Rose Thorne(She/Her)

Has Phoenix Wright been a documentary about the Japanese legal system this entire time, and we just wrote it off?

Vampire Survivors has got me back in its grip. The Ode to Castlevania DLC dropped on Halloween. I really don’t understand where the time goes when I play that game.

Also picked up Webfishing, an absolutely adorable time. I don’t know that I really consider it “playing”, the actual gameplay is pretty basic, but I’ve enjoyed the peaceful nature of it and have had fun just chatting.

This is seriously dating myself, and probably hyper-specific, but it feels more like chatrooms back in the late 90s to early 2000s. Most of the rooms I’ve been in have been relaxed. Having a talk about life while someone strums “Simple and Clean” on a guitar somewhere in the background. A bit of roleplay going on.

The small lobbies, the small map, the chill gameplay, all makes for a cozy, welcoming place. Like you really did just stumble across someone’s campsite, and they invited you to sit.

How about instead of coming in and being a dick in someone’s thread, you post things to encourage what you’re looking for?

No, it must just be easier to smell your own shit in the garden than finding a toilet.

Found a package of ground beef randomly hidden in the very back of the milk cooler. Thankfully kept fairly cool, and still in date, but a customer had stuck it there because he wanted to come back later. He came back the next day and tried to file a complaint because it wasn’t there.

Fish left in the bathroom. Like, straight up a pack of salmon fillets, just left there on the top of the toilet tank. Our best guess was that someone wanted to steal it, but either couldn’t fit it or got spooked and just abandoned it. It was in a far corner, barely used bathroom, too.

Half eaten fruit or candy thats been shoved to the back of a low shelf. You know a kid did it, there’s massive mess back there, and depending on what aisle they hid it in, it might have been there for a couple days to a week. Once found a bell pepper some kid had chomped into.

This is more just “general trash”, but still not uncommon if your store has a hotbar: Stolen food containers. People grab their dinner, eat it throughout the store, and then just put the trash wherever. If you’re lucky, they leave it somewhere obvious. If you’re unlucky, you find an open container of half-eaten rotisserie chicken shoved into a vent after they turned the heat on for the winter. Going past the deli in my store has triggered minor PTSD at times. That smell… Just… Hot rot. That’s the only way to describe it. Rotting garbage, oven warmed.

You can and will find terrifying things working in grocery.

I once found a pack of beef jerky that had become 90% mold. It was tucked all the way towards the back of the shelves, partially shoved into the crack between two of them. We had no clue how long it had been sitting back there, because jerky rarely needed a full teardown.

Leaving things they decided they don’t want just wherever in a store. It’s annoying as a customer, because now I have to dig through their mess to get the product I actually wanted, and even moreso as an employee.

At least put it back in the right department. The underpaid employees who have been there since before the store opened for the day really don’t want to have to play the game of “How long has this ground beef been sitting in a produce basket, and how much product did we just lose?”

For me, the biggest first step was recognizing my habits in letting it start and pushing myself to not let it. I had to look at my own habits, learn to recognize when they were starting, and actually push myself to get up and do.

With that last bit, though, came the why I was struggling to do in the first place. Sometimes it can be that it’s something we don’t enjoy, and with that, it helped to remind myself that just getting it done meant it was over with. I can get back to whatever comfort I was in when it’s done, and make myself do it.

Sometimes it’s more, though. My depression and anxiety heavily fed into my lack of motivation and energy, and even the perfectionism I struggled with was fueled by anxiety that I’d somehow get it wrong.

That took getting help, medication, and changing a lot of my own thought process. Making a schedule definitely helped me with feeling like I wasn’t getting done “on time” or early enough. If I know something takes me 30 minutes, I schedule it out for 45 so if I take longer, I’m still not “behind”, and if I get done quicker, hey, I got some free time!

Learning to give myself some slack really helped, too. I had to tell myself it was okay if everything wasn’t perfect, if something came up, because we can’t plan for everything. The only thing we can do is try. Sometimes we give it our all, but something outside of our control goes wrong.

Learn to recognize and break negative thought processes. Don’t ignore mistakes or accidents, and don’t just bottle up negative emotion, but recognize when the thoughts are becoming a block.

Find what motivates you. Sometimes it’s easier to get through the rough when you know there’s something worth it at the end.

Hey, so, not a licensed professional, but deal with something just like that(screaming in sleep).

Go talk to a professional. Mine was PTSD-related night terrors, and once I got on Miratazapine with therapy, they actually went away. Been something I’ve dealt with since my early teens, and I’ve not had an episode in months.

I mean, have you looked at HoI4 lately?

Look, I get it, but the state of DLC in Paradox games has moved beyond even the memes. I think they took those as inspiration. There’s a fucking monthly pass now!

I deeply enjoy their games, but the DLC bloat confounds me.

Eh. I have thing going on that I’m looking forward to, trying to keep my head up with things, but right now there’s this issue that’s putting a shadow over everything.

I try to talk to the person involved, but they’ve kept at it to this point where I don’t want to be around them. I’ve tried to be gentle about it, but it’s like everything I said gets forgotten in a week and I’m the bad person for putting my foot down after.

I think it feels worse because I know what I need to do, but it’s going to make a lot of things very difficult, and it’s going to take accepting that someone who was very important in my life isn’t the person I knew when we reached that point. That neither of us are.

If only the sequel kept to the same idea…

“Dude, This Book Is Full of Spiders”? THEN WHY WAS MINE FULL OF SCORPIONS‽

Is that last bit a claim, or a threat, Google?

It kinda varies, for me.

My biological grandfather and step-grandmother were my closest, but it was mainly with her, and I didn’t realize it until she passed. I could tell so many stories about that woman, both from after my birth and well before it. Honestly, the further I accept myself, the more I realize she has always been my go-to for the woman I aspire to be.

My biological grandmother is a narcissistic piece of shit who I will never speak to again, if I can help it, and my step-grandfather along with her. When I was younger, I thought it was healthy, until I realized that what was happening was I was getting toys and shinies shoved at me so I’d look to her as a provider and ignore her shitty comments towards everyone else.

He’s not much better. He can’t handle not having control, but also hates showing it, so he acts like a passive-aggresive bully until he gets his way and when confronted on it shrugs and goes “Who I am. Don’t like it, go” then throws a tantrum when you do.

Same thing that always happens, I got asked where something was in a store I don’t work at.

Doesn’t matter what I wear, apparently I just scream “retail employee”. It’s gotten depressing, kinda.

Depends on the situation.

Currently? 40 pound box of cake mix I’m probably going to launch at my store manager.

Being pedantic, but it’s beyond that.

To grok is to know or understand so completely, it becomes a part of yourself. To know something fully. You can understand the concepts of astrophysics, but you might not grok the concept.

Embrace the Rot by Endless Tavern.

Just avoid Australia, you’ll be fine.

This is what happens when you take things away. Used to be you’d just levitate yourself wherever you needed to go.

Then there’s Fallout. Who needs horses? Courier can carry themself and 400 pounds of Sunset Sarsaparilla up a damn near vertical cliff face if you do the side-to-side.

Not with Trek, but I’m a former stagehand and I’ve done amateur stagework. Spent a lotta time building and maintaining sets and props. I’ve been there.

You’re backstage, you’ve got how everything should look memorized, it’s all set up, and for a moment, while it’s just you and that dry run, you forget yourself. You’re a part of the show.

Eventually you step back, remember it’s all fake. You notice the little flaws, notice the floor isn’t just right under your feet. You were tired, trying to get something done. A lapse.

I genuinely believe in the magic of the stage. Not in the sense of a spell, but of the ritual. No matter if it’s on a screen, or in person, if you do it right, we let go. For a moment, we forget our world and step into another.