We got another dog back on Memorial Day weekend. He was a rescue out of a terrible situation on the Texas-Mexico border (multiple infections, inch deep cuts hidden under matting in his fur, fleas, ticks, you name it) and despite being surrendered by his previous owner, we’re honestly not sure he’s ever lived in a house before.
I cannot stop laughing at the crazy-eyed reaction he has to pup cups, like the sugar high hitting his bloodstream is just the dog equivalent of this child.
I am late to the party because naps, and I think I must have missed something someone said somewhere but…
Please do not doubt someone who claims they have been abused. Not even if you profoundly dislike them. Not even if they engage in shitty behavior themselves after the fact.
NGL, I got way too drawn into Ghost’s personal life and resulting well-being about a decade ago, but it was not in the Regina George “OMG, why are you so obsessed with me?!” kind of way that Dropkick tried to portray it as later. It was in the “As extremely unlikely as it is to be accepted, I feel like I need to (with my partner’s knowledge and agreement) at least offer to put this person up in my spare bedroom because they have repeatedly expressed to me that they feel unsafe in their own home” kind of way.
I’m not going to go into more than that because it’s absolutely not my story to share, and I’m not going to claim that it justifies terrible behavior on his part because it absolutely does not. Believe me, even after confirming there was no bad blood between us – at least not about that and the dRaMa!!11!one!elevn!!! that resulted – there have been several times since then that I’ve wanted to sock the dude in the mouth.
But, like… don’t, guys. Just don’t. Not cool, and A+ to the folks who said they aren’t going to do that.
In my experience, abusers are going to be abusive regardless of what community, culture, or system they’re in. They will find ways to bend the rules and norms of that setting to their advantage, as well as to blame those they abuse for somehow being at fault for what was done to them. And this is true for any kind of abuse, although sexual abuse is the most egregious.
The key to minimizing this is making it clear from the outset that it’s not acceptable by the broader community as a whole, then enforcing this mandate regularly and consistently when it’s uncovered that oh, hey, surprise, this abusive person is a piece of shit. Officially, yes, but also unofficially, with a general aura of “You fuckers are not welcome here.” that is present from start to finish.
It’s not perfect, not by any means, but no system is and I think it’s the only way to balance the fact that everyone’s experiences, preferences, and desires are their own and that no one else really has the right to dictate that for others, save those who cannot possibly consent for whatever reason.
Final GPA for my Master’s degree. Considering there was a point when I lost track of how many times I dropped or failed out of undergraduate programs, I’d say this isn’t half bad.
I prefer they/them. She/her is also fine. Like, I won’t be mad about it or offended if someone uses that, especially given how complicated my own feelings about gender are and the fact that my body-type adds a lived experience I will always have thrust on me barring major surgery I don’t want, but I do get the warm fuzzies when folks at least try.
Uhmm.
I somehow got an A in the worst class in my entire program, the hell-class that I was seriously concerned about failing in the final semester before graduation, the class that had me in spiralling meltdown mode for two months.
I understand virtually nothing from this class, including how or why I got this grade, but fuck it. I’ll take it.
@Tchotchke said in Liberation MUSH:
I appreciate everyone’s thoughts. Getting that out of my system and finding that a bunch of people with an outside perspective thought it was problematic was cathartic. Thank you.
Dude, my friends and I left that game over way less awful shit than that. And while I sometimes miss my character and regret the amount of setting material I wrote up for a staffer that was very shortly thereafter replaced by a hypercontrolling weirdo…
That policy (? bbpost? whatever it is?) is so beyond the pale that no amount of nostalgia would be worth going back. I suggest taking Roz’s advice and noping the fuck out of there.
@kalakh She is perfection. Also, have some ridiculousness in exchange.
If anyone knows how to reboot a dog, that would be aces. Benny seems to have crashed.
@Testament said in Predators and Roleplaying Communities:
Secondly, you hear about this stuff in the fringes, but never truly up front and so bold. So I really respect those who are even willing to discuss it on an open forum. It does make me really wonder why I keep partaking in it when these kind of predators exist.
So I have another post that I want to make in this thread for the folks who are sharing their stories, but it’s been difficult to write because this has been difficult to read. I need to sit with it for a little while more before I make it.
But in the meantime, I wanted to respond to ^this specifically.
This post may have started with predators in roleplaying communities, but the truth is that it isn’t roleplaying communities that are the problem. They’re just the community that we, as a forum, share. This is a cultural problem and it happens everywhere. It is a plague and it is endemic. And yes, I know what I’m saying and yes, I chose those words on purpose because this problem does, in fact, literally kill people.
My first memory of being exposed to a predator where I realized in the moment that something was wrong but didn’t know how to voice it happened when I was eleven. I was in a school play at my very small, very Christian school. Afterwards, my father told me that my friend Kim’s dad had been sitting near them and at some point during the evening, had told him that he’d “been staring at me in my dress all night because I had legs like a grown woman’s.”
To this day, I don’t know what I’m more shocked by: the fact that this man had the nerve to say something like that to my father without expecting to be punched in the face or the fact that he was right and my father, who’d been abused himself as a child, passed this on to me as a compliment I should be happy about. A “compliment” from forty year old man, whose house I had slept in more than once when having overnights with my friend. A “compliment” that just meant that I was growing up and men were going to fawn over me. I should be so happy!
That he said this about an elementary school child.
I am well and truly glad that the RP community has gotten a somewhat better grasp on this than it had when I was fifteen. I understand the urge to leave it anyway and respect the choice of people who already have. But the next community and the next hobby and the ones after that will have all the same shit, wrapped up in a different package. The only way to stop this is to fight this everywhere, all the time, and force society to change – by educating people as prevention, by creating safe spaces for those who have been abused, by punishing the predators, and by creating an unyielding aura of even a hint of this being totally unacceptable.
Is this the point where I get to whip out my notes on historical hygiene practices, from the time that abbots were complaining of Norse invaders seducing local women what with their heathen “baths” and “combing their beards” to the importance of frequent undergarment changes for proper Tudor lords and ladies?
Because I can and I will, and that is not an offer, that is a threat.
Christmas is on a Monday this year, which means that it and the New Year’s holiday don’t cross over the middle of two different work-weeks. They’re one work-week and an extra Monday, which means we’re anticipating that end of year PTO will probably kick off on December 15 and go up from there.
Because of this, I’ve advised every team I create communications and messaging for that it’s not a good idea to send anything important after December 19 because no one will be here to read it. Sure, you’ll officially check the box that says the communication happened, but very few people will read it and the ones who do won’t remember it by January and everyone will be confused. I’ve been telling them that for a month and they all said that makes sense.
In the last three business days, I have had nine – NINE – new requests for pieces come in that they all want published by the recommended deadline. Two teams submitted three requests each. At 10 AM today, I had someone ask me for change management messaging they want to send to 3,000 people tomorrow. One group wants a communications plan that will carry them to 2025. Nevermind the fact that our editorial calendar is so overloaded from now until December 13 that we’ve already started pushing things to the following week to relieve some of the pressure.
Then today the group that is my problem child and is always my problem child contacts me to tell me they’re “floating a few ideas for stories” and that they “just want to check what my capacity is” for the next week.
None. My capacity is none. My capacity is I have been asking you for this since the beginning of November with some overflow into I have made the intern start vetting requests for me. If y’all want to get me something for the holidays, the thing I want most is for you to learn what a deadline is, thanks.
@Rowan said in Celebrities We Lost 2023:
The Pogues lead singer, Shane MacGowan. Christmas was never complete without hearing their Fairytale of New York. Best xmas song ever! https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67546785
This one is… sigh. Cry.
Back in March of 2008, right before St. Patrick’s Day, the Pogues were supposed to play a relatively small venue here in Philadelphia. Like, holds about 2000 people small. I had tickets to see them, but at the time I lived over an hour outside the city and this terrible winter storm blew in. We usually don’t get snow that late, but it was piling high, the roads were wet from the day before, and everything started to freeze over. Even the trains into the city had warnings about delays and cancellations and I was afraid that if I tried going to the show I’d either get in an accident or get stuck there with nowhere to sleep. Besides, I was convinced – convinced! – that with such miserable conditions, they were going to reschedule.
They didn’t. The band played on anyway, to a tiny audience of about 300-400 people, and I missed it. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would never have another chance to see the Pogues. They played New York and Baltimore and DC, but they never came to Philly again. That was my one and only chance and I decided not to go.
Buy the tickets, folks. Go to the show. Do the thing. Don’t miss out.
Late to the game, but I apparently live in a car wash outside of Mexico City.
Failing that, my next option is actually a residential street! In Johannesburg, in an area where all the houses look pretty nice!
They’re also surrounded by massive fences, protected by armed guards, and in one case even boast their very own barbed wire. o_0
@SpaceKhomeini said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
Oh yeah, n/m you definitely know then.
I think what I didn’t realize was the thieving nature of nearly everyone who operates in that space, right down to the most inconsequential vendor. All that tuition and fee bloat over the years went into those pockets too.
My mom worked at one ivy league for, like, thirty something years. Once a friend of hers found out that I wanted to major in English, they would save up free copies of books that publishers sent them every year in a desperate bid to get the department to choose their editions for that coming school year. She would send my mom bags and bags of books to bring home to me just to get them out of the office – so I got to see exactly what was marked inside them for what the vendor would charge the school, versus the MSRP printed on the back of the book if it was carried in a regular store, versus what they charged the students at the campus bookshop. It was insane, especially considering:
a) the markups I was seeing didn’t include any third party vendors for things like hardcover textbooks, mostly just paperbacks of things you can buy at Barnes & Noble
b) the majority of these books were in the public domain
c) the markup for used copies was even worse
@SpaceKhomeini said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:
Having worked in higher ed admin I am sure you would be thrilled to know about the vendor grift that is part and parcel of the whole thieving enterprise.
I’ve worked for two different universities. I saw enough while I was there that I wouldn’t be surprised at all at what their senior administrations pull.
Today, I started my day by filing a complaint against my student loan provider with the Department of Education.
Every month, they receive an extra payment above what my required minimum is. They have specific instructions on file from me to apply this to loan that has the highest interest rate, in order to prevent interest from accruing. Despite the fact that their own computer system reflects that these instructions are on file, they have been applying these payments as pro-rated across all of my loans, sometimes in the amount of only pennies. This makes my extra payment significantly less effective.
My provider’s office opens at 8:00 AM. I called them at ~8:10. I have been on hold for 54 minutes without reaching a human being. It took me less time to document and file a complaint with the federal government than it did to to even reach a person at Nelnet.
I took these loans out starting in 2002. I started with a $44,000 balance. My balance is now… $42,700. My extra payment of $200/month ends up applying… $32 to the principal balance. At this rate, I’m going to pay off these loans in 111 years and 3 months.
UPDATE: I ended up sitting on hold for an 1h 45m before getting to a human being, who then proceeded to spend the next twenty minutes of the call talking over me, talking down to me, and insulting me because it wasn’t possible that they made the mistake I said they made. No, no. I was “clearly confused” and he was going to explain to me step by step how student loans work because he’s “more technical” than I am.
(My dude. I have an MBA and I work in finance, where my job is literally writing guides for phone reps walking clients through major financial transactions. Get fucked.)
After twenty minutes of arguing with this man, I finally give in and let him spend the next 10-15 minutes explaining my student loans and how payments work, step by step, like I don’t have the brain cells to read a basic table. Until we get to the screen with the breakdown of each of my payments and how it’s been applied. And then to the screen with special instructions for excess payments. Which clearly shows how I’ve set them up to be paid, and which doesn’t match how they have been paid. At all.
So then he got the pleasure of having me lay out point by point, line by line, what was wrong and what needed to be fixed. Bro all of a sudden went from talking to me like an idiot to backpedaling on what his original excuse was for how my required payments are larger than I think they are (which would’ve made their mistake worse??), reassuring me he was filling out a ticket with their accounting department, how it would be handled, that they would fix this, etc. etc. Y’know, like he didn’t just tell me this was all just too hard for me to understand by my wee widdle self!
This problem could’ve been fixed in 10 minutes, including the time to write up a ticket to their accounting team. Instead it took 45, most of which was him just insulting me. And that’s not counting the nearly two hours that I spent on hold. I cannot imagine what this is like for people who don’t have the same background or understanding that I’m lucky enough to have when dealing with this BS, nevermind for people who may have financial difficulties, incompatible hours, or accessibility needs.
Education in this country is so completely fucked, from daycare all the way on up. This entire system is broken, it’s designed that way on purpose to make people give up, give in, and give over every dollar they have, and my level of rage right now could probably power the entire Eastern seaboard for the next three days.
@dvoraen said in An Arx Peeve Thread:
@Aria Imagine if one of the speech bubbles said: “Everyone is of one mind: I’m the best.”
Gonna tell Mia’s kids this was the Horned God:
Art by @AvelokaDraws.
We’re supposed to go to a concert tonight.
I logged onto the venue site to check the venue map.
There are a slew of tickets for better seats, with better views, without multiple sets of stairs to climb, currently being sold for less money than we paid.
My face right now:
Is anyone else a planner person? I’ve been using the same system for a few years but noticing a whoooooooole lot more white space in my book since I graduated in May. So now – naturally right AFTER ordering my planner for 2024 – I’m considering switching to a different, preferably more portable system than the one I have.
Curious to hear people’s thoughts on: