self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
I'm a transhumanist doctor. In a better world, I wouldn't need to add that as a qualifier to plain old "doctor". It would be taken as granted for someone in the profession of saving lives.
At any rate, I intend to live forever or die trying. See you at Heat Death!
Friends:
A friend to everyone is a friend to no one.
User ID: 454
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
46m ago
Playing Tarkov for the first time without watching half a dozen new player guides and keeping a map open on your phone is masochism. The game is ridiculously obtuse about its mechanics. That's not a good thing, but once upon a time, the payoff to all that hard work felt very good. I went from a survival rate of 30% to 60% over 5 wipes, and a KD of 2 to 7, I think. Albeit that includes PVE kills too. I was only above average as a PVP player, perhaps just average when adjusting for playtime.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
Searching my username alongside "Tarkov" will turn up a fairly unflattering paper trail re: my relationship with the genre. Reading it in chronological order resembles the journal of somebody trying to quit caffeine while living above a coffee shop. I'm not quite sure how I managed it, in the end.
One extreme form is the extraction shooter, where 95% of the gameplay is routine.
This gets at something hard to convey to people who haven't logged the hours. Hardcore extraction shooters share a structural feature with actual combat, or at least with everything I've read about actual combat: long flat plateaus of tedium, occasionally interrupted by short bursts of unfiltered terror. Your life isn't, strictly speaking, at risk, although I suspect if somebody pulled the actuarial tables on long-term Tarkov players we'd find some interesting blood pressure data. But the stakes are higher than in any comparable genre. A single death can wipe out days of progress. Every kill you score has cost somebody, somewhere, an evening they aren't getting back.
The thing that makes this fun (where "fun" is being used in roughly the same sense that ultramarathons are fun, or possibly in the sense that some hobbies are genuinely satisfying to participants and indistinguishable from torture to onlookers, Type 3 fun to be specific) is that death turns out to be effective pedagogy. And not only for the people writing the obituary. You absorb caution and prudence almost involuntarily, and your gut, given enough thousands of hours, becomes something pretty close to a calibrated instrument. You look at a dozen doors, a hundred bushes, and a few broken windows, and you just know that something ain't quite right.
There's also a gameplay premium on what military types call violence-of-action. Once the rounds are close enough to part your hair, you discover that holding still is functionally identical to dying. The best fights play out like choreography: two people of roughly comparable skill trying to outshoot and outguess each other in the span of about eight seconds.
And the decision tree branches forever. Is your magazine still good for another burst, or did you spend most of it on the last guy? Do you loot the body now, or wait in case his teammates are about to round the corner? Do you chuck a grenade into the room where you're pretty sure somebody is camping? Do you, in the immortal words, feel lucky, punk?
Then there's the social layer, and like most things, the game is better with friends, or with acquaintances who rapidly end up becoming your friend. Do you trust the new player you've been mentoring to actually watch your six? Do you accept, in advance, that he probably won't, and forgive him in advance because you remember being him? Do you risk your own kit recovering your dead teammate's gear so the insurance payout works out in his favor? There is no single right answer to any of these. The game just keeps teaching you that some answers are better than others, and you'd better figure out which is which, fast.
And then sometimes you do everything correctly and you still get domed by some guy in a bush three hundred meters away. War is, as the saying goes, heck. I don't play Tarkov anymore, although the reason has more to do with BSG's ongoing mismanagement of the property than with the underlying design, which is still genuinely unlike anything else on the market (except maybe Gray Zone Warfare, which I'm trying to get into). Whatever else you can say about it, nobody else is making this game. It's a shame BSG is unmaking their game. One step forward, two steps back, toes inside their own ass. I'm too old to deal with that nonsense.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
9hr ago
He liked dogs, which brings him most of the way back. This analysis is, admittedly, incomplete, and has not taken into account every aspect of his character or biography.
I suspect that my depression was, in hindsight, mostly due to a case of Shit Life Syndrome. Recently-ish, life improved and so did my mood.
However: I've written about my experience with a clinical trial for psilocybin. It worked wonders, even if the chemical didn't change the material aspects of my life or work. That was all the existence proof that I needed that I could be in a bad place, unhappy with how things were going, without necessarily feeling depressed about it. I've been on plenty of standard antidepressants, and they did fuck-all for me. That is not a general indictment of the class, the drugs aren't perfect, but they do work. For some people. Some of the time. NNT between 5-7. I feel this discrepancy in my bones, more than most psychiatrists do.
Then I dabbled with other substances, after my life got better. I would like to claim they helped, but the problem is that I was already feeling pretty good when I took them, and my main goal was to make the euthymia stick. It's been a month, and I'm doing well. I remember being terrified that I'd immediately relapse when I'm back to work, and that hasn't happened yet. Thank $Deity for that. If it does happen, I'm going to go see a psychiatrist and ask for IV ketamine, it's effective, particularly for treatment resistant cases like mine, and doesn't have the memory-loss issues of ECT.
And hey, if you need more tailored advice, DM me.
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