I was talking to my neurologist about the new (to me) FL-41 coating I got for my glasses, which helps my headaches substantially and makes me actually use them regularly. He asked to see them, I assumed just to see how dark the tint was. But he spent an awfully long time looking at them, which I found odd.

He then turned his attention back to me and excitedly said “you have antimetropia, getting that corrected probably helps as much as the coating!”

He went on to explain that my left eye is farsighted and my right eye is nearsighted, which, uncorrected, leads to headaches, photophobia (sensitivity to light) and various other issues, and can eventually cause lazy eye, where the brain filters out info from one eye entirely. My optometrists never said anything about that, but probably should have. I would have actually worn the glasses more often even before the coating (the correction itself is pretty mild). Though that does explain why I could never figure out if I was supposed to wear them all the time or not.

I looked it up when I got home, and I guess it only impacts 0.1% of the population, so yay. Make that TWO rare conditions! (I also have a birth defect where my bottom 3 vertebrae are fused to my pelvis, lumbar pillows, even the ones built into car seats, are horrible torture devices for me)

I have a migraine and daily headache condition and one of the side effects is a changing assortment of hallucinations. It’s nothing to worry about, we keep track of them as part of my treatment and do periodic MRIs just to be sure when the hallucinations change..

But they are pretty damned normal, even outside of having a condition that impacts your brain, and most people don’t really understand that, and keep it to themselves if it happens to them, so I figured it’s worth asking.

Without drugs being involved, have you had hallucinations? Not just sounds or visions, but smells or touch or proprioception (body position) hallucinations? Those are far more common and much less talked about than hearing voices. Do you know what caused them, if you had them, or was it an alarming experience?

My biggest one is that chicken usually smells like peanut butter. I hate peanut, and actively avoid anywhere that uses peanut oil, and yet chicken still smells and tastes like it’s cooked in peanut flavoring. Awful hallucination.

Recently I’ve had some other olfactory (smell) hallucinations, lavender, sage, etc. sometimes a mild burning smell which is alarming because that’s associated with other issues like stroke. Have also had some audio hallucinations, the sort of thing I pause whatever’s playing to see if I’m imagining it. No big deal, because I’m aware of it happening.

I’ve recently fallen down a rabbit hole of fake video games. Not fake like fraud, but fake like art; games that don’t exist to play, but do exist to tell their stories. I’m super into it but finding more is kinda difficult, so here we are!

What fake games do you like? Why do you like them? Pictures, links, videos, whatever.

I really enjoyed Petscop (video 1/25 linked) and Valle Verde (video 1 linked, Spanish with subtitles), both series are let’s play style, exploring fake games to tell their stories. Petscop is much more narratively involved, and tells a great story (you’ll probably want an explainer video afterwards.. it’s involved) while Valle Verde is more ghost-in-the-machine horror.

I found this rabbit hole through this video, from Super Eyepatch Wolf about fake video games, why they are made and how they “work” as an art form. Their content is weirdly enjoyable to me, and pleasingly entirely too long. Plus they have their own fake video game.

Edit for clarity: Fake video games is a super broad category. Pictures with gameplay hud that implies a video game, videos of gameplay or cutscenes styled after games count (even those weird live action “games” people record for TikTok count), books or stories that describe gameplay for games that don’t exist count, even soundtracks modeled after game sound tracks count. So if it’s a game or part of a game that doesn’t exist, it counts!

I’m really interested in people’s motivations. Whatever they are, even if just financial.

I love other Ava Max and just found this one and it resonates so enjoy friends!

Ultra-upbeat pro-feminist reality in dance music format! If you like this check out sweet but physcho, kings and queens, and not your Barbie girl!

So if this isn’t the right community for this I get it, and feel free to remove it (but please do let me know why, so I don’t make the same mistake in the future, the rules don’t really say what sort of content, and this feels pretty femme-centric)

Partially I need to vent and don’t have a great social network at the moment, and partially I’m looking for ways to handle.. not the situations (those I can mostly handle as ex-military, former wrestler, badass chick 💪), but the guilty uncomfortable awkward feelings. Those are new since I stopped trying so hard to mask and started experiencing myself more.

I bartend once a week at a bar and grill as the only employee of my shift (I also cook and it’s too much tbh), and I guess that used to be a lot easier, or maybe the places I was working were just… less likely to attract the sort of people this one does.. it’s sort of an older-crowd townie bar (I’m complimented on being highly competent, and I feel like I’m drowning), with a local heavy drinking culture. It doesn’t cost a lot to sit and drink all night, so a lot of people do. ($1-1.50 for mugs, or 1.75-2.25 for pints/bottles of cheap swill - on Wisconsin..?)

I usually try to dress super frumpy, baggy sweatshirt and stuff, because I’m ace/aro, not very social, and somewhere on the autism spectrum, and getting hit on at work is nothing but wildly uncomfortable.

I’ve made the mistake before of looking somewhat nice (no makeup or jewelry, just something that fits better than a baggy hoodie), and it doesn’t net me more tips, it just leads to uncomfortable propositions. Drunk dudes, am I right?

Young guy tonight (based on his first console, probs like mid 20s) was super nice, totally nerdy and probably wasn’t expecting a chat about video games with a collector at a dive bar, but I’m just not interested in hanging out for playing right now because I’m moving in two months, otherwise I’d risk the awkwardness even though I can tell it would have been at best a weird friendship. I felt really bad for that rejection when he verbally swallowed his feelings and asked anyway (would.. never mind.. well maybe you’d like to). Because just bad timing. Even my boss knows I’m leaving at the end of July, and have a lot of work to do. He rushed out after but it legit wasn’t personal. Poor kid. (Omg I feel old. He didn’t like Reddit or other social link aggregators and I introduced him to the concept of RSS feeds..)

Coworker didn’t bother trying to be subtle. He’s around a lot and always drunk, and he today said “I know you are asexual and I respect that, but I really want to just ravage you” and so on and so forth with increasing specificity, for a very uncomfortable half an hour of drunken propositional rambling (despite my very clear “no, thank you, you know I’m really not interested in that with you or anyone else. That doesn’t sound fun to me as much as you think it should, so I’m not interested, but thank you for being honest about it so we could be entirely clear, now please stop commenting on what you want to do to me..”) while I tried to clean.. and prior he tried to pick a fight with some other guy I’ve never seen before that one of my regulars also had never met.. and I had to tell him to chill the fuck out.. I’ve never had to flex my powers as the sole voice of the bar before and it suuuucked, but he did indeed shut the fuck up and sit down. So that was kinda fun?

And I’m just.. so tired of fending off this shit. I don’t want any of it. I don’t wear makeup, I stopped trying to cover my gray hair years ago, and I intentionally dress to not impress.. I’m just trying to do my job and also be comfortable with the heat.. I’m not even all that nice to anyone, other than quiet lady folks. Especially those who clearly don’t want to be there and just got dragged along. I try to keep them entertained when I can, and make them question their dynamic. I get being there.

How do I deal with feeling like crap about other people being gross? Or risking their all to be turned down by someone doing a job? I know how to be strong and upfront and honest, to do the work to be clear about my intentions, even if I’m nice about it, but I don’t have a clue how to feel better about it..