RL Anger

Ganymede

Not familiar with the Santa Fe reference, link? It sounds like something to get pissed off about on some level.

Kid purportedly goes on rampage because girl repeatedly rejected him; girl was one of the victims.

surreality

Kid purportedly goes on rampage because girl repeatedly rejected him; girl was one of the victims

Yep, I'm pissed. On every possible level.

It isn't the first time we've seen this, either. The case out in California a handful of years ago was similar, with the whole gross proto-incel manifesto.

Deleted

@surreality I work with a guy who seems vaguely incel. It really creeps me out and worries me.

surreality

@admiral I can totally empathize with the whole 'I am not having the sex/romatic/intimate life I want to be having' feeling. We have all been there at some point or another, some of us may be there right now, etc. It's the 'I'm entitled to that' and the 'what other people want doesn't matter' that's twenty tons of fucked right up.

It's also just frustrating. Typically these folks have these ideas of what the reality of sex/romance/intimacy is that's hopelessly skewed. This bit in particular isn't necessarily gendered, either. As in, a lot of guys may expect a relationship that looks like their favorite porno, but that's not much different than the women who expect a relationship that's like their favorite romance novel. Both are not standard reality or a reasonable expectation to have from day to day life. Some folks have moments of those things here and there, but it's not usually the every day, day to day, even then.

So it's like... well, duh, if that's what you're looking for, of course you're going to be frustrated, because that shit's fiction.

Ganymede

@surreality said in RL Anger:

Typically these folks have these ideas of what the reality of sex/romance/intimacy is that's hopelessly skewed. This bit in particular isn't necessarily gendered, either. As in, a lot of guys may expect a relationship that looks like their favorite porno, but that's not much different than the women who expect a relationship that's like their favorite romance novel. Both are not standard reality or a reasonable expectation to have from day to day life.

Thankfully, my romantic life was guided by Calvin and Hobbes.

surreality

@ganymede Wayyy back, far enough to qualify as a 'first' on a variety of things on one side or the other, I dated a guy whose mother wrote romance novels.

Genuinely awesome guy, completely and totally. But wow on that head-wiring.

Auspice

IhatemyjobIhatemyjobIhatemyjobIhatemyjob.

SG

I don't care enough to really be 'angry,' more a puzzled sort of thing.

I clicked one of those links on youtube that went to a youtuber gossip video about controversies and what not between channels. One of the clips showed a youtuber pulling in 136k a month. Holy shit. Who knew ads that never make it past adblock payed out that well? Those guys, I guess.

Anyways, I took a peek at one of these top youtubers and was even more mystified that people sit through any of these videos.

I guess this is what getting old feels like.

Insomnia

The ads have to be seen to get revenue from them, so those are the ads viewed by people with adblock turned off. But usually, or at least more recently it's more likely people pulling things in through Patreon, rather than Youtube ads with Youtube being so harsh on demonetizing ads.

People love gossip, they always have, it's just moved to the internet now.

Considering there is 450 hours worth of content uploaded to Youtube an hour, there is a lot of content out there.

surreality

I can't go into specifics about this, because it treads on that 'other people's secrets' line. Apologies in advance for that. This is someone in the hobby, but it is not someone who posts here, and I will not name them here.

But, goddamn. Over the past couple of years, a friend of mine -- somebody I care about a lot -- has done the worst crap ever. Really piled it on until I have literally zero self-esteem left.

I'm a creative person. I don't consider myself pretty, or smart, or funny, or clever, or knowledgeable, or any number of other common 'positive' traits people ascribe to themselves, even if some people think I am one of these things or high IQ tests or wards in stuff or whatever, I've never thought of myself as these things, and have always considered those things to be 'just a fluke at best' or 'the stopped clock is still right twice a day', etc.

Me, I had the one thing: I'm pretty good at being creative. Whether it was creative problem solving, out of the box thinking, or creating artsy things, compelling stories or worlds, etc.

It has always been my 'saving grace', sometimes in the most literal sense. Father lost his job years ago, everyone was freaking out... I just knuckled down and started working on jewelry at warp 10; saved the family finances that year doing it and gave them all the cash save for enough to buy a vase from one of the shows we did. Exploded the business (in the good way, adding multiple shows and getting us past juries we never came within miles of for over a decade of being stonewalled) for years to come, through which I worked 14+ hour days, every single day to make stock. It just came naturally. It's just what I did because someone had to. There are no end of stories like that. It's been my job, and it's been my sanity saver; that Gaiman commencement speech speaks much truth, 'make good art' is a lifesaver.

This hobby (RP in general) was how it helped on the sanity front since the very first tabletop game I was in when I was fourteen; there's been tabletop, AOL way back when, MOOs and MUXes, totally freeform stuff... all manner of options. No matter how tough things were, there was always a story I could join in, or create, and it was a brief escape from the stressful crap going on RL, even if the story involved lots of failures or sad things, etc. because that was totally fine, too. It was just time to not have to live in my own head for a few hours, which provided a release valve from the stress. My brain will hyperfocus on a stressor, given the chance, especially if it's something that makes no damned sense, and it's like a computer stuck in a loop -- eventually it crashes. These breaks? Prevented that, and gave me a break for a few hours, after which I had fresher eyes to regard the real world problem and, usually, deal with it much more easily.

So! Creativity. The one thing I have going for me. My actual financial means of support, and in other ways, my coping mechanism. OK, kinda a pressure-filled and not great life or self-image, but it works, and in a lot of ways it's great because I love creative work, as only rarely does it feel like work.

...the friend -- for reasons I understand? and have empathy for? and were not entirely intentional? -- completely, aggressively, and for nearly two years solid attacked my creativity in every way imaginable. All the art was crap. All the wiki was crap. All the RP was crap. All the ideas were crap. You name it, it was meh, it was crap, it was boring, it was garbage. Worse, constantly comparing me negatively to someone else in the cruelest and most degrading and demeaning and dehumanizing ways possible. (He wonders why I hate this person. Seriously? He has to wonder? I'd never dream of saying or doing anything to or about them, but damn, do I hate them.) There were a lot of other things piled on to that, many of which were so over the top crazy it triggered "huh, I thought I was over that a decade or more ago" PTSD. I do not have a night without nightmares any more, and haven't for years because of things this person has said and done.

This destroyed every shred of faith I have in my creativity abilities, because, like the dumbest motherfucker to ever draw breath (I keep telling y'all I'm not smart), somehow, I genuinely trusted this person, and was exceptionally vulnerable to them in ways I probably never have been to anyone else I've ever known in my life.

So! I'm kinda fucked.

I have spent the last two years trying everything I can lay my hands on to find something that works. I've tried building games -- we all saw what happened there -- and knitting and patternmaking and more jewelry and everything else, many of these things things I've had no difficulty with in the past, and nothing works. Nothing. It's all garbage.

The longer this goes on, the more ingrained it becomes. Our brains do change in a hard-wired way, ideas can become permanent. I am fighting tooth and nail for these things to not become permanent even while I'm afraid they already have.

I am struggling with this, still. The whole suicide thing I've mentioned isn't a joke; as it stands I see no purpose to keep existing, as the only thing worthwhile about me is broken, and may be permanently broken.

All of the above is RL Sad, not RL Anger. This is the angry part.

The friend's response to this is that they'd do something to change it, but because of arbitrary and unreasonable conditions, they've decided not to 'to be a better person'. And in some respects this is absolutely reasonable, but those are all ancient history and there's no question about that.

What makes me angry is that this person sees themselves as a valiant hero for coming to this 'better person' place, but has done so almost entirely at my expense, and consciously so. They still have all the things they want or need. They're paying the bill for their 'better person'-ness with my pain, and consciously so.

That is not a hero. That is a selfish, exploitative monster, desperately grasping for high ground after knowing they've done horrible wrongs.

And it's not fucking OK.

Insomnia

@surreality said in RL Anger:

That is not a hero. That is a selfish, exploitative monster, desperately grasping for high ground after knowing they've done horrible wrongs.

They are also not your friend. Friends do not cut down friends that way. Cut them out of your life. And yes, it hurts, but it will hurt a lot less in the end. Relationships are a two way street, both people need to want it and work at it, that's just as true with friends as it is with lovers. And this person is not your friend. Don't waste any more time on this person, and you do you, and you do art. If art makes you happy, do it. Do it for you, your family, and for people who actually care about you. Don't do it for this person who is not your friend.

Deleted

@surreality Time to Godwin's Law this shit. (Not really, but I'll be invoking Hitler as an example)

I don't care if you're Literally Hitler. Literally Hitler's friends wouldn't cut him off at the knees like that. The whole point of a friend is to -literally not do that shit-. This person is a leech. A parasite. Someone who sucks on your suffering and uses it to make themselves feel less like garbage. Nobody deserves to be treated like that. Not even Literally Hitler.

Please. Out this person. They deserve it.

surreality

@admiral said in RL Anger:

Please. Out this person. They deserve it.

On that point, I really can't. It could destroy their real life due to some of the undisclosed circumstances involved, which would inevitably come out when he inevitably lies about it, and forgets that I delete almost nothing ever and have hard evidence.

You can read that one of two ways:

I don't want that to happen
If that happens, I feel entitled to be the one to drop that particular bomb

Both are true at varying times, while the latter is (obviously) rare enough to qualify as the purported sighting of a thylacine.

Admittedly, supposedly the person he did all the negative comparisons to is a nice person. Have to wonder how she'd feel knowing he did that to someone, using her as a weapon. I hate her, but only in the sense that somebody would hate the knife someone slashed their face with, knowing full well it isn't the knife's fault.

Deleted

@surreality Just as a general addendum; don't be so down on yourself. Most of the hobby are socially inept with varying levels of self esteem issues. I've met a lot of people I first knew on MUs and, aside from a few really... shitty people they've been a lot more awesome than they believe they are.

And if they aren't awesome, they're still not really any worse than anyone else. So buck up. You probably aren't shitty.

*Looking at you, married couple who let a five year old girl run around naked in an apartment I, an adult male, had to share with you. Fuck you guys.

surreality

@admiral Part of the frustration in all of this is that I know how stupid it is that I let this person get to me so badly. For a long time before all of this began, he was literally the best person I knew. That's why it's just so mind-blowing and hard to process. There's that stupid part of my brain that's like, "This is so not the same person, he's gotta snap out of this insanity eventually and realize how stupid he's being."

Some of the horrible has stopped, but aside from a half-assed 'Sorry, I shouldn't have done that', there's nada done to make any of it right, and plenty of the hurtful bullshit continues unabated. (And who are we kidding, 'Sorry, I shouldn't have done that' with no specifics doesn't cover a solid year of vile accusations and put-downs and all the rest.)

I try to be a decent human being. I am incredibly snarky and have a grim as hell sense of humor, but I try to be a decent human being. I am not always successful, obviously, but I bother to make the attempt.

Lithium

@surreality I do not understand why you would call them your friend after all of that. I also do not understand why you would not absolutely do whatever is necessary to protect yourself from this person. At the very least, you absolutely should cut this person from your life.

Utterly.

Completely.

There is no redemption story here that I can see for them. For years this person has done this and they chose to do it, willingly. I would consider such a person to be pretty downright evil. Because it was willful. It was not that they didn't know, they chose to do what they did at your expense.

Excise them from your life so that their influence is no longer making things worse.

Ganymede

@surreality said in RL Anger:

I try to be a decent human being. I am incredibly snarky and have a grim as hell sense of humor, but I try to be a decent human being. I am not always successful, obviously, but I bother to make the attempt.

Your creative efforts are not shit.

We have disagreed on a lot of things, but I find it remarkable that anyone would classify what you have worked on -- what I have seen -- as bad.

That's unfathomable to me.

Take that for what you will. I have not seen your jewelry in a long time, but I doubt -- highly doubt -- that it qualifies as garbage.

I don't know what else to tell you. Inspiration is hard to find when it is stolen.

I like karaoke.

Aria

@surreality ....do you want me to punch him in the face? I've punched neo-Nazi bikers in the face. I'm pretty sure I could take on a self-obsessed internet turd without too much trouble.

Pyrephox

@surreality Please remove this person from your life. Seconding what people have said up above - they're not your friend. Friends sometimes go through rough patches, or they say stupid shit, but if it's been relentless and constant like this? It's not a rough patch. It's not a slip of stupid shit. It's deliberate and it will never truly stop as long as they remain in your life.

Also, I don't think anyone who has done the work you've done can ever be considered "not creative". Juries liked your work. People like your work enough to /pay actual money for it/. That's a pretty compelling evidence that it speaks to people who aren't abusive assholes. And I really, truly hope that you come to recognize and respect your work again!

Cupcake

@surreality Lady, you know I feel for you, and you know that I completely understand where you're coming from. Toxic people are toxic, and this schmuck is absolutely not your friend. Clearly, they tear you down to make themselves feel better and you should not have to be subjected to it, or be hurt by it - and it is 100% their fault that you have.

PM me if you need an ear.