it's difficult to feel that sometimes.

lately it's come to my attention that i am a challenging person to be around. my general state of mind is very analytical and critical of things i'm passionate about, particularly w/r/t video games. it's not so much whether i enjoy the same things or not as a whole; a negative perspective coming from me has been known to sour other people's enjoyment of something or else they just feel their tastes have been insulted outright. i really don't know if this stems from people just not "having skin" so to speak or because they actually put some stock in my insight and don't appreciate when it's used against X thing they like. this is one of those cases where empathy doesn't come naturally to me and has to be applied logically, and that's probably because when you reverse the roles, i do appreciate and value dissenting opinions. being able to respectfully disagree with me is commendable and deserving of hugs

in the case of video games specifically, i guess the main thing is that as a game designer i have this disposition where i am much more likely to bring up something i didn't enjoy as opposed to something i did. meanwhile in the case of say, music, i never have much to say beyond "this owns" or "not my thing" because music isn't something i know how to dissect on any technical level. in other words, knowing the general workings of video games means i can't always see things for how they are as much as how they could have been improved on

either way none of this reflects too well on me because i'm not like, someone who would play bad games deliberately to make a goony LP or anything like that. my opinions shouldn't matter any more than Joe Dudebro's, but ultimately they do because i have friends and they'd likely prefer to keep their distance with someone who can't chill the fuck out and stop taking every opinion they don't """get""" as some kind of challenge

otherwise i'm pretty much in the dark about what other people may not like about me, but i just remedy what i can

the short answer is no, but a more apt word might be "faithful"

in a very literal sense, i'm faithful because i've adopted this mindset that it takes some degree of faith in order to accept that the things my senses tell my brain are true, or at least that they're being reported as accurately as my human brain's architecture enables. i'm also aware that my perception can't be 100% accurate, if only because there are ranges in the color spectrum which the vast majority of people can't see, and those in the sound spectrum we can't hear, and so on. in short: i am faithful that my five senses can tell me everything i need to know, for as long as they continue to function

in a much less literal sense, i'm also faithful because i believe in people. specifically that anyone who wants to change has the power to do so, and the power to leave the world they die in a better place than the one they were born into. i'm also all about sappy intangible concepts like love, kindness, friendship, etc. not as if they're some kind of magic cure-all but as virtues that have real application and merit, and are the closest thing to a religion i can believe in

i will absolutely take a bath over a shower whenever i'm not in a hurry

i've always felt like the only thing that makes a shower "good" is the "kills grime in less time" aspect of it, where the Goodness Level of the shower hinges on a few concrete beep boop factors like "time spent + water used to achieve satisfactory cleanliness"

a good bath is more of a meditative process that's harder to pin down. to consider them a luxury sometimes feels appropriate and other times feels like you might as well consider oxygen a luxury too, because being able to just relax in a body of warm water every so often makes life a hell of a lot easier to carry on with