My level of antagonism depends on how self-destructive brain wants to be.
Brain wants me to eat a whole cheesecake even though lactose doesn’t always agree with me. Okay, well, Brain wants me to be happy and also acquire those sweet, sweet calories, I respect that.
Brain wants me to vividly imagine sticking a knife in my belly while I’m chopping vegetables for dinner. Sorry Brain, you’re kind of a dick.
I’ve heard of therapists recommending you name your brain - particularly someone you dislike - so that you can separate yourself from the part of you that runs amok.
Fuckin’ Greg’s at it again, won’t let me sleep until I check to see if the door’s locked for the seventh time. Boy, I hate that guy.
Not to be flippant, but if you want to alter the way you think, then therapy is probably the answer.
The good news is that in my experience, the valuable part of therapy is totally free and you could start today.
I’ve had success with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). The model for CBT says that our automatic thoughts initiate our feelings, and while our feelings are valid, our thoughts can be bullshit.
Our brain is like an overgrown field, and each thought is like a person passing through it. Each time a thought passes through the field, it wears down a groove which will become a trail or a road. Our thoughts want to take the path of least resistance, so they follow the well-worn paths. However, we can create new paths with better thoughts that lead to more positive feelings, and eventually the negative paths have more resistance than the positive ones.
The key technique is recognizing Cognitive Biases, which are common ways that our brains lie to us, and then restructuring our thoughts through journaling exercises. Common biases include assuming other people think poorly of us, making predictions of the future with limited information, or thinking that because we feel bad we must be bad.
Now on the flip side, therapeutic techniques are not a one-size-fits-all solution. What’s worked for me might not work for everyone. And that’s okay because there’s plenty of tools in the toolbox left over.
I got a lot of mileage out of CBT. It’s logical, there’s a process to follow, and it improved the quality of my life to a point. It didn’t happen overnight, and I still have bad times more often than I’d like, but there was improvement
Whether you have access to a therapist or not, the greatest impact from therapy comes from doing the homework. It’s lame, but there it is. But if you really don’t vibe with a technique, the good news is there’s a zillion other techniques you could try a web search away.
Unfortunately, it looks like drawing a big rectangle is the only method to calculate area that’s baked into Godot. You could get the Area2D’s CollisionShape2D children, and then for each child you can child.shape.get_rect().get_area()
Now, if you’re getting each shape anyway, and you know what kind of shape it is, you can use the appropriate formula to calculate area. For instance, if it’s a CircleShape2D, you can check the radius and get something like var area = shape.radius * shape.radius * PI
For a polygon it becomes more complicated. You can get the points of the polygon and then use Geometry2D.triangulate_polygon() to get an array of triangles inside that polygon. You can then calculate the area of each triangle and sum them to get your total area. There’s no built-in way to do this, so it’s left as an exercise for you.
The question I have to ask: from a design standpoint, is the exact size of each country truly important to the game? For the sake of argument, Canada is a really quite large country, but it’s sparsely populated. A lot of the land is frankly not very habitable. If I was going to abstract a surrender-factor, I’d think about “population” filling a role that you’re thinking of for “area.” If that were the case, you could just attach a property to each country manually. Maybe a little more work upfront depending on how many countries or regions you’re including, but it’s definitely cognitively simpler.
Considering the cube
Quiddler is also the name of a card-based word game. It plays like Gin with a lot of Qs