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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I'm not sure what this says about me, but after a years-long period of intermittent lurking, I finally registered an SA forum account just to post on this thread. Reading about Denise reminded me of a crazy friend I had in school, and in the spirit of crazy-middle-school-friend sympathy, I'd like to share a bit of her story.

When I was 13, my family moved across the continent, and I started eighth grade at a new school where nearly all of my fellow students had been in school together since kindergarten. I was a total outsider, and being awkward and nerdy at the best of times, I had a pretty hard time making friends. I used after-school clubs to try and fill the void my social life had become, and it was at one of those clubs that I met the girl I'll call Calliope.

Even to my confused, lonely 14-year-old self, Calliope was a pretty weird kid. She was obsessed with Disney's Hercules and had written fanfic about it, which she showed off to me pretty proudly. (In retrospect, the stuff she'd written was very typical adolescent-girl wish-fulfillment, but at the time it seemed mesmerizingly weird to me.) She claimed to be a "pagan Lutheran" and was clearly in love with attention, but she was nice to me, and we shared some nerdy interests -- particularly Lord of the Rings, which in the pre-movie era felt like the talisman of a magical secret society. (Yes, I was a giant LotR nerd.) We settled into some basic dynamics fairly quickly; she was the magical, special, crazy heroine and I was the sensible but boring sidekick. This was obviously not healthy, but I was young and stupid and lonely, so Calliope became my best friend.

Once we got to high school, the weirdness deepened, and the spiritual weirdness began in earnest. Calliope wasn't precisely a soulbonder (although I believe she identifies as an elven otherkin now), and thankfully she never had an astral romantic life, but every semester or so she'd have some weird new belief system. Unfortunately, I'd been skeptical enough that she pinpointed me as The Cynical Nonbeliever, and I suspect I was kept out of the loop of a lot of her craziness as a result, but there were still some humdingers. There were a few weeks when she thought The Matrix was true, and there was some odd thing at the end of sophomore year where she swore that she'd sold her soul to the Vestal Virgins for 4000 years, but the big one was the year-or-two-long stretch where she claimed at she and two girls I didn't know were the triumvirate "soul-daughters" of the goddess Kali and were active on astral plane, where Calliope was a "guardian dragon." This set of mythology got expanded on quite a bit, and since we weren't really on great terms anymore by that point, it was also used as the basis of some high-school-girl sniping.

The real problem with Calliope, in the end, wasn't that she was crazy but that she was desperate for attention and, ultimately, something of a malignant narcissist. She was mildly attractive, thinner than most of us in our little nerd group, and able to start dating early in high school, and she made sure that we all knew just how special and beautiful she was. I often ended up taking the brunt of it, probably because I was too "mundane," and Calliope all but told me I would die alone. As time went on and I drifted away from the nerd social scene, Calliope eventually came to control it, pretty transparently because she loved being the big charismatic fish in a small awkward pond. (Never mind that she didn't really have any friends or do anything socially outside of the nerd-hive -- she was still the magical elven princess, and that's what matters.) The toxicity was obvious after a while, and I pretty much severed ties with her after high school, but in retrospect it all screwed me up pretty badly.

There are a lot of Calliope stories I should tell, so I may as well throw out a few for consideration:

Calliope's Epic Adolescent Fanfiction
Roleplaying With Calliope: So Many Special Elven Snowflakes
The Soul-Daughters of the Goddess Kali: 99.8% Actual-Hinduism-Free
Calliope Internet-Dates A Cannibalism Fetishist (And It's Mostly My Fault)
Calliope Tells Me About My Past Lives
Why In God's Name Is There An Elf In First-Period Calculus?
Calliope vs. College (In Which Antivehicular Reaches Her Breaking Point)

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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I have to admit, kawaiiest, I was reading that story and going "okay, so some dude gets his drunk on and does something regrettable, big surprise," and then I hit:

the kawaiiest posted:

According to the guy, otaku-san was not embarrassed at all and spent the whole trip talking about how pissed he was that I "broke the mood".

"Broke the mood?" Really? I can only picture him lighting a ring of scented candles, putting a mix CD of moe-anime EDs on the ol' hi-fi, and sprinkling rose petals on the floor before whispering to the pillow about how beautiful it is and how this is their night, baby, their special night.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Sir Prancelot posted:

Welp, I realize it's pages behind but there's the answer I've been trying to dig up for a week. <:mad:> Thank you for providing this vital information so I can start us a delicious new thread with plenty of anti-rear end in a top hat stipulations and a greater emphasis on the books themselves.
I realize this is off-topic for this thread, but it's good to hear there's a new Bibeau thread coming. I read the whole saga during my lurking days and have a hunger for discussing the amazing world of Felsic Current.

On a vaguely-related subject, is there a thread policy on posting, for lack of a better phrase, primary source material? If/when I post more Calliope material, I have some written stuff of hers that it might be better to quote from than paraphrase, and I think some judicious name-replacing should make it immune to Internet detective work. If nothing else, I'd really like to share her completely batshit, bizarrely cannibalism-focused attempt at a fantasy RP setting and the silver-blooded elven slave princess from it she inflicted on a game I was in.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Fascinator posted:

Yeah, I don't think there's anything really horrible about it, but I think it's extremely strange to maintain an incredibly high level of interest in a particular aspect of entertainment for so long. I mean, I wouldn't bat an eye if I ran into my junior-year chemistry partner and found out he still liked to watch wrestling on the weekends, but I'd be extremely weirded out if he still wore shirts with the Rock on them every day and never talked about anything else. There's something about that level of interest in an aspect of mass media that is incredibly off-putting and inappropriate in an adult.
To be fair, in the case OrangeKing mentions, it might just be a case of selective Facebook posting -- not to get too devil's-advocate-y, but I can see a situation where she's comfortable posting cosplay photos but considers photos from her everyday life too personal to post publicly. (Or maybe her everyday life just isn't photographically documented.) If her Facebook feed is mostly normal stuff, I'd be inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, but if it's all about her every-weekend con schedule and her costuming, that kind of sets off warning bells.

Also, holy crap, Denise's Magical CD Player is amazing. On one hand, it's another sad example of her using her fantasy life to compensate for an unsatisfying reality, but on the other it's really compellingly odd. (Besides, like uglynoodles said, replacing a portable CD player wasn't exactly outside of her power.)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Goddammit, I had almost managed to purge the part of my brain that remembers Sabrina Online! Goddammit!

... and now another part of my brain chooses to remind me that I know a dude who owned a skunk-themed fursuit. Welp, guess it's time to weep silently for my generation.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Rabbi Vole posted:

If I'm not mistaken, she's now in the TF2 fandom and also drawing joke art of somebody's fursona being raped because said person had the audacity to post about being raped one time.
I'm sorry, I can't even process the rape-shaming because I'm picturing the noseless pregnant Heavy Weapons Nagas. oh god oh man oh god

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Vaginal Reward posted:

They were a large group of girls, who later rented their own house and were all in pseudo-lesbian sadomasochist relationships with eachother while also going to cosplay conventions as gay male yaoi characters? Those were some interesting years.
This sort of behavior seems to be really common, along with other forms of what I call "fandom lesbianism," and I've always wondered why. (For the record, by "fandom lesbianism," I mean pseudo-lesbian hookups between women who would never otherwise have had any romantic or sexual interest in other women. I'm sure fandom lets actual lesbian/bi women hook up with each other, too, and more power to them.)

My suspicion has always been that it's a combination of the hugely female-dominated fandom environment and the sexual and emotional intensity of the activities in which that fringe of fandom engages. If you're adolescent or otherwise inexperienced, the sheer thrill of watching/reading/writing/roleplaying sexually explicit wish-fulfillment material is going to stir something up in you, and it's only natural that those feelings get deflected onto the people you're around -- namely, your also-adolescent-or-inexperienced female fandom friends. (Hell, even Denise seems to have done this a bit with the "let's make out while you channel my astral husband" stuff, although that didn't really go anywhere.) Combine that with the homosexual themes of a lot of fandom stuff and the general societal encouragement of female/female sexual experimentation, and the hookups (and their later terrible denouements) are inevitable.

It strikes me that a lot of the human-trainwreck stories in this thread are motivated on some level by the very natural urge in lonely adolescents to just have somebody to call a friend or to love them. If you're lonely enough and/or have some self-esteem issues, the bar for these friends or partners can be set very low, so crazies like Denise and most of the rest of the thread can get away with a lot of toxicity before the relationship reaches its breaking point. I can speak from experience here; I hung out with Calliope, who spent a lot of high school kicking me around when she even remembered I existed, and I was involved in an awful long-distance relationship for years just because the guy involved was the first person to show romantic interest in me. When you're awkward and nerdy and crave friendship (or romance, or just plain ol' getting laid), you'll take whoever's there, even if they're dreadful.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Snapdragon750 posted:

She felt guilty because she ENJOYED it. She told me that in order to get through it, she just imagined it was Piccolo so she totally liked it and now felt really bad about it.

I've never been sexually assaulted, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm guessing this illustrates a really bad understanding of what it feels like to be raped.
Not to derail the thread, and I can't speak from personal experience, but my understanding is that this is closer to reality than one might think. Some people do experience sexual arousal and pleasure during rape, purely as an involuntary physical reaction, and obviously this can lead to guilt -- particularly given how quickly a lot of people will assume that a physical reaction of that sort means it's not rape and the victim must have really wanted it.

That said, there's a huge difference between the experiences of actual rape victims and the hallucinatory bizarreness of someone's account of being astrally raped by an imaginary guy named "Bugsby" trying to keep her anime-character astral husband for running for astral mayor. That weird soldier-rape story pretty much verifies that Summer wasn't afraid to play the rape card to win even the most trivial argument.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Oh, awesome, we're talking about fanfic now? I've been tempted to post this for a few days, but I've been looking for and not finding the primary documents in question, so I may as well give this a shot.

Calliope's Hercules Fanfiction

Calliope's obsession with Disney's Hercules was the first sign to me that my brand new best friend was trouble. She talked about, quoted, and sang song snippets from it endlessly, and when I expressed my irritation, I imagine her next plan of action became obvious... one day, when I was at her house, she forced me to sit down and watch it.

I was not amused. I had some background in the actual myths, as well as watching the Kevin Sorbo TV show (yeah, I know, but I was a pre-teen at the time), and that reinforced to me that the major theme of the Hercules myth was the suffering brought down upon him as the bastard child of Zeus, as well as by his own short-sightedness and brutality. I was also, to be fair, a pedantic little poo poo. The Disney movie lost me as soon as it was established that Hercules was Zeus and Hera's legitimate son who fell off Olympus somehow, and from there I started making a mental list of everything it got wrong. Calliope was not pleased; I'm sure she expected, or at least hoped, that I'd squee over it too.

My reaction to the movie probably planted the seed of Calliope's later conviction that I was a squee-harshing mundane, but we remained friends, and soon she shared her Disney's Hercules fanfiction with me. There were three stories that formed some sort of Epic Trilogy, and unfortunately, my memories of them are a little hazy now. My copies of the first two are on old Zip discs (yeeeeah '90's represent) for which I don't have a drive at the moment, and I don't think I ever had a copy of the third; the first one is still online, since I MiSTed it (yes, I was a dumb adolescent), so I'll be skimming it for details, but the second and third will be a lot more vague. Apologies.

"Fatal Destiny: Flavia's Tale": "Flavia's Tale" was, in true pre-adolescent fashion, the story of a magical new character with whom Hercules falls in love. (I've changed her name because, well, it's still on the Internet, and I'd rather my awful MiSTing not be detective'd up.) It starts when Hercules meets "Flavia," a beautiful beggar/thief girl who makes her meager living by playing her flute, which of course she's amazing at. Hercules sees the beauty lurking beneath the dirty facade and brings her back to the villa, where it turns out that she was also a childhood friend of his in-movie love interest Megara, until DRAMATIC TRAGEDY broke them apart: Megara's boyfriend, whom she sold her soul to save (this happened in the movie), left her... for Flavia! Oh noes!

Oh, and also Flavia has psychic powers and is the long-lost daughter of Aeneas and a muse. Go figure?

Anyway, rear end in a top hat Ex somehow reenters the picture and kidnaps Flavia and Megara. Hercules rushes to the rescue, only to find Flavia all dolled up in gold and jewelry and crap, along with one of those obligatory HAR HAR HAR YOU CAN ONLY SAVE ONE situations where the two women are suspended above pit traps. Flavia's psychic powers kick in and tell her that her "pit trap" is actually safe, so she mouths SAVE MEG until Hercules gets the picture, and Flavia promptly falls onto a pile of pillows that lead into a slimy sewer tunnel, which somehow leads her back to the scene of much villainous gloating. Flavia attacks rear end in a top hat Ex, who promptly takes Megara hostage, so to free her Flavia offers to "sell [him her] body." He accepts, but since she's covered in toxic sewer slime, she knows he's poisoning him to death! (Frankly, anyone who sees a woman covered in toxic sewer slime and immediately starts making out deserves what they get.) Hercules tries to defend Flavia's honor by pulling rear end in a top hat Ex away from her, but somehow the force of this sends her flying into a wall so hard she breaks everything. (?) There's an elaborate, loving description of all her broken bones and spitting blood and stuff, to the point that it disturbs me even now re-reading it.

Hercules and Megara race to get her help, but inevitably she's Too Far Gone; cue a hyper-melodramatic, lengthy death scene in which all the Gods of Olympus stand by being sad but not actually doing poo poo, including Flavia's mother, who finally gets off her rear end and raises the dead Flavia as a ghost. Flavia proceeds to say even more goodbyes, telling them to keep going with their lives, and tells Hercules and Megara that they'll have a daughter who'll change Greece forever, or something? And then her ghost leaves, and then it turns out her body has been changed into an immaculate marble statue of her pre-exploded self in Megara's garden forever. At this point, Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

Sadly, this endless/weird/gory death scene is not the part of "Flavia's Tale" that made me most uncomfortable as a kid. That would be reserved for the "apple tree scene," in which at one point at Hercules's villa, Flavia climbs an apple tree, falls off, and is somehow caught by her rapidly-tearing clothes such that she ends up in a suspension bondage situation. Calliope bragged about the raw sexiness of the apple tree scene for a while into high school, and, uh, yeah, I dunno.

Blah blah, end of the story, now that the alternate love interest is out of the way Hercules proposes to Megara, which leads to...

"A Fresh Face, A New Hope," the story of Hercules and Megara's daughter "Ryla Andressa" (not changin' that one, since Google doesn't deliver anything relevant, and it's amazing). Unfortunately, this was the blandest of the Calliope Trilogy, and I remember very little about it beyond a few salient points:

1) Megara is told of her pregnancy by some minor Olympian god, because either Ryla Andressa is Jesus or women in ancient Greece couldn't tell when their periods were late;
2) Baby Ryla Andressa is given a black unicorn named "Shadowshine" by Zeus;
3) Ryla Andressa has some kind of generic heroic arc and falls in True Love with some generic dude, eventually getting married at 18 because that's what girls do, even when they're super-strong hero types; and
4) There were musical numbers. The entire fic was loaded with musical numbers, most of them being altered versions of songs from the original movie, with possibly a few poorly-metered Calliope originals in there.

In general, "AFFANH" was a gender-swapped future-kid version of the original Disney's Hercules film, which is probably why I remember so little of it. The other Calliope stories at least had the good sense to be kinda crazy.

Finally, there's the magnum opus, the one I cry bitter tears over not still possessing in some form:

Silver Mountain.

Silver Mountain began with Ryla Andressa having a baby, a girl (naturally) named "Sierra." (Yes, really.) Sierra is born in Olympus, but as the result of a bad babysitter, she falls to Earth and is raised by sirens in Bimini. (Yes, really.) The sirens name her "Saria," which is said to mean "silver," so there we go with the title. There is a Great Quest to find her again, and they finally do when she's in her late teens (the magic time for girls to get married!), and she's welcomed to Olympus in style. Zeus offers to grant her godhood with any deific domain she likes, and she chooses... wait for it... "the supernatural," which somehow grants her full domain over all the gods. (What?) She ascends to the throne of Olympus, and things start getting really fuckballs crazy.

First of all, it turns out that Sierra/Saria is evil! And also slutty! She marries Some Generic Dude, but later kills him so she can slut around, and at some point in this equation, she has triplets: one whose name I forget, "Royalla," and "Cinnimue," who is the lone good one. Cinnimue sees her mother's reign of terror and sluttiness and decides that something must be done, so she embarks on an epic quest that, sadly, I remember very poorly. I do remember that it involves going back in time to Hercules's adolescence and somehow changing history such that Hercules... doesn't have a slutty granddaughter, I guess? You'd think just keeping her from being raised by sirens would be enough. (I'm not sure that Calliope actually drew the connection between "evil slut queen" and "raised by sirens," to be fair to her awfulness.) Also, Flavia comes back! Thanks to time travel! And, I believe, is somehow saved to marry some other dude or something! Sadly, I forget how this all ends, but I'm sure it ended in sluttiness being conquered and extremely white-bread matrimonial love saving the day.

There are two other factoids I remember about "Silver Mountain," but not well enough to place in context:
1) At one point, Calliope gives an initial description of a female character using her bust/waist/hip measurements, complete with cup size. This weirded me out a lot when I read it, and the thought of a 12- or 13-year-old girl writing it still kinda weirds me out.
2) During one of the two epic quests, Ryla Andressa is captured by bandits, who "rape her brutally." And... that's the whole rape scene. I'm not even sure it's brought up again after she's saved. Yeah, I dunno.

A lot of the stuff in Calliope's fanfiction strikes me as pretty standard adolescent fare (Mary Sue love interests, future children, a black unicorn named "Shadowshine" for God's sake) but in retrospect, it foreshadowed a lot of later problems. Calliope had this weird tension between uncomfortable sexual precocity and a very cookie-cutter view of Happily Ever After, and the timeframe of her HEA -- "married to your One True Love at eighteen, have a kid by 20 or 22, after that you're old" -- weirded me out even as a 14-year-old. I suspect it was a product of her home life; her parents were very strict and traditional, with a lot of expectations for her (this is probably worth its own post), and she acted out by writing weird bondage crap while not actually being willing to break away from the mindset entirely. This tension colored a lot of Calliope's later antics, and in retrospect, I should have known even then that things weren't going to end well.

Anyway! As a palate-cleanser after those giant chunks of text, I'll offer you this:

A History of Murry Purry

As eighth grade went on, I started to branch out a little more socially, and soon enough various acquaintances told me just why Calliope wasn't popular: she apparently spent her entire fifth-grade year pretending to be a cat! I never got details, unfortunately, and I wish I had. What is it with this sort of crazy and going through a cat phase?

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Is it bad that my first thought there was "holy poo poo, she's raking in the fandom money -- Bad Dragon stuff is freakin' expensive!"? Clearly I know way too much about the freakish-animal-dildo market.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

hallo spacedog posted:

To be fair pretty much every entry-level Japanese class has someone similar in it. Luckily, if you stick with it, those guys get weeded out by like second year max, in my experience. The upper levels still have unusual people in it, but no one quite so uniquely horrible and socially inept, because I think to get to that point you actually have to finally put in at least a modicum of effort.
This is definitely true. I was a Japanese major in college, and our first-year Japanese classes definitely had a handful of weeaboos in over their heads. To be fair, I'd argue that most if not all people who start the language are doing it because of imported culture, whether that's anime or video games or sushi; the ones who survive are the ones who can keep their weeaboo in their pants and actually do the drat work, without assuming that Japanese is all sugoi kawaii yo~ idiocy. (The fact that it's a difficult language for native English speakers to learn doesn't help. I know our attrition rate in college was huge, and I suspect it's the same everywhere.)

We had some weird dudes in my college Japanese program, but thankfully, nobody was as bad as Brian here. The worst two offenders were a kind of jackass-y dude who would introduce himself as a ninja and once convinced our very sweet, very shy Japanese TA to tie a tie around his head at a department party and, later, a dude who managed to get kicked out of Japan after graduation (argued with his boss, lost his job, promptly lost his work visa and apartment lease, flew home).

What I wonder about is how Brian got away with screwing with his computer and newspapers and crap. Champignon, were your Japanese classes really large? I went to a small school, admittedly, but even in the relatively crowded first-year classes, we only had thirty-some students, and classes were very hands-on. Nobody could have gotten away with sneaking in a magazine, let alone playing freakin' WoW during class.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Champignon posted:

I suspect the reason Brian got away with it was through a war of attrition; it was obvious that Brian had been doing this for over a year now before I met him and the teachers were likely sick of even dealing with his bullshit. The uni's disability office might have also sent a memo to all relevant teachers with something along the lines of "kid might act weird, cut him some slack unless it's ruining other students' class-time". The computer thing was cracked down on, lest it was perceived that he was receiving special treatment.

Ah, okay, that makes sense to me -- I can see how, after a certain point, they'd just try and block it out to focus on the non-Marsden-san students. It's amazing to me that he kept this up for years, but I suppose that comes down to the "no self-awareness" issue.

That said...

Champignon posted:

I remember one time Brian snapped back at the teacher because he "needed to hearth back to a town to log out". Never thought I'd hear that in a classroom setting. :stare:

Good God. Did he say this in English, or did he try to stutter it out in Japanese? (I'm not sure whether speaking in English in class was as big a deal in your program as it was in mine, but the sheer gall of saying this in English in the middle of class... yeah.)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

GenericOverusedName posted:

I've seen a few more skintight/detailed furry getups, but they involve a lot of makeup and effort. And face prosthetics and other expensive crap that you'd probably be more likely to see in a very expensive play or film than at some con. It's a lot easier to just order some old sports mascot suit, cut off the label, and go around like that.
The problem with this argument is that most furries get custom-made fursuits (made by other furries), or at worst buy secondhand custom suits (from other furries), and that poo poo is expensive. The real terror of fursuits is how much people are willing to pay for them.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

The discussion of fursuits reminds me of the bizarre LiveJournal kerfuffle in which my fursuiter friend was involved. The guy started doing cosplaying at furry cons instead of just suiting, and somehow this caused some other furry to post an extremely indignant LiveJournal post about how doing Doctor Who cosplay at a furry con somehow makes you history's worst criminal. It blew over quickly, but while it lasted, it was amazing.

The suiter friend in question has also combined fursuiting and cosplay via accessories that can be worn over his suit so that he can be his fursona as a Kamen Rider or whatever. This dude really isn't appropriate for this thread otherwise -- he's pleasant, socially functional, hygienic, and not obsessed with Sai Baba -- but I fundamentally do not understand why you, having dressed up in a mascot suit, decide the mascot suit needs to be in its own costume. Not my scene, I suppose.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Pterodactyl Feet posted:

There are soulbonding astral-boyfriend girls (one of whom got a BJD boyfriend)
I really want to know how this worked.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Horrible Smutbeast posted:

Man, I can understand wanting to be cautious but why do all these crazy girls honestly believe that all men are out to rape them? So weird.

Short version: because, in their heads, being targeted by rapists means they must be attractive and sexually desirable.

Long version: A lot of anime and other nerd-directed material works with the idea that rape is an act of love at best and a crime of passion at worst -- that rapists assault their victims because they're overcome with love and lust and just have to express it, because the victim is so desirable. These girls are usually insanely socially awkward and desperate for any kind of affirmation of their capacity to be lusted after and/or loved, so the theoretical attention of rapists is very positive, and they're willing to imagine it's there.

Alternately, being afraid of rapists is an excellent excuse for having social anxiety problems anyway or not interacting with strangers. Even legitimate anti-rapist safety advice for women generally involves some degree of paranoia, so taking that a step further (if you're already a little detached from reality) makes it totally plausible to do whatever antisocial thing you want, right? She's not playing with dolls in public and avoiding eye contact because she's awkward and has a nigh-autistic focus on her obsessions -- no, she's doing it to keep herself safe! Can't you normies respect that?!

Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 11:04 on Jan 19, 2012

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

PiratePing posted:

When I was 12 I had a classmate who was the only fat girl in school and always had some story to tell about how random guys she hung out with outside of school were madly in love with her. She also lied about her cupsize. She loved the idea of being the first girl in class to get boobs so she paraded around showing her fatroll/moob cleavage, since she didn't have actual breasts yet. Later when puberty hit she would loudly brag about how large they were and how hard it is to find bras, sometimes even going as far as to fake back pain because her boobs were just so, so large. In reality, she had a b cup that was struggling to stick out further than her belly on the best of days.

To be fair, even normal preteen/teenage girls can get a little breast/bra-obsessed. I have this distinct memory from sixth grade of standing around with a few of the girls in my class trying to talk nonchalantly about how we were all wearing bras now and what it was like being bra-wearers and oh my God. This can hit fat girls especially hard, since it was a way in which we were finally ahead of the physical curve for once.

Interestingly, Calliope was the opposite of this -- the average-sized girl in our mostly-fat peer group -- and soon became completely insufferable. She developed a reputation as being awful to go shopping with, because she'd go out of her way to point out all the cute clothes that they had in her size and not yours! Tee-hee! I only saw this sort of thing once, at my 16th birthday party at the mall (yes, I know, we were very suburban), where she was very proud of and loud about the fact that she could still fit into a child-sized pleather skirt at Old Navy. This was obnoxious as gently caress -- and in retrospect, given that she was not quite 15 at that point, it wasn't even terribly impressive.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Yeah, I kind of love Patman. The being-hit-by-cars thing is baffling and sad, but for some reason the charging-into-every-class-dressed-as-Batman thing is endearing to me. It must have gotten really old if you had a class with him, though.

EDIT: Wow, I made the exact same post as the person above me. Oops? Well, the sentiment holds.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

uglynoodles posted:

This is a thing Denise has told me about celebrity or character crushes that have significant others; You are actually are the character's twu wuv, see. Their evil bastard of a SO is just controlling them and if you can break into their mind on the astral plane they will start to search for you sio you can be together forever.
Oh my God, it's insane astral-marriage theory meets terrible shipper-fic theory (only I know the character's true love!!). That's... that's beautiful.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

the kawaiiest posted:

Her :nws: art page :nws: is a pretty good example of how out of touch with reality she seems to be -- the artwork here is actually worse than most of what I saw when I was working at the academy, and she claims to be a concept artist for video games.
Good Lord. Art aside, look at her freakin' Web design! The text colors! The use of anime emoticons in links! Being socialized to the Internet is one thing, but she isn't even good at Internet standards.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Heresiarch posted:

Oh god, no. Most manga artists learn by copying other artists, which is why most manga artists are loving terrible, professional or otherwise.

The other thing that most "manga is a style!!!" fangirls ignore is that manga style is optimized for speed. A lot of the stylistic shortcuts are because manga artists need to produce pages and chapters at an insanely quick rate compared to Western comic art, so the style evolved to be quick and efficient to draw. Someone who's not under those deadline constraints and spends a week on a single awful character portrait has no excuse for using the same shortcuts besides raw laziness or mimicry.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I don't think I've ever seen a post on Gaia that didn't make me want to rail at the KIDS THESE DAYS like a porch-bound old man. It's like a terrible version of that line from Dazed and Confused: I keep getting older, but the kids on Gaia somehow stay the same age, and it's a deeply stupid one.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I like how there's enough room between those eyes to drive an 18-wheeler. Awesome!

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Unbudgingprawn posted:

Rick the Roomate and the Underaged Internet Girlfriend
Man, at least he gave you warning! Given this thread, I half-expected him to whip it out and start jacking, then blame you for waking up at an inopportune time and ~ruining the mood~.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

the kawaiiest posted:

Amazing otaku failure-to-launch capsule summary

That's an impressive collection of failure, but is it wrong that my favorite part is his complaining about there being "too much fish in the food?" Japan is an island nation! Of course they eat butt-tons of seafood! Did he just imagine it being somewhere in a free-floating "Asia" where they'd always have mac'n'cheese available for their special gaijin?

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Oh, man, she even uses the Picasso excuse. Picasso is to bad artists as e. e. cummings is to bad writers: a disciplined artist who mastered the standard forms of his craft before using non-standard forms in a way that actually had merit, thus ensuring that his name would be used as an excuse for the untalented amateur not even trying to master standard forms. Hell, even I know that Picasso could smoke a standard representational drawing, and I'm no artist.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I am desperately curious as to what Parrier is in charge of at the local con. Is he just running a panel, or is he actually expected to organize something?

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I love that Hoshioni's Photobucket account is "otakuabdl." It sums up... well, it sums up everything, really.

Well, maybe that and GRADIENTS!! in 64-point flashing rainbow font. Dude loves him some gradients.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Good Lord, Cruxxed. I am sincerely, sincerely glad you transferred away from him -- Zandar sounds not just hosed-up but actively dangerous, and it actually made me a little angry that everyone thought it was funny that he was stalking you. His undergoing some sort of bizarre ego breakdown and breaking his umbrella in rage-sadness is a pretty amazing way to end it, though.

We had a dude who wore a feathered hat at my university (one of those green hats you associate with mustachioed Bavarian dudes), and he was also a weird guy, but thankfully he was a pretty fun, harmless weird. The only story I have about him involved his sophomore-year experiment with brewing his own mead, which involved borrowing a friend's trash can as a fermentation container (I sure hope there was a liner involved), drinking the eventual product out of a horn, and then being massively sick the rest of the night.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

While the thread is on the subject of creepers, I should tell one of the Calliope stories I've been meaning to since I started posting here. It's lengthy, but I think it's worth it.

Previous Calliope Stories:
An Introduction
Calliope's Hercules Fanfiction
Calliope Is Terrible To Shop With

Allow me to introduce a dude so awful I'm not even going to invent a pseudonym for him:

Rotty: The Internet Dude Your Mom Warned You About

I first met Rotty when he showed up on my usual hangout, an MST3K-fan IRC server, as the coauthor of a story we were planning on riffing. Said story was an alternate-universe Star Trek: TNG story about hypersexualized adolescents, but this didn't necessarily raise any red flags for me. After all, my then-boyfriend had shown up at the group thanks to his anime tentacle-rape fanfic getting riffed, and he was nice enough, right?

I was an idiot.

Rotty and I became friends, but the longer I knew him, the more it became clear that the man was a steaming pile of id contained imperfectly in human skin. First of all, he fell in love with any woman he didn't figure would kill him for it, and soon enough, he confessed his love for me and started being extremely passive-aggressive about my dating someone. He had a lot of fetishes and bizarre peccadillos, and he had basically no shame, so we (and especially I) got to hear all about them: his love for BDSM, especially slavery stuff; his irrational but extremely strong disdain for pants; his never-explained hatred of his parents, with whom he still lived despite being college-aged; his transformation fetish; and most memorably... his cannibalism fetish.

Yes, Rotty had a boner for cannibalism, particularly the live-cooking and eating of young women. I got to hear about this at some length, to the point that he would even complain about stupid lines in his cannibal-fetish spank fodder at me, while I as a Geek Social Fallacies-infested idiot just "uh-huh"ed and tried not to be nauseous. The best part is that he continued holding a torch for me all this time, so I can only imagine it being some kind of bizarre reverse courtship ritual -- showing off the most shameful and disgusting parts of himself to try and win my heart.

Needless to say, I got pretty sick of Rotty after a while, and I was desperate to fob him off... and Calliope was between boyfriends. I had a terrible plan.

When Rotty Met Calliope

I forget how precisely I introduced them -- probably just giving them each other's e-mail addresses -- but I introduced Rotty and Calliope to one another, and they hit it off. Calliope was between boyfriends, and it was our junior year in high school, so she was starting to run low on potentials; I want to say she'd already threatened bisexuality a time or two, so she was eager for romantic attention. Rotty, of course, was not picky. It was a match made in Hell.

Somehow, they managed to date over the Internet for nearly a year, and her relationship with Rotty unlocked something in Calliope. She'd always had some dark sexual undertones before, but previously she'd tried to be sly about them; dating Rotty brought them out in force, and they stuck around. The BDSM bit didn't surprise me much... but what did surprise me is the depth to which she indulged his cannibalism fetish. This produced perhaps the most terrifying single moment of our long, weird friendship.

The terror went down in Calliope's kitchen. I was over at her house, we were talking, and somehow Rotty came up. Calliope, with great pride, revealed to me his pet name for her: "succulent cutlet."

There aren't enough :gonk:s in the world.

The worst part of it is that even those two dating didn't actually get Rotty to leave me the hell alone. I had the displeasure of meeting him in person that summer at a meetup for the IRC group, and from the moment we met in person, he launched into his strange attempted courtship again. He gave me a bag of bulk candy he bought at the airport (I did not eat it); whenever I would sit down, he would race to sit next to me before my boyfriend could; he freaked out at length at my roommate (to whom he'd also confessed his love!) about her letting my boyfriend and me have a little private time in the room; and finally, when I was stuck in the airport with him waiting for our shared connecting flight, his lecturing me about how he didn't understand what I saw in my boyfriend. All that, and he looked like a nerdy Archie gone to seed. What a catch!

Well, at least he wore pants.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

The Saddest Rhino posted:

Is this Rottweiler from tvtropes?
Holy poo poo, that's him.

I see he's been using the years since he finally got banned from the IRC server very, very well.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

SurreptitiousMuffin posted:

Jesus Christ. The various tvtropes threads have had a field day with the guy already. He's a virulent homophobe who says "any sex not for procreation is evil". He's is an 'ephebophile', misogynist and brony.

He believes anything written after 1950 deserves to be burned because it's all morally repugnant. I'm now thinking his idea of morally sound is Cannibal Holocaust.
Man, I'm going to have to catch up. It sounds like he's gone a completely different crazy direction since I knew him, but none of this is surprising -- I'm not surprised at all that he's a brony, honestly. Or a misogynist, or a homophobe...

(I wonder whether he knows that one of the women he was desperately crushing on on our IRC server back in the day was actually a guy? I wish I was in a position to tell him.)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Fascinator posted:

I once had a (college) student argue forcefully in a completely unrelated essay that the oldest living legitimate male-line descendant of George Washington be crowned king of America with powers equivalent to those enjoyed by King George III in his day. He also specified that, should Washington be found to have followed Thomas Jefferson's example and fathered children with a slave, these descendants should be barred from the throne. It was remarkably well-thought-out for a completely stupid and unrealistic crackpot plan.

Perhaps the student was Rottweiler. I have no idea, as I was just the grader for a 200-person freshman-level course so I have no clue what the guy looked like.
The best part about this argument is that George Washington has no blood descendents; he had two stepchildren whom he raised with Martha, but he and Martha had no children, and Wikipedia tells me that smallpox might have rendered him sterile. There's something amazing in not just being an idiot monarchist but not even doing basic fact-checking in your proposed monarchic scheme.

Anyway, I have a small confession -- Rotty being discussed in the SA TVTropes thread did come up earlier on my regular IRC server (where reminiscing about what a dick that dude was happens every few months), and that was part of my inspiration to share my story, so it wasn't really a surprise that it was the same guy. The katana was a total surprise, though, which was most of my "holy poo poo" reaction. He hasn't changed that much (I want to say there was a story about his wearing a suit jacket to play DDR during the meetup), but seriously, dude? A katana? I'm pretty sure I could have taken Rotty in a fight had I been forced to, and I'm 5'3".

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Oregon is what he told me as well, although I don't remember exactly where. I also don't know if he's still living with his parents or not -- God, I hope not. If he is, he probably expects his mother to do his laundry, and I'd hate to be washing the clothes of someone who wears a trenchcoat and full suit in all seasons.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Jaded Mandarin posted:

I thought Rottweiler swore up and down that his parents were... you know, that Batman thing?
I suppose it's not impossible that they might have gotten shot outside a movie theater sometime in the past decade -- I am very blessed in that I haven't talked to Rotty for almost ten years -- but when I knew him, they were very much alive, he lived with them, and he was pathologically angry at them for no reason he ever bothered to offer.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Jaded Mandarin posted:

Has he ever elaborated on his choice of username? I'm surprised it's not something like Antigonus Plautus John Paul XVI.
If he did, I don't remember it now. He's been going by it for well over a decade, though (going back to his Usenet history well before he showed up on our server -- apparently he was a fairly popular regular on rec.arts.tv.mst3k.misc, for whatever that's worth?), and I suspect it's just an antiquated handle chosen in the depths of adolescence and never changed.

A generic, meaningless handle sort of suits him well, though. I've been skimming the TV Tropes thread to catch up on his more recent "adventures," and it strikes me that he holds all sorts of Deep Convictions now that he never held when I knew him; obviously, these things can change for someone over time, and even in my day he had some uncomfortable White Man's Burden ideas going on, but a lot of the beliefs he espouses now are a 180 from what I knew about him. (For one thing, he certainly wasn't fixated on sex being only for procreation; for God's sake, he ran a soft-SF sex roleplaying room set at a resort where every employee was also a sex slave. Pretty sure nobody there was makin' a baby!) I lean towards the theory espoused in the TV Tropes thread at one point that Rotty really has no core personality or convictions, just a set of fetishes and prejudices that he dresses up in different coats to seem smart or become popular. A more specific handle would tie him down, but "Rottweiler" can be all things to all people, and in his time on the Internet he's probably come close to managing it. (Well, minus the things that rely on you not being totally slimy, of course.)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Since someone asked about it in the TV Tropes thread (which is harrowing stuff, incidentally), I figure I'll clarify about Rotty's transformation fetish stuff here. Sadly, it wasn't nearly as interesting as the thread speculations; his fantasies, at least the ones he told me, revolved around slight transformations to facial features and whatnot. He claimed this was because he was totally :smith: about his own appearance, so tragically enough, it means he was actually less deluded than he is now, where he apparently thinks looking like Archie swallowed a handful of 'ludes and decided to cosplay as Inspector Gadget makes him dapper.

The material in the TV Tropes thread about him is all pretty :gonk:, but those pictures of him with women really make my skin crawl. As much as I hate to say it, I sort of hope that Masochistic Masculist is/was dating him because of self-hatred and that she'll grow out of it in time. (On the other hand, if you're a self-loathing female MRA, Rotty is arguably your perfect man -- he says to the world that even this most pitiful spectacle of humanity is innately superior to you and you're willing to subjugate yourself to him. There's no better way to build up self-loathing cred.)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Colon V posted:

Later on, I found out he tried to stab his parents to death with a knife, or something? I don't even want to know any more.
Talk about burying the lede!

Still... good Lord. Seriously, a fetish for his own unwashed filth? I know some people can be attracted to "natural" scents, but, like, the skin grease? euuuurgh

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

A bit belatedly, but I'll chime in and say that the "self-loathing leads to bad Internet hookups" theory is very valid, and I have my own experience with it. When I was 16, between adolescent awkwardness, undiagnosed depression, and Calliope, I was pretty convinced that I was destined to die alone; when a 27-year-old Internet buddy confessed he had a crush on me, I thought about it for a while and then jumped on it, because a boy finally liked me! For real!

You no doubt know how this story ends, but it took seven years to end, which spanned most of high school and all of college; even once it ended, he was passive-aggressive at me for years, to the point that he posted a bitter secret on Fandomsecrets about me. On one hand, dating him throughout college and thus having a mediocre-to-awful long-distance relationship hanging over my head during four prime gettin'-laid years is maybe my greatest regret in life. On the other... well, this is the guy I was dating when Rotty oozed on up to me, so my sad rear end probably dodged a bullet there.

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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I'm not sure what the best part of Lonk's story was: the repeated weird, transphobic mentions of Alice's disgusting penis (and how long the disgusting penis was) or the part where he encouraged an alleged friend to self-harm. drat good times!

e: By disgusting, I mean in Lonk's opinion, of course. I am actually pretty down with eight-inch dongers!

Antivehicular fucked around with this message at 11:36 on Jan 28, 2012

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