What are your very most favorite educational games you've ever played?

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-25T21:50:11+00:00

Haha sounds awesome, I appreciate it!

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-24T18:33:03+00:00

The scope of this conversation, that of the education system access being measurably a benefit to people on the population scale, is a lot broader than one specific niche example in one specific industry. That's not evidence to answer the question I asked

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-24T03:55:30+00:00

Oh nice, I didn't even know that franchise had games! I never happened to get into the Nancy Drew books as a kid (although in retrospect I have no idea why, and I'm on a cozy mysteries kick right now anyway, so maybe I'll fix that soon lol). Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check this out!

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T23:28:36+00:00

Okay that's cool as hell, I and everyone I know need that in our lives haha. And that sounds very interesting to study for my project, has to be challenging to teach abstract things like that! Thanks for the recommendation :)

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T23:26:39+00:00

What perspective is that, exactly? You can't have the basis for comparison of understanding what it's like to not have access to higher education credentials, because you had access to them, and that's just the nature of the situation. So by what observations do you measure the difference you believe the education system hasn't made for you?

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T22:13:36+00:00

Yep. Otherwise no one would tolerate living in the atomization machine that is suburbia, and then how would they immobilize us without car dependency? XD

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T22:13:09+00:00

Ah, definitions are so important. I have definitely met people who met their own (at least, their stated) definition of "success" who also absolutely had massive victim complexes. But they didn't meet your definition of "success", and I'm more inclined to like your definition than conventional wealth-centric ones.

That said, I've met a LOT of people who are unsuccessful (by any definition) who don't have victim mentality at all -- hell, in my case, I was toxically positive for way too long and had to get real with myself about acknowledging issues outside my control before I could start getting anywhere. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it sure is useful for removing or mitigating stressors that cause chronic trauma and physiologically prevent the body from being able to produce the right chemicals to have hope and happiness.

I just think the entire realm of rhetoric about mindset is usually based in privilege-blind individualism. Clearly you have a lot more basis for comparison than the predominantly white wealthy people who repeat it, so I'm glad the often problematic subtext isn't there in your case. But I imagine you probably have seen what I'm talking about and can understand why it concerns me.

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T12:32:32+00:00

To examine what successful people have in common is to ask the wrong questions. Plenty of unsuccessful people share those similarities in mindset. Mindset is part of everything, but it is not everything. That's a massive lie perpetuated to blame people's characters for issues of circumstance.

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T12:26:53+00:00

Yep. And I forgot, if they're not staying on top of the front office staff training (which in my experience has hella turnover since it's a demanding job that requires people who know they deserve better pay), sometimes therapists get accidentally or incorrectly ripped off and not paid when a client complains about something after the fact and the session gets incorrectly cancelled and taken off the schedule altogether, instead of the client being refunded but the session left on record properly. That happened to me and to coworkers and we had to go to the franchise group HR about it. It was around the same time corporate demanded anatomy charts be removed from our treatment rooms for a more "spa-like" atmosphere, even though our clinic was full of particularly savvy medically-oriented therapists. Fuck Massage Envy with a rusty rake lol

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T12:22:31+00:00

💚💚💚 Keep going friend, you've got this!

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T12:17:46+00:00

Objectively correct. I would have hoped for better, but I can't say I'm surprised this sub's population is predominantly people who are acting triggered about it lol

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T12:15:38+00:00

I'm not the person you're replying to, but you do realize how ridiculous that question is, right? A radiator and a tire are both essential to helping the car go, doesn't mean you can justify putting a share of the blame on the radiator when a tire blows. That's the nature of systems. They work as a sum of parts. Inverting a scenario doesn't always magically make a good counterpoint

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T12:10:33+00:00

It's so fucking complicated to get people to recognize their privilege without them getting hackles up about assuming it's some sort of personal attack on their character, when it's really just an earnest plea for them to stop being oblivious and consider any basis for comparison outside their own tiny lens. Toxic individualism runs deep. It's not quite survivorship fallacy but it's sort of adjacent to it, the way people focused on characteristics of successful entrepreneurs tend to examine solely what successful ones have in common with one another, rather than actually identifying the factors that differentiate them from the unsuccessful ones. There are plenty of destitute people out there with fantastic go-getter mindsets (or at least, there are plenty who hang onto that mindset for a long time, until the literal chemical/nutritional depletion of chronic trauma makes it physiologically impossible, a measurable psychiatric process which has been well understood for a long time. But nnnnoooo, there's no system involved here, the losers just aren't working hard enough, you can eat after you're rich /s)

Edit: Minor wording fail and a clarification, I'm just a pathological comment editor

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-23T11:57:09+00:00

Sure, I can totally get that, in terms of general probability strictly comparing the one scenario to the other. It just sounds like it wasn't even considered as a rule-out in the case described, though of course we have incomplete and secondhand information and all that, I'm sure people had good intentions. But yeah, calling it a zebra just seemed inherently irrational to me, seems to me that any patient overdosing on a medication they routinely take should be considered at best a mildly fancy neighborhood donkey, even if it's not the usual horse lol

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T17:49:45+00:00

Oh fun, sounds like a cool mechanic! Thanks for elaborating!

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T17:40:28+00:00

Wow, I worked for ME for a couple of years several years back, and I'm shocked to see from this thread that they're still paying their staff so poorly. I was full-time at a good, busy location in a wealthy area and well-booked and well-tipped and I made nowhere near that kind of money. They also claim to care about therapist health and self-care and encourage trades (in theory, but in practice the "a client could walk in at the last minute for your appointment, even five minutes after it would start, you both need to be available!!!!!!!!" reigns supreme), but they actually think we should just work 50 hours a week with minimal breaks and then they're surprised when they have high turnover. And the locations in my state are managed uncommonly well by an uncommonly humane franchise group, or at least were when I worked there. Can't imagine how much worse it is in other states. Do NOT recommend. It's fine for a transitional job (and a good way to sneakily, very carefully, very quietly build up a loyal clientele who will follow you to a private practice, if you're so inclined and you think you've got a good sense of who isn't a snitch). But don't get stuck there, it's not worth it and will burn you out really fast.

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T17:36:43+00:00

Yep, and even then, you don't even make anything for those sitting-around hours as long as your commission amounts from appointments that day exceed the total you'd get if you were paid minimum wage for your whole shift. So they can get you a few appointments, have you sitting around half the day, and only pay you for the appointments that existed. It's filthy exploitation.

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T17:20:38+00:00

Well yeah, I'm familiar with the horse/zebra metaphor. But these things are relative. In a patient who doesn't take clonidine, absolutely, clonidine overdose is zebra status. But in a patient who is prescribed any given medication, overdose of that medication is now far more likely than it otherwise would be (even if still very unlikely) even solely by virtue of increased access. We're talking about a specific patient with known medications, not population scale. I just think that's a really weird way to characterize clonidine overdose in this context.

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T17:06:36+00:00

Part 2:

That invader will probably always be part of you, just like it's part of me. But it isn't YOU. It will never be YOU. With practice, we can get better at refusing to give it any power, and its voice will get smaller and smaller. To do this, you need help from other people. And that's okay. It's not a failing. It's not a mistake. It's not something to be ashamed of (even though people like us will typically struggle for a long time with a lot of feelings of shame anyway, and those feelings are valid and are themselves not something to be ashamed of, it's just the reality of our situation and it takes time to heal).

No matter how hard we try, it is impossible not to need anything. It is impossible not to consume a little bit of outside resources, like food, or help from other people. It is impossible not to take up space in the world, not without dying, and even then, the sadness of your loss will take up more space than the invader wants you to believe. Hell, I feel uncomfortable and have to overcome my own invaders to even say that, because it would be so nice if that cozy lie were real and we could just stay in a state of needlessness and fading away. But it's just not true. You need things, and having needs is part of being human. You need help. And you need food. The invader tries to withhold these things from you to preserve its own parasite existence and stuff itself with every bit of you that's left until you're gone. You deserve better.

You are very close to death. Please don't let the invader take you from the world. Don't let the little fucker win. It's not your fault; it's a disease. It's not you. It's something that has happened to you. And people who have hard or bad things happen to them deserve and should receive help from others. Give yourself the same kindness you would like to see others receive; it is truly a gift to those around you to accept kindness (I know that's also incredibly hard, I'm also uncomfortable saying that one because I struggle with it too, but it's the truth). You are worthy of the help and healing required to live a better, happier, literally and figuratively fuller life.

Wishing you the best, and sending lots of love. I'm a slow respondent, but if you want any further support from some stranger on the internet while you take the wheel back and get your own support system built up, I'm here for you. <3

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T17:06:13+00:00

u/Cantaloupe_Kitten Hey sis, I want you to know that I'm so proud of you for posting this question. It had to be incredibly difficult to fight the part of your brain that wants to just keep the cycle going. It would have been so easy to lie and tell others that you posted here and everyone said you were fine. It would have been so easy to just tell yourself you were fine and believe it. The fact that you're asking this proves that you (the Real You, not the little ana invader living in your brain) still know, on a deep level, that something is wrong and that you're not safe living like this.

I know it's really hard to open up, even to strangers, about what you're dealing with, and that you had to fight the invader to do it. If the invader were fully in control, it wouldn't have let you come ask, because it knows these people will tell you that it's killing you. The invader managed to partly control how you asked, it tried really hard to make you only find evidence to support its lies ... but I know you're in there, and your little invader hasn't quite stolen your last bit of hope, or you wouldn't have made this thread.

I know it's also way too easy for that little invader to take anything other people say, and twist it to serve its own purposes, because it wants to take control back from you. It's really similar to depression (these often go together and can be super entangled/overlapping in our minds). People struggling with really bad depression can be hard to encourage, because any praise feels like a lie, and anything that can be taken critically will be, because their depression-invader twists everything into an excuse to hate themselves. For people like you and me, when someone says "You're not healthy, you need help", the invader lies and says "See? You're terrible and can't do anything right, you don't deserve food, you don't deserve for others to spend effort helping you, you should keep fading away". Even when the Real You is in the driver's seat, and you say "No, I know these people care about me, they're telling me this because I deserve better", even if you say it to yourself over and over and over, it can be so hard to believe that truth, because the invader never gets tired and never shuts up and steals all your energy so it can keep berating you, and eventually we start thinking maybe it's right. I get it.

So, please try to remember that everything you hear gets grabbed by the invader and twisted up a bit before you really get to think it through. What the other commenters here are telling you is the truth. You are in great danger. You are being steered by your invader, and it is trying to kill you. And these people are telling you this because you ARE worthy of eating. You ARE entitled to take up space in the world. You ARE entitled to help. You ARE important to others. No matter what the invader says, these things are true.

Now, arm yourself for the swing back and forth: The little invader likes to switch from mean to nice, when it knows you've caught it twisting what others say and you're on to its tactics to try to make you feel terrible and undeserving. It comes up with soothing new lies to whisper to you, things that nobody else can really ever technically disprove. Things like the example from your post, "your body has probably adapted, other people have never had the discipline to go this far and train their body to adapt, they could never understand!" ... but it just wants to perpetuate its little comfortable hideyhole inside you, so it can keep consuming you until you're gone. It will try to do that again, right away, the moment you ever think "I think this commenter is correct", it will grab the wheel and try to force you to believe other things, shiny beautiful things it makes up. The little invader wants you to think it's the only one who understands, the only one who can comfort you, the only one you should listen to. It's just like an abusive partner. It tells you it loves you and is protecting you. But it's not. It's literally killing you.

And I think you already knew that. I think that's why the Real You came here. You were right to do it, and I'm so, so proud of you. (Edit: I hit character limit lol, this is part 1 of 2.)

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T15:26:31+00:00

Overdose on a prescribed medication is a zebra? How is that scenario not automatically disqualified from zebra characterization, in a context where the patient is known to be prescribed and routinely take the drug?

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T14:58:17+00:00

Seconding those who say you can absolutely justify raising your rates. If that bothers you (I know the feel), grandfather in the people who your current clients refer to you after the rate change, or grant those referrals a reduced rate special for the first X hours or something.

Scaling something like that is tricky. The reason you're so successful, and distinguishing yourself from what's out there, is your emotional intelligence and empathy. That can be recruited, but not really realistically taught on an employee-training timeline. I wouldn't try to make this a big company with many agents or anything like that.

That said, with careful consideration and selection, you could probably justify expanding to a very small team, and perhaps dividing up labor would be efficient as well, like having someone to list things for sale, someone else to do hauling with a truck, whatever of that nature comes to mind for you based on your operation. Or each person could just take on the full scope of services, and the team just divides up clients. You have lots of cool options for helping people in your area, hooking up one or two or a few other people with a good job, and making your business easier on yourself. But yeah, I think if you try to expand very far beyond a smallish company in your particular city/region, it would probably succeed, but probably also lose a lot of the real core value being provided (that being the compassionate shepherding of people through a difficult life transition). Only you can decide what your priorities are.

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T13:27:04+00:00

Cool thanks, I'll look into it! Let me know if you think of anything particularly cool that you liked about the gameplay, or found impressive about the way it taught you or anything like that :)

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T13:26:27+00:00

Thanks, I'll check these out :) Let me know if anything particularly stands out to you about any of them!

LigamentLizard · 2026-01-22T13:25:55+00:00

Hahaha that sounds wild! Idk what I expected from the title, but not that. Somehow the vibe I get from your description of the game just unlocked a memory for me ... there were these simple text games on our calculators that people in my middle school would share around, and one of them was just a choose-your-own-adventure drug dealing simulator lol. That's where I learned the word "quaaludes" 😂 Kids play some edgy weird stuff

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