eddyfate

I just tweeted about this, but I need to vent. This is an old button for me, so if it seems I'm getting really wound up, understand that this is something that's bugged me most of my life.

Someone in my office just got a comment that the term "deaf" was offensive, and that the preferred term is "hearing impaired."

No, it's fucking not. The complete inability to hear is called being deaf.

For those that don't know, my inability to hear caused me to be enrolled for a time in a program for kids such as myself. It was called the deaf program. It had deaf people in it. I dated a deaf girl for a while. They have a Deaf culture. Fuck, even Wikipedia gets this right:

The term "hard of hearing" may be used to describe all degrees of hearing loss up to and including total deafness. It is more likely to be used by individuals who have acquired deafness in adulthood rather than by those who have grown up deaf. In the case of profound deafness, this may be political correctness, a euphemism for the simpler and more accurate "deaf." Interestingly, this is seen as a euphemism only from the side of the mainstream. Members of the Deaf community do not generally aspire to be hearing and reject labels such as "hard of hearing" and "hearing-impaired" on the basis that they reflect the mindset that deafness is a pathological condition.

Even mainstream television gets this right. If you're going to stick up for a group of people, the least you can do is find out what the holy hell you're talking about.

Stop fucking telling handicapped people what offends them, and fucking ask them instead.

Why do people take social networking sites so seriously?

I'm not being glib or hyperbolic here. I have heard of people falling to pieces over being unfollowed from Twitter. I have seen individuals get really upset that they didn't get friended back on Facebook. I have had folks email me asking why I hate them because I stopped reading their LiveJournal. And it has recently come to my attention that certain choices I've made on such sites have made people upset, assuming that I somehow hate them or wish them ill because of my choices.

Perhaps I have a really strange way of handling social networking. I look at it as a source of information and entertainment. If that source no longer has useful information for me, I stop reading it. If it's no longer entertaining, I cut it. And certainly, if reading it frustrates me or makes me upset, I sure as hell turn it off.

Am I missing something? Are we so wrapped up in our need to be connected, networked, plugged in, up to date and making our utter personal trivia constantly available to the known universe that any quiet departure from our onslaught of hastily hammered out insights means that it's some personal attack that either must be challenged as an affront or requires a vitriolic screed decrying the silent dissenter as a petty, obnoxious bastard equivalent to a village idiot? Or can I possibly make my own decisions about personal relationships with people without checking in with some website's idiosyncratic etiquette?

If the little number on your website showing how many people are reading your inane crap is more important to you than actually talking to a human being, then please do me a favor and stop reading this journal now. Seriously. I won't even be offended or upset. I've had people ask me if they can stop reading my journal, and you know what? Not only was I not mad about it, but I was pretty confused as to why I was being asked. Why are you asking me? It's your life. Read what you want, connect with who you want, and do what the hell you want.

I appreciate that you respect my feelings, but you know what really earns my respect? Talking to me and giving a shit about me as a person instead of caring more about my hotlinks. If you don't respect me that much, that's cool. Just because a website says we're friends doesn't mean we have to be. I'm okay with that -- are you?

Am I way off base here?

Edit: It seems I talked about this a year ago, too.

Edit 2: Within half an hour of posting this, I got a bunch of new Twitter followers. Huh.

This bitch has been blowing her horn at all hours for weeks. garchangel confronted her about it this morning, and called the police. Then, they did it again, and her husband came out of the house to threaten garchangel and tell him that they can "blow their horn whenever they want." To understand the utter stupidity of this situation, these people live two houses down, and sit in their car to blow the horn so that their kids inside the house can come out. Sometimes it takes them ten to fifteen minutes to come out. But apparently the words "noise disturbance" doesn't mean anything, but threatening their neighbors is okay. It certainly seems to be less work than walking their fat asses into their house to get their fucking kids.

I fucking hate people.

EDIT: To make the situation even more retarded, the woman has a cell phone, as does the husband who claims to always be inside the house, and was in fact talking on it when garchangel came out to speak with her.

Something I read in passing in LiveJournal got me thinking, and a short rant came from that thought process.

I am a huge fan of communication. I believe it's an important skill to have, and people should use it more often. However, I have been frequently frustrated by said communication. It was because I had gotten brain-washed into accepting communication as a binary state: communicating is good, and not communicating is bad. I've since realized that communicating poorly is just as bad, if not sometimes worse, than not communicating at all. If I can't understand or appreciate what you're trying to communicate to me, then we're not communicating. Communication requires two things: a sender and a receiver. If I'm not receiving your message, communication has not occurred. As such, you can't expect to pound on a keyboard or babble for a few minutes and expect communication to magically happen. Vice versa, if the message the person communicating to is sending doesn't sink in immediately, you don't just stomp off and say "You're not communicating with me!"

If you don't know how to communicate well, learn. It's worth the time and effort to learn how to write clearly in your native language, and how to take the time to express what you mean, as well as to actively comprehend what is being communicated to you. For Americans, you should have gotten most of these skills by the eight grade, and in fact most of our society's reading level is geared to that dynamic. It isn't hard to communicate, but it does take effort. From my experience, though, it's often effort well spent.

Today's suck I can't go completely into, but it has currently been wrapped up by the fact that I just got a call from our security company, and our house alarm is going off. Police are going over to the house to investigate.

Fucking. Joy.

Edit: The basement alarm went off, and the police haven't called in, which implies to the security company that all is well. Could be a cat got downstairs or something fell over.

Yesterday, I left work. This, in itself, is not a strange occurance, and tends to happen an average of 4.3 times a week. However, due to our collective days, the mood of both greebotrill and myself was foul, so even the act of leaving work held little joy for us. After a brief bout of annoyance at my flat tire preventing me from dropping off much-needed paperwork to banzaigrrl, I went home and unwrapped my comp copies of the Tomorrow Knights RPG as well as gobs of Omlevex books (if people want cheap copies of Omlevex, an awesome Mutants and Masterminds Silver Age sourcebook, drop me a line). Then Lappy decided that it didn't want to access the internet on the night I needed to handle an IRC scene for Requiem, so I decided to go to the store to pick up new cat litter and cat food for De-Claudius. I returned to find Lappy still in a state of sulk, so I restarted the wireless card software and it instantly connected.

At this point, picture me restraining myself from throwing Lappy through the very conveniently-placed bay window in my office.

It seems that the stubbornness hadn't left, however, but merely moved to my GAIM program, which steadfastly refused to connect to IRC in any meaningful way. Deciding not to muck about with it, I downloaded that old standby of IRC junkies everywhere, mIRC, and installed it. mrogre was nice enough to camp out and reserve a channel for me, so I joined him and we both muddled through IRC commands to project the illusion that we knew what we were doing. greebotrill called garchangel and I downstairs to a delicious steak dinner, and after satisfying my dietary needs in a very tasty fashion I went back to my office and chatted with people while trying to watch an episode of Doctor Who Confidential. The memory-intensive task of running Firefox, mIRC, GAIM, and DivX Player was too much for Lappy (and for my rapidly diminishing restraint), so I gave up on watching TV and just read a bit more from Life, The Universe, and Everything before the IRC scene started.

The scene itself was entertaining, enjoyable, roleplay-intensive, and reminded me that running a game over IRC isn't really the good idea I keep pretending it is. I certainly don't blame our VST, who did everything in his power to make things run smoothly; the fault was in trying to administrate a game system online without appropriate tools (such as a dice roller). I ended up staying online too late, missing Iron Chef (again), unable to fall asleep until rather later than I wanted to, and as a result being tired and leery of yet another day kicking me right between the eyes with a steel-toed boot.

However, I do continue to not be on fire, which is positive.

Flat tire. Dentist visit. Lost respect for someone I gave a chance to. Made a mistake on my calendar.

It's going to be one of those weeks.

Edit: Yes indeed - it just got worse. Money problems again (or should I say, still).

[head/desk]

I'm flattered. I really am. I'm flattered that so many people think so highly of me to give this rumor validity and weight. But it's not true, and I'm tired of telling people it's not true.

I am not working on, writing, submitting a proposal, or have anything to do with any nWoD Changeling book.

Really. Not lying. I made a post a while back out of curiosity, not because I'm under some secret squirrel NDA. When I say "I'm not working on X project," that means "I'm not working on X project." When I say "I'm sorry, I can't talk about that," it means "I'm sorry, I can't talk about that."

Really. No mystery. Promise.

Who in the FUCK did I piss off? My day is going straight to shit, and keeps getting worse every half an hour.

So, long stories short.

Requiem: Fun. Had some slow spots, but I was suitably entertained. The politics of the city just got a LOT more interesting, and I'm looking forward to how it all shakes out.

Midway City: Sent the last of the edits off, as well as the Afterword. All I have to do is work on the character sheet, and poke at the final layout draft, and then it's off to the printer.

Computer: After a lengthy diagnosis session with Dr. onecrane and Dr. garchangel, it appears the patient is suffering from a defective motherboard. Next step is to contact the place we got the motherboard from and request a replacement, which means more delays. Still, we're sure that most every other part works fine (the processor might be a bit sketchy, but I could stand to upgrade that anyhow in the distant future). At least we got to hang out with onecrane and mrogre, so all was not lost.

Map Case: The Czech map case I ordered two months ago finally arrived yesterday. It's big enough to hold a hardback gaming book or textbook of moderate size (say, around 400 pages), and currently holds my character sheet (in the flap pocket), a pencil and pen in the left side loops, two flat pens (a gift of banzaigrrl's) in the right loop, the WoD MET Draw Deck in the right pocket, my sunglasses and a deck of cards in the front bottom pocket, my moleskin and PDA in the smaller inner pocket, the first Baker Street graphic novel in the thin big pocket, and The Fountainhead in the thick big pocket.

Fable: I'm going to go back to it. Like, now.

Last night, aside from the usual (Midway City editing), we also went computer part shopping. Managed to find some pretty good deals on memory and a monitor (thus alleviating having to take onecrane's generous offer of one). So, over the course of the year I've gotten a new DVD-Rom, DVD burner, wireless card, backup 30 gig hard drive, motherboard, memory, monitor, and power supply. Really, the only thing remaining that's original to 2004 is the video card, case, processor, floppy drive, and one hard drive. So the ever-patient garchangel offers to put it together for me last night.

And it doesn't. Fucking. Work.

He has no idea why it doesn't work. I have no idea why it doesn't work. It should work. The system powers up, the fan runs, and the light lights up, but nothing appears on either of the two monitors we tried it on. Some jiggerypokery on garchangel's part didn't clear up the problem.

Today I completely forgot a dentist appointment, because I haven't yet gotten into the habit of checking my Palm every morning (I've shut the alarms off, because 90% of the time they go off either when I don't need them or when I can't shut them off easily), and I have a lot of little but extremely annoying tasks to do at work today.

A quick recap of the last few days:

Midway City

Thank you.

...

Oh, and I got my parts for the computer, and garchangel was nice enough to try to put it together while I was out, but I was told today that the motherboard was mounted with the wrong screws (hence why it burned out) and the RAM doesn't fit, so we need to buy both today, as well as pick up/buy a monitor from onecrane. Because the universe enjoys kicking me in the junk.

But hey. Dalek!

Friday: D&D (mrogre flavor). The most information gathering I've ever had in a D&D game. Something clicked in the game, though, and it seemed less "hey, let's be social and roll dice" and have more emotional investment, at least for me. Good time.

Saturday: D&D (atekes flavor). Fairly moderate change in background prompted some revision of the characters (most especially mine). I'm coming to learn that onecrane and I can't seem to make characters that get along in D&D - either I'm snarky and he's surly or I'm surly and he's snarky (well, as snarky as a half-orc barbarian can be). At least I don't have to be mean to cresida anymore. Again, good time (and good food).

Sunday: By this point, I'm thoroughly possessed by a D&D campaign idea, and I've borrowed books from banzaigrrl, mrogre, and onecrane (as well as getting access to books that garchangel owns) to flip through and contemplate. What I might do is jot down my ideas, toss them in with the other abandoned D&D campaign idea from five years ago, and see if it still appeals to me when it's my turn to run tabletop again.

Ordered parts for my computer, and decided to salvage some memory into greebotrill's computer (as well as putting in the DVD drive that's been sitting there for months). Installed the memory and drive, discovered a CD of porn that no one recognizes but could be from m0nk3y, and went to test the computer, but the monitor wouldn't click on. Unplug, replug, etc. - nothing. Went to get my monitor, and it worked fine, except that the green pins were damaged somehow, so now it's all this lovely shade of puke yellow. Plugged the original monitor back in, works fine (sigh), and added a monitor to the list of things I need to buy for my computer just to get it WORKING again - I'm not even doing an upgrade. GAH! Hopefully I can snag a monitor by Wednesday or Thursday when the parts come in.

Midway City first draft layout is done. Plan to poke at it and send it back later in the week. If all goes well, it should be at the printer next week.

Watched a DVD of Bullshit! and one of fucking cocksucking Deadwood. Very entertaining.

Now, work kicks me in the ass.

Between White Wolf's newest policy, the news in London, the news of Pyramid guru and fellow nGo member Scott Haring, the news of maerli's mother, and now the fact that my shuttle to the Hilltop campus to have lunch with banzaigrrl and cresida never showed up after waiting for it for fifteen minutes, I'm just having a day.

Desktop computer refuses to turn on - it either doesn't even register the on/off switch, or the fan kicks on for a second before shutting back off (sounding a bit like a car trying to turn over). Laptop wireless card is in greebotrill's work laptop, which is (of course) at work.

As such, access is going to be sketchy for an indeterminate amount of time until I figure out what's up.

At least all of my Midway City files were backed up to a floppy.

So last night I learned that I was both more and less of a computer nerd than I thought, as I struggled to fix my computer. ( A lot of probably inaccurate technobabble follows. )

So after a busy weekend, I finally got a night where I could work on Midway City. So, of course, my desktop computer chooses this moment to crap out on me. I'm currently in the process of slowly copying 40 gigs of information onto greebotrill's computer so I can reformat my desktop. Meanwhile, I've gotten Lappy to a point where it can do most everything I need to finish Midway City. Still, an entire night pretty much wasted, and a few more nights of reinstalling software loom in front of me (and, of course, copying everything BACK onto the desktop...)

[head/desk]

Dear Universe,

I had previously mentioned that my dose of Perspective(tm) was received. I don't always use your product on a daily basis, but it is something in my thoughts at all times. Recently, I lost my prescription of Perspective(tm), but I managed to locate it again. While I appreciate your company's enthusiasm, a few hours of misplaced Perspective(tm) does not immediately require that a new dose be shipped to me.

Therefore, I would kindly ask you to STOP FUCKING WITH MY FRIENDS AND FAMILY PLSKTHX.

Cryptically yours,

eddyfate

You want a silly rant? Okay, here's one.

Why is the vampire genre commonly referred to as "Requiem", but the werewolf genre referred to as "WTF"?

Yes, Werewolf: the Forsaken has unfortunate initials that also mean "What the fuck". Really, it was funny last year. Get over it. It's just not that funny anymore, and it's really confusing if you're not clear. "Hey, WTF is on tonight?"

So, it's "Requiem" and "Forsaken", or "VtR" and "WtF". For the love of Paco, be fucking consistent.