I'm not sure if what you describe is really an inability to get the big picture or the lack of available information to really base decisions on.

For me it's hard to make that kind of decisions because other people can't plan well and their estimates are notoriously wrong and forget to take into account a lot of things.

But what I'm really good at it seeing the bigger picture in the sense of knowing the interdependences between things. If I see a requirement I don't just follow it point by point. I think about what how it fits into the whole and where things can go wrong and ask if people have considered that. (90% of time the answer is no)

So I consider seeing the big picture and the details my strength, but like you I struggle to plan ahead long-term or estimate things because I don't feel confident with the amount of information available to make such guesses.

The guitar cat got me.

Except some agents go against explicit instructions and delete the prod database. You know your argument doesn't hold, we've all seen the news.

My logic was always, if == is equal, then for >= we replace one of the equal signs to denote that it doesn't have only be equal but can be both.

But that was probably also influenced by languages where == means the value is equal and === means value and type have to be equal for the comparison to be true. If you compare "5" and 5 in those languages, == will be true and === will be false, since one is a string and one is a number.

At the end of the day, those signs are arbitrary conventions. People agree on them meaning something in a specific context, and the same thing can mean different things in different contexts. A in English represents a different sound than A in Spanish, and sometimes even in other dialects of English. Thinking of out like that helped me to keep the conventions of different programming languages apart.

There's one thing in your post that I haven't seen you mention yet it's all over the place: depression.

I don't know anything about you but this post, and I'm not a professional, but from very painful personal experience I'm almost sure you're severely depressed, maybe even to the point where you need hospitalization.

Depression fucks with your head. It makes you not-do things you're looking forward to and you don't understand why. It makes you unable to see anything positive. You cannot get out of it without help after a certain point, and you cannot trust your own thoughts anymore.

These days, after years, I'm better. For me it's never going completely away, but I recognize patterns, I know how to break the spiraling (and most importantly, no one shames me for how I'm doing it anymore) and I can say " this sounds like depression speaking, let me do something else and return to this thought tmr and see how I feel."

But it took years of therapy and several months of hospitalization. If you're at the point where your outbreaks scare your family, maybe it's time to look into that.

Another thing: depression in men is critically underdiagnosed, because most docs look for physical reasons if a man comes to them with symptoms of depression. If you haven't been diagnosed yet, it may be that it didn't occur to your doc, maybe because you're masking well or because he's just not used to seeing men with depression.

However you go on, I wish you all the best. I hope that you can find a way, with or without meds, to live in peace with your brain.

That smug face.

I love it, Ty!

I'm an outsider "looking in", so to say, as in I met quite a few people attending a local Waldorf-School near where I went to school. I always felt a lot of them were a little out of touch with the real world, not quite prepared for how things are outside. Very sheltered and... For lack of a better word, dreamy? It felt like they hadn't learned some of the fundamentals of science but focused a lot on soft stuff instead.

It's hard to put into words since those are impressions of a pretty judgemental teenager x) and stored in a different language than English since my english back then was still pretty bad.

But their education seemed to lack real preparation for anything but social sciences. It's been a while, though, maybe it has changed by now.

I think Chinese and Korean culture share this concept, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were more Asian languages who did. Since a daughter joins her husband's family upon marriage, their children are considered belonging to the other family. I recently learner that apparently there's a saying in Korean that daughters always leave things at their mother's house when they get married so they have a reason to come back despite having left the family.

As an autist who studied Japanese and gave up when I realized I just couldn't connect with any of the Japanese people I met - even the ones where it was obvious we wanted to be friends - I can assure you the culture is even more impenetrable for autistics. And I don't have such issues with other autistic people usually, no matter the culture.

Don't mistake your stereotypes for reality and tell everyone people call you out because of political correctness. You're just plain old wrong in this.

There's lots of programmers on languages that need more keys readily than us keyboard has. Äöüß, just to give an example.

I don't know, every time I read a post like this I'm kinda speechless. I know lots of Americans and many of them are brillant and open-minded, but then there are posts like this which are completely oblivious that there are reasons for other keyboard layouts.

The reason OP can't fathom programming on those is that they aren't used to it. If you grew up with non-us layouts you similarly couldn't fathom programming on the us layout.

Sometimes I feel like people refuse to even think about acknowledging that there are other experiences than their own. Go out, try out new things, exercise your brain and callenge yourself.

Do you have the chance to sit the whole group down together and tank about that?

As in, tell them what you told us - you can't dm as you normally would and have to keepepulling punches because he keeps endangering the group and you dont want to punish the group for his bad choices. Remind them that you are supposed to have fun too and dming like you're walking on eggshells is killing yours.

I'm suggesting bringing it up with the whole group because it sounds like you brought it up with the player alone already. Or maybe you have focused too much on how they could play better instevd of how it negatively affects the group. Maybe they need to realize that even if this is fun for them, it's not for you - and maybe not for the others as well.

IMHO, this is something that should be talked trough with the group. Getting less lenient and not weakening your encounters is risking the wole group's fun, so it should be discussed with the group.

Enabling choices per se is a good thing, but if you have to rely on someone for life and death who knows how to shoot a gun, owns it, brings it and yet only uses a knife in the gunfight, it's gonna get you killed. And this should happen. Just make sure everybody knows about this.

Maybe this will spark discussion about why he makes these characters and why he plays them like this. Maybe it can help find something he enjoys. If not, the group is now prepared to die more often and you don't have to pull punches.