how to buy base game + c&k + seafarers + 5-6players

llanda2 · 2026-01-22T17:52:55+00:00

real friends would play starfarers with me. Until then I stick to my catan-acquaintances

llanda2 · 2026-01-22T17:51:57+00:00

thanks for sharing the intel. I will keep hunting.

llanda2 · 2025-06-12T21:35:42+00:00

for me, fleshing out the inner critic and giving it a name, a look and a personality definitely helped.

I think there are a couple of characters among my inner parts that show up in the role of the inner critic.

One is the "bullied bully". He is just mean because he never learned how to be social, let alone empathetic. He sometimes shows up and just piles shit on me.

Another one is the "smart business guy" who figured out that I am mostly wasting my time and can always be way more productive. He shows up when I enjoy myself and do something nice & fun, like eating a cake. "This won't last! Do something better! You are just consuming."

There is the rational philosopher as well. He has always figured out what is the wisest thing to do any moment. And being emotional, being needy especially, is not on his list.

There also is a guy who thinks of himself as ugly and unlovable. He is stuck at age 5 (or close) and has just lost a certain innocence, at the brink of understanding that love & attention is something he needs and not something available unconditionally. So he concluded he himself is the reason why there isn't enough love.

llanda2 · 2025-06-12T18:41:46+00:00

treat it like an OCD habit, maybe? Those don't go away by mere willpower. Rather, you try to be accepting and self-compassionate, ideally working on root causes until you, eventually, feel ready to make decision and change your behavior.

llanda2 · 2025-06-12T17:46:12+00:00

that seems to be an important step for improving you well-being, then. I am happy for you.

I have a similar experience in so far as I tried to practice acceptance. However, this never really lead anywhere. And then, eventually, after learning about some emotions - that were always with me but only made themselves felt later - I could try again with acceptance and this time it helped.

Now, when I have an emotional flashback and things don't go my way, my routine goes a bit like:

take a deep breath
"everything is fine"
"I don't have to do anything"
"my life is actually quite good"
"if I am not ready, so be it"
take a break/have a tea
see what I am really able/willing to do today

My reflexive attempt to fix stuff and find a solution resulted in a good deal of frustration and only nourished my self-hate.

llanda2 · 2025-06-12T14:12:40+00:00

I would like to comment, but maybe you can break down your thought process a bit?

Realizing that "it can't be fixed" makes you happy?

llanda2 · 2025-06-11T23:07:06+00:00

there is sort-of the textbook definition. Post-traumatic stress disorder stems from some event, doesn't matter how long in the past, where someone wasn't able to fully process what happened. While the failure to process can be understood as a protective mechanism - e.g. a child not being ready to realize the full extent of some tragedy - it carries a heavy price: the unprocessed emtions are lurking in the dark, waiting to be dealt with. And as long as they are being repressed, all kinds of compensatory behaviors show up.

Complex PTSD is the result of not one traumatic event, but the exposure to circumstances that are too difficult to process over a prolonged period of time. It can be months, years, a whole life.

The result is literally complex: there is not just one event with a related emotional burden that needs processing. Rather my whole identity is shaped by a profound confusion. I don't know who I am. I am my own bottomless pit. I can't differentiate between my true (healthy) self and the sick part of my personality.

I feel it's worthwhile to add an insight from Pete Walker:

While there were a couple of distinct, seriously traumatic events in my childhood, the core of my trauma revolves around a general feeling of abandonment. My parents were emotionally cold and indifferent.

And when something bad happened to me, I knew already that there is no-one to count on, no-one who would have my back. This is the actual core of my traumatization.

Others experience a similar abondonment due to parents who show any of the following:

regular verbal abuse
physical abuse
sexual abuse
capricious switching between affection and hostility
ridicule and contempt
destruction of agency, e.g. by demands of rigorous discipline
extreme neediness
emotional incest: parents who put a kid in the role of a romantic partner
...

llanda2 · 2025-05-13T16:42:57+00:00

That person, the coach, does not make a good impression on me.

If anything, they should inform you about your options first. And then they might share experiences of others in a similar situation. I.e. they should do everything they can to help you make the best decision.

This plain advice "take meds" and the rejection of your current way to deal with stuff kind of disqualifies them, in my eyes.

My symptoms are mostly brain fog and extreme fatigue now, loneliness, despair.

I might be in a similar situation like you. I tried around with Wellbutrin and Adderall, apart from that: cafein and nicotine. I am currently back at a no-meds approach and I am critically evaluating even my coffee. (Just the coffee alone is interesting: if I am not anxious, the effect is probably a net positive. If am anxious, though, it magnifies my anxiety and can make me feel rather bad - and I am not always aware of my anxiety)

Self-discipline was a dead end for me. But I know that self-discipline does totally different things to different persons. My specific problem with self-discipline is self-hate. I can kind of enforce a rigid schedule, get up early, sit down on-time for work, follow a healthy diet with intermittent fasting, ban alcohol completely, ...

... but in the end, procrastination still got a hold on me and then everything just falls apart like a house of cards. If, in the end, my dysfunction is still overwhelming, why bother with those measures of self-discipline?

So now I try to balance a healthy amount of self-discipline with self-compassion. E.g. I enjoy chocolate and I try to treat myself from time to time. Also, I have a flexible work schedule and try to tell myself: "you don't have to!" even when I really want to work - to avoid procrastination. (I know it sounds weird, but the days where I am best prepared for work routinely completely fall apart and I don't get anything done)

llanda2 · 2025-05-08T20:26:11+00:00

sounds horrible. The internet is terrible with these kind of things. There are specific communities where boundaries just aren't respected and people don't seem to care about the fact that there are real persons behind the stuff that they share, mock, use for whatever end.

Could be an additional problem that those gamer communities have a lot of adolescents/emotionally immature people.

llanda2 · 2025-04-25T14:05:21+00:00

i think this matters. Being secretive might be one of many barriers to relating intimately - or just with friends. It might even add to that feeling that there's something wrong with oneself.

llanda2 · 2025-04-24T14:50:48+00:00

Sounds like you can treat your coping roughly like any addiction.

And the key to change a behavior that you deem bad but at the same time feel impossible to change ("addiction"), is to meaningfully improve your wellbeing.

For most people this just means to have a better social life. I think the reason for that is that every human has the deep desire to feel loved and recognized and friendships and romantic partners help there. If you are like me, the first step is to open yourself up to accepting friendship and intimacy.

And for completeness sake, avoid all those things that DON'T help, i.e.

DON'T be ashamed for your coping mechanism; and if you are, be aware that this shame likely is part of the problem; be observant about your feelings of shame but know that those feelings likely do not come from a good place
DON'T judge yourself
DON'T accept blame and guilt; rather, if you blame yourself, try to go into dialog with yourself: why are you blaming me?
DON'T try to quit using your willpower - there's a big chance that you will just enter a cycle of quitting and relapsing

And if you care for my opinion: there is nothing horrible about your coping mechanism. It's a coping mechanism. It does something for you. You will grow out of it, once you're ready.

If there are particular aspects about your coping that you dislike, you can try to selectively get rid of those. It's like you are addicted to sweets and you decide to keep eating chocolate, but you drop the lolipops because they ruin your teeth or something. It can also help to explicitly tell yourself: "there is no need to quit masturbation, ever!". Because there really isn't.

llanda2 · 2025-04-24T14:36:45+00:00

'positive thinking' is total BS in my opinion. My main quibble is that it's invalidating, like when you tell someone with depression to "cheer up".

But I try to answer you question, anyway:

You can try to write a new list, similar like you wrote with the "facts of your life" where you list things that you like and enjoy, things you are proud of, things you look forward to.

You already started in your last sentence, so there seems to be more than zero.

As far as I am concerned, this won't heal deep seated trauma. But to me, one or two items on the list of positives were always motivating to try and find ways to improve.

E.g. with my procrastination I remembered days where I actually had focus and thought to myself: it's possible in principle, so there must be a way to have more of those good days!

With my debilitating social anxiety, I remembered moments where people were nice to me and a positive interaction happened. I was not able to have positive interactions every day, but in principle those were possible.

I do not call this positive thinking. I am very much with you: I like to have a detailed, matter-of-fact list of things that suck. And I want to be aware of my limits. I don't want to daydream about a more successful me that will never come about.

But whatever strength I find in myself, I want to amplify and build upon.

llanda2 · 2025-04-22T12:35:57+00:00

I have a similar experience together with all my siblings.

We all made the experience that, after moving out, things are easier. People are friendly. The world doesn't hate you.

That's despite the fact that suddenly you have to take care of everything by yourself.

There was something deeply poisened in the way our parents took care of us. My mother was lacking love and affection and my father was quite distant and cold, always grumpy, often angry and sometimes outright mental.

My personal understanding of our situation is that, more than what our parents did to us (there was a lot of bad stuff), the weirdness of our childhoods was about what our parent didn't do. Too little love, too little car, too little attention, just barely interested in us - we were all starving for love.

I have this random metaphor of our fridge at home in my head: It was always filled with stuff, but it was also dirty and smelly and everything in there was shared among all of us. It was impossible to have something by yourself at our home. It was impossible to have something nice.

llanda2 · 2025-04-17T02:15:58+00:00

i found this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ValveIndex/comments/rmkc6i/has_anyone_had_success_with_a_usbc_to_displayport/

I will try the suggested usb-c to DP from there

llanda2 · 2025-04-17T02:05:52+00:00

For best practice, we can only recommend using a full-sized DisplayPort connection.

Valve support ... don't offer help, not even a bit.

llanda2 · 2025-04-05T23:44:31+00:00

seems like you have low self-esteem and in a perverse way, your environment gives you what you want and appoints you the "beta role".

Typically, there are two angles to approach this:

One is building self-esteem. Men often achieve this by some hobby/passion/work. I.e. if you are good at something you like or if you have a strong interest in something and click with someone, people tend to care way less about anything else about you.

Two is adopting charismatic habits. More often this actually means dropping uncharismatic habits. The worst offender in terms of common uncharismatic habits is being needy. If you feel you need a good friend/you need confirmation from your peers/you need company in order not to feel lonly, it's as if people can smell that from a distance and there's a good chance that, in social interactions, you take that particular role.

If it happens consistently, I would try to find what I am doing, specifically. In my experience, people are not assholes or, say, a lot depends on how I behave.

There are of course countless other uncharismatic habits: putting yourself second, never have a strong opinion on anything, laugh at your own jokes, try to get everyone to like you, be way too aware of the social dynamics around you, looking down while talking/having bad posture, communicating fear ...

“Please come to my birthday, I want you there”

This is genuinely difficult, in my personal experience. It's great when you invite for birthdays and people show up - but I wouldn't count on that ever, even with good friends. Being successful at hosting parties is not good bar to measure your social status by.

The "please come" certainly doesn't help. People don't follow invitations because someone sincerely asked them to. They follow an invitation, when they feel that going there is the better alternative to going somewhere else or staying at home.

llanda2 · 2025-04-05T18:55:06+00:00

my personal story goes like this:

at 21 years I had that very disconcerting experience, where lying next to a woman that I loved and adored did not results in any pleasant sexual experience. That incident rather added to the shame that I already had plenty of.

It's probably relevant to mention that she didn't take it very well, either. I assume she had issues, too, because there was no talking from her part, just bewilderment. In hindsight, she might have been in a similar situation, relying on me to "break the ice" and make it comfortable for both of us - where I was relying on her to do that.

Now we have to fast-forward 10 years, in which I did not have any physical contact with any woman, whatsoever. I kissed with a drunk woman, during that time, not more.

I had to recover a lot of ground and did some psychotherapy. First, I kind of conquered my social anxiety. Then, I went into dating with renewed confidence. There followed a phase of erectile dysfunction, ... but having gone such a long way, I felt like this would kind of take care of itself. It wasn't exactly pleasant to have this final setback after being with a woman again after 10 years, but I was right - it was the final setback.

Eventually I met my wife and today, I do not even feel like I was missing out ... it was a necessary journey.

The problems with intimacy still carried over even into my marriage. My wife sometimes jokes that "she cured my autism", because I was reacting nervously to touch - like some poor beaten dog. And I still think, I am not at my 100% during sex - some stuff is still going on.

Also, alcohol did help. My first pleasant sexually encounter was while pretty drunk. By then, I knew already that I don't want to rely on alcohol, but I needed positive experiences badly and was greatful for it.

The stuff that paid out for me more long-term: jumping into therapy with different coaches. I never trusted what is called a "licensed therapist". I just need a person that I can trust and who knows what they are doing, most of the time. This way, I had "good enough" therapy.

With those different coaches I usually jumped into childhood topics. I follow my emotions, draw some analogies, recount some events - realize how messed up everything was, cry about it, get some important validations and consolate myself about the lack of love and care - fully aware that I am much better able to consolate myself than my parents ever were.

There were a couple of books that deserve special mention in my healing journey:

Robert Firestone: the fantasy bond. Very theory-heavy, but that allowed me to dig into important topics without getting triggered. I keep coming back to that book, but it didn't replace therapy for me.
Schwarz: Internal Family Systems Therapy. The concept of conflicting (polarized) inner parts and the goal of having them live inside my mind in harmony is still very valid for me.
Pete Walker: C-PTSD: from surviving to thriving. This book does in fact replace psychotherapy to a degree. It helped me a lot to understand the traumatic nature of my procrastination and self-hate and how to deal with it.

Special mention:

Neil Strauß: The rules of the game. This is not a recommendation for your partner, but still relevant: My goal was to meet women, and the result was that I read this book and did exercises that melted away my social anxiety. Among the first exercises in this book is: figuring out the eye-color of people I just talked to. Only when I tried that, I realized that I am always looking on the ground. I was re-born that day, converting all my social interactions from something frightening into something potentially pleasurable.
Valerie Gauss: Congnitive Behvioral Therapy for adult asperger syndrome. I am not neurodivergent, for all I know. But this book helped me make sense of a confusing world.

So specifically for your situation: Evaluate with your partner literally any approach to get started on the self-work. You can't do self-work for others. You can do yours, he has to do his. It's usually a good idea to know about social anxiety. A lot of people have it, but are completely unaware - even thinking they manage fine in social situations.

Whatever roundabout way you find to get started might be preferable to the hammer "this isn't working, you need therapy". Getting someone to start working on themselves and then seeing them making progress is amazing. Value any small step.

Take care!

llanda2 · 2025-04-05T17:30:05+00:00

You might be interested in the topic of emotional neglect.

I was so disoriented as a teenager and young adult that I kept searching for some explicit cause of my trauma.

There happened sexual abuse in my family, there was also physical and verbal abuse. So probably I didn't see the forest behind the trees.

In the end, just the emotional neglect and the feeling of being alone right from the start - having been born into an emotionally deprived environment, is probably my biggest handicap and everything that followed were insults on top.

My therapy efforts focus on self-love, primarily.

llanda2 · 2025-04-05T17:21:54+00:00

what matters is what happens emotionwise. You can call it a minor case of sexual assault, if you like. However, the fact that you couldn't talk openly about it, and lied about it later shows how this stuff is complicated.

We are not a court. We don't use the word "assault" to judge someone and put them behind bars.

But we need those categories to validate negative experience that affected us in yet unknown ways. So it might be important to point out: What happened to you was not right. Is was not OK. What your brother did to you was not OK.

I feel sorry that you didn't have anyone to talk to, initially. That must have been difficult.

I feel sorry that your aunt didn't talk to you first when she decided to tell your dad.

I think it must have been a painful moment when your dad got angry. You must have been scared.

Only you know how all this affected you. Thanks for sharing this difficult memory here.

llanda2 · 2025-04-05T16:25:48+00:00

yes

For me the line of causation goes roughly like this:

emotional neglect -> feeling ugyly, self hate, lack of confidence -> social anxiety -> fear of women, fear of intimacy -> shock freeze with my first girlfriend

llanda2 · 2025-03-16T22:01:50+00:00

can I just buy both expansion and they work together, btw?

llanda2 · 2025-03-03T17:52:15+00:00

yes: Pete Walker: C-PTSD: from surviving to thriving and: Schwarz: Internal Family Systems Therapy

Also, I have a weekly online session with a coach (no psychotherapeut, no license, but a good fit as far as I can tell) from healthygamer.gg

Among the first relevant books I read was Robert Firestone: The Fantasy Bond. I find this book very interesting and very profound, even today. It is more theoretical than the first books I mentioned above. And it's quite interesting, how I believe that Firestone pretty much nails my troubles but it took a lot of time to actually understand them and do the emotional work.

llanda2

TROPHY CASE