@greenflashlight said in Oh, Humanity:
Once, more than a year ago, I was in line at a drive-thru. When I got to the window, the teller told me the person in line ahead of me had paid for my order.
Now I do it all the time. I want other people to have that surprise.
Someone did this for me a few weeks ago and I was so weirded out by it.
@ominous said in Oh, Humanity:
Who the fuck puts ketchup or lettuce on a cheesesteak?
WHO THE FUCK PUTS KETCHUP OR LETTUCE ON A CHEESESTEAK?!
YAAAAS. This is the thread we need in these dark times.
@wizz said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
I love these new kittens we got to death, don't get me wrong.
But the little sister both wants to be held and also doesn't like being held for long, and somehow, SOMEHOW, every single time she starts flailing to get down, she hooks one of her little claws directly into my nipple. Every. Time.And for that split second of infinite pain I want to HURL HER INTO THE SUN. And then I set her down and she's like "mew" and I am like, oh my god you are my world please sweet creature I just want to rub your little face.
Thick, baggy t-shirts are Kitten Essentials.
@too-old-for-this said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:
I finished doing the dishes before going to 'free him' because silly me, I assumed 5-10 minutes more of him being in his room wouldn't kill him.
You need to get the hell out of that position. That sounds ludicrous.
@ganymede said in The Work Thread:
But my administrative assistant always seems like she's walking on egg-shells.
I feel like I was literally trained to walk on egg shells around attorneys. Like -- our training really should have been about what we can do. Instead, it was mostly what we can't do. Which is -- basically anything unless an attorney has explicitly signed off on it because that's what the Court rules say.
Which is stupid.
It's an entire profession based on paranoia and micromanagement.
ETA:
It's doubly stupid because it's like:
Courts: You can't do anything on your own volition.
Experienced Paralegals: But -- why? We know this as well as the attorneys. This shit doesn't change, judge.
Courts: Because attorneys are the only ones licensed.
Experienced Paralegals: This one has had his license for two days and has never worked in this field.
Courts: But he's licensed.
EPs: But he's clueless...
Courts: And licensed!
I meannnnnnn if this is the level of competence you can expect going forward...
Yeah, agreed. Children is fine, and God-Emperor is weird, but whatever. But that's always where I stop.
@greenflashlight said in Dune:
I plan to find to a copy to see if I actually hate it as much as I remember hating it back when I was a kid. Take that for all it's worth.
I think, after having read it again not that long ago, that if I had read it as a kid? I would hate it too.
It takes a minimum amount of very specific life experiences to appreciate some of the themes in that book. Feeling trapped in relationships with people you don't love, the sheer legwork it takes to seed those kinds of mythos over centuries, over planets, the very real feeling of doing something that you don't want to do, that scares the bejeesus out of you, for the sake of your family because a power greater than you wills it for no particular reason...
The cultural clashes of the fremen, the love-hate of Atreides and Harkonnen with Jessica and Leto / others later.
Like -- as a teen/child there is simply no way that you have the necessary life experience to appreciate just where the adults in that book are coming from, or where this teenager is going.
I think so. But I also use a Kindle for the automatic highlighting and the additional notes and such that come with them.
It seems weird to me that people keep saying this is not the Hog Pit. Noted, but.... this also isn't Mildly Constructive? And there are no personal attacks?
Like... I'm not sure what rule is being violated, but this isn't even in a constructive section thread?
Seems a good start would be to advocate a move to the section you believe should apply, as a first step.
Wait, is that not how the Jedi work?
See, I don't see emotionally supported heroes when I re-read that book.
What I see is a bunch of just-barely-not-kids called adults by the standards of the day. The first of the men is imprisoned, tortured, and presumably sexually assaulted, possibly by multiple individuals. Coming home, he brings his trauma and newfound xenophobia with him to this friend group, where the charming and charismatic central figure gets tangled up with the exact kind of person that they feel is dangerous, and then gets a disease and dies, further cementing their trauma and grief as this group of relative strangers bonds about the one thing they have in common in the only way they know how, lead down a path of increasing conspiracy by a wacky doctor that not even the doctor in their own group takes very seriously.
But he gives them a plausible explanation, and presumably a means of catharsis. Except, as we know -- that catharsis never comes. They act on those fears and paranoia, and they feel just as tainted and weak and afraid afterward as they always had. Mina, in particular, is torn between two worlds -- the exotic and seductive world of the strange and foreign, or the demure role of the housewife to the successful man that she genuinely cares for. Mina's story is probably one of the most tragic of them all, as, in her own words, she never really finds what she was looking for, and always feels outside of herself.
And then the group goes back, finding every scrap of evidence they can find to support their story and justify these objectively terrible things they have done that cost some of them their lives in a quest for revenge and redemption and just general ablution, and weave together this narrative with questionable evidence and few other witnesses.
It's a dark tale, yes, but it's not dark because of the monster.
@misadventure said in Books...Books...Books....:
Same issue, but more about mental energy.
Dracula sits at 65%. I started to re-read it along with my spouse so we could talk about it, and compare it to the various Dracula and vampire movies we've been watching because October was approach, October is now.
Dracula is in a format that almost nobody uses anymore, and you kind of have to have an appteciation for that sort of evidentiary storytelling style.
@ganymede said in The ADD/ADHD Thread (cont'd from Peeves):
(That said, I guess I'd better make sure she doesn't make an OnlyFans site or something in ten years, what with how much she likes spankings.)
Look.
Look.
Student loans are a thing, ok?
And if it comes to slave labor at entry level for years or a few smutty videos -- I mean, that one's a no brainer.
If I have kids, of whatever junk, that's the rule. If you're gonna do the smutty stuff, that's fine, but invest that shit wisely.
@paradox said in Balancing wizards and warriors:
I had a long debate with a friend and I took the position that the Aes Sedai in many ways are the villains of the story.
I mean -- yeah. I'm gonna second this one.
You not only had all the nonsense that the One Power had done to the world, now burned into legend and faded into myth more than memory, you also had the fact that anyone that showed any hint of the One Power was forcibly kidnapped and dragged off to a militant training facility, where any deviation resulted in being Stilled and forced to swear an Oath that shortened your life like woah.
They were corrupt and power-hungry and paranoid, and when the Black Ajah came in, none of them even noticed. They were so tied up in their other petty squabbles.
The Aes Sedai in any other setting would be monsters. It's only the Shadow and the Black Ajah and the ... invading power from across the sea whose name I forget, now, that puts them into any sort of redeeming placement. They're, at best, antiheroes.
@il-volpe said in Dare I ask...:
My recent-ish experience with this was, uh, "You cannot learn firearms 3 by practicing, you have to shoot at things in a GMed scene." Since GMed scenes, and hence opportunities to shoot at things in GMed scenes, were not forthcoming (for me), I would have to +request My character would like to go on a rampage for no particular reason, I will attack the lover's lane on prom night with my glock 9. Or something of that ilk.
I wouldn't let you buy firearms 3 by going to a shooting range.
I would absolutely let you buy firearms 3 by participating regularly in competitive paintball.
Firearms 1 and 2 is for stationary targets. 3 is where you can hit a moving target consistently and accurately from something greater than point blank range. 4 is where you start getting into professional sniper, and 5 is like -- you made your own gun that you've been firing for 20 years and now it is basically an extension of your body.
