Posts made by Ganymede

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

It was a relief to have him pass and end his pain. I hope that through the sadness you and your partner get to feel a little of that peace.

Thank you.

I think I'm past the sadness. The feeling of helplessness went away when I realized that there is something I can do: give him a peaceful passing. I'm looking forward to it, knowing that he is in substantial pain and suffering.

As macabre and as morbid as that sounds, I find the idea of being able to end his watch comforting and empowering.

@saosmash said in General Video Game Thread:

Theoretically, generally speaking, you shouldn't be held responsible for a fraudulent signature executed on your behalf. I suppose if someone acted in reliance on that signature in good faith to their detriment there would be an equitable question about what that would mean in terms of enforcement. One question that may come up is what action, if any, you took upon discovering a fraudulent signature was executed on your behalf.

This is more or less my opinion.

The point of an NDA is to restrain someone from talking about sensitive, proprietary information. If you haven't been doing that, there's no reason to try and enforce the NDA.

@Scissors

I am sorry that my experience is bringing up sad memories.

Gay Edward -- he loved men dearly -- was a wholesome and dumb cat. He's the cat everyone wants: lazy as shit, warm as fuck, and stupid as hell. He was going to turn 10 this year.

The diagnosis is far worse than we thought, so I know that euthanasia is probably the only reasonable thing to do. He has two masses on his stomach, and the ultrasound showed fluid collecting in his stomach tissue. Given his anemia, the doctor suspected this to be blood. I can only imagine what it feels like to have two cancerous, hard masses growing on your stomach, along with having an un-burst blood boil on the inside.

Like, holy fuck, no wonder he didn't want to eat.

I will be putting him down in a few hours. I will go secure with the knowledge that our decision is the right one. I will put the needle in, if asked. I will push down the plunger. Because, goddammit, were I in that position I would want my loved ones to fucking let me go and do the honor of bringing a merciful end.

I feel that we focus so much on the sanctity of life that we forget about the dignity of life. I thank God that I have the opportunity to give my cat the latter, which is a gift I hope my loved ones will give me at some point.

I'm going to sing Dust in the Wind tomorrow at karaoke.

@Thenomain

If you have Hulu, though, you should really watch the series.

Season 3 is my favorite, if only for "Riding the Dragon," which is possibly the best spoof on RPGs I've ever seen. (Also, horribly accurate.)

@Auspice

I don't feel responsible for the diagnosis.

Feeling helpless is not a feeling I relish. I do recognize there are things I can do little about, and that this is one of them. Underneath the robot, I am actually very much an alpha wolf, so the concept of not being able to do anything does not sit well with LawyerCatBot.

And, unfortunately, my cat must remain in the ER. He may need a transfusion, and they are performing the ultrasound tomorrow. I am going to make arrangements for my parents to watch the monsters while my partner and I journey to the clinic to say our farewells, and we will hold him gingerly until the end of his watch.

I will eventually learn to convert my sadness into blinding anger. I just haven't had enough bourbon yet.

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

I know where you are. I have been there before, and recently at that. I'm sorry you are having to deal with it.

That's all right.

Watch what you wish for, it seems; my cat is going to die tomorrow.

That's not even a joke.

You see, my cat, over the past couple of weeks, has not been able to eat. For a brief respite, we had him on steroids, an antibiotic, and an appetite stimulant. For three days, the poor guy could eat wet food, after having lost about 3 pounds in 3 months. He had not been eating right, but switching food seemed to help him eat. Until he started coughing up blood, and then stopped eating altogether.

The good thing about becoming emaciated was that it was easy for the veterinarian to detect the massive lump under his chest. A previous x-ray didn't catch it, or the mass grew quite large in just a month or so. That's not uncommon in cats, I learned today. The veterinarian thought that it might be liver cancer, or stomach cancer, but suffice to say that the mass is pronounced, hardened, and likely malignant.

We paid to get an ultrasound today just so we would know for certain what would kill our cat.

Once we get the diagnosis tomorrow, we plan to put him down. There are options like chemotherapy, but given that our cat is severely anemic (16% of normal red blood cell count), that would probably kill him. He refuses to eat or drink now, and his organs will shut down over time. So, doing something or doing nothing will lead to a prolonged, likely-painful death.

I didn't burst into tears until I was able to hug my children, who were very confused why their parent, dressed in a suit from work, was clinging to them.

If there's a word to describe my cat, it would be stupid. He was so very stupid, even for a cat. Afraid of everything to boot: he was successfully scared off by an ant once, and it was just the most pathetic thing in the world. But our cat loved the simple things in life: hopping into your lap for a purr and pet; eating the same damn food every day, which probably didn't help his diet at all; and, of course, chasing a red dot until he ran square into the fireplace glass.

I will likely get to watch him depart from this world quietly and peacefully.

If there were ever an argument for euthanasia, this would be it. I can handle crying from knowing I will lose a dear friend, but I do not think I could handle watching him slowly slip away from poison or atrophy.

If I seem a little distant for a while, this is probably the reason why.

Work seems so petty and stupid right now.

@Testament said in General Video Game Thread:

I dunno, mush politics can be just as bad. At least with games, I can play by myself and everyone else can go kick rocks.

I don't have to worry about ID theft on MUSHes, generally-speaking. Or having to deal with people spewing epithets online, as if they wouldn't completely fold faster than Superman on laundry day in real life.

I can deal with MUSH politics, IC and OOC.

I can't even right now.

Everyone seems to want something or need something. This is the problem with being somewhat reliable and helpful. Do this, do that. Respond to this, reply to that. If I weren't so damned good at my job, I probably wouldn't be half as stressed as I am.

Now, the cat won't eat. Again. Just stopped eating over the weekend. And I caught myself thinking, in earnest, that if he would just die already I would have one less thing I would have to worry about on a daily basis.

There's too much to do, and too much to give a shit about. I honestly begin to understand the concept of compassion fatigue, and I've hit the point of exhaustion.

@Jaded

All of the above is why I MUSH still.

@Tinuviel

Another addendum:

The players here are really, really awesome.

@Sparks said in General Video Game Thread:

Beat Saber is one of a handful of games that make VR worth it. (Others are Elite: Dangerous, The Unspoken, and Job Simulator.)

Who the hell would find a Job Simulator to be "worth it"?

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

You can also get really good deals on last year's models.

These were Christmas gifts. I just can't immolate them.

Dear Amazon,

Please allow this letter to serve as a memorialization of the frustrating process I experienced in dealing with your Kindle Fire technology. More specifically, your Appstore, from which all useful or entertaining applications -- your device comes with none -- must be downloaded.

I have two Kindle Fires, both of which began their existence as kids' devices. To my disdain, I was forced into pushing them into your FreeTime shell. I realize that doing so may be useful for feckless idiots who don't monitor what their spawn do, but for semi-civilized bourgeoisie like myself it is a pointless, substantial hindrance to my children's enjoyment of your product. Worse, it is especially frustrating for any semi-literate parent on the rush who might want to try and use the device as a substitute tablet, only to find that there's literally no way to get out of the shell once you've been forced into it, like some sort of Kentuckian wedding.

Although I managed to somehow tear into your asinine, wasteful programming, I found myself confronted with another sign of your designers' incompetence. The Appstore does not tell you why your device won't download something, thus preventing the user from trying to fix whatever problem may be affecting them. Simply telling the user "Your download failed for some reason" does not meaningfully direct me towards how to go about remedying the situation. What it does meaningfully direct me towards is balancing your device on a stand so I can three-step kick it through goalposts.

This frustration increases in the situation where one of the two Kindles seems to download things just fine, but the other one -- they were setup in precisely the same manner with precisely the same aggravation -- does not. That both devices, equal in power and in presence, function differently presents a conundrum in which angst and chagrin turns to blinding rage. I would complain to your help department, but I am anticipating another impotent response, such as: Your device isn't working; try again later!

I sincerely hope that your company takes stock of the millions of complaints received from users of your devices, and improves the user's experience immediately. If otherwise, I sincerely hope you bleed when you go fuck yourself.

-- Me

Yes.

Because Brightburn looks like it is going to kick so much ass.

@Tinuviel said in RL Anger:

It's become formal. Crazy highlanders still wear them for daily wear.

@surreality said in Historical MUSHes:

Someone making these things a focus of how they interacted with other players in the 'I wanna be a bigot!' way would have been glaringly obvious to everyone, given that environment.

On The Descent, I played a fairly bigoted character. Yes, he used the N-word. Yes, he used the F-word (for homosexual men). Why did he do so in a post-apocalyptic setting? Because he was a white, heterosexual man born in the 30's who became a vampire at an old age (60s), and it fit in with his character.

Did this produce interesting RP? I think so. Was he antagonistic? I think he was, in many ways. Was I ever called a bigot OOC? Of course not. Why? I think it's because I never really threw it in anyone's face.

For me, that's not the insidious thing about bigotry. Marches with torches are scary and frightening, but the daily seemingly-innocuous aggression is just as bad. Also, for me, I enjoy playing concepts that I abhor at times.

@Ghost said in Historical MUSHes:

Make this happen, people, and post the wiki site. I won't be playing, but I will nerd out on your journals.

@Ghost said in RL Anger:

I don't mind the hot naked girl as company, but --

@Too-Old-For-This said in Good or New Movies Review:

They did make The Killing Joke. Just not LA. They made it animated... and it was panned. HARD. They even got Mark Hamill to come out of retirement to voice the Joker for it (the ONLY time he ever said he would)... and they still fucked it up. They focused so much on the lead up story, that the storyline itself was relegated to 20 minutes of 'peekaboo' style animation flashing and a bit of action. I'm not surprised people are hesitant to touch that particular story again.

Did you watch it? I did.

They did not fuck it up. They did try to tack on about 30 minutes of unnecessary character development between Barbara and the Batman. I understood what they were going after, but that doesn't mean it was necessary. But was it bad? No, it wasn't.

No, what you have is a lot of fanboy nonsense, for the most part, regarding the added sequences, and some ornery bullshit about deviating from the source material "too much." Frankly, I enjoyed The Watchmen movie as much as I enjoyed the graphic novel, but I liked the movie's ending more because it is a little more realistic and understandable. Did the fanboys bitch and moan? Oh, you betcha.

So, no. I liked The Killing Joke. It was very good. It just wasn't as "edgy" as The Dark Knight or as 90s-noire was the graphic novel. So what? Hamill and Conroy do just fine, and you'll pardon if I don't need to see suggestive photos of the Joker banging a paralyzed Babs.