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Grognan posted:Moroni. Are you loving serious
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Apr 2, 2015 23:39
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Dabir posted:Are you loving serious Yes Mom, please come back from WOW Being in the silicon valley tech scene there was a lot of potential going around as far as money to be made and devices to be patented. Father starts up his own company and works on it in the off hours of his Apple job. It goes well, so well that he can afford to have more kids and move into an even larger house in a state that doesn't pay income tax. He's never around and when he's around he tends to be that bircher, authoritarian guy to whom the term self esteem is "just something invented by liberals". This leaves the bulk of the domestic work to her, the mother that has to date in this anecdote had about five kids in the space of about 10 years. Raising kids is hard work, especially when you're having to teach them all school at the same time, even worse the other domestic partner really doesn't help and berates her to tears when he doesn't get laid.(Masturbation's a sin you see. Foreplay? Never heard of it) So through forensic examination, I knew my parents were cool and did interesting fun things at some point. I had found the 2nd edition AD&D GM and players guide in the attic at one point and being computer nerds back in the day they had some old games and such floating around. Even if he views all computer games as the spawn of satan now, he at least had some interests outside of proper godly ones that he doubled down on later(fishing and hunting). Blizzard's Warcraft series and Starcraft were games that he liked. I enjoyed my time when we played together. Never against, he couldn't actually adapt to what a human could actually pull and he didn't like losing. So at this point there are still computers freely available compared to the past where they were not very available or the future where the access was kept under lock and key. After moving away from Galt's Gulch onto a mountain that has scads of other people's second or third homes on it things are starting to crystallize. She's been withdrawing slowly and steadily throughout the years because therapy or even admitting something was wrong was basically against god's plan at this point. Something repeated to me when I felt lonely or depressed was that it was a trial of my faith and god only sends trials to those who could bear them. This had me praying to god for death, sincerely. Makes sense though, we were taught the basic grand plan that was linked last page and that even the middle level of heaven was basically the garden of Eden. Suicide would probably put you in the murderers bracket so I was holding out for the better option. Through discussion after everything shook out, I had found out she basically had a lot of the same feelings at the time having suffered under him longer without anyone to actually turn to to vent. Under this sort of emotional pressure and negativity this happened to her.  But for Macintosh because they really hated Microsoft. Now for a while she kept it reasonable but raids being what they are in EQ(terrifyingly slow slogs) she was online for a lot. Two boxing or three boxing roles because the community for MacEQ was incredibly tiny(Sony basically hated this game). This helped her make some friends and escape the emotionally toxic slog of trying to raise the many children that have been pushed upon her because it was godly. Not making GBS threads you, the number of kids he had and the fact that he could make them count off like it was loving basic were the sort of things that he liked to show off. So the company is approaching its IPO when this happens.  Welp, it basically sucks her in (and me a year later). She was already primed by EQ and the stress at the company was getting worse as was he. We basically didn't see her for about a year(my memory is a bit fuzzy at this point, I didn't want to remember). Her mother had moved in at this point to help raise the seven kids in the family. After this though the eldest sister was basically mom now and our educations were also suffering accordingly. (the younger children were eventually enrolled into public school) Now instead of taking a moment of introspection to look at why things were so intensely lovely in his home he alternated between burying himself in work, convincing me and her that it was our own fault for being sad, and dishing out discipline like he was john wick in a club. And so it goes. The Wall of Censorship, The Tipping Point, or Why I Would Have Fit In This Thread Twelve Years ago. I'll continue but I need a moment to collect myself. Grognan fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Apr 3, 2015 |
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Apr 3, 2015 02:55
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IronicDongz posted:"Telestial" sounds like a joke word. It's a perfectly cromulent word.
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Apr 3, 2015 03:09
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Grognan posted:I'll continue but I need a moment to collect myself. Take all the time you need.
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Apr 3, 2015 04:13
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Grogan, you have an excellent story so far, but just a point of clarification. Whenever you say her, you are referring to your mother correct? Sometimes it gets a bit jumbled of weather it's you or her. Keep posting please. And thank you for sharing.
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Apr 3, 2015 04:27
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Excelsiortothemax posted:Grogan, you have an excellent story so far, but just a point of clarification. Whenever you say her, you are referring to your mother correct? Sometimes it gets a bit jumbled of weather it's you or her. Her means my mother because I intend to try and keep myself out of this unless I keep talking about these things until my story comes along. Grognan fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Apr 3, 2015 |
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Apr 3, 2015 05:30
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At least Mormon Hell has a sci fi name.
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Apr 3, 2015 06:16
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So basically, everything in this song is completely true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZIFqaqKoBI Goddamn. 
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Apr 3, 2015 07:47
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For what it's worth, the English word "moron" didn't appear until the early 20th century, so the name Moroni didn't sound stupid at the time.
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Apr 4, 2015 04:29
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Hello fellow Silicon Valley ex-Mormon  My family wasn't crazy but I was first exposed to furries by a friend at early morning seminary. She also showed me her Protoss/Zerg rape slash at Girl's Camp. K, if you're out there, I hope you're doing well!!!
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Apr 5, 2015 02:12
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hyperhazard posted:So basically, everything in this song is completely true. Everything, yes!
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Apr 5, 2015 07:21
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I'm sorry about the delay. Censorship If you've been following so far you probably have an ok mental picture for the type of person he was. Controlling, paranoid of the things he didn't implicitly trust, and immensely derogatory towards those things he felt were morally degrading. This really kicked in when he had kids. Everything was to be examined for moral taint. This meant that I personally, until I was out in the world on my own, never heard any genre of music besides gospel and country. Saturday morning television was not allowed. Shows like Captain Planet(environmentalism) and GI Joe(addressing the SA apartheid) were encroaching liberal ideas that were contaminating his children and would lead them astray from the chosen path. It's funny in retrospect, if he had taken the time to sit down and talk about it with both sides of the viewpoint in a fashion that he didn't ape from Rush Limbaugh. I would have probably stuck closer to his ideals even when real life started to impinge. Nickelodeon had perhaps the game shows approved, but time spent in front of the television was a rare privilege as well. Movies were to be wholesome affairs that the church approved. We eventually wore a full set of these tapes out as they were some of the closest things we had to new and refreshing stories that we got access to when things were under a real lockdown. Books were a bit of a different story because my mother's mother was a relatively normal if quiet person that liked reading to the point that her garage was fitted for shelves all the way around, top to bottom, and she had filled them all with books. Trashy romance, first edition Edgar Rice Burroughs anthology, westerns, baen sci-fi, Xanth, sword of truth, Asimov, and Alan Dean Foster(first fictional book I read for my own entertainment) she had it all. She shared that love of reading with her daughter and it was passed on. Mind you anything that was released to me had to have been gone through with a pen to remove words like "drat" or anything referring to sex at all during the worst of that controlling period. Coming out of this sort of environment I was one weird teen. My peers at the church, who were the closest things to friends I had, would make references to all the poo poo that I had no clue about. I was probably the easiest person to get along with because I would agree with you and any sort of interaction with others was fascinating. As well as those people having things like nintendos, segas, and dads they weren't afraid of. The parents of these other kids also liked having a well behaved and polite kid that would automatically do the housework at any given moment. My first real friend was not someone from the church, but he was hanging around because his mother was giving it a try. He took one look at me and said "you don't know how to talk to people, do you?" I didn't know and I had no response for him. He took this in stride and that's how I eventually became acclimated to normal people outside the all smiles all the time dynamic that Mormonism seems to bring up in people. The Tipping Point So in the last post things were coming to a head. The house was always a mess, he would be locked into a his office right by the bedroom, she locked herself in the bedroom, the kids would manage their meals and school work the best they could with a minimum of parental presence. Schoolwork was a combination of this(which worked great to teach me algebra) and this(holy poo poo I might make a new thread about this tripe). Followup was spotty to nil, which is bad when you've got two parents that never actually make sure you're doing the work instead of just trusting you to take care of your own education. With this sort of dysfunction being blamed upon her(the mother) and her own depression being addressed as a lack of faith, the amount of self-loathing she was experiencing was way too much for any reasonable person to handle. I would know, I had gotten a lot of that sort thinking embedded into myself as well. Arguments were happening often and tempers were being raised. Twenty four hours after my friend had invited me to crash at his place (he had just moved out into an apartment) an argument got heated enough that I had stepped away and put my fist through a wall. I decided to leave just then and a friend had offered a way out. I had found out that three days later she had left and set herself up in an apartment. This shocked the hell out of everyone to say the least. There was a lot of toxic feelings flying around. At this point both her and me had internalized our self-blame so deeply we hated each other for "bailing out". It was really bad all around. As an aside, it did take years to put herself back together but things are a lot better now for everyone involved. Actually there was a kickass phase where she got herself excommunicated from the church. I'll probably talk more about that later. broken pixel posted:Grognan, thanks for sharing your story. I don't recall if you mentioned your status these days, but I hope you're in a better environment... You and everyone involved (probably) deserved a better life than that! As for that Christian homeschool textbook, I'd love to hear more about that in a post or proper thread. Do you think you could carry on an ask/tell session for a while there? I think a lot of people would be interested in what sort of things those books actually teach and how it feels to read them as a kid. Grognan fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 6, 2015 23:25
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Grognan, thanks for sharing your story. I don't recall if you mentioned your status these days, but I hope you're in a better environment... You and everyone involved (probably) deserved a better life than that! As for that Christian homeschool textbook, I'd love to hear more about that in a post or proper thread. Do you think you could carry on an ask/tell session for a while there? I think a lot of people would be interested in what sort of things those books actually teach and how it feels to read them as a kid.
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Apr 6, 2015 23:44
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So what were the Sword of Truth books like with all mentions of sex removed? Theres currently a Lets Read of it on the forums and its uh...I'm surprised your parents let you read that
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Apr 7, 2015 02:04
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Xun posted:So what were the Sword of Truth books like with all mentions of sex removed? Theres currently a Lets Read of it on the forums and its uh...I'm surprised your parents let you read that Honestly I think her mother bought like, one of them and never got the rest on account of good taste. Edit: John Ringo was right up my dad's ally though, he liked his war-porn a lot. Started with Tom Clancy, moved to David Weber and then John Ringo.They got a bit sloppier as I got older as well as they didn't have the time and effort to completely censor everything. Had an sabot round from an abrams on his desk he liked to nerd about. Joke's on him I went and ended up enlisting at some point. Grognan fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Apr 7, 2015 |
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Apr 7, 2015 02:51
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Do you feel you benefited in any way from this upbringing that you wouldn't have if you'd been going to school and your parents had been less controlling? (Or if they'd been entirely non-religious?)
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Apr 13, 2015 01:37
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Thanks, Grognan, that was very interesting. I'd be fascinated to hear more if you were ever up for it.
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Apr 13, 2015 22:12
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The dad censoring books reminds me of this family in my ward growing up. The dad set up his own little film editing workshop where he would go through and censor anything objectionable, often taking good chunks out of PG films and making them very confusing. He'd loan them out like a Mormon video rental so I had very warped views of classic movies until I got out and saw the unedited versions. My family was very lax in comparison: soda, TV on Sundays, stuff like that. There was briefly a time where my parents tried to conform to the standard, at it was probably after I took a "which kingdom would you go to if you died RIGHT NOW" and me and 1 other kid got telestial.
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Apr 13, 2015 22:38
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I have a not-so-fun story for the thread! A tale of filth and delusion! I have a cousin named Jordan that, until two weeks ago, I hadn't seen or directly communicated with in nearly ten years. We're six years apart (he's 24, I'm 30) and have lived in different states all our lives, so we were never close. I remember him as being kind of a whiny, spoiled, nerdy kid, but I figured it was just because every little boy is whiny and uncool when you're an 11-year-old girl. His parents got divorced when he was 3 and his mom moved out of state and my uncle couldn't be assed to take care of his own kid so he dumped him on our grandparents, who indulged and spoiled him. Until he was ten he was the youngest grandchild and the youngest boy, something that counted for a lot with my grandparents. Anyways, a couple weeks ago I got word that my grandmother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. We are not a close-knit family, so this was also the first time I learned that Jordan still lived with them and had, in fact, never moved out. I had assumed that between Jordan, his father, my other aunt and uncle, and two other cousins all still living in my grandparents' town that my grandmother's care would not all be falling on my grandfather, an old man in poor health, but what I was hearing about my grandmother's condition and care made it obvious that this was not the case. Of all the out of town relatives, I am the only one who has no children, a flexible work schedule, and extra income, so I was chosen to go spend a week and a half there and help my grandparents find better care options. So off I went. I hadn't been to my grandparents' house in about a decade, and I was shocked at what I saw. My grandmother hasn't been able to navigate stairs for a couple years, so she moved into what used to be the dining room and my grandfather only goes upstairs to sleep now so he can keep her company. His bedroom is still the way I remembered it, but there are four other bedrooms on the upper floor and Jordan had taken over all of them. Not like "he has stuff in all the rooms," I mean he turned all four rooms into actual goon lairs, to the point where you couldn't see the floor in any of them because they were completely covered in paper, garbage, dirty dishes, CDs, whatever. Despite the fact that two of the rooms had goddamn beds in them already, he had a cot mattress he'd been dragging from room to room to sleep on, a different room every night and sometimes multiple rooms in one night. To my eternal shame, I did not think to take pictures until the rooms had already been whipped into a manageable shape, but the Super Goon Lair was only the beginning of my troubles with Jordan. Because I was going to be sleeping downstairs with my grandmother so that my poor grandfather could get some loving rest, I let Jordan stay in his filth that first night, and he deigned to leave his inner sanctum and go downstairs to say hello to me. This was Special, as I had been assured that Jordan only left the upstairs in the dead of night to eat and that was it. He asked how I was and if I had come very far, refusing to meet my eyes the entire time, but after a few minutes he got a bit more animated and started telling me about his Magnum Opus, the reason why he couldn't be bothered to come help his own grandmother who raised him. You see, Jordan is writing a screenplay. Not just any screenplay, but a screenplay that I'm pretty sure would be the target of an intellectual property theft lawsuit from Chuck Palahniuk if through some twisted miracle it ever went into production. I listened to him rhapsodize about it for a good twenty minutes while I furtively played with my phone, until he said the words that made me snap to loving attention: "And you know what, CrotchDropJeans? The more I work on this, the more real it becomes. I don't mean that they feel more real to me, I mean that they actually become real people." And in that moment, I understood why my parents had moved us far away from that side of the family. More tales about Jordan: Writing and Selling Your Screenplay What Came Out of the Closet and Other Tales of Filth How Jordan Get Money? How is Income Formed? My Little Jordan: Friendship is Magic The Genesis of Jordan Jordan Hates the Great Wall and Other Sociopolitical Observations Grandson of the Year And a bonus tale, starring my grandmother: We Don't Eat Food From Republican Hands
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Apr 13, 2015 22:52
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We got a fresh crazy!  The first thing I want to ask, is probably the most complicated... how did you confront him and clean poo poo up?
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Apr 13, 2015 23:01
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^ He is docile from many years of non-interaction so it was easy. He whined a lot but I think this might have been literally the first time he was ever yelled at so he didn't fight me on it. The next morning I went upstairs and told him that I was cleaning the downstairs so he needed to clean the upstairs, now. I had to go back up and tell him to get back to work about 30 times, and it wasn't done nearly as quickly or effectively as I'd have done it, but it did sort of get done. Typing up Story #1 now!
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Apr 13, 2015 23:04
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You guys don't have to list all the possible options, just tell all the stories in order and we will read the poo poo out of it all.
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Apr 13, 2015 23:16
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^ I figured, it's just so I can keep track of what I've told and what I plan to tell 
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Apr 13, 2015 23:20
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Writing and Selling Your Screenplay I wish I could give you a blow-by-blow of the screenplay's content. But here's the thing about Jordan: due to spending almost his entire life living with my grandparents (who are maybe two rungs above shut-ins) and skipping pretty much every formative adult experience, Jordan is unable to effectively communicate IRL. His speech meanders and trails off, he never looks at you, and he often stumbles over words and speaks in a flat monotone. He is very difficult to understand. I vaguely remember him going to speech class as a child, but I have no idea if this is the same thing just untreated or if he just gets so little interaction that he can't really talk to people. As for just accessing a copy, he wouldn't let me read it and he only keeps it in a paper copy and lord knows where that thing is stashed. After cleaning out the closets in his rooms I was terrified to snoop anywhere. He told me enough about the screenplay for me to get a good handle on his favorite movies and books, but because his speech is so....weird I never got a coherent plotline. From what I can tell, it's about a guy who is not unlike the dude from Fight Club who undergoes a violent conversion to a belief that the modern world as we live it today is a total sham and only major upheaval and revolution can save humanity. This man's name is Kyle. Kyle bears striking similarities to Jordan except he has the power of going outside and maintaining employment. Anyways, as the screenplay goes on, Kyle apparently becomes more and more present in the corporeal realm. Jordan is pretty stoked about this, even though I'm pretty sure the dudes from Fight Club and V For Vendetta wouldn't want to hang out with Jordan. Kyle's gonna solve all of Jordan's problems, like the one where Grandma keeps asking him to refill her glass of water. Kyle's realness will be finally and permanently manifested once the screenplay is finished and purchased by a major motion picture studio. Exactly how he will become real and why an anti-corporate character's existence is tied to his rights being purchased by a major studio is unclear, but Jordan is working towards getting done! He has a book about screenplays that is helping him out. He carries this book everywhere--along with the cot mattress, it makes the four-room circuit with him daily. Unfortunately, Jordan has severe, legitimate ADHD and often forgets the book, forcing him to panic and scramble around the house looking for it. One time he happened to leave it in the bathroom while I was in there taking a shower and getting dressed, and he kept pounding on the door asking for it. I told him to gently caress off, I'd be out in five minutes, and used some of that time to quickly flip through the book. One of the pages had a transcribed conversation with Kyle scrawled across it where Kyle had the exact same handwriting as Jordan but in italics. I only saw it for a minute so I don't have it by heart or anything, but it was basically Jordan asking Kyle for advice about how to write about Kyle's character. Kyle said that he would go out the door and immediately commandeer the nearest car and drive to the city. Then Jordan promised Kyle that he'd write in any car Kyle wanted. Kyle's response, if any, went unrecorded. Anyways, this screenplay, on account of being his life's work and also having the existence of soon-to-be-real people dependent on it, is extremely important. I was there for ten days, and every day I went with my grandparents to their daily lunch outing and/or accompanied them to a doctor's appointment. Every night a neighbor, friend, or relative would stop in to say hello and check up on them (but of course not do anything substantial, in fact they often ate the food I prepared and then left the dishes out for me to clean up). In all that time I never left the house with Jordan, and he never came downstairs except in the dead of night. This is because of the screenplay--it's extremely important that he get that done! I'll go more into his household contributions or lack thereof in the Grandson of the Year story, but when I left to go to the airport he refused to stay downstairs with my grandmother for the hour it would take my grandfather to drop me off at the airport, because he needed to write in his screenplay and he only feels comfortable writing upstairs. Again, my grandmother has Alzheimer's. She also has poor mobility and has fallen often, plus she has diabetes and twice while I was there needed to be given a shot or a snack to bring her back during a blood sugar episode. She can't be left alone. Oh yeah, the title of the screenplay has five words and he consistently misspells two of them. One of the persistent themes of the screenplay is the Kyle-Jordan character's intellectual superiority over all over humans.
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Apr 13, 2015 23:25
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Baronjutter posted:You guys don't have to list all the possible options, just tell all the stories in order and we will read the poo poo out of it all. I kinda like the bullet point lists of hosed Up Stuff To Come. It's like arriving at a buffet table covered in awesome food and knowing it's all gonna taste so good even if it is cakes and pies and canapes and poo poo made of other peoples' suffering, psychoses and neuroses. Anyway, and yes we will read the poo poo out of it.
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Apr 13, 2015 23:27
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I know it suck immensely, but you're a great person for going out to help your grandparents. Thank gently caress Jordan isn't cruel enough to do much beyond mooch. At least he isn't stealing money [I hope]. What the hell were in Jordan's four rooms? Beds? Dressers? What was in there before? And why is it always gritty real life Fight Club-esque novels?
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Apr 13, 2015 23:44
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Wedemeyer posted:I know it suck immensely, but you're a great person for going out to help your grandparents. Thank gently caress Jordan isn't cruel enough to do much beyond mooch. At least he isn't stealing money [I hope]. Aw thank you! It was tough, but there were some good times and it was good to help them out, even if I didn't get to accomplish a whole bunch. Funny you should mention stealing! We'll get to that later. quote:What the hell were in Jordan's four rooms? Beds? Dressers? What was in there before? And why is it always gritty real life Fight Club-esque novels? Originally the rooms were bedrooms for my grandparents' three children, plus a guest room. When I was a child, they were a guest room, Jordan's room, a computer room, and general miscellaneous storage room (AKA magical hide and seek headquarters). My grandparents aren't hoarders, but they're definitely pack rats, and all the rooms got to be a bit on the cluttery side as I got older. None of them would have batted an eyelash in the Goon Lairs thread the last time I was there, but they weren't minimalist by any stretch. Jordan's room (the original) still has Jordan's racecar bed and toys, only now they are strewn about and broken (well, when I got there. Now they're at least in a coherent stack.). The guest room had the original furniture, but it was all overturned for some reason. The computer room still had a functioning ancient desktop that somehow got wifi, but when I got there the wraparound desk was mostly covered in Jordan's junk, and the contents of the bookshelf had been overturned. My grandparents gave a lot of the furniture in the storage room to my aunt a few years back, so that room was basically a garbage nest for Jordan to live in, denuded of furniture except when he dragged his little mattress in. Now that I think about it, I bet that mattress was from the racecar bed and not from a cot like I thought. It's always Fight Club ripoffs because they provide a fantasy world that allows sheltered middle-class white male nerds to fantasize that they have a purpose in life that doesn't involve coming to terms with how much they've failed by the standards of our society.
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Apr 14, 2015 00:02
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CrotchDropJeans posted:It's always Fight Club ripoffs because they provide a fantasy world that allows sheltered middle-class white male nerds to fantasize that they have a purpose in life that doesn't involve coming to terms with how much they've failed by the standards of our society. Bingo. Society has failed them, you see! 
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Apr 14, 2015 04:09
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CrotchDropJeans posted:. I find this interesting because one of the points of Fight club was that the people who couldn't come to terms with how much they've failed by the standards of our society were made susceptible by that experience to being manipulated by a crazy sociopathic cult leader and their "purpose" was essentially meaningless and destructive. It's not like this is a subtle point, either; the pointlessness of it kills several characters in the book. The decision of the protagonist to shoot himself is to escape this cycle of destruction. To aspire to bring your life meaning by emulating fight club requires you to take the complete opposite conclusion than the author intended. It's supposed to be a cautionary tale...
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Apr 14, 2015 05:27
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^ Yeah that always bugs me about Fight Club guys. But it's not unusual with media-obsessive internet shut-in types. There was a thread somewhere, I think in PYF, that pointed out that the phenomenon of girls being obsessed with the movie Labyrinth were totally missing the explicit point of it, which is not to get unhealthily invested in a fantasy world.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:29
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Oh I get the psychological attractiveness of it and i can understand how powerless people would be attracted to the shallow, anti consumerist philosophies. It's just interesting to me because the book explicitly makes fun of the type of person who would be sucked in by that sort of sentiment and yet those exact people seem to be among the book/film's biggest fans. It's a level of satire you don't see reached very often... After the film was released there were stories of real life fight clubs actually being formed. Without a hint of irony
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Apr 14, 2015 05:38
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Serrath posted:I find this interesting because one of the points of Fight club was that the people who couldn't come to terms with how much they've failed by the standards of our society were made susceptible by that experience to being manipulated by a crazy sociopathic cult leader and their "purpose" was essentially meaningless and destructive. I think this is one of the main problems with the film vs the book. The movie ends with Durden's plan succeeding and wiping out all the world's debt, the protagonist getting back together Marla, his secret army effectively ruling the world, etc. while the book ends with the protagonist's bombs loving up (because he sucks at making homemade explosives, in a callback to an earlier chapter where he compares using kitty litter, orange juice, Styrofoam, etc.) failing miserably in his suicide attempt, permanently disfiguring himself (he fully blows out one of his cheeks and damages his jaw and teeth, not the light napkin with full speech from the film); and ends up in a mental institution where he's occasionally reminded by a porter or attendant that Project Mayhem is still out there waiting for him to return and lead them, which horrifies him. No question that the movie is the much better told version of the story, but the message it leaves you with is pretty much the opposite of the book's.
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Apr 14, 2015 05:40
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Toph Bei Fong posted:
I took a different interpretation of the ending; I saw the narrator shooting himself as a final repudiation of Taylor's plan. Taylor's plan ultimately didn't work because he wanted, all along, for the narrator to hit bottom and become the same as him and the narrator rejected that violently. Which is the same as the book. Him surviving doesn't change anything, he still told taylor to listen to him before shooting himself which was his answer to Taylor's philosophies. This isn't my view, though, the author of the book and movie have talked at length about their "intent" with the scenes Anyway I don't want to hijack this thread with a discussion about a 20 year old book/movie :p surely we can agree that both stories weren't the ringing endorsement of the anti materialism, middle class rage that maybe some of its fans pretend it is
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Apr 14, 2015 05:47
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I never thought about it but holy poo poo back in the nerd days I knew a lot of dudes obsessed with fight club and girls obsessed with labyrinth. They were generally the sort of people that would fit well into the stories in this thread, but I was always repulsed by such people so I never got to know them well enough to learn their tales 
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Apr 14, 2015 05:59
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VideoTapir posted:Do you feel you benefited in any way from this upbringing that you wouldn't have if you'd been going to school and your parents had been less controlling? (Or if they'd been entirely non-religious?) I did get a very decent grounding on theological reasoning I suppose. Which ended up being fascinating when I reinspected it through the lens of "looking at religion as social phenomenon" instead of "grounding logic I should judge everything by". I got a good math education and I didn't pick up any bad or addictive habits until I had access to them. I also did try to take the best out of that moral framework. That is, treat others like you would like to be treated compared to the other bits of the church like "gays can't get married" and "bad things happen to bad people". I also have the perspective of having to learn how to talk to people and form relationships at a point when I was already an adult and had no experience of what anything healthy in that respect was. I suppose this is somewhat backhanded of a benefit because it sucks putting yourself out there in weird situations and getting awkward often enough until it doesn't matter anymore. Other than that, I can't say that I benefited in a way that offsets the crazy and nasty at all. If I can find examples of my crazy textbooks I'll post them.  Grognan fucked around with this message at 06:08 on Apr 14, 2015 |
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Apr 14, 2015 06:05
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What Came Out of the Closet and Other Tales of Filth By the afternoon of the third day, Jordan had gotten his rooms into a passable state, which was fine with me. All I really wanted was for the space not to be a fire hazard or attract bugs. While I was there, one of my goals was to make a decent dent in clearing out some of the clutter, since my grandparents were overwhelmed at the prospect of having to move one or both of them into a facility as it was. So with their permission I set to work clearing closets, shelves, and cupboards of anything that looked like it hadn't been used in years and held no financial or sentimental value. Because my grandparents habitually used the bedroom closets as jammed-to-the-brim storage spaces long before Jordan's takeover, I'd told him that I'd handle those if he cleaned the floor and living areas of his rooms, as long as he got any of his poo poo that might be in there out beforehand. He assured me that this had happened, and upon a cursory inspection it looked like he was telling the truth. The first three rooms's closets went by quickly with no traumas of any kind, hurrah! I found all kinds of cool things that made me feel really sentimental about my childhood, and also I am one of those people who really love organizing things so I was genuinely enjoying it despite the grimness of the task in general. The last bedroom was the one that had been Jordan's dedicated bedroom in the days when he was more sane and not living a lifestyle akin to the Redditor version of the crazy attic wife from Jane Eyre. It had two closets for some reason, and ever since I could remember one had been filled with luggage, the other with my grandmother's rejected purses, hats, and winter accessories. Jordan had never kept his things in there, he'd always had dressers and trunks for his stuff before he decided to place them all over the floor and mix them liberally with garbage. I went through the purse closet and got everything all nicely sorted. No problems there. I started in on the luggage closet and that one went very nicely too for about fifteen minutes. About halfway through the luggage pile I found a pretty decent vintage leather duffel bag. "How nice,"I thought. "I wonder if Grandma and Grandpa would be okay with me having this, it looks like it hasn't been used in decades." Since pretty much all the bags had had stuff inside them, usually old travel packs or smaller bags, I pulled this one out to empty it and check it for damage before asking if I could take it home. I almost vomited. I definitely dry-heaved. Why? Piss bottles. The bag was full of piss bottles, at least seven or eight of them, poor innocent water bottles defiled, with sediment at the bottom of all of them. My first instinct was to shriek in horror, storm into the other room, and scream at Jordan until every vein in my head popped and he was reduced to a quivering broken mess who still somehow had the capacity to dispose of the bottles and disinfect the entire room. But I couldn't do that. I couldn't raise a huge ruckus. My grandmother has very severe anxiety and any kind of loud yelling from upstairs would send her into hysterics, and even if I let them know right away that it was just ("JUST") piss bottles wouldn't do either, since both my grandparents have that old person thing going on where they fixate on stuff obsessively for days on end. If I thought it would galvanize them into tossing Jordan out I'd have screamed like a banshee and shown them the bottles with my own hands, but I know perfectly well that it won't so I couldn't just upset my grandparents over something that was ultimately not going to hurt them if I kept quiet about it. But still, piss bottles! I washed my hands thoroughly, then went around knocking on the three remaining doors til I found the one he was "working" in. "Jordan," I hissed, "come in here right loving now." "I'm working, CrotchDropJeans! Maybe later?" "No, now!" I dragged him into the room and showed him the bag of piss bottles. "What the loving everliving christing gently caress is this poo poo?!" He tried to argue that they weren't his, but he'd been occupying that room for a good twenty years, continuously. Who the gently caress else would come into his room, piss in multiple water bottles over a period of a few weeks at least, and stow them securely in the closet?! Then he tried to tell me that they were really old, which I actually did believe since they were buried really far down, had....signs of age, and most people, I daresay even most piss-bottlers, would remove the evidence if they remembered it was there if someone told them they were going through the closet and to get all their poo poo out of it. I had to stand over him and make sure that he not only bagged the bottles and their receptacle, but actually took it out to the outside garbage and then disinfected the area. And I told him that I was going to leave the room for fifteen minutes, and that when I came back I expected any further personal effects to be removed from the closet so I could finish clearing it out. I finished the closet wearing rubber gloves and what, if anything, further he may or may not have removed from it remains a mystery. Vignettes of Filth - Around day three or four I noticed that I'd already replaced the toilet paper roll in the hall bathroom a few times, which is odd because my grandparents both exclusively used other bathrooms and this one was only being used by me and Jordan (side note, I was surprised at how not-a-biohazard it was when I showed up--maybe on the level of an average college kid, kinda dirty but nothing shocking). Why was so much toilet paper being used? I hadn't noticed any signs of anyone being sick or anything. Then suddenly my mind flashed back to the literal mountain of crumpled toilet paper surrounding the computer and I wanted to die. - I asked Jordan to please take out the kitchen garbage and an hour later I found it stashed behind an easy chair in the parlor, wtf - One morning I strolled into the kitchen to make a nice breakfast for my grandparents and I discovered that the counters, floors, sink faucet, and several plates on the counter were coated in what I can only describe as a substance resembling a mixture of mud and cheese. Apparently Jordan had been feasting on what he called a "gravy quesadilla" in the wee hours of the night.
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Apr 14, 2015 06:10
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Grognan posted:If I can find examples of my crazy textbooks I'll post them. What subject is that? Social studies? Also, are you familiar with this thread? http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3659026&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1 Did you ever run across this strain of insanity?
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Apr 14, 2015 06:19
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Briefly returning to people-don't-understand-movies-chat: White supremacists loving love American History X.
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Apr 14, 2015 08:13
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CrotchDropJeans posted:Then Jordan promised Kyle that he'd write in any car Kyle wanted. Kyle's response, if any, went unrecorded. I get the feeling this kid has never driven a car, which makes me want to read his lovingly detailed rendition of Kyle driving all the more. However, it might end in calamity when he slams on the brakes, causing a pissbottle stashed under the drivers seat to roll out and wedge itself behind the pedals. He doesn't know how it got there, though; he'd just been saving it for a friend.
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Apr 14, 2015 10:08
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| # ? Jun 1, 2024 00:43 |
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CrotchDropJeans posted:Piss bottles. The bag was full of piss bottles, at least seven or eight of them, poor innocent water bottles defiled, with sediment at the bottom of all of them. 
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Apr 14, 2015 14:54
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