Best posts made by surreality

@insomnia “What better people to have this happen to than a couple of scientists,” she told me. “We can go forth and science.” <-- I almost died right there. Thank goodness there are no crows around.

@Sparks One of the things with this that I think is quite relevant is that these are scenarios that are easy candidates for FTB.

I suspect that if these things were off-screen, or handled by rolls in an FTB, the issues would be negligible at best.

Where the trouble comes in is when players feel obligated to TS staffers to get ahead, or staffers feel obligated to write out an NPC spreading 'em for a player who asks or makes the right rolls. Both of these scenarios are nightmaretown.

Even a bit of normal journalism is like that. My father handled sports for the local paper for over 30 years; while he was assigned to a variety of teams and had friendships with a number of the owners/managers/players through the years, it was still pretty scattered without being freelance.

(In part, this could be because he was never actually a sports fan to become a 'fan follower' in that respect; this is ultimately why he did so well and they kept him where he was for so long. He actually had really wanted to write movie reviews.)

@Snackness It is worth mention that if you're aware someone is already doing something with a pile of other people... that might not be time to try to start a conversation with them and expect to have their attention focused on you. (I just ranted about this in the ADD thread, for instance.) I'm not saying you do this or ever have, just... this is the other side of that particular coin.

So, I finally have some finished shiny rocks as of last week. This makes me happy to a degree that makes no real sense, since all they do is sit on a shelf in little storage boxes, being shiny.

But I like shiny, so that's a thing.

I grump about it, because it is messy and often outside and often a pain in the ass, but this involves slogging around buckets of rocks anywhere from 10-30ish pounds each daily, and that can get up to slogging around 64lbs in a day (though broken up into smaller amounts because no).

This really fucking sucked the first week, a few months ago.

It has sucked less as time goes on.

This is super fucking awesome, because while that's no great feat for 99.999% of the planet, my back is so profoundly screwed I've been told repeatedly and emphatically that I would never be able to lift more than 5lbs at a time for the rest of my life since I was 19. (Sorry, doc.)

Obviously, I pushed this regularly for little things -- even a gallon of water is over 5lbs -- but not 'all over the house back and forth' and 'daily' and 'up and down stairs' multiple times a day. And if I pushed it this way for more than a day or two before, damn, would I be paying for it in hurt.

It is a little thing, but it isn't, really, because the achey days are now the rare exception, rather than the non-achey ones. And I'm pretty happy about it.

Something not in my job description as staff: providing a player with strokebait.

I don't believe I have to type this out loud, but here we are: once someone tells you, the player/staffer/whatever you are, that whatever you've just done has inspired a real world orgasm?

The dynamic has definitely changed on some level.

Is that a relationship? No.

You have, however, wittingly or no, just 'inspired' some very physical sexual reactions from another player, not their character.

Whether you are OK with that or not.

That's not a character interaction any more, y'all.

I travel so rarely, we got this look from the derpyfloof when the suitcases came out so we could start packing later:

...and yes, what they've done to this chair over the years is a true horror. But they love it, and it still works as a chair, so. Sigh.

(Yes, that's the creature that is such a coward, she once scared herself so badly with one of her own sneezes she then hid for hours.)

In fairness, part of me feels this was a bigger issue before we all got old and lazy and believed in things like 'enough sleep' and 'work in the morning', and getting laid was a much bigger priority in those horny college age days, but that could be my need for a nap talking.

@mietze Have you ever seen a cat do that 'bleah bleah bleah no please no bleah bleah bleah' tongue trick to try to get food out of their mouths?

That was me when someone insisted I try their 'super awesome kale salad that's so totally different, honest! (ETA: I mean literally I did the cat thing reflexively. I felt so bad. But it was at a Cracker Barrel, so. Not as guilty as I may have.)

I actually love broccoli rabe and can deal with dandelion greens (which tend toward super bitter for anyone not familiar), but whatever kind of kale they put in that salad magically turned me into a three year old who would not under any circumstances let that spoon-plane come in for a landing.

Welp, I guess we've come back around for me being the bad guy for not wanting to be around someone who, within the past month, went off on an utterly divorced-from-reality and entirely personal abusive rant at me, and topped it off by mocking the medical circumstances that are totally fucking up my family's lives for the next decade, it being the last decade my elderly folks probably have.

I guess I'm out, then.

@peasoupling I can see this being a huge factor, yeah. I'm sure it has to be better cooked. The raw chopped kind in that salad -- which was otherwise a 'sweet' salad with cranberries and walnuts and some kind of sweet dressing and other weirdness -- made it taste like someone had literally sprinkled wet dirt into a defenseless fruit cup.

"To throw a bad vampire orgy, I don't know how one would recover! Half the bats you see, they are just vampires who have thrown terrible orgies and they are too afraid to regain their vampire form. They just flit around. Shame bats. Bats full of shame. And you know them, because they don't fly as high."

@thenomain Imagine the day we have one that's two small cylinders, one holding a pen, the other with a series of numbers and a speaker and microphone, that you pull apart to have a flexible screen in the middle.

It will happen, and we'll all talk about what a stunning new innovation The <Corp> Scroll is.

@Derp I'm going to call some serious bullshit here, despite agreeing with some of what's been said.

Doing as you describe?

Means that the bad actor gets control of the game space, and has driven you our of a place where you have not done wrong, and have every right to be.

That's some bullshit right there.

ETA: When someone does actual, real wrong, no matter where or in what context, you have every right to be angry, upset, hurt, or whatever else.

The wrong people do is not limited to 'got that ewang I wanted' or 'got that fac head role I wanted' or 'said a mean thing about my character to other characters'. Some people cross major lines, in profoundly unacceptable ways, full stop.

Victim-blaming, victim-shaming (which you are absolutely doing here, man, much as I love ya), and forcing the loss on the victim of these behaviors is completely inappropriate.

@ganymede I have run out of fingers and toes counting the times people have asked me what I have against <thing>, when <thing> is something I have never even heard of -- so... that. Very much that.

Double (may not be by the time I'm done, but whatever) because it's relevant:

If words and text-based communications could not cause actual harm, things like cyber-bullying would not exist. We know too well that they do. The term 'verbal abuse' would not exist, and unfortunately, it not only does, but it describes an occurrence that also exists.

And so on.

Nothing beats the 'I have to pee' dream, though. Come on, people.

It does not matter what is happening in that dream, you will have to stop to use the facilities every few minutes until it wakes you up. Outrunning a deadly apocalyptic storm? "I swear it will JUST take a second just bundle up and you probably won't freeze to death in the blizzard winds!" Space ship crashing? "But the life pod doesn't have a bathroom it's right around the corner I swear I will be right back!" Terminator chasing you? "I know, I'll hide in this convenient restroom!"

I hate that dream so fucking much, even if it always seems to wake me up snickering at its inherent absurdity.

@Tinuviel said in How to Escape the OOC Game:

It is the responsibility of the injured, I would argue, to inform others of the injury rather than to simply assume that the injuror was attacking them. What is harmless to one person can be harmful to another, and the only way we can properly adjust our behaviour is to know when we've caused harm.

Calls to mind the quote, which is apt, "When someone tells you you hurt them, you don't get to decide you didn't."

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

Family - can't live with them, can't kill them, either.

I feel this one so hard right now.

We are doing a hardcore declutter/cleanout of our disaster of a kitchen. By 'we', I really mean 'I'm breaking my ass to bits doing this, but my husband lives here also and therefore it is ostensibly his kitchen, too.'

I ache in wheres I didn't even know I have.

If I come across one more Chinese food takeout container lid he has saved for some reason, however, I am going to make him carry it around forever, perhaps rectally.

I am weirdly happy to see the idea of the tags being discussed as a positive option. I remember bringing it up a few years ago to a much more negative response and a lot on 'spoiling the plot surprises' and/or 'if you can't handle <literally any example, no matter how extreme> and it could theoretically happen on the game at all, you shouldn't play that game'.

That? Tells me we're, collectively, doing pretty good, even if we still, also collectively, have room to do better.