Im actually really happy with me personally lately. I still have a lot in life that could be better, but im alive, healthy, and living as my truest self. Everything else will come eventually. I recently started planning for my future for the first time in my life. Its weird. I never thought id live past 25, let alone want to.

Last week I was told that my dog's trainer said I was the best client she's ever worked with. The man that works at the front desk said he randomly asked her one day who the best client she's worked with was and apparently with zero hesitation she said my name. I'm quite proud of that, because I worked really hard when I had my dog in training to make sure I was doing everything I could to make it, and us, successful. This trainer has worked with thousands of dogs and owners over the years so to have the distinction of being her best client is quite a pleasant surprise. I was determined to turn my crazy excitable COVID puppy into a well behaved dog I could take anywhere, and we succeeded. It was a lot of work, but worth it, and I'm proud of both the results, and the fact that apparently our trainer was impressed too. ☺️

• I make a great vegan ice cream that is loved by many non-vegans.
• I beat depression and anxiety.
• I have a fun job that pays well and I'm good at it.

My mother in law said I'm a really good dad. Like not even on father's day, just like randomly once.

I’m always a little surprised when I look into the population MMR distribution for games I play a lot. I’m often in like the top 5% or better in the kind of games I play a lot. But… I suck at them. I don’t feel like I know what I’m doing and when I look at streamers who are actually good at the game, it’s not like they’re just a more refined version of me, it’s like they’re playing a different game.

So I like to describe myself as being “the top of the trash heap.”

I'm incredibly humble.

The horrors persist, but so do I.

I wanted to learn hardware design by designing a basic risc-v processor, ben eater style, kind of like a 1970s minicomputer, with expansion slots for new isa extensions and CSRs. But obviously using real breadboards for experimentation would be too slow when designing a 32 bit processor. I had never touched an hdl before.

So I sat down and started writing my own simulator and netlist generation dsl from scratch. It only works at the gate level, no behavioral synthesis, but flexible enough to write components modelling, for example, 74 series chips. It does vhdl-like delta cycle simulation using 8-valued logic, but without vhdl's signal forwarding footgun.

I then implemented an rv32i processor with full m-mode support, and a risc-v emulator in rom to trap and silently emulate any missing extension instructions. When a new expansion board is plugged in, those instructions are simply not trapped and are accelerated in hardware.

I then learned just enough systemverilog to faithfully transliterate the generated netlist into structural verilog, and it actually synthesized and worked perfectly on an fpga.

I am now in the process of very slowly designing boards to hopefully one day manage to build the whole thing out of discrete 74hc series logic

My body is a machine that turns Vietnamese supermarkets into Mexican food for my lovely wife. I do not feel pain, or remorse, or pity, & I cannot be stopped unless I am killed.

I've gotten better at teaching roller (and inline) skating. Yesterday I passed a certification as a "Level 2" instructor.

My actual skill level is kinda intermediate. At the skate school where I teach, many of the other instructors can skate circles around me, but I'm doing ok for someone who never touched skates until my 30s and is otherwise a very unathletic overweight computer geek.

When I do have the energy, I'm a pretty good cook. Also I'm managing to grow things outside. Not like. Well. But they went from seeds to fruit which is the only thing I really wanted.

I am a really good earthmover, heavy equipment operator. My machine of choice that I run daily is a motorgrader.
Other equipment I am very skilled with; bulldozers, scrapers, and loaders. Fair on excavators. Skid steers and loader backhoes I am average.

I can speak in a British accent!

(Happy Birthday Mel Brooks!)

My neurodivergence means that not only can I process a huge amount of things at once, but I can also process through large tasks quickly.

This means I am an absolute maniac when it comes documentation, large scale changes, and complex thoughts.

In one research assignment, I managed to visualize a 12+ dimensional object/map, in its entirety. I felt amazing and understood the datasets complexities all at once.

The moment I am done with my current job, I am fucking off to be a professor.

I have nothing to brag about.

I'm great at getting dogs to trust me. I work at an animal shelter and we have a ton of strays, neglect, and abuse cases that get brought into our shelter (only a few shelters in our podunk county). These animals are usually fearful and greatly distrusting of people, especially men. I get these dogs to trust me and not be so fearful fairly quickly, and in the short time I've been working here I've become the goto guy for dogs that are emotionally shutdown. It helps that the shelter I work at is run by great people who have put together a great team that really cares about all our residents. I get to take my time working with these dogs and am not pressured to get it done faster.

I have bipolar and addiction issues. I’ve been sober and stable for 8 years. With a lot of work and therapy and meds I’m down to 2 episodes a year and stay very stable outside of those. I’ve also started a program in my city for addicts with mental health issues, for half the month it’s a peer support group, the other weeks we bring in local therapists to run free workshops on DBT skills and principles. This is often the only time many of my regulars can access mental healthcare. For someone with a major mental illness and low education I feel so proud of myself

I still exist, despite fighting depression and dissociation and suicidality my entire adult life. I have been homeless, I have moved across the country to a place that is safer for people like me because where I lived no longer was, leaving me alone in a place where I knew no one, and I am still here.

I am okayish at learning and understanding languages. I have a personal language with a couple thousand words in it that I have been using for twenty years.

I am a quiet person and try my best to be humble and small and hurt no one. I often fail at this, but damn it I try.

I’m an awesome physicist. I’ve created valid solutions for a variety of problems the community thought impossible, as well as solved problems that nobody else was aware of. My first major solution was for the diffraction of waves through an aperture. As part of that solution I even improved upon Bethe’s solution. Bethe was a Nobel price winning physicist.

I solved a data science issue with working with a collection of arbitrary data sets in a systematic manner. That open source software is pysat, python satellite data analysis toolkit.

I invented a new neutral wind instrument for satellites called SANDS that also measures composition and temperature. It is smaller, faster, more robust, and requires less power than previous attempts. In fact the solution is a differential equation rather than a ‘simple’ formula. The reason is the instrument operates too fast to simplify the math.

Most recently I solved another impossible problem in plasma physics. Previously the community couldn’t correctly calculate the distribution of electric potential around the globe because they thought the magnetic field was too complicated. I can. My software solution also produces visual art though it was explicitly designed for physics.

I also invented a new class of musical instruments called photonic musical instruments. These instruments use the resonance of electricity and light to create music in the same way acoustic instruments use the resonance of vibrations in wood. Photonic instruments create music we can’t hear using colors we can’t see. I created a software plugin that authentically recreates photonic musical instruments but in a way that we can hear. I’m currently trying to market the plugin and my art which is proving to be quite the challenge.

Can I brag about my day? My husband and I got into a cycle of fucking, showering, smoking a joint, and (optionally) eating that repeated 6-7 times today. It was an absolutely perfect day off and we even got two loads of laundry done.

It’s super hot where we are (hence the showering), but our apartment is 3/4 underground, so it’s about 10C cooler than outside. Still warm, but not unbearable inside and we needed a way to pass the time, lol.

I've gotten very good at cooking by trying around 200-300 recipes from all around the world. Whatever dish you're thinking of, I can probably make it perfectly and tell you it's origin and related dishes. I've made a system of my recipes where they are organized by origin country, allergies, diets, ratings, categories and tons more, and all ingredients are connected to more information and other recipes where they're used. I feel like I'm getting close to solving cooking as a whole by fixing all paper cuts and annoyances involved one by one

I do go for the jack of all trades approach. So I'm not great at anything, but I'm good enough in most things.

My endurance might be above avarage, really useful for resistance training, giving me higher than avarage work capacity and recovery ability and can maintain it with a decent consistency.

Yeah i know that's not exactly bragging, but I'm trying my best.

I didn't go to college and knew I had to gain as much real work experience as I could to be competitive. That ultimately landed a managing position with a huge international company making about 80k a year.

That job drove me down so hard I ended up having a mental breakdown, went into a program, and quit the job.

I started over with another local company making $19 an hour. In a year and a half I've been promoted a few times and am now making 70k a year with the understanding from this place that I guard my mental health very closely and they e been absolutely cool with everything.

I can whistle from both ends!

I have very high metacognition and I can tell 5 minutes before my period is about to start. I’ve never had bloody underwear or bloody sheets.

While not quite salty enough, I made same absolute banging chicken alfredo today, and the naan-dough I made has risen impressively

I'm pretty good at Mario Kart. I hadn't played it for about 10 years, but I beat all my friends when I played Mario Kart World for the first time with them recently.

I can recognise almost 300 汉字 💅 it did take me about 8 months, life keeps getting in my way

also finally, formally medicated, no more self medocating for me!

also congrats to you OP!

I got so good at supreme commander that I could 3vs1 my TeamSpeak friends and whoop them every time. Eventually they wouldn't play with me.

I suck at every other RTS.

Also I'm an incredible lover, for real

I have done exactly 3½ minutes of animation over the course of the past 24 days. It's probably the most I've drawn since I was a little kid, and I've been having a blast with it. I don't want to oversell the quality of the animation — it is very amateurish, there's a lot of limited and reused animation, that's part of the point — but the animation I've done still represents maybe on average 2 or 3 hours of work each night, so about 60 hours of work in total (probably well over 100 hours of work when counting the work that went into the prescoring, opening and end credits, and storyboarding).

I'm hoping to have about 9 minutes of animation done by July 15, but at this rate it's looking more likely that I'll only get about 5 or 6 minutes done, and I'll leave the rest as storyboards. But we'll see.

When college aged, I modeled for a few art majors' photo projects.

I caused a pizza delivery car to run off the road through the power of my pelvic thrusts. Thankfully they corrected quickly and no one was hurt.

My mental breakdown has their own Facebook page.

I started numerous traditions in my social circles.

I'm reasonably good at taking postcard quality photos with garbage equipment.

I've been on radio, as a PSA to get your bum fingered for prostate cancer. Edited the recording myself too. The cadence of saying "digital rectal exam" is burned into my memory, from listening to the audio so damn much while editing.

I made a Smash Bros Brawl hack that quickly became a local mainstay of gaming get togethers (even outside of my immediate social circle) and persisted after I left the area. Ton of custom stuff layered over Brawl Minus, long before infinite came around.

I've made a number of custom programs for making "glitch art". Algorithms to screw with images. Toss in ~50 of my photos, run them through ~20 different functions that make psuedo-random changes, do ~10 runs per function to get even more results. Then delete the results down to ~10 worth keeping. More fun than it sounds.

I led a small marching group in an international parade on ~20 minutes of training while quite drunk. I directed them while holding a flagpole as an extension of my junk. They shouldn't have let me, and I asked if they wanted a friend with actual marching experience to do it, but they said they wanted me to do it.

I've made multiple 6-10 hour drives, some on little sleep, to be there for friends and family in times of need.

Before I proposed to my wife, I spent a week smashing together existing romhacks of Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and getting them to work properly combined by fiddling with the code, then I did a handful of custom modifications myself to the graphics and script. End result is a special version of the game with Zelda and Link swapped, then replaced by my then gf and I, that asked my then gf out on a date when she beat the first dungeon.

She then proceeded to nearly trip over me when I got down on one knee at the end of that date.

For the job that started my career, I was one of three candidates out of 35 who didn't wear a suit to the first round, and I was still hired.

I turned a seasonal internship plugging in computers into a full time sysadmin/engineering position in the span of three and a half years, skipping a few intermediate positions at that workplace.

I have scripted business critical systems integrations at my workplace, that have impact on literally every employee.

I was the first person in my social circle to be able to afford a house, and my wife and I are the first ones who wanted a kid and had one intentionally.

::: spoiler Sexual escapades Despite being a nerd, and how much all my peers in high school talked about it, I actually had sex before most of my peers. Consensual, age appropriate partner I was in a serious relationship with, and good first time.

Once fucked someone so good that they passed out for a moment.

While my partners have been limited, I've been the largest any of them have had. Not as much of a flex as you'd think, too big isn't pleasant.

I have a single digit number of times where my partner hasn't climaxed. :::

And a "secret": I only have a list this big because I have to remind myself of reasons to be proud of myself. Left to my own devices, I don't tend to think I'm worth much, so every few years I sit down and try to make a little mental list. This is the combination of multiple ones.

I am good at making the impossible happen. I’ll have a vision for something which seems impossible to most people, but by putting my soul into it I can still convince some people that it’s something worthwhile, and then we make it happen together. My visions don’t always come to life, but when they do it’s extremely exhilarating.