Posts made by surreality

There was a mascara I loved from 'long enough ago now I really should have thrown it out' (which, let's be honest, isn't long for mascara, but still) that I wish they still made. My natural hair color is light enough that my eyelashes sorta vanish if I'm wearing anything else on my eyes. It had a very slight shimmer (black, bronze, blue, or wine) without going full glitterypants in the various shades, and that stuff stuck like glue. I am still pissed that trend went POOF and I can't replace it.

That there was color to it at all was quite subtle -- if anybody else has ever tinkered with cosmetic pigments, I think they used the 'blackstar' shades for them -- but it worked super well for 'you have a totally unnatural hair color, lady, wtf is with the mouse brown eyelashes?!'

(If I had clue one how to replicate mascara at all, you can bet I'd mix up more of that stuff. I may have to track down that Wet n Wild one and see if I can mix some pigment into it and not have it turn into glopville.)

@ganymede I am officially blinded by the concentrated adorable in that image.

DAMN YOU.

(All of those cats may not be doing the same thing at once, but I think the whole forum just went OMG FLOUF!!! at once.)

@arkandel Aww! It is pretty adorable in the pictures. It's a shame they weren't open. That woulda been a heck of a story, I'm sure.

It needed to be shared here, too: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/photography/proof/2018/06/cat-boat-amsterdam-animals/

The Catboat.

@ganymede ...the sig says it all.

@ganymede My point is more this: when people try to push, they hit a stone wall and don't get anywhere with it. Null response. Whether it's just not giving a crap about the gossipy bullshit, having no idea what they're talking about, or 'nope, not listening to this shit', stonewalling works.

It's pretty much the only thing that works.

@ganymede The people who do this shit tend to feel out people that can be pushed around, at least to an extent.

Typically, the targets are people who aren't inclined to want to rock the boat, tend to keep their heads down, don't aim for the spotlight all the time, don't want to waste time with drama or OOC conflict, etc.

Then they exploit those generally positive traits in a negative way -- because the know that person won't want drama with them, and they can be pushed, and pushed, and pushed. They push a little harder once in a while to see what they can get away with, too, and people get used to it. It's shitty, but plenty of people do.

You stonewall that kind of bullshit from the jump. It makes a world of difference, and tells this type: 'this is not going to be an easy tool, move along'.

@ganymede The best example I can think of is actually one from RL.

When I was... nine or so? Before boys (or girls) were even a second thought ever and the very idea of kissing was still super duper gross, the folks sent me to a snobby all girls school. The older sister of a friend of mine went there, and her parents spoke of it highly. She thought it would be the funniest joke ever to write a note to another girl in my class, telling her I wanted to see her naked, and sign my name to it, during the first week I was there.

You can guess how many people wanted to talk to me -- ever -- in the two years I attended that school. This included the teachers, and the counselors I was sent to to 'fix my unholy deviance'.

This kind of mean girl bullshit is pretty commonplace on games to this day -- which isn't even high school drama, it's gradeschool drama. It's not as troublesome as it is RL, obviously! But it's pretty commonplace, and we need to do a much better job, as a community, of standing up to it.

@ganymede I think it's a little more complicated than that for many of us. Specifically, I'm referring to 'the ability to guard one's reputation' -- and social currency is a factor there.

If you don't really know many people very well, or haven't interacted with piles of people on games when they know, 'oh, hey, that was so-and-so', people don't necessarily know you well enough to discern the reality from the bullshit. This can be a real issue.

One dedicated whisper-gamer with half a dozen buddies can effectively cut off all avenues of RP for the player who has no one or only one or two players who actually know(s) them and would know the whispers are bullshit vs. the folks who don't know them and only know their buddy is claiming such-and-such is true.

This kind of thing happens all the time in the hobby, and it's incredibly corrosive. The best case outcome here is that person just plays with their one or two friends, or leaves without ever knowing about the toxic nonsense -- and then has to deal with going to other games wondering why people freeze up and freeze them out the moment they dare speak their name.

Anonymity and invisibility bites us in the ass here: you can see the wary look RL and inquire about it and address it and know the sources -- you are not oblivious to all but 'what's with the crickets?' that seems to come from out of the blue.

Not many people, in my experience, want or are willing to stand up to their friends about this kind of thing to even find out for themselves, let alone say, 'I haven't seen the problem with <person> you're describing,'[1] even when they do have personal experience that is contrary to the nastiness being expressed to them. People generally don't want to risk creating that conflict; we're not just risk-averse in RP sometimes re: death/loss/etc., as a group.

1. Mercy knows I've pissed off plenty of people with the latter over the years, and I'm still always incredibly hesitant for just that reason -- even though that's what has to happen broadly for this kind of situation to stop being the kind of problem it is for us as a hobby.

@arkandel If you like fun and goofy, I'd say yes -- thinking of it as a comedy first helps. The husband watched a few episodes of season 1 and went, 'screw this!'. It just took one episode of 3 and he watched the rest of it happily and is super excited for and thus far enjoying 4. (They inherit Constantine for a few episodes of 3 and apparently all of 4, which is also a plus for us, at least.)

There's really not much to know that doesn't get explained fairly well in the intro sequence, to be honest; scanning through the wiki page for the episode synopses for s1-2 would more than cover it and take maybe five minutes tops.

The cast really seems to have gotten into it by 3. We've seen the classic 'team that works together really well though sometimes somebody screws up in some well-meaning way' in a lot of the other supers series, but not much of the 'dysfunctional band of screwups that still has to pull a win out of their asses'. I think of it somewhat in terms of gaming dynamics? We see a lot of the former: the 'team that is a well-oiled machine most of the time tackling challenges' -- which is... fine, but not always much fun, is more predictable, and is kinda 'classic tabletop fun'. More fun to me is the team of misfits, which is somehow more like a lot of MUing -- the misfits are fun and interesting in their downtime with more conflicts and confusion and humor and challenges in some ways that the well-oiled machine that only sometimes breaks down tends to be. It's the same sort of charm that things like 'The A Team' had, in a way.

ETA: I can't say I care what happens on Arrow. It's just... on. And there. It's background noise that isn't streaming TV news.

@bobotron ...when Beebo showed up in Arrow, I about died. Instant spit-take. (This is so not a spoiler, was just a funny little easter egg. But STILL.)

Legends of Tomorrow continues to be the campiest happy on television at the moment in this house.

My husband could not make it through season 1. I wasn't terribly interested, either. It got a bit better in season 2, as they started to get far less serious. They finally hit their stride on ridiculousness for season 3 -- and all it took was one episode to get him to watch from there. Season 3 is more or less a love letter to our childhood, and all the campy goofy madness we remember living through in the 80s in many ways. (In some ways, it's even funnier to him than it is to me, because he knows what else the cast has been in as a generic movie geek, and there are several wink-wink-nudge-nudges at the 4th wall in that regard.)

I did not think they could out-goofy themselves. They have, and it is a joy to watch.

I don't do comedy. There are only a handful of comedy movies or series, even, that I like, and it's always a hard sell to get me to watch one. Regardless of how people may rave, getting me to watch a sitcom is like telling me I'm really going to enjoy it as you pull all my teeth with rusty pliers -- and only the snarky ones tend to make the 'I will get through more than the pilot'. (Archer, Disenchanted, The Good Place, I'm looking at you three... the only three I'll watch.)

But I love this. I love this as comedy. Good on them for embracing it fully. The 'snarky band of screwups and misfits' dynamic will always have a warm fuzzy place in the cockles of my otherwise coal black heart, but they really didn't sell it early on, and they do now. I can't necessarily empathize with The Flash or Supergirl very often (my 'inner good person' is a lot more like The Atom, down to the love of showtunes), but grumpy reluctant screwups with good intentions (and often geek streaks a mile wide)? Yeah. I feel that one. I was not entirely optimistic that they'd be able to hold on to what worked from Season 3, but they have, and the result really is the very best kind of fun.

@aria Much luck!

Also, these are not my critters. I do not know whose critters these are. I just stumbled across this picture the other day and it might be one of the most adorable things on the internet, and it's in theme with 'cute fuzzy creatures in people clothes/costumes'.

The potency of cute going on there is dangerously high.

@testament said in Forgiveness in Mushing:

What I'm asking, after that long-winded opening is: have you forgiven someone in this hobby?

Yup! Lots of times. Often, it's for one of the following reasons:

• It was stupid to be angry about in the first place.
• It has been so long I don't even remember why I was mad to begin with.
• The person has demonstrably changed.
• The person has expressed genuine remorse for the bad behavior and taken steps to do better.

Or are you just not the type? There's nothing wrong in that, inherently. Once you're screwed, fuck that person, no matter how much they may change. They did you dirty once, so screw them and the horse they rode in on.

Some people are in this category. It takes work to get there. Not just being generically crappy, but engaging in a sustained effort to cause harm and be terrible. Hey, if somebody puts the work in...

Or have someone did a friend of yours wrong, and mob mentality takes effect?

Has definitely happened. I am very protective of the people I care about. I generally hope for good things for all of us screwballs in this hobby and will always hope everyone is doing well and having fun with what they're doing (provided their fun isn't being shitty to others, and some people do define their fun that way), but the people I really give a genuine damn about are very few and far between.

I can, and absolutely have, turned into rabid crusader bitch on this front. This is a tendency I'm taking a very hard look at now, because while I don't think it's necessarily all bad, it's a tendency that has been manipulated and weaponized before. There is really nothing so damnably dangerous as someone who believes they're doing the right thing, because when you think you're all grar for great justice? It becomes a moral/ethical/integrity thing. Most of us try to be decent people. If something appeals to the inner 'decent person', it's really easy for the fight to be harder, longer, and it's especially easy to lose sight of when it's simply become a fight between people rather than about the ideals that drove it in the first place.

Or were you the person that did the screwing up and how hard has it been for you recover from that?

Results pending? It's the best I've got here. It is hard in some ways, but not because of the other posters here. Blame the Roman Catholic upbringing or whatever, but there's a lot of guilt, it's fresh, it's raw, and knowing I engaged in and enabled some terrible shit is not something I will forget any time soon, and it'll be a while before I'm able to forgive myself for it, if I can.

Did you have to hide who you were?

I'm against this, personally. I understand people who do, or why they do. I generally try to keep a low profile on games -- sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don't -- but more recently I've come to believe that it's better to be open about who and where I am, and if people love or hate me, they have whatever information they need to engage or avoid as they choose.

Play a different game with a different user name or email?

I did this in the wake of Spider moving out of my house. Half the hobby hated me for helping her, the other half for finally asking her to leave. It was no win for anyone, and I went to hide out on Shang for about 8 years.

Broadly: when it comes to forgiveness, some of it is pretty simple. If someone hasn't shown a shred of remorse for their bad behavior, is only interested in dodging the consequences of bad behavior, or whining about whatever consequences they are encountering because of their bad behavior? For minor things, I already give people far too many chances and will probably doormat in this manner until my dying day like a dumbass; for the major ones? I want them out of my face, and out of my life.

@tinuviel I have only observed it with wasabi, not just generic spicy foods -- he likes a number of spicy pepper dishes and curries, and it doesn't manifest there. Admittedly, I haven't seen him try other spicy horseradish dishes specifically, so it could be a food family.

My husband shaves his head, and has a really intense blush response to wasabi. Goes bright pink in a wave, and poof, it's instantly gone again within seconds.

Recently, my parents, terrified of 'the green stuff', dared him to eat a small amount.

We can track its strength by how far up his face the bright red goes: bridge of nose, weak; mid-forehead, average; hairline, somewhat strong -- etc.

While traveling, we went to a place that had much stronger wasabi than normal, and we watched in amused awe as he turned scarlet all the way to the top of his head.

My husband, wasabi spice thermometer. (ETA: Proof that we all have super powers -- most of them are just spectacularly ridiculous.)

May want to define active, too; there are a few places around lately that are small but have things going on, and a few that are large with things going on.

@derp It's that nothing is going to stop the bad actors from acting badly, and it isn't long before it becomes a case of, 'You got raped? Shouldn't have left the house then, should you?'

@tinuviel Oooh, interesting. The first link that came up in search said it wasn't available for rent or purchase at this time.

@arkandel ...but it says it's coming out in Summer 2017? Dammit, I do not recall it doing so, and I really would have liked to see that. Some of those shots were like 'whoa, flashbackville'. My nostalgia needs a feedin'.