Best posts made by surreality

My #1 Oh God I Need to Hide in My Cave and Never Come Out-ism is what I just refer to as 'The Newt Scream'. Yeah, Newt, Aliens, that noise, which is a noise plenty of kids make all the time for a variety of reasons: extremely shrill and high-pitched and generally a sign of alarm.

As humans we are evolutionarily conditioned to respond to this sound. We can't not hear it. It's in our hard wiring: "One of the younglings is in danger, bigger human, protect the youngling!" I am completely and totally unable, for whatever reason, to tune it out to the 'dull roar, maybe glance up and see if there's a child in peril' that most folks can and do if they even notice it at all.

I hear this noise, and my whole body tenses enough to painfully cramp in an instant. I involuntarily flinch and shudder; I cannot NOT flinch and shudder. I feel an ache in my head pounding away as my blood pressure spikes right through the roof that is painful enough that sometimes my eyes will tear up. Essentially, even from a long distance away or over the din of a chatty crowd, my body responds to this noise the way a normal person would respond to someone firing off an air horn right up against their ear and I can do roughly jack nor shit about it.

No, I don't hate your kid.
No, I don't think your kid did something bad for making a noise that is as involuntary as my response to your kid's noise is.
No, I don't think you're a shitty parent because your kid made a noise kids often make simply because they are kids.

I can't filter background noise and I have exceptionally sensitive hearing (both of which I was in years of therapy with an audiologist for when I was a kid myself) but even with that in mind, nothing ever made so much as a dent in this one.

ETA: tl;dr: My worst fear is probably seeing The Babadook in a theater with a good sound system turned up to high with the doors locked. I would not simply shout "fire" to escape, I would set one and hope I burn to death before the film ends.

@cupcake ...but but but but but you can flop over into the puddle on the dirt road to put yourself out when you're on fire! See, there's your free education!

(If I hadn't seen plenty of actual political discussions/arguments precisely as dim as the joke response above, I would probably hate political discussions less than I do. )

There's some sticky stuff in here, too.

People have vastly different sensitivity levels. 'That made me uncomfortable/sad/etc.' is doubtless true when someone says it, and it is absolutely a time for empathy, but I also don't think it's an entirely reasonable metric for 'do we take disciplinary action about it as staff'.

I'm being very specific for a reason: taking action and taking disciplinary action are not the same, and that can be especially relevant in in this circumstance. I don't consider, 'Bob doesn't like joking around the way you do with others, so don't joke around that way with Bob, OK?' to be disciplinary action, but it is taking action.

Being mindful of Bob's sensitivity is important, but if Joe isn't being a dick, or trying to harm Bob in any manner, Joe doesn't deserve a smack for it. He does need to know not to do that around Bob any more, and he needs to not do that to Bob any more. If he continues doing that to Bob, then he's being a dick, and deserves the smack upside the head.

That aside... using sensitivity alone is a concern to me. It's not something to disregard under any circumstances, but I've seen a number of instances of it taken to extremes I can't say I'm ethically comfortable with at all.

There are the obvious ones -- the person who can never lose or be intimidated or share the spotlight or look bad IC, for instance. They may be sensitive to these things as a player, and not want to experience them, but that doesn't erase them from being part of the game, and experiencing them part of fair play on the whole for everyone.

It's the less obvious ones that worry me more. 'Cry bullies' exist, and it's good to be mindful of them. I hate that term as I think it's gross, but it describes the concept well. Most of these folks do not have bad intentions, but are extremely sensitive to things in a way that does start to actively constrain others around them in ways that can cross over into uncool territory.

If Bob, above, can't hear anything negative directed at them under any circumstances, and complains any time they hear even the mildest criticism, there's eventually going to be a problem for which there is no easy solution. Bob feels what Bob feels, and respecting that on the human level is important. Making rules or taking disciplinary action based on what Bob feels in this case? Makes me very uneasy. It can't simply be dismissed as 'Bob is oversensitive, tell Bob to suck it up', but there's no real easy answer here that I can see, either, beyond telling people to simply not engage Bob in that manner, potentially over and over and over and over again as different people do this, and that doesn't seem like the appropriate answer, either.

Some typos are best typos.

Trading email with my mother this morning, re: my father's birthday, and if she has any plans I should ready myself for:

"Today is super bowel. Not a good day to go out."

I love you, Mom. So much I totally just pretended I didn't see that in the reply, but it still made me grin and giggle because sometimes a well-placed typo is just priceless, and thus I had to share with the fellow language geeks here.

@Hund Always, always, always report the creepers. I say this to everyone. Even when it's hard, report them for creeping. Even idiotic staff can't ignore it when multiple people do, and if they're doing it to one person, they are assuredly doing it to more than one person.

Umpteenthing the Altered Carbon recommendation.

Another one that would make a fantastic game setting, too.

@faraday Oh, I don't disagree. It's just that this notion that 'anyone who wants a game that doesn't scrub these things out of existence is only doing so because they want to engage in bigotry'.

That even without policy, no one went there? Says a lot about how ridiculous that argument is.

@karmageddon "Oh, my god! I totally thought they had given up! When I told them I was giving my husband head at the time, they said I had no case!"

"...you were giving your husband head while he was driving?!"

"...don't be ridiculous. He would have gone right off the fucking road if I was doing that. What do you think I am, stupid?"

"Whew."

"I was driving."

<click>

I identify as bi RL, by which I do explicitly mean 'gender is just not a factor of attraction for me, I'm into someone or I'm not, and that person could be anything on the gender/sex/etc. spectrum/moebius strip/hula hoop'.

I tend to play women, because I'm crap at playing men. The majority of my characters aren't what many people would consider especially feminine, either. Sometimes they're 'sexy', sometimes they're not, sometimes I think they are and other people don't agree, also vice versa, and so on. This is simply how it is for me; I neither lament or celebrate it, it's just 'what works for me'.

I would like to be able to say I play bi characters, or lesbian characters, but I pretty much don't. I would like to be able to say this isn't because of the number of cringe-inducing male played lesbians and bi women in the hobby, but it is. It really is.

Are there giggletwit horndog bi or lesbian women RL? Of course there are. I am not interested in relationships or intimacy with them RL, either.

No, dude, most women I know don't actually think about sex all the time. Most women I know don't talk about how much they want to bang someone or would rather bang this person or that person on first introduction. Maybe I hang with some boring-ass girlfolk, but I don't think that's the case. I do not view everything through a lens of 'do I wanna fuck it' even though technically everyone could qualify without a gender/sex filter; consistently, I have seen men playing bi or lesbian women approach the world this way. There are myriad reasons I can think of that could account for this disparity, from men thinking of sex more often than women do throughout the day to men not having the social conditioning women do to hide their sexuality and sexual feelings under threat of being slut-shamed, but regardless of the cause, this difference stands out to me like a flare in ways that are a complete nope-o-rama to the notion of approaching the subject at all in play at this time and likely for the foreseeable future.

That's GRRRARRRRRRR #1: A lesbian is not a quirky lounge lizard with a vagina. Stop acting like it.

Grar #2 emerges because so many of the guys that do this go on about how 'they do it right' or 'they are too enlightened to fall into those fetishistic traps' and so on, while blatantly ignoring that difference in social conditioning re: sexuality that men and women experience is proof they are not so fucking enlightened as they think.

They may not be 'pursuing the porno fantasy' directly, but ignoring this reality does effectively ramp up their porn-o-meter substantially. While the 'men think about sex every seven seconds' thing is complete bullshit, what little research has been done suggests it's about twice as much as women do. (Same goes for thoughts of food and/or sleep. So we are not thinking about these things as much, either! Grar! Ahem.) So, y'know... 'twice as much' is something people notice. And if you're going for sex twice as often as I wanna go there? Yeah, you can see the problem, I'm sure.

And the NyQuil is winning, so this ramble ends here for now, to... maybe be finished later when the horrible snotmonsters fuck all the way off. Augh.

@tinuviel In the midst of The Great Studio Cleanup, I had all my cards/IDs/etc. in a little ziploc bag.

Following in my mother's footsteps, "I just put it somewhere it would be safe while we're cleaning and moving things around."

When anyone in my family says this, we are not to be fucking trusted, because this actually means, "I put it somewhere totally safe that made flawless sense at the time! It's totally safe now! ...from me ever finding it again within the next five years."

...so now I need to get a new driver's license but I'm not rushing to replace the cards.

@Cobaltasaurus Yeah, I feel this one, too.

I don't stress about it as hard as I might have once, though. It nags and needles some, but then... hey, I am female. My me-ness is as legitimately female as anybody else's femaleness.

@cupcake That lady? Wow. She inspired quite the inappropriate volley of profanity in my brain. I'm sorry you had to deal with someone so spectacularly shit-tastic.

May karma deliver unto her what she deserves, but spare her dog (who is probably adorable and lovely) from any of the fallout.

@eye8urcake said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

I just can't call it pansexual, I'm sorry, maybe I'm just too old but I accept an all-inclusive meaning and like how @Pandora explained it - attraction is about the person, not their genitalia, for me.

^ This this this this this.

You're not alone in this, and I've spoken to other folks who have the same eyetic. This... did not just mean what you're describing as I was growing up. (What you describe applies to me, too.)

What that word used to describe? No. (It's meaning was a lot more, uh... expansive -- men, women, anything in between, other species, fruits and vegetables, farm implements... -- to put it delicately. If someone is happy with that, no shame! It's just not me.)

So I have a massive fucking twitch about people trying to shove the term down my throat now. I get that 'language evolves and changes', but damn, that word had connotations that were anything but OK. If people want to reclaim it as a label these days? Go for it; I assume the modern meaning when someone mentions it, but goddamn. Not a team shirt I'm gonna wear, no matter how in fashion the label may or may not be.

@auspice Not gonna lie, I think Discord is perhaps the most aptly-named application in recorded history.

@Prototart That is such a fucking truth.

Look, straight white guys. Please, don't play lesbians to show your woke-i-tude. Wokefulness. Wokeaholism... woke-ever.

It fails spectacularly at the task.

That moment you realize someone is never going to stop lying or being a completely shady asshole really fucking blows.

@Arkandel ...I would very much like to bronze that post.

@Arkandel said in Sexuality: IC and OOC:

don't play anything to support an agenda. That's not what playing games is for, and it won't go over well when things which typically happen in games affect that agenda.

This needs bronzing. It needs inscribing in elegant calligraphic script ninety feet high. The color of the sky in my world now has this as an addendum thanks to a talented skywriter.

This is so common, though.

And I will say this: this is my relax and unwind time. Yes, sometimes ugly things happen that disrupt it that fall under the *ist umbrellas, and my fun gets screwed up.

It gets a whole lore more screwed up if I feel like I'm expected to, at all times, be hyper-vigilant about what everyone is saying and doing around me as translated through the most paranoid and persecuted lens possible, reading for things to be offended by at all times. I will simply not do this to myself, or allow people to shit that hard all over my enjoyment of the hobby.

@tinuviel We would have had to pay extra for one, but Dad haggled them down to include it for half price.

@Pandora True as hell, though.