Best posts made by surreality

I'm just going to opt out now.

Your clique may have the thread to keep discounting my experiences as having existed in reality, as they do.

Do enjoy!

<steps out>

@Auspice Except when they're not, because nobody's perfect!

(So it's OK for them to not be perfect, but there's an eagerness to hyper-scrutinize, vet, and judge everyone else.)

I would like to think this will go well! ...but while I am a starry-eyed optimist enough to think some useful discussion could have come from the other threads in spite of everything, I'm not that huge a sucker.

@Pandora said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

I wanna know, will there be a rule added against unsubstantiated witch-hunts before or after someone's reputation is ruined by a scorned ex-TS partner?

Why bother even setting up the server then. I mean isn't that the actual purpose of discord servers, period?

I may have told you this story before, but it may make you feel better, @Thenomain.

Once upon a very long time ago, I got a 'halp!' call from my father for tech support, shortly after they got a new computer.

There are two important facts to know here:

1. I am a lifelong mac user. My mother worked for the school district back when mac was the school computer in the 80s, so it's what we had in the house for the two of us to use.

2. My father has been using computers far longer than that. He was a journalist for years, and had a travel word processor from hell and later a 'laptop' that took up a whole hard-sided briefcase (and had its own handle), that used the kind of modem that looks like two giant suction cups that you'd screw onto a phone. As in, I remember when we had to upgrade one of the phones in the house to push-button from rotary, and this was a big stinkin' deal, because the equipment he was using required the kind of phone that could translate the tones.

That he was calling me for tech support was worrying, as a result. Mom had been using PCs a while since the schools had since switched over, which was why they did, too, and this was somehow different from the (by now relatively normal by mid-90s standards) laptop he'd been issued at work.

He explains that he can't ask my mother, because he has a question about-

-- wait for it --

-porn on the internet.

About which apparently I knew everything? I am, to this day, amused and completely fucking baffled by this; the only thing that became clear was why he couldn't ask my mother•.

But he sounded so legitimately distressed that, gods help me, I asked him what his boggle was. (This is where I pause to take a really deep breath because just remembering this, and how painfully earnest and upset he was, is making me tear up with laughter.)

Dad: "They're trying to scam me out of money, I can tell!"
Me: "Well, a lot of sites do that, yeah."
Dad: "They said it was all free, though! And one of these, I gave in and entered my credit card info, and it still did the same thing! They're trying to scam me!"
Me: <now legitimately confused> "What's it doing?"
Dad: "The pictures cut off halfway down the page, no matter what page I click on."
Me: "Huh. And it won't scroll down?"
Dad: "...scroll down?"

Yes, the man who had used scrollbars in every other piece of software he had ever used in his life to scroll up, down, left, right, and every-which-way he needed... did not think to try to scroll down.

For days.

Days over which he spent money and tragically futile rage in, apparently, abundance.

Me: "Yeah. Just like the stuff you used for work, or all those articles you read in the web browser, or emails... "
Dad: <sounding happy as a schoolboy> "You're a genius! You fixed it!"
Me: "Glad it's working now, Dad. Enjoy."

And that's how I became <cough> the guru of internet porn, apparently.

It took the better part of a decade to disabuse him of the notion that I could perform any and all required magic on his computer after that. At one point, he called to ask what he needed to type to upgrade his RAM. One frantic 3AM call•• involved something barely coherent about software to magically translate foreign films without dub tracks or subtitles into English because this was something that should and therefore must exist.

I swear, it happens to all of us.

• (And she wouldn't have told him, she would have made some shit up on the fly about a saint trying to save him from hellfire and 'breaking' the computer to save him from himself and while that shit normally drives me screaming up the wall, in this case, I would have laughed my fucking ass off.)

•• (I forgive him this one. I once called him frantically at 3AM to come over from next door to kill a really, really enormous spider before the days of the spider-smashing heavy-duty swiffer with Mjolnir scrawled down its side.)

@Kestrel said in Intersectional MU* Community - Discussion:

The last discussion thread about this topic was not engaged in good faith

Glad to see you're at least admitting it now!

@GamerNGeek Check out HorrorMU. I evangelize a lot, but there's reason for that.

The amount of time you're talking about is safe, though much less than that could start getting hard to keep up, if that makes any difference. Things move at a decent pace, but a lot of folks (including the headwiz/plotmistress) try to keep people updated and in the loop IC and OOC, since that's about the amount of time a lot of folks have these days.

ETA link: http://horrormu.com/index.php/Main_Page

This, perhaps?

@Pandora I would have done the same. I know you've mentioned playing princesses and similar often enough, too, so if you were at the time? Dang, if I was in your shoes I'd be a little nnngh on that since it'd sound a bit like I was being lined up to become another notch on that bedpost as just part of a princess collection. Allllll the 'no thanks'.

@aria No joke. Black Mirror; an excellent show if you really want to give up on living, period.

(No, really, it's very good, but it is good in such a way that I cannot think of anything that could possibly be worse for anyone with depression to watch than this, ever. They should tagline that shit, "Black Mirror: When you're looking for that final push to give in to that suicidal impulse.")

This thread reminded me of what we've come to refer to as 'The Xanth Incident'. Because I also grew up reading those books -- starting allllllll the way back in that 'grades 1-4' range.

Which means I got none of the lewd humor at all. None. And there is... a lot. Since I stopped reading them in about 4th grade (I forget off hand what I mostly moved on to then), this never really dawned on me save for a generalized later understanding that it was known to be there. (I was too busy giggling wildly as a kid over 'the catastrophe', which I still find funny to this day.)

Fast forward to about 2013 or so, and we're planning a road trip to Florida for the first time, and bringing my mother. This is also a reminder of childhood, because my father used to cover spring training for the local paper, and would be there for 3 weeks every year (split with another writer from another local paper); we'd go for one of those weeks and beach comb.

So, all the happy nostalgia, and since all three of us are going to be driving down, we're looking for something Mom-Friendly as an audiobook, and my husband said he could borrow 'those Xanth books you read as a kid' from a friend who had the whole set unabridged.

We thought this would be fine.

Y'all are already picturing the gif, right? Because it was apt.

And we were all trapped in that car for over twenty hours.

@cupcake Lyrics make sense. I totally get why they made the choice. Conceptually, it's a great fit. Musical style is jarring as heck, though, even though I absolutely see why they'd connect the references.

It's one of those 'idea: A+++', 'actual output: D-' problems, minor as it is.

@Ghost I would play this with you forever, and it would be amazing.

OK, so, this should have been a post in 'Things I Love' because OMG new computer! Coming today!

The reasons it's not there:

1. We really didn't plan to get it now, and had to mad-ass-scramble to get funds together for this.
2. The earliest it was going to be coming was the 9th -- but they really expected it to be more like 'shipping on the 21st'.

This all sounds like 'ok, hassle, but still good, right?'

The reasons it's not:

1. It's coming today. Why is this a problem?
2. We have a shit-ton of desk cleaning to do before there's a place to put the fucker.
3. We thought today, I misread it, it was supposed to be tomorrow, we eased down on panic for roughly 30 seconds before... it's early, nope, today.
4. We planned to clean out the space for it last Fri-Sat, so we'd be prepared in case it did arrive on the 9th! ...but the power was out and this room is a pitch-black maze of needles and power tools and tangled yarn in the dark. You could literally trip and die in here at least a hundred different ways with all manner of embarrassing things to have been impaled to death on (from metal t-squares to giant creepy dolls to yarn swifts to... everything, because this studio is fucking chaos) in your obituary.
5. This room is full of fussy little shit.
6. Last night's 'brief nap' at early o'clock ended with sunlight.
7. I just saw the tracking information: I have an hour before the thing gets here, tops.
8. It will be hours before we can even move shit enough to get to the goddamned double-protected outlets to plug in the necessary new power strip.

Ffffff....

@Ghost ...after tax day hell, I will see what I can do. Mwahahaha.

@aria Your dog clearly needs to meet my scaredy cat. They could confuse each other into endlessly entertaining panic. (She once sneezed so loud she startled herself into a backward scurry, bounced ass-first off the headboard, wondered what 'hit' her, and launched across the room to not be seen again for hours. It would not surprise me to discover that she had simply teleported herself into the future out of sheer baffled terror.)

@bear_necessities I suppose it depends on how good at it you are. <rimshot>

This one is a peeve: No, Mom. There are no finished rocks yet. I told you this process takes 2-3 months. It's been two weeks! Believe me, I wish it was that quick way more than you do.

This is karmic payback for all the road trips when I was a little kid and every utterance of 'are we there yet' in my life, I'm sure of it.

Yes, Mom, I put some of the boringest plain white rocks you love for no reason I could possibly understand into the noisy machines, too.

Sigh.