Bay 12 Games Forum

It's just a matter of how good a hit it was.

Some tips that come off the top of my head:

• If you've been getting hit a lot in a fight, even if none of it has been serious, you should probably step back if not just retreat. It's a gamble: do I step back and keep my ability to walk, or do I think I can end this fight soon enough?
• Close quarters is not the only way to fight. If you've decided to take a step back (as per the above bullet), there are some things you can do:
• Got a (cross)bow, a quiver, and some ammo? You can fire at the target. IIRC you need enough free hands (put the other weapons you're holding in your backpack)
• You can also just throw stuff. Every adventurer I've had so far comes with a dagger in their bag, which is just right for throwing. Don't throw anything you want back, unless you're willing to go after it.
• What kind of armor did you pick up, specifically? This section of the DFWiki gives you a table with a more protective and less protective set.
• Finally, I recommend always try to wear the armor before taking off other clothes. Quite a few of the things you start out with can exist under better armor. The only things off the top of my head that need to removed are any kind of cap or veil, and your shoes/sandals.

Don't worry, I fell for it too (although I do recall reading something about "Daily Currant" = parody a while ago).

I felt something was off when I saw a story in the sidebar about Obama forgiving all student loans.

Bear with me here. It might be quite a bit.

So, for the past few days (since about 9 Sept. or 10 Sept.), I've been having a more terrible than usual bout of obsessing over questions concerning our mortality (mine and others). Y'know, stuff that you have no control over (except various measures to prolong your life, but that only ever delays the problem, instead of solving it).

Usually, when I get one of these bouts, it simply is something I obsess over as night falls. Within a few days or a couple of weeks, these terrible, useless questions leave my mind. This time though, it affected me more than an intellectual worry in the minutes-to-an-hour-at-most before sleeping, it became an emotionally traumatizing process. One where I feel sad, distressed, and a sort of knot in the center of my chest.

I'm far better than when I started getting these thoughts a few days ago, where I sat useless, crippled, almost paralyzed by these tormenting issues. Now, since I decided to give meditation of a simple kind a try, in addition to refusing to latch onto these thoughts as they recur as much I can, I feel better. Yet I still find myself getting tied up inside, looking for some way to relieve the pressure. My efforts so far feels permanent but have only been temporary. I'm looking to fix this.

(The "not latch onto these thoughts" bit, to explain myself better, is comparable to seeing a file on your system and refusing to open it up. I come across this file of distressing questions often, and avoid most of the time the temptation to open and read it.)

I suppose it's onset by the fact that, summer vacation now over, my brothers have gone back to another year at school. I graduated a few months ago from high school, not searching for a college at the time because of a lack of motivation to do so, which I now deeply regret. I'm living at home now, still, and I guess this was onset by a realization inside that my life is supposed to move on to better things at this point, which itself was brought on, I'm guessing, by the fact that my usual three-month summer vacation hasn't ended by this point with school.

(I should say at this point that I already feel better, just by writing this. However, it feels suspiciously similar to other methods I've used in the past days that have made me feel better, and I also don't yet as good as I might other times. I shall therefore wait to put this on the forum and discuss it with others before truly feeling as though I'm starting to feel better.)

I'm not a very social person, and haven't been for quite a few years by this point (a couple months before graduating I made the sorry realization that I was unfamiliar with the process of making plans with friends, to give you an idea.) I know that this hasn't been helping my situation in any way, and probably hurting it quite a bit .

How have I dealt with this worst bout? As I mentioned above, I early on in this bout wanted to try meditation just to calm my nerves, and what a wonder just a couple of minutes makes! It doesn't solve the distressing questions, but it sure goes a long way in me feeling better. I've also been trying to find funny things, and spend time with my family in little ways when I can, just to feel better. (My reclusive lifestyle the past few years has extended to my immediate family. Although for the past year I've been little by little trying to fight back against this trend. My desire to stop wasting my days brooding in this current bout has certainly helped.)

Had I written and published this post a couple of days ago, I would've been convinced it was depression. However, just recently I decided to go searching and it's also possible I have primarily-obsessive OCD or perhaps "just" GAD (Generalized Anxiety Disorder).

Because I'd rather not think about it for long, even if just for this post, let me say a thing or two on the whole concept of mortality I've been obsessing over. I've (wisely perhaps) given up on finding a satisfactory scientific answer to my worries, and would rather just be able to accept this fact of our finite lives and move the hell on.

Especially because, if on the off-chance my worries are a result of PO-OCD, apparently looking for a satisfactory answer would make things worse, and I should instead look to not giving a damn. Which, incidentally, I'd like to do anyway . (Even if I don't have PO-OCD and I would be psychologically fine in searching for a good answer, mortality seems to be the one thing where I have to accept it as an unanswerable question.)

Things I am or will be trying someday:

• Speak with a psychiatrist, or at least some doctor to start. That's critical, and not something I can put off for a very long time. During high school I also pegged myself as potentially having social anxiety disorder and ADHD-PI (because self diagnosis is so reliable). It wouldn't hurt in any case.
• Open up to my parents about how I'm feeling. How do you get over that hurdle though, especially when the most you can open up is to a bunch of largely unknown people on an internet forum ? I know they would be supportive of me, the only potential strain being on our finances in the case of medical treatment.
• Keep meditating. I'll only get more effective with time and practice. I do it every night for a couple of minutes to calm myself, and I do it for small moments throughout the day when necessary (although those momentary variations probably won't be really effective until I get better at meditation in general.) The takeaway I get from meditation so far is to stop and just breathe when you feel overwhelmed.
• Exercise, of which I currently do none. For some reason I get incredibly embarrassed just at the thought of changing my habits for the better. For some indescribable reason, I'm overly worried over what my family's reaction will be when I try to do something different. There may be light teasing that I'm not being my normal self!, but nothing else beyond that.
  
  (I could just tell them I wouldn't appreciate such teasing, but that requires overcoming the same uncomfortable hurdles as everything else I've mentioned.)
  
  Although, I can at least do something in my room when I'm confident no-one would interrupt me. Probably playing out some of the more maniacal parts in Jesus Christ Superstar . Hey, a little tiny bit of exercise is better than none at all, right? I'm particularly thinking of the 2000 DVD version, especially Judas and Pilate.
• Probably go to a college next year. I suspect/hope that moving out and away from where all my current habits and patterns work just fine will force me to develop new, hopefully more sociable, habits than what I have.
• In the interim, perhaps do some edX or other online courses, if for no other reason than to show better effort than my final times at high school (taking the IB when you're prone to procrastinating boring things is a terrible thing to allow continuing).
• I could/should also hold down a job, perhaps at the local Best Buy or similar. Money is only the secondary goal here; right now I feel more concerned with some excuse to get out of the house, and I don't do anything that requires leaving at the moment. Sure I'll be giving up my all-day freedom, but something tells me (and probably you) that I'm not doing much with it anyway

Other thoughts:

Thanks to Sappho for her post in an earlier discussion thread on depression. Thanks for the Cracked articles (and the cool song ). One thing in particular that struck me from "5 Things You Think Will Make You Happy (But Won't)", and that I need to constantly keep in mind for the next thought I write in this post, is:

Experts have figured out that the brain has no ability to actually predict your emotional reaction to life changes that haven't happened yet. In other words, you physically do not know what you want. The act of sitting around pondering it is apparently what fucks you up.

That's quite possibly the most comforting thing I've read recently; that I effectively can't predict what I'll be, like, like to do, or anything about myself in the future.

Also: I've noticed, at least when depressed, it's so much easier to think of what you have that you can lose (your family, Barry Gibb, Doctor Who, etc.) or what's already been lost (one of our cats, the next Bee Gees album, etc.) than it is to think of what you can gain in the future, primarily because you can't predict what will exist in the future, much less what of it you like (see above Cracked quote).

If some story from the Doctor Who-niverse has addressed the afterlife (or lack thereof) in a comforting fashion, or gives you reason to not care, don't hesitate to let me know about it . Preferably something BBC-licensed.

I need to keep in mind this Oatmeal comic and hope to someday have this epiphany for myself.

Although it's the subject of my depressing thoughts, I'd appreciate if we didn't focus too much on the subject of mortality here. To go back to the file analogy, it's hard enough opening up that file just to be able to write this post, I'd appreciate if you all didn't force me to keep opening that file to tell you what's in it. Not that I won't cooperate in the ensuing discussion, but I am trying to push it out of my habitual thinking before it's too late. (It's apparently a read-only file for me, and I don't have root privileges to say otherwise, thus I can't just delete it and be done with it.)

Writing this post makes me feel better, but not in a "weight off my shoulders" way exactly. For some reason this is the analogy that popped into my head:

If my issues are the Mandelbrot, complete with all its infinite complexity, then writing this was me stepping far away enough from the thing to draw a bounding box around the shape.

What I'm saying is this post made me feel like I took a scary, poorly-defined, seemingly limitless and eternal mental issue and, through writing about it, was able to define the boundaries of it. The problem isn't gone, but feels more manageable (and more easily conquerable) now that I can see how far it stretches. Before I didn't have a clear idea on where it ended.

Well, that was depressing. I bet you could use some upbeat music right about now. I bet I'm right; if so, I guess we must have E•S•P or something .

Simple. Save. Open your save's raws and mod turkeys and dogs to have HOMEOTHERM:50000. Reload. Run.

  Note to self: genocidal change to biology on-the-fly is a thing that I can do.

Ninth before January and February were added, yeah.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar , if it's of any real interest - although it didn't have anything to do with the roman emperors for whom July and August are named, which is what I assumed. I knew two were added, just not which two. Ah well, I suppose that'll just serve as a reminder to actually check things before saying them, from time to time 

Huh. Could've sworn it was July and August that were the new ones.

Also, on the subject of optimization: “Premature optimization is the root of all evil.” — Donald Knuth (ie. working code first, optimization later)

[snip]...and proving their assembler-based library is several times faster, but I don't really know how they get that good at that sort of programming

It's not too difficult once you start. The worst part is how much more verbose you have to be about the simplest things, and that's not too bad. (Admittedly I've only ever worked with "small" assembly languages, such as 6502 and whatever chip's in my Arduino Uno. I'm not quite desperate enough yet to get into x86_64 )

Think of it like embarking in an evil biome instead of a more sane one: death is swifter and more horrendous, but the essentials of fortressing remain. Death is a program crashing and fortressing is programming. Writing assembler in as few instructions or clock cycles as possible is subjecting yourself to some great self-imposed challenge while in a terrifying biome. And in either situation, having a working fortress or program is way more rewarding when it's done in a terrifying biome during a bare-bones challenge than when you've done it in the most benign of biomes having started the journey well-stocked.

I think it's time...

( •_•)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)

...to call in the Liberal Crime Squad.

I just went to an abandoned fort of mine for the first time. It was a few days travel away from the nearest human civilization, and I ran into semi-frequent goblin ambushes (from which I always ran) as well as the occasional, easy to take on bogeymen when I didn't get to the mountains or beaches in time. I became a vampire before going so I didn't have to worry about finding animals to kill all the time.

It was fun to explore the fortress in adventure mode, toggle a few switches, etc. At some point I decided to satiate my vampiric thirst, which led me to waiting around outside until bogeymen happened to come. No problem, but at one point one of the dwarves passes out and I decide to risk getting some blood. That's when I was caught in the act, and then proceeded to slaughter a good dozen or so of the dwarves that were hanging around, before "giving in to starvation" because I was bored.

Lessons:

• Everyone in my next fort needs some military training. My thoughts are a main hall "danger room" setup and/or conscription squads, just so everyone's prepared. (And at the least knows how not to die.)
• My military needs better training. That means either risking "long patrol duty" training sessions, or using a danger room for my first time.
• Don't flood a fortress I would like to explore.

Edit: also, one of my next adventures should be just a misc. object user. At one point in the fight against my fort dwarves I picked up a ☼hornblende table☼ and started beating people with it, just because I felt like it.

@Owlbread: I'm completely fine with that. I just added a way for people to do that .

@Loam: You can add your work at that link too, if you care to. And I agree, the diacritics give a certain flavor to dwarven speak (esp. when Dwarven uses so many of them!)

@Baffler: If there's something you need to do that you can't, I'll gladly add you as a mod or admin. You started this project, after all.