Best posts made by Aria

@derp Dogs, man. Their love is whole-hearted, unconditional, and gross.

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I am going to scream.

One of my teammates and I, with support from an additional teammate and our boss, just pulled off a (virtual) year-end celebration for the 700 or so employees in our subdivision and the 400 or so partners we have in IT.

We had two rounds of trivia, three contests, pulled in four live performers, compiled a greetings video where we managed to wrangle all but one team in the entire subdivision, gave out over $40,000 in year-end gifts, and almost $10,000 in raffle prizes. Because our subdivision is extremely diverse, we had our leaders talking about how they celebrate Christmas -- and Hanukkah, and Diwali, and New Year's, and Thanksgiving and included, like, four or five other holidays into our decorations, too.

It was a huge hit. Leadership was over the moon. When we opened the comments form, excitement (and a few questions) came pouring in.

After the second comment.

The first comment, the very first one, was an employee who felt the need to lambast us for making the celebration "secular and superficial" instead of "creating a safe space dedicated to the real meaning behind the holiday."

I suppose it was inappropriate of us to only play two (instrumental, so no lyrics) religious Christmas carols and only have half a dozen leaders share how their families celebrate Christmas, specifically.

Clearly, we should've held a full Advent Mass for a division where a solid 20% of the employees are Hindu and regardless of the fact that we had several members of our leadership team excitedly talking about their Hanukkah traditions, what they did for Diwali this year, what Bodhi Day is, or they amazing multi-ethnic season they have in their household that has three different faiths in just two generations.

It was unfair, even selfish, of us to have year-end celebration for 1100 people and try to include everyone, instead of making it very clearly and very specifically a celebration of Jesus, because obviously the workplace is the optimal place for that.

@apos said in Let's talk about TS.:

@haven said in Let's talk about TS.:

Is this thread here so we can see shit posts and decide OOCly who we would never fuck ICly?

Because right now, I will never TS any of you!

That worries me way, way, way less than the opposite. 'You made some solid points there. I'd now like to TS you'. Wait what.

Look, man. Some of us get turned on by smarts.

DON'T KINK SHAME.

Being told by my doctor that they don't need to cut up my boobs any more than they already have in an attempt to prevent cancer. ^_^

@il-volpe It's been awhile since I've watched the show and I unfortunately think I left my books in South Carolina when I was there visiting my RP bestie for his fun-tervention, so I'm a little rusty, BUT....

I really love the dichotomy between the 'urban fantasy' feel of the real world +magic and the high fantasy feel of Fillory, so anything that emphasizes that being forced to switch back and forth between what seems imaginary and your 'real' life is A++ in my book. Also, as someone who loves the Acanthus from nWoD Mage and the original, unsanitized fairy tales, particularly those from Slavic countries, and Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies"..... I like the fact that the fairies are just dicks. Like, all the time. No cute Amy Brown winged pixies with a stocking fetish, but just 100%, all the time operating on rules and logic no one else gets and that makes them pretty much just awful.

My custom-made shirts were just delivered by DHL.

They are both for work.

One has foxes and daisies on it. The other has cats and moons.

I AM AN ADULT AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME. ^_^

I am a pineapple on pizza person, but that pizza must have some sort of salty pork product on it, and preferably also chicken and barbecue sauce.

My default option at most places is pepperoni, sausage, and mushroom -- usually a safe selection, even at places that are 'meh'.

But the pizza of my dreams? The pizza that I yearn for? When I went to IU Bloomington, there was a local pizza place called Aver's that specialized in gourmet pizzas. We're talking, like, "these people have won national awards" level gourmet pizza. And they had one named the Cream and Crimson, which were our school's colors. They delivered it to our house by accident one night, as someone else in our complex apparently had ordered that plus one of the two pies we'd gotten and the driver accidentally swapped the two. By the time we figured out what happened and called the shop? They told us they were already sending out replacements to both places and to just eat it. So we did. And it was amazing.

I present, from their website:

"Cream & Crimson - Alfredo sauce and cheese are blanketed with a layer of oven-roasted red potato seasoned with fresh garlic and dill. Topped off with bacon, cheddar and creamy gorgonzola cheese."

http://averspizza.com/

If you are ever in the Bloomington, IN area? I highly recommend ordering from them. Highly. I haven't lived there in almost 13 years and I still miss their food.

@Darinelle

Double post, but here's a present!

Girl, go get a bra fitting. You know it's been too long since your last one and the Nordstrom's annual sale starts Wednesday. Wearing the right sized bra will change your damned life.

My dog has an enormous bed. I have a small car. Still, when driving halfway across the state to visit @insomniac7809 's parents, we went to the trouble of bringing it with us so he could be comfortable.

This morning, I woke up to this. Note that we apparently went to all of the trouble of squeezing his enormous bed into the car so that he could sleep on the bare hardwood floor next to his dog bed, and not actually on it.

FFS, dog. >.<

My boyfriend and I are big fat nerds who met via RP, then became OOC friends, then he met my RL friends, then he met me, then we became RL friends, and then one day when he was visiting and we were drunk, I got sick of his shy hinting and shamelessly threw myself at him.

That was a little over ten years ago. Now we have a house and too many cats and no time to RP together, which is hilarious because we RP on the same site and our characters are married. I guess they, too, grunt at each other incoherently in the mornings and assume everything is fine so long as the House isn't on fire and the occupants are fed.

you, @insomniac7809 !

Mostly I'm just mad that she's so sweet, we're starting to want to keep her even though we Officially Have Too Many Cats. At least one of whom belonged to a neighbor who refused to take him back after he 'got out' and we tracked her down. Apparently she was moving and he was 'too much trouble'. So this is a thing that has happened before and I was hoping it would go better this time.

On the upside, he is a very handsome man and a snazzy dresser. Here's a cute cat picture to make up for my bitching.

I am a horrible monster who loves to torture my pets. I also have no regrets.

@Meg Sometimes brains need to punched right in their big stupid face.

My advice -- and my last therapist thought this was both hilarious and super effective -- was talking back to your negative self-talk like it's someone you not only dislike, but have zero respect for. Give it a name and shitty personality you just despise and next time, that little voice going off in your head can go like this.

"None of your friends actually like you. They're just being polite."

"Well, you cut filled donuts in half and leave them in the box, so no one likes you either. So you can just shut up about it, Brenda."

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

A friend on Facebook: "White Irish immigrant slaves were treated worse than any other ethnic group in American history, and you don't see them asking for reparations..."

Really?

I mean, really?

ETA: I'm not entirely sure that I have the willpower to address that gently. I told her that Irish immigrants were indentured servitude and had rights, unlike chattel slavery, but if it turns into an argument, I dont know if I can keep Jim Halpert WTF from turning into...

This was actually a common argument used in the pre-Civil War north in order to dampen what had historically been a very strong anti-slavery sentiment among the Irish in the New World. Effectively, they were sold membership in the newly made up club of "whiteness" in order to get them to STFU and still let slavers count black people as farm equipment. **

Spoiler Alert: It worked.

Double Spoiler: This means your friend is not only spewing racist shit, she's spewing two hundred year old racist shit. At least come up with something new and exciting, like the Irish once ruled the world until the aliens came and made Barack Obama president and that's also how we got all our Civil War artifacts that didn't exist until 2008. (You didn't just imagine them in school. Those are memory plants from the aliens.)

MUFON and casual internet racism combined! Look, Ghost, I'm helping by combining all your friends' hobbies into one.

**Source: The entity of Ignatiev's "How the Irish Became White", which is incredibly fascinating but was written as a text largely used by graduate students in history programs, so it's really, really dry.

@Too-Old-For-This said in RL things I love:

@Ghost I dunno, I think she picked the deceptive hardcore mode. IIRC, the family wanted a big church wedding and reception, hundreds of guests type wedding. So the guilt-tripping is real.

Not quite. Hundreds of guests (probably 200-230ish if his mom's whole family came) and not exactly a church wedding (despite my mom's massive "But people are expecting <xyz formal, old-fashioned, expensive thing she isn't paying for>" guilt-trip), but close enough. And instead of doing either of those and shelling out $40K like the average traditional wedding costs in my East Coast city, I get to go "Hahaha, motherfuckers, my wedding dress was $63 including shipping."

Anyone who continues saying that we should totally do this other super expensive thing we have no interest in is promptly met with wide-eyed excitement as I announce, "Wow! That's such a great idea. And an incredibly generous wedding gift! Thank you so much for doing that for us."

Here is an actual, real-life picture of someone who is totally me walking away from wedding planning conversations.

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

This part of the peeves thread is difficult to parse without pictures.

...Your own fault for not specifying of what, smartass.

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

@Ganymede @Macha @Auspice My SO and I are pretty generous. We have a lot of friends who don't have as much as we do, so we often do things like cook dinners, help people with projects, etc. We have a yearly tradition where we invite people who don't have family in town for a post-Thanksgiving dinner. Thanksgiving with all the fixins. We are that couple that give out a lot of free food to homeless people, etc.

We found out a while ago this acquaintance of ours lost his job and had a cancer diagnosis and was asking for a few hundred to pay bills. We reached out to friends and got a group together, and he got some 400+ out of it. Later found out he never got fired or had a cancer diagnosis, but instead used it to buy a tattoo and then Facebook blocked everyone who gave him cash.

So, having said all this...I TOTALLY GET BEING DEPRESSED OR HAVING A HARD TIME. I love being there for my friends; it's a badge of honor to me that they can come to me when they need a friend. Having said that, "I'm in a bad place and it would mean a lot to me if someone bought me WWE tickets" just kinda pisses me off. It's also hard when you just see the same 5 or 6 people just constantly flip flop from "internet fighting" to "so depressed cant do anything but would be okay if someone did..."

Just brings me down. I'd love to help. I can even understand how getting a new thing would feel great! Still...it's grating because it makes me worry that I'm friends with some people who take advantage of others.

As someone who has had a depression diagnosis for twenty years and tends to isolate myself into a little corner of blankets and exhaustion and gross for fear of either expressing my feelings or being the slightest burden to anyone ever except my poor husband.....

Your "friends" are taking advantage of you. And they fucking suck.