on a subject.

I hope this clears things up.

The market is saturated with crap that doesn’t sell under its own merits. In theory a review signals that not only did that product sell, but somebody actually cared enough to leave a review.

An online market is especially tricky for consumers because you can’t really look at the product to judge it for yourself. You have to make do with a product description, specifications, or photos. All of which might be incomplete, poorly translated, or photoshopped / AI-generated.

So reviews tell you what other people thought. It’s their first line of marketing after SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Of course, unethical companies are out there using paid and fake reviews, so it’s not like a savvy shopper can even use the reviews to judge quality.

Anyway, as someone else said, don’t engage with these emails. You’ll just end up with more emails if you do.

HtWFaIP - How to Win Friends and Influence People

I got back together with an old tabletop group recently.

Five or six years ago we wrapped up the campaign we were running to take a little break. Scheduling became tricky, a couple of people were expecting their first child and some others were starting new jobs. Without a common meeting, the group just kind of faded out.

Anyway, a couple months back I bump into one of the players and we start talking. Shortly after that, he starts up a new group chat trying to get the band back together.

My mental health has been an absolute shitshow the last several years, so I really agonized over whether I wanted to try to get back together or embrace the solitude that I desperately crave for my free time. Well, I went against my initial judgment and it’s been awesome playing with likeminded people again.

A couple of friends still can’t really make it, the schedule is too difficult with young kids. But we brought in a couple new players too and the funny thing is that even with new people it still feels like old times.

Credit where it’s due, around the time Dying Light 1 came out, Roger Craig Smith was lending his voice to Chris Redfield, one of the more iconic zombie guys from Resident Evil.

My favorite Redfield moment was when, without a shred of irony, he talks smack about the villain acting like a comic book villain. Then in the same breath, he punches a six-ton boulder into submission.

Dying Light also really kinda shook up the zombie slaying dynamic with parkour. It seems like a fairly minor thing now, but that freedom of movement was a pretty big deal at the time, even if it was pretty janky.

Narratively, I agree that Crane isn’t a very strong character. He’s a dime-a-dozen government goon turned idealist. I don’t even remember how the story ends, or even most of the major beats except for a couple of major characters.

But at the time, to kick zombie butt while scooting around the rooftops and listening to Chris Redfield quip one-liners: those were special times even if it was a decade ago. They’re probably trying to recapture that magic, but I don’t know. It was lightning in a bottle and you can’t always get that back