Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

Wow... not feeling great today. I might have eaten a combination of things that wasn’t such a great idea, and now my insides make me feel icky. I took some imitation pepto, which will hopefully help. Kind of a random note too: I like the taste of pepto. I know some people don’t, which I never really got, because I just always thought it tasted quite nice. Maybe I’m a bit weird that way.

Anyway, last week I said I’d go over some things I missed then, so I might as well dive into doing that:

First off, a thread I got a bit annoyed with. The subject matter got to me first off, because the maker of the thread was asking people to give them things to put in a book they were writing. That’s not something I think people, especially those who want to be writers, should do. I think people should use their own ideas, do research, or read/listen to/watch something and modify it until it’s their own thing. One shouldn’t just ask others for ideas, especially other writers. We use ideas for our own stuff, why give them away when we could use them? It would have been different if the person was asking for help fixing something or working things out. He/she gave no details of the story other than it’s a high school romance where one of the people involved has a stalker. That’s a broad starting position, something that just pops up and a person plays with until they figure out what they should do in the story. It’s not specific enough to help iron out details with. And the maker of the thread wanted ideas to jam into the story. Ideas are great and all, but they might not match up well with the characters, which I think would drag down the story. Maybe I should have explained that rather than just asked why we should hand out our ideas, but I didn’t think of it at the time. I’ll try to make a mental note for future instances of people doing this though. The thread maker replied to my question by asking if I was writing a book and then answered the question his/herself.

stare I don’t refer to anything I do by what the end result might be, because sometimes I simply don’t know. I refer to what I work on as far as writing goes as writing projects. Maybe I’ll finish something someday and it will be a book, maybe it will be a series, maybe it will be in the form of a comic, maybe it will be a play, or whatever else, I don’t know. And again, maybe I should have explained this instead of giving the response I did. I was a little agitated at that point, so my response wasn’t the best. I pointed out that his/her assumed answer was incorrect, and that there were other reasons people write that don’t involve creating a book. I said “we” though, which probably caused some confusion in the reply I got with the person thinking I contradicted myself. I don’t think I did, since people can write for different mediums, and I’m probably one of such people. In the last section of that reply I also called what the thread maker was doing (asking for ideas to be handed to them), lazy. I’m not sure how harsh it sounds to others, but I did cut it down and retyped it several times before hitting submit, if that counts for anything.

The reply I got included at least three direct insults (calling me an idiot, telling me I’m a “failure in life”, and telling me I’m broke). I ignored all but the last of the insults because I’ve never understood how telling another person they have less money than oneself is an insult. My reply was quite long, as I tried to reply to each of the person’s points, but I also tried to not be too wordy as I often am. I also did my best not to insult the person back, though I might have done so in an underhanded way when I mentioned “careful readers”, told him/her to research the word “hobby” (implying they don’t know what it is or means), and I said something about what they’ve said to me made me think they don’t understand plagiarism. So, yeah, I’ve been bad too. Some of what I said was on the nice side I think. I told them not to assume they’ll be a famous author that makes a sh*t ton of money because that could hurt them in the long run. I told them that they should research, as other people on the thread suggested (who were ignored, by the way). I also said that if they needed help working out what to do with the story they’re working on, they could rework ideas so they fit into the story, or ask others to help them workout specific areas of their story, which I’ve done in the past and am currently doing, (though I started the current one after the person blocked me). The people on the forum can be really helpful in working out kinks and making a story better, after all.

After that long reply I gave, the person blocked me, saying I was arguing and not giving constructive criticism. The only other posts at that point on the thread told this person to go do some research, and nowhere before did he/she say they wanted constructive criticism. I won’t argue with what he/she said about arguing, because I might have been, I don’t know. I thought I was just replying, the thread maker might have gotten a different impression. Also, I’m pretty sure the person didn’t read anything I said, because I did give some advice. Not a whole lot, if I’m being honest, but some. Another person also chimed in on the thread telling them they were being rude to me and they should try to use their own ideas instead of asking others for theirs. That person was also blocked. The last post on the thread was the thread maker saying they wouldn’t get mad if people handed them ideas (no one said he/she should be mad about that), then they said it’s an “agree or disagree” thing and that people didn’t have to give them ideas. Then he/she said that other people didn’t need to be rude because they had writer’s block (first mention of that in the thread), and that telling this person to come up with their own ideas makes them worse. *sigh* The last post is aggravating. It’s like anyone who didn’t shoot sunshine out their a** and vomit rainbows at the thread maker was evil. Yes, I wasn’t the nicest, and neither was the person who chimed in after me, but we weren’t calling this person an idiot and cussing at them like sailors. We spoke our minds, and we happened to disagree with what this person was doing. At best I think we might have been stern, but also somewhere near neutral in what we were saying. The person seemed to also want to say it’s fine if we don’t agree with them, but the action of blocking makes it seem that’s either not true, or he/she doesn’t want to hear any of it. I’d quite honestly hate the forum if we weren’t allowed to voice disagreement with one another. It would be so boring...

Oh, and the cherry on top of all of this was a post this person made on another thread (page 2 post 2), in which they claim that people on the thread said or implied they were too lazy to read, which is wrong. Their post shows that the poster themselves obviously didn’t read the other posts, or if they did, they had some reading comprehension issues. It’s both sad and hilarious at the same time. All in all, my experience with this person has been disappointing, and I’m starting to become more wary of new people on the forum. It doesn’t happen all the time, but a few times I’ve posted on thread by people I didn’t recognize and they got angry at me. I don’t want to ignore new people because the forum needs them to survive, but I also don’t want stuff like this to keep happening.

Second thing I guess I could go over is the old lady I’ve been working for. I’ve earned a small amount money, and did quite a bit of work organizing for her. And sometimes when I go over there she moves stuff I organized emotion_donotwant I’ve expressed that this annoys me, and she’s said that sometimes it can’t be helped because she’s got stuff she needs to do. So, I supposed we’re at a point where we understand each other. Whenever she moves stuff I organize now, I just makes a funny face, bite my lip, and maybe make a joke about it instead of keeping it all bottled up so I get pissed off at her or anyone else like I used to years ago. I think this works out better because my frustration level seems less than it was back then. Or perhaps I’ve just matured a little, I don’t know. She also seems to trust me and my judgment when it comes to what I’m doing with organizing, which is nice. Not too many people have given me that amount of freedom before. It is kind of boring when I’m over there though. I keep wanting to bring my mp3 player with me, but I don’t have small earbuds to wear. I just have these big heavy earphones, and I don’t want to wear those when working. They make my ears sore, and can make it hard to hear people. They also use more of the battery than little earbuds would. Maybe I can make enough money to get some earbuds, though for now I need to use everything I earn form her for food, because roomie used his entire paycheck on bills.

Since I’m on the topic of money, I mentioned a few entries ago that my room mate is being more open to me getting a job, and he is keeping with that, however, we missed the most resent job fair. It wasn’t his day off, and I can’t navigate the busses to save my life, so I couldn’t go. He’s probably still going to help me look for something though because we need to income. Yay for desperation?

Also, in a follow up to last week’s entry, we did end up going to get the other cat and on Monday we turned both over to the humane society. On Wednesday, my room mate went to check to see how they were doing, after calling on Tuesday and getting run around by some a*****e who decided not to be upfront with him. Both are doing okay, and roomie says he’ll check up on them on Wednesday of the upcoming week. The skinny one with the walking problem turned out to be old, not hurt, so they’ll probably try to adopt him out. Older ones tend to get adopted less often than the young animals, so he doesn’t have a huge chance, but he’s a big old sweetie, so I have high hopes for him. I was hoping to maybe take him in ourselves, but we have three pets and can’t really take care of one that might need special help confused Oh well, even if he isn’t adopted, I’m glad he’s in the hands of people who can give him the basic things he needs, like medicine and food.

I can’t remember much else I wanted to talk about... I was considering top tens that were coming out at the start of the year. No one is able to watch, play, or read everything that comes out in whatever media format each year, so I was thinking if I made videos and wanted to do something like that, that I’d just make a highlights thing towards the end of the year or beginning of the next one. I wouldn’t have everything in the highlights be form that year either, but rather things that I found or wanted to talk about. I think I’d mostly point out things that were good in some way and that possibly not a whole lot of people knew about. I like discovering little things like that, and there might be other people who feel the same.

Lastly, most of this upcoming week is probably going to be in the eighties temperature wise. My room mate and I both think he needs to finish with the vents or get the owner of the building to hire someone to deal with it. I can’t make it through another summer in this house without proper air conditioning. I would probably die from heat exhaustion.

I think that will be it for this week. There is almost two pages worth of words in this entry, and I think that is more than enough.

WC:
F01 = 13693