I_smell

This might be a dumb question, but why is one of the news stories on the front page a rape case?

Wow, didn't expect this article to go in that direction!

@fear_the_booboo: Yeah it's really difficult to actually roll up a conversation with someone, I agree! I wasn't screwin' around, I actually did send out hundreds of messages.

First off: completely opposite experience for girls than it is for guys. Girls get a dozen messages a day, guys get zero- it's perfectly common! I really had to learn what to expect in my own slow, bumbling way. I felt, though, that the 5 people who replied back always made up for the 50 that didn't. Making a solid positive impression on one person at a time was really rewarding. Once there's that possibility where one or two people really do wanna be around you, I felt like I could lean on the optimistic "They're just busy" and "They stopped signing on" and "I wasn't that interested this time anyway" kind of stuff.My phobias started melting away every time one person liked me back.
Also- judging your performance in stuff like this against girl-friends is something that gave me a lot of anxiety too, but gender stuff is a very big topic that I'll just leave to the side in this thread.

There's a lot of shallow, one-note conversations! It's true! Some people on there are totally empty and don't know how to have a conversation. Personally, that helped me learn how to be more extroverted and hold up my side of things. I had to have some go-to topics to light things up every now n then, and I had to learn how to find the talking-point in my week, and talk about things excitedly. Those were good skills to take out into the real world, though, and I think I really benefited from this obstacle course of boring people.

Also I did meet up with a couple of those people, and it turns out they are just legitimately introverted, shy girls who had the same troubles I had. After seeing that in real life, I wasn't intimidated by getting the cold shoulder any more.

Also there are exciting people who've traveled the world, flown a helicopter, hosted live TV, drove a race-car and all sorts of things. It's a fraction of a fraction of people, but I shotgun it really wide and I did meet up with a few.

Hey duders, don't know if this is in the right place, but there are a lot of these questions on Danswers and I'm just gonna share my thumbs-up encouraging story here. I guess it's too long to expect them to read it out as an e-mail.

I couldn't call people on the phone, or look at myself in the mirror, or do normal things- I'm totally one of those guys, my name's I_smell! Let's skip ahead to why I feel a lot better about it now!

• When I was 20 I moved out of my parents' house and into a different country! That's scary, and it's something I wasn't looking forward to, but for some part of me it's a fantasy to fly out somewhere and start again. I knew two people in this new place, and through a lot of pushing me to get out, I got out. I spent every day at some meet-up or event, learning a language, joining the gym, doing any lessons of any dumb thing to get me out of my bedroom. When you're at a desk every day, it feels dorky to go to Meetup.com and head out to the first Ex-pat meeting you see, but those things EXIST and they're THERE FOR YOU TO GO TO! Look something up on facebook and go to a jazz festival, cash in a Groupon for some cooking class, look at the gym and head to kickboxing twice a week, it's all there and it's good for you. Use my examples, those are good.
  This kind of stuff just made me feel active and awake, and enjoying new things. I'm still a big fat loser who hates himself, but at some point you've introduced yourself enough times that it's not impossible any more and you can make friends. I still don't approach people very often, but I'm a lot more ready when people open up to me, because I incite it to happen a lot.
• Another thing, I'm really happy they mention this so much on Danswers, I signed up to online dating for a couple months. I used to think this was classic nerdy loser thing, but honestly it was a hell of an experience and I recommend it to everyone. Not even ashamed to say it, I bought the paid version when I first signed up so I could tool around with it, I sent like three hundred fuckin messages out, I WORKED it as much as I could, like a real project. Pretty average response, too, it's hard work!
  Every meeting up with someone was an experience to grow up and cool off and feel good about myself, though. Even if it goes badly, you feel like you learned something. You get to know that some people totally like you, you meet people who are way more shy than you and rely on you to be a fun dude, and you get to see a world outside your small friend group. I could write a whole other thread on how to get the most out of this kind of stuff, but for this thread I'll just note that it's definitely something to try out.
• A big big thing for me, this took a long time to FORCE MYSELF into it, was visiting another country. ALONE. I had straight-up rolled my own phobia of being alone by the time I was 21. This was hard, but for my position in Europe a flight to Belgium or France or Spain was not a big hit in my monthly income. I booked a hostel, I booked a single flight, looked up some sights to see on Google, and I was really scared that I'd be tumbling around lost, wanting to go home.
  The second I set foot in that hostel, a bunch of random 20-somethings wanted to make friends with me out of nowhere. At this point I've got STORIES to tell, cos I've done all this shit in BulletPoints 1 & 2. If you've tried to play the bass, and made your own sushi, and gone out with a porno producer then people LIKE TALKING TO YOU! Visiting other countries by myself, for a couple days at a time, was really seriously therapeutic for me. Bouncing myself off of other people, be they more exciting travelers than me or even more introverted creeps than me, I felt like I was the man I wanna be. At that point, it doesn't matter if you're eating in a restaurant by yourself, because your alone-time is COOL!
  Not every experience was about meeting other travelers, but even spending time completely by myself was fulfilling when I was seeing sights in Spain.
  Another thing to look up: Couch-Surfing. Similar to online-dating, I think it's a big topic to talk about, but long-story-short it's an interesting experience that opened me up a little as a person.
• Last thing I'm gonna put on this list, I have a Google Doc that's just a big list of things to do. Like a bucket-list, but I don't think of it like that. I PERSONALLY think of it as "I would be proud to be the man I am, if I had done these things."
  From big important things: Maybe you have to confront your dad on something, maybe you have to get over an ex, or you'd feel like a more exciting dude if you jumped out of a plane- to corny small things like "bake a cake" or "smoke a weed" or "lose x amount of weight". Whatever makes you genuinely feel accomplished: it's your list! It might seem impossible that you'll ever have great abs or tell your older brother that you're a homosexual, but once you've got a lot of those small ones ticked off it'll look a lot more do-able. Also you'll see yourself as someone much more capable. I know it feels goofy to have a list, but I have a list and I like it.

I can't turn back time and be the coolest kid in school. Don't wait for that to happen, and don't hate yourself cos it didn't! You don't have to be a background character if you don't want to be. Life is short, and doing nothing is more painful than going to a random dance class or Spanish lesson, you know that.

The first step is hard and dumb and awkward, but keep making first steps. EVERY WEEK!! I tried to keep it short enough to read, so I hope this is an encouraging, positive read for at least one person out there.

Been stuck on this design problem in JetGetters for a while where everyone's flying around really fast. It means that people are either really far away from you, or zooming right by you too quick to really have some fun combat.

So one of the kickstarter backers today linked me to a game called SkyDrift!

Awesome! Ontop of looking really cool, you can see that SkyDrift is a kart-racing type of game. This means that everyone's in this clean chase formation, which is great for combat and everything we're doing.

Maybe if I could design a game mode that would herd people around a track like this, even if it wasn't a race, then we could provoke some fun chasing combat scenarios. Exciting! Gonna look into it.

Yeah I'm more just talking about it so I can get into the habit of talking about it.

The No Time web game wasn't a prototype btw, it was a game I made I a weekend. A finished game! We only decided to build on it like 2 months later.

OH speaking of NTTE by the way, we're working on a Unity port of that. So yknow, controller support, better stability, ready for other platforms, should be a lot cleaner soon.

Every facebook redesign goes through a hundred people and a dozen meetings. For the site to be so big, features need to go through loads of iterations before they prove to be an efficient enough use of space to stick around.

This interface text bothers me:

THE MASK SLIPS.

From the trailer I expected it to be really gray and slow n boring, but whatever, those robots were pretty agile and all those crazy monsters were giant nuclear Street-Sharks.

The front half of it felt like when I used to watch anime, and the back half of it felt like when I used to watch GhostBusters, or Honey I Shrunk The Kids or some other big dumb, corny adventure.

It was a good bit o fun.

I watched Real Steel last year and I enjoyed that.