I was walking down a steep street and from one of the gardens some ball shaped toy rolled out and started slowly descending. I caught up with it and brought it back to that garden and a kid and his father (I assume) were coming out to get it and they thanked me.

I bought gifts for some neighbors in real life but I regret it since they'll forget about it and since i am introverted

>>6039
Those kinds of things go a long way into making you less of a stranger to them.

>>6039
I got a small wooden USPS truck for the very professional clerk at my local post office for Christmas.

>>6039
consider it your exposure therapy. even if they forget you, you'll have a proof that you can talk to other people lol

Happy yer!
my rosolution dis yer = make more money. Smol biz will do!
Okane has been very kind to me lately. I wan make okane bigger :D !!

I'm gonna spread my money around by traveling all over the world. I have six big trips planned so far.

С новым годом.

>Do you have any plans for 2026?
I'll try to keep calm and drink rum. Although, I expect 2026 to be worse than any previous year I've witnessed, despite all the cool new seasons of shows that were promised. The end of the internet is nigh, I tell you.

>New Year resolutions
Read through the Chinese classics
Memorize 1000 lines of verse (or try to anyway)
Bump up my daily run from 3km to 5km
Learn programming in lisp
Read through my massive backlog of VNs
Attend gym regularly
Get a small paying job

>>6052
>Read through the Chinese classics
Best of luck anon! I'm preparing for my Chinese exam in Singapore
>Memorize 1000 lines of verse
Which poems are you looking at?

>>4542
ai not allow

>>4543
Yeah, he's on a bunch of boards. The anime is really good. Luckily, I didn't play the hentai game

Summer with Liru!

Liru is a great werewolf! ️

I love Liru!

> Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves
This is a self-help book that I have read because I got fed up that I can't seem to talk with anyone. I see all these people around me having fun talking with each other for hours but anytime I try to talk with anyone, it fizzles out after around five minutes and I feel like a failure and an outsider that does not belong in society. I found the title to be a little misleading, it does not really say anything about "being ourselves" and, while it supports its advice with research (done in the USA, mostly on university students…), it does not really propose any scientific theory about conversations either. Otherwise, it was a good book. It is organized around the acronym TALK, which stands for: Topics, Asking, Levity and Kindness.
My main takeaways from topics is that it is okay to talk about pretty much anything, people are more accepting of topics than most would suspect, but they also like to switch topics around a lot more than you would expect, so you shouldn't get stuck with a single topic. I don't think I am good with topics and one of the advices of the book was to keep a mental list (or not just a mental one) of random topics to talk about, and just throw one in when conversation starts to lull. Admittedly this sounds weird but apparently it works. I know that I always feel like I need a reason to talk about things, like I can't just ask someone if they like yuri without it somehow coming up before but their research says otherwise.
Asking is about asking questions, which is apparently something that most people don't do enough. The general advice is to ask more questions, try to ask follow-up questions, and that questions are also a good way to switch topics, which is a desirable thing. I think I ask enough questions…
The next is levity, which is the funnies, and the advice here wasn't that convincing. But yeah if you are funny, be funny, and if you are not funny, at least enjoy other people being funny.
Kindness, I guess everyone here is an expert on /kind/ness and will agree that being /kind/ is great. Apparently it also helps if you are kind while talking, or at least not rude. But you should listen actively and things like that.
There was also some stuff on talking in groups, having difficult conversations and apologizing, that did not interest me that much, but the content seemed sensible.
At the end there Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

I've decided to go through the Chinese Classics this year. I'm starting with the Daxue and Zhongyong. These two books were beginner level for anyone getting a basic education in China, Japan, Korea, and the rest of the Sinosphere before the 19th century. What we have here is a very different moral and ethical structure from liberal modernity, one that modern people would find very challenging. Both books are fairly short and there's a solid amount of commentary which makes reading a lot easier. I also picked up a copy of Baudrillard's Symbolic Exchange and Death. On imageboards, he's typically associated with the idea of simulation, but really this book was his magnum opus and symbolic exchange is most important idea. I get the sneaky suspicion that his theories of sacrifice and gift exchange aren't right but I want to finish the whole book first and I'll have to go back and read Marcel Mauss. This book also has a clearer layout of his ideas of simulation and simulacra.

>>5935
>like I can't just ask someone if they like yuri without it somehow coming up before but their research says otherwise.
I don't think I could do that. "Hey, have you ever heard of eroguro?" That wouldn't work I think.

>if you are funny, be funny, and if you are not funny, at least enjoy other people being funny.
I really struggle with this because I've spent so much time on esfores and VIP type boards that I have a really warped and disturbing sense of humor. Other times, I find other peoples sense of humor unfunny or just weird. Like they'll bring up some talk show thing or a stand up comedian and I just don't get what's so funny.

I just finished "The Inn in the Spessart Forest" by Wilhelm Hauff, it's a collection of tales with a framing story around it about travellers taking refuge in the inn but fearing they will be robbed there and telling stories to each other to stay awake. It was a nice little book and some easy reading, I enjoyed it.

>>5977
Anon!! Thank you for this, I didn't know. I'm interested in China too, I was reading the Sanzijing to learn it.

>>6002
I read another book of Hauff's tales, this one contained "The Caravan" and "The Shiek of Alexandria and his Slaves". Very fun!

>>5998
> Pavlov dog yourself into preferring some better activity
But I can’t stop daydreaming - it’s constant.

>>5999
It's called multi-track drifting, if you catch my drift. If you don't catch it yet, you should daydream even further on a competitive level, and I mean it seriously.

>>6003
Competitive dissociation doesn’t sound like a healthy endgame.

>>6006
It probably is, but it works for me so far, probably as I need an embodied investment to search for dissociative aesthetics for myself to outdo…

>>5995
My friend had it really bad it sucks.. he could dream about being an emperor

>>3095

Das cute mang.

>>3051
'tis da 'mas?

In my country e don't celebrate christmas

…boing…

>>5892
great step in the right direction sleep friend!

Last night I had a dream where I was running away from a crowd who were shooting at me in some abandoned cityscape. I had a revolver and, naturally, I shot back, killing several. Then I spotted a machine gun nest under a water tower, I got to it and pressed 'E', and the animations of charging people falling as they were mawed down by machine gun were amazing. They tried to flank me unsuccessfully, and finally they unleashed a cavalry charge of about a hundred people. Those got so close that I distinctly saw each face before a bullet stopped them.

I don't usually have violent dreams, and I didn't play any action games the day before.

>>5984
I just woke from a dream of rescuing and tending to slave girls. Can't possibly describe the mixture of feelings I'm experiencing. It didn't go anywhere though because I'm not horny right now.

I slept pretty good last night.

I need 9.5h or otherwise I start accumulating debt. I might not notice it the first three to four days but after that I start feeling worse (but not sleepy for some reason). I also wish that I didn't get eye bags when I sleep less than ten hours. Feels unfair

I can't tell if I have recurring dreams. Sometimes the settings and mood seem exactly the same as a dream I've seen years ago but I have no idea if I've actually dreamt it before.

The biggest help to getting sleep has been a bright light lamp that I use for 30 minutes to an hour every morning close to my face. I could go just outside but I'd rather not

>>4758
>How did you sleep last night, anon?
I slept around 6 hours. Wake up feeling like shit, but I attribute that to my lack of exercise yesterday.
>How many hours of sleep do you usually need? Did you have any dreams?
After working some nightmare shifts in an old job, I try to get 8 hours every day if possible. As for dreams, for many years I couldn't dream or remember my dreams, it was depressing. I've started dreaming again after eating some edibles some months ago, granted I get really anxious when I ate them, but being able to dream again feels way better.
>Do you ever have any recurring dreams?
Some recurrent dreams/nightmares are
>being a teacher again
>being at that bad job again
>body horror (hair, teeth or nails falling out, or digging out objects from my body)
The best dream I had recently was a Death Race/Zombie game/Comedy film mix that was really fun. I wish to dream something like that again.

>>5932
The one on the left

>>5934
The sauce is in >>/lum/

>>5940
I forgot why I asked this

The internet is so cruel. Can someone hug me and give me a dose of hopium?

>>5930
I have a ton of old VNs, older PC games, and old programs I'm autistically attached to and can't stop using (e.g. Word 2007) and getting them to run on Mint was a pain. Not having a package manager feels weird but I just want something simple and straightforward. I've tried running Bazzite in a VM and its slow as hell which is probably a VM issue but it looks good. I know in the Linux world you are supposed to learn how to do stuff but I'm so weighed down by work that I can't devote anytime to it beyond absolute basics.

>>5948
There isn't that much to figure out, if your IQ is higher than that of a tiktoker. Linux about as hard to use as a hammer. Just gotta aim.

>>5948
>I know in the Linux world you are supposed to learn how to do stuff but I'm so weighed down by work that I can't devote anytime to it beyond absolute basics.
Then use Bazzite. VMs are pretty simple to run using Virt Manager from the flatpak store so you can either run your windows stuff in that or using Wine/Proton. You don't need to learn much about Linux to use Bazzite as the nature of the system makes it pretty simple OOTB. Also I'm not sure what your PC specs are but Bazzite probably had bad performance because you ran it in a VM. Watch some YouTube videos about it or something before you decide to switch, and it's not a bad idea to install Bazzite on a separate drive and dual boot until you decide if it actually works for your usecase. Also, if you are put off by the gamer branding and focus, they have a more standard desktop oriented version called Aurora, also maintained by Universal Blue. I have it installed on my laptop and it's fine.

>>5911
>>5908
It looks like the freebasic yaml syntax highlighting configuration for that micro text editor wasn't perfect enough. So here's the improved version,now with additional block comment highlighting comment and new function highlighting addon color,

Rename the file from txt to freebasic.yaml and put it in ~/.config/micro/syntax/

>>2776
Wish it was true, cause the best I can do is being decent at using a search engine (DDG) so I can do most of the things I wanna do but I can't code for shit and I have a 100wpm record which I know is nothing compared to maybe some people on here and despite having a PC in my hands since I was 4 (win98), I feel like I'm barely scrapping the surface…