Ixrec

While positive thinking won't magically solve every problem (outside of Equestria), this sort of thing could be an opportunity in disguise: The main reason I got into manga in high school is because a classmate lent me some volumes of Rurouni Kenshin.

Babies crying/screaming in public. I know they're too young to control themselves and not everyone has day care/babysitter options, but something about that shrieking just makes me instantly miserable no matter what I was in the middle of. In particular, going to the theater when a new animated Disney movie comes out is a huge gamble in my experience. Chewing with your mouth open to a lesser extent, but that one never seems to happen to me any more.

Probably Wonder Woman. She has much more combat training and skill, and they both have the standard package of strength/speed/toughness. Master Chief or Deathstroke?

Personally, AAA gaming has been steadily moving away from my interests for several years now, so this doesn't really change what I'll be doing. I was always unlikely to get a next gen console anyway (maaaaaaybe if Metroid Prime 4 or Halo Infinite come out). Pretty much every game I want to play any more is indie, or somewhere in that gray area between indie and AAA, and available on Steam and runs fine on my laptop. Plus, even AAA games that look interesting tend to be far better when you play them a while after release, partially because of patches and updates, partially because the price goes way down, but also because hype and anti-hype have died down enough that you can finally tell whether it was any good before paying for it yourself. I do think that "those greedy bastards!" is an oversimplistic reaction to this, but back when I was paying attention there was a huge problem with game development costs rising out of control despite consumers not wanting to spend more, and with the used games market causing a huge portion of sales to effectively go to game stores instead of game developers/publishers/etc. Last I heard, one of the big reasons for the rise of paid DLC was actually to give people an incentive to buy new. Although now that physical discs are little more than a glorified DRM key, it sure seems like they could solve that by pushing everyone towards fully digital game distribution and cutting out all the middlemen to reduce costs (sorry Gamestop, but... you kinda are getting obsolete). Either way, this does feel like a sign that not much has changed since I stopped paying attention, and the mismatch between dev costs and consumer willingness to spend has only gotten worse, which I can only assume means even more people will do more of the things I've been doing (play behind the curve, play more small/indie games, ignore console exclusives so you only need the PC you already own, etc).

Still the best boop in canon

I still like both American and European chocolate. This horrifies everyone else I know who's ever had both.

While at a restaurant, I'm a nice quiet doormat. 99% of the time I already know what I want to order without looking at the menu. I spend the whole time entertaining myself with my phone, only getting up to get a drink refill. I also tend to intentionally go at less crowded times, so the bored waitstaff end up chatting with me until someone else arrives. I've never done a service job myself, but I hear so many horror stories about it (even in this thread!) that I have "don't make their job any worse" burned into me anyway. However, some of that is ironically because I'm a very picky eater, in the sense that most of the dishes at most restaurants I simply don't enjoy no matter how well-prepared they are. Most of the stuff I do enjoy is low-brow comfort food, i.e. "good food is wasted on me". I'm also a creature of habit that eats pretty much the same stuff at the same place all the time without much variation, entirely by choice. The most adventurous thing you might see me do with food on a typical week is try strawberry pepsi instead of cherry or raspberry pepsi. I've done this half a dozen times! But not out of timidity: for some reason the wrong dish was always one I also liked, so digging in right away appealed more than complaining and then waiting for them to make the other thing. If it was something I didn't want to eat at all, I absolutely would say something.

As a programmer, a big part of my job is communicating with other programmers, which leads to a lot of technical writing. I don't write fiction though. I probably could get decent at it, but I know that producing anything I'd be happy with would take a HUGE time investment, and it's just not something I'm passionate about.

Almost all holidays have been a non-event for me for several years. Birthdays especially since I turned 18, partially because the exact number stops mattering very quickly after that milestone (I still forget whether I'm 28 or 29 sometimes and have to recalculate ). Mostly that's because there's nothing special to do with any holiday. I'm already doing what I want to do pretty much every day, and there isn't anything I'm putting off because it's expensive or only fun once a year or whatever. All I did this year was take my whole birthday week off, because I had vacation days built up and no reason to spend them on any other week. I should probably clarify that I don't have any negative feelings about any of this, unlike some other posts. There's nothing annoying or traumatizing or existentially angsty about birthdays for me. It's just another pretty good day in a very long series of pretty good days.

Because internet, I know there are places I could go to find fans of anything, but you can only be in so many subcommunities at a time. And there are some things you love but don't have much to say about beyond "omg I love this". So for me, eurobeat music often feels this way. I never bump into a fan of it organically, and I don't know what I'd do on a eurobeat forum other than gather song recommendations (which would be stunningly pointless since I still have >200 albums of Super Eurobeat to work through). I swear I was not planning to reply to this many things, but you all mentioned stuff I know... My mom recommended I try it maybe five times and I never got around to it :facehoof: She ended up showing me an episode when I visited for Christmas. Metroid is the one I care about too. I definitely feel the franchise neglect, but at least in my experience Metroid fans are easy to find; they just haven't had much to talk about in a while. I think most of us are scratching the itch by playing indie Metroidvanias like Ori, Guacamelee and Hollow Knight. YES! That was one of my favorites out of all the books school made us read (probably tied with Frankenstein and Scarlet Letter), and I never heard about it again until just now.

100% learning. I was full Twilight all the way from Kindergarten to college. I even have a few textbooks I liked so much I still have them in my bedroom. And I intentionally say Twilight instead of Moondancer, because socializing was never difficult or awkward for me. I pretty much always had a group of people to talk to during break periods, and in most classes a classmate or two that always paired with me both to chat and to get the work done efficiently. But also like Twilight, none of those friends were particularly close, and I lost touch with all of them pretty much instantly when I went off to college (unlike her, I did try with a few at the time, but it didn't work). Unfortunately in real life there isn't a sun goddess that simply tells you where to go to guarantee you bump into all of your future BFFs.

I like speculative fiction in general, but that's because of the potential to speculate about how things might work in a very different world from our own, and how that would have tangible impacts on the way stories unfold in that world. So when a fantasy/sci-fi work appears to have put no more thought into the setting than "we're doing swords and sorcery" or "we're doing present day plus robots", a lot of my enthusiasm evaporates. Steampunk is one of those subgenres that in my experience is at just the right popularity level where it usually is a decent indicator that the author/artist/whatever put some serious thought into their setting and made something I'll find really interesting, but of course there are exceptions. Cyberpunk is in a similar place. Medieval european usually indicates the opposite, but I've been pleasantly surprised plenty of times. I don't have any strong opinions on steampunk relative to all the other subgenres defined by which branch of the tech tree your fictional world went down; they're all awesome when done well. Where MLP fits into this is interesting. The show's tech levels are all over the place, presumably because having tons of magic makes them less interested in pursuing certain kinds of technology (which is exactly the sort of thing I love to dig into), but the show tends to avoid explaining this aspect of the setting so it's hard to tell how much was intentional. The one big exception is weather/season manipulation, which it does go into quite a bit of detail about, and I loved all of that. Now the real question is... how many gears must one glue onto Twilight before she becomes a steampunk pony?

I used to, and there might still be some in my parents' house, but definitely none where I currently live. Do you own a backpack?

I'm pretty happy with myself, in isolation. But I am currently single, and one of these days I need to change that. Oh, you wanted character flaws? Same ones as Twilight, basically.

Pizza and soda. In the one chat room I'm currently a moderator of, it became enough of a running joke that everyone's been calling me "Pizza Cat" for years.

Devious

It's been a very long time since I even tried a forum that had signatures on it, and tbh I find it really distracting when every other signature on a forum has huge images (or gasp gifs!) in it, so for now I'm leaving it blank. If I'm still here in a month maybe I'll have something worth putting there, or maybe I'll just leave it blank forever. On the other hand, every website ever wants an avatar, so that's the one I put a modicum of effort into. But I usually never change avatars either; at least for me the point of an avatar is to be more easily recognized, so changing it more than once in a blue moon kinda works against that.

Depends on a million unspecified factors. Do I have a job in either world? Do I need a job in the fantasy world? Is there a transdimensional internet? (in real life basically all my friends are online, so we might as well be in different dimensions as it is) Was I doing anything interesting with these magic powers before I left? How close am I to these human "friends"? And so on. If the idea is that friendship (and any other kind of meaningful interpersonal relationship) is somehow categorically impossible while doing stuff in the fantasy world, then yes of course I'd stay in the human world. But that'd be a very... unusual fantasy world