NevelioKrejall

Not remotely. If you feel like you’ve seen everything, it might be time to consider a (literal) change of scenery. There are too many places to go, different people to meet and try to understand, books to read, flavors to taste. Seeing it online isn’t the same as seeing it in person with your own eyes. You could go a day’s walk in any direction and likely find something you haven’t seen before. You just have to be looking for it.

Humans will take any chance to reduce complex and nuanced psychology into rigid, prescriptive labels. It’s all astrology, only the flavor of the meaningless noise changes.

This is how assholes test your boundaries to see how far they can push you. It wasn’t a joke until you pushed back.

This was my favorite game as a kid. Doing fan-art and a D&D campaign about it for years got me hired on as an artist for the new one! It’s gonna be wild.

Mine isn’t this bad, but I can relate to the first-day-on-Adderall thing. It was wild when I walked into my messy bathroom an hour after that first dose and my brain just went: “It is possible, even reasonable for you to clean this bathroom, in a finite amount of time, without every moment filling you with dread. This task will not consume your whole life day.” My brain had simply never done that before. I could just choose to do something and–perhaps more importantly–to stop doing something. I remember I was hyperfixating working on a hobby project at 11 PM on a work night and my brain went: “If you stop working now, brush your teeth and go to bed, this fun project will still be here for you to work on tomorrow. You don’t have to keep at it until 6 AM and then go to work without sleeping.” That seemed like such a foreign concept at the time. It was weird to hear that from my own brain, not in a “you’re being bad” way, but in a “it’s going to be okay” way. There was a lot of happy crying those first few weeks.

Just wish I’d been diagnosed in college instead of in my mid-30s. I might have graduated.

People like to throw around the word ‘lazy’ but it’s more like I can’t turn it on OR off unless I’m medicated. Once I’m in the zone I will work until I grow a beard, then wither away, then my crumbling skeleton grows a beard. It would be a powerful thing if I could aim it.

Please remember that your DM is a person. They are also playing the game and deserve to have fun, and for their boundaries to be respected. They are not just a physics engine for your shenanigans.

That being said, some DMs in specific groups might be totally fine with this. Just don’t spring it on someone without prior discussion and consent. That is (among other things) what session zero is for.

This also happened to me. I dropped out of game art & design school. Now I’m doing art and animation for a game dev company. I took the scenic route, but I got here eventually!

Doesn’t work for me either, despite having ‘show read posts’ disabled.

In my scifi campaign based on Star Control II, all genetic engineering was illegal (one of the primary antagonist groups is a race of blade runner style artificial humans). So of course two of my players teamed up to be an outlaw geneticist and his awakened capuchin monkey. They played it 100% unironically and it resulted in some of the best role-playing it has been my privilege to DM for.

This post has a weird energy. I can’t decide if it reads more phobia or more fetish. Maybe both XD

I mean…

You’re the kwisatz haderach, Charlie Brown.

A psychopath wouldn’t be worried about whether they’re a psychopath.

I don’t think anybody really sees themselves as a simple ‘A’ or ‘B’ in this way. Maybe I’m wrong. It just seems impossible to simplify an entire life and experience of the world as either ‘blessed’ or ‘cursed’.

Which isn’t to say I think models of human capability can’t be fun.

I like to imagine it more like ability scores in D&D. Someone might have low Wisdom, but training and proficiency can still make them extremely perceptive. And in some cases, you can find ways to leverage an unusual ability when you’re trying to do something, like making an intimidation check using Strength instead of Charisma. What is a weakness in one scenario can be a strength in the next.

This model is still simple enough to visualize easily, but has enough moving parts to allow for lots of different ways of being without any one way being ‘good’ or ‘bad’. Neurodivergence might be part of the stats you roll up, but your circumstances and your choices combine to build a life experience around them that can be completely different from another person who rolled the same numbers. Likewise, different rolled stats can affect how well you handle certain situations and adventures, but this is neither a curse nor a superpower, and is true for everyone.

Models only get you so far, but humans are a social species. We need each other by our very nature. Teamwork is in our DNA. And, like DNA, teams are more adaptable when they are diverse. Everyone has something to bring to the table, neurodivergent or otherwise.

Assuming you are genuinely asking, “ugly” is entirely subjective. Someone might be unattractive to you for any number complex reasons, including the possibility that you are simply not who they are trying to appeal to (or they don’t make appealing to other people a priority at all, for political reasons, personal reasons, or just convenience), but there is no objective standard of ugliness, despite what mainstream media and beauty standards may want you to think. Everyone is beautiful to someone.

Free Stars: The Ur-Quan Masters has an excellent story and wordbuilding, and you can talk to all kinds of weird aliens. If you don’t like the ship combat, you can set up the game’s AI to fight for you.

If you liked this game, you might be interested to learn that Pistol Shrimp games, an independent game dev company started by Paul Rieche III and Fred Ford (the original creators of Star Control and Star Control 2), are making a sequel, with story written by Paul Rieche III.

The re-release on steam is partly to get the word out about it. Join our discord to learn more!

Hey, this is my exact story, including the undiagnosed ADHD, dropping out of college, the dead-end wage slavery for way too long, and now having a decent paying job that isn’t what I went to school for, but that also doesn’t kill my soul.

Except: I have an epilogue!

I still don’t have a degree, but I never stopped practicing my art because I am simply incapable of stopping. It’s what I do. I recently got a side gig that was my absolute unrealistic pie-in-the-sky dream job when I was in college, working for the very creators that inspired me to choose my major in the first place. College wasn’t what got me there. It was passion for the artform, introspection/therapy to develop a more forgiving and accepting attitude toward myself, and sheer perseverance. I spent the first 18 years of my adult life thinking failure and dead ends were all the universe had to offer, but I kept trying anyway (mostly to spite that hostile universe in a ‘fuck you, kill me yourself’ kind of way).

It’s not over until it’s over. You don’t know how your story ends. Keep trying. If someone says you missed your chance, fuck 'em. They can’t see the future any more clearly than you.

Disgusting things, children. Glad I never was one!

Even if you didn’t like their coffee, they sell like candy and sandwiches and mugs and stuff? That’s not a useless gift card and I’m sorry you lost it!