I haven’t had a conversation of more than a couple sentences in two days. In that time I’ve driven 6 hours, alone. Eaten at a restaurant of another culture where most people were speaking a language I don’t, alone. Gone to a concert, alone. Eaten a continental breakfast (which I love), alone. Toured an entire art museum, alone. Walked several miles through a city park, along the shoreline, and around the entirety of a large pier, alone. I get this comic.

But at the same time, I started to learn to give/get self-hugs a long time ago, and even doing things alone I still have connections to others. I listened to a book while driving that I may suggest for book club. The restaurant I ate at was recommended to me by a stranger I knew for just a few minutes at a music festival three months ago. The band I saw is the one I listened to as I started getting out of the grief pit from my dad’s passing, and I thought of him a few times throughout the show and it felt good. I don’t know that I was thinking of anyone during the continental breakfast, but it was pretty tasty in a mediocre way. At the museum I saw paintings that took me all the way back to elementary school when I first learned about them, and I felt connected to my younger self. Walking alone I could casually observe the groups around me and appreciate a brief glimpse into their dynamics (and their costumes!).

So for now, I have no hugs as I go about my day, but it’s okay. I can get by, and eventually there will be hug-filled days ahead.

Thanks for the comic!

Taking mushrooms and walking around the Chicago art museum since I’m in town.

Then next weekend my friends/ex-roommates are having a costume party. I’m going as a glam witch because a guy gave me a bright pink wig at a music festival this summer. I haven’t dressed femme around strangers/acquaintances since I moved back home!

I don’t know, I think it depends on if you include the origin of soulmates in the definition you use. If you define soulmates as people that were made for each other, then yeah I suppose that creation is out of their hands while defining who they are (and maybe implying that something/someone did the creating). When I think of soulmates I tend to think of persons that are perfectly suited to be together without necessarily needing a cause for it.

It would seem unlikely that every person has a soulmate or that every set of soulmates would meet each other, but it seems possible for such people to become perfect for each other through free will.

Also as a tangent, I misspelled it as ‘soupmate’ in the dictionary at first, and if I had a soulmate we would probably be soupmates too :P

Yeah, I was planning to get it on PC for $30-35 like I did GTA V. I could barely tolerate the ~100GB install of that game. By the time this reaches PC I wouldn’t be surprised if it balloons to an even larger file size.

Hey fuck that. No game is monopolizing my drive to that degree.

I’m pretty sure the only same sex romance options are Femshep and Liara, your admin assistant in ME2 (kinda), and then your admin assistant and shuttle driver in ME3. You can’t even romance Jack as Femshep.

With Prussia being my favorite to play in Victoria 3, it’s cool to see a little more about what the deal was with Schleswig-Holstein.

It’s a reference to the 2007 anime Code Geass, considered one of the greats. They’re the main characters that are childhood friends living in a subjugated Japan under a large authoritarian superpower. Lelouch spends the show scheming to burn the current order down to then build a new world from the ashes while Suzaku works to carve out better living conditions for the oppressed Japanese and improve the world from within the system. Who is right? Within the show it’s debatable.

It’s got a lot of anime tropes, but it’s pretty good.

Well, I’ve always been a Suzaku guy, but I get where Lelouch is coming from!

Capital lobbyists already have so much sway over the government in the US, I think we should go full corporatist and build national level unions to counter their interests.

I had no idea! I’m only familiar with Teenage Anarchist and Thrash Unreal, which apparently came out before she came out. That’s awesome.

A true antique then! Was there a particular place it started or did this joke just kind of circulate?

I can’t tell anymore. I’ve always read it as a backwards 7 with the middle mark to differentiate it from a 1, but the comments on this post have me second guessing that now.

I asked my optometrist friend and they said there was a thing going on about eye drops that can temporarily fix near vision, which is apparently different than nearsightedness. That would be pretty neat!

Pretty sure I still have the highest score for the Gurren Lagann Opening song, had to fight a guy for it. I love that game.

Supreme Commander 2.

I bought it from Target for like $15. I put it in my CD drive, had to install this Steam thing, watched it install, clicked play, and watched a black screen crash to desktop immediately. An entire weekend of research later I learned there’s this thing called a graphics card, the game requires DirectX 9 and pixel shader 3.0 support. Mom took me to Microcenter for the first time, bought me a $40 Zotac 9500GT, and the rest is history.

I tried it solo for a bit today and it does seem like it would be really fun in a group! Unfortunately nobody was online today.

Wait, is that the line? I’ve always heard it “and have we found the same old fears?” Huh

I remember the moment it clicked for me that this was the case. In early 2018 I overheard my roommate listening to a Bitcoin podcast hosted by people I understood to be prominent members of the community. They were trying to justify why it was a good thing Steam no longer accepted Bitcoin to purchase games. I couldn’t see a single upside to a currency, whose purpose is to be exchanged for goods and services, no longer being accepted for a good. I thought about the large amount of crypto the podcasters likely held and how they were probably trying to keep other people in to keep their own crypto worth more. But if the people near the helm were no longer able to admit when something is wrong, then the dream was dead, crypto was dead to me, and I stopped getting more.