Best posts made by surreality

@Arkandel It's a valid question!

It's also one I never, ever want to know the answer to.

...my state. Especially my county.

Yup, had to go in for jury duty. And am typing from there. Because our county has... a cyber cafe in its jury lounge. There were so few of us called in today, most of the computers have been totally unused all morning.

@mietze said in TS - Danger zone:

almost universally in RL and otherwise many folks find it super hard to ask for what they want out of a situation or proactively state boundaries.

And a lot of times, when (generic) you do state boundaries, people take issue with the very notion of (generic) you having boundaries, which does not make things any easier.

@Miss-Demeanor said in RL Anger:

@silentsophia If its any consolation, nobody in my household will be setting foot outside until at least Sunday.

This is me, too. Out there? Oh hell no. Oh hell no and y'all can't make me nope nope nope.

@mietze Yeah, that's definitely a thing. It's a thing in general, really: "I did something wrong, so now I am going to flail and gnash my teeth in such a dramatic and histrionic fashion that instead of you being mad at me, I'm going to make you feel sorry for me and console me." In a lot of cases, it's a negative consequences dodge.

Hate that garbage.

That day when this is you, because I know I am not the only one who has this day:

"Self, you have been way too down and negative lately."

"Have you thought about being positive for a bit and seeing if that improves things?"

"Give it a shot, it's important to work toward this goal."

<approaches something she does every day just a mite more positively>

<shit explodes in face enormously with paranoia and suspicion and borderline accusations being flung at her out of nowhere>

"Whoa... stay calm, approach this with purely rational chill and just basic info and it'll be all right... "

<tries that, it is apparently zero help>

"Oh."

"Yeah."

"That's why."

@insomniac7809 I have seen this come up. Like, in seriousness. Not on a sex game.

...I need more liquor.

@Arkandel

Q: What do you have to offer a woman? Even ignoring Chad for a minute - how would you sell yourself to a potential gf?

A: Well my pog collection is top tier (maybe top 6 collection in the world) and it is actually worth a lot of money.

A: I'm an amateur Masseuse in training

^ not the term actual massage therapists being trained by a legit school tend to use, frankly, and reeks of 'goddamn shady' (as in, the husband would punch this guy in the dick for describing himself that way, if he didn't punch him in the dick for randomly capping it).

@bored I normally do obscure, too. I recently switched over to Angelina due to better range (and good crazy eyes). Since... yeah, from Hackers and such through now.

At this point I just have to think they're being raptured to get the next world ready for us all to be awesometown when we all go up in a blaze of nuclear armageddon some time in the next howeverlong.

@Pandora said in TS - Danger zone:

I have no interest in pretending people aren't coerced, I don't know where you got that idea. Even pre-obtained consent can be coerced from someone trying to be a good sport, or desperate to be liked, or anxious about ruining someone else's fun.

^ This deserves to be highlighted. Many problems come from this.

I would call it the official coin of 2016, regardless.

@eye8urcake Seconding ninjakitten here. I'm pretty sure I'm the one who mentioned that -- and it was a known troll doing it. So 'where it's coming from' really matters. There's a difference between an active poster who chats with folks doing this and someone with no post history going along your own post history and upvoting then undoing it (sometimes over and over) en masse so you get a storm of like... 50+ notifications with their name attached to it when you come back to the screen. (Not joking on the numbers there either.)

I agree with some general premises I extract from the quote: "don't specialize yourself into such a corner you can do nothing else", "people should be encouraged to know how to handle a variety of life skill basics broadly to at least some extent", and "don't hesitate to learn something just because its outside your area of focus," -- all of which I think are useful concepts that people sometimes struggle with.

Beyond that, any relatively arbitrary list is still precisely that -- arbitrary-- and we need specialists in the world, period.

I tend to take this view: Don't hyperspecialize to the extent that there's no room in your brain for how to prepare yourself some kind of basic meal/know how to apply basic hygiene/etc. because it is very unlikely that hyperspecialized understanding of popular clam preparation methods from the 1890s is going to be in such high demand that you can hire a full time cook/asswiper in modern society.

In gamer terms, 'be careful about min/maxing your life to extremes.'

Which is pretty much the useful version of 'if you can't pull off my arbitrary human swiss army knife list, you are less than human', which is not so useful.

Also: OMG home tomorrow night probably. Well, not home home until thurs night/fri, but omg out of HERE.

Sphere staff unto itself isn't so much a bad thing in that it means there's one person with a final call that is expected to know what the hell they're talking about, and have at least passably reasonable judgment.

That is more necessary than it may sound; even staff teams that get along very well may have vastly different ideas about which direction to go on any given issue -- from a basic 'goddammit OP left this totally nebulous again and left it up to the ST to make a call so we should probably post somewhere how the game handles this scenario for future reference and consistency' (which comes up all the time) to more serious concerns, like 'the sphere is in shambles and everyone hates everybody else in it and nothing is happening and dogs and cats are living together and... and... and... ' final calls on how to handle it -- revamp, scrap, overhaul, close for repairs, etc.

Everybody is going to have a different idea about those things, and while it's great to have a variety of opinions pouring into the idea pot for consideration? It can be argued and voted on until doomsday, which is a common recipe for burnout, frustration, flaring tempers, and hostility in too many cases for it that to be a good thing.

There's a hell of a lot of problems with the sphere staff model -- but not everything about it is a bad idea. 'Everybody does everything' is not the best solution for consistency or all the details working out; considering the density of the source material and all of its quirks, not everyone is going to be as competent at certain tasks. The 'all admins are general admins + there is a sphere expert/authority available/poor son of a bitch stuck standing right where the buck stops' model is considerably better than either, really.

@Monogram said in Mental Health and Grown Up Stuff:

I'm working on building a desk, that's in literally 30 pieces which will then be put towards the PC we're starting to build(a Corsair Obsidian series tower, I'm told is very pretty).

This, this, this. While it's not traditional advice, I really cannot overstate the value in doing things with your hands, especially things with visible progress of some kind.

It is more help than you will ever imagine it could be. It could be painting miniatures or woodwork or knitting or whatever else, really. The end result being a useful object isn't always necessary, even if it is a great cherry on top sometimes. The doing and the progress, though, that's weirdly 'big'.

I believe someone mentioned -- I don't know if it was here or back in the last days of WORA -- that there's one of the 'all media' games that does something like this, with a mention of every person and infraction and what it was and all the rest. It sounded like a nightmare to me, but apparently it's something that's done out there, and some folks had some reasonable arguments for why they supported it. (I am still not on that page, but there were reasonable arguments for it.)

I think this is where we see the 'we've had a recent issue with <problem> and have had to speak with some players related to this, please try to not <things that would recreate issue>' sorts of posts crop up. It is also not a flawless approach, but if you know you've reported <issue>, and the issue post goes up, it shouldn't be difficult to do the mental math there.

@Monogram I remember seeing those desks in the store! They're super pretty really. We really liked them and would have nabbed that kind, actually, but I needed a bigger/gigantic L for the project space. We almost caved on doing two of those with a table between in spite of that. They're seriously nice desks.

@L-B-Heuschkel Irony: even if all staffers did have that superpower, people would accuse staffers of spying via code/etc.

...and it would be so much worse.

"You're reading my mind! I know it!"

"...I was asleep, what?"

"You're reading my mind! You can't prove you weren't!"

"...I am going back to sleep now."

@Arkandel said in RL things I love:

There are people across the world, too many of them, who are simply marginalized. They've nothing to lose, and it shows. Why would they show empathy for others for a potential disaster when they perceive - rightly or not - none coming their way for their own presently dire situation?

There are also people who feel marginalized and slighted due to a lack of perspective.

My parents, retired, have a combined retirement income of roughly $100k/year. They are also not always the most responsible people and they consider many of what anyone outside the US would consider luxuries to be essentials. (Satellite TV with all the channels, each has a car, they both have good health insurance and care, etc.)

They have, however, bought into the lie of 'welfare queens', violent and lazy minorities, and abusers of the system like it was the world's most epic, awesome trend ever. They fervently believe anyone not like them is undeserving of any sort of help whatsoever, and resent that so much as a penny of their tax income would go to people they are convinced will waste and abuse it, living in the lap of luxury, while they worked hard all of their lives for what they (wrongly) perceive to be 'just barely getting by'. (They really did, too. There's a reason I grew up as something of a workaholic who freaks out when I'm not productive enough and my 'enough' is not sanely scaled.)