u/_kvltworx_

Every time I tried to open up and talk to someone about my feelings of loneliness and alienation, be it counselors, therapists, whatever, I always got hit with some variation of “Hey, just keep being yourself, try not to worry about things you can’t control and you will be surprised”

Well that has proven to absolutely NOT be the case, I’m well into my 30s (almost 40 at this point) and have yet to even hold another person’s hand much less experience any kind of romance or intimacy. It’s reached the point where I actually can’t remember what it’s like to not eat alone.

The last time I had a non-work related number in my phone was probably 8 years ago (definitely pre-COVID) - all this time I tried to keep those words in mind:

“Just focus on yourself and it’ll get better”

“It’ll happen when you least expect! You never know!”

Despite trying my best to develop interests, hobbies, creative skills, whatever, it always feels so empty without anyone to share it with. Forget even having a relationship (basically given up there) but just even having a friend with similar interests I could even show what I’m working on to is something I would kill for. And it’s also so hard to enjoy interests/hobbies without a social component sometimes (not to mention all the things that sound fun or interesting but are impossible to do alone).

I live in a major urban area and having to see people in groups out and about in the evening and weekends enjoying each other’s company (not even talking about couples, just seeing platonic groups of friends) fills me with so much remorse and anguish it’s almost unbearable at times. I feel like an invisible visitor that observing some sort of foreign land when I walk around nowadays, not sure how much more of this I can withstand… sorry for the rant.

This is my first ever post on here so I should qualify that I am not an incel in the “traditional” sense as I never got into the whole internet incel scene of sexism/extremism but I am a man in my late 30s who has have never hugged or even held hands with a woman (much less dated or had any physical intimacy) - just never happened to me for a myriad of factors.

Recently someone I met a while ago wished me a happy birthday out of the blue and we got to talking and maybe it was due to getting another year older but I figured “What do I have to lose, she is attractive and I’m not getting any younger” and unbelievably she said yes to going out sometime. Now I am kind of panicking as obviously I’ve missed out on all the experience of preparing for dates and have no idea of what is acceptable to wear and how to present yourself.

I tried looking at some of the men’s fashion and style subreddits but a lot of it is “advanced” for lack of a better word and for someone like me who isn’t attractive or charming a lot of the style advice is something I can’t pull off. Not to mention going out and buying an entirely new outfit would feel a little uncomfortable like I’m not being myself and worst case would make me seem inauthentic.

For people on here who managed to get a date, how did you approach this issue? I’m not a slob by any means but I definitely don’t think my day to day wear is good for making a first impression (90% of my clothes are generic plain items as I try to avoid making any sort of identity out of how I look)

Morgue: https://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/chinkstinker/morgue-chinkstinker-20260609-072609.txt

It turns out having only like 5 skills to train makes for a pretty smooth run once you get past the very delicate early game due to Felid HP.

Went into the new Gulch portal and some of the new enemies are very cool and of course it had some great randarts that I would never be able to wear as a Felid (+5 rCorr cloak!) There was a thing at the end called Purified Mutation Catalyst which gave me regen from killing Drained foes which made me think of skilling all the way to 26 for lich form but I settled on Storm which was plenty powerful enough for V:5/Zot even with Felid HP (plenty of Blinkbolting and resetting despite Tesseract pressure)

Morgue: https://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/chinkstinker/morgue-chinkstinker-20260608-081057.txt

On a bender of ranged runs recently and decided to try out the GC ranged wind, splatted a dozen times before even seeing Lair as I kept making dumb mistakes while not understanding all the wind mechanics.

The rampage/salvo almost makes it feel like a ranged Wu Jian - it rewards slightly riskier play in crowds to get the most out of your movement abilities (I’m sure we’ve all been there when the lunge stab wakes up the rest of the Death Yak pack)

Went with Dith and by mid game it was a lot of fun to “juggle” a few enemies in a large mob with the rampage to get in the middle of everyone, Shadowslip and unleash the built up Salvos. Kind of felt like using a Stand from Jojo’s lol

Would be insanely reckless on any other ranged character to not just shoot at edge of LoS but it is a very interesting way to mix up ranged. Dith is just such a strong god overall too, makes Abyss an almost free 3rd rune.

Current dump:

https://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/chinkstinker/chinkstinker.txt

Very nice RNG run so far with a good Oka penetration HC gift and then a +Dex HC from a trove that made Bane of Claustrophobia almost worth it lol

Obviously as a Coglin anything with multiple resists/buffs is huge due to no jewelry so I’d love to wear this:

the +10 pearl dragon scales of the Exceptional God {rF+ rN+ Str+2 Slay+2 SInv}

But with 10 Encum rating it makes mindelay terrible and getting double turned is an easy way to die. Is there a way to calculate out how much training is needed to offset armor penalty to ranged weapons, or is 10 just simply too much and it would take a prohibitive amount of armor skill like into the high teens/20s?

Most recent morgues:

PoNe: https://crawl.roguelikes.gg/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260520-204354.txt

GnHW: https://crawl.roguelikes.gg/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260520-204354.txt

DjAE: https://crawl.roguelikes.gg/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260522-065408.txt

BaFW: https://crawl.dcss.io/crawl/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260430-044358.txt

The other classes I have won with multiple races, especially IE which I think has to be the strongest start for a mage - getting an AC buff is huge and single school training for most of the starter spells means you are way less spread thin early game skill wise. If you can get a way to kill undead/rC enemies like some wands or a decent low skill weapon it’s very easy to at least get to Lair/Orc with IE even for me as a low skill player.

I feel the same way about AL, extremely strong since you get a full screen spell in the starting book but you gotta pray that you can kill that +3 Battleaxe wight with Mercury Arrow and flame wands before it gets next to you. I have a soft spot for AL since my most “powerful” character ever started as a AL.

Necromancer was one I especially struggled with until I got the advice of “you gotta also do something other than necromancy” - going Gozag thanks to an early altar meant I didn’t get to use Animate Dead which sucked to lose something from the starting book, but stacking rampage boots on Po let me do a poor man’s Serpents Lash until I got the wombo combo of Discord + Infestation going.

HW was also challenging as I have a hard time with “directionless” starts (Artificer took me a lot of tries and still yet to win with Wanderer or Reaver), but the new Parchment system in 0.34 means going wide is a lot more feasible in the mid game until you get your endgame spells going. Ranged + summoning & good old Gnoll of Ash brought it home in the end.

AE was Dj but I did get CBL, MCC and CL as my level up spells so it was all pretty on brand - huge damage potential but the one school where you really need rElec for yourself to not get owned by your own AOE. Died a few times to my own Static Discharge shamefully, and I never quite learned the trick of “double zapping” on corners.

FW as a start was interesting as I have had a lot of characters go into FC on other starts since it has so many useful multi school spells like HFM, Spire, Splinterfrost, etc but as a start it’s a little painful on D1. Kinetic Grapnel just kind of sucks and most magic characters aren’t going to get much use out of the hammer since it swings really slow at 0 training if you are out of mana and get double turned by a D1 elec/venom dagger Kobold. As always, Paragon with an Unrand (G&G in this case) is just busted.

FE & Cj are kind of similar to me as they both seem to encourage building towards a blaster, lots of loud powerful spells where you kind of play “tower defense” with mana management around stairs. The -1 Str on CJ is noticeable on certain species since you can’t readily use a buckler/leather armor early on without affecting spell success.

EE is kind of interesting since it’s “what if the projectile gets bigger” going from Sandblast - Stone Arrow - Boulder - Bombard - LCS. Having escape tools like Petrify/Passwall is awesome, but the lack of a true AOE made it really frustrating the times I had to do Lair without finding something else useful (Stone Arrow’ing one Blink Frog at a time is maddening).

Edit: Forgot Summoner! Obviously it’s extremely strong - Crocodile is one of the best escape tools in any starting book, even if Seismosaurus will drive you crazy trying to get it to hatch in time to kill the scary thing. With Parchments if you find Mana Viper or Forest, you can just skip it and still cruise right on through to Lair and Orc.

Much kudos to the devs for Parchments, it’s made magic a lot more fun and less intimidating.

Morgue:

https://crawl.akrasiac.org/rawdata/chinkstinker/morgue-chinkstinker-20260531-005829.txt

This is probably the 4th or 5th time I have had a very powerful character just completely eat poopie doodoo thanks to these things. Maxed resists, 99 total AC/EV (more with Acrobat!) I had a few close calls in Cocytus/Dis (Tar was a breeze) but man, Oni Incarcerators seem to just hard counter anything that isn’t an extremely tanky melee brute so hard with the -move and ManAss.

I switched to the lower damage antimagic Arbalest to hopefully keep them from ManAss’ing (and I forgot their -move is not magic, so that’s on me) and had flight to try and use the Geh smoke over lava to limit LOS since you can’t PoG & Fog like in other hell branches to reset fights.

I probably misplayed as I’m not a great player by any means but how do y’all deal with these guys? I had a really powerful Re caster that also got taken down by these things even after surviving nasty Banes in other hell branches. Any advice is appreciated thanks!

Morgue:

https://crawl.roguelikes.gg/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260516-231358.txt

I had played a Gr caster a while back for the Roxanne CCA and wanted to try one again as the other recommended book start, Fire Elementalist. Took a few tries as the low HP really made all kinds of big damage spikes (boulder beetles, trample attacks in Lair, etc) hard to manage.

Hilariously out of touch Veh spell gifts - Ignite Poison without Olgreb’s or any Alch training (I managed to find Staff of Olgreb in a scary Obsidian Statue vault and risked it all), Plasma Beam and Freezing Cloud without any Air/Ice training, I kept thinking “certainly Veh will offer Boulder or Bombard any moment now” but they never did haha - I think Stone Arrow simply didn’t ever appear in the game at all which is very funny for a Gr run.

Finally by the midgame I found BVC/Rimeblight in Parchment shops and a Necro enhancer Orb so I had a game plan for skilling finally, and at least I got Ignition as a Veh capstone. Horrific Z:5 with 8 OOE’s and mal force mark so a Bane was unavoidable 😔 Rimeblight + Permafrost carried the day here.

Josephina dropped an amazing randart Death Talisman with rF+++ so I decided to try extended, but even with a manual of Shapeshifting, 20 Zig floors worth of XP pots, multiple Pan Lords, still wasn’t able to get to 26 Sh and was losing focus so I decided to just grab the Demonic rune and call it a day.

Oni of Makhleb:

https://crawl.roguelikes.gg/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260513-040027.txt

Octopode of Gozag:

https://crawl.roguelikes.gg/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260515-000305.txt

I love playing Oni and am a nerd for the custom race titles so I really wanted to get Yokozuna - obviously Statue or Storm would have made the most sense for a UC melee brute but the game had Scales of the Dragon King in a shop before S branches so it was hard to pass up an endgame armor like that. I used Eel hands for most of the mid game and it is amazing in corridors and corners due to the Arcjolt style zap through, probably the best of the new mid tier talismans imo.

The reworked Blade form is really really cool - rather modifying your base UC base damage type the blades are now an aux attack and also parry on melee strike, at max level it’s 12sh which is really good - and it lets you keep a shield now, so you don’t have to sacrifice much on defenses despite the AC reduction. I took Makhleb from an early altar (and Makh is underwhelming as always) but with the new Blade form being aux attacks I could see this having great damage output with a Wu Jian or Okawaru dex fighter build.

The OpSh is also my first ever Octopode win! The extremely fragile early game like everyone says is pretty punishing and it took 5 attempts to even see an S branch. I used a lot of Flux baubles in the early game before moving to Dragon for S branches and finally Statue for the late game. With Statue AC and Shield of the Gong I had pretty good defenses but new Slime pits is no joke and I had a few single digit Hp situations. Somehow the game didn’t spawn a single hat other than Crown of Vainglory but as appealing as wearing 10 rings would be, that was 100% gonna get me killed combined with Gong noise I figured.

Morgue:

https://crawl.dcss.io/crawl/morgue/stinkchinker/morgue-stinkchinker-20260506-211139.txt

After probably over a dozen attempts (furthest I got was XL22 Vaults/Depths) at the double gunner CoHu thing, managed to get a win! My other ranged wins have been all with Hep/Dith and much sturdier species so it was pretty challenging to play the glassiest of glass cannons.

Going through a 1/3rd of the game with basically no elemental resist swaps is as always, the challenge with Coglin, and I never found a way to properly have rElec or rF/rC at the same time. A very very lucky break was an early scarf of repulsion which helped a lot against enemy ranged.

Lucked out with Mule from a Bailey acq, combined with Oka armor gift gave me rF++ for OOFs at least. Duel saved me a few times from summoner swarms before I got Dimensional Bullseye online and as always PoG puts in great work on ranged characters.