I’m lucky to have “inherited” my parents’ doctor. She is extremely compassionate and gets deeply involved in you and your concerns on every visit. So much so that she is infamous for being behind schedule, to the point where we fully expect to wait for an hour to see her after the scheduled appointment time. She makes up for it by talking with you for as long as you want.
She also hasn’t accepted new patients for like 4 years… so yeah, I guess all the good ones are taken.
Hollow Knight and Darkest Dungeon both fit this for me. When I initially played them there would be some pain point where I got frustrated with some wall in the exploration or a tough setback (like some classic darkest dungeon bullshit like 3 spiders getting critical hits in a row killing a hero at full health). But the atmosphere of both games kept pulling me back again and again, and each time I’d get a little bit further.
Now I can say I’ve beaten Darkest Dungeon probably a half dozen times, nearly 100% Darkest Dungeon 2, and beaten every pantheon in Hollow Knight (with bindings on all but P5).
Not sure if my obvious masochism was the biggest factor in these games pulling through for me, but I can still say they are fantastic experiences for anyone willing to dig in and face the challenges they have to offer.
I’m sort of dating someone.
2ish weeks ago my parents met another couple at a cocktail party and found out they had a single daughter about my age. In an extremely unsubtle attempt to set us up our families did an escape room together. Honestly, sex and dating have never been important to me. My longest relationship was a couple months long in high school, I went on maybe 3 or 4 dates in college. I went to this escape room thinking I’d make pleasantries for an hour, solve some puzzles and go home. But when I met her she was cute, and smart, and funny, and after we escaped she asked if I wanted to go with her to something else she was doing that day. We ended up spending the whole day together. And again the next weekend. I haven’t “officially” asked her out, or kissed her, or really acknowledged anything about what this is. But I have had so much fun with this badass trapeze-flying, skydiving, engineering, competitive dancing, just-so-cool woman that I can’t stop thinking about when I’ll see her next.