Esme Povirk @madewokherd@computerfairi.es

stream canceled due to tech issues

https://twitch.tv/madewokherd Still doing the chaotic game-switchy thingy.

This might be an adaptive characteristic based on teachers frequently asking me to do things that I found practically impossible. If I weren't able to disregard them, it would've destroyed me.

It might also be where I learned to accept my experiences as real, even if no one else seems to get it or believe them.

In certain ways, adults trained me from an early age not to trust them.

I'm realizing that in most of my life I'm not very responsive to external motivation, but in software development I absolutely am. Or maybe it's just that the flavor of external motivation I respond to is "this has a concrete benefit for someone" and not "someone is asking me to do this".

A project I've been working on for 2 years is now out in the wild (Proton bleeding-edge branch, enabled by default for 4 games: the non-special-edition Skyrim release, Mugster, Clustertruck, and Red Faction). It add gamepad support to launchers that don't have it built in. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/commit/627d220fa3d7a489ddf258a96b2bf557604d5db9

This is real and not an April Fools joke.

So the process of quieting our brain was:

• Observe (through meditation, hypnosis, or whatever works) how you think.
• Try to identify the whole chain of events. For us, that was a nonverbal thought followed by internal speech. Which led to more thoughts, causing a feedback loop.
• Once you can see the chain of events, find a way to intentionally interrupt it. We did that by directing our attention to somewhere there weren't thoughts.
• Practice until it's easy.

We had the important realization recently that there was a condition that needed to be met before we could learn that. In order to decide not to voice a thought, we had to be aware of thoughts before we heard them. But it wasn't enough to just observe them as many people do in meditation, once we could observe them we had to actively suppress our automatic response to them.

Backstory: We used to have constant verbal chatter going on in our brain. It didn't stop even when we slept, it just became incoherent. Then, we started exploring hypnosis, and at some point it clicked, and we found a way to, with difficulty, not voice our thoughts. It was such a relief, and we practiced it until it became the default, and our mind became much quieter and calmer. We've wished since then to teach it, but we never understood well enough how it happened.

@lizardsquid I remember enjoying some of the "robot wants" games.

And "Escape from Puppy Death Factory", but that one doesn't seem to run well in Ruffle. :(

Does anyone else have, like, a nearly-transparent layer of static overlaid on their vision, only noticeable if you focus on it or turn off perceptual filters?

@b0rk Actually, I tend to function with a detached head or on the "wrong" branch a lot, I just move the branches to where I need them after I've committed.

@b0rk Never use "git reset", instead detach HEAD and move your branch with "git branch -f" before checking it out again. (I think that idea clicked for me as a result of one of your git threads.)

To split a commit, do an interactive rebase and cherry-pick it twice, editing to remove parts of the diff the first time.

@b0rk Huh, I had no idea "git stash pop" existed. Not sure if I even realized you could have multiple stashes. Definitely did not realize that "apply" can be repeated.

I kinda use git-stash as a place to put diffs that aren't important enough to go in my long term memory, so I may have lost work to it but only by forgetting that work existed. I can't imagine remembering more than one stash simultaneously.

https://twitch.tv/madewokherd am doing a little chaos