Month: November 2024

Justicar

On November 25, 2024

World of Warcraft was a bad period of my life. I often think back to it, and, I will eventually write-out all of what happened to me on that server. But, right now? Right now, I’d like to point out something specifically.

My life has been nothing but tolerating something that was intolerable. And I kept on trying to keep my mouth shut; but when I was told to smile and take abuse, to say nothing when I’m being abused, and to accept such a condition?

Yeah, I’m not doing that.

Your Dipshit Friends

There’s something about me where I have this inherent loneliness that makes me gravitate towards anyone who will talk to me. Lots of people have it. It’s a weakness.

You shouldn’t just keep the company of anybody. It’s thought that if you can’t be tolerated by many, that there’s something wrong with you; but, in reality, the vast majority of the human species is one variety of dipshit or another. (The real kicker is when you realize that, even when you’re right, you are still, inevitably, inexorably, somebody else’s villain.)

But I kept the company of anybody. After all, as far as I can tell, I was still a teenager when all of this nonsense was happening.

And it was just me and my dipshit ‘friends’ against ‘the world’.

With friends like these…

… who needs enemas?

I had a lot of ‘friends’. To be perfectly honest, they were merely acquaintances. But there were two people that I loved talking to.

Bonaparte and Saristinae. Not in that order; not in any order. But Bonaparte was this cool guy who once made a YouTube video in which he (fictitiously) presented a recipe to make cocaine using a frying pan, and Saristinae was someone who pissed off the right people so bad that a journalist malded about it, leaving the only lasting evidence of my friend’s existence.

I know where Bonaparte is. I found his YouTube channel again, though I honestly don’t want to contact him again until maybe First Contact is over and done with.

But Saristinae, I pretty much miss every day.

Because Saristinae was smart, and Saristinae had a point.

World of Warcraft was elitist and bad.

And you couldn’t blame children on the shittiness of the game. The people who made the game bad were usually of the age where you’d expect they would have careers and families and 401ks and mortgages. But instead of doing something productive with their lives, they just kind of started / precipitated drama on any one of the servers that were available.

There used to be legends of shit that people would get up to on Illidan. Even now, Serenity Now will probably echo into eternity. And our server was sort-of an offshoot of Illidan: it was the place where people who were too bad for Illidan would end up, after they got banned.

It was the scrapheap. If Illidan was Tiphares, then my server was the Scrapyard.

And I was Gally.

Alone in a crowd

Have you ever felt lonely at a party? Or alone in a group of ‘friends’?

That’s kind of what Bluesky feels like, to me. That’s kind of what everything feels like, to me. I felt at home with Saristinae and Bonaparte; I feel at home, now, with Lloyd, and MBot, and Gavizuli, and Blue, and U-Thought. But, outside of a few people who I feel truly understand me, who are on my same wave-length, and can and do appreciate what actually matters and is important in life, the rest of the World is just a sea of faces. Empty and vacant, holding nothing for me.

And the people in the crowd are not going to understand how I feel, because they either barely understand how they themselves feel; or they don’t care how I feel. And none of that matters.

But.

World of Warcraft was pretty much the social media for video game players, back then. It was a game; and it was also the interactive experience of networking with others.

People found wives and husbands in this game. They got married and had kids, and, from what I’ve heard? Very few divorces.

No one appreciates that this game had more to it than its mechanics. It was the social aspect of it that elevated it beyond a game, into something like an Internet town square. In fact, when I stopped playing it? That’s exactly when I started using Twitter. I found it a similar ‘replacement’.

I tried to ‘socialize’. But the reality of the situation was, people took the game too seriously.

Also, one of the top guilds was just casually sharing revenge porn.

There were many problems with this server.

Oh the misery

Outside of trying to improve my condition, all I’d really do on World of Warcraft was grind achievements. After a certain point, the only way to get any sort of real ‘progression’ in the game was to pair-up with a guild that was co-led by an actual rapist. So I didn’t do that.

This, too, was during the period where Blizzard had absolutely no fucking idea what they wanted to do with Molten Core. Even that is somehow lost to time now; but the reality was, for 2 weeks, we weren’t even sure that Blizzard was solvent. There were rumors that World of Warcraft hadn’t sold enough, and, given the apparent ‘failure’ of Molten Core’s reception (not enough people could even attempt the content: it was tuned to the point where the first Molten Giant was wiping entire raids), the thought was, this is it, Luigi.

Once I had learned that the title of Justicar was a thing (apparently, once used as a title for Paladins, in some such text), I wanted it. I wanted it bad.

It wasn’t until the Draenei came that I got it.

Guarding a base

At the time, I didn’t understand why my Internet connection was so ‘bad’. I was on dial-up. When I’d get disconnected from Alterac Valley, I didn’t know why. I just wanted to play.

At times, not even playing Warsong Gulch was ‘safe’. My disconnects were frequent, and the experience was frustrating.

I got everything from Alterac Valley first. Then, Arathi Basin; or whatever it was called. (Honestly, even as I type this, I’m realizing that my memory of this is fading. It just isn’t important to me anymore.)

But Warsong Gulch, that’s the thing I’m remembering, now.

I remember… my ‘friends’. There was one. I won’t say his name; but he was a dipshit, guaranteed. Later on in our ‘friendship’, I learned he was actually sent by another guild to try to recruit me into being this polyamorous lady’s next husband. That lady would always talk about me giving her a baby (making her pregnant). Disgusting.

Well, he was the one who decided that I needed to be made fun of. He explained it to me thusly: I had done something wrong, and I had to be made fun of. To teach me a lesson.

For guarding the base in Warsong Gulch.

I don’t know where the guy is, now, and I don’t care. I never want to talk about him.

But I remember, standing over the flag room, in Warsong Gulch, guarding the flag. Because, basically, it was all I could really do with my Internet connection.

And I remember . . . feeling so disconnected with ‘humanity’.

There was nothing I could really do that wouldn’t be ‘criticized’. That wouldn’t be ‘mocked’; ‘ridiculed’; and so on, and so forth. And yet, I had no desire, nor ability to do the same sort of things to them. I had no talent for cruelty. I didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

I’m pretty sure I hold the world record for getting Justicar as Alliance. On our server, the Horde were all adults who were min-maxing the fuck out of everything, so getting any reputation at all in Warsong Gulch was basically pulling teeth.

But I did it.

I did it, and every single time I did something for myself, there was this asshole, this guy who was supposed to be my friend; this weirdo-asshole who was always trying to get me to talk to this lady who wanted to fuck me.

I need to keep better company.

I’m pretty sure shitdick was going to steal Deathcharger if it dropped while we ran it together.

God, I don’t miss you. I don’t miss you, and, even now, I still think of how I told you I was ‘making good time’ getting a Winterspring Frostsaber, and you just had no ability to not mock me.

There was so much to mock about you, and I never did.

But you never missed an opportunity to ridicule me.

How’d I ever live like that?

Standing in the Cave, in Alterac Valley

I remember feeling so ashamed. There was nothing I could do to exit the cave; sometimes, when my connection (or the data involved, really) was good and/or favorable, I could play the game. But, otherwise, sometimes? Somedays, we were pushed back to the cave, and that was it.

And there was the threat of being banned if you stood in there.

Sometimes I think back to that, and, I keep on fucking trying to parse it. And, you know what?

Now I wish I was just trying to fuck around to get something for free.

At least, then, when people tried to shame me, I wouldn’t have felt bad.

That’s the thing about actually being a bad person: you laugh when people call you out on it.

Good people don’t laugh when people say that they’re bad. They feel bad, and wonder why they’re being punished.

I’ve felt like that my entire goddamned life.

Incorrigible.

By Margaret Gel

On November 21, 2024

In Uncategorized

I’ve tried, for a long time, to forgive Humanity for its trespasses. I’ve tried to make peace with the idea that there are a lot of stupid dipshits running around, making things worse. I’ve tried to have patience.

I remember one day that a stranger told me that I had the patience of a saint; of an angel. And of all the things that I’ve done in this life, of all the shit I’ve seen, there’s only one thing that I’ve come in contact with that perfectly encapsulates my lived experience.

It’s this video.

This is my life. This has been my life since I was 3 years old. When I realized, with horror, that every adult around me was not only not as smart as I was, but they were angry. They were angry, and vindictive, and ape-like.

This is my life. Every single day, I wake up, and I try to have some fun. I start anew. And every single day, my brain gets real fucking sad, because, do you know where the round peg goes? That’s right— the SQUARE HOLE!

It’s Idiocracy out there, now. Elon has the Department of Government Efficiency— DOGE. He’s posting the most basic-ass-bitch memes you’ve ever seen, though now they’re -ist as fuck.

And on the other hand, we have Bluesky, which is like if Tumblr shoved its cock up Twitter’s ass and was now wearing it like a cocksleeve. Just like an elf, Bluesky can have many versatile roles in any given party!

The thing that infuriates me— that’s not the right word, but, it’s like, it makes me feel like I don’t really have any place here, that I cannot have any real fun— is, everybody’s either a fucking racist, a Neo-Nazi, or they’re the most easily-offended fucker I’ve ever seen.

I don’t like it. I, in fact, hate it.

And I want to go Home.

I thought that, after all this shit ended, and I was finally allowed to go back Home, that I would maybe update shit online.

Fuck that.

I quit. The minute I get out of here, I’m gone.

This sucks, dude.

Being Too Unique

The thing that bothers me the most about people online is that they have this preternatural desire to be more ‘unique’ than everybody else. But they do it in the most-narcissistic way possible: they want the rules to never apply to them.

In a phrase, humans cannot allow any Gods before them. And that’s why I don’t want to be around them anymore.

Because it’s just grating to see the same fucking behavior, all day long! I browsed Reddit again for less than a minute last night (because, but of course, none of these people are smart enough to know how to actually permanently ban my account), and, boy fucking howdy, nothing on there made me happy.

It’s just the same shit! “Look at me!” And nobody gives a shit about anybody else but themselves. Sometimes, not even themselves!

And it’s tiresome. There’s no fun here.

Gods, if I could just leave.

I would stop complaining if I could just leave.

The Problem with the Internet

By Margaret Gel

On November 18, 2024

In Funny Stuffs, Lore, Treatises

For about 30 years now, I’ve been trying to put my finger on what exactly is causing the amount of friction I have with human beings online. They like to say that it’s entirely my fault, but that’s bullshit. There’s a certain level of interaction that I give back to them (for lack of better terms in English: meaning, I react in certain ways that feed into what they’re doing) that is not helpful for the environment of which I wish to create. Let me give you a concrete example.

A person yells out into the void, on a social media service, ‘if you do X, then fuck you, you’re scum.’

I reply, ‘don’t call me scum.’

The person replies and starts a fight.

People often say, ‘don’t feed the troll.’ But this doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because, in this situation, only the troll is allowed to speak. It’s similar to how liberals try to get away from Neo Nazis by avoiding every single bit of terminology that the Nazis use. The Nazis glom on to something, and the liberals abandon it.

Let me give you an example from popular culture, to help you understand this more easily. I’m going to make this more-palatable for you.

The Nazis take shit like the Borg.

Now this is the point where the people reading assume that I’m suggesting pacifism against Nazis. No: what I’m pointing out in this video occurs 1 minute and 7 seconds in:

… I’ve made too many compromises already; too many retreats. They invade our space, and we fall back.

Here’s what I’ve seen happen over the past 3 decades, online.

Good people used to populate the Internet. There were assholes, but they were cloistered. And then the more people got to use the Internet, the more they took it for granted, the more general toxicity and negativity invaded the space.

Now the good people are cloistered, but the assholes run free.

I’m not suggested we should have gatekept the Internet better. After all, there also is no ‘we’. I could not have done anything, nor could you have.

What I’m saying, is, the more that the real world began to use the Internet, and the less that the Internet was this curiosity, relegated for use only by ‘nerds’ and social outcasts and misfits, the more everything bad about the real world began to permeate onto the Internet. Now there’s no going back.

Social outcasts used to keep the Internet nice for themselves. Now that they’re beset on all sides by normies, they’ve reacted in such a way where they’ve become spiteful, rageful, vindictive, and territorial, in ways that don’t make any sense. And they have no real way to gatekeep their environments that don’t also hurt they themselves.

‘Don’t feed the troll’ created an environment in which the people causing all the problems were allowed to speak, while the people who caused relatively fewer or no problems, they fell back. They surrendered their territor(ies) online, went to different websites, and became less concentrated. Meanwhile, the Bad People™ got full use of the facilities.

The insane are running the asylum. They have been since 2003. It’s just that, with how widespread Internet use is, it really hasn’t become a problem until quite recently. I’d like to say it started in 2014, to puff myself up and say, ‘I ruined this.’ But I didn’t. And it would’ve happened a different way, anyways.

Not even Chanology was the start.

This is not some blameless phenomenon. People perpetrated this. I had a hand in it, but I did not ruin it by myself. Furthermore, in trying to grow and evolve as a person, when what I did to protect my own ego, something that was once pretty much nonexistent, fragile and easily hurt, caused the largest tantrum spiral I’ve ever seen on the Internet? I offer no apologies.

Somebody told me I was worthless, and that I should kill myself.

And I told them to go fuck themselves.

And everything just unraveled from there.

It is, of course, going to continue. Human beings have no real desire to become better. When they say, ‘do better’, they don’t really mean it. They just want to be mean to one another.

And that’s your problem.

You want to be mean to each other. A lot.

Here’s a secret: when the Tantrum Spiral started in 2014 (and none of you are going to know what I’m referring to, unless you actually know me), I did not tell that person to go fuck themselves.

I said, ‘I don’t deserve to be spoken to, in this way.’ And they took it like I had slapped them in the face and said ‘go fuck yourself’. That’s why I always tell the story like that.

That’s the thing about human beings: you can tell them, ‘good morning’, and they’ll take it as an insult, demanding you tell them, what’s good about it?.

When people say that to me, by the way, I always tell them,

you’re alive. That’s what’s good about it.

Discussing Turtles with Crazy People

My uncle, Ryresai, once told me a story about how he was doing research about turtles, and other turtle-y things. And he was discussing this with someone, who seemed very interested in turtles. He was, in fact, a published author on some sort of turtle-y research.

My uncle is very intelligent. And he’s very passionate.

It was about an hour and 45 minutes in that Ryresai realized that the person he was talking to was insane. Some things started not making sense. And after that, the whole thing started to unravel.

Ryresai suddenly realized that nothing he had said to the man had had any real effect. He was discussing turtles with a crazy person.

The man he was talking to might once have been ‘sane’. Or he might have been something like a savant, where he was good at one thing, but he lacked relevant and useful experience and knowledge of protocol when it came to other things. Or he might have gone insane after he wrote the book.

But even then, there were signs. There were tangents in the book that started to not make sense. But it would almost-always get back on track. A minor derailment; nothing more.

But that’s the thing. Even, if not especially, the smartest of people, they tend towards insanity. I, in particular, chose not to pursue mathematics, because I did not want to develop schizophrenia. (When you’re nine years old and you’re basically the kid that J. shoots in the simulation in Men in Black, you tend to not want to pursue any more advanced informations.)

That is to say, I played the Marathon series on PowerPC Macintosh, and then, I got into Quantum Mechanics/Physics, pretty deeply.

You don’t wanna do that when your balls haven’t even dropped.

But, anyways. Jokes aside, there is one thing I want to tell you about all of this, that I want to impress upon you.

When you try real hard online? And you’re wondering why everyone is so angry at you? And you don’t understand?

And you’re trying to tell people things, and get them to understand you, but they’re just not understanding you?

Be careful.

You may be discussing turtles with crazy people.

An Explanation

A lot of people don’t tend to get the sublteties of my writing. They don’t understand my nuance. I’m not saying people aren’t smart if they don’t get it. I’m just saying, I want to make something perfectly clear.

The Internet is this way because you can’t get anything done when the people you’re talking to don’t fucking understand what you’re saying. That’s ‘discussing turtles with crazy people’.

Essentially, everyone trying to do something good online, they’re not being heard, nor understood; and when they want to gather with like-minded people, those like-minded people tend to either be insane themselves, or in such a bad fucking mood that they’ve cloistered themselves in a way that makes interacting with them damned near impossible.

It’s easy to be a mindless dipshit who smears their shit all over the wall and tells even the most-learned of elders that said elder’s mother sucks him good and hard thru his jorts. It’s much more difficult to actually produce anything resembling a civilization, when the vast majority of people who could, are being smeared with other people’s shit.

This is untenable.

Don’t expect anything useful from the Internet.

For civilization to exist, the people who act as the enablers of said infrastructure must also exist. And no one online is going to do the work for free, forever, without getting burnt out so badly that it doesn’t even matter.

I could write more, but I honestly have better shit to do.

Twitter Post-Mortem

By Margaret Gel

On November 17, 2024

In Treatises

Note: I work 7 days a week now, and my life is pretty much better and greater than it ever has been. So I have very little time for this now, but I feel a need to say something.

I left Twitter for Bluesky about 3 days ago.

And I’m not coming back.

No thanks.

When it comes to Twitter, there’s no easy way to parse it. You can only really speak of it truthfully by adhering strictly to definitions of what it was not. But of course, there are exceptions and expectations to list, and maintain.

Forthright it must be noted that, as of the time of this writing, Twitter is… alive. But one must question what sort of ‘life’ it really leads. One must question if websites like MySpace are ‘alive’, in comparison to their former glory.

Twitter is worse, though. With MySpace, the lights are on, but nobody seems to be home. One must necessarily wonder, who’s paying the hosting bill?. With Twitter, the lights are on, but the site itself is a fucked-out windsock. It may still ‘breathe’, but the light clearly left its eyes, some time ago.

And that’s okay. Clearly, it’s not, but— in a world where people set children on fire and nobody does anything, the boundaries of ‘okay’ are not clearly defined. Twitter’s ‘demise’ is, essentially, unimportant. What I had for lunch today was more important. What you had for lunch is, too. Essentially, Twitter was never ‘essential’.

It was great to get news before it actually broke— in my family, I was known as the ‘Computer Guy’, who could get the latest news before it even hit the airwaves. I’d beat mainstream news by 2-3 days. And I’d do that, because Twitter was mostly bullshit and I just told them unfiltered everything, and when I was right, they only remembered those parts. They love me, so they gave me leeway that newspapers would not be given by strangers.

Clearly, Twitter is not important, in the grand scheme of individual lives. There was a potential for it to be something more, but I think we all know why that never occurred. I think we all know who smothered it in its crib, so to speak, after a certain ‘Spring’ got a bit too spring-y.

And it wasn’t exactly important to me.

But I feel a sense of loss. And it’s similar to the feeling of loss when you come to terms with any other unimportant, yet emotional loss. There’s a sentimentality here that, in my mind, demands to be addressed. And that sentimentality spakes thusly:

It feels like when you’re processing the end of a beloved television show, only the show is still on the fucking air. Like Stargate SG-1 after the Goa’uld were defeated; or, perhaps, the Simpsons, trudging along, becoming exactly what they mocked during their best and greatest of all years.

But, in the end, shedding a tear for the Simpsons’ meteoric fall in quality— past season 8, most reckon— seems silly.

And so does shedding even a tear for Twitter.

Yes, I wanted a lot of things. And yes, I will discuss them.

But I’m a normal person right now.

I work 7 days a week.

Twitter could fucking fold and, as George Carlin once said, my blood pressure wouldn’t even change.

I have all of my friends on Bluesky. I have all of their Discord information. And, essentially, even if Bluesky did not exist, I know that I would find them.

With that in mind, I cannot be hurt.

Who gives a shit about Twitter?

Goodbye.

By Margaret Gel

On November 1, 2024

In Funny Stuffs, Lore

Just as a quick aside: today, I woke up to a permanent ban on Reddit. Why?

Sexualized Harassment

This was very interesting. For the first two bans I received, I came back to two comments that seemed to have been edited. People were responding to shit I didn’t say, which was interesting. And then I realized that I was being targeted by a Reddit admin, or some sort of moderator who was moderating one of the top subreddits, based on the behavior exhibited.

In particular, I was targeted after I left a single comment: “Good”, on a thread in which a super-aggressive dog breed got banned in the U.K. And that’s when it started. And it was, yet again, as you could probably guess: yep, it was World News.

For the second comment, I have no idea what the fuck happened, as they don’t even show you what comment they ban you for. But this one, I’m telling this story. Because even though I don’t give a shit about Reddit, you don’t get to accuse me of sexualized harassment. You don’t. Fuck you.

Last night, Subreddit Drama (again: this is probably where the fuck the ban originated from, some admin or someone high up in that group of subreddits) had decided that a woman was not even a human being. And I took issue with this.

Usually when I get banned from places, I think, ooh, maybe I did somethin’ wrong. Like, even when I got banned from a Sailor Moon community when I was a kid, after I pointed out that the 30-year-old (almost 40, really) was grooming kids, and that’s no good, when I got banned from there? Until now, even then, I would sometimes wonder if I had done something wrong in another way, ‘earning’ me that ‘ban’.

When I was threatened with a permaban on World of Warcraft, for reporting a pedophile actively grooming a child (the GMs threatened me; even banning me for a second, to ‘show me what it’s like’), I thought, have I erred in some way?.

No.

This time, I have realized that it is you who is full of shit.

When I got banned the first time on Reddit for saying “good” to the news article that talked about a dog breed being banned in the U.K., the ban was for “racism” or some shit. Which was fun, because, it’s a dog. They’re a dog. They tried to make it out as being some sort of anti-black comment. It’s not. I’m a black people. Get fucked.

The second time, it was similar bullshit: they accused me of threatening someone. I did not.

Now, you’ve accused me of sexualized harassment.

I won’t accept that.

Leaving a nice paper trail

I’m leaving this here because I’m marking the wall. I’m gonna tell everybody what happened, and that’s not a threat, nor a promise. I’m leaving this here because you’re full of shit and I’m not going along with whatever shit you’ve just pinned on me.

The comment I think I got banned for (because it happened directly after), was telling a bunch of people in Subreddit Drama that they weren’t treating a woman like a human being.

The situation is thus: there’s a lady who has a Patreon. She has a web comic, and everyone has decided to harass her. They suggest things like leaking her nudes off of her Patreon, and everyone there was saying of her, such bullshit like, ‘well, she needs to get a thicker skin’.

The fuck, you stupid dickheads? No she doesn’t. Leaking nudes is a crime.

I got banned from Reddit, permanently, for telling people that leaking nudes is bad.

I got banned from Reddit, permanently, for telling people to stop harassing a woman.

Nope. I won’t accept that ban as legitimate. Get fucked.

I won’t use the website anymore (quite frankly, the thing did nothing but piss me off); and when the time comes and someone asks me for an AMA, I’m going to have the distinct fucking pleasure of telling them why that won’t be happening.

But of all my bans, I think I might actually wear this one with pride.

I wasn’t sexual predator enough for Reddit.