I'm cautiously gearing myself up for a conversation with bff where I tell her that we need to recalibrate our relationship, and....I genuinely don't think I've ever had a serious, emotional conversation with someone I care about before.
I've never been a Conversation Haver; I tend to take the approach that people can't significantly change without meaningful reason, and since I am not and never have been someone's Reason, I cannot prompt change. Therefore, my choices are (a) live with what is; or (b) end/limit the relationship.
But....this is my best friend in the world. I do love her. I just can't keep on as we've been going, where it's less a friendship and more ten minute intervals where I talk about my life, after which the focus switches. I once sat in a bar for two hours waiting for her; afterwards, she asked if I wanted to stay in her hotel room like I didn't have to get up in another 5 hours and drive to work. She texted me during my recent trips, and when I said I was traveling she asked no further questions. Said nothing unless it was about what she was reading, what she was doing. I'm not even sure she realized I was traveling at all, just unavailable to her.
I can give a high-level summary of her PhD thesis. I'm not confident she knows where I work.
Truthfully, part of this is that we simply have different social styles....but still. Coming back from my family trip, I said I was tired and trying to get work straightened out, she should go ahead and plan something for the holiday! I was free! Only for me to text a week later....and promptly have her join me, for my previously standalone plans. Oh, and she asked me to bring my camera, because she wants headshots for her new job.
I still love her very much, but if this is the kind of relationship we're going to have? I need less of it.
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It's kinda weird how, compared to Metroid Dread, Metroid Fusion was so much more blatant in
its prioritisation of linear story progression over exploration
its linear presentation (literally naming the areas sector 1–6), though it still does the classic "linear game pretending to be nonlinear" thing by taking you through them in a different, but still fixed, order
the way it literally directly tells you your every next step constantly
yet when playing the games, it felt to me that somehow, despite all of this, Fusion felt a lot less frustrating in its linearity to me than Dread. In Fusion it was immediately clear that I would just be sticking to a single sector for each part of the game and those sectors themselves would still be mostly freely explorable in a way that felt more similar to Metroid II, but in Dread there was just no telling AT ALL when the path behind me would be blocked off and it also felt wayyyyy less justified than in Fusion, especially with just how often Dread would be doing this.
With Fusion's extremely tense atmosphere being present throughout the entire game and so much of the story taking place and developing during the game itself, I was totally understanding of its structure and restrictions. Dread on the other hand just kinda made me feel nothing, except
frustration at the lack of exploration with every single door locking behind me constantly for no good reason. Even some obstacles don't *go away* but instead switch from blocking the path forward, to blocking the path back: the thermal doors, the lifts that go down if you stick to their spider magnet walls, the big boxes that you had to move with the charge beam (or grapple beam idk? or both?) it just gets soooo annoying
frustration at how you need to use 3 buttons simultaneously to perform one single god damned action
frustration at how abilities felt extremely underused in the level design—you rarely grapple your way across the ceiling to cross a pit like in Super (which is the kind of level design that allows for sequence breaks in completely natural ways that encourage player experimentation), no, you just open the grapple beam door lock with your grapple beam door key. Literally every single ability in dread relies on this WAY TOO MUCH in painfully obvious ways, including literally every single power beam upgrade
frustration at how missile tanks feel worthless because getting only 2 is just not worth my time (yet the total number of missiles is similar to the other games... a sign of the game being too long/padded compared to the old games)
frustration at how energy tanks feel worthless because every boss does 100+ damage per hit; you're just not allowed to be tanky and the game is forcing you to play in only one specific way. The full energy tanks are just straight up given to you at way too hard-to-miss points—it's not a reward for exploration, it's forcibly scaling up Samus's health so it can scale up the next bosses' damage accordingly and absolutely nothing ends up feeling different. And to make things worse, the energy tanks that you DO get to find on your own don't actually DO anything because they're fucking energy PARTS. They just deliberately made exploration as unrewarding as it possibly could've been
frustration at how almost every area looks the goddamn same and has no music to stand out with either
I must say Dread's final boss was actually really reasonable though, it was really generous with the heals/restocks provided in between & low damage numbers making it so that my collected energy tanks FINALLY felt like they were actually making a difference. I will hate that one arbitrarily locked door in the escape sequence though
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What's the most evil lab equipment in your opinion 😂
In my very subjective opinion? Ion chromatographs are on my shit list. It's not really their fault - the one I have to work with is old, hasn't been maintained properly, and no one else knows how to use it so I have to figure out everything myself, which is NOT FUN! It's finicky, frustrating, and it requires working with sulfuric acid, which I do not enjoy. It's very very sensitive and if you accidentally contaminate it with ions, you will be troubleshooting for weeks trying to figure out what happened. Ions are everywhere, in everything. In dust, in tap water (and nearly all filtered water, we have a special machine that makes Ultra Pure water with no ions or anything in it), on your skin, on virtually every surface that hasn't been specially cleaned. So if you have extra ions that shouldn't be there, it's a guessing game - are they from the sample? The eluent? Sample vials? Glassware? Is the water filter malfunctioning? Are the ions even there at all or is the detector messed up? You just have to keep trying stuff until it sorts itself out. The one I work with has NOT sorted itself out yet and I've been at this for over two weeks. I'm at my wit's end here.
And bonus answer for non-instrument equipment: drying tins. They're these little aluminum trays to put soil or whatever in when you stick them in the drying oven but they make Bad Noises when they scrape together. Also they bend easily, so if you stack them and then they get knocked around, sometimes it becomes very very difficult to get them apart.
In contrast, the best instrument is the Gas Chromatograph and the best other equipment is micropippettes. The GC is straightforward, easy to use, really hard to contaminate, and rarely has technical problems (plus when it does, they're not my problem - I am not the designated GC expert). Micropippettes are just fun because it's satisfying to click the button to release the pipette tip and launch it into the trash can.
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Loving to cook and being good at it rules so hard. You get to do something you really enjoy for a few hours (something you have to do anyways), and at the end of it you get a delicious meal that'll make you go "life is worth living actually". Just Ws as far as the eye can see.
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Finally feeling like I’m crawling out of this rut just in time for the regularly scheduled pit of despair to throw me right back in it but I’m holding on with my fingernails you won’t take me!!!
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