@GirlCalledBlu said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
If the community takes issues with how you're acting, then maybe you should... change it?
It's not about fitting in with a community to this guy. It's about dominance.
Which, again, just... how sad must you be if that's the level of power you can take pride in exerting?
@Macha said in RL things I love:
Puppy play time. It's just the best.
A coworker's husband brought their baby puppy in to work for her to take back home (they work different shifts and didn't want to leave the babypupper alone), so I got to play with a baby chihuahua for a few minutes at work and anyway, the moral of the story is it should be required by law that workplaces provide their employees with puppies to play with for a few minutes every shift.
At first, it was fun for me to speculate about how little is going on in his life that this is the only avenue by which he can feel powerful. Then I thought about it seriously, and I just kind of feel sorry for him. Like, can you imagine being such a loser that dodging bans on a make-pretend game is how you feel powerful? You just know he's the kind of person who would put kittens in metal trash cans and light fires under them except he's afraid the cat would scratch him up.
EDIT: Actually, no, a kitten torturer isn't quite right. You know who he really reminds me of? Hank's friend Dermott from the Venture Brothers.
It's not that I can't see things at all in my head. For instance, I had a very clear visual in a dream last night* that I'm still holding onto. But when I think, it's in words, not images, and I think that's part of why I was always shit in art classes.
*I forget the context but I think I was watching some kind of action movie. A big, lumpy monster, based heavily on the Hermetic Evolved (now there's an obscure reference) was getting shot in the back by a hero with a submachine gun, and I can still see the pattern of the bullet holes as the hero swept their gun to try to control the kickback. I can see the look of angry contempt on the monster's face as it turned around, grinding its teeth in an exaggerated chewing expression before spitting out a mouth-sized gob of lead because it had somehow sucked the slugs through its body into its mouth; because its inner flesh was somehow fluid and protean enough to allow such a thing, even though the bullet holes remained in its outer hide, which I could see despite the monster having turned to face the camera because dream logic.
@mietze said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
This is why I really have very little trust in our community's willingness to really deal with problems until a game runner proves otherwise, and I operate on the expectation that they will always err on the side of people who harass or have that history until it is too bad to ignore.
Yeah. That's the fragile part of the fragile happiness I mentioned. As much as I'm glad that victims are getting a voice and the community seems to be supportive, I've been through too much to believe that the support is generally more than lip service, saying the things you'd expect good people to say while doing nothing. I hope I'm wrong but I don't really think so.
Still. It's the kind of day where I need to hold on to the good feelings rather than the fear, so I'm gonna do that for now.
@Sunny said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
I mean, MSB isn't safe. I know it's not safe, and when I'm feeling unwell I avoid it because it's unsafe. And I don't mean in the Hogpit way, I mean in the 'if I'm actively harassed, if someone is trying to harm me, if somebody shows up and starts doing genuinely bad things I can trust that the people running it will help' -- it's just not safe around here. I participate in a lot of places that aren't safe, by choice and with my eyes open -- but yeah. This community as a whole is terrible for that, and even MSB is really, really unsafe in that fashion.
I don't have anything to add here, just... letting you know I see you and you're not alone.
On a more general note, I'm very heartened to see so many discussions of harassment in this hobby being had openly. I'm glad the community is in a place where these conversations no longer get victims labeled as psycho bitches making trouble for men.
That's not to distract from the fact that we still need to have these conversations at all (not to mention direct action to stop these conversations from being necessary), but still, seeing this makes me feel happy in a fragile kind of way.
@Kestrel said in A bit of trouble on Firefly:
Here's the kind of manipulative BS he pulled with me:
Thanks for posting that log, Kestrel. When you mentioned it earlier, I assumed it was just another butthurt little boy having the kind of toxic but honest misunderstanding they seem so prone to... which I guess this nearly is, really, except for the honest part.
@Jennkryst said in The WoD Itch:
@RizBunz Yeah. City of Hope has its problems. They are many and varied. But it's the only place I can currently play a Mummy (or at least... pretend to play one, while I distract myself with Space Engineers)
I am apping a Mummy there in the next day or two.
@Tashly Similar. I am an aural thinker, not a visual one. Pictures do not come easily to me, and I don't know what color my friends' and family's eyes are.
Also, your avatar suggests you have excellent taste.
@insomniac7809 said in The Work Thread:
Sales are down because foot traffic is zero and there's nobody in the goddamn store.
No, I'm pretty sure it's because millennials put avocado on toast.
@surreality said in surreality's playlist:
Once people openly admit to ongoing intentional harassment, and that doing you as much harm as possible is ethical, moral, and just, it'd be foolish to stick around, so I'm not doing that.
Is this something you want to talk about and/or warn others in the community about? Forgive me, but I have trouble telling the difference between vagueness meant to encourage questions and vagueness meant to discourage questions.
@Derp said in RL things I love:
'Virgin' didn't get a meaning of 'never done the dirty' until like 1300. Before that it just meant 'some young woman that is not married'. Nobody was really basing it on sexual experience before that.
Was there an expectation that unmarried women should have an intact hymen?
@Sunny said in Real World Peeves, Disgruntlement, and Irks.:
Listen to your gut.
If it’s wrong, yes, you miss out on a single person out of eleventy billion.
And... look, I like you and I hate to even seem harsh, but... I think it's worth considering whether he deserves to be with someone who can trust him, you know?
I got into writing because I am a reader and monkey see, monkey do. I have never tried to publish a story because I will never personally believe I am good enough at anything to deserve recognition for it, but I took classes, I've read books about writing, I've kept journals, all that.
The only thing I can say to answer the question about what I learned that improved my ability to create is, I have failed. I have failed a lot. I have failed over and over at attempts to capture a feeling in words, and I have used those failures to avoid failing in quite the same ways again. I don't really feel qualified to give advice, but since you ask for it, my best advice is this:
Every painting is a self-portrait. Sometimes, you are going to paint yourself in ways that show you to be very ugly. You have to be willing to be ugly because without that ugliness, there's no truth in anything you write.
@Ganymede said in RL things I love:
Look, I ain’t the smartest, but you’d think that men would be concerned with giving women screaming orgasms with the proliferation of porn on the Internet, or keep it up for more than a minute, or look aesthetically-pleasing, but apparently they just have unreasonable expectations for or as pizza delivery people.
There's too much heterosexuality there for me to really comment. I can only talk about the Christian angle, in which pleasure is bad but men get special dispensation because if you don't squirt, there can be no babies.
@Ganymede said in RL things I love:
Are we starting to call Republicanism a religion now?
I hadn't intended to go there, but since you bring it up, I think there's a serious argument to be made.
I was all excited when I saw the marquee said McDonald's had chicken for breakfast, but it's literally just McChicken patties on either a dry-ass biscuit or a McGriddle.
@TNP said in RL things I love:
@Ganymede You're making the mistake of thinking that pleasure is desirable for women. The purpose of them is to have babies. Enjoying sex is not necessary and possibly even sinful.
I love that men have crafted a religion in which their inability to give a woman an orgasm is a sign of virtue.
@mietze said in RL things I love:
When I was a kid, my church culture taught that using tampons would turn you into a slut, because once you started putting things other than your husband's penis into your vaginal canal, you would not be satisfied with his penis and would continue to voraciously experiment and be ruined for marriage.
I... wish that didn't sound like something people would say.
I also wish it didn't happen to you, mietze. I'm sorry.
@Aria said in RL things I love:
Me: <snort-sprays water while laughing>
Thank you, sincerely. That's a wonderful compliment.