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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • This thread is about feeling like we already have enough money, lol. Yes, they taught us about compound interest in school. I know I could be making more money, but I don’t want more money, I want my money to just be sitting there so I don’t have to worry about it. My dad is always so stressed out because he never has any money on hand, it’s always tied up in stuff and he has to constantly micromanage everything. I’m sure he has more money than he would have if he wasn’t doing that… but it certainly isn’t the “passive” income he claims it is. It’s more work than his actual job, and the stress is costing him years off his life on top of the time it already costs to manage it all.

    I have enough money. More money would be a waste. I don’t want to do even a fraction of what he does, it can just sit there and I can just chill. I like my life.


  • One thing to keep in mind, just to get your expectations right. Kids are more neuroplastic than us, and it takes kids about 5 years of practicing every day to get fluent at their first language. They are learning a few more things for the first time during that too. But you can expect it to take about as many practice hours. So if you only practice 1 hour a week, it’s gonna be a long time. But also, you don’t need to hit the bar of “fluent” to solve your problem. Where kids are at after 1 year is very serviceable for it instead being a second language. If you plan to move to an english speaking country, that would be plenty to get by in your day to day life while you all of a sudden start also spending every day practicing.

    Learning to read and interpret a new language is more than 10 times easier than learning to speak it. Even just writing in it, where you have all the time in the world to compose each sentence is going to take alot of practice to get good at. For speaking, you have to be quick enough to form full sentences in seconds, at a time where it’s not the main thought process going on in your head.



  • Yeah, everyone always talks about having a “hole” they need to fill with something… I’m pretty sure I don’t have that. I enjoy stuff, I’m a pretty happy person. But I don’t really -need- anything, other than sustenance stuff. I like having more stuff, but it’s not that important to me. I live well below my means, so my extra money just kind if piles up. My dad always says money just sitting there in the bank could be “working for you”, but then he always lives paycheck to paycheck and stresses about money all the time, that lifestyle didn’t “work for me”. I’d rather just have that money sitting there and be stress free instead, that works for me.

    I like VR quite a bit, so I like to make sure I have a current headset and computer. But those are both pretty cheap. Computer is like 3% of my yearly income, but I only need a new one every 5 years or so, and the old one still sells for decent. And the headsets are less than 1% of yearly income.

    If I won a lottery or something, I would probably just become a secret philanthropist, well, more of one. But don’t tell anyone, it’s a secret. I do like just randomly helping people with stuff. Money makes that easy, but I help with whatever I can. Despite being autistic, I am somehow inexplicably also strongly empathic. So I’m ultimately a people pleaser, but very much an introvert with heavy social anxiety. So yeah, I like to make people feel good, without them knowing it was me, cuz getting credit would suck for me.

    I don’t think we really get to choose alot of our behaviour, we are mostly a product of our genetics plus our life experiences. I’m honestly not even sure about free will. Did I actually make any choices that could have been different, or was the answer I eventually settled on always going to be what I was going to do based on everything that happened leading up to it and my perception of those events. I suppose ultimately, it doesn’t matter. I like the way I am, and I wouldn’t change anything if I could, so it doesn’t matter if I probably can’t anyway.







  • When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don’t generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn’t really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in “heaven”(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it’s a really nice thought that I don’t want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.

    The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.




  • A gimmick that is already in up to 10% of households, with a further 10% of those households using it more than 4 hours a day. Sure, it sounds like a small amount when put that way. But that’s already getting to be a pretty targettable market, and if you look at the growth chart, it’s not slowing down.

    You may individually not have liked it, but it is indeed here to stay. I don’t think an apple headset will be worth it for a bit, but apple sold alot of Quest 3’s at the very least. So they sold people on the idea of VR, and then once they were in the door, they bought a reasonable headset. In that way, apple has helped alot. They helped to establish it as something that is “ready” for apple to take it seriously. That conveys alot of legitimacy to “normal” people.

    I personally am, of course, in the minority of people that use VR for 8+ hours a day. It has replaced TV, Consoles, and gaming monitors for me. Plus I do my exercise in VR. I made a virtual 4k 120hz screen for my PC, that I use from the comfort of my recliner. It’s like if you had a steamdeck to stream your desktop to, except you don’t have to hold the weight of the deck, the screen is not near your hands, and also its 10 feet wide and at a comfortable viewing distance of 20 feet away, and is 4k 120hz. And you can use whichever controller you like holding. Also it’s cheaper. The downside is that if you want someone else to be able to see your game, you have to stream a video of it to their device, or a nearby TV. And speaking of a nearby TV, while playing on my Virtual screen, I can also just see my real TV too. On Quest 3, the passthrough video is clear enough to see about a 720p equivalent resolution at a comfortable viewing distance(40 degrees of your field of view). 720p may sound low, but it wasn’t that long ago that we were happy to see 540p (DvD quality) as a huge upgrade to what movies used to look like before. And Quest 4 will improve upon that too.

    VR has only just crossed the first threshold into main stream adoption. The Quest 3 was the first headset that is worth it to non early adopters. They will only get better from here on. Not to mention they are also coming the other way, with AR stuff starting as light weight and unintrusive as possible and slowly building on what is possible to pack in without getting in the way at all. Step 2 of the AR sunglasses is coming soon.

    While VR is the “console” of the future, AR is the “mobile phone” of the future. And eventually they will meet and blur the lines, kind of like how we use phones now. Modern smartphones are both what cellphones used to be, as well as surprisingly capable portable console gaming now.



  • If you are comfortable with games that are not technically classified as freeware yet, but functionally, they probably should be… then emulation of older consoles is a great way to go too. While they are certainly not “legal”, I don’t think anyone playing them has ever gotten in trouble. Only the people that try to make money off of it find that the console companies are motivated enough to shut them down. Otherwise, it doesn’t feel super risky to just play stuff. Just stick with games that are impossible to pay for if you want to be completely safe. There was a ton of good games on 16 and 32 bit consoles that you literally couldn’t pay for now if you tried. And even as new as gamecube is getting pretty hard to possibly pay money for.

    Newer stuff, I only feel ok emulating what I actually own. But as time goes on, newer and newer stuff becomes the new old stuff. A pretty wide variety of console emulators for android are in a good place now.

    I do recommend a controller though if you go this route. Ideally one of the ones that also holds your phone for you. Either by making it into a switch/steamdeck kind of shape, or the ones that hold the phone above an xbox style controller. Both are good.



  • Magic DosBox, not a game. But in combination with https://www.old-games.com/ , it’s a pretty good selection of all the old games made for Dos back in the wild west of indie games back before they were even called that. There are, of course, also old commercial games that have transitioned to freeware now too. Should be able to find lots of awesome games there. Moraff adventure games are particularly interesting. Bit of a steep learning curve, but great to come back to now and then. The site has reviews of every game and sorts them into categories. It can be a little overwhelming just due to the sheer number of available games, but take it slow, and work your way through. It’s worth the time investment to find gems.


  • Sparklite, I don’t know what it looks like purchases-wise, it was free with gamepass and had no in-app purchases when acquired that way. It’s probably one of the newest games I’ll post about. New enough that it was possible to get it with gamepass, lol. The game sort of has a modern retro zelda feel. I don’t think it’s a particularly long game, but it’s certainly enjoyable and pretty casual. I think if it has transactions, reading other reviews it might be like a “purchase the rest of the game” style thing. So basically a free demo that you can then choose if you like the game enough to pay.


  • Hmm, I was gonna say moonshades, last time I played it there wasn’t much for things you could buy. But when I look now, there is. So I can’t say for sure how unnecessary any of it would feel now, but it wasn’t necessary back when I played last. It’s kind of like the old early 3D party dungeon/maze crawlers where you use the arrow keys to walk one “block” at a time. There is only 2 party members in this. So you still sort of get the group synergy stuff, but each character is a bigger share of the team power. You could do a tank/healer thing or magic damage/melee damage, or not have either one focus on anything in particular.

    I hope it’s still not necessary to buy anything, it was a good game. But the store is pretty comprehensive now, so that has me worried.


  • Cardinal Quest 2, it is possible to spend money, but honestly spending money would be worse than earning the stuff yourself. I still probably gave them some money, since I think the game was free. You don’t have to have played Cardinal Quest 1, it’s pretty story light. Kind of like playing Diablo 2 if you never played Diablo 1. Kinda the same game as the first with much better execution after learning some lessons. The game itself is pretty easy, but there are optional challenges you can take on that can be as their name implies. Lots of replayability as there are many character classes and 4 different stories. Over time you’ll likely want to beat each story with each class. Mostly cuz it keeps track, lol.