Best posts made by GreenFlashlight

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

Agreed. It seems many countries are much more intent on protecting fetuses from abortions than caring for and supporting them once they are actually born.

I suppose it's the cheaper option.

It's less that than that a fetus is the perfect minority to advocate for. It can't contradict your narrative or criticize your methods or ask you to listen to its perspective before you begin speaking for it, and because it hasn't been born yet it hasn't committed any crimes you can be associated with. Once it's born, it gains a voice and loses its use as a political prop, so they kick it to the curb with a line about how it should have had a strong enough moral character to have been born to a richer family and maybe if it weren't so lazy it would learn to pull itself up by its bootie straps.

Nothing new to add to the list, but I'm at once surprised and pleased to notice how many of the Youtubers I follow are coming out as gay, enby, and/or trans.

@aria inserts obligatory smartypants trivia that alpha males aren't even a thing, that the scientist who said they are a thing retracted it when he realized his research had been done on wolves in captivity, so he tried it again on wild wolves and it just doesn't work that way

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

But low grade nausea/pain just really sucks when you do not know when its going to end.

I feel you. I can handle pain, but nothing turns me into a whimpering baby faster than nausea.

@ganymede said in RL things I love:

"This man smelled like Marlboro cigarettes, four shots of Everclear, and regret."

As I try to clean the things that can happen to a toilet when no men live in the house to periodically lift the seat and expose what's going on down there, I am forced to conclude that my stance on gay rights has been wrong this whole time and the Bible was right.

@ganymede You're doing a lot of free labor educating us. I just wanted to let you know I see it and appreciate it.

Wrestling with a sense of feeling wrong for being attracted to a woman who is very clearly trying to attract men, not women, and almost definitely not homoromantic women who exist in some nebulous area between having no libido and just plain being asexual of some kind. I know it's stupid to feel that way because nothing says I'm only allowed to be attracted to women in polo shirts and khaki shorts, but I'm so used to enjoying the hotness of queer folks that finding an exceedingly straight woman attractive is messing with me. Like, that thing I just said about her being exceedingly straight? Yeah, I'm so confused and uncomfortable that I'm deflecting my feelings and trying to justify them by creating insupportable narratives in which she's trying so hard to look straight because she's deep in the closet and some part of my little gay heart can sense that, which then makes it not weird to find a hot woman hot.

I can't tell if sexuality is confusing or if it's only confusing because we have to navigate it in the context of a society that has some truly fucked up preconceptions about how sexuality is supposed to work, but either way, this shit needs to get simplified, please. I don't like how I feel as if I'm betraying my core, fundamental self for feeling this way.

@rinel said in RL Anger:

@sahin your mental health is worth way more than any specific college route you have planned out. You're doing a responsible and adult thing.

Quoting for truth. Your brain is a piece of meat like every other part of your body, so its breakdowns are as valid as when your heart or liver or whatever other bit of your body calls in sick, and it deserves just as much consideration. I hope one day we will stop calling it "mental" health as if it's a less worthy form of health than the rest of the body is.

@cobalt This could be 100% projection on my part, but your post does read to me like a cry for help: the kind a depressed person makes. I'm worried for you, Cobalt. I hope you're okay, and that this is a passing unhappiness you feel alright coming back from after it's done. If I'm wrong about that and this is a permanent situation, then I still hope you're okay, and happier in your new stage of life.

Thinking someone is your friend until you find out he's a homophobic misogynist who only likes you because you're one of the good ones so he doesn't mean any of it about you.

You ever buy all the stuff to make jambalaya, go to the fridge to pull it all out, discover the thought of cooking is too exhausting to deal with, so you just start eating the sausage cold straight from the package while wondering if this is a sign you might be getting depressed?

@testament Fair. How can I support you? Would you rather talk about it or not deal with it until a better time?

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

Piece of shit internet people who consider themselves hilarious (yet noble, caring safe space) people to bag on someone for having a cause, but never stop to consider the reason for the cause could be related to personal trauma.

Those people can go fuck themselves.

There is every chance they considered that and concluded that your trauma does not excuse you opening old traumas for anyone else. They might have even concluded that your trauma leading you to abandon empathy for others who share that trauma makes your decision worse rather than better, even if it is understandable that your pain would draw your focus inward.

I get that you are trying to stop people from being hurt, but I question the efficacy of trying to do that by spreading hurt to a tiny community of niche hobbyists who agree with you about the problem but disagree about your solution. This is not how you build solidarity with potential allies.

@buttercup You did not fuck everyone over. Unless you are withholding some crucial detail here, there is no way you could have possibly known this would happen, and no one could fairly blame you for it.

Please do not hurt yourself over this. It is completely okay to feel despair in this moment, and you should be allowed to feel it for as long as you need to. Just please set your despair aside when it is no longer serving you.

I'm glad you posted this. Reaching out takes bravery.

@kk said in The Work Thread:

I am like should I really stay in this trench alone, on a sinking ship at this point?

I would argue, dead serious, that staying on a sinking ship is worse than self-destructive: it teaches the ship's captain that they can let the ship keep sinking because fuck it, you'll bail it out for them, so they may as well bring in some more bodies to drown down in the hold after you've gone under for the third time.

I like OOC rooms because they provide a place and a format to get to know other players prior to playing with them. I'm at a point in my life where I don't want to play with randos. I want to play with people I like, and having a place to talk to others as well as to see how they treat others is a good way to gauge them.

@surreality said in Reporting Roadblocks: Denial, Fear, Shame, Guilt, Embarrassment, etc.:

What do you think games can do to help? (Not resolve, but help.)

I'd start by changing the disclaimer from "tell us immediately if you're being harassed" (or whatever similar sentiment) to "we're here to help you, so we hope you'll feel safe coming to us right away if you're being harassed." It's a minor change, but the first sentiment is very... well, it's very confrontational; not necessarily toward the victim--though there certainly is an angle there in the implications, that since it's phrased as a command, you have done something wrong and/or punishable if you fail to comply--but certainly toward the crime itself. That's a bad thing because it stresses the importance of the crime over the importance of the victim's needs, which as an aside is a cultural problem we need to deal with: go Google "Al Franken harassment" and count how many headlines come up that name the actual woman rather than calling her 'woman who accuses Al Franken' if you want an example of what I'm talking about.

But anyway. By changing the statement to "we're here to help you, there's at least an implicit promise of comfort, and that staff will listen to the victim without discarding her as having played her part in the procedural drama of hunting down the wicked harasser. It's a good start.

I think the logical follow-up to that is to look for staff that has experience with victims. We're off-balance, so we need someone who knows how to approach us and how to not knock us further off-balance than we already are. This may mean letting an accusation go because the complainer isn't willing to pursue a course of action for whatever reason, and that needs to be something that's okay. The victim needs to know that though one person on the game has violated her dignity for the sake of his own needs, the staff won't do the same thing to her.

I think the logical follow-up to that is to have a policy in place protecting the confidentiality of any communications. The complaints are only for the eyes and ears of the advocate-staffer, not for anyone else, especially not staffers who feel gung-ho about "protecting other players" by taking a victim's complaints and beginning an investigation anyway. Don't be that guy. That guy might help some potential, future victim, but he does so at the expense of hurting the victim who's already here, and that's fucked up. The victim you have is the one who deserves your concern.

Anyway. I'm going to see a movie in fifteen minutes, so that's all I got for top of my head ideas. Feel free to criticize them if you think I'm overlooking something.

What do you think individuals people do discuss these things with should do to help?

The first response to the story always has to be, "What do you (the victim) want to happen here to be safer and happier?" Obey her wishes as best you can. What she wants may not be what's best for her, but it's not your place to make that decision. You may have to negotiate a compromise--obviously, not every wish will be ethical to implement--but the goal should always be to give her what she needs to restore her sense of agency.

What do you think individuals in this situation should do when confronted with these feelings?

Whatever they can. I've discussed how idiosyncratic my own coping mechanisms are, so I'm not going to suggest there's any one correct way for a victim to respond. The context of who's involved, the risks, the consequences, and the needs of the moment are all too complex. If you've been harassed, then you do the best you can with what you have, and please don't beat yourself up if hindsight reveals you didn't choose the optimal course. You're muddling through a hard, scary time: no one blames you for not thinking straight.

Except assholes. They blame you, but they can go to hell. People who've been through it are with you and support you.

When I think of this forum, in its current incarnation more than its previous one but even so, I think of the Room. Have you ever seen that movie? It's a movie about literally the best human being in the world who has never done anything wrong in his life, whose girlfriend cheats on him, emotionally blackmails him into falling off the wagon, lies about him physically abusing her, and tricks him into thinking she's pregnant just because she finds it amusing to hurt him that way. She has literally no reason to do any of these things, as the supporting cast of the movie repeatedly says to her and to the audience, but just does them anyway because she is a woman and women are evil.

The movie isn't very complimentary to men either, since the author-insert main character literally never gives any reason this sociopath is worth "loving" except that she's beautiful and sexually available to him. It never displays any qualities she might have that are worth treasuring or would make her a good life partner, and never has the author-insert main character compliment anything about her other than how she looks good while he's thrusting atop her. Neither the author nor the main character show any signs of seeing her as a full human being who has an existence separate from what he wants of her. If she's hurting him, then it must be because she's an evil bitch who just likes hurting men for fun, because he can only perceive her in terms of how he is affected by her. And of course the movie takes for granted that the author-insert main character is blameless in all things because how could there possibly be two sides to this story about a break-up? That's obviously ridiculous. The only side to the story, which she even admits to her mother and friends, is that he's perfect, she's an evil slut, and his only fault was loving her too much to admit she's an evil slut and kick her to the curb where evil sluts belong.

And it's not just the evil sociopath slut who's out to get the author-insert main character. His friends and employers all betray him in various ways too, some of them more nonsensical than others because it's a badly written movie, but the general thrust here is that nothing the author-insert main character did provoked the behavior he received. They were all just jealous of him for how perfect and moral he is, and decided to tear him down because they have evil hearts that love doing evil, like Saturday morning cartoon villains.

Anyway, you should probably ignore me. I'm just here to back up Kestrel's post because as a part of her clique of witch hunters, it's important to me to try to turn this board into an echo chamber where only the thoughts approved by our collective are permitted to be expressed.

@Auspice said in Good or New Movies Review:

but that would be ignoring TLJ and Finn/Rose

Breakups happen, especially as people discover new feelings about their orientation.

@Groth said in Good or New Movies Review:

If the second movie isn't doing any of the setup work for the third movie, you're not making a trilogy, you're just making three movies that follow each-other chronologically.

I think you and I understand the word 'setup' to mean different things, because everything I described wanting to happen (except for that last bit) was a continuation of things that happen in the Last Jedi. To me, that means they were set up.