wizardbeard

Yeah, at that point you're most of the way to a flash cart's cost anyway. Was a big gift for someone I knew cared about having something to display.

More from my college years, but an ex made off with more than half of my video game collection right before scalpers/speculators started driving prices through the roof. Most of my GameBoy games. My favorite GameCube games. All of my Genesis, GameGear, Xbox360, and N64 games plus each of those consoles. Including multiple complete in box games. The argument was that she found and bought some of what she kept, but it was always bought using my fucking money. She didn't have a job past our first year together. Really had me swindled. Don't mingle finances until you're married folks.

From childhood? A whole bunch of LEGO sets that are either out of print now or are still stupid expensive. Hard to justify $50+ on LEGO.

You can get a good quality repro cart, repro box, and repro players guide all together on AliExpress for ~$80 if you shop around. Or at least you could a year ago.

Still super overpriced, but cheaper than dealing with a scalper.

balemussy got me acting unwise

But seriously thanks, that is some great art!

Don't feed the troll children

Edit: I thought we were past the "I identify as an Apache Attack Helicopter" type shit a decade ago. Boo! Get some new material!

Pretty sure the dragon account had the username dragonfucker, with only a display name of Dragon Rider (drag).

ELIZA was one of the first chatbots, developed with 1960s era tech. With what is obviously an incredibly limited selection of preprogrammed response phrases to any arbitrary input, it managed to fool people into feeling like they were talking to a human, merely by asking open ended questions.

Example:

Obviously modern AI/LLM based chatbots are far more complex, and far better at generating convincing responses. But they still aren't real people.

Also, having been in a relationship with someone who only told me what I wanted to hear (as chatbots do), it's very unhealthy long term. Makes it very easy to develop narcisistic behaviors, and to have completely unrealistic expectations of how normal social interactions should work. Biases to ignore negative or unenthusiastic feedback, the chance to feel slighted when someone doesn't respond with interest to what you're talking about, etc.

You've gotten a lot of great advice so far, so I'll keep it short.

Don't beat yourself up if you aren't super confident in social situations right now. Socializing is a skill, and like any other skill you can get out of practice. Like any other skill, you can improve over time through repeated attempts. Like any skill, it will come easier to some than to others. The more you get out there the better you'll do.

The best site I'm aware of for finding local events is meetup.com.

That ex I mentioned earlier used it to jump ship to an entirely new social group after things exploded with me and her former one. Moved on to a whole new social group over two weeks during the holiday season. Tried to warn them that she had been stealing from her last friend group (when I found her on the site, the group she had joined posted something about keeping an eye out for something someone had lost during a meeting, otherwise I would have stayed out of it) but they thought so well of her it fell on deaf ears.

My wife used it for a number of years and met and maintained a decent social group out of it. Especially for a grad student hours away from her previous social life with a schedule dominated by clasees and multiple gig-work jobs.

Beyond that, local libraries, community centers, and museums may have event schedules for social stuff. In my area there was a weekly evening trail walk with food and beer trucks at a local museum. Wife and I were starting to make small talk with regulars and knew a few names... before a storm came through and flood damage closed the park for over a year.

There is no direct way to find people who would be intersted in having a long-term friendship.

That's true in real life as well, even in situations where you have regular interactions with a lot of people with stuff you have in common (college and college clubs).

Judging by your other comments you likely already know this, but you start small and go from there. See how far/how long you can take the friendship.

Except for the commentary sentences above the links. Eugh.

A "Junk" is a type of Chinese sailing ship: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junk_%28ship%29

But it's a pretty rare and specific term.

Yeah. It's a "fun" ride skimming through the Executive Orders he rolled out as soon as he took office. Should all be accessible from whitehouse.gov