I think I’m about to take liberties with the term “strategic play.” But I’ll tell this regardless.

I have a friend who is only hyper competitive when playing games, especially board games. In the moment, he wants to win so badly that he will do anything to win. He manipulates, gaslights, he’s dangerously intelligent and he’s good at making it seem like he’s just playing casually. And then once the game is over? He doesn’t care at all whether he won or lost. It’s infuriating sometimes.

Thanks to also being an extremely competitive person, I saw through it pretty quickly the first few games I ever played with him. But nobody else does. It seemed like nobody ever tried to win by comparison. So when he and I are in the same game, I know I’m going to lose. And he’ll use the other people at the table even if I can see it happening. Even if I made comments about it mid-game, nobody would believe me.

So I got petty. I couldn’t beat him at the manipulation game. Instead, I turned him into a meme. When he ever looked like he was behind, and someone noticed, I’d say in a light-hearted conspiratorial way, “[his name] is always ahead.” Repeated it whenever he would take the lead and eventually when he won the game. “You see? [His name] is always ahead.”

It caught like wildfire. Our other friends started using the catchphrase, even in games where I wasn’t there. People started using attack cards on him more often. They’d be less friendly with him about trading. People would snub him even when he was so far behind there was no catching up. The day I realized how much it got to him, was one day he told me how much that phrase impacted his ability to play games with friends. It ruined a lot of his fun. Sometimes new friends who didn’t even play with us that often would use it. I didn’t realize how much damage it caused. All I wanted was for people to be more wary of his manipulation tactics. But instead I took something fun from a good friend and made it miserable.

So I haven’t said it for years since. But our other friends still remember and will say the phrase from time to time. He’s always ahead.

Literally moved everything to Linux (Nobara) like 3 weeks ago and the only thing I can’t get to work is Bizhawk which I can easily get around. It’s insane how far Linux has come for gaming and whatnot.

There are lots of parasitic bugs in this story, including Elon Musk

My mother told me that she hated me. After a really dumb argument we had, as adults. I still talk to her and play nice in front of our siblings but I haven’t forgiven her and I don’t think I ever will. I lost a lot of love for my mother in a single day and then nothing anyone has said to me since has ever matched or beaten that feeling. How do you trump your own mother hating you? She moved on like she never said it. No apologies. Never mentioned it. You can call me every name and slur and hang me for all my fuckups and oddities, but you can’t hurt me. I’m already at 0 HP emotionally

Seeing my friends.

Cool rocks.

New video games coming out soon (Tekken 8!)

Finding new pretty things to wear.

Baking treats.

Having a whole day to myself with no interruptions to do what I like.

Complaining about AI in all the wrong ways to complain about AI. AI is definitely a poor substitute for actually well thought out feature implementations. But it has nothing to do with why your iPhone sucks to navigate on.

“Morpheus this is really not funny”

GUIs are a useful tool to give common users an accessible way to understand how they’re interacting with technology. They’re best utilized,I think, when the point of the technology is to be viewed. Like imagine you had to browse and launch Netflix shows in a terminal. That would be incredibly annoying.

In contrast, its really goddamn slow to perform routine server maintenance and commands through a GUI. I save so much time managing my servers through CLI, scripting, and automated tasks. Almost everything I’m dealing with is text based information.

Criticize myself unnecessarily and with some self deprecating flourish

Quite literally you are your brain, trying to account for the entire body and mind as the self simultaneously. But you may catch yourself thinking or saying things like “I can’t wrap my brain around this.” Isn’t that odd? Your brain refers to itself as my brain. Is that a linguistic issue or is your sense of perspective off?

“Don’t you have a heart?” Why do we imply that our sense of compassion is only located in an organ that just pumps blood? That clearly can’t be the case.

We know cases where someone gets a brain tumor and suddenly becomes violent or unfeeling. When the brain is damaged either during life or during gestation, we know that we can lose all manner of things: cognition, motor skills, memory, emotions, etc. It’s all the brain.

What confuses the issue is everything the brain is attached to. What I think all conscious humans do is try to make sense of the mind-body connection. I feel tired, that’s not just my brain feeling tired. I can feel tired in every single part of my body independently or all together. “I” am the brain. If I lose an arm, I don’t lose my sense of self. But losing important functions can damage the self I’ve constructed of myself. If I lose my eyesight I will be a very different person when I’m unable to visually enjoy video games, movies, art, nature. But clearly blind people still have a self. If it sits behind their eyes, will it move? Adapt to their ears?

All this to say, your self is self constructed. It’s malleable. But make no mistake that the source of where self and consciousness are maintained is the brain.