The thread for flipping shits (and tables)

Gueeeeeess who must've missed a lab last week

and gueeessss who found out about five hours after the deadline that there was an assignment for it

The shit is wrong with me.

I'm angry at a lot of things beyond my control and in my control.

I'm also angry that I hadn't completed anything.

I want to flip my goddamn table, but it's too heavy, plus I want to keep my stuff on there.

This is not really me flipping the fuck out. This is more me venting, getting a weight off my chest. I need to, and I'm doing it here because I know you guys in particular won't mind. Thank you.

SpoilerShow

Tomorrow it'll have been ten weeks since my grandad's accident. He trundled out to the vegetable patch one morning, as is his wont, mucked around 'till elevenses then on his way back inside he tripped and fell at the edge of the patio. He was adamant that everything was fine and that he'd be back up in his feet in a moment, but thankfully my gran wasn't quite as optimistic. Given how it turned out he'd broken his hip and done his left leg in something terrible, it's rather fortunate she was there to watch it happen. Maybe not from her perspective at the time, mind.

At that moment I was packing for the trip up to Oxford we were to embark upon the next day; I said I'd stay at home when the call came through. I would have just been a deadweight anyway, and knowing me I'd have stood in the way of the ambulance crew or something equally useless. Grandad said he didn't mind; the last thing he wanted was a fuss and he knew how important the visit was going to be for me. I figured I'd get to see him when i got back. Hopefully.

For the first fortnight or so, gran was the only person he'd let visit him. He didn't want to cause too much trouble and dad was cutting a commission deadline pretty close as it was. But it did cause an issue; it did gran in, having to drive back and forth every single day, often needing several trips to cart all the stuff he needed up to the hospital. Upon every arrival, she said, without fail there'd always be a request for a bed adjustment, or a glass of juice, or a check of the TV guide; always something instead of the "hello" she'd expect. Or, rather, expected at first.

He finally let my dad visit him just after he took his first turn for the worse; a chest infection a fortnight after his admission. Gran collapsed on our sofa that afternoon. In her case, it was simply exhaustion and she was fine again after a nice cup of tea. Grandad got better too and was at last moved to a closer hospital a mere five minutes down the round from gran. Things looked up, though progress was slow.

I only got to see him a fortnight ago. Up until then, he didn't think he was in a good enough state - he didn't want me to come away fretting over him. He seemed a bit miffed about how he was still stuck in a hospital ward and he could hardly talk. His speech was somewhere between squeaking and croaking, and I felt guilty for being able to talk normally. When I entered the ward, he asked me to pick the fan off the floor from where it had fallen off a few minutes earlier (I'd been forewarned), then about how my driving lessons were going (he'd always looked forward to seeing me learn to drive, but my first lesson was five days before the accident. He's paid for just over half of them so far). He wasn't exactly perfect, but he was on the mend. The next day, some people were going to assess the house to see if he could go back home, so he was rather cheerful about that.

The day after, he caught something else. It passed, just, but afterwards he couldn't remember my visit. I haven't been since.

In the words of my gran, "we need to get Eric out of there whilst he's still got some off his marbles left". That bad turn postponed things, but last week a posh new bed was delivered and since upstairs will no longer be accessible, I spent the evening before helping mum and gran rearrange some furniture. I recall having joked about how I'd seen a picture once, taken two days before I was born, which showed that my grandparent's lounge hasn't changed at all in over seventeen years. "It's about time you redecorated," I said, and immediately felt like an arse for having done so.

The reason I'm venting here, though, is because this whole process has become excruciatingly difficult since that last setback. Gran has always been decidedly obstinate and awkward; irksome characteristics, but tolerable (barely)... until now. Getting grandad home was going to be a breeze, but once it became apparent he was going to need more assistance if he wanted to live anywhere other than a care home things got complicated. And thus recently there've been more arguments than usual; be it over trifles such as whether or not she should get the swivel chair recovered, more serious things like the inappropriate placement of the bed in a room where everything will be made all the more arduous, both for grandad and gran, or the really serious issues, like the fact that gran is convinced she'll be able to pay for the care grandad will need once he's back home from her own savings. It's all so frustrating and painful and depressing; not only do we have to deal with grandad's incapacitation but also gran's attitude towards it.

Dad gets me to answer the phone now. He's given up trying to talk sense into either of his parents and figures they're more likely to listen to me anyhow. They don't, although in gran's case that's generally because she never wears her hearing aid despite our incessant requests. I just wish I didn't have to dread Sunday evenings any more. I just wish gran would let us take care of things so that the arguments could stop. I just wish I hadn't let myself slip when it all got too much today and am thus brimming with regret over what I said.

I just wish I could cope. Fuck, if I can't cope whilst grandad's alive I really don't want to think about what would happen if he popped his clogs...

Almost Perfect
Splintered consciousness; secrets kept

I've struggled for a long time, trying to figure out who I am and what my place in the world is. I've always tried to present a clean slate whenever I go someplace new; so that people can tell me what they see rather than forming their preconceptions from preexisting prejudices, subconscious and conscious, social, political - and I can know how I should behave. So that I can understand my station and form a picture of the world around it. So that things are predictable, or at least understandable - not a world where everything changes every day.

I still don't know who I am; and no matter what I do, I can't figure it out. Some days I feel different than I do other days, and act accordingly. I can't even figure out what pronoun I should use.

If that speaks of mental disorder of any kind; you're probably right. Is it wrong to want to see a psychologist for validation, yet scared to do so for fear of being forced into a 'cure'?

You'll Regret That
Find a job you enjoy; and you will never work a day in your life

I don't know where I'm going. I've always thought I could grow up to be whatever I wanted. If I wanted to study here, I could, if I wanted to be overseas, I could do that too - but the parental units...ahhh. I don't want to go on and onnnn >_<

At this point, my mind is telling me to stop opening up; close, delete, stop exposing yourself to a world that doesn't care...

...b-but you do care? I'm scared, I'm scared that...

In short; I wish I could do arts. But I won't get to do arts. Instead, I'll be forced into engineering, a subject I don't want to do, in a country where I don't want to be, because it pays more and more reliably. Joy. And every day it'll be harder to give up, or easier, depending on how you look at it. In twenty years I'll look back.

Everyone has to give up on their dreams, don't they? Everyone has, in some way or another. Everyone's made compromises, yielded to reality. Everyone scrabbles for their own little scrap of happiness. Right?

And there are those who want it all! Now! And to the full! Refusing to yield - and for their troubles denigrated and cast aside and killed - left to die on the side of the road.

There we go again. I still don't want to post this. I probably won't, unless I can retain my nerve and STOP ARGUING FOR ONEEE SECONNND JUST ONE

Yes. That was one second. How very smart of me. Omnes: Ha ha ha!

Standardized Intelligence
These headings and subheadings just seem arrogant now I'm sorry ;-;

Exams. Why did I put these last? Is it because what happens now will define my life; yet there is so little I can still do at this juncture? I'm so sorry I'm sorry everyone; I've taken up everyone's time -

People
I-i-i

- I can't handle people. There's something wrong with me; something is not right upstairs. A properly working machine is not supposed to break down!

But not 'right' or 'normal' doesn't mean that I'm not me!

...I feel like I'm turning water into whine :3

NO
AT ONE POINT IN LIFE I HIT THE SATURATION MARK OF YOUR FUCKING BULLSHIT

It all started a year ago! Mom had this super dumb case where she had pain in her neck. Asshole Doctor Extraordinaire Michel Creemers, one who has a track record of denying me bedrest when I have flu/40° fever/malaria and aids at the same time, called it stress, which every doc-to-be knows is a bull-fucking-shit excuse for "fucked if I know, DWI lol"

TURNS FUCKING OUT, ASSHOLE CREEMES, mom has four hernias. in her neck Just to give you an idea: FOUR HERNIAS ALL NEXT TO ONE ANOTHER, IN HER MOTHERFUCKIN NECK. I heard that the germans call that: NOT STRESS. APPARENTLY YOU HAVE A LOT OF TROUBLE WITH THAT

but let's move a coordinate to the left and shoot a fucker down there. mom has a boyfriend yay! he is a dick. Let me write out what I'd tell him if my wonderful idea of "national tell someone they suck without repercussions" day gets implemented: His authooritarian boy-scout sherlockism drives me insane, and until he can finally fucking realise that I have a problem with him, not with mom, I am giving the FULL FUCKING RIGHT TO HIS DAUGHTER who left him to go live with her mom, and 1000% TRUTH to his other daughter who moved out to not deal with his shit anymore. (that last daughter got dragged back to live with him due to her grandma dying. another story I end up being the fucking butt of)

AAAAANYWAY guess what I hate dogs. I hate them with some sort of passion that when compared to any amount of suns is going to gut all of them from the arse down and tear their supernovas out through their fucking throats. GUESS WHAT: mom knows, this boydfriend knows this and pretty much everyone in my near vincinity can smell it from a block away that I would rather take your dog, kill it and hang its corpse from the big ben than stroke it once. GUEEEEEEESSSSSSSSS WHAT boyfriend came up with as a way to relieve mom's pain?

i'm not even gonna say it it is just that fucking irritating. IT WAS A CHRISTMAS GIFT

BOYFRIEND KILLED CHRISTMAS

the dog is right downstairs making a noise I can only elaborate as "rice krispie gladiators"

mom has been fighting an uphill battle so far at her job, her boss was a dick, etcetc. She is now retired, pending how much she's gonna make. basically I'm poor now. yeah, my mom is retired and i have no cash. MOOOROE BULLSHIT YEAY

SO MEANWHILE i still have a dad, who sucks, and who apparently forgot how the parent treaty works: since recently he got this tremendous idea: LETTTTTS SPLIT THE TRAFFIC COST. om wants to go to her bf who also lives middle of nowhere: which adds up to about 2.5 hours per car. WITH THE FUCKING DOG.

and here dad is insisting that I start driving school, get a new PC so I don't have to tF2 on my bro's pc, and basically being a fucking bitch about me, and my llife, and everything I stand for.









siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

I have one assignment that I have barely started due on thursday, and three others due on friday.

This means I have to count up all my observational drawings and probably do some extra if I don't have 16 decent ones, do another 7 A4 size patterns (doesn't sound like much but each one takes a few hours D: ) and somehow pull 3 full page advertisements out of nowhere by the end of the week.

Also $70 phone bill right when i didn't need to spend any more money ;________________________________;

So between an incredibly shitty day at school yesterday, a fuckton of college applications to deal with, and still wanting to draw and keep up with grand battles while simultaneously feeling awful about the quality I bring to both, my self esteem is basically at an all-time low. I'm constantly second-guessing myself and I literally cannot remember the last time I thought of myself as competent. Oh, and since I missed math class Thursday because I was in Pennsylvania, yesterday's and today's classes are basically COMPLETE WASTES since I need to get one-on-one help from the teacher for them to make any goddamned sense.

Everything

Is

The worst

And I can't

Do

A thing

guys I think I'm dying of sodium poisoning from bad popcorn

If I disappear for more than two months I'm probably dead and I will all my characters to Fogel

If I actually survive this I will probably never ever eat popcorn again

Quick MrGuy! You gotta get that sodium out of you! Pee like your life depends on it!!!

I am so sick of MSPA. I'm really ready to just be rid of it.

For the last two+ years my internet life has been dominated by my time spent on a forum expressly designed to tout the praises of a single comic author. Anytime I talk to someone about my internet doings I say "Oh I go on the MSPA forums." And they either have never have heard of it, or are like OH YEAH HOMESTUCK.

I am ready to move on with my life. Ready to settle in on my future.

I've been looking at all these Physician's Assistant programs, the vast majority of which I do not qualify for (yet. hopefully.) They're all Master's Programs, which is great. I already have a Bachelor's of Science so that is the next logical step. Its going to be a while though, probably the next several years of my life are going to be devoted to getting accepted and succeeding in one of these programs.

While going through these schools I realized that Master's degrees have sub-categories just like Bachelor's degrees. You can get a Master's of Arts or a Master of Science. The Physician Assistant programs fall under the latter category.

I was looking at one school that I could possibly be a competitive applicant for, when I noticed what they called their program. What many schools call their program and what I have been struggling to get accepted into for the last year and a half.

"Masters of Science of Physician Assistant."

Motherfkning

M.S.P.A.


I do not know what I am going to do with this information.

Oh hey there depression symptoms, long time no see.

plaid wanna have a picknick
i think I know a certain missus random anger i'd like to hook depression up with

Mine already comes with random anger, with an added side of lashing out at people! But sure, there's always room for more rage.

Guuuuuuuys I'm at work now and it's like 9am, and barely anybody else is in.

I'm more nervous that perhaps the situation warrants, considering the Hilgendorf Building (one I can see across to from my sixth-floor office) was decided to be an "earthquake risk" so you're not supposed to go in it any more.

On top of that there was a fence between Hilgendorf and my building, and I wasn't sure whether I was on the right side of it. It's kinda freaky.

I can't write essays and I'm gonna flunk a class this semester because of it. Simple enough.

I am terrible at managing my own time and put off work that I don't want to do in order to do forum stuff that I do want to do and end up not actually doing either of them and just sitting there refreshing web pages and thinking "I'd better start that thing I'm doing"

I thought coming close to failing an early module last year had given me the kick up the backside I needed (I caught up later by applying myself) but I seem to have forgotten how to again
Need to get my shit straight soon I can't afford to coast any more

god I post in here a lot okay

so it's senior year and I'm in the play as well as band as well as helping kids learn math so naturally I'm super busy. This week in particular was a very busy one with a concert going up and a math test on friday and some therapy appointments

so naturally this is the week my immune system decides to be a little bitch and give me a sore fucking throat the first half of the day and terrible leg cramps the second. I feel absolutely terrible and the goodwill I was coasting on since seeing The Muppets has basically fucking evaporated. And I can't take the day off tomorrow because I'm just too fucking busy to afford it.

knowing my luck I'll have this shit until sunday/monday evening, preventing me from getting a single sick day.

Depression stuff round two!

The managed to bugger off mostly until yesterday, at which stage I promptly went to feeling happy for getting presents to feeling awful and not feeling like I deserve anything, which then promptly slid into short tempered lashing out at people for no reason again. Awesome.

Also the underlying 'everything you produce is shit and no one cares so what is the point of it anyway' stuff has come back to the surface. Yaaaaaay

Plaid I have seen your drawing and it is excellent so don't you dare think that!

Also I actually feel much better today so consider my shit un-flipped.

Awww, thanks D:

Oh hey thanks dad.

Start a fifteen minute car ride with "so you're turning twenty tomorrow"; then manage to bring up every single fucking insecurity I could've aspired to have in regards to my getting older before we reach our destination.

I can't even start on a reasonable discussion with you because you assume my computer usage is the root cause of everything from my lack of friends (I've apparently got enough friends to break your caravan, bitch) to insufficiently sparkly grades last semester and prior (nope, or at the least we can attribute last semester's paltry offerings gradewise to SAD (if that's a real thing) or ~*~actual~*~ depression symptoms. Take your fucking pick).

Schazr do not listen to him, you are an awesome person. Your avatar is a rotating picture of a spider you caught and can roughly identify off the top of your head. You've gotten yourself an awesome job which constantly generates neat stories and fun times. And of course you are just a pretty fun chick to be around in general.

Right so I've been meaning to get a lot of shit off my chest and I've got quite a few things to say but I'm going to stick to the one at the forefront of my mind right now.

Bit of back-story first. I've never been on particularly good terms with my dad. He's well-meaning, I'll give him that, but he's authoritative and he has that insistence that he's right no matter the circumstances. Last summer he had some plan to force me to get a job or do something over summer (his words were probably about how I spend too much time on the computer) by taking away my computer and laptop and so on. It sort of backfired-- I didn't get a full-time job (which was what he no doubt wanted) and I didn't stay off the computer (instead I spent most of the day locking myself in my room with a laptop, complaining to friends online). I was sort of stuck in this perpetual cycle of misery because there was no way I could meet his goals and my normal release mechanism was cut off from me. It progressed to a point where I outright told him I was contemplating suicide (which I was, a decent amount of time was spent trying to convince myself it's a bad idea), and even then it took another three weeks before we did any sort of therapy.

Seeing a therapist did help. Sort of. It meant there was someone between the two of us, and he did relent. I did two days per week of volunteer work at one of my city's nursing homes-- not the best volunteer work I've done, but enough to get my dad off my back (admittedly he wanted something like five days a week, which I politely informed him was not likely to occur). After maybe three weeks of this relationship I left for college.

College sort of helped our relationship, honestly. It meant I could do whatever I pleased and wouldn't have to deal with his demands, I could call and he'd offer support and such and I'd tell him that yes, I'm avoiding being an asocial basement troll. But uh, now I'm back for winter break and I feel like he's learned nothing. He's still got this insistence that I'm incapable of taking care of myself and that I spend too much time on the computer and it's his responsibility to make sure I do all of these things that only he cares about.

I feel self-destructive right now, honestly. Like I sort of just want to burn everything, damn the consequences. I feel like things are the beginning of summer again and I want to tell my dad that no, my plans for winter break don't involve getting a job and working out and talking to people and that I'd much rather sit in front of a computer and talk to people I'll never meet in real life and write about a psychic space leech and a cyborg bird and try to reinvigorate my pixel art habit and hang out with friends before returning to school.

I'd really like to tell him that but I know I never will.

I like to think that most of the time I am not a very hateful person. There are few people I dislike (hell, I can't think of anyone on this board, and less than I can count on one hand on MSPAF) who I dislike, even fewer that I can say I outright hate.
In fact I can only think of one guy I really can't stand.

Unfortunately he also owns the webspace to the board of which I am admin.
Does that situation sound stupid to you? It is. There is basically no reason for this to be the case at all, this is how it happened:

SpoilerShow

Everyone is playing a fun forum game on Forum A
Forum game gradually takes up more and more threads
Some users on Forum A are (justifiably) annoyed that their subforum is filled with this single forum game, but as this is a fairly large community (as in bigger than MSPAForums, I just checked and it has more than 10 times the currently online users as MSPAF does right now) there is basically no chance of any subforum being created for it
Forum B is created so we can play our silly forum game in peace, a solution with which basically everyone is happy as it also allows far more structure
This works fine for a few months (possibly even years???)
Some people on Forum A decide they want to play the game, I am not sure how they missed the creation of the new forum (maybe they went on holiday for a year?) but they decide to do it on Forum A
It catches on again and surprisingly does receive it's own subforum, despite being a community of maybe 20-25 people on a board which regularly holds 6000 active users at a time
Suddenly Forum A and Forum B both notice that they both exist
Predictably instead of joining together in perfect harmony it devolves into a lot of snark and bitching about which forum is best and how everyone should be playing there
Over time a couple of people just join both forums and show everyone that actually there's cool people in both places and they're being stupid (COUGHITWASMECOUGH), though despite this they keep running as separate communities because it would just seem like a waste of effort convincing everyone on one board to move to the other
One day there are rumblings on Forum A that the admins are implementing a restructuring, removing a lot of useless subforums and merging similar ones. There is mass panic! Surely our subforum is going to be on the kill list! It is proposed that everyone just joins Forum B
"NO!" says one member "JOIN THIS FORUM I JUST MADE AND AM PAYING FOR INSTEAD!", so for some reason everyone does
This avoids absolutely no problems at all, because now we still have to convince everyone in Forum B that upping sticks is a good idea, but somehow we manage

Note that this means abandoning a reference subforum containing 547 topics and a game archive containing 219 (we're artists, nothing ever gets finished)

Ironically the subforum on Forum A isn't even deleted despite being the tiniest target audience there is, although then it is later because everyone left out of fear it was going to be deleted

Still, after both communities were united on this one single board everything seemed to be going sort of OK, there were no arguments about which board had been better and people seemed to forget they had ever been two separate communities in the first place.
We try and run a vaguely democratic system where the staff are elected by the members and any particularly important changes are also voted on.
Except, of course, it turns out that it's impossible for the person who creates the board not to be admin.
And then it turned out that really he just wanted to host it so he could be god king of the community (and that's my title damn it, but that's not why I hate him (honest!!)).
Yes, he was paying for the hosting space, but no that does not mean he should be allowed to be above the rules. He deleted the posts of anyone who disagreed with his (often honestly slightly ridiculous) opinions in topics and when someone sent him a (admittedly slightly rude) PM asking why their post was gone they recieved a month long ban. It took me and my wonderful partner in crime (except the opposite of that because we're staff members) about a page of arguing to get him to reduce it and then still had to covertly drop the ban time in the admin CP after he'd stopped paying attention before he'd reverse the thing.

Eventually it took me quoting several absolutely terrible things he said about both his position and other board members in public so everyone else could see what was going on (he'd also delete any post in which I reprimanded him along with his own :|) before he backed off a bit and vowed that he'd just stick around as admin so he could fix technical problems.
Despite promising that he still struggled incredibly hard against the idea that someone who wasn't him was in charge, reversing changes that (as I mentioned earlier) people had voted on and arguing against any action me or the other staff guy took.
He is basically an intolerable douchebag that we can't get rid of.

Oh and he's participated in a grand total of one out of the two hundred game topics we've had since the forum's creation.

And it was patently obvious that this was going to happen ever since the very beginning.
This isn't the first time this guy has offered his hosting services! Previously, he ran an image host purely for users of both forums which was very kind of him. The one day he got bored of the game, killed the file host and deleted everything. I mean fine, he was paying for it out of his pocket (with advertising) but he didn't think to let anyone back up their images first or warn them.
There were countless topics then rendered completely unreadable to anyone, considering the game is very heavily image based.
Then everyone decided to think "nah, he won't get bored and abandon his duties this time"

Now that's all bad enough
BUT THAT'S NOT EVEN WHY I AM POSTING THIS

In the recent months he's actually barely done anything, to my honest relief. He sort of seemed to have lost interest again to be honest, but is still hosting the board. He pops in occasionally to ask "any technical problems?" so he can appear to be actually useful, to which we always reply no.
Oh, except this time we didn't say no! Two of our members (one of whom is the beautiful Sanzh with whom you are all surely acquainted) are suddenly completely unable to post, receiving an error whenever they try and post or log out. And on top of that, the forum has actually been out of date for at least a month, with a red box popping up saying "your forum is out of date, please update to the latest version downloaded from here to apply vital security updates and bug fixes"
So we asked him if it were possible to look into a solution to the bug (my staff partner did actually find a solution but it turned out it was for a newer version than we were running) and update the forum. To which he answered "no".
Despite being the only person with access to the board's code and the file hosting, and thus the only one able to apply any code changes or board updates.
Despite the fact that he had changed the board architecture from one me and the other staff member understood purely because it was easier for he, on his end, to update.
Despite this being the one thing he was expected to do and that he himself had promised to do.
Despite the fact that someone being unable to post on a message board removes the point of them even being on the board in the first place.

Because apparently updating the board would remove the two manual changes he made by himself (these being "coloured names for staff" and "rotating avatars won't bug out and look awful" (oh and that second change didn't even work)) and thus is too much effort to fix the problem that some of our users suddenly can't post (and there's no guarantee the number is not going to rise from two, they didn't both lose this ability at the same time).

I politely (that is not sarcasm) pointed out these facts. This was his response verbatim:

I wont be repeating any work, my work here was done a long time ago.

So yeah. This is the one man I actually hate.

I'd be perfectly happy to pay for another message board myself and in fact I would have done this over a year ago and avoided this whole thing if he hadn't just said "I'll do it" and hosted one without asking anyone (when we already had a board and never needed a new one in the first place).

But now that would take convincing our fifty odd members to move again, abandoning another 175 army reference topics and 205 game topics over stuff that has almost entirely happened behind the scenes where they can't see it. Only the tiny cool crowd that hang out in our underpopulated IRC channel are aware that anything bad is happening at all, and even then they only know bits of it and despite being pillars of the community I don't know how well their opinion would sway anyone else's (if it even aligns with mine at all).

And I am not sure if I would even be able to manage that if I even tried.