Totally feel that, what a strange tip. Tried the same thing at my local branch last fall, convinced it would be a goldmine. Nope. Just rows of people in their own little bubbles, some student glaring at me when my chair squeaked. Felt like I was breaking some unspoken rule just by existing too loudly. Ended up just reading random magazines for an hour to make the trip feel less pointless. Proper meetups or a busy cafe are the only places that ever worked for me.

Oh man, my friend had that exact thing happen. He was so sure his way to beat the raid boss was perfect, kept telling us to follow his weird path. We wiped like three times. He finally gave up and just went with the group's call. Next try, we cleared it easy and he was laughing the loudest. Letting his plan die saved the whole run.

Yeah, getting stuck in a creative rut is exactly right. I used to only grab prompts from one big subreddit and my stories all started sounding the same. Now I mix it up with weird news headlines, random Wikipedia pages, or just writing down a strange line I hear on the bus. It keeps things from getting stale.

Sometimes the cheap stuff just gets the job done though.

Honestly thought water temp was just coffee snob talk before this.