Posts made by Aria

More real life funny than real life happy, but…

Today, one of my coworkers accidentally made the most wildly inappropriate comment at me and I cannot stop laughing.

I went to see Bush over the weekend. Today, I wore the shirt I bought at the concert to work. She was trying to tell me that she really liked the shirt and the outfit that I put together, but instead she said:

“I keep looking at your Bush, Aria. I really like it!”

It is only by the grace of God that I managed not to blurt out “Thanks! I grew it myself.”

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Aria said in MU Peeves Thread:

You can access it here.

My answer to the optional last question was “hire a regular person to try and read your books before you publish them.” But mostly I just want that job for myself.

Man, when I staffed their game servers, I volunteered for that job and they still wouldn’t let me do it. Not even just proofreading. Don’t worry! They have an editing service…

Then they published a book with a typo in the fucking title.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Roz ONYX PATH!!!!!!!!!

White Wolf – not Onyx Path, but ehh – is currently doing a community survey that will impact the future of their games as both TTRPGs, actual plays, and video games.

You can access it here.

@Juniper

Fun Fact: If you get the right kind of IUD, you can enjoy the benefits of not getting pregnant AND not having a period.

A+. Do recommend.

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Aria Faraday’s is live, it’s on Ares Central.

Ahhh, thank you! The old link I had for it died years ago, but I never bothered worrying about it because I’d switched to Arx and Ares games that logged right from their site.

Are there any log cleaners still around like the one that used to be on the Ares site a decade ago?

I recently started MUing on a game that DOESN’T use Ares or seem to have any code that logs scenes. I’m RPing and manually saving and cleaning all of my scenes for “lasts”, like a fucking savage. Just… what?

So today is my first day back in the office after PTO. When I was checking my calendar last night, I saw that my boss put a meeting on the books for first thing this morning with her and with her boss. I figured something went wrong with one of the projects I was working on with the boss’s boss while I was out and they needed to get me up to speed.

Uhh, no.

Turns out that when I found out how underpaid I am compared to my teammates last summer and lodged a complaint about that, initially got an ugly response, then they backpedaled hard and asked how much I wanted, only to get turned down? That request stuck around. My boss’s boss’s boss noted the complaint and when they did mid-year adjustments this year for people on the bottom end of salary bands, he personally lumped my name in with the ones that got sent to HR. Even though I was above the cut-off percentage for consideration.

My boss called a meeting to give me a 5% raise, on top of my end of year adjustment from 2023, because of something I bitched about a year ago.

@Buttercup said in Real Life Struggles/Support/Vent:

So, in the last couple of months I got to witness closing arguments in the NYC of Trump. My son and I went on an epic near 30-day road trip and visiting seven of the ten greatest national parks (Rocky Mountain, Tetons, Yellowstone, Sequoia, Yosemite, Zion, Bryce, and the Grand Canyon). Been an amazing journey.

But today in the line to get my box of bagels the cashier looked over to me and gave me a senior citizen discount, she let me know and I was horrified – I am 44.

So I went white early (late 30’s) and I can’t not sport a beard. I’m bald and keep my head shaved.

Should I dye the beard back red to its natural color? Or is that just a horrible decision for men?

I’m with the ‘enjoy the discount and don’t worry about it’ crowd. However, it’s your body and if it’s bothering you…

I wouldn’t go full beard dye. One of my former bosses used to dye his very white hair back to its natural dark blond shade and it was striking enough that I could always tell when his wife had done it for him that weekend versus when he was due for for a touch-up because of how much the color faded and how unnatural it looked for the first week.

I’d go with using a beard comb to apply it to some hair but not all of it and blending colors. (Kind of like highlights, but for your face?) I say this because my father-in-law is a natural ginger who, in the time I’ve known him, has now gone completely, solidly, kids would go ‘Santa!’ at him if he weren’t such a thin man levels of white hair and beard. But for the first decade I knew him, the blend of natural red and white looked blond and I - along with a lot of people - had no idea he was going gray at all. It wasn’t until I saw his wedding picture with my mother-in-law that I realized he actually had bright red hair and apparently, that was a response he got all the time for about 15-20 years.

On condition of his FeLV test coming back negative tomorrow…

We adopted the kitty they recommended to us - a ten year old little man currently named Steely Daniel, which is absolutely fantastic as a name but we’re generally not jamming out to “Reelin’ in the Years”.

I am trying to convince insomniac that his name should be Sir Catrick Stewart, instead.

He has a snaggle toofs and a wonky eye that we’re hoping is just some glaucoma and will be taking him to our regular vet ASAP to confirm.

@Snackness said in Pets!:

@Aria this might be a shitty and irresponsible thing I am about to tell you but you seem like you will use it for good so…find a poor rural shelter. Not a rescue. No hoops, no questions besides ‘are you allowed to have a cat.’ Walk out with cat.

I do appreciate this suggestion! We’re going with the group we picked because Philly’s animal control had a painfully low survival rate for years and though they’ve gotten much better, it’s not great and they’re currently full. (Yo, @Tez or literally anyone - you want a cat? Come to Philly.) I could very easily walk in the door and say, “Hey, I want a cat” and they’d shove three in my arms before I made it back to my car. The problem is that I don’t have the heart to walk into that building again. Even when I was doing transport for rescues and pulling seven cats at a time to redistribute to fosters and much needed medical care facilities, I’d end up leaving in tears because I’d have to watch other pets getting surrendered while I was in the waiting room. It felt like a losing battle, no matter how much good I was doing.

Fortunately, the shelter we’re going with is their biggest no-kill partner. So literally the space we free up will result in another kitty getting sprung from animal control within 48 hours to take that spot.

I’m just deep in my feels about because one of the cats we were considering looked like the little guy we lost to pancreatic cancer in early 2022. I spent about 2.5 seconds thinking their Instagram photo for him was me somehow stumbling onto my own feed by accident, then being confused about this pic I didn’t remember taking of Kolya. It’s dumb and life doesn’t work this way, but for just a little bit it was like the universe was giving me my cat back.

I am very happy he has a home and the kitty they’ve recommended to us badly needs one, but I’m still having a hard time feeling excited about it instead of feeling like I’m losing Kolya all over again.

So insomniac and I decided that we wanted to adopt another cat after seeing several posts about the local animal control facility being full (with the consequences that implies) and their primary local rescue partners also being full and unable to pull any animals.

We haven’t intentionally adopted cats from rescues since 2008. Every kitty we’ve had since then has been foisted on us by the Cat Distribution System. It’s been really weird and emotional to see one of the two cats we’ve been considering get adopted and knowing the other has a meet and greet with potential adopters today.

There’s lots of other kitties available, so I know we’ll find a match and I’m happy they’re going to good homes, but I’m not accustomed to this emotional swing of getting invested in and then sad about a furbaby I’ve never met.

@RightMeow said in RL Peeves:

RL Peeve is domain change. Not that it’s changing, but that I’m going to have to try and remember my password.

Most people use password managers for security.

I use password managers because ‘lazy’ is my fundamental personality trait.

My coworker’s partner is liquidating a lot of their inventory from their Etsy shop. So today they showed up with a bag full of block printed t-shirts for me and tried to foist them off on me for free, until I insisted on paying something for it.

(Pay artists. It’s a rule, not a guideline.)

My clothes are extra queer now and I am very happy.

I also enjoy reading descs, but I’m NGL - I will start scanning and glossing over bits if they get too long. No, I don’t have an objective standard that I consider ‘too long’, so much as there being a vibe of realizing that someone’s character is the most beautiful and magnificent creature to have ever existed, and also they are stunning, and also they are the tallest (or shortest!), and also their swanlike neck and arabesque limbs and also their bulging muscles of bulgingness and…

Yeah, bro. I get the gist and none of this is interesting, thanks.

That said, while I will never stop laughing at ‘luminescent lavender orbs’, which you can pry from my dead, bitchy, 90s WoD-playing hands? I’ll forever take a florid description over an automatically generated one that hasn’t even been edited, because the process and craft of writing matters to me. It is literally how I make my living and I have very strong opinions on the subject. Give me a bad writer who is trying to be better over someone who doesn’t think writing matters every time.

Our office opens at 8:30 AM. My workday begins at 9:30 AM – which is clearly posted on my office profile, my Outlook, and my Teams, the last of which provides a gray warning message that reads ‘Send during their normal working hours of 9:30 AM to 6:00 PM?’ if you try to message me outside that time.

If you, co-worker from a different department, call me multiple times in a row at 7:45 in the morning, I’m going to assume that it’s because it’s a fucking emergency and not that you want an update on something that’s already been reviewed and edited and which is not going out for another… <checks watch> four hours.

PS - When I call you back ten minutes later and you don’t answer the phone, and then ignore your Teams messages for the next 30 minutes, I’m going to be extra double pissed.

@STD said in MU Peeves Thread:

… Dare I ask, who is this Jill the Guest?

What Roz said above. It’s clearly a two part thing for them. You’ve got:

1. The medical/sports fetish part.
2. The unwitting participation of whatever female character bit they’re talking to.

As soon as Jill realizes you know who they are and what they’re doing, it ruins it for them. Last night they apparently bounced from City of Glass and moved on to Sixth Estate within a matter of minutes, dropping off each one once they realized the people they were speaking to weren’t giving them one or the other.

@Buttercup said in MU Peeves Thread:

@allthecookies

This is some torch being tossed down is it not?

Like one day you’re brought into a room and told this is a sad job but if you don’t do it the aliens will descend and destroy us all.

What if Jill actually is one of the aliens, desperate to connect with humanity? But sadly all they know of human culture is volleyball and high school sports physicals.

You’re not fooling me, Jill. You’re not fooling me!

Today was the sort of day where:

1. I finally had a long enough break in my work to shower at… 6:30 PM.
2. At 7:00PM, I had to log back in because one of my co-workers called me crying.

Also, our leadership has apparently decided that the best way to get us the additional writer/content producer we desperately need in 2025 is to… get rid of our project manager. At a time when our book of business has increased by 40%. Because that totally makes sense.

@bear_necessities said in RL Peeves:

I feel like this might be good for women who have had double mastectomies and got fake breasts? But I don’t know why you’d want them poking out like that.

I had briefly considered that, since my mother and grandmother both had breast cancer. But every silicone prosthetic that I’ve ever seen for them was designed with a hint of one already included and this bra doesn’t have the little pocket you’d put the forms in, anyway.

So I think this really is some sort Escherian, impossible object expression of women’s beauty standards?

“Show off your nipples! But not your nipples, because ew.”

@Snackness said in RL Peeves:

@Aria Everything about this is deeply weird.

Look, I don’t make the fake nipple bra rules here, man. I just bring them to everyone else’s attention like the friend at the candle store who goes, “Ohmigod, this one is repulsive. Here, smell it!”