Posts made by Wizz

oh god

OH GOD WHY

I AM SO SORRY

@ganymede

I had written him off for the better part of a decade, but because my youngest sisters are still involved with him I wind up hearing more and more about the shit he does and (sometimes worse to me) the shit he was doing that I had no idea about when I was younger, and the more I learn the more awful I feel about having not done something more to prevent the harm he's caused and is still causing.

My sister and I really wanna do something to help. I mean, seriously, if you weren't being facetious about going after him, hit me up in a message.

So this is...kind of a weird one, but I was hoping our resident lawyers might have a suggestion.

My father is a complete garbage human being. Just awful. He's guilty of physical and sexual abuse of minors, all sorts of fraud, embezzlement, etc. Like...I don't even know how or where the list ends. He's been involved in the "Troubled Teen" boarding school industry since the nineties and if you've ever heard rumors of some horrible atrocity they might be guilty of, I am positive he's done it. There are survivor web forums with entire threads dedicated to this man, and the New York Times had a pretty serious hate-on for him in the early aughts.

I cut him off about ten years ago and have tried to encourage my younger sisters to do the same ever since, and to my relief my closest sister has finally done it in the last two years. And now she wants to like, bring him down. I am all for it, but have zero idea where we would even begin.

Somehow, like literally maybe some pact with Satan or some shit, he has avoided any real jail time. He has dozens of aliases and moves around the country frequently. He's abused us, for certain, but that was all years ago and we don't really have concrete proof of the rest? Just social media stories from former students that for some fucking reason parents are still still sending to live with this fucking guy. We believe he is a clear and active danger to the minors with him.

We know he stalks former female students through Facebook and my sister wants to maybe create a fake profile to try and trap him somehow but I have no idea what the legality of that is.

Do we just get a lawyer? Reach out to law enforcement around his favorite haunts? the FBI???

I dunno if y'all had seen this already but uh, warp drives are this much closer to being an actual thing now

I HAVE TOO MUCH EXCITE FOR MY BODY

@warma-sheen

The whole Cyberpunk fiasco quite possibly is going to influence every development cycle in the industry moving forward.

But in my opinion the alpha gameplay footage looked pretty lackluster, so given that they just fired the development studio I think it probably had more to do with them underperforming or having some pretty significant creative differences.

@ganymede

God yes. It broke my heart to learn they weren't making more after the end of Season 5.

I just wish Swift Wind lived in my house and would take me and the kiddo on adventures.

@wildbaboons

My nine year old started watching it all on his own and absolutely loved it, he got me into it in fact, so it kinda just depends on the kid I think.

@warma-sheen

The only addition I'd make to that is that you can reasonably expect others to respect your boundaries as long as you've made them aware in advance. That's easier and usually more consistent in tabletop, but it's not like it's completely out of order to ask people you MU* with like, "hey, gore and torture should be a no-go please."

But yeah, I'd agree ultimately the onus is on you to leave if you're uncomfortable.

Speaking of HBO Max, 30 Coins is just fantastic.

I am a huge fan of practical effects, so this show has really been a treasure and they are sincerely horrifying. The story at times gets almost a little cheeseball, but it's self aware enough about it that it stays charming.

I'm not usually into Catholic theology-heavy horror either, but damn if all the lore isn't presented with enough subversion and straight-up weirdness to be fascinating. Give it a shot if you haven't already!

@jennkryst said in Interest Check: Exalted 3rd ed Mu:

Sure, they can't SHAPESHIFT, but they can get mutations and have SOLAR CHARMS in their Deadly Beastman.

You can take mutations as a Solar, but you don't get them in a neat package deal like Deadly Beastman and the other Lunar charms that build on it, so you have to pay full costs for each of what are essentially permanent disfigurements that mark you as a freakish Wyld-twisted outcast, which you would need to constantly pay motes towards disguising.

You'd likely be dedicating your entire CG merit and bonus point pool and probably some extra XP after just to make this one thing (being a "better" Beastman that...can't change back) barely functional, with the Charms necessary to prevent your mutant ass from being chased out of town, where a Lunar just has to choose one or two charms to get an equivalent form that they're automatically able to shift in and out of.

That sounds like a pain in the ass character concept just to make a completely OOC point.

Like, Solars are still pretty OP, I don't think anybody could really dispute that, but at least they seem to be giving the other Exalts really unique niches that Solars can't just stomp all over this time around.

I waited on watching season 2 of What We Do In The Shadows and holy fuck am I glad I did. I really, really needed to laugh this hard.

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

Here's the thing that I think lots of people forget:

Kids are really smart. Like, a lot smarter than we give them credit for. Definitely the coding it for an eight year old is difficult, but... I think a lot of times, adults get way more worked up about stuff than kids do.

We used to see all this hand-wringing about "OMG, how do I explain the <whisper> gay lifestyle to my children?!?" and it's like... look, Susan. No one is asking you to explain leather daddies or something to your four year old. You can chill. The few times I've had to explain what 'gay' is to a kid, it's pretty much a case of "Well, they love each other just like your mommy and daddy do. It's just that they're both girls." And usually the kid is like, "Okay! Can we color now?"

I don't intend to knock at you at all here because I think that you're right that adults generally do get more worked up than can be warranted, but like...you can't just flippantly assume that a kid understands across the board. A lot of things don't have a simple "that's just the way it is" answer, children don't have the years of context and experience that we do so a lot of distinctions we make can seem very arbitrary and hard to parse to them and they will want to avoid the discomfort they feel during those conversations? So sometimes they just play it off, exactly like you describe.

But as a parent, you're the one who has to deal with the fallout if you missed something crucial or treated it too casually.

I think the emphasis on "because we don't want to make other people uncomfortable" idea will resonate pretty well if you can word it in a way he relates to.

This is what I have been leaning on, haha. We'll see how he does over the next few weeks.

ETA: I really appreciate the suggestions and I had an initial conversation with him that followed them, and I think he gets it. He'll probably have roughly a thousand follow up questions at random times over the next few weeks, knowing him, haha, but it was less stressful having talked about this beforehand. Thanks y'all.

@Aria

Very much how I want to approach it, but it's always the "coding it for an eight year old" part that is difficult, haha. It's a very complicated topic and I definitely want him to understand why without making him feel awful, so...I dunno. Maybe I'll sleep on it.

@auspice

That's a great suggestion! It's hard to know if he would appreciate the distinction yet, but it certainly couldn't hurt to look into resources.

My third-grade kiddo's principal just called and said he drew a bunch of naked women in his math book.

I am completely at a loss. He is really into art, draws all sorts of things, but I have been really careful as to what he's exposed to in terms of age-appropriate content in shows and movies and I have no idea where this would come from. (Just curiosity, I guess?)

I also have no idea where to go for guidance on this stuff...I know my super conservative fam would go the shame route and I really, really don't like that and won't do it.

Just sucks feeling like I am fumbling around in the dark on this one...this is a subject that seems very easy to fuck up.

If you're feeling real down this holiday season and looking around for positives to brighten your mood, here's a potential addition: not having to vacuum up a GATDANG WINTER COAT'S WORTH of your own body hair every two weeks.
#cavemunproblems