Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[scriver]

There's always a bigger snail

[King Zultan]

Your gonna need a bigger boat snail.

[LordBaal]

I summon the bigger fish.

[Loud Whispers]

Yeah most fish just got the right temperament for predation; I suppose it's far more unnatural for them to be bereft it. Had to sell some Angelfish that had been aquarium reared from birth; they got along fine with other fish until one day they got territorial because of breeding and ate their rival Angelfish's eggs. All of a sudden they started going buckwild trying to see what else they could eat, which they (re)discovered was everything. Couldn't keep them in the big tank with all the small fish, and couldn't keep them in the small tank on their own for any long period of time, so had to say goodbye to the lovely boys and girls. Once they've had that taste of live flesh it's like their instincts reactivate as they connect the dots between small fish and food

[TamerVirus]

Whacky big money millionaire man John McAfee, whose life story is one big WTF after another, has uninstalled himself from life; dying in a Catalonia prison cell before being shipped over to the US for tax evasion related charges

[Loud Whispers]

RIP McAfee, whose sole regret was not dying free

[Grim Portent]

Yeah most fish just got the right temperament for predation; I suppose it's far more unnatural for them to be bereft it. Had to sell some Angelfish that had been aquarium reared from birth; they got along fine with other fish until one day they got territorial because of breeding and ate their rival Angelfish's eggs. All of a sudden they started going buckwild trying to see what else they could eat, which they (re)discovered was everything. Couldn't keep them in the big tank with all the small fish, and couldn't keep them in the small tank on their own for any long period of time, so had to say goodbye to the lovely boys and girls. Once they've had that taste of live flesh it's like their instincts reactivate as they connect the dots between small fish and food

My grandmother has told me she was put off keeping fish forever when she was a young woman because she had a tank with mollies, which are livebearers, and angelfish in it. The angelfish learned when the female mollies were pregnant and about to give birth, and would hang out below them and eat the babies as they were born.

Angelfish are fucking assholes really, which was something I keep in mind from my time helping at the pet shop and the community/non-community fish split we had. They need a very particular kind of community tank, and can easily outgrow most good community fish.

[Imic]

Dunno if this fully counts as a WTF, but I picked up the book Madhouse at the end of the world from a bookshop, and it has become one of only two books I have ever read which made me feel so physically unwell that I ended up lying on the floor for several minutes recovering. The other book was ‘The Electric State’, which I recommended to someone else who also became physically unwell from reading it, so I’m not 100% insane, at least.

Point is, the book is about all the horrible things that went wrong in one of the first serious expeditions to Antarctica in t ship called The Belgica. The vivid descriptions of the men’s declining mental health, declining physical health, declining tolerance of one another’s company, declining confidence that they will survive, and declining willingness to go below decks because of all the rats as the crew begins to drop dead of disease and poor health one by one and madness begins to claim the survivors... these things will likely haunt me to my dying day, and I’m not even halfway through the bloody book yet.

[heydude6]

Why do you torture yourself like that?

[Mathel]

I woke up today at 0:46 and thought someone was welding on our roof.
Then I realised that it was nonsense, because our roof is made of ceramic tiles, not solid metal that a thief could weld apart.

Turns out, it was continuous lightning in the distance and rain striking our roof, but it sounded a lot like welding sparks. It must have been at the start, because the thunder arrived when I was coming back from the toilet.

[JoshuaFH]

Why do you torture yourself like that?

Sometimes it's ?entertaining? or ?cathartic? to read these kind of awful, neverending tragedy parades. Like in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the main character starts out healthy and hopeful, but later on in the story is so completely broken as a human being, that one of his own family saying to him (paraphrased) "You should have prostituted your wife out when you had the chance. It would have made life much easier." and rather than getting angry at such an appalling suggestion, he just dejectedly says "Yeah, maybe I should have." (also paraphrased)

I'm saying it just breaks your heart, and it's too intriguing to look away.

[Frumple]

For some people*. I stopped reading that sort of junk years ago because there wasn't anything entertaining or cathartic or intriguing about it, just misery inducing. I'd finish reading what I started (mostly, anyway), 'cause at the time I hadn't really developed the skill of telling something written that was making my life worse to fuck off, but they never really did much but make my day worse.

Once I got the basic message of that sort of stuff, I pretty comfortably chucked out the thought of digging through that sort of literary sump ever again. Got enough misery in my life to wallow in more of it when I got time to read, y'know?

Now I dredge through other literary sumps, that at least occasionally have people throwing mountains at each other and relationships that are anything other than immiserating trainwrecks, heh.

[Imic]

Well, characters do survive, given that these are real events compiled from journal entries and the accounts of survivors, and one of the crew members was Roald Amundsen, the guy who first reached the South Pole, but the main reason I’m still reading this is that I have an intense morbid fascination with the shit that went down in early polar expeditions. I usually can’t get into these kinds of stories, but this one spends the first third of the book establishing characters, relationships, hopes, dreams, goals, etc. etc. so it is at least not an eternal slog of misery from start to finish. This all being said though, if it gets too much worse, I’ll probably stop, since no cathartic escape is worth actually torturing myself over.

[Arx]

It can be fascinating to get that insight into how people fall apart. It's sort of like taking apart a machine to see how it works, except for people. And books about things like that are a better way of seeing it than trying to do it yourself, that's unethical or dangerous or both. Similar thing with, say, Crime and Punishment -- being Raskolnikov isn't exactly uplifting but it is very interesting.

[WealthyRadish]

being Raskolnikov isn't exactly uplifting but it is very interesting.

You haven't begun "stepping over" any obstacles, have you?