-9. Father was an abusive alcoholic monster who ruined friendships and activities like baseball by fighting with parents early on in life. My mother was/is a workaholic with a tendency to be neglectful of emotions as I got older. I was often left alone to care for my younger brothers. Brothers who left to their own devices became little monsters themselves by falling into drugs and alcohol both before 14.

My childhood ended at 14. I’m 33 now at probably the lowest point of my life. Because, except for my Dad, we still live together. All those years in between 14 and now I learned to cope by reducing myself to nothing. Be quiet. Don’t move. Stay in my room. Don’t be a burden. Unfortunately I’m at two extremes where I feel safest in that reduced state but everything in me wants to leave. Even if it means living in the streets. That’s my trap. That’s how my childhood has me by the throat even now.

I absolutely detest the practice of saying the “the proper nouns of the world,” i.e the Tom Brady’s of the world. Or the Empire State buildings of the world. First off, it’s a proper noun. The implication of a proper noun is there is only one specific instance. Second, that’s diminishing to the proper noun used by lowering that status to the mean. Last, it’s usually used in a sports context to unnecessarily group up a bunch of players even though we already know the context of why they’re being grouped up for comparison. It’s just fucking dumb. It really grinds my gears.

The law sitting in the background like Undertaker when he got drafted to Raw.

This explanation helps a lot. I was watching Maxamillion_Dood play online and it seemed like every other track they selected was random. And when it wasn’t he clearly didn’t know what lap they started on. Like the race would be over the first time they crossed the finish line. Everytime that happened Max was confused. Even to me as a viewer that seemed weird. I couldn’t tell what was going on either. First time I ever watched a Mario Kart game and had a hard time telling what was going on.

I was on broadcast crews for sports events. I started out doing camera then worked my way up to graphics. As cool and fun as that job was there’s major caveats to it. You need multiple jobs in this field to make any money. You can’t just coast at one place and expect to make bank. You have to hustle back and forth between gig after gig. This was just for college. Pros are even worse. I knew people getting gigs with my favorite pro teams and they’d say stuff like " we only got 2 dates this month" and that’s with avails given upto 6 months in advance. I was told for one arena that the group there is very clicky and the only way to get into it is to wait for someone to die. I know guys who would spend a weekend in Philly just to book it up to New York for a few days then fly down to Florida for the next weekend. It’s a real hustle, with potentially no down time, and crap pay. It’s an amazing gig of you’re fresh out of college and have the energy for it. Unfortunately life put a couple road blocks in my way and I had to give it up for my own sanity.

I recently started playing around with Reaper on Linux. It’s no different from it’s windows counterpart. You can use something like yabridge to use third party VSTs. All I had to do was point it to my VST folder and viola, almost all of them work. The only problem I have is that none of them work graphically. The sound works and they render just fine but for some reason clicking on a knob or button is waaaay off. For example in Pro-Q, if I put the mouse by the top of the plugin the frequency knob will highlight like the mouse is on top of knob. Nothing happens if the mouse is actually on top. This may be a yabridge issue. Their GitHub does say Wine versions greater than 9.22 don’t work. I’m on the latest Wine and haven’t fucked with different versions yet. If the fix is that simple then the experience is no different for me at least. Otherwise I just have to use the UI-less mode where Reaper turns the plugins into a series of sliders you can adjust instead.

I agree that it still needs a cooking, but what’s there is already so good. Salmon is great raw or cooked.

For video games, Ostranauts. It’s the perfect space survival sim IMO. You wake up on an industrial salvage station and get a ship. Then you fly to derelict ships and scrap them for money and parts. Build up your own ship and travel farther and farther out. It’s jank as fuck to learn but once you get it down it’s the type of game where you put on music then just go for hours and hours. It’s early access and a lot is changing but the core gameplay loop is so addicting already.

For tabletop games, Infinity. It’s the best miniatures skirmish game I’ve ever played. The rules are deep but tight. The number of minis you put on the table is just right to me. List building is the best of any game I ever played. The rules are free. The app is free. The miniatures are the best out of any wargame I’ve ever played. It’s just a shame that people are so locked into Games Workshop that they don’t see other games as an option. Like I had a couple friends get hardcore into it but never more than that. And at the height of it’s popularity at our store we had one of the best players on the East coast play in a tournament. That was a sight to behold. Like I’m not a tourney player at all for any game. Watching the number 1 east coast player do his thing was the most inspired I ever was to become a tournament player.

Try it. It’s a fantastic game. I think the newest version that came out on Steam is the way to go but a lot of people still recommend the PSP Version if you wanna emulate it. Or you can go all the way back to the SNES version. I don’t think there’s a bad version of the game but there are definitely better versions of the game.

Tactics Ogre. I see people drop Final Fantasy Tactics as the greatest tactics game of all time. Then you always see Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Disgaea after. People sleep on Tactics Ogre. It’s a mechanically superior game to all of the mentioned. It’s story is equally as good as FFT. I think the graphics are better. It’s a challenging game from the start. FFT was created with the Tactics Ogre director and lead artist to be a more accessible version of TO. People see 90s golden era Final Fantasy and automatically put FFT on a pedestal. TO is like Undertaker stalking AJ Styles ready to obliterate whatever is in its way.

Working my way through act 2 of Baldur’s Gate 3. I feel like I’ve done just about everything in the Temple of Shar except the ::: spoiler spoiler fight against Balthazar. :::I tried it a couple times but got whooped a little too easily. Shadowheart is a beast though. She’s usually the last one alive when I try it. She can take out all the mobs by herself. It’s gonna take the whole squad to win the fight. I need to get my party up a level or two. Me being a defenseless bard is pretty tough. In all my attempts I’ve been sniped turn one with little recourse to get revived.

Then on top of that I’ve put time in AI Wars 2 and fighting games. AI Wars 2 is so cool. Complete information overload and a wonky UI but it’s got the addicting qualities I like in video games.

Tekken has been calling me as like a stress reliever. Then the Marvel announcement yesterday made me fire up Strive and SF6. I might put real effort into Strive this time. I’ve always wanted to but it’s never quite clicked like SF, and Tekken. And yes I installed DBFZ out of sheer joy yesterday. That rollback better be good.

ICE Barbie, DOJ Barbie, and Dumb Communication Barbie is the worst lineup of Barbies ever. Then to top it all off Hegseth is Ken.

My brother got Loser down one of his sideburns. Everybody uses it against him every once in a while.

The new Deafheaven album is amazing.

Snooze - I Know How You Will Die - Out of left field discovery. They have a really diverse sound scape. It’s mostly metal but does a good job of not following a set genre of metal.

BCNR - Forever Howlong - is a grower, not a shower. At first I didn’t really like Tyler’s songs because she left absolutely no room for anything to breath. But I’ve done a 180 on them as I find her voice so soothing.