In my experience, the fries are great for five whole minutes before they turn into soggy cardboard and broken dreams

It’s a pretty good five minutes though

That’s the plan, yup

Honestly, that’s tough, but fair. No therapeutic tool is going to be a magic bullet solution for everyone.

My wife struggles with something similar. When we try to walk through an exercise together she thinks it’s about saying that her problems are “all in her head.” For my own outlook, I liken it to thinking that although my thoughts might be faulty, my feelings are valid. But hey, I’m not an authority, I’m just another struggling human trying to make sense of it all.

For what it’s worth, one stranger to another, I think that whatever you’re going through you’re totally valid. I hope you find or have found some relief - goodness knows we’re still looking

I highly recommend Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. CBT is the best medicine I can afford, because all you need is pen and paper.

If you don’t think you can change your circumstance, then you can try to change how you react to it. The core model of the therapy is to analyze your thoughts and look for patterns in which your brain tries to fuck with you. Identifying distortions and fallacies helps to replace your automatic thoughts with more positive ones.

Example:

Thought: I hate my job, everything about it sucks

Distortions: Overgeneralization, All-or-Nothing Thinking, Feelings as Facts

New Thought: I hate certain parts of my job, but I like X part of it

The whole thing only works if you believe in it, and the important thing is that you’re not just putting a sunny face on things that make you feel terrible. You’re working to restructure your thought based on objective truth.

I’ve struggled for a long time with the Sunday Scaries. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to get easier, and I’m going through it right now, but I know if I take the time to untangle my feelings then things end up easier in the long run.

Good luck out there, partner

I’d like minimum wage to be able to support my family, so that a job flipping burgers could actually feed us

Failing that, to live as a bunny in a cottagecore tree stump, spending my days slicing up strawberries like they’re roasts, and baking pies with my neighbours

Banana peels take up to two years to decompose, unless they’re in the right environment such as a compost heap where the process speeds to 6-9 months

That’s still lightyears ahead of cigarette butts and plastic bottles, but a lot of people don’t realize how long their trash lasts for

As other people have said, there are definitely bots on the fediverse

In fact, the coolest thing about lemmy for me is that there’s a checkbox in settings to disable viewing any bot users

Although as I understand, users have to self-identify as a bot, so the actually harmful bots probably don’t do that. But I can dream

angry upvote

But honestly, fair. Alien is a 50-year-old movie, so when viewed with a modern lens it might not seem to be anything special.

Part of the legendary status of Alien is just how influential it has been. Before Alien, a horror-scifi movie would be some schlock about flying saucers piloted by men in gorilla masks terrorizing Hollywood. Audiences certainly weren’t expecting a psychosexual thriller about forced oral insemination and mpreg.

And the android! Robots in movies were walking vending machines, and yet the robot in Alien is just some guy until he starts to malfunction. Plus in the context of the franchise, it makes you distrust every single android in each subsequent movie, and might even leave you guessing who else in the cast could be a robot in disguise.

Other movies have done it better since then. We all stand on the shoulders of giants after all. And the funny thing is, a lot of the time when you look back at the movies that spawn the tropes, they don’t seem that impressive because they haven’t been totally refined yet.

I have a soft spot for Alien, it’s my favorite in the franchise. It relies so heavily on practical effects, it’s got those retro-futuristic computers which I adore, and the smart woman saves the day (sort of) after all the dumb men tell her she’s wrong. And yet despite what I just said, I don’t think anyone is actually very dumb, the characters are all quite human and I understand and relate to their motivations.

It’s a movie that feels far more modern than it is. You might even forget that it’s fifty years old until you see that explosive finale in gloriously bad 70’s CGI

I also liked Prometheus. It’s not the best in the franchise but it’s certainly not the worst, and it doesn’t deserve as much hate as it gets in the community

Personally, I like to supplement my knowledge with the occasional book. Like shit, that’s sort of the whole point of books.

I don’t think a book has ever got me started on something new while programming. Like if I want to pick up a new language or framework, I have better luck going directly to the documentation. If I have a specific problem, then I can search online or find a tutorial or something.

Another risk of using a book as the entry point is when those books go out of date and no longer become relevant. Always make sure they’re using the right version of whatever tool you’re using, lest you pick up a book vaguely titled “Learn Python” and discover it’s for 2.7 when you’ve installed 3.11

But as you’ve kind of surmised here, books are great for filling in the gaps in knowledge. They’re also generally speaking written by authors with tons of experience (and perhaps biases) which might tell you why things are done a certain way.

Of particular interest - and caution - are opinion-based books. For example, Clean Code is full of examples that sound good on paper, and then when taken to their extreme are shown to be brittle and cumbersome. I still think the book has some good points, but at the end of the day it’s opinion, and opposing opinions exist for a reason.

So I guess what I’m saying there is books are great, but you shouldn’t follow them dogmatically

Did you get the secret ending where

I did on my first playthrough, thought the game ended far too early before I realized I had gone down an alternate route.

It’s still pretty short though

About two weeks after I moved out of my parents’ place, my apartment was broken into while I was at work.

I had a pretty bitchin’ video game collection and a basement apartment. They broke in through a window and cleaned me out.

Kind of a funny story, I had worked a double shift and was pretty exhausted when I came home. Went straight to the kitchen to make some mac n’ cheese. Came back out to the living room to watch TV with dinner and there was no TV. That was my first clue something was amiss.

I couldn’t stay in that apartment, ended up moving elsewhere before my first month’s rent was up. I felt a bit better when I was in a different apartment, but I guess that feeling of my nest being violated stuck around a bit longer. I kept a bat by the door for a long time, and I still end up triple checking the locks because of something that happened like fifteen years ago.

Well, that’s once again changed the way I look at things

Easy come, easy go

I’d be okay with that. The key thing is we need to do more than we’re currently doing because the system is broken

You know what would be way better than a symbol for “healthy” food would be requiring manufacturers to label food that fails to meet standards as “unhealthy.” Bonus points if you tax it to death so it’s no longer economically viable to sell garbage and label it “food”

Like, shit, the public perception is that I can’t afford healthy food anyway. But at least if the unhealthy food was also labelled it’d be easier to avoid

I heard someone remark once that “If it’s clean enough to put back on your body, it’s clean enough to be put back” and that changed how I look at things

Although in practice, I either hang stuff up on hooks on the back of my bedroom door, toss things on The Chair, or use half-dirty laundry to cover up the shame of the unused exercise equipment. Old habits are hard to break I guess

“Winter holidays” that’s a good one, excuse me while I cry in capitalism

I grew up near the mountains, and now I live near the sea.

I find myself missing the mountains, there aren’t really any near here.

The sea has its perks though. It’s influenced a lot by the weather, so it feels like it has its own character. If you’re close enough, it has its own white noise too.

I’ve been through the prairies of Saskatchewan and let me tell you that view’s a trip. They say if your dog gets out you have three days where you can watch him go before he’s lost

If you want an out of the box distro that just works and has that old-school flavour, maybe look into Mint.

If you want something a bit more modern, then pop_os! is something of a Linux darling

Ubuntu probably has the widest community support. Although it does seem to have some issues

I’m not clear on what your bugs are, but if it’s like, you run a command in the terminal and a bunch of scary sounding messages come up, that’s normal. That’s just how it likes to be

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen used it, then I’d say Linux is probably worth another shot. It’s come a long way, and it only gets better with age

“Win if you can, lose if you must, but always, always cheat.”

I’m told this creed is an invention of a family member, but if I’m following the message it’s almost certainly stolen from somewhere.

I’m also a big fan of “Anything worth doing is a worth doing half-assed”

The licensing is going to depend largely on what model or service you use. I imagine the website will have an About or License page which will detail your uses.

If the license isn’t permissive, it would be somewhat ironic since it’s an open secret in the industry that those models are trained with stolen images.

Asking this question on lemmy is probably going to give you a spicy time. Many of us despise AI.

Can I use it as inspiration and make my own assets that are similar but not the same?

Legally, I don’t imagine this would give you a problem. You’d be using the prompt as a reference and then creating your own assets. The generated image is likely to be watermarked in some way, so I’d recommend tracing it.

I’d really recommend you drop AI and run though. I suppose many people don’t really care, but in the indie gaming community you could be burning a lot of goodwill by using it

If you’re considering assets, you can get free ones from Kenney or Open Game Art. They might not meet all your needs, but they’re an excellent tool for prototyping or supplementing your other assets