Right now I’m basically playing Beyond All Reason almost every evening. It’s a game in the Total Annihilation “tree” of games. A massive scale RTS. I previously played Supreme Commander and Planetary Annihilation, both of which are also inspired by Total Annihilation, but I have to say that BAR is really better than both of them. I almost can’t believe it’s an open source game. It’s still in alpha, but it’s been way more stable than most AAA games I’ve been playing recently.

This also goes for many things in general, not just gamedev. I used to be a teaching assistant at the University that I was studying at, and this was the main thing people seemed to get wrong in their projects. Instead of going for the basics and building from there, they just went for all the fancy cool features, or the most optimal algorithm. Then, when the deadline inevitably came around, they would have basically nothing working correctly. Sometimes I even warned them, and yet it still went wrong.

I wouldn’t say that my mental state is perfectly optimal at all times, but I usually don’t experience any of these. Sometimes I get overwhelmed with the world, when life feels like a treadmill going faster and faster and I just can’t keep up. Usually that resolves at some point though, and then I can be somewhat happy and cheerful again in the here and now. Nowadays I tend ro try and dissociate a bit from what’s happening out there.

There’s war, famine, and crisis in the news every day, but I just have to accept that I can’t change the world on my own. I tend to ignore the news mostly, apart from the headlines every now and then, because it just constantly got my mood down. Me being sad about it doesn’t help anyone.

And life may be meaningless once you start analysing everything. In 200 years there will be barely any trace of me. The more reason to just do the things that make me happy, even if it ultimately doesn’t matter to anyone else.

I’ve found that the ability to be happy is something subconscious that can fail from time to time. In 2019 I wasn’t doing great and everything just felt empty. I did fun things, but didn’t truly feel anything from it most of the time. When I recovered in 2020, I felt a weird happiness that I didn’t understand. The world was going to shit due to COVID, and yet here I stood smiling at 2 birds fighting over food. It’s like I got a sense back that I didn’t realize was lost. Since then I try to remember this “irrational” happiness whenever I feel down. At some point it’ll always come back again, and the exact same situations will suddenly feel happy and worthwhile again.

Yeah because everything in the world is binary and there can’t ever be nuance.

I’m reducing my meat intake, but I do still eat meat every now and then. When I do, I tend to consider the impact on animal welfare and the environment. Eating meat from an animal that has lived relatively free and happy life is a lot better to me than one that has been locked inside for most of it’s life.

Nah, at worst I’m just searching for things I should reasonably know like “do I need to cook X before eating” or something. Why would I ever search for something weird with my search history on?

If it’s in a language-specific community or instance then it makes no sense to downvote imo. I personally do downvote unlabeled posts in communities that aren’t language specific though, because they clutter my experience.