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[parodeity]

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[splinten]

Well I literally crashed into this dude who constantly forces me to eat and sleep and relax, which helps.

[Dave makes him be less tired is the answer.]

Back then, being exhausted all the time was the state of being that I preferred.

[parodeity]

[ ? ? ? not sure if computes, surely dave makes dirk more tired. ]

It's not like I don't understand that, but even I found time to chill the fuck out back in the day. This is one of those opposite direction things, maybe.

[splinten]

[Incorrect, Dave.]

I'm not sayin' that I never did. But aside from the issue where boredom allowed me time to contemplate how much I hated myself and how deeply alone I was, as I got older and understood more about myself and my circumstances, I felt like I was racing against a tickin' clock to try to be what I needed to. There were so many things to do and so many improvements I had to make on myself that it felt like I was wastin' my life if I wasn't in some way engagin' in something to those ends. Part of why I developed AR was to have yet another me to do all the things I needed to do, this one tireless and high-processing unlike my faulty and melancholia-prone brain. It's only been in the last year that I've started to consider chillin' somethin' I should actually permit myself.

[parodeity]

Why? Didn't you guys have a gap year where nothin' of importance was happenin'?

[ like holy shit the meteor kids at least managed to find time to do fuck all. ]

[splinten]

If you mean the six months between game entry and your arrival, those would be the months featuring my self-distancing from two of my best friends while I simultaneously self-destructed on my other best friend, who was also my boyfriend. My fear of my friends hating me and everything bad about me ruining things was at an all time high. I was exhausted almost constantly.

[So. Not relaxing?]

It isn't that we didn't have any fun times, or that I never relaxed in the almost sixteen years before that. Just that feeling happy and relaxed was more of a rare exception than anything else, and generally my state of mind has changed to something much more capable of handling periods of calm and pure enjoyment since we met and started talkin'. As compared to before, when it was difficult to really accept those moments even when the opportunity presented itself.

[parodeity]

I imagine it has a lot to do with the world not bein' in a constant state of endin'.

[ like. just hazarding a guess here. ]

[splinten]

Not really. To a degree, maybe, but there are different urgent things here. Mostly, I've changed my perspective on what I need to be. Competency and usefulness are not as desperately a priority as they used to be, although it would be disingenuous to imply that I don't still worry about being useless and incompetent. It just doesn't matter as much compared to other things. Or I guess it would be more accurate to say that I used to think I'd never be able to be any good at those other things so I tried to stack my stats in the things that made me exhausted, but while talkin' with you I decided it was okay to do my best to be understanding and loving and supportive towards the people I cared about, instead of writin' those things off as impossible and givin' up on pursuin' the things that genuinely make me happy. Now I can think of sitting with you and purely enjoying a movie as a good use of my time, because I can at least half-accept that my company is valuable and something that you'd actually want from me.

[parodeity]

I'm pretty sure you would have figured it out eventually, dude. It's not like it wasn't a thing you didn't want to do.

[ presumably. ]

Personally I guess it's the opposite.

[splinten]

I don't know about that. Personally, it's impossible to imagine reaching that point without you.

[Calmly and casually. It's just how it is to him.]

You mean that you've been able to relax a lot less now that you're here?

[parodeity]

I mean the shit I wrote off as impossible when I was a kid was the shit you threw your stats into. And the shit I did to exhaust myself was pretty much the shit you considered impossible.

[splinten]

[Dirk's confused.] The stuff I thought was impossible. Did you exhaust yourself tryin' to do it in general, or just with him?

[Does Dave think of loving and understanding people as something you do to exhaust yourself until you can't feel? That doesn't seem right.]

[parodeity]

The stupid stuff you wouldn't waste your time on, maybe I should say instead?

[ like. shit that didn't have any effect on improving his person. literal time wasters, mindless. ]

But I guess it wouldn't be incorrect to say I was constantly exhausted tryin' to love and understand someone who wasn't ever gonna do it back.

[splinten]

Okay, I get it now. This probably goes with not learnin' how to self-reflect properly in the realm of things we never got real instruction on how to do. I don't know that either of us made the better choice. At the very least, all my efforts didn't result in a better fighter or a more competent ally. Mostly they resulted in really weird robots and AIs.

[parodeity]

How does it go with not learnin' how to self-reflect properly?

[ explain, please. dave...is not sure how to reply to the parts about being a better fighter. he apparently lucked out there through sheer daily abuse.

he's not sure bro is responsible for the competent ally part? except he might be, because that's how dave learned to adapt and give way. ]

That wasn't the stuff you spent time on that I really considered worthwhile. The fightin' shit.

[splinten]

We weren't exactly sat down and talked to about how to respond to our respective unbearable situations by anyone. Like with self-reflection, we never got the kind of environment and support we needed to learn how to answer the expectations put on us and the time we needed to fill.

[That is his logic, anyway.]

What was the stuff?

[parodeity]

Teachin' yourself shit that mattered? Like...the smart stuff. School-y stuff.

[ dave can fake a bunch of knowledge and has an eclectic base, but he never really taught himself an entire branch of science or anything. ]

Bein'...I don't know, competent at shit that's actually useful.

[splinten]

I never invented anything new or advanced any of the fields I picked up. I just learned what other people had left behind, like I did with everything else. Anyone can do that. We've definitely had tech people in here better than me, more than once. People use me for it mostly because I've been here longest and am the most workaholic tech left around.

[Dirk isn't modest but he doesn't think it's that remarkable. The only robot he ever felt was truly worthwhile was Huggy Bear/Lil Seb, and that was because of the bunny he put inside.]

[parodeity]

I think you underestimate how difficult that kind of shit can be to learn. Or like...I'm pretty sure you're underestimatin' some of what I know you can do?

[splinten]

You're already catchin' up fast, and you're operatin' in multiple fields. The only reason you won't be able to do what I can do in a couple years would be if you decided you weren't interested in the subject.

[As simple as that. Dave is at least as smart as Dirk, if not smarter.]

[parodeity]

And now we're into the overestimatin' me portion of the morning.

[ there's simply no way he's going to ever come close to anything dirk or roxy or even rose can do intellectually, but it's nice dirk is deluded enough to think so, he supposes? ]

I am not sure this battle is as epic as was advertised.

[splinten]

My estimates on this front are extremely accurate. Your aptitude with statistics and the stock market already proves that you're capable of processing and analysing large amounts of data complexly, on the fly.

[Dave is smart?]

Are they ever?

[parodeity]

The stock market was run by crocodiles, it wasn't exactly rocket science.

[ dave disagrees with this assessment, although admittedly he tends to disagree with most positive assessments of himself unless...tricked into it like dirk, sometimes? wow. at least he used to pretend to believe the positive assessments of himself and talked them up, back when he was thirteen. ]

I mean, some monster movies deliver for a given value of deliver? But I guess it's hard to name one that has monster-to-monster combat that's, like, stellar?

[splinten]

You're completely ignoring the kind of mental mathematics you had to do, dude.

[Dirk knows what he sees. Dave is smart. He will fight on this.]

My theory is that the lake of a real sense of scale through the human perspective diminishes all monster vs monster fights.

[parodeity]

That wasn't anythin' special. It wasn't, like, calculus.

[ dave will fight back? though there's literally no ire in his tone. it's matter-of-fact. ]

I think that's bullshit. You could totally make a good monster vs monster movie, you just, like...have to give them maybe more backstory, I guess? And like...well that might diminish the monster movie genre cliches?

[splinten]

It was advanced statistics mentally computing numbers at a level very few people are capable of.

[So it's good.]

How would you do a monster vs monster movie?