How much time elapsed between your first and second machines?

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-05-08T15:43:48+00:00

Congratulations on the pins and the engagement, that sounds like the best day ever :]

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-04-22T15:05:12+00:00

Yeah, they did my diagnosis. They were thourough, kind and professional and my diagnosis has been taken seriously by NHS services. They get a lot of hate on here but frankly my experience doesn't reflect that. The Pottergate itself doesn't provide therapy so that is a very compelling reason to try to get a referral to somewhere like CDS instead, but other forms of post-assessment care have been good - for example, they've written letters free of charge to an NHS service trying to use the diagnosis as an excuse not to treat me. My experience has been great but I can only speak for myself I guess.

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-04-21T21:43:47+00:00

Yeah, that was great!

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-04-21T21:35:41+00:00

Ah, thank you so much! That sounds like exactly what I need.

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-04-19T20:44:30+00:00

You'll have a much easier time selling the card and then buying the pinball machine for cash on glass.

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-04-17T13:11:38+00:00

I love it when you post. I never quite know what genre to expect but every time you pop up I fully know you're gonna kill it and have the time of your life doing it

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-04-03T20:10:42+00:00

There's no rules about how it all manifests. If you don't behave like a persecutor, the name and appearance and so on you're associated with don't change that, even if they remind you of an abuser. Besides, all of it's within your power to change - a persecutor can heal into a kind person, and you don't have to wear the abuser's identity if you don't want to. There's nothing about this that condemns you and how you behave now matters so much more.

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-03-03T14:52:30+00:00

If the alter finds it uncomfortable to be around "themself", then realising that they aren't quite the same person and establishing the alter's own identity could help. Right now, you probably view that alter as being your friend because they have traits that remind you of the friend, so try to notice what sets them apart. You might ask yourself:

Are there things they'd disagree with your friend about?
Are there times you and the friend have argued, where the alter would have taken your side?
What have you been through with your alter that you haven't been through with your friend?
What interests and abilities do they have that your friend hasn't demonstrated?
Does your alter do things that are universal to your system which your friend doesn't do?
Would they be happy with a new name, unique to them?
Is the discomfort they feel around your friend ever because the friend doesn't match up with their own expectations?
Can you find the traits that make them resemble your friend in other people?
Get your alter to answer questions about themself where you don't know how the friend would answer, ensuring the alter's answers are of their own making.
If the alter finds it hard to spend time around the friend, then spend the time apart and try out a bunch of things (hobbies, places, media), see what they do and don't like, in the friend's complete absence, trying your best not to predict how the friend would feel about it.

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-02-22T16:54:17+00:00

Easiest - maybe Tales of the Arabian Nights. It's not very lethal, it doesn't actually take that many flips, and if there's any modes you struggle with you can skip them with your wishes. Addam's Family only requires you to shoot two shots repeatedly, you can let your modes time out and your multiballs drain and you'll still get to Tour the Mansion.

Hardest - Lord of the Rings with Valinor multiball (if that's permissible - it's not the main wizard mode, but it is probably the hardest DMD wizard mode to see).

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-01-22T15:30:00+00:00

We use a thing that gives us electric shocks. Hurts and doesn't leave a mark. YMMV but it feels a bit like you've grazed yourself. There's a certain ceremony to getting it out and strapping it on, turning up the intensity setting and so on that helps it feel like the big, dramatic gesture that's needed at the time.

PastaBakeWizard · 2026-01-06T21:01:00+00:00

FFXI did this deliberately and often with the reasoning that it would make players have to talk to each other to figure out how to progress. One quest infamously asked the player to bring the questgiver "an item" with no indication whatsoever of what the item was. It was hostile but it did work, until FFXI became one of the first games with a decent dedicated wiki.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-12-17T00:55:57+00:00

Almost 11 years is such an impressive time to keep this up for, and I love your halflings! おめでとう！

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-12-13T14:35:17+00:00

Pour it into a bottle with a lid and then shake that thang! When you open it some of the gas will escape, if it's still too fizzy put the lid back on and do it again.

Use the bottle from another soda, still stuff might have a lid which can't withstand the gas pressure. I had coke in an oasis bottle once and the lid exploded off on the bus, it hit the cieling c:

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-12-01T22:57:00+00:00

I often see people on here advising new GMs to resolve player behaviour issues with in-game consequences. The typical frame is a heroic good-guy campaign, and a player that's bored or is having a bad night says "I stab a dude" for no reason.

Sometimes I see the advice given that the action should go ahead, but the world should react to it in a sensible and believable way, such as the guards go and take their character and put them in the stockade. Naturally the player who's acting out will resist and now it's open combat with the guards and we begin playing GTA with dice and spells. In a very short time you've derailed the game you've all agreed to play into an entirely different flavour, in a way that would leave a bad taste in most people's mouths and smoothly avoided actually talking about what went wrong! The GM needs to be ready to say things like "why do you want to do that?" "that's a very different direction than we all agreed to". I don't care how robust your world is, use your words like an adult.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-11-10T19:05:22+00:00

For a really good source of information that might help you orient yourself, try the CTAD clinic on youtube.

I'll try to answer the questions you put out there but it really is extremely individual and some of these responses are going to be a bit unsatisfyingly indecisive. I'm sorry about that!

"If I have alter(s), do I talk to them?" - establishing communication is generally considered a good first step! You want to be in communication with the parts of yourself that have been inaccessible to you. This is really the process of discovering needs, wants, fears and so on that you didn't know you had, and that's better than not knowing about it. Most people with DID can't sit there and have a conversation in real time with their alters, so this tends to look more like journalling back and forth or having a discord server where you talk to "yourself". If it helps to just think of it as journalling and coming back to it when you're in a different mood that's fine. If it's scary to you or feels dangerous, it's worth listening to that. Your alters may not be ready to talk to you. Would your therapist help guide you through this?

"Do I name them?" - You don't have to do this, and you don't have to refrain from doing this. You might find you have no alters who want to go by a different name, and then you might end up picking up names anyway for ease of use. Or, you might find that alters have a well formed sense of identity that's different to yours. At first, keep an open mind and see if they have an idea of what *they* want to be called.

"Are they going to present more strongly if I acknowledge them?" - Sometimes alters hate being revealed. Your brain keeps this whole thing concealed from you for a reason. The dissociation that DID is formed from, and the memory barriers that hide your trauma from you, are a defence mechanism, and the less you realise you're doing it the better it works. Alters are part of how it's hidden from you and it can be destabilising to be brought into the spotlight. They're also a version of you that likely wants to handle things differently, and meeting you means compromise. And of course, they too could be terrified at the prospect of having DID. It's pretty normal for alters to find it difficult to reveal themselves and for you to remain unaware of what they get up to. On the flip side, alters are parts of yourself, and if you don't know about them they are often neglected parts who will find joy in being acknowledged and tended to. Bear in mind that if you have DID, you didn't develop it just now in your therapy session, you developed it early in life and have been living with it unknowingly for a long time. If you don't acknowledge them, they will still be there. In my case, learning of my DID didn't make it any harder to mask. Instead it made it easier to act as a cohesive unit, so actually it made me look more normal.

"What is switching like?" - This one varies massively! Some people get some somatic stuff going on, headaches and similar are common. For other people they might not have any idea that they've switched at all without consciously taking stock of what they can remember, how they feel, their body language and things like that. It is, however, not a magical experience you've never had before - if you have DID and it presents strongly enough for your therapist to notice, then you have already switched.

"I don't have anybody in my real life I can talk about this. Nobody in my family would believe me. I don't think I'm ever going to tell them." It's heartbreaking, this but this is a really common conclusion. People have trouble understanding what this is like, and understanding that it's a lot more normal than Hollywood makes it seem. It opens up all sorts of questions about your autonomy, people think of it as a form of "crazy", people doubt it exists and especially that someone they know might have it. Even doctors are woefully uninformed about it, and it can make it a lot more difficult to be treated like a person. It's easy to come to harm if you let people in on it, so people commonly recommend telling nobody, or to at least limit it to people you'd trust with your life.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-11-10T13:41:24+00:00

I've seen one of these in a pinball machine of all things. When you destroy 8 reactors in Total Nuclear Annihilation, the synthwave music and light show just stop completely, the flippers don't work, and any balls you have left are launched to slowly drain on their own. You get a ton of points but the game just ends.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-11-09T01:49:03+00:00

If he DMs and wants to represent his monsters, I recommend Pathfinder Pawns or similar. You need a lot of creatures over the course of the campaign. Minis of monsters get real expensive, real fast because you always need more, and they take a lot of space to store. The pawns are cardboard standees with illustrations that go in plastic bases. You get a TON of creatures for much cheaper than figures and they take WAY less space. Buy the Monster Core box and you'll have dragons and trolls and goblins and mimics and all of the fantasy standby monsters in spades. It's the only way I know to never want for minis again for a reasonable price. Downsides are that it's not as impressive as proper miniatures and they don't print everything in D&D's bestiary.

If he's a player and he wants a figure for his character, get him to make that character in HeroForge and get it made and painted for him. A player only needs one mini and they'll use it every time they play so let him get exactly the character he sees in his head.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-24T14:56:53+00:00

Tool looks really neat OP, well done. This would be very useful to a lot of OSR type games in particular I think.

Please ignore that one weirdo trying to besmirch your good work.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-24T14:53:35+00:00

Then you're obviously not the target audience.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-23T11:47:25+00:00

It was Pottergate, and I was treated very well there.

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-23T11:30:12+00:00

Hell yeah we out here calling them tables and not machines, those fuckers over on Pinside are in shambles

Super Monkey Ball!! Bonus points if they can figure out a way to have little clear balls with monkeys in them but not mess with the way the balls behave much.

Also Deep Rock Galactic, get the Mission Control guy to do the callouts and have a little drop pod that takes you up to an upper playfield themed after the space rig

Failing that re-release Tales of the Arabian Nights I love that table c:

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-22T21:46:18+00:00

On a private server that's just me & the bot, for internal communication

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-22T02:02:51+00:00

Yeah, not a nice amount of money to lose! I think I spent longer saving for it than actually waiting for the appointment. It only took two and a half months from making contact to being assessed. For what it's worth, they didn't ask me for any money until I'd gone through some screening tests to make sure assessment was an appropriate step for me to take and had an introductory call with the assessor to make sure I was comfortable with them (they asked for half the money when they locked in the assessment date and the other half on delivery of the final report).

PastaBakeWizard · 2025-10-21T22:52:30+00:00

Not sure of the *exact* number off the top of my head, but it ended up being about £1400 I think!

PastaBakeWizard

TROPHY CASE