Well, I recently lost, like, 50% of my credibility as an intellectual as I stopped smoking. So I guess I am now somewhere in between both ends.

Yeah, that was clearly just the group having fun, sounds like it might have been some kind of in-joke. Stuff like keygen music and adding extra fun stuff to your cracks has always been part of the culture. For the most part, while I’m not saying there is zero risk, but as long as it’s from verified groups with good reputation, your pirated software will be safe to use - also part of the culture.

Mayo + Ketchup combined, the classic “Rot-Weis”-combo in Germany.

That or, preferrably, mayo + a good chilli sauce

I ran an instance for a while out of curiosity a few years back - building the database seemed to work fine and appeared like a good idea, had a lot of fun to see the connections with other servers and my crawler filling holes of unknown spaces. But I think the search algorithm itself was (most likely is) not sophisticated enough, it just did not give relevant results often enough, and it was extremely vulnerable to very simple SEO tactics to push trash to the top.

Strangely enough, this is often the exact other way around for me, but it heavily depends on the true crime documentary. Horror movies, for the most part, leave me apathetic. My brain has problems to suspend disbelief for them - especially when they rely on supernatural elements. So many horror movies are more enjoyable surreal films, while reading or hearing about truly horrible events in real life can disturb me quite a lot sometimes.

Danke, Herr Skellet

Hey, just be glad I changed it from asdf_test_3, okay?

Satohi Kon’s “Paprika” is still my favourite movie, and there is a lot to discover and reflect on, on second and third and umpteenth watches.

I know this all too well, although for me it surfaces much less as the thought of “saving myself the pain”, but instead being a very aggressive: “I am so bad/worthless, any attempt by me could be genuinely hurtful/transgressive”.

Had a lot of work, therapy, life developments, it got better, but never truly vanished as this thing that sometimes bubbles up at the core of my self - some days more, some days less. Wishing you the best in your own struggles with thoughts and feelings like that.

I actually had to get rid of adnauseam because YT detected it pretty consistently, ublock origin as of this comment still works fine on YT though.

Peertube is eagerly awaiting a proper community.

Disco Elysium

The sheer joy of realising it’s not “just another” RPG, slowly pulling the curtain on how intricate the worldbuilding is, discovering the main character and in turn reflecting on yourself. It’s become a small addiction to watch first time streamers and let’s players for me, to vicariously relive that process.

Another candidate might be Ultima 7, the interactivity and how “real” it felt in the 90s was mindblowing for kid me.

Turns out trying to sleep at a psychiatric hospital is actually a bit hard. (Especially for tens of thousands of hours in one night.)

“Let’s end imperialism by converting communist movements across the globe into extensions of our imperialism, thus setting back the proletarian struggle by opportunistically redirecting it towards our national interests”

My name is Yoshikage Kira. I’m 33 years old. My house is in the northeast section of Morioh, where all the villas are, and I am not married. I work as an employee for the Kame Yu department stores, and I get home every day by 8 PM at the latest. I don’t smoke, but I occasionally drink pre-frozen water from my fridge. I’m in bed by 11 PM, and make sure I get eight hours of sleep, no matter what. After having a glass of frozen water and doing about twenty minutes of stretches before going to bed, I usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, I wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning. I was told there were no issues at my last check-up. I’m trying to explain that I’m a person who wishes to live a very quiet life. I take care not to trouble myself with any enemies, like winning and losing, that would cause me to lose sleep at night. I am also always prepared for hurricanes, thanks to my frozen water in the fridge. That is how I deal with society, and hurricanes, and I know that is what brings me happiness. Although, if I were to fight, I wouldn’t lose to anyone, especially not hurricanes, thanks to my frozen water in the fridge.

Some sort of humanist atheism/existentialism? I guess…

As a teenager and young adult, I used to be very interested in cosmology and astrophysics, to the point I wanted to study it at uni. The vastness of the world and existence seemed like a beautiful enigma. I was also always interested in philosophy, which ended up more lasting than my interest in physics.

After growing older, the vastness of nature and existence seemed more and more haunting than beautiful. If there was something like a God, it had to be a mad idiot god. I actually kind of sympathised with Gnosticism and similar thoughts for a while, but I could not believe in a metaphysical, perfect entity waiting even further behind everything. I could not believe in some sort of salvation, that could just come to us by giving up on materiality. It seemed like an empty self-delusion. Similarly, I respect Buddhism a lot, and think there is a lot of good ideas within it, but it’s ultimate life-nonaffirming philosophies and focus on avoidance of suffering did not resonate with me.

Looking at the history of our planet, our universe, and humanity, it seemed clear to me, that existence just stumbles along. We are a “mistake” in a vastness of empty, dumb, boring clouds of hydrogen and dust, nuclear furnaces and holes in reality, devoid of meaning. Life felt more and more to me, like a great rebellion against a vast, seemingly all-encompassing nothingness. No aliens in sight either, that could relieve us of our burden. Just humanity, as the one lifeform so far known to us, that at least has the potential to not fall into the traps of self-annihilation and lifelessnes that permeates our past and present. Just humanity with the responsibility of getting our shit together or life eventually being just reincorporated into the vast, dumb nothing of the “idiot god”, so to speak.

All the mistakes of humans felt to me more and more like just extensions of the same stupidity that is also manifest in all of nature. And our struggle against it, feels like a sort of “sacred duty”. Those loaded words to illustrate, that I’d think of myself as actually having strong faith in a weird way, even though it is not rooted in the supernatural as such.

It’s also evident to me, this faith has at least partially persisted for me as an anchor for myself. I have not been suicidal ever since I felt that way, even though for most of my life I have been struggling with trauma and a variety of mental health disorders, and have been suicidal before. I could not think of that anymore, suffering seemed almost meaningless to me, now, and it feels better to endure it than to give in to the vast nothingness without a fight, without trying to create as much good as possible in this small contingent miracle that is life, that has been brought forth by so much struggle and so many seemingly impossible coincidences, chance and “mistakes”.

I have a big aversion against beliefs that put faith into higher powers, be it nature or God or some sort of transdimensional aliens or whatever. I try to analyse beliefs like that not with disdain, though, but as results of how we are caught in the world we are, in our circumstances, and how life itself has had to “trick” existence itself into allowing life to exist, by follwing its rules but also emergently transcending them, creating something new from it, that is more than the sum of its parts.

Politically and philosophically it lead me to Marxism and Hegel respectively. Marxism with it’s focus on changing our material foundations and dynamics, in order for us to be able to develop our humanity and be able to act more rational in the grand scheme lends itself well to it. Hegel, with looking at the development of ideas and humanity dialectically, developing something until it reaches the limit of its own contradictions also appealed to me.

Sorry for the wall of text, the question caught me in a somber mood and caused me to monologue.

I was, and am, skeptical, but I also must admit, the potential breakthrough is teasing my psyche with that feeling of just wanting it to be real. A part of me hopes that maybe it will still end up confirmed by other peers, but, granted, it was a low chance even when the news first came out.

Technically, the radio play was first IIRC

“Journalists”

Only if I can use it, too, not because of communism but just because