Posts made by Ghost

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

@Ghost

I don't want to make it sound trivial, but have you thought about opening up your own safe group?

Not trivial at all. My friend beat me to it so there's definitely an alternative, but its just crazy how common this is.

Its pretty easy these days to create FB groups and just rendezvous to another meet up club. Most gamers who want to play Azul and Catan will show up in a heartbeat. So all is well, but a bunch of drama and some people feeling tired of having to find new game spots that didnt suddenly become fronts for other stuff.

My buddy says it best: "It's totally great to have a Fetlife community have a gamer subgroup, but when you do it the other way around youre always gonna make some people uncomfortable."

@Cobaltasaurus Fuck that's horrible. I'm sorry that happened.

Yanno, the real shame about LARP is that it can be SO FUCKING COOL when players dress up, get into character, and treat it like an ongoing soap opera/HowToHostAMurderMystery, but the sheer number of players and groups I've seen use it as a hotbed for poly/swinger recruiting and other shady activity totally ruins it. I see pictures(also WoD documentary) of these players in Germany in full Nosferatu makeup and question whether or not I'd do it again if it were like THAT, and I still think "...i wouldn't if it were with the same crowd."

My town has a LOT of shady stories surrounding these groups. I know of an orgy that happened mid-LARP in someone's shed, 4 or 5 "SCA" affiliated groups who went from RP to being these weird social clubs with swinger/dungeon/poly parties (and the members all have secret names like Dragonstar), lots of broken marriages, cheating, poly drama, blood play, etc. (Disclaimer: I don't judge poly/bdsm/etc. I'm into some of it. By weird I mean more so that I see more gaming stuff being used as a front for recruiting college age girls into the parties than I do see them giving a fuck anout gaming itself). Parties where they say things like "unless you have a sign on your shirt saying 'no touch' expect to get mauled or undressed if its your first night there".

But I gotta wonder. With how pervasive some of this stuff is in the gaming community, how many people are there who show up looking just to meet people, game, and make friends who get pressured with this next level stuff? I know quite a few who have sworn off LARP and some gaming groups because of harassment, bad stories, and being shunned or excluded for not ponying up on the sex action on the side.

In fact, I'm actually dealing with some of it myself right now in real life. A group of gamer meetups is now turning pool parties into "dungeon parties" and some RL friends have reached out to me saying things like "I...didnt sign up for this". It's resulted in conversations about how sex clubs, bdsm clubs, etc all contract to secrets, anonymity, no cell phones, touching rules, etc but these "clubs" really don't.

In my estimation you can probably trust people at ACTUAL sex/swinger/bdsm clubs more than some of these people.

Ah. One more.

High school teacher who runs "RPG club". Recruits pretty high school girls, then after graduation they pose in chainmail bikini and boudoir-esque fantasy garb for his side gig. Technically not a crime (all 18, no longer students), but was recruiting for it on the DL at the high school.

I see this dude more regularly than I prefer.

Yeah, LARPs can be danger zones. Absolutely.

From my page1 story, the "hot tub" guy had a rape fetish. He ran a LARP where his evil Lasombra Archbishop would punish players by producing a very RL huge purple dildo as a prop and then go into detail about how it was being used on their PC. I guess this happened to a lot of players who were attached to LARP as one of their few social outlets, so they didn't complain. Eventually, a sixteen year old girl had a character who failed. Dude brought out the dildo (crime), described how it was being used on her pc (another crime) and then she left the LARP crying. When she complained she was booted from the LARP.

This is the same 16 year old girl who lived with her dad in a "LARP house." Basically a LarpHouse is a crack house (usually minus the drugs) where someone acts as slumlord to 7-10 larpers who pay rent on couches. 16 year old's dad shared a curtained-off area with his daughter...who began "going to do scenes" with a 24+ year old male who was playing the role of her PC's love interest. When her naive-as-fuck dad found out his 16 year old daughter was getting boned (crime) by this guy, he got angry and was BOOTED FROM THE HOUSE. However, he didn't call the police to make a complaint because...

...he wanted to keep being welcome at LARP.

If I had a teenaged daughter I would absolutely refuse to allow her to LARP and try to keep her away from LARP after she was 18, because the idea of being grandparent to some neckbeard nowhere-person LARPer's baby just fills me with horrible butterflies. Anyone who has ever larped knows the vultures descend on single women quickly, and the younger and more "in shape" they are the more harassment they get.

@silverfox said in The Weirdest Thing I Ever Purposefully Did on the Internet:

This was literally last night.

I googled bear fur underwear.

For reasons.

Is that a thing? For real?

Asking for a friend.

Technically, if one were homeless and looking to pull oneself out of poverty, a cell phone might be crucial.

The ability to use the internet to move money around and receive callbacks from job interviews might arguably be more important than a regular roof to sleep under.

@Darren said in RL Anger:

For the record, he wouldn't have gotten a cent out of me even if he had not
had a brand new iPhone because I don't tolerate panhandlers.
Every time you give money to a beggar, you make the lives of everyone that
lives, works or otherwise frequents the area, a little bit worse by
validating their behavior.

@surreality Lots of "experts" out there. By this I mean it's pretty common (and dumb) for people to assume all that stuff is simple.

I should also take this moment to say (since this came up in relation to surr) that craft/trade show merchants with Square are relatively safe. They often have cards, email, and want to be tied to the transaction and able to be contacted for follow-up sales. If a craft show-type person got a rep for skimming cards or fraudulent sales, their ability to partake in shows would be in jeopardy.

But also, Square and some other services can take around 2-3% of the transaction so if you have cash it never hurts to ask for their preference (cash doesn't have processing fees, but they have to manually track cash for tax purposes).

@wahoo Agreed. I'm not into the whole "if they can afford a cell phone, they can't have food stamps" type rhetoric. People are people and no one understands a total stranger's life situation enough to be able to make that call. Plenty of people wearing suits are looking for jobs and ending the night at homeless shelters.

VenMo, Cash App, PayPal, Patreon are all safer because the SERVICE encrypts the transaction and the receiver of the money doesn't have access to your card, the magstripe data, nor do they have any right to confidential information on the app's servers. There's lesser risks of fraud or skimming using those services as a means to donate to anyone.

But as someone in the card industry? Cards are like sexual organs: best to not stick them in strange devices of people you don't know or can't track down later if needed. If an ATM card slot looks weird? Don't do it. If a panhandler asks for VenMo? It's relatively safe but they may be able to bug you later or Facebook you if your VenMo account has details they can follow up on, but doesn't involve card swipes.

Sorry to derail about card industry stuff, but 99% of the time it's lawyer stuff and I got to go Ooo! Ooo! I get to be a subject matter expert!

Re: Square

There's very little underwriting involved in Square, and Square takes a lot of risk on transactions, so their requirements are punched up quite a bit. Generally speaking you can't use Square as a business without an EID or Tax ID. There's also Square Cash, but these services generally require some form of bank account to wire the money to after the card is swiped.

1. It's very unlikely that someone with access to Square plus a compatible cell phone with internet plus a bank account are so needful that they can take their panhandling game to the cyber-networked level. Once bank accounts and tech get involved the upkeep and fees go up.

2. BEWARE OF CARD SKIMMERS. What you SHOULD be asking yourself is this: "Do you really want a panhandler on the street (who would be difficult to find or contact if a decimal were misplaced in the transaction I.e. 200.00 instead of 20.00) use a device to magnetically scan and record the content on your debit/credit card's magstripe?"

Card transactions are about trust. Trust that the consumer has in the person processing their card transaction to not steal information or misuse the transaction, and trust the merchant has in the consumer that the card isnt a forgery or other form of identity theft.

There is no way in Hell I'd let some rando panhandler on the street swipe my credit/debit card into a device that isn't easily attached to a known business entity that I could easily get the law involved in the event of fraud/ID theft. Card skimmers are devices used to record the data on the magnetic strip with the intention of later selling them or using them in fraudulent online MOTO (Mail Order Telephone Order) transactions where the merchant cannot easily confirm the cardholders identity.

@Lotherio Psssh.

Just add "Asking for a friend" to every search.

What is the best way to dispose of a body? Asking for a friend.

Ooo. Or prefix every search with On friend's computer...

I forever stand by concept of typing the following into YouTube's search engine. Just fill in the blank with anything that comes to mind.

THE ____________ THING ON YOUTUBE

Funniest. Dumbest. Scariest. Meanest. Coolest. Whitest. Blackest. Gayest. Weirdest. Craziest. Sweetest. Hottest. Etc etc etc

Never fails to entertain.

Okay, first of all...

NO, THIS TOPIC ISN'T ABOUT THE KINKIEST THING OR THAT HOOKER YOU ORDERED OR ABOUT THE TIME YOU WENT ON TOR TO CHECK OUT RED ROOMS AND BROWSE PERSONAL HITMAN FEES USING BITCOIN.

No. This is about those moments where you actually Google'd something, YouTube'd something, or actually used Bing and then realized it was either for something really stupid or somewhat bizarre. I'm talking stuff you actually looked for that would be worthy of Tosh.O

I'll give examples of my own:

• YouTube deep dive resulted in searching for videos of Venus Flytrap from WKRP teaching a gang member about the Atom
• The Heinz Automato
• Glenn Danzig IMPERSONATOR crooning a shopping list
• What ever happened to Paul Pfeiffer from The Wonder Years?
• Researching Atreyu from The Neverending Story's MMA record
• Deep Dive into the cast of 21 Jump Street to later learn that Dustin Nguyen was married to the lady disabled in a car accident by the actress who played the yellow Power Ranger
• Former member of Menudo is a seriously out muscleman now who recorded a He-Man cosplay video

@Lotherio I love BabyYoda's "WTF is going on? I don't know what's going on but I'm not comfortable" faces.

(Btw this is not a spoiler. No one knows what Baby Yoda is, but no one knows the name of Yoda's species so by default it's just Baby Yoda)

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

Almost all of my chosen family locally ate people I met because of mushing

The only MU'ers I ever truly hung out with in person involved a hotel party where it was a ton of rum and coke, cards against humanity, and then my SO and I hooked up in our room, which the MU person littered with rose petals and a dreamy picture of Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Figured 1 and done. No more. Never again. I'll call it ending on a high note.

I'm a rum and coke guy, but not am expensive alcohol guy so Bacardi Oakheart has been my go-to

I still can't get over just how good The Mandalorian is.

So glad that Rogue One style Star Wars storytelling didn't die with that one movie.

Because I was dared.

And because we also need a place to talk about and share intel on quality booze like Pepsi and bourbon.