Posts made by eye8urcake

I loved 'Cats' when the show was out in the 90s but I'm still sick of hearing 'Memory' and probably haven't heard it in close to 20 years.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:
Some tellings state he was an officer, some an enlisted man.

This line took song form in my head, with some kind of Johnny Cash-style guitar accompaniment.

Making it through my first scene in like two years... and it was completely by accident, as I was trying to sneak out to look around at the map and just blundered right into gasp PEOPLE!

I loved every minute of it and finally remember why I stuck with this hobby all those years before.

/sings, "Merry Christmas to me... Merry Christmas TO me... Merry Christmas to Ca-aaaake... Merry Christmas to me."

ETA: Special thanks to @Sunny and @OldFrightful.

12" GIRLS bicycle. Pink.

12" BOYS bicycle. Red.

Like wtf, really, I'm buying a bike for a 4 year old.

ETA I KNOW I can buy her the red boys one (I am!) I'm just peeved.

@Sunny said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@surreality said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

The form of abuse you are most concerned about is not the same as the kind of abuse people in this thread are most concerned about.

There is no happening on a game that is worth traumatizing a real human being, full stop.

So @surreality had a lot to say here, but I really want to call this out. THIS IS THE POINT.

Yes, there are people that absolutely can abuse this sort of system, but what are they going to accomplish with that abuse?

Being irritating.

This sort of system is not being discussed to address irritation, it is being discussed to address harm.

ETA: The reason I have not addressed the topic of being concerned that the hobby is going in this way is that I have no way to express my objections to 'we care about harm to human beings now' being a problem in a fashion that is appropriate outside of the hog pit.

ETA2: Who seriously cares if someone uses +nothanks to get out of a rape scene if they aren't actually traumatized? WHY IS THIS A PROBLEM?

BC players are promised opportunities to RP rape on the fucking tin, yo.

ETA: This is sarcasm, just in case that's not clear.

@Arkandel said in RL things I love:

Up's first five minutes are er, up there with any romantic movie ever made. Change my mind.

I can't. I am in utter and complete agreement. You basically go through the whole romantic movie of the entirety of their lives together, that quick, that clean, and with it making as much, if not more, impact than any/most other romantically inclined movies I've ever seen. That just set me up like slightly soggy house of cards for like... the entire rest of the movie.

@Ganymede said in RL things I love:

@eye8urcake

So, Up, right?

So, that one I am literally watching through the sheen of tears 3/4 of the whole movie, even though I've seen it once before. The Toy Story movies apparently kill me (I hadn't yet seen 2 or 3), Wall-E kills me, and this thing I never even heard of before, The Good Dinosaur, kills me.

Oh, and Brave. It didn't help that Luci, this kitten we've taken in who's taken to his name with far too much enthusiasm, ripped the fucking Chromecast and Roku out of the back of my television during the final fight that I was positive wouldn't turn out well despite this being a Disney, Pixar, and 'family' movie because for some reason I just get REALLY INTO these.

Can't sleep, going in for more. Got my snorkel on, wish me luck.

All these Pixar movies I've never seen before are killing me. I feel like the soft skin over my eyeballs and eyesockets is permanently sunburned from the crying and the rubbing.

Soon-to-be daughter-in-law setting her baby shower for 12/28 is really irking me. Her family == loaded and shits bricks of money, me == the absolute opposite of that. She and my son know this, very very well. I know I'm an old, but I feel so put out and feel like this is such a rude scheduling that I'm aghast that she (and by osmosis somehow, my son) really should know better out of nothing more than common sense. The baby isn't even due until 2/14. My other daughter's due date just got bumped up to 1/1 so sit the fuck down and wait your gd turn! /rant

That brings me to my second peeve of this situation, that I have to meet her family at all. They're fucking Trumpsters, and the rest of the family who hasn't forgotten how shitty I am at keeping my mouth shut for propriety's sake (basically everybody except my son) is understandably anxious about how long I'll even last at this thing because there's only so much of their shit I'll be able to listen to and pretend to ignore before I bounce or explode. I will do my best to bounce because I don't want to be That Bitch who ruins someone's first fucking baby shower, but I'm going to be relying pretty heavily on spouse and spawn to do some heavy lifting to help me achieve this goal and I hate doing that to them. There's going to be a bloody wedding this year, too, which will have all of the above problems plus I've been told I have to wear a fucking dress, plus I'll be trapped in a fucking church with those same people, so... blargh.

Maybe they'll elope after the baby's born, like I did in the olden days. Vegas is way closer for them, too. Probably not, though; she's definitely a wedding dress woman, and not a Nine Inch Nails concert shirt and a miniskirt chick like I was.

I think some of this anxiety is actually just the overflow of my other daughter's pregnancy being entirely abnormal and high risk while my hands are completely tied to do fuck all for her except keep being here when she calls to freak or rage about All the Shitty Things(tm). A few months back, they pushed her to a high risk OB/GYN because they thought the baby had Trisomy 21. The next month it was a worry she had CF instead, which I got the fun task of correcting my daughter about when she was relieved thinking it was fibromyalgia.

Now the fucking CF test results got lost or stuffed up someone's ass or something bc two weeks after waiting eight miserable interminable fucking weeks for the negative result she got for the gene profile, they're like 'oopsie, you're positive, we need to test babydaddy now even though that's going to take six weeks and we're moving your due date up to within four weeks'. This time that came with the caveat that they don't think she's actually going to have CF because babydaddy is of enough Native blood but that they DO think she's going to need abdominal surgery with possible colostomy because something something intestines.

She's not told her siblings about any of this, she's not stopped working full time through any of this, plus two (2) stress tests a week because they're worried about pre-term labor (I guess not so much anymore, by my math?), and having to pay for literally all of this out of pocket because she's got an insurance plan with a fucking $5000 deductible - something I intend to at least try to help fix with her since the birth will trigger a re-enrollment opportunity.

I want to be helpful to them, and supportive of them, and for my experiences, good and bad, to help them, somehow, when and where they can. I don't want to be the parents I grew up with who couldn't even be fucked to muster up a kind word or a bit of support for me, and I do my level best but goodness if I don't just want to be a gravel pit instead of a rock sometimes.

@surreality said in Personal Agency for Personal Boundaries:

@Pandora My main concern is that -- while it's private on the player level?

I have encountered one too many staff members over time that would, with access to such a list, behave in what I could call a questionable manner at best.

A page or so back someone, I forget who, said something about possibly getting a group of people who have had boundary issues in the past and/or who are uncomfortable/anxious about dealing with reporting directly to staff to chime in on this. This particular part of the last post @surreality made has nudged me into speaking up a bit.

I've played on multiple games where the actions and words of staff in response to being asked to mediate in these types of situations have ensured I would never go to them if/when things happened to me in their games. I've played on at least one game where the main bad actor in regards to my issues with speaking up when my boundaries were slapped, beaten, tied and torched was staff. I've seen conversations in Discord that are absolutely the thing of @surreality's nightmares, where complaints made to staff about even heavy-duty 'against policy' OOC shit like sexual harassment and blackmail were fed to the game's server by the staff member that's supposed to adjudicate them for shits and giggles and to mock the people making the complaints with the people that were being reported. I prefer to play without any OOC communication whatsoever, even for consent negotiations because of the sheer number of assholes who think it's somehow okay to perve on me via these channels simply because our stories in a fictional textual game have crossed in some sexual form or other.

If there was a 'tool' that the guidelines of a game called for using de rigeur that let me not have to page/tell to someone who was already making my teeth itch, or not have to interact with, for example, the only staffer online at that moment who happened to be an asshole I knew considered the whole of the playerbase to be on his wank bank's menu, I'd use the hell out of it. I like the idea of a consent command tool better than a rape command tool insofar as normalizing this type of 'checking in' or 'marking' on admin logs because it seems less gross somehow and it seems like it would foster 'consent' becoming habitual within that particular community, with 'rape' being the aberration but beyond this... I've got nothing to add in terms of useful suggestions.

The one thing that gets old in these conversations is the sheer number of people who shrug these things off and want the players who get fucked over to shut the fuck up and go the fuck away simply because they don't ever have these interactions or they, as game runners, don't care to expend more of their precious free time in dealing with them - which is fair, but also why I just don't even try so many of the games I see advertised bc those are the people in charge of them. I'd also postulate that in some cases, at least, this kind of attitude might just be a visible symptom of a greater problem with said games' cultures and why they either dry up and die or end up with a few die hards who get off on doing shitty things to each other enough to suck it up and deal with the shitty things done to them so they can keep their fixes coming.

Before the 'Type quit and close your client then, you whiny bitch,' brigade gets going, I'm going to own that in hindsight, yes, I see that this was definitely what should have been done on those occasions. At the time, though, on each occasion I was playing a PC that I'd put hundreds of hours into, PCs that had leadership roles, PCs that had metaplot/story resting on them with enough weight that at no time did my 'Should I quit, or no?' decision ever feel like it affected me/my game and only me/my game and so, sure, hindsight is 20/20 and I should've just said 'Fuck this shit (and them), I'm out,' but I didn't. I'm not sure I would recognize that I was blundering into the same shit today if I'd put enough time and effort into a game and/or had enough responsibility in my role(s) to other people.

Sick again, so I'm camped out in front of the tv and just enjoyed binge-watching 'Dark' and 'Glitch' very, very much.

@Kestrel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

Note to self: Never trust sweet old ladies.

They're all Gingerbread Witches.

@LittleLizard said in Dead Celebrities 2019:

Lil Bub.

That just sent my husband spiraling off into the winter doldrums. He is such a huge fan of Lil Bub.

Since we're empty-nesters for the second year in a row and neither of us bothers with our trash families, my husband and I don't really do much for holidays we used to go crazy on because of the kids. I still cook us 'holiday' meals but mostly because that sort of stuff is too hard on our budgets but is on sale during those times, not because we're actually celebrating.

This year we were going to go to Daughter #2's house 7 hours away because she's eight months into a really hard pregnancy that's going to require neo-natal surgery and she wanted family around for holidays but I didn't want them driving. Blizzards rolled through the Sierras and her oven igniter ate shit so we've postponed, and I went ahead and bought November holiday dinner fixings for us, and as usual I bought too much.

Cut to my son, who is also expecting a baby with his fiance and since they just bought their house in April, they were going to stay home and do their new little family thing. Turns out the fiance's mom ended up hooking her into a trip to Texas for moral support because the awful branch of the family decided to show up, so my son called and asked if he could come to us for dinner. Fuck yeah, score!

SO Thanksgiving went from 'meh' to 'woohoo' because every course went perfect (last year I dropped a pie in the litter box, for an example of how things usually go wrong), and even though I miscalculated the turkey cooking time (as usual), drafting my ridiculously huge 80s toaster oven ensured that everything was ready and served simultaneously and I got to sit down with husband and son to watch The Irishman.

My RL thing I love for today is that one day you get the best of good luck amidst a whole year of just suffering and fuckery.

ETA: Getting my husband to agree to try 'Mass Effect' because I could download an XB360 version for $5 was just a cherry on top.

@Auspice said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

@mietze said in Why We Don't Make New Friends Anymore (Or Creepers Do Creepy Things):

Yeah, sorry for spelling error. I do really love feeding people, but not usually that way.

We know what that copy of To Serve Man really is.

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

@RightMeow

NO HE WAS NOT.

And just to spite him I absolutely took out the trash AND vacuumed the cultural hall even though he insisted they didn't need done.

That was his dastardly plan. And it worked!

@Sunny Right now, no advice short of 'neck yourself and save the trouble' is going to be unhelpful. I'm skimpy on details, location, etc.

We don't. We're so disgustingly rural that the interstate is a twenty mile drive, the nearest town (with like, gas stations and post offices and stores) is another forty, and the nearest 'city' (which includes hospitals, WalMart, fast food) is twenty-four miles past that. There is one hospital within 150 miles, that's actually pretty amazing (husband broke his ribs during one of our vintage mx races, laid around for three days to develop a blood clot and PE before we even realized he had issues and he didn't die, is my frame of reference) that I owe 12k to right now for a 90 minute ER visit from a year ago. The hospital is (surprisingly, if you ask me) unaffiliated with any of the major corporate entities, and while I tried to work with their financial aid department, I am simply unable to provide them with the documentation they require to slot me into any of their programs.

Medicaid would normally be an option but I'm in the red part of Nevada, and one of the bones thrown to these voters is a relatively restrictive process for this that I also lack the documents to even attempt to participate in, not because they don't exist but because I can't afford them and some of them have been lost and needed replacement for so long, the Patriot Act is actually fucking me here and I don't have the money to jump through the hoops.

I know what I need and how to get it, it's just a matter of scraping the money together and I've got to admit that I know that when this passes I'll shuffle doing so right back down to the bottom of the pile because there's just so much stuff for me to field right now.

At any rate, I'm starting to yammer again so let me wrap up by saying I'm going to look into Providence Health - they might have something I just don't know how to connect with, or looking into them might reveal something else that might be an option, so thank you for the suggestion. I do have serious issues being talked to about God, but being sick and in pain tends to blunt my sharp edges about things in general, and I'm not enough of an asshole as to be ungrateful enough to spit at people who are helping me though I thank you for the heads up.

I managed to sleep last night, then got up and made sure to eat something and drink a huge glass of water before even thinking about coffee and so far I'm actually feeling 100%. I'm starting to wonder if it's just something so fucking ridiculous as merely forgetting to eat and drink on top of not sleeping very well because I just don't as a rule. I kind of hope so.

Anyway, thanks a lot, looking into that.

ETA: Sorry, I didn't even realize there was a 'Health and Shit' topic and found it last night, after posting here. Thanks for being cool about it.

I've always had issues with pre-menstrual symptoms, but once upon a time I could reliably count on the fact that any given month's wildcard special guest symptoms would come and go over the course of a week. My issues vary, anything from light cramps and heavy mood swings to an overwhelming need to devour a Mount Everest-sized salty <anything as long as it's 90% salt, really> to being unable to stay awake when weird, heavy waves of exhaustion just permeate the entire core of my being.

Over the past year or two, however, this has changed and whatever goes awry goes awry for literally two weeks before and two weeks after the main event. It's just... all the time, it seems.

Right now, what is going awry is pain. It's not the most intense pain I've ever been in at all, but it's constant and fluctuating and I am always aware of it and it's like my bones are just LEACHING it into every part of my body. Even as I type this, I can't sit still. I have to squirm or press the soles of my feet hard onto the floor or alternate massaging one hand with the other, or some other stupid little (but for some reason EXHAUSTING) thing that sort of works the ache out of some small part of me for a few seconds of faux-relief.

I can't go to the doctor, I'm uninsured and broke for umpteen reasons, and apt to be that way for the foreseeable future but I'm just so fucking tired of every waking moment being one part pain, one part figuring out how to do all the shit that has to be done around this pain so I figured I'd throw myself a bit of a pity party in this thread. Thanks for giving me the space to do so.

Dropping by good old MSB to scope out anything new and interesting to play over my God-awful winter and being relieved of the desire to play within five minutes of beginning to catch up on posts.

I love you guys. You've always got my back.

ETA: I'll include apologies for upvotes on month-old posts here, too. I forget how long I go between visits and ding away on everything, and ever since I read a post where someone was weirded out by people who do this, I've been self-conscious about it so... sorry.