JustAnotherKay

See my other response :)

Difficulty balancing encounters

They're being creative because they want to be powerful. They want that "wow that's clever and highly effective, you're so smart here's a one-shot" moment. So, let them. Balance be damned. Let them wipe out entire encounters if they're clever enough. Or, throw in a fluffer enemy or two that can either get "one-shot" at any moment or be a nuisance for the entire encounter

Edit: If you like friendly competition (and you should probably check with your group too) you can turn combat encounters into puzzles where you're basically trying to stump each other on how to handle a situation. Try to think tactics instead of numbers

Search terms: CBT, mindfulness, thought exercise, emotional control

Can probably throw some of those, or a combination of them and get some paperwork that will give you a much more in-depth explanation and many more options. But, for convenience, here's one that I use often:

Close your eyes, control your breathing. Imagine yourself sitting next to a stream, surrounded by calming forest noises and water running. When a thought comes to interrupt your scene, put it on a leaf and put it in the stream. Watch as it simply floats away.

What are we actually doing here? Breath control regulates the heart rate which helps lessen anxiety response by the brain, slowing the release of cortisol and beginning the process of reducing emotional volatility. Forcing our focus onto an image and sound, and waiting for interruptions trains us to identify intrusive/unintentional thoughts. "Putting it on a leaf" is basically a euphemism for acknowledging that the thought happened and then moving along. As you practice this, your brain will start to automatically filter more of those unhelpful thoughts out, and when something slips past you'll have the tools to handle it (assuming you're still cool-minded enough to begin the process)

You can, it's just really fucking hard. One of the best things I learned in therapy is how to push these thoughts away. I thought for a long time that it was impossible, until I learned different methods and really put some effort into learning it

Looks like it, with some extended capabilities to interact with the web. Although, apparently it doesn't do so very well lol

I literally told my last interviewer "I enjoy repetitive, tedious tasks"

Long term, I agree. To test for 3 hours, and then decide which partition to nuke and which to keep? For this particular use case I'd prefer it

Safety concerns, fair. Silicone can be warmed/chilled though right? Temperature play?

Have you hit it with anything to check if your ports are still open? There are a handful of tools for the task

I actually love this idea. I'm on a federated service, why do I need to go to 3 meme communities on 3 instances when I could go to "meme" and see all of them?

Crossposts from within the cross-feed could be automatically hidden to avoid showing the same post multiple times, and then we just start spreading the word to crosspost instead of reposting. I think the only issue is that this would definitely be better to implement client-side because AP is just a protocol to move data, whereas this requires checking too many user-defined variables to make it idiomatic easily. I could be wrong though, I don't know the AP code very well

I actually don't like this advice for this particular use case. The live session is gonna be sluggish because of the USB bottleneck which will make it look like the games run a lot worse than they would with a proper install.

Especially since this person also is already Linux proficient, I would say just jump into a dual boot setup or wipe the windows partition momentarily. Sure, it's gonna take a little longer and it's a bit tedious to have to reinstall windows if you change your mind but I'd prefer a bit tedium over a poor benchmark

Throat play.