Getting to the end of the year - Late November 02023

If you are considering purchasing or repurchasing paid account benefits for Dreamwidth, the month of December provides a 10% bonus to points purchased for the account doing the purchasing, whether for yourself or as a gift for someone else. That's from 1 December 00:00:01 UTC to 31 December 23:59:59 UTC, so adjust to your local time, and if you want to take advantage of the bonus when it's active, don't wait for the last moment.

War is often a story of people who don't want to kill each other going out and killing each other because their leaders demand it. They come back with stories, and only some of them ever get told.

War criminal, Nixon adviser, and generally loathed individual who is likely responsible for deaths in the millions, Henry Kissinger, has finally been caught by Death at 100 years of age. His legacy continues to live on, in deaths, and bombs, and coups, and a grand amount of US foreign policy.

( There's more inside, of course )

At the end, The vessel you bake in has effects on how the bake turns out, because different materials transfer heat in different ways.

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

December Days 2023 #2: Things I No Longer Believe Fully: I'm Not Good At Video Games

[The December Days theme this year is "Things I Used To Fully Believe About Myself." Some of these things might be familiar, some of them might be things you still believe about yourself, and some of them may be painful and traumatic for you based on your own beliefs and memories. The nice thing about text is that you can step away from it at any point and I won't know.]

#2: "I'm Not Actually Good At Video Games"

Speaking of nerdery, and more things from both my distant past and my recent past, it may not be obvious because I don't do as much of it as I used to be able to, but I've been playing computer and video games since a very young age. Like "playing Math Blaster at the target age for Math Blaster" and "I have played much of the game catalog of Sierra On-Line, before it was bought out, and went through the entire Apogee/id shareware space" and if you get me one of those "Classically Trained" shirts with the video game consoles, you need to have an Atari 2600 and/or a Kaypro II and/or an Apple IIe on the shirt. Yeah, I'm old.

( A Journey In Games, And How I Managed To Avoid Becoming A Gamergater )

Like many of the things that I'm going to be talking about in this series, the thought that I'm not Good at video games is based on a faulty premise: I've believed that Good means being the Best, or I'm using someone else's idea of Good as the measuring stick (if not specifically the Stop Having Fun Guys, then it's usually something derived from them), rather than my own. It's taken experience to gain the wisdom to successfully work with myself, understand myself, and find new ways of looking at the situation that work for me and ultimately lead to a happier, more healthy way of looking at things. As much as I would have liked to short the process and arrive at the better way of looking at things without all of the aggravation in between, I needed all of the experience to synthesize a working mindset and test it for success. And nowadays, when I'm playing with the kids and teens who aren't relentlessly training all the time, I get a lot of "you're good at this!" which ultimately proves the point I needed to learn from the beginning: Good is relative, and the more important thing to do is have fun.