Be Excellent To Each Other

Holborn right now. Leaving from kgx at some point

Too far away for me, sorry

Why is be excellent to each other crossed out in the rules?

Goodness, I did that over a year ago. Mainly because nobody has any idea what it actually means, and it's better to actually rely on people being innately decent than having a rule.

And people would wave it around when they wanted to get someone banned, and as everyone here is a cunt to everyone else it never really worked.

Or indecent for short.

Oh, that's a bit sad, really. I think people used to be nicer to each other. The Internet keeps getting meaner. I used to come here to get away from it.

It's not because there's not an expectation of people being nice to each other, it's because it's better to have people who are nice people than to say 'thou shalt be nice' with no real way of managing that.

No worries. Meeting was 35 mins. So heading back after i finish eating. £232 of value, there.

On the 1305. Hurrah. Mercy for aircon!

Skype. Would save your company tons of money.

I had my HR manager call me, saying i need to raise a travel request, so i can go to Derby to do my job. I refused, he said I can't travel.

Which is fine with me... he is looking into it

New policy innit. Too much unnecessary travel.

Pretty dumb when you're directly sending someone out to a customer though.

It is reassuring to have meat contact and my reassuring hand on the tiller

Yes, it is daft. Apparently the policy has been around for 12 months, I just ignored it.

Er, what is it you do for a living?

It is what it is. I'm exempt from it anyway.

Each week, I write numbers down for people. Sometimes, the people are happy with the numbers. Other times, less so.

That's Numberwang!

Ugh, our internal intranet platform is a piece of [redacted], and one of the pages I was working on last week has up and broke today. I tried to fix it and couldn't, so I was proclaiming to management that we need to log a support call with the third party, and how I couldn't fix it because it just didn't work.

I felt responsible I guess because I'm the only one who works on it now since our web designer left god knows how long ago.

So after informing support, and my boss, and my boss's boss that I was too incompetent to fix it, I managed to fix it, and now I look both good for fixing it, but more stupid for announcing it was broke because nobody really had chance to see how broke it was, so I can't even claim the kudos points for swooping in to save the day.

TLDR: made myself look stupid by announcing I couldn't fix something when I didn't need to.

I don't know why I'm moaning, I don't like to make a fuss normally.

Break it again, say it's really hard this time, play Nethack for 3 days, then fix it.

To be fair, most of the IT systems could do with "improvement'

Just read the Candle Cove and Yellow Wallpaper stories mentioned earlier. Both were brilliant. Probably won't sleep now.

Perhaps I'm just stupid (yes yes, very witty response blah blah) but I really didn't get what was spooky about the candle cove one. The last chap was just a sad fellow projecting on others' reminiscence.

Or just taking the piss.

It reminded me a lot of classic Twilight Zone twists. But I liked the 'from the messageboards' style (what, no Bogbrush?) and it kept me gripped throughout. What the kids actually saw is, of course, up to your imagination (just like watching clips of Jim'll Fix it).

All the kids saw something. All the adults saw was white noise.

Yes, that's how I read it, too.

But only one person reported an adult saying that - the last chap who chipped in at the end.

Because only one person had recently relayed their remembrances of the show to a parent.

I mean, we might all sit an reminisce about Dogtanian, but then hue many of us would then contact our parents to ask if they remember us watching that show? I don't think that stood out as odd.

That was the point

that isn't a point. Loads of people say "yeah we all watched this programme" then some sad cunt with an evil parent says "yeah I thought I watched that but it was PTSD and my mum's evil "

Nah, it was a deliberate set up conversation with the spooky reveal at the end.

Did you think that they were proper message board posts or one complete fictional story?

You'll find out at the Cottage...

Oh no, don't get me wrong. I get the story but I'm just confused as to how Kissyfur understood it.

But the spooky reveal made no sense as a spooky thing

How so? It's implying that something was ... I dunno, hypnotising kids through TV static. Perhaps feeding off them in some way

Only because the guy at the end , who'd already read everyone else's comments, came and made some smartarse comment at the end being all like "yeah I know what the shit was, im the only one who understood it, you're all morons". It was basically ***.

It's not a real comment thread! It's deliberately planned out like it's people chatting about an old show they all remember, then the last guy tells them all it was just static and none of them ever knew!

is what I was getting at.

Mr Chris... I do not think this story was for you.

No, I get that. It just doesn't work. It's not spooky at all. YMMV of course.

To explain slightly better - there's no obvious link between the discussion posts and the final one to make you think that the final post is the "correct" memory. If there had been one other poster dropping something about parents' memory of it or something it might have tied up, or if the final poster had been friends with one of the earlier ones. As it is, the final post comes across either as (a) a sad crazy person who had spent hours staring at a static screen (I don't know, Chinny or someone) (b) someone rather obviously trolling the entire board (Cras, myp or Zardoz) or (c) someone who had shit reception on their telly and actually just spent hours in front of a static screen pretending to watch the show he knew his mates were watching (probably me). It just doesn't come across as a spooky reveal to me at all.

I think if it's one of those things that didn't give you a little shudder as you read it the first time, no amount if explaining how other people read/interpreted it will capture that initial little creeping up the back of the neck, like a joke that needs explaining is rarely funny to the person receiving the explanation.

What I wondered was whether the entire story and conclusion was agreed upon in collaboration before it was posted (is it collaborative, or one person working with a number of accounts?) or was it written spontaneously, and the ending/twist just something contributed, a surprise to the other posters as much as readers after the fact?

I think it must have been planned. It starts of pretty innocent, then the things they're talking about being in the show get more and more screwed up as the comments go on.

I didn't realise it was actually a message board thing, I just assumed it was a short story formatted to look like one. I also really liked it but didn't find it quite so creepy as some did. Probably because when I got to the pay off I wasn't all that surprised, I hadn't guessed the ending but neither was I surprised that it turned out to be something like that. I dunno, I love ghost stories and stuff like that but things that actually creep me out seem to get fewer and further between as I get older.

You were right. It was almost certainly written by one person all at once. There are subtle clues as to extra weirdness. The year varies, the location, the channel.