Thread "2015 Rant/Share/General Discussion thread" in forum "Comic Talk and General Discussion *"

Posted at 2:02AM, Feb. 6, 2015

ozoneocean wrote:
Oh, and there were no geeks or nerds or jocks. Those American TV tropes (do they have a basis in reality?), did not exist for us.
Team sport was not thing in Australian schools so none of that dynamic could happen.

This really surprises me! I'd assumed it was a big thing over there, probably because of the mad rivalry that goes on with any kind of Australia v England sporting match. If the team sport thing isn't being drilled in, It must just be some kind of intercontinental hate thing? All of this stuff goes over my head.

We definitely have a lot of that in our schools, or did when I was there. I've always been suspicious of any kind of physical group activity. If we're talking bullying, physical group activity seems to be a breeding ground for that kind of thing, with people bonding over whatever chemical rush is released into the brain and their shared hatred of anyone who wasn't up to scratch. Fortunately for me I was big, ugly and stubborn enough to avoid bullying and not care about peer pressure or the consequences of not giving in to it. No, team captain, I am not one of 'the lads'. My sense of self worth is exponentially related to how low an opinion 'the lads' have of me!

The only proper bullying me and my friends encountered was towards the end of our school careers, when socially inadequate members of the year above started to go out with girls from our year. They would mark their territory by picking on us. I can't really blame them, full of hormones and lacking the wit, charm and personal hygeine to attract girls of their own age. It's says more about the girls we had considered friends to be honest, who on reflection were equally responsible for this behaviour. Some people have a much worse time though. I used to think, if these are the best days of our lives, just how crappy are our lives going to get?!

Posted at 2:02AM, Feb. 6, 2015

There were definitely nerd and geek groups at my school and those were my favorite ones! I really want to write a response to this discussion, but before I do, I need to preface it with this:

Oz, your high school social life sounded like Freaks and Geeks, Mean Girls, The OC, 90210, Twilight, and The Breakfast Club all rolled into one. Oh my, what an entertaining read.

Posted at 7:02AM, Feb. 6, 2015

Freaks and Geeks hit very close to home. It was set in 1980 and I went to HS 1978-1983. Except we had no idea what a geek was. Freddie Blase the pro-wrestler popularized the term in the 1950's(?) but we didn't use it. In fact i created a mythical animal that was a globe with two eyes and huge feet that I called a geek (though I spelled it ghek)

But nerd was everywhere. I was an off-the-wall nutcase loner with a love of the whimsical and passionate interest in military history. I never went out and had few if any friends and in fact was terrifed of talking on the phone. True social anxiety. I was terrified of social interaction and crowds. An aftereffect of my grade school torture at the hands of various bullies.

I was a totally non-social misanthrope. Better to be silent and thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. And everytime i did open my mouth I was the fool or said dumb things. My lessons in social interaction came from Monty Python and Saturday Night Live. (The John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd years)

Some friends nicknamed me "Marvin" after Marvin perennially negative and depressed robot from Hitchhiker's Guide. And I was known throughout the school as an artist, actor and writer. But I rarely spoke. 2013 was the 30th HS reunion and I reconnected with a lot of people. It turned out that everyone remembers me but I remember practically no one. High school to me was "make school or die" a reference to the French Foreign Legion "March or die" Do my time in school and get out.
My HS years are not romantic but a time of inability to interact with my peers, terrible fear and missed oppurtunity. And I was the star of the Drama club, literary magazine and art class. I could perform but not interact. My legacy was to have a teacher swear to never again give essay tests because of my horrible handwriting.

In 1989 I moved in to share a house with some people I had known in high school. One who had known me rather well told me I was a completely different person from the one he had known in High school.

Posted at 7:02AM, Feb. 6, 2015

The social dynamics are what make the school experience simillar to the films, but if I could actually replay those years I'd have ignored all that and just studdied properlly and done the work like I was supposed to. I wouldn't have refused my parent's offer of private schooling and I would've done all the school work I was supposed to there as well.
It wasn't until university that I realised that working hard and taking stuff seriously gets you places.

Thank goodness you can't replay stuff! Ever onward and ahead! :D

@Scarf - Serious tesm sports for Aussie school age kids have always been after school activities and kids that do them are likley to come together from different schools and ages: Cricket, tee-ball, softball, swimming, little athletics, Aussie rules football, rugby, baskectball, soccer, etc.
Competative School sports are limited to "house sports": Different school teams among the school "houses", or "factions". Stupid athletic stuff like running, high jump and all that kind of thing. And EVERYONE competes in it so there are no groups or cliques of sporty types. If anyone tried they'd be thought of as morons since there's no prestige or point in specialising that way in school sports that it becomes your social focus.
Though being GOOD at sport was still very highly regarded, as long as that wasn't ALL you were good at, if it was then you'd be one of the freaks or the wannabes.

Jebus, I should stop going on and on about it, hahaha!
Scarf and Bravo your expereinces were pretty interesting.

Posted at 4:02AM, Feb. 8, 2015

So I finally got something I had ordered from China back in December. It was a tiny little letter-sized slip of package. Though posted on January 3 it didn't arrive in the USA until January 23. Then it sat in San Francisco for two weeks. Someone drop it behind the machinery in the postal sorting facility?

All the other stuff I ordered form Asia at the same time arrived within a week. Guess this one had to be at the long end of time in transit to even out the average.

Posted at 10:02AM, Feb. 9, 2015

I started off my education training pretty early. One of my preschools was swimming-based, and I was one of the best swimmers in my year and that gave me a lot of confidence. I was admitted into a Magnet elementary school in Northside Chicago because I was able to pass a reasoning test that asked the simple question: Where does bread come from?

Kindergarten was similar to the preschools I attended, I made friends quickly. But after the first week, my mom was called into a teacher's conference because another little girl told her mom that a girl in her class had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack that was meant for boys. She was talking about me and there was a concern that I was not fitting in with the gender norms of little girls my age. I loved the Ninja Turtles, Michelangelo was my favourite and I was very proud of my backpack. My mom was worried that I would be labeled as a Tomboy, so the following day, I remember walking back to the store to trade in my super cool TMNT backpack for a Little Mermaid one. I did not talk much after that.

Bullying still existed when I was in school. It was more of a right of passage based on where people sat on the bus. The little kids sat in the front and the rudest rabble-rousers sat in the back and would bully the people who sat in the middle rows the entire ride home. I was usually able to slip under the rader of the mean boys on the bus because they would focus their attention on the younger males. One of my good friends on the bus was continuously picked on because of his weight, but when he grew-up, he ended up starring as the main character in a pretty well-known American sitcom on FOX. I guess that is a type of poetic justice.

I believed that bullying was a lot more gender based because little girls can be just as cruel to other little girls based on silly things like hair accessories or the number of beads or embroidery string in a bead box. Some of the girls in my class were really mean and used popularity as the benchmark for being cool or deciding who was worthy enough for their friendship. I narrowly escaped being ostracized because I sat next to one of the "popular" girls on the bus.

I was able to leave all of the ugliness and judgemental behavior of my peers behind when my family moved West to California. I was given a clean slate and reinvented a new persona for myself that was based around academic achievements and I was not held back by my elementary school years.

___

High school was a whole new monster to navigate socially, but I was fortunate because I was able to keep the friendships I made in middle school as a foundation. I went to a really large high school of more than 3,000 students. We had every single high school stereotype under the sun: jocks (football), cheerleaders, goths, emo kids, track runners, skaters, surfers, nerds, loners, ROTC kids, ethnic-based groups, stoners, artists, Christians, Republicans, ASB, queer, drama, ballers, band geeks, and the list goes on and on. There were just too many students to keep up with the popular kids because I had no clue who was considered popular due to the fact that the school was too big.

I found my identity as a JV and Varsity letter-earning member of the academic team. I would sneak into the Magic the Gathering room during lunch and play chess against random people until I would win or they would forfeit. Overall, I was too preoccupied with college acceptances to focus on the drama and cliques of high school.

Now looking back at the hilarity of high school stereotypes, I must say that I loved solidifying my own unique identity during my college years. However all of my experiences, even the negative ones from elementary school have all played a major part in shaping my personality today.

Posted at 5:02PM, Feb. 9, 2015

kawaiidaigakusei wrote:
But after the first week, my mom was called into a teacher's conference because another little girl told her mom that a girl in her class had a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle backpack that was meant for boys. She was talking about me and there was a concern that I was not fitting in with the gender norms of little girls my age.

That is so sad, kawaii! I had something slightly similar happen in first grade, although it wasn't gender-based. I can't remember exactly what the issue was, but basically I wasn't doing something I was meant to be doing even though all the other kids were. Rather than just telling me what I was meant to be doing, my teacher phoned my parents to complain. My mom and I haven't always gotten along, but I'm still indebted to how awesome she was in this situation. She told the teacher that I wasn't like the other kids and I wouldn't just copy whatever they did, and that that was a good thing. Basically, I was given the message early on that it was okay to march to the beat of my own drummer. Probably not a message that served me well in terms of popularity in high school, but I still appreciate it.

—

I always find American high schools in TV shows/movies to be really strange. Like, cheerleaders? I think we probably had them, but they weren't the "popular girls" or anything. The "nerdy" group was just the IB kids, and their being friends was more a result of being in all the same (small) classes all the time. I spent most of my spare time in the art room and just talked with whoever happened to be there, or no one. When I wanted to hang out with people it was either the IB kids or a group of slightly geeky/strange kids who hung out in the same alcove all the time. I found both groups to be too dramatic for my liking, though, so whenever arguments arose I would just slip off to the art room again.

Posted at 4:02AM, Feb. 10, 2015

Wow, what kind of a mother picks on another person's child about their gender identity? That woman must have been a Z-grade loser. Probably had some serve idenity issues… Poor old closset case, repressed by society so she represses eyerone else in retaliation.

Man, my sister LOVED toy cars when she was little, especially racig cars. She wanted to be a racing car driver when she was older. I on the other hand loved dressing up and making clothing, hinking about hairstyles, outfits and hats. Neither of us are gay. My sister is a very girly girl who just happens to love cars. I'm arty and my outfit thing has gone into collecting hats, and assembling Hussar outfits, antique white tie and morning wear etc- collecting vintage clothing mainly.
Though I just finished putting together a killer pair of cheetah print flared jeans. ;)

Posted at 7:02AM, Feb. 10, 2015

I've got the opposite end of the spectrum with bullying now.

My kids.

I took my eldest (9) to the local skate park, well local to me. He doesn't know anyone in the area so he minds his own business skates and tries to be friendly. He is a bit on the clumsy side so not much of a skater, he doesn't fall off but not tricks, nothing flashy. When I take him up I sit at a distance and let him have his fun, he started talking to a group of lads, who after a little while started picking on him. He asked me to go over and tell them to stop being mean to him. They were swaearing at him and taking the piss because he couldn't do any tricks. I didn't because that would make it worse, instead I gave a little advice on how he would deal with it and asked if he wanted to leave. He tried his best but they were caught up in group mentality and just continued being rude regardless and he decided to leave after a bit. Still not sure I di the right thing, but I figure if I stepped in then he will get more shit for getting his dad to fight his battles for him.
Problem is he used to fight his battles a little too well and lash out, have worked very hard to rein that behaviour in it has gone the other way.

He's too soft and sensitive. He's like me in that, I was a sensitive kid and got bullied so much I ended up raging. Eventually I learned to control it but it caused me a lot of trouble, both in fighting and later becoming a target for the "tough" kids to prove themselves against. I wanted to avoid that for my son but now it seems to have gone awry, and despite being very intelligent he takes things to heart and his heart rules his head. Where as young ozone was able to be clever about it his emotions cloud his judgement. An additional problem is he's on the autistic spectrum and social interaction is hard for him at the best of times. I'd keep him away from everything if I could but that's no solution.

My middle son (6) used to be far more interested in girls toys than boys. He used to like to dress in his sisters clothes and when you asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he would say "a Queen" That seems to have been a bit of a phase as he is very much a typical boy now.

Posted at 12:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

Ugh. This gender thing can be a headache. Especially when people pry into other people's business. But sometimes we get this as grownups. Long ago, I'm shopping at the grocery store when one of the male shoppers comes up to me and tells me I'm not supposed to hold the basket in the crook of my elbow. And the reason? Nothing about health, more about how only "ladies" are supposed to do that.

I bet somewhere out there, some guys are raging at the celebrity chefs and cooks in The Food Network because of their profession… which is supposed to be female only. Then again maybe the ragers have been living in a rock since the 1950's and can't accept anything outside of what they were taught as children… hmm…

Posted at 2:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

This is why I am so scared to have kids In this generation. How is it we have progressed so much, especially in gender identifying, homosexual rights and acceptance and the sorts; yet it seems the bullying has gotten worse? Maybe it's always been this bad but I have only become more aware of it as an adult. I'm sure cyber bullying doesn't help..

Posted at 2:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

Back when I were a lad (and this is going back quite a way I should stress) homophobia, sexism, racism and all the other favourites were definitely a lot worse - entrenched in the media as well as witnessed everywhere you went. That's not to say they've gone away, far from it, but at least there seems to be a general consensus that these are bad things now, which is progress of a sort. I'm going to start carrying a basket in the crook of my arm as of tomorrow.

As for cyber bullying, the internet is where the dark underbelly of humanity really rears it's ugly head, thanks to the anonymity. Why do we need anonymity? What's wrong with "If yer name's not down, yer not comin' in!"?

Posted at 2:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

ashtree house wrote:
This is why I am so scared to have kids In this generation. How is it we have progressed so much, especially in gender identifying, homosexual rights and acceptance and the sorts; yet it seems the bullying has gotten worse? Maybe it's always been this bad but I have only become more aware of it as an adult. I'm sure cyber bullying doesn't help..

I don't know if bullying has actually gotten worse. It's just gotten easier. Children have always been bad people, they're just bad people with iPhones now. With the increase in possible ways of communication, and the increased frame of reference for children nowadays, we can bully people in more different ways, and without even being in the same building.

Also, television and the internet diminish social skills a bit, or at least mold them into a form that is less useful in actual face to face social situations, so children need a longer time to learn the same level of social skills that earlier generations had to work with. They're probably hanging around a maximum level of bullying for a longer time, instead of the shorter period of maximum bullying that we all experienced.

I'm not sure I actually made sense, but all the thoughts I have on the subject are there in some way, so I'm done talking about the subject for now.

- - -

I miss Robin Williams.

- - -

Genders are stupid, and we'll never solve this problem until we come up with a few more of them. I'd prefer not to have a gender, and just be myself, but if a gender is required, I'd prefer to be a trunk person (Rick and Morty). Sadly, Michael Denny and the Denny singers will never let me be one.

Imagine not having a gender. You wouldn't share a gender with anyone, and none of your little quirks could be attributed to something you have no control over. You'd just be you. It seems like a much better way of being.

- - -

I got a new iPhone, even after Genejoke urged me not to get one. (I'm agreeing that they're overpriced, but they're also exactly what I want in a phone, and the one I got was on sale.) It's an iPhone 5s Gold 64 GB. I'm really excited about it, but I need to get a nano SIM card before I can force it to do my bidding, and I have no idea when I get a chance to pick one of them up somewhere. Supposedly you can cut a bigger one down, but I´m afraid of doing that. Does anyone have any experience with cutting into their own SIM cards?

Posted at 3:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

call yu phone service provider, they will send yo one out usually free of charge.

Posted at 4:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

Children have always been bad, and now they have iPhones.. Truer words have never been spoken Kroatz. Kids today scare me, I'm 26 and totally get intimidated by teenagers hahaha

Posted at 7:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

ashtree house wrote:
Children have always been bad, and now they have iPhones.. Truer words have never been spoken Kroatz. Kids today scare me, I'm 26 and totally get intimidated by teenagers hahaha

Haha, me too! I'm 21 and get a little bit nervous around teens, which is totally ridiculous. I think I forget sometimes that I'm not in high school any more, and don't have to worry about them mocking me (or if they do, I don't have to care any more).

I don't think bullying has gotten worse, just different, as you said. When my dad was a kid he got chased home every day by the school bully (Ronnie O'Tool - I always thought that was a perfect name for a bully). I think that kind of physical bullying has largely been supplanted by other forms, like cyberbullying. I also think adults take more notice of bullying now, which makes it seem more prevalent. Not so long ago, bullying was seemingly just a rite of passage in the eyes of most adults.

genejoke wrote:
Still not sure I di the right thing, but I figure if I stepped in then he will get more shit for getting his dad to fight his battles for him.

That sounds like a really tough situation. I really don't know what the best response would have been. I think at 9 years old it would still be appropriate for parents to get involved, though. Actually, when I was bullied in high school my mom took it upon herself to call the girl's parents and even then I (surprisingly) didn't face any backlash from her or her friends. Although I'm not sure it was all that helpful either.

Kroatz
Imagine not having a gender. You wouldn't share a gender with anyone, and none of your little quirks could be attributed to something you have no control over. You'd just be you. It seems like a much better way of being.

I like the idea that no one should feel that they have to act a certain way because of their gender, but I'm not so sure about gender-blindness. Or are you talking about a pretend world where physical differences don't even exist?

Posted at 7:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

Yesterday was my birthday. I think I'm older than all of you, except for maybe one or two others DDers. Or not. But it was a lovely birthday, and I'm just as glad that school days are long gone. I never much liked school because of the kids and teachers. I learned early on to view it all as a game. Find out what they wanted and, if it didn't cost me anything, then give it to them. I ended up with good grades and a few good friends.
But then when I didn't want to play along …

in Kindergarden my Mom was called in because I wasn't meshing well with the sudents. "Mrs G, please encourage D to not call the other children 'rambunctious hooligans', it only serves to distance her from her classmates"

in 4th grade my Mom was called into the Principal's office because I led 3 or 4 other kids into his office to complain about a lunch lady (she was a dreadful Fascist and had no business being around children – I rather said words to that effect)

My parents weren't entirely surprised. Afterall, to This Day they've kept my first complaint letter, To the Toothfairy, who had really fallen down on the job.

Then there was the time I was taking care of my much-younger sister while our parents were on vacation. She came home from school and told me about a fight she had gotten into with two other girls, twin sisters. I called the girls' parents, introduced myself to their Dad and apologized that my sister had overreacted when she had kicked one of them. "She had just been scared by their threats and when the first one hit her, she was so frightened that they were about to carry o—" "I'm sorry, but did you say they Threatened her?" "Well, yes, I'm sure it was onl—" "Hold on please" And then this Dad roared out to his daughters, thanked me for calling and mentioned he had something he had to deal with. Those girls did not bother my sister after that.

My son is autistic. Very high-functioning. He's learned to recognize when people are mocking him, and these days he does very well for himself. But there were some incidents when he was little where I stepped in. And I continued stepping in until some changes for the better were made.

There is no single right way to make complaints, or to handle bullying. But wringing hands – gah, I've seen too much of that. Imo, if you truly believe that there's a bad situation going on, even if it may not be within your power to remedy it, at least speak out. Maybe I've had success with this because I don't look physically threatening and I'm soft-spoken. But the "silent majority" is assumed to be a consenting majority – until they speak out.

Posted at 8:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

Happy Birthday, Ayes! Hope you have a chance to kick back, relax and look at the ceiling. With shades on!

Posted at 8:02PM, Feb. 10, 2015

Banes wrote:
Happy Birthday, Ayes! Hope you have a chance to kick back, relax and look at the ceiling. With shades on!

Oh. The shades come off on B day. :)

Posted at 1:02AM, Feb. 11, 2015

Merry birthdaymass Ayes!

Speaking of iPhone and bullying those bloody things are a whole new vector. My young niece has one and on one occasion I know about some kids that were mean to her got a hold of the stupid phone and changed settings, made posts from her Facebook account and used her phone as an internet hotspot.

IPhones unfortunately make that sort of thing much easier. With a different model you can lock down some of those functions.
Another issue is that kids are becoming LESS technically adept, unlike their parents, because now they mainly interact with very dumbed down userfirendly devices, Android, IPhone, Macs, Xbox, PlayStation etc.They can't troubleshoot problems as easily, they can more easily be taken advantage of by people who actually understand the tech they're using.

Posted at 2:02AM, Feb. 11, 2015

Hey, Ayes! Happy Birthday!!! :)

Hopefully I'm one of those DDers who may be older than you (I'm 43 at the moment).

Waitaminute… so we go from a generation who is tech savvy to the next which is less so? If I ever have children I'll make sure they learn tech so they're not going to be easily victimized. Especially by people who call you on the phone with a heavy Indian accent who claim they're from the Windows corporation who then tell you they detected something wrong with your computer…

Posted at 3:02AM, Feb. 11, 2015

Happy belated birthday Ayes! Hope it was great. Happy 29th birthday. Unless a woman indicates pride in her advancing years she's 29. (Like my sister saying "I'm 60 and you will worship your older sister")

As far as parental interferance with bullying? Just use the policing technique "presence". It's a varifiable authority technique. You see something wrong going on and you just walk over and check on stuff (indicating your position if you don't have a uniform.)

"Hi son, let me know when you want to go home. What are you guys up to?" The teacher glare at the other kids is optional. Make an innocuous statement that is not correcting the behavior just indicating that you are aware of it. Often that is all that is necessary. Presence. I'm here and I'm watching. Wanna find out what I'll do if I see you misbehaving? Try me mutha-fucka'

Posted at 3:02AM, Feb. 11, 2015

Happy Birthday Ayes'!

I too had assumed tech savvyness would continue to increase. Ozone's point explains why this isn't happening. I hadn't thought of that before and was completely bemused in those constant pointless traditional vs digital media debates, when younger artists turned out to be sticklers for pencil and paper.
It's like they would try one type of software, not like it much and then decide digital wasn't for them. It didn't seem to occur that there were other software options and that you'd have to customise these things to suit yout needs. Or maybe that just seemed too much like hard work.

Posted at 6:02AM, Feb. 11, 2015

I think it's a fine line on the tech thing, but I agree that because softeare is so user friendly it doesn't take much to get by. There is definitely a case of kids being software savvy but it ends there.
My job is all about mobile devices. I see the good and bad on most models, be it hardware or software, build quality, support from the manufacturers and so on. There are some distinct reasons I won't touch certain manufacturers with a very long barge pole.

Posted at 1:02PM, Feb. 11, 2015

Interesting: I need a new phone. Any pointers you can share?