I didn’t realize there were alternate hardware options available. I have the custom firmware installed on mine, but I had two of them crap out of me in the past so it’s crossed my mind that if that happened again the resale market for them might force this one to be my last.

Some ds and 3ds games tried to shoehorn in touchscreen usage, which was annoying because there’s no shame in a good game not making use of the stylus. With that said, the ones that made good use of both screens were spectacular. Shoutout to Yo-Kai Watch 3.

My favorite cat was named Buddy, but since he would get into a lot of mischief we would often refer to him as “the monster”. Once you start calling your cat Buddy Monster, you’ll find you’re now a very short distance from Monster of Buddies I’m pulling your strings.

Brutalize me I WILL HEAL

The reason I’m inclined to turn to online dating is because the real me is someone whose dream life would be spending most of his days sitting around with a good friend playing with cats. It’s not like I have no solo interests at all, they’re just not ones that can invite a connection by doing them in public. Sometimes I read math, I have papers on the arXiv on category theory and categorical homotopy theory, but I’m out of academia right now so that’s not a way to connect with real people.

I absolutely love talking to people and forming connections, but just with one other person at a time, otherwise I get behind the conversation and go into deep introversion. I like getting to listen to someone tell their stories and talk about themselves. One of my favorite activities is reading books out loud with a friend. I don’t know how to go out into the real world and just do that with one other person. Online I can, and have made some wonderful connections. It’s just that dating apps specifically look like a nightmare.

If I were really into hiking or whatever I would be all about living that out. Unfortunately, the person I am is someone who would be doing activities as a means to socialize, rather than the other way around. Doing those things would very much not be the real me. It’s not easy to live a solitary life for an extended period and not dream about more, and those dreams start to feel like an ulterior motive if I’m seeking out new connections.

I don’t think at all about what “top” should mean in a dating pool, it hadn’t even crossed my mind, so I’m not sure why you’re bringing that up. I don’t care about whether I find someone in a top percentile of anything, I just want to find someone who is empathetic and who I connect with.

Reading this just unlocked an ancient memory. There was some DOS game that was included in a big pack of cds in sleeves that came for free with the pc my mom bought in 1993 (I think). I could never play it because none of those cds came with manuals and the game required the last word of manual page 5 or something to actually open.

I’m going to start dating again sometime soon, so this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot.

I hate that if I go on an app and make a contact, the ostensible purpose will be to date. When that’s the purpose, at some point an evaluation will have to be made. Either that purpose is met or it isn’t. You could have a conversation about being friends or considering your options, but I’m sure starting that conversation feels awkward and hurtful. It would feel like downgrading them from the original intent behind meeting.

Not starting that conversation could be delaying the dreams of two people though, so there would be a time crunch to make a decision before I might be ready. It feels like this will inevitably end up with throwing aside people who could be great to have as friends.

A connection shouldn’t be a decision, it should be something that happens. I’d rather just hang out with someone with the expectation that we’re hoping to be friends, and if there is a connection we’ll see it in each other sooner or later. Unfortunately for me, striking up conversations with single women to be friends with while having the thought of going further in the back of my mind might as well be the definition of creeper behavior.

I’m just pirating, but from I saw a lot of people have the opinion that the original is a better experience. If I remember correctly it’s an option to just go with original graphics and audio in +, but I figured I’d test out to see if how well the modded DSi works for me.

I’ve started Cave Story for the first time and it seems really cute. I recently modded my old DSi, so I’m playing that version.

When I lived alone I was great about cleaning up any messes made in memory, but dust bunnies had eternal lifespans.

I think the person who drew this comic was born into the wrong generation. (They’re a boomer at heart.)

Often when I upset strangers online I feel bad and log out for a few months.

Any impact protest voters might have had could be outweighed a thousandfold by nonvoters. Why call out protest voters unprompted as a cause of an election swing when their impact is a drop in an ocean?

Half the country didn’t vote. If 1% of them leaned Biden they would still have had more impact than protest voters, and I feel like the percentage leaning Biden might have been slightly higher than 1%.

I feel like I see protest voters called out 300x as much as nonvoters and I can never understand why it’s so disproportionate.

Like 10-15 years ago I took a screenshot from my pokemon game. I named my ditto “children” and then put it in the daycare center, so that when I went to pick him up the daycare lady says “If you want your children back, it will be $5000”.

As someone who had never watched the movie “Taken”, it was kind of unsettling to login to reddit the next day to find like five messages in my inbox saying some form of “I don’t know who you are but I will find you and I will kill you”.

Probably doesn’t fit the intent but thankfully those are the only examples I have.

Yeah I opened the door to the wrong car once before and almost got in. I can picture myself getting as far as sitting down, but I can’t picture myself realizing and then thinking “hey there’s no rush so I should pull out my phone to take a photo of this dog before leaving”.

I’m relieved because I saw this post and assumed it meant in a more serious way than normal.

I genuinely do appreciate you saying this, because I felt pretty bad about myself and logged off for a while.

So my intuition is wrong there, thanks. I clarified my question to the other guy just a minute ago to hopefully make what I’m asking more clear, (I didn’t fully understand myself tbh), I’d be curious to get a response to that.

I really apologize if it came across as hurtful. I was being overly wordy trying to be sensitive to how this question would come across (hence using this thread for it) and it didn’t convey great. It just seems like it would be very similar to the mental and emotional struggles I’ve gone through and comparing and contrasting to to my own experiences helps me understand people better.

Took some time to reflect, I communicated my question quite poorly and that is on me but I’m gonna try to ask it in a better way.

I feel somewhat strongly that trans-affirming care is the only appropriate approach to treating being trans. I have the impression that as a trans person you feel this is wholly incompatible with my sense that it is a mental health issue. I’d like to explicitly ask why my two beliefs are contradictory.

I’m asking because I am just in the past year or so suffering with severe physical and mental illnesses, and when I try to picture what the trans experience is like, I find that what I am imagining aligns very closely with my mental illnesses and not closely at all with my physical illnesses. I was extremely reluctant to accept that I have a mental illness because of both societal stigma and because in my situation, no one in their right mind would choose to treat my mental illnesses with therapy and pills when a change in living conditions would actually help enormously more, which seemed analogous to treating being trans.

That is what’s made me feel my two beliefs aren’t contradictory - I hadn’t understand how deeply I had internalized stigma against the mentally ill until I was asked to apply it to myself. I am imagining that other people would resist identifying as having mental illness in the same way I was. I picture the trans experience as emotional anguish with all physical threats as consequences of that emotional anguish. One where, also like many cases of mental illness, physical treatments are the correct option. But I don’t understand a way to liken it to my experiences with physical illness, so maybe it would be helpful to understand the physical danger and physical suffering explicitly.

I think there are extremely few situations where a mental illness should be treated as something to correct rather than accommodate without the patient being fully on board with thinking of it as something that needs to be corrected. In many cases, the only reason a patient would be fully on board is societal stigma and designed inaccessibility of accommodations, which is the impression I have of the trans experience as well. That’s the reason I don’t think of options other than trans-affirming care as okay.

I reacted badly because of recently surfaced mental health issues (blehhh) where I obsess over my character and respond to perceived character attacks as an attack on my identity even though I should just be listening. Your response seemed to focus on why I should agree with gender-affirming care and I read that as a character attack, rather than considering that you don’t see it as even possible to believe being trans is a mental health issue that should only be addressed by gender-affirming care. I was being overly wordy to try to be clear that I’m trying to understand how your experience compares with mine, and look, we’re back again.

Also I tend to read comments like that as a disgust and a need to distance from the mentally ill, and that’s something I very much need to work on because I know it’s not the intention at all. It stung more than usual in this case because I was looking to build camaraderie and tried my best to clarify that I don’t want mental illness to be an attack and that I am in favor of gender-affirming care.

This time I promise I will have the good sense to wait at least a few hours in responding to something that makes me feel bigoted. I apologize for being hurtful earlier and I’m hoping this one is less so.

tl;dr - The core stumbling block for me is this one - when I try to picture what the trans experience is like, I find that what I am imagining aligns very closely with my mental illnesses and not closely at all with my physical illnesses. I’ve elaborated way too much on why that is. I need to hear what I have imagined incorrectly, what I have overlooked.

Before I do that though, I’m commenting a follow-up to ask you to elaborate on if there’s something specific I can introspect on. I’ll read and think over the next few days.

One last edit:

Logging off is because I know this is an issue I have. Right now I don’t have much to be proud of other than my character, so in a moment I’m bad at listening and taking in criticisms that might suggest bigotry, because it feels like an attack on my identity. I’m aware that in reality I should be listening and not fighting, it just takes me an unreasonable amount of time and I act like a jackass until I’ve processed. Hence, logging out to introspect. Better late than never.

I’ll introspect on that. It generally takes me time to digest. I’m embarrassed here. But I do agree that gender-affirming care is the correct treatment. I read your response like I was not explicit about being in favor of it.

I think I should log off and mull on it because right now I’m just being an asshole. I’m a very slow learner and it generally takes a few days after I argue vehemently against something for it to sink in that I was wrong. I interpreted the first response like you thought I was arguing it should be addressed in a way other than gender-affirming care and responded like that was an attack, which is really shitty of me and pretty embarrassing.