I’d always thought that making friends and talking to strangers was super hard. My whole life, I’ve struggled along with just a couple friends…

Recently I’ve been reshaping my life and have been trying to make new friends… I’m still working on the execution, but just talking to people and finding common ground and being social has become SO much easier than I always thought it was. I think the trick was to just stop caring what people thought about me and being proud to be my genuine self.

There’s a group I’ve been meeting up with regularly and we’re going to the zoo this Sunday, and bowling next Sunday, on top of our usually scheduled Thursday afternoon general social meetups :)

I have been trained by Balatro for clubs to be blue and diamonds to be orange… Now looking at a normal deck of cards feels wrong.

Also it’s a lot easier to remember a deck of cards in the late game when it’s only 28 cards and 23 of them are 3 of hearts with a couple rocks thrown in.

I’m not in IT, but I was trying to get a coworker to send me a file they were supposed to have generated. I sent them a PDF and I wanted them to update it with current procedures (they were the area supervisor) and type it out in a word doc so it could be edited and rev controlled.

They never got back to me, 2 weeks passed. It was a 2 page document, so I emailed them to ask if they had finished. They responded that oh yeah they had finished a while ago, and I could find the completed document attached.

They sent me back the original PDF I sent them. After a confused follow up email, they again sent me back the original PDF.

I went over to their desk, which I had never been to before, usually I interface with them out on the assembly line. I was like “Hey what’s up, could you send me the .Doc file you created?”

Their response? “I forget what I named it so I can’t find it.”

I am even more confused. After some general troubleshooting I ask them to open their documents folder, which they did not know how to do. It didn’t matter because it was empty. They then close out of Outlook, which had been fullscreened the whole interaction.

Their desktop was the most densely packed jumble of hundreds of files I have ever seen. Not snapped to grid.

Turns out every document they ever interact with gets saved to their desktop permanently, and to find things they use Windows search. This explains why I kept getting back the original PDF, they searched for the name of what the file was supposed to be, and they just grabbed the first result without looking and slapped it in the email.

I ended up finding the document by showing them how to open a finder window, navigate to their desktop, and sorting by “last modified”, then asking them what day they remember finishing the document. It was named New Document.doc.

It ended up being so bad I had to completely re-do it myself anyway.

Aww, I was hoping the branding was based around the Quartz crystal subtype of the same name… My parents are big into Herkimer diamonds, I was about to go order them some bags lol. (They are currently on a ~2 week road-trip around central NY to go digging.)

I will be interested to see how visible they are from afar. The space is down between a big pile of scrap metal, and a giant pile of salt. It SHOULD be fairly visible from the highway, where people are stuck in parking-lot-esque traffic every morning and evening.

The space is actually fairly interesting. It’s been years in the making, but the aptly named Public St. is now legally recognized as a public right-of-way to the bay, much to the chagrin of the abutting heavy industry, who would rather keep public out of their space to avoid scrutiny. I don’t know about other states in the USA, or other countries, but in the tiny state of Rhode Island where I live, the area between the low-tide and high-tide line are public property. Everywhere. Without exception. This is written into the state’s constitution and tries to make it “impossible” to own the coastline. All over the state, there are right-of-way lines which consist of small strips of public land between private land to allow the public to access their lawful public property. The incorporation and inclusion of such right-of-ways can get somewhat contentious, and powerful interests who wish to privatize and exclude the public from access to the coastline always have something to say about it.

This particular new right-of-way doesn’t really lead to anywhere you’d want to perform any kind of fun water-related activities. It’s horrifically polluted, smelly, and directly adjacent to loud, messy industry. It does, though, cram a wedge in the space to make room for environmental justice causes like the aforementioned project regarding publicly displaying the current air quality right in the heart of the industry responsible for said poor quality, and can now be used to bring awareness to the pollution generated by the industrial waterfront. It also just feels powerful to be there. It’s a place that really feels like you shouldn’t be allowed to go there. On Sunday afternoon I sat there and watched a cargo ship be loaded up with scrap metal by 2 giant cranes only a couple hundred feet away. The ship was still there yesterday.

Yesterday I attended the “activation” of a new project in my city, where an artist/activist will be hoisting some large (10+ feet long!) wind-socks with a color matching the day’s air quality warning level (yellow --> orange --> red --> pink) at the end of a public right-of-way to the ocean on the industrial waterfront (which is a large source of the particulate matter making the air quality poor in the first place). I got to the spot early, planning on sitting and reading and just chilling before the event, but when I got there, the artist and their 2 friends were struggling to get things set up, so I joined in and helped. Had a lot of fun getting my hands dirty and getting it all set up!

and then stayed the whole event and helped pack everything up.

I ended up talking with a couple people there about the project, environmental justice, etc., took a lot of neat pictures, just had a nice evening.

There was also a small amount of anguish interleaved, as well lol. One of the artists friends’ started talking to me after we finished setting up, and I just did such a poor job of conversing, I wasn’t really prepared or in the right mindset for deep conversation. They were asking so many questions about me, and I just… didn’t return that energy. I feel like maybe they were flirting with me? Even if they weren’t, It was one of those things where only after they got bored of talking to me they went to go talk to their other friend and like 20 minutes later I had that “OHHHHHHH… Damn.” realization, like I should have asked them more about themselves, they were clearly interested in learning about me. Well, I wanted to at least apologize for being a bad conversationalist, but in the middle of packing up, they just left, and I never got the chance lol. So now I have that internal cringe embarrassment going on today, like I want to just curl up into a little ball and expire, even though I will probably never see this person again.

My parents were super anti-video game, and also thought Pokemon were some satanic cult thing… My brother and I used to absolutely LOVE when my mom would leave us home alone on school vacations or weekends to go shopping or something or run errands while dad was at work, we would pop right on over to Kids’ WB! and cross our fingers that Pokemon was on.

Our dad took my brother and I to some computer fair/carnival thing one time in 2000, I don’t remember exactly where it was, but it was in a parking lot in front of some boring commercial building. There were computer themed carnival games, booths with information, displays of the newest tech, etc. We played lots of games and had a fun time.

Well, turns out, I was REALLY good at throwing floppy disks, because I got the 3rd highest score in the floppy disk throwing game (you had to hit targets of varying size to score points). My prize? A purple Gameboy color and Pokemon Yellow. (First prize was a high-end Windows 98 computer. I remember being bummed I didn’t win a computer, but I still have that purple Gameboy Color… Probably wouldn’t be able to say the same for the PC)

Of course since I won this thing, my parents couldn’t take it away from me (well OK, I mean they COULD have, but besides being anti-video game and anti-pokemon, my parents were really great). This was the crowning achievement of my childhood. Of course, pokemon only has one save file, and so naturally, my brother “couldn’t play my game”. It took a while for my parents to understand this, but they eventually caved and got my brother his own neon green gameboy color and Pokemon Silver. Seeing the superior graphics of Silver, I saved ALL my pennies to eventually buy myself Pokemon Crystal. My brother, seeing the enemy Pokemon animations in Crystal not present in his Silver, saved all HIS pennies to eventually buy a Gameboy advance and Pokemon Saphhire… and the arms race continued. I got a GBA SP. My brother got a DS, I got a DS Lite, etc. etc., a constant stream of one-upmanship…

I still have the Purple Gameboy, Yellow, Crystal, Ruby, and the GBA SP, some of my most prized possessions. Almost every other physical thing from my childhood has been lost or sold. I had one of every single Pokemon game up until X/Y… A couple years back before the cartridge prices really exploded, I sold all the DS/3DS ones, which was kind of a bummer in retrospect, but whatever. I have much less interest in re-playing the DS era games. Maybe Black/White someday, I have good memories of that release. Last year I casually played through Pokemon Yellow again, and this year I’ve been playing Crystal.

I just started the Zones of Thought series by Vernor Vinge last Friday. I’ve been binging another author’s work (Greg Egan) for the last several months, but finally finished his last novel, so reading something by a new author has been refreshing and exciting! The story immediately fell into a trope that I haven’t been a fan of in the past (High-tech race meets low-tech feudal race), but it is already way way more interesting and deep than the last novel like that which left a sour taste in my mouth (Fire Time by Poul Anderson) and I’m enjoying it a lot!

I have a really hard time setting boundaries, and will quietly sacrifice my own happiness and sanity to make others happy. I also have a long history of fearing being alone…

From Freshman year of highschool to 2 months ago (2006-2025, wow almost 20 years, time flies), I think I have been single for a combined total of maybe a year, year and a half? I dated 3 women in a row for a little over 5 years each, exiting one long term relationship and immediately starting another one. Each time I just quietly sacrificed and changed myself for years until I could go no further, and crashed out, super unhealthy. The last long-term relationship, we moved in together after 3 months, and lived together for 5 years through 5 moves and COVID, it was crazy.

After that last long-term, I tried dating more casually, but quickly ended up in another relationship that lasted almost 2 years, but she really hurt me quite a lot, and I was so unable to leave until I was literally hanging onto sanity by a thread, because I was so afraid of being alone.

I told myself after that, I was done with dating… but I quickly fell back into it, and actually succeeded in dating casually for a bit. I ended up with a really pleasant friends-with-benefits situation with someone who had their shit together and was really good at setting boundaries, which helped me immensely, and I started working on myself in my own space outside that. Of course, though, I met some other woman who I fell for, and started dating her exclusively. She did not have her shit together, and I found myself right back in my old habits of sacrificing myself to help her. This lasted another year and a half, until 2 (maybe 3?) months ago, I finally just dumped her because I was so so bored and so tired of sacrificing my own happiness. I even got to the point where I was able to articulate and communicate my needs and wishes that weren’t being met (which was a first), but after multiple talks, and almost breaking up once, she just never changed. This time I am REALLY done with dating.

I’m only just now starting to miss the physical side of dating, and would like to someday maybe find a similar FWB thing, but for now, I haven’t even thought about setting up a dating profile or trying to meet anyone with the intent of dating. These past months have been the longest stretch in 20 years that I haven’t thought about dating, tried to date, set up a dating profile, etc… It’s kinda sad when I think about it. I’ve made a lot of progress on the fear of being alone, and even though I have no pets and live alone in a tiny apartment, I am finding my own happiness and keeping the loneliness at bay with the most active social life I have ever fostered, so for now it is going really well.

I am still working on all the fine details, and I have been on the journey for a while now, but ditching my smartphone has been one of the best things I have done in a very long time. My fancy new “dumb phone” came in a couple weeks ago and I have been loving it (Lightohone 3)

I have always been good at “doing nothing”, but not even having the option for the dopamine drop of scrolling whatever has been such a positive experience.

I actually haven’t thought about it THAT much lately because it’s just become my new normal, but yesterday at work I went to the bathroom and there was someone standing at the urinal peeing, and scrolling on their phone… Like you can’t even have that short singular human experience of ripping a hearty piss without distraction??? It made me think a bit deeper about how happy I am that I’ve “fought my way out of the machine” and never let myself get too far gone.

I’ve only really ever played Pathfinder (I forget the version we played), and DnD 5e. The types of campaigns I like to be part of are really fast-and-loose numbers-are-a-suggestion type heavy on the storytelling and roleplay. I’ve played some amazing campaigns, and I love sharing all the crazy stories.

One fun one that comes to mind is a 5e campaign which was anime mech fighting high-school themed… I played a “warlock” character who was a deadbeat street thug who schmoozed and lied his way into the academy to try and move up in the world even though he had no mech fighting or other relevant experience, and my patron was a significantly older otaku who would channel their years of expertise through me via sat phone/an earpiece to pilot the robot. Out of everyone in the campaign, I had the smallest, weakest weapon, a simple dagger, but I was able to manipulate the images reflected off the dagger’s blade and did most of my damage and combat via psychological warfare and manipulation (which were canonically things that I had tons of experience with from my time on the streets). I ended up getting like full-mech active camo as a logical extension of the blade-reflection-manipulation and went towards a stealth build which was fun.

After all the people I played with all moved away and we stopped playing, I tried to go to a game store and find a campaign. I found some people who were looking to start something, and I built a Kenku alchemist/rogue with a whole tragic backstory with a bunch of various villains I gave to the DM if they needed anything to tie in. I 3D printed a bunch of little percussion instruments, made a custom not-obnoxious utility sound-board on my phone, and even made a custom Guiro with differently-spaced ridges that the sound of was supposed to be my “real kenku name”… Nobody cared, everyone was annoyed at my insistence to be thorough in roleplaying, the wizard was a min-maxing Timmy rules lawyer who’s only character trait was “Hat that slowly gets bigger without you noticing until it’s a really fucking big hat”, and needless to say I only played like 2 sessions lol

It depends on which theorist you talk to. Some say seconds to minutes, others say days to weeks, the nutcases say thousands to millions of years.

And at the end of the day, the electrical properties of these elements probably aren’t that interesting or useful, and almost certainly won’t be like, semiconductors or anything fun. Just dumb, heavy, really fucking radioactive wire lol.

One time in a steampunk gunslinger campaign I played a half-elf sniper/artificer who was secretly a prince running away from his tyrannical king/queen parents to join the grassroots resistance against great evils conspiring with the crown. It was one of the most complex/fun characters I have ever played, and getting the party to avoid interactions with royal guards (so I wasn’t recognized) without outing myself was a fun silent puzzle between myself and the DM. It was also funny that I was basically The Handsomest Fellow ™ who wanted to be judged on merit instead of beauty and had to deal with a ton of unwanted attention from NPC’s, and tried to make myself look as haggard and disheveled as possible at all times, lots of fun all around.

We played this campaign for almost 2 years, and the LAST session before we all graduated and moved away and went our separate ways ended with me getting recognized and outed to the party and I am still salty about that cliffhanger like 8 years later lol

Also our Paladin was basically Rob Halford (Judas Priest), his holy mount was a motorcycle, and I convinced the DM to let me craft and attach a permanent charm of flight to said motorcycle…

I tried GMing a Pathfinder game once with 3 really good friends, and fell so thoroughly flat on my face haha. I am really good at coming up with stories and settings and characters, and I am good enough at improvising when given some kind of tiny seed of direction, but being the provider of said seeds of direction and navigating my own creations… Fohget-about it.

I will try and dig through my e-reader to find it, but it was a while ago so I might have purged the file.

On a completely unrelated note, just this week I finished up the last of Greg Egan’s works, I’ve been binging all his stuff. If you haven’t read any of his stuff I highly recommend it. They were all so good, but Diaspora and the Orthogonal Trilogy were my standout faves. the Orthogonal Trilogy is so unbelievably deeply technically detailed, it kept me glued to the pages and pages of equations, even if the characters were a little dry. It’s all about the universe-building in that one. Egan has an entire website with a massive amount of additional information and details about the physics of that universe.

Hah, I guess I wasn’t thinking far enough into the Trekkiverse.

I had recently read a book that had replicator-like technology but the matter stream was a luxury that not everyone could afford to connect to, it was laid out as an analog to the internet or other services like that, so that’s where my mind went. I can’t for the life of me remember which book that was…

I’ll put on my best Keiko voice and disappointed stare.

“But Miles, where do you think the matter replicators get their matter from? And where does the power to run them come from? Until there is a complete and total change in human philosophy regarding the accumulation of wealth, any required resource will become the new vehicle of capitalistic control.”

The “island of stability” actually encompasses many of the superheavy elements that we have already produced. The “stability” part comes from “magic numbers” of neutrons in the isotopes that are theorized to have some kind of stabilizing effect on the nuclear shells.

The difficulty is that we can theorize the number of neutrons we need to stabilize a certain number of protons, but finding atoms with the right number of protons and neutrons to smash together to hopefully create that total number is… difficult. Sometimes those particular isotopes with the proton/neutron quantities required either just plain don’t exist, or are themselves a wholly synthetic isotope with its own set of problems like being insanely slow or difficult to produce, having a crazy short half-life, incompatibility with various acceleration methods, etc.

The elements at the very end of the periodic table are somewhat tenuous as we know “elements” to be, as there has only ever been very VERY small amounts of this material produced, and the isotopes of those materials that ARE produced split apart almost immediately with insanely small half-lives, so it’s not like there’s any amount of it just kicking around in a jar somewhere in some lab.

There’s a ton of interesting reading on the theoretical island of stability in superheavy elements, where a special number of neutrons added to the isotope can possibly make these superheavy elements stable for a macroscopic amount of time so they could actually be studied and handled instead of instantly exploding apart and only being detected through their decay products.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Island_of_stability

I think there are elements with experiments designed to produce them up to around atomic number 125 or 127. Currently the highest confirmed, named, and somewhat categorized is 118. There’s info out there about the theoretical elements. Here’s the page for element 119. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ununennium. Purely theoretically, you could just keep adding rows to the periodic table, and it will keep going, but most of those materials will never actually exist or never could exist. It’s kind of like theoretical vs applied math.

There aren’t that many people browsing these communities, the same people that see this post will probably be all the same people that saw your last one, give or take a few. There was only one other topic posted to casual conversation since yesterday evening…

It’s probably a lot easier to just try and start public conversations in random threads (or make your own about something you want to converse about) instead of just saying “PM me to chat”…

What’s your favorite breakfast place in the state? I go to the Classic Cafe in Providence pretty much every weekend. I get a weird anxiety about going to the same place twice in a row, like I will be silently judged, so if I ever go out for breakfast Saturday AND Sunday, I’ll hit up a different spot on Sunday and see what else is around. Bolt Coffee is really good but it’s expensive.