Posts made by Wizz

@arkandel said in Health and Wealth and GrownUp Stuff:

When you do something wrong you hear about it in no uncertain terms. When you're doing well you... get paid since that's what's expected?

This is why I loathed being middle management as much as...people loathe middle managers, looool.

I mean I loathed management just in general, but like being the guy who was expected to constantly praise and encourage my team while course correcting their day to day mistakes and then also be the hand of the directors when something was seriously wrong on a larger scale that we simultaneously had no real way of personally impacting but were still held accountable for when it made its way downstream was just fucking exhausting and...well...

"Yeah I know I just got finished telling you all how awesome we as a team in particular are doing but like...our region as a whole missed some arbitrary goal by a single-digit percentage so we no longer qualify for this bonus that I was told to get you all psyched up about for literally months now."

Soul crushing. YAYYYY CORPORATIONS

I've been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the six billionth time because I've had a super bad nostalgia streak, and this time I've been following along with the Buffering podcast, which does episodic commentary, just so I can get a different perspective on what I saw.

Anyway, they recently posted this meme and I NEVER MADE THIS CONNECTION, EVER

Holy shit, ANYA'S BEST FRIEND WAS ORIGINALLY CECILLY, THE LADY WHO REJECTED SPIKE WHEN HE WROTE HER A GOOFY POEM AS A HUMAN AND LEAD TO HIS DEATH

Then he gets vamped, something really shitty must have happened to her and she became a vengeance demon, and then 150ish years later they get to have this fun awkward little moment.

Hahaha man. Fan for like 15 years and tons of rewatches and I never caught that, because it's so subtle!

@quinn

Or maybe a slightly-AU game where the Rebellion didn't manage to destroy the second Death Star and so the war went on for way, way longer than anyone expected, and simple attrition and a lack of new blood means there's only old grizzled guerilla fighters left in a losing battle?

GET A LIL GRIMDURK UP IN THOSE STARWERS

@shangdi

There are two other WoD games on Ares, where you hosted, and they're both 2e as far as I can tell.

@ganymede

Exactly! Awesome, dealing with the horrible agent is over, new place yays! Just less "oh god, how could someone live with that?!" please, when, y'know, plenty of us live with that to one degree or another and it kinda hurts the feels to imagine you'd be gagging and revolted if you ever came to visit.

Could we maybe tone it down just a touch with the shitty apartment shaming? I know that the tub's not super appealing but like, grimy apartments are a reality a lot of us poors just gotta suck it up and deal with, and it's embarrassing enough.

ETA: Just to be super clear, I did mean shitty apartment shaming, not that the shaming itself is inherently shitty. Don't want anyone to read that as waaaay more hostile than I intended.

Hahaha man, can you even imagine what your mental landscape and life would look like if literally the only way you were taught to cope with your massive and horrific childhood trauma was to...eat handfuls of bugs at a time and sing the exact same song about not giving a shit over and over again for twenty years or whatever??

I put in my tax return last month and the 21 expected days sailed past. No info on the website or app on any expected date for the refund, but no request for contact either -- just a generic "we're still processing your return" message.

After the 30th day, I am quite frustrated and try to call the IRS directly, and they have the phone tree from Actual Hell. It's deliberately difficult to navigate to a living person and contains a bunch of dead ends to pre-recorded messages about being "too busy" to take your call, which is a load of shit considering you can actually talk to someone if you know the arcane secret combination of numbers to push.

I finally get through after a lot of trial and error, and it turns out my return's in error processing -- expected time is now ten weeks from the date I submitted it, with no explanation as to why.

Jesus H Christ, I needed that money this month. And it is so fun to have a lot of frustration and no legitimate place to direct it.

@kestrel

This was the exact position I was in for many, many years with my siblings, and it's a horribly lonely place to be. I am really sorry.

But I made my peace with it and eventually the evidence was just too much to ignore, and they each came to face the truth when they were pushed too far. Not trying to say that's bound to happen in your case, but who knows? And if not, you have still absolutely made the right choice. You're not alone and we're proud of you, the whole "blood is thicker than water" bullshit is one of the hardest manipulations to overcome.

@greenflashlight

It is very much a Mormon thing. They've got a very strong fixation in their teachings on the importance of bearing children and how the special God-given duty of women is motherhood, which is frankly why most LDS families are so large.

One of the downsides, of course, is a lot of social awkwardness if not outright social ostracism towards women who don't want or can't have kids.

My kid broke my heart the other day when he said he hates Mother's Day. His mom is...somewhere, I dunno, but we haven't heard from her in almost six years. This is a very hard holiday for him, so we're making it Grandma Day instead. ‍️

So much love and sympathy for other people in similar situations...just remember that family is what you make it.

@misadventure

Changing the baseline setting from what to what, for example?

@silverfox said in MUs That We Would Love To Make (But Won't):

A mu* where everyone is a cat. CatsMu

That's it.

Funnily enough, there was also an actual game like this that I vividly recall, back in the 90's. It was set in a city and had some magical elements to it IIRC. Tiny Baby MU*er Wizz was thrilled.

All I know is that King of the Hill is the greatest anime of all time

@solstice

Big sympathy oofs re: revisiting old favorites.

This year I've been going back to a few shows (anime and otherwise) that meant a lot to me when I was younger, and discovering they aged poorly or even horribly is a real gutpunch.

@too-old-for-this said in MU Things I Love:

The sea battle. That scene was EPIC and BADASS.

That was literally my first scene on the grid with this character I had just picked up on a whim after being away from Arx for like, a solid year? I had absolutely no idea that was going to happen. I logged in the night before for the first time and House peeps were like, "so, gonna go to the war tomorrow?" And I was like

Lol.

But holy shit, it reminded me that, wow, this hobby can be tremendously fun and tense and challenging, and like every single player there was on their A-Game and staff did an amazing job. Good stuff.

Picked my kid up from school today and I was floored to discover that nearly every single parent and child there walking around in the parking lot and on the grounds was not wearing a mask. This was easily fifty or sixty people milling around in close quarters and we're not even at 25% of our adult population fully vaccinated in this state.

And then I spot my kiddo making his way through the crowd, still wearing his little mask because I have patiently explained why it is still important, even if he pointed out his friends and their parents don't bother anymore.

I almost cried in a mixture of gratitude and frustration right there in my car. God, I am so tired of this.

A few more recommendations:

Baccano!

Baccano! tells the story of a group of alchemists who meet in secret in 1711 aboard a ship called the Advenna Avis where they are gifted with an elixir that grants immortality by a demon; they then split up to travel the earth. We follow them through a series of nonlinear stories as they encounter one another again and again across the centuries, with most of the show focused on an escalating conflict between rival mafia families during the Prohibition in New York City where the immortals and the elixir surface again and shenanigans ensue.

This is like, easily in my top ten favorites. The score and the way the story is told are fantastic, the cast is large and interestingly eccentric, and the action and occult elements are just fun.

Pet

Hooboy, Pet.
It is an incredibly heavy and dark story about a criminal organization that uses psychic hitmen to either manipulate memories or cause mental breakdowns and catatonia in their targets. This is another one that is hard to say much about without giving too much of the story away, but it is complex and just...a lot. The visuals are amazing, as the show takes you into the psyches of the victims and the psychics, it's very surreal.

There are some elements of the plot that are very troubling, if not actually triggering, and so I'd say be cautious with it. But it's worth the watch, and lingers with you for quite some time.

Inuyashiki

This is an intense horror/sci fi anime that follows the lives of an elderly salaryman and a teenager whose bodies are accidentally destroyed by interdimensional aliens, who absolutely panic and proceed to replace them with super advanced cybernetic weapons platforms and then just...bail. The teenager, who was already mentally unstable, blossoms into a terrifying psychopath and the old man is forced to try and stop him.

It's a genuinely bizarre show, and very graphic and unsettling, but still worth the watch imo. The old man in particular (the titular Inuyashiki Ichiro) is such an unusual protagonist and you develop so much sympathy for him over the course of the series as he slowly learns to become a hero, and what that actually means. Plus, there's a scene where Ichiro is trying to activate this jetpack built into his torso and he can't make it work until he starts singing the old Astro Boy themesong to himself and C'MON THAT'S JUST ADORABLE, you'll wanna pinch his wrinkly old man cheeks!!

Parasyte

SPEAKING OF UNSETTLING BODY HORROR.

This is another show that is in my top ten, and is just amazing. It's an Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque story of these little, well, alien parasites that burrow into people's heads, eat their brains, and take over their bodies -- only one of them fucks up when it tries to snatch the body of high schooler Shinichi Izumi, who traps it in his arm where it is forced to adapt and possess his hand instead.

They slowly become uneasy allies in the fight against the other parasites, who are infiltrating society and snacking on people. It's tense, incredibly gory, very creepy, and explores what it means to be human. I love it.

I'll maybe throw some more suggestions up later, but in terms of comedy I def feel like The Disastrous Life of Saiki K deserves a mention!!

It tells the story of the most powerful psychic on the planet, Saiki Kusuo, who could communicate telepathically by 14 days old and started running mundane errands for his completely incompetent parents at a month.

By the time he's in high school, however, he is utterly jaded and apathetic about life, because his psychic powers have robbed him of any thrill or sense of accomplishment; everything is trivially easy for him and he can't be surprised by anything (due to his clairvoyance, precognition, telepathy, etc).

It's hard to say much without spoiling the best moments in the show, but I love it so dearly. It doesn't rely on raunchy humor or a lot of cultural tropes that might be unfamiliar to American viewers and is one of the few anime I have ever seen that actually managed to make me cackle out loud just because of how constantly absurd it is. Give it a shot!!