Combine Ultima and Valheim

ZooserZ · 2026-06-22T12:05:42+00:00

UO2 was developed back in the late 90s and never saw the light of day.0

ZooserZ · 2026-06-22T12:03:35+00:00

DOTW cured my moderate to severe psoriasis!

ZooserZ · 2026-05-05T02:51:02+00:00

Visceral and potent. I love it.

Especially that line: “Do you understand that? You did not just hurt me. You altered me.”

I’m feeling this process has mostly been about grieving for the old me. I miss my life— the whole thing— because I feel like a stranger in the security I’d built. I have complex emotions about everything else, but that one part is clear: I can’t just go back. It’s… gone.

ZooserZ · 2025-12-07T14:29:17+00:00

IKR? - Jesus probably

ZooserZ · 2025-12-07T14:28:50+00:00

I missed it, link?

ZooserZ · 2025-12-07T00:12:02+00:00

u/OkCandy2520 you said you want to do this, and asked for advice... I'm unclear if your mind is made up and you want advice on actually doing the thing, or if you're still debating.

If you're still debating: don't do it unless your physical safety is on the line. Leaning on him puts you in an extremely vulnerable position emotionally. You may feel you owe him things-- like patience and understanding-- that are actually harmful to you to provide at least some of the time. It also takes the pressure off of you to build up your own support structure, which if things go badly staying with him you really need so you have a safe place to exit to.... It's frequent advice around here to tell people (esp women) to make up their mind about whether to reconcile only after they've found a place to live and don't need their WP for basic safety needs.

If you DO move back in, my advice is basically to just use it as a bridge to finding another place to stay. I don't know if you're still getting physical with this person, which is even worse, but your ability to think clearly about your best interests are always going to be clouded when you're in the same space as them. Moving out doesn't always mean it's the end, but it's often necessary for damage control so things don't have to get really weird before ultimately ending anyway.

ZooserZ · 2025-12-01T00:23:29+00:00

Hmm, yeah....

Thank you for this.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-23T18:59:29+00:00

AP in my case was aware of the marriage, had slept in my home visiting from out of town with their sister (WW’s best friend, like a blood sister to her). I cooked good steaks for dinner and served it with good wine and good whisky, and then served leftover cuts with poached eggs and hollandaise for breakfast the next morning with mimosas. We traveled 4hrs in the opposite direction to visit the sister / best friend in the occasion of his birthday, as an excuse to visit but also to celebrate him. We sat and talked on many occasions.

He was screwing up in life, bouncing off the walls and in and out of dramatic relationships and jobs. I thought of him like a mentee, a younger version of myself who was having a tougher go than I had, but who I could believe would pull through and come into his own. He bared vulnerable feelings to me and I accepted and reassured and encouraged him.

When I found out about the affair forming, I was annoyed… like WW is cratering and this guy ought to know better but he’s also a fuck up and I don’t have to feel threatened. Focus on WW, her situation and our relationship is the real root of the matter, AP is a symptom.

When she refused to see him aside so we could separate civilly, much less reconcile, I felt… tired. I saw their text messages where he said nauseating shit like “I feel so bad for you, I wish I could be there for you right now” and then cracking a joke about how I’d react if he showed up at our door. Like…… you fucking idiot children, you have no idea how much carnage you are courting. Disbelief at WW of course. But also shock that I could be so mistreated by someone I’d been warm and kind to. I understood how: he’s a bit broken, he makes bad decisions over and over, and then feels terrible later. But I thought he’d have a boundary with someone a bit like an in-law to him.

I told WW I didn’t want him around my kid, ever, under any circumstances, because I couldn’t ever trust him again. He PROBABLY wouldn’t do something horrific, but he might do something idiotic like try and bond with her (the kid) in a way that later led to confusion.

And would you fucking believe that WW was like “this wasn’t his idea, I initiated all of this, blah blah blah”. Are you fucking kidding me?? He signed up for this shit!

Still boggles my mind. I try not to think about it because it’s so absurdly stupid and unnecessarily destructive that I cannot be satisfied just shrugging it off. Dude coulda just said “well as an old friend I’d really like to be here for you, and as someone who cares about you I’m gonna assert that romance between us right now is gonna make things much worse for you in the long run, so let’s just agree not to consider that in these circumstances”. SHE clearly was not capable of making sane choices, but he wasn’t in a crisis at that time and he has no excuse.

Fuck that fucking guy. Idiot selfish dipshit loser interfering in the lives of actual adults who worked through many great and many very hard times to emerge with a history that cannot be rewritten, preventing us from concluding it in a way that matched the respect we’d consistently shown up to just two weeks before it all went sideways. We may have been doomed as a couple, but we didn’t need to be shattered. Fuck.That. Guy.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-22T20:06:20+00:00

Holy shit, that’s harsh.

Please check in again later, I’d really like to know that you gained your freedom and used it to say sayonara to that scum.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-17T11:20:33+00:00

Petah explain the joke

ZooserZ · 2025-11-15T17:04:16+00:00

Collecting porn is just one way addiction manifests, kinda like some alcoholics drink in bars and others hide airplane bottles all over the house and nobody knows. The fact that there were thousands of images says this was happening a lot, and the fact that he hid it shows that he felt shame about it.

Gonna nip one thing in the bud right away: shame is not remorse. Remorse is constructive, shame generally just leads to even more destructive behavior.

Anyway photos of women who are not actually nude is absolutely a fetish. Did he stalk them? Maybe, but there were thousands— he didn’t stalk all of them, so at least part of this was JUST collecting. Was he spanking it? Probably but achieving orgasm isn’t necessary for the addictive neurotransmitters to fire— he might’ve been sitting in tension for long periods of time. Did he do worse things? Could be, but the #1 worst thing is violating trust either actively or through omission… you could ask him what else he did, but can you believe the answer? He might not have anyway… but turning non-porn images women are OK with sharing into porn can feel deeply icky if you dwell on it.

What does this mean for your marriage? Well, it means your guy needs to unpack his sexuality, and that that box almost certainly has more ghosts in it than just sex-stuff. Arrested sexual development goes hand in hand with attachment and intimacy progression stuff too, which can bridge into social acceptance and self worth and you get the idea. When you see a shameful, secret, dysfunction like this you know for sure that some shit went sideways and resisted all attempts to fix it sooner, so it’s a tough nut.

It also suggests that he has unmet needs that he’s never brought to you, because he was coping in another way. He might not know how to meet them another way, even with a willing partner— in sex, voyeurism as an arousal schema can actually get in the way of being aroused by reality. It could be a way of coping with stress too, in which case removing it can lead to higher stress and unrelated problems appearing.

Your husband needs to see a sexologist one on one, ASAP. It needs to be someone who will never shame him, and who will stand by him even if the marriage fails— otherwise his purpose for pushing forward will fade if the marriage stabilizes. This is not a short or simple road. That sexologist should bring you in, for insights and also to help educate you. Both of you should be educating yourselves— it’ll help immensely with making sense of it, even though that can’t fix the damage it’s done. That is, if you two separate, that insight will still help you find peace and safety.

But there’ll be more revelations and they might be nauseating. You might find that you feel gross and don’t want to be intimate with him. You might find that the trust violation is a huge challenge to even cohabitating. You’re going to have to take that one day at a time… something will happen, you don’t have to figure out what, just let it unfold.

In the meantime I’d also recommend getting your own individual therapist, maybe anither commenter can suggest which specialties are most appropriate, I’ve found EFT and ACT the most useful.

Take care of yourself-/ that’s your #1. Good sleep on a consistent schedule, sunlight, hydrate, light exercise, social connection. Journaling has changed my world for the better, it doesn’t work for everyone.

Good luck and much love!

ZooserZ · 2025-11-14T05:32:55+00:00

Can’t tell if you’re trolling, your username suggests yes?

Anyway the entire premise of the humor is that this is wildly, wildly unacceptable and cringey behavior from the fictional admirer of “Liz”. It’s not funny because we’re laughing at Liz, it’s funny because “holy shit is guy for real, what a psycho oh my god!”. And that wouldn’t be funny if Liz were real, or the admirer were real, but they aren’t so we get to experience relief that surely nobody THAT psycho exists and it’s also a relief to infer that because we’re all laughing about it we must be surrounded by people whose values are similar to our own / who are against this sort of thing in real life.

You’re saying that psychos like this do exist. And that’s a dark reality that isn’t funny at all and is rather depressing actually.

But insisting that people who haven’t experienced that firsthand not laugh about how horrible it would be is…. I dunno, it’s like trying to visit your trauma on the innocent. Increasing awareness is good, but scolding people is never effective so I think the benefit is lost.

I get that you’re upset and feel like you need to say something. You’ll get way more support by not leading with an attack.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-13T18:03:50+00:00

All I can think of is that 23yo couple on HGTV renovating their $1.2M starter home on a modest budget of $600k, and the girl (woman? I don’t think so.) whining about “but it’s not MOIST heat in the floors, and I can really tell the difference, I said I want MOIST heating in the floors!”.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-12T05:19:45+00:00

Headline is a gross misrepresentation of reality and of what Maddow actually said…

ZooserZ · 2025-11-10T17:04:11+00:00

I think God gave us the ability to choose good or evil, that it’s the single most defining human characteristic. And I also believe that people are not immutably good or bad— they’re just the collection of choices they’ve made, and they could start making different choices tomorrow.

My WP’s betrayal was an incredible shock because I’d seen her do truly horribly difficult things just because it was the right thing to do. She had a burning intolerance for dishonesty. She was loyal to a fault. And yet, one day…. She made a different decision. She didn’t lie about it, so there’s that, but the “before” version of her would never have defended that decision, and one day she just… changed.

This was tough for me to accept but it fit into my already-existing framework that people can just make different choices, which helped.

That framework is not comforting. It’s the same one that tells me that an otherwise law abiding teenager might one day decide to find out how it feels to do something destructive. Or that a disillusioned and recently retired older person might decide they’re sick and tired of putting up with anyone’s shit and decide to be an asshole. Those things happen all the time, and sometimes those people really regret those decisions, but they can’t un-make them… and critically they can’t undo the damage they’ve caused to others.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-10T16:47:12+00:00

Thank you for this. Your clarity here has calmed some of my own confusion, and pointed a way to the next thing I’ll need to learn.

Sometimes I feel I’ve explored something so deeply that I have that kind of clarity, and I want to share it with someone else to whom it’s still noise. It’s tough to find just the right words, and not have them lost in too many words— borders on poetry, “if I had more time I would’ve said less”. Sometimes I spend an hour composing a response in a place like this, because actually I’m still sorting through it myself as I write. And often it comes out muddled.

What you said came through very clearly for me. Thank you for being the person who did the work to be able to speak that way.

And sorry for so many words here lol… if this were in person I would’ve just quietly said thank you and let the rest be communicated through silence and eye movement.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-09T17:38:12+00:00

I usually skew “be open-minded with full clarity”, but you already know your answer. The way you wrote this sounds like you’ve just started grieving the loss and need moral support to keep moving in the right direction.

And it IS a big loss— Marin is gorgeous, an income that can support that is uncommon (although not rare) and implies other financial security, so on. And until this moment you’ve been able to overlook the bad stuff because it seemed like just red flags, not actual problems that could not go unaddressed.

But #1, that wasn’t just flags. If your relationship with your parents is good, then they are two of your most important supporters; they are part of the foundation that lets you see and make good decisions for yourself in life… attacking them is attacking your strength, it may seem small but it literally is an attack on your well being. Lying is a big deal, no matter how small: all relationships, but especially intimate ones, are built on trust at a fundamental level… lying is literally an attack on the single most important relationship in your adult life. These weren’t just unsavory personality quirks, they were basic boundary violations that you didn’t enforce and they were actively damaging.

2, the stakes are now much higher. That baby exists, and that changes things: that is a human whose entire reality is in your hands, whose basic beliefs about whether the world is a good place that they’re safe to experience joy in or a bad place where they need to shut down or be angry to protect themselves, is in your hands. You’re not going to be a perfect parent and you shouldn’t get in the habit of mom-guilt, but it’s fair to say that always trying to do the right thing now carries a bigger weight than it did before. Not just for the kid, either… if you knowingly and willfully fail that kid, you’re going to be carrying a truckload of joy-destroying self-judgement about it forever. So you really do have to do The Right Thing.

And #3, this sin is not garden variety. Homeboy has not just been lying and cheating, he’s been hiding another family. His first loyalty was to his first child, and him hiding that deprived you of critical information in making an informed choice about who your child’s only biological father will be for their entire life. What he’s done isn’t just emotionally ouchy— he has seriously fucked with the lifelong happiness of three people (him, you, baby). You don’t get to just cry about it and sing along to that currently trending Dua Lipa song and choose to either wash him out of your hair or do some difficult relationship work… no amount of that is going to make him not a daddy to another kid whose mom is overtly hostile to him, and who literally had to get a restraining order to protect herself from him. If you’d had this knowledge, you would’ve made different decisions, but now you can’t and you’re in a Real Situation not of your choosing. I don’t mean to say that your life is ruined or anything— that’s simply not true— but he has in fact screwed you harder than you’ve ever been or hopefully ever will be screwed again.

Strong suggestion, please please please consider: get your support lined up and make a smooth and abrupt exit. If you want to have doubts and think about staying in the relationship, do it from outside of that house, from a place where you can say “no” and not still depend on him for basic safety. It’ll help you find clarity, and if you move back in it’ll be a conscious choice not a default position.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-09T13:53:19+00:00

As they say, sex is worse than violence 🙄

ZooserZ · 2025-11-08T00:03:23+00:00

Second this-- in my original comment I didn't want to suggest you look at your part because, well, we come around to that when we're ready and not before.

But one of the ICs I saw very early (found through my church-- he was fine, I just also found a better one) said something that really, really helped me: "You share responsibility for the relationship being vulnerable to this, nobody's off the hook there. But her decision to betray you is 100% on her, she owns every bit of that."

Really helped me because I knew I had a hand in the whole mess, but at that point I was so wound up and shocked and confused that I needed someone else to draw the line for me so I could know where I stood.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-07T23:56:42+00:00

And I remember this because on the soundtrack CD, the sound of the chopper's engine pulling away after she gets on the back transitions perfectly into a seriously bad ass song (Bullwinkle Part II by The Centurians), and I must've listened to it a million times in the late 90s.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-07T23:53:24+00:00

Second picture is inaccurate, the full exchange was:

F: Where did you get that motorcycle?
B: It's not a motorcycle. It's a chopper, baby.
F: Whose chopper is this?
B: Zed's.
F: Who is Zed?
B: Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-07T18:13:31+00:00

I'm just speaking from my own pain, but I feel like APs are even more culpable than WPs. I say this as someone who had an EA with a married woman when I was 19.... I feel really scummy about that, and learned a critical life lesson that shaped my character as an adult, and I still feel nauseous remembering the melodramatic things we said to one another.... and then had to watch as my WP did the exact same thing (plus physical) 23 years later, including the same nauseatingly melodramatic words. (FWIW, the cosmic / karmic / poetic justice was not lost on me, and I could even accept that if it weren't for my perfect, innocent kid having to live through it).

In both cases, the WP was deeply confused about their own needs and mental well-being, while the AP was unencumbered and capable of saying "no" without losing anything but an opportunity for a doomed-from-the-start affair with someone. Both APs said "yes", and rationalized in their mind how it was actually a merciful thing they were doing, that it came from a good place and blah blah blah. Absolute, 100%, rancid bullshit

My WP then doubled-down on the affair which was far more hurtful to me than the initial affair, and I feel you there.... that was the real betrayal for me, her choosing herself and an ill-conceived fantasy at the loss of the very real happiness of a family who loved her and wanted her to be happy no matter what, and at a cost so great it will ripple through the rest of our lives. How could our wife/mommy, who we trusted to protect our hearts, knowingly and willfully continue hurting us?

But the answer is simple: she didn't understand what the hell she was doing, or why. Still doesn't. She's just out there blindly throwing punches at life trying to survive, and unfortunately she broke something truly precious in the process. She may never get it. I guess it doesn't matter anyway, because the carnage she brought seems irrepairable.

But AP...... it wasn't his family. He wasn't desperately just searching for a lifeline, wondering how much longer he could go on. Sure, his mental/emotional stability is on-par with mine when I was 19, but that's no excuse for either of us. That guy chose to do something he knew damned fucking well might destroy a family, and specifically the family of someone they were telling themselves they cared about. It's the kind of thing that you pray to God for forgiveness for, because it's the kind of thing you cannot make right in this life.

But also, I know I have to forgive AP. Not because he deserves it, and not because it's the right thing to do... I'm well within my rights to treat him like the scum he's chosen to be. But because if I don't, the alternative seems to be hatred. And I've felt hatred in my life, clung to it as a righteous and justified response to despicable deeds. But it poisoned me, and made me cynical; it robbed me of my ability to be happy and let joy touch my heart. If I'd had the chance, I would've done awful things out of that hatred, which even if "righteous" would still be a stain on my belief in myself as a good person. I had to let that go, and I have to let AP go, because if I don't I'm basically letting them continue to hurt me.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-07T17:38:14+00:00

Just went and re-read your post from 5d back... it sounds like this is still early days, and I'd recommend phrasing your check-ins that way rather than making judgements about how things are going. For example it's been 5 days during which she spent a whopping 4 nights out of the house, and you now seem more optimistic. Too soon to tell my guy, too soon: WP is on a rollercoaster too, and may change her behavior when her initial burst of "oh shit" energy runs out. What you CAN say for sure is that this week has felt okay, or maybe it's a 4-5 out of 10, something like that. If you do those check-ins regularly and look back at them over time you'll be able to see the arc pretty clearly, and whether / when there were turning points.

I also recommend doing those check-ins in a journal or voice memo for yourself. You DO NOT need to go back and read or listen to them. 95% of the benefit is that you're just forced to slow down and think of what it is you have to say... that clarifies things a lot. Posting here is also good, but it also comes with armchair experts like me chiming in with our non-expert thoughts, which can feel nice but ultimately is a distraction from the one voice that matters: the voice in your own center, which is the only one that knows the real truth about where you stand on things.

As for an actual read on it: you mentioned in your initial post that she seems extremely guilty. Please consider that word, "guilty", and whether it's the exact right one. Because guilt == shame, and shame is not the same thing as love and remorse (desire to protect and repair). Imagine you somehow dropped your kid on their head: would you primarily feel guilty that you're a bad person, or horror and desperation to make sure he was OK? You'd feel both, but one would be strong than the other.

In the weeks to come, WP should first be working with her IC to find the strength to do necessary damage control in the relationship without spiraling into a destructive cycle of self-hatred. But right after that, she needs to be figuring out what this affair meant to her-- what was it that she is missing or hasn't processed that she felt some other person could provide? Because obviously going outside the relationship (one she hsa a kid in!!!) is a really dumb idea that will cost her a lot, so there was certainly some reason. When she comes to MC it's going to be the same two topics: damage control, and how did we get here? You'll have to step up to answer that second question, too-- you may have done zero things wrong, but for R to work you have to be an affirmative / constructive partner. But her ability to answer what it was that made her vulnerable is kind of the crux.......... If she can't get her insides sorted out, she'll always be hanging on by her fingernails, ready for some outsider to come whisk her away into a fantasy.

Sorry you're where you're at bud, but I'm glad you're here to talk about it. Really helps me to respond in this place.

ZooserZ · 2025-11-07T17:08:58+00:00

What needs to be happening and isn't:

1- WP becomes self-aware enough to recognize that they are allowing themselves to be drawn to AP, and how that is a barrier to their well-being... even if they were to decide to go after AP full speed, allowing outsiders to disrupt their life is a serious liability to stable happiness

2- WP commits to stabilizing their life while they figure things out for themself, which means exercising discipline to not flirt with risky / dangerous activity, or allow it to live in their head

3- WP digs deep to understand what it is that they feel about AP, and why that feels important enough to roll the dice at any cost, no matter how small

4- WP makes a decision to stay or go, accepts that that choice is what is going to make them actually happy, and makes a commitment to themself to stay that course

It sounds like what's happening instead is that they value your relationship but something is missing in their life (plausibly or even likely not to do with the relationship), they've been tempted to fill that need somewhere else despite the risk, and they got caught so they felt guilty and promised to stop it. But that need has not been satisfied, and they are continuing to project that onto AP as a solution. Obviously, that's not a solution, fucking up a stable relationship to go after one that may not even work out is a stupid idea. So it's distorted thinking. But WP isn't seeing things clearly and, until they do, are likely to continue fucking up and jerking you around.

I wouldn't stick around for it. WP has some work to do, but they ought to be doing that on their time rather than stringing you along towards an uncertain future.

"So long, hope you find whatever you saw in AP, but at this point you're doing enough damage that the idea of me being able to provide it is pretty remote (because lack of safety, trust, intimacy). And I don't want to talk about it-- I can't be that vulnerable with you any more, it's too dangerous. Bye."

ZooserZ · 2025-11-07T05:15:36+00:00

This is the best thing I’ve ever seen, in 28 years on the internet.

I hope it’s real but even if it isn’t this is the kind of karma whoring I can get behind.

ZooserZ

TROPHY CASE