Best posts made by Aria

I played TT for the first time in years on Monday night. And it didn't take me an hour of staring at feats to figure out WTF I was doing on this latest D&D edition. ^_^

Trufax: Not one but two different women in my family married into the name "Ruth Guth", in the days before not changing or hyphenating was an option. You know those ladies loved their husbands very, very much.

@aria said in RL things I love:

I am going to go visit my RP bestie of almost four years next month and help turn his awful breakup/months of couch-surfing into a "bring all your friends over into your furniture-less new place and we'll have a big camp out/slumber party in your empty living room" housewarming bash. Followed by a full-on Macklemore visit to the local thrift shop to help him get new stuff.

I am excited. ^_^

Due to the awful circumstances said RP bestie still finds himself in, he remains in dire financial straits. I, meanwhile, have an Amazon Prime account. And thus the ability to invade his porch with a functional coffee pot if I want to. >.>

There are few things as amusing as watching someone flail at me for being nice to them.

@auspice The "m'lady" was what really did it for me.

A++. Would shop again.

B-b-bbbut @Auspice ! You made his boner sad.

That's practically a war crime, you heinous bitch!

@surreality The worst part is, they weren't even boning. They're young and recently had a baby (whose crib they put against my bedroom wall, so I hear their kid cry at 2AM before they do, FFS), so if Sunday morning meant Gram-Gram took the baby to church and this was their only chance to have sex? I'd politely ignore it out of sympathy.

But no. This just seems to be what the neighbor lady puts on to sing to -- loudly -- while she's cleaning her house. Including vacuuming. We don't do loud shit in our house past 9PM to avoid waking your kid up. Maybe don't do loud shit in yours before 9AM on a weekend so you don't wake me up.

@thenomain -- If we're talking about the height of the genre and not modern American Gothic literature....

It's important to remember that one of the defining characteristics is the intense use of the setting to define the narrative, to the point that it almost becomes a character unto itself.If you want a modern visual example, think of those long establishing shots in True Detective, through the swampy, dilapidated, isolated areas of Louisiana and how that comes into play. (Seriously, Cary Fukunaga is fucking brilliant at using setting to create atmosphere and his version of Jane Eyre is one of my favorites as a result, even though others more accurately follow the storyline from the novels.)

In British Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th century, this usually results in the story of a young woman facing the mysterious and quite possibly supernatural in a castle, an abbey, or a mansion (think The Mysteries of Udolpho or, if you'd like to use a modern film equivalent, Crimson Peak, which I also recommend). This generally evokes an overall atmosphere of corruption and of decay, of something sinister and inherently wrong hidden behind a facade of beauty and, often though not always, class and wealth.

American Gothic literature, by contrast, was often set against a backdrop of the wild and the unknown, which makes sense given how -- from the colonial mindset -- unsettled and deadly anything outside the very narrow centers of 'civilization' were. A lot of early American Gothic deals with themes of survival, the animalistic nature of man, and being driven to madness by extreme situations. You're also more likely to see direct -- and for the time, very shocking --- violence as well, as opposed to the looming threat of it. Edgar Huntly pretty much centralizes all of those themes into a single novel and even though it's not especially well known, had pretty profound effects on the writing of, say, Joyce Carol Oates and even Poe, though of all American authors in the genre, Poe relies most heavily on the British Gothic tropes.

This obviously changed and developed over time, as Southern Gothic literature -- which now makes up the bulk of the American canon -- also has profound themes irony, social issues, and warped communities, too. But.... that's the start, and The Witch does that really, really, REALLY well. I cannot recommend it enough, even if the 17th century dialog takes about ten minutes to get used to.

@thenomain Tread carefully, Theno, or I will bust out my gender theory analysis of Frankenstein and start waving it around. I mean, I have to do something with the ten pages I wrote on that shit.

@coin and @Roz -- Yeah, that's.... entirely possible. My high school English education was very odd, as my school decided to switch the sophomores' honors class to the juniors' honors class curriculum one year. As a result, we had two grades supposedly studying the same material for one year of overlap and not enough textbooks to go around. Like.... literally, we had sets kept in the classroom and we weren't allowed to take them home. As a result, we ended up reading a lot of things that parents were willing to pay out of pocket for (short, inexpensive novels) or things that were out of copyright that my teachers could make handouts of for us to take home, which is how I ended up studying Paradise Lost at 15 and read "A Man for All Seasons" -- which I've yet to meet anyone else who's ever studied it -- but to this day have only read excerpts of Moby Dick to compare to scenes in the fucking movie. (No, that is not a joke.)

@darinelle said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

Goddammit, friend_07, stop trying to "fix" my issue with advice that doesn't work unless I am

1. A spoiled goddamn toddler who is willing to make everything about me, and
2. In possession of a body that isn't broken as fuck.

But thanks for reminding me, on what was starting out to be a cool, chill morning, why I continue to struggle with depression. Good job. Had a great weekend, but that shit's over now.

"Just stop worrying about it."

......That's not how anxiety works, fucker. Believe me, I would if I could.

If you need anything, let me know.

@auspice I also graduated as an adult with a full-time work schedule, which feels super weird, though at least had the ability to walk at graduation with one of my fellow "Yeah, we're 30....." classmates.

I recommend taking your next few days that you have off of work and doing literally nothing with them. Like, relish the fact that you have no deadlines looming over your head. Give yourself permission to spend the entire time playing video games in your underpants like an irresponsible teenager if you want to. Or whatever else may be on your personal "I don't have to do anything right now" wishlist.

And then when your diploma comes, put it in the most ostentatious frame you can afford. I still owe $44K on that thing. You bet its framed in the gaudiest gold-colored whatsit I could find.

Sooooooo, my university email account is still active, even though I graduated (as an adult student) back in 2015. I never really use it because it's basically just full of spam trying to get me to donate money (I still owe you fuckers $43,000, so you piss off asking me for more while I'm still paying you) and reminding me relentlessly about when basketball tickets go on sale, since that's a huge thing at that school.....

....Except to check every week or so for messages from Unidays. Yeah, I still have access to a student discount site, so yeah, I'm going to use it. Thanks, extra 15% off overpriced sweaters at ModCloth!

I logged in today to see that right now, they're having some huge up-to-60% discount off promo going on. Naturally, I browsed the list to see if any of them were sites where I'd been window shopping and waiting for things to go on sale.

And now I can't stop laughing. 'Cause one of the sites listed as having a discount promo? Is a sex toy site. Thanks to my affiliation with a very, very Catholic university, I can now get a 25% discount off of sex toys.

The irony. It is delicious.

I'm in the middle of Season 2 of GLOW and I love it. I love it just as much as the first season. It's fantastic....

With that said, they totally lost me on Debbie this go around. I loved her in Season 1 -- complex, angry, and with all of that shown on screen, with zero attempts to mitigate any of her perfectly justifiable reactions. But this season? After the bungalow scene? Fuck you, Debbie. Really, fuck you. And a half-hearted gesture of apology you tried to foist off on someone else to get them to do? Yeah, I'm kind of out of sympathy for you, girl.

@surreality We just dropped $800 on having our A.C. fixed, down from the B.S. $6K estimate we received from the repair company. I strongly advise getting a second opinion.

In the meantime, I don't live that far and if you and the hubs can fit our old window A.C. unit in your vehicle, you're welcome to come borrow one or two of them for a spell so at least one room in your house is livable.

(Alternately, I think my office is even closer, so if the boy can load one in my car, and I can meet you at the Wegmans by work so you don't have to worry that @insomniac7809 and I are going to store you in the garage freezer like internet psychos. Or something.)

@surreality ^ This. I was color-matched a Sephora, where the test they give you spits out a color code that works with any product in their store. The yellow undertones in my skin are so strong, I'm about two shades darker than "as pale as the spectrum registers" and "as far into the yellow end of the spectrum as we have." Surprise surprise, I have an easier time buying foundation from Korean brands than US ones. Thanks, adopted grandpa of unknown Meditteranean-ish origins!

@surreality said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:

That they would have so many two minute long individual ads for various bits of medication did not help. Really, I swear, Hulu, I am not your target audience for 'please go get a prostate exam'.

There was a brief period where every YouTube ad that came up was for psoriasis.

Every. Single. One.

I'm not sure what the correlation between psoriasis and 90s alt rock playlists is, YouTube, but sure. Go for it.

I just bought an Instant Pot from Prime Day based, at least in part, on the recommendations here.

You fuckers better cough up the goods now.

flooooooops

We just got back from seeing Panic! at the Disco.

Through the magic of the concert gods, I managed to get second row seats the day of the show. At the original price.

It was soooooooooo gooooooooood.

@goblin -- Other people have covered the idea of voter disenfranchisement pretty well, but I think there's something that may not have been explained that is true regardless of your political beliefs re: voter ID laws.

You don't (at least theoretically, given some of the voter roll purge issues that have been cropping up) have to register to vote every year or in every election. Theoretically speaking, once you register to vote, you should stay registered to vote provided that you do so every so often, don't move, and don't commit a felony in a state where that removes your right to vote, temporarily or permanently.

However, there have been issues of voter roll purges cropping up, so it's always worthwhile to check online -- which is really easy! -- as to whether or not you're registered and your registration information is correct. And there's people who only bother to vote in presidential elections. Or people who may be away from their polling place on election day that need an absentee ballot. Or who serve in the military, so they might be on base or overseas. Or are in college, so would need to change their registration if they wanted to vote where they go to school versus in their hometown. Or who have moved to a new area and simply forgot to update their registration. Or in my case I live in Pennsylvania, the most heavily gerrymandered state in the US. Recently (back in February), the state courts ruled against the drawings of district lines as they were and ordered them redrawn. My district -- which had been so heavily gerrymandered that my ZIP code literally had to be checked block by block based on your street address to figure out who your Congressional House representative is -- was completely redrawn, and the district I'm currently in versus the district my November vote will count for has totally changed. I used to be PA District 1 and I think I'm changing to PA District 3, or something. (I know the candidates, but keep forgetting the district ID.) For me, it was worth checking on my registration to make sure that my voter record had properly transferred and whether or not my polling place changed, so I don't show up at the wrong location and end up getting turned away.

So, yes, it's a pretty garbage system.... but until recently, for most people post-Voting Rights Act of 1965, the big problem was remembering to update their stuff by the deadline if their situation changed. Slightly less so with the overt "hahaha, you're poor/brown/foreign-born but a citizen/unlikely-to-vote-for-our-dickface-candidate?!? you don't get to vote!!!!" bullshit.

@auspice Fancy vests!

@tinuviel It's lined, too, unlike most shitty women's fast fashion. I got it 30% off and am thrilled.