u/pomplemice

I started solo board gaming this year for something different. I wanted something tactile and away from screens. I also wanted to scratch my magic the gathering itch without getting sucked back into that very expensive world. This year, I started with Ashes Ascendancy and Arkham Horror, currently completely immersed in the chapter 2 core set and children of blood content. Apart from the enjoyment, I have really come to appreciate the cognitive exercise, especially when playing Arkham. I am keeping track of every little resource, card combos, interactions, key words, counters, and of course the story text. Not to mention the time spent theory crafting and planning out my deck. Pulling off a cool combo or advancing the story just feels like such a satisfying slow burn reward.

I started playing my switch the other night and just could not get back into video games. I play mostly single player RPGs. Everything felt too passive. Constant prompts telling me what to do, characters spelling out the story for me, quest markers just lulling me where to get the next objective, etc. I turned it off and just went back to the table haha. It's like I have no drive to play video games anymore.

I totally understand people who play both and never thought I'd say this, but I now prefer solo board gaming 9 times out 10. Anybody else like this?

I loved my medical school experience, but neurology residency was brutal for me. Nothing could have prepared me for what it would actually feel like.

Those long nights on MICU during omicron, the never-ending slog of medicine rotations, spending "days off" just managing to do laundry and sleep, rinse and repeat all of PGY-1.

Then PGY-2 hits and you are juggling multiple stroke codes, patients seizing all the time, consult pager anxiety, and putting out wards fires. Then you feel like you will get a reprieve during clinic weeks, but realize resident clinic is just the absolute worst with the rudest patients always showing up late with a massive problem list, attendings dragging ass and repeating neuro exam minutiae when you are an hour behind schedule, and just going home feeling completely drained. PGY-3 and 4 started to get significantly better, but I was so burned out and jaded by that time that I considered leaving medicine altogether. Just seeing my friends and family seemingly pass me by in life while I still feel felt like a 20 year old college student was just rough. I fell into a near-debilitating depression and had to take one day at a time thinking I would not make it due to my worsening mental health. There were some abysmally dark days...

While my fellowship has been busy, it's like I finally have time to breathe and look back on the rollercoaster I just rode. Just having most weekends off and performing a much higher level of care at work has renewed my love for the field. I realized we need both the quantity of time off and quality of time at work to really matter. I feel like a completely different person and have my life back in order (mostly, still some things are a work in progress).

I just signed for my first job and was able to negotiate a really good 0.8 FTE position with a great income (good enough for me, I took the pay hit to work less FTEs) with a nice balance of EEG reading from home, clinic, and inpatient with NO call other than a little bit for EEGs. It is in the exact city I want to live in close to friends. There were so many job opportunities and I had the luxury to walk away from offers that were sub-optimal for me. It felt absolutely wild after years of begging programs to accept me. Seeing people struggle in this economy and having this enormous privilege to build the career I want and not have to struggle financially is just such a luxury. Sitting at a desk at a white collar job or in finance would also just kill my soul.

This isn't to say "tough it out" or to excuse the residency model and become a shill for an absolutely abusive and exploitative system, but rather to share some optimism for how much better things can get on the other side. It won't be perfect, but I'm feeling incredibly grateful to be where I am today and hope everyone else is hanging in there too!

I had always seen Arkham on shelves in the past and was curious about playing. I could never find people who wanted to play, only to realize you can easily enjoy the game solo. I wish I would have jumped in many years ago and grabbed some of the cool sets that seem to be out of print and super expensive on ebay.

I just picked up the Chapter 2 core set (on sale for 55 USD on Amazon right now btw) and am absolutely hooked to the mechanics, storytelling, art direction, and attention to solo play. I have been playing through with all the investigators (failing quite a bit of course) and can't get enough. I plan on picking up some of the newer investigator decks for Marie and Miguel because they interest me. I might even grab all of them depending on how I am feeling.

My question is, how much of the old content should I look into getting? Do you have any recommendations for excellent prior solo play campaigns? I would also like to build up a collection to start doing my own deck-building instead of just relying on the premade ones in the core set. I see that Children of Blood is coming out later this month. Should I just focus on picking up new stuff as it releases if I like it and not bothering with the old? Just feeling a bit overwhelmed with the amount of content out there and where to go next.

I love TCGs, but got out of things like MtG due to the never-ending treadmill of acquiring cards, especially singles. I also increasingly played less at social events with time passing and just being busier in life. I guess I am just a typical 30+ year old casual with less time for gaming and card games.

I have heard that Keyforge has some decent single player adventures like the Keyracken. I have watched some youtube videos and browsed some of the cards. I really like the idea of just pulling complete decks and not needing to chase singles. I love the design and theming.

I am most interested in playing primarily solo adventures and collecting some fun decks without spending too much. I would like to play with others on rare occasions. I live in a large metro area and it looks like there are occasional events. Is it worth getting into with this goal? Anybody else primarily just collect and play solo?

Also, if so, what would you recommend I start with? I was thinking about the discovery set and the keyracken adventure.

I interviewed in the location I want and absolutely loved the position. I really clicked with the team at dinner and so on. I knew pretty quickly that if they offered, I would take the job. The recruiter sends me a congratulations email the day after saying it went really positive and that they would like to offer me the position. First, we needed to do the references check. I take care of it promptly. I again get a similar message stating that he will get a formal offer written up for my review in 2-3 days. I think "great, all this is pretty much in the bag, just need to get it on paper."

Well, the week goes by and I don't hear anything. I figure it might just be slow, so I wait until the following Monday to send a quick check in email. No response from the recruiter. I reach out to one of my interviewers as well later on with nothing. Two weeks go by, so I send another message stating I would love to take the position and am weighing several offers on the table for a good fit. Still no response.

I would not feel so weird about it if they didn't explicitly say they were going to offer the position and have it ready in 2-3 days. It's just radio silence whereas before the responses were lightning fast. Now we are at nearly 3 weeks since the "offer" email and I feel completely ghosted. It has also wasted my time because I didn't aggressively apply to other places in the interim.

Is ghosting like this just the norm?

Edit: Oh my god. Within a few hours of posting this, I got the contract. It was a mix of things just being slow and my anxiety disorder. Thanks everyone!

I have made prior posts about my profound anhedonia, or the inability to derive pleasure from anything. I had a window where I randomly felt somewhat better and could at least numb myself with things like video games or shows, but I am back to just feeling absolutely nothing. It's like there is no way for my internal reward circuit to fire. Accomplish something that other people would celebrate (I just got hired for a new job)? Nothingness. Finally reach my week off of work that would normally be exciting or at least feel pleasurable just to do nothing? I feel nothing from this. Daily things that used to at least temporarily give me SOME inkling of joy like going out in nature, video games, reading, movies/shows, seeing friends, just feel completely empty.

I was playing a video game trying to relax tonight and it's like the mask came off. The game felt nothing more than simply pressing random buttons to move arbitrary pixels on a screen. Any illusion of immersion was gone. No joy, no pain, nothing. Just my fingers arbitrarily pressing buttons. This made me realize that this is what anhedonia feels like to me. Every day just feels like an act of moving my body, force feeding myself food, playing the game of work/socializing, passing out to sleep, rinse/repeat. Nothing feels like anything. Everything just feels completely empty, devoid of any meaning or emotion I remember the world being filled with. It's just like playing that video game, nothing more than a meaningless sequence of button presses that feels like NOTHING.

I've thought about killing myself and debate what the difference would be? Kill myself and just experience the ultimate nothingness and not even know I ever existed? I guess there's some hope that I might feel something one day and just keep living one day at a time, as hard as it feels.

Sometimes I wish I could just start feeling more pain, because feeling SOMETHING seems preferable to this vague, meaningless shade of grey. Does anybody else feel this way?

I like the chocolate peanut butter flavor on its own, but agree with other posters that it leans more into a mild hazelnut flavor and wasn't quite what I was expecting.

However, I started adding a big spoonful of peanut butter as well as a teaspoon of unsweetened cocoa powder and it tastes amazing. I also do 8 oz of unsweetened almond milk + 8 oz water for all of my huel shakes to make it creamier. Tastes very close to drinking a Reese's shake and I highly recommend trying it this way. This makes chocolate peanut butter my #2 black flavor, second to banana of course.

I came to a painful realization about myself today after one of the worst past few days in a long time.

Whenever I am super depressed, I lose all derivation of pleasure. Nothing feels good or right. I force myself up in the morning and grind at work. Eating feels like I am force feeding myself. I get a profound sense of anhedonia, and therefore lose all motivation to do anything other than try to numb myself with video games after barely managing to get through the work day. Rinse and repeat all week. It is when I am depressed like this that I wish that I was dead or non-existent. Sometimes, the desire to want to kill myself feels so strong, but I just don't. It could be various things that keep me alive, like friends or family, but still the desire to cease to be remains.

It's almost worse when I feel happy, because I realized something. Every time I am happy, it never lasts. The moment I was enjoying, the friend I am with, the food I am eating, and so on is temporary. The pain of witnessing something pass and how fleeting it all is really hard for me. Then, when I really am starting to enjoy life, I get an intense fear of death that overtakes me, causing crippling anxiety. Seeing time and moments pass, knowing that I too will pass sends me into a panic. After the panic has died down, I go back into feeling depressed.

So, when I am depressed I want to kill myself. When I am happy, I experience an intense fear and anxiety of death. It's like being two different people and neither state is all that preferable. Just imagining my whole life flipping between these states is making me feel really hopeless. That's all there is?

Does anybody else ever feel this way?

Russia bringing it with this one

I'll provide an example of my Friday.

Get in to the hospital dead early to chart review, see patients, and grind to get as much notes and other bullshit for the day done or prepped before rounds. Before rounds, it's morning report. Fine.

Then, instead of rounding, it's Friday, so grand rounds are happening. Attending says "you guys should really get to grand rounds early and in person." The whole fucking team goes to grand rounds. I listen to some ultra specific mini dissertation research project that has no clinical relevance to my job while work and other bullshit continues to pile up. Then rounds happen later than usual and the attending repeats half the HPI questions for every patient and just painfully drags out the morning. We try to get as many orders done and such on rounds, but it's never enough.

That runs straight into lunch. Time for noon conference. "You guys should really get to noon conference early." Even though I wish I could just get 30 minutes to eat in silence and you know, take an actual goddamn break, I sit and half listen to conference as I suck my food down.

After conference, time for social work/interdisciplinary rounds. Then, the attending insists on doing teaching. Everyone is so exhausted and has work hanging over their heads, so it's hard to get anything out of it.

Fucking finally, 3 or 4 PM rolls around and we can at last sit down and actually do our jobs, working well past sign out to clean everything up from the day. You feel so drained from the feeling of unfinished work hanging over your head all day. The whole day just felt like a never ending sign out, repeating the same one liners and shit to different parties without actually doing anything worthwhile.

I know we are at an academic teaching hospital, but God the whole thing just feels so unbelievably inefficient. The majority of the work you actually do towards patient care is in the narrow pre rounding window and at the very end of the day. I feel like everything could be wrapped up so much quicker, then any leftover time used to take breaks, learn, do whatever. So much feels like self inflicted bullshit.

Tldr at bottom. Resubmitted due to not having enough paragraphs.

I'm visiting Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. As I was having trouble finding my Airbnb, I ran into a Russian girl coming from the same apartment who lived in a unit above me. I asked her for help and she got me in to the building and was very pleasant.

She then states that she lives there and if I have any questions about the neighborhood to what's app her. My host confirms she does live there. I think okay, cool. We exchanged numbers and then she texts me a bit later saying by the way, you are quite cute, wanna go to dinner? Honestly, the spontaneous idea was interesting to me, so I said yes, why not.

You only live once. I just thought it'd be cool to meet a local, practice my Russian (everyone in Kyrgyzstan speaks russian or Kyrgyz) and just hang out. I did find her cute as well. 

We meet at a restaurant and everything is fine for awhile, but then she starts doing this weird stare, like staring deeply into my eyes and commenting on the colour and how perfect they are. She then starts doing the same for my nose. Super weird. She asks me if I used drugs to dilate my eyes and change their colour. I say no. We then go back to standard stuff that isn't weird at all like hobbies, interests, work, travel, etc.,

Then, she goes on a long tangent about her obsession with wanting plastic surgery for a more perfect face (didn't notice she had minor cosmetics until she pointed it out), but she literally went on and on about wanting a perfect face, then repeatedly asks me if I got a nose job, to which I keep saying no. She kept getting right up close to my face to look at my nose, eye, or ears. She states that I look like an ideal Russian man (I am not, just American with Irish/English/German roots) and keeps commenting on weird body parts.

She also wanted to watch me eat and didn't order any food, only drinks. She just sort of stares at me the whole time.

She then tells me this super sketchy story about how there used to be prostitutes living in the apartment building, but they were evicted recently.

Other weird observations. She pulls out not just a second phone, but even a third phone. I ask her why, and she says it's common in this country due to how bad service is. Pretty weird. I noticed also that she repeatedly uses hand sanitizer or goes to wash her hands. Over and over again. She mentioned a few times, "please don't be scared of me" while staring at me deadpan.

She also told me some weird story about how she is in nursing school and that her current professor keeps having hallucinations and how it's freaking her out. I figured this was likely a language barrier issue, so I confirmed with Google translate and yes, this is correct. Just such a weird off topic thing to mention. Then some random story about a crazy ex who pulled a knife on her one time and "wanted to cut her open."

She later does order something after I finish eating, so I awkwardly now sit there waiting for her to finish.

I say I'm ready to go and figure she is probably hoping to just get a free dinner from a foreigner, but interestingly she offers to pay. She had to make stops to wash her hands many times and kept insisting on spraying sanitizer on my hands and stuff. We then walk back to the building and parted ways.

She then texts me a bunch of weird photos. At first, strange, grainy photos of her legs dangling at the gym or herself putting on lipstick and staring dead pan into the camera with a glazed over look. Random pictures of her hair styling, and I mean a ton of them. Some mildly sexy, but not overtly like sexting. Several of them have extremely creepy lighting, like super dark and surreal looking as if from a David Lynch film.

The really creepy ones were a bunch of close up photos of one eye, like completely zoomed in and just labeled "мой глаз." They had no context and she just kept sending them all night. 

She states how she loved meeting me and wanted to meet the next day for a museum. I said I have a lot booked, so maybe not. I said nice to meet you in Russian, but did not comment on the photos. She sends me a bunch of other messages and starts repeatedly calling me.

I tell her firmly I am not interested and would like to stop communicating, but she continues to call, send weird texts, and endless creepy photos of her eye or just staring into the camera deadpan.

I booked a hotel and got the hell out of that Airbnb.

What am I dealing with here? I feel like this is just a really mentally unwell person: the OCD like behaviour, preoccupation almost with body dysmorphia, and weird mannerisms and photos not making much sense.

However, the three phones and whole story about the prostitutes really sketches me out. I started thinking maybe she is trying to solicit sex? But then, she never asked or really made any major advances and if she is that obsessed with hand washing, I doubt it?  A scammer maybe, but then she offered to buy dinner and didn't ask for anything? I just get a major off and creepy feeling from the entire thing. 

I do hope she can find help and just feel pretty sad about the whole thing. 

Tldr: Met a Russian woman at my Bishkek Airbnb building, she asked me to dinner. The date was filled with red flags: intense staring at my face/body parts, wanting to watch me eat, obsessive plastic surgery talk, repeated hand-washing, three phones, random stories about prostitutes/a knife-wielding ex/a hallucinating professor, and unprompted "please don't be scared of me." Afterward she sent weird random photos of her eye and pushed to meet again. Not sure if she's mentally unwell, a scammer, or something else — but I'm creeped out and relieved I left that Airbnb behind.

I speak basic Russian, but from the US. My eSIM card was having issues and I landed in Almaty around 3 AM. I couldn't get Yandex working nor did I have any Tenge. A cab driver approached who had a badge on (kicking myself for not taking a picture or anything...). I said I prefer to use the Yandex app and he said he is a Yandex driver. I know this is now a lie. He grabbed my luggage and just asked for the address.

I realize this is so stupid of me, but I just came off of a 20 hour flight and jet lag. I was completely delirious and just wanted a ride. Got there fine, but he charged me 25000 Tenge, which I misread as 2500, not realizing this until I looked at my bank account. Also, he insisted on carrying my luggage up five flights of stairs to my rental unit, but now I realize that was also so stupid to let him follow me to where he could see the keypad I used to get into my Airbnb. I know these are old tricks, but my delirious brain just was not processing anything..

Any advice? My tentative plan is to call the police, block the charge on my credit card, and then have the Airbnb host change the keypad...

Just feel so stupid and angry. This colored my experience the moment I walked off the plane here.

I gave Jimmy Joy a try after Huel was acquired by Danone, but good lord this is so much worse. No matter what I did, either more or less water, blender or shaking, mixing oat milk, some fruit, etc Jimmy joy comes out like chalk and tastes absolutely vile. I can't even stomach the thought of finishing a bag and will be switching back to Huel, which tasted drastically better.

Has anybody had any luck with the money back guarantee for the first order?