Some words...
Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2016 5:05 am
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..Ando wrote: back when I was around here. My parents pulled their strings and got me labelled with a bogus condition, and got everyone to believe in it, and then they used their connections to get doped up by some fucking idiot bribed by Big Pharma. I was on five different medications at one time (I'm only on one, now). I think that it contributed to me being somewhat slow emotionally and socially for a bit, not to mention the fact that my father was an abusive chimp and my mother was to get cancer and eventually die (she died four years ago).
Interestingly, I have a mild variant of Schizoaffective Disorder, although I am not manic. There isn't much I can do at this point.
Meanwhile, "Asperger's" was recently taken out of official diagnosing practice, when they went from the DSM-IV to the DSM-V, so now after everything else I'm stuck like this as result of a long chain of events & mistakes that all started from something that, officially, doesn't even exist.In a 2008 essay in the journal In Character, history professor Wilfred McClay writes that as a society we have twisted the meaning of forgiveness into a therapeutic act for the victim: “[F]orgiveness is in danger of being debased into a kind of cheap grace, a waiving of standards of justice without which such transactions have no meaning.” Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School writes that, “There is a watered-down but widespread form of ‘forgiveness’ best tagged preemptory or exculpatory forgiveness. That is, without any indication of regret or remorse from perpetrators of even the most heinous crimes, we are enjoined by many not to harden our hearts but rather to ‘forgive.’ ”
I agree with these more bracing views about what forgiveness should entail. Choosing not to forgive does not doom someone to being mired in the past forever. Accepting what happened and moving on is a good general principle. But it can be comforting for those being browbeaten to absolve their parents to recognize that forgiveness works best as a mutual endeavor. After all, many adult children of abusers have never heard a word of regret from their parent or parents. People who have the capacity to ruthlessly maltreat their children tend toward self-justification, not shame.
Holy shit, there really is a 'common thread' that runs behind the psyche of the majority of ZZT community members.Appetite4 wrote:What you have experienced, and what only some of us on these forums have identified, is something I call the "TRUE" ZZT Syndrome. Not the excellent "bad ZZT design" tutorial, but rather a common psychological trend I've seen for well over two decades worth of ZZT adventures.
Designing a cheap "world of our own" is an escape for many of us. I could see that not just Flimsy but a whole lot of us suffered from feelings of persecution. This explains all the pointless forum fights, the astronomical pride people take in their works, the inexplicable hostility and betrayal from NPCs in the games themselves, and countless random-death encounters for the protagonist that very much reflect one's perception of an unfair world in real life.
Amidst all this, how does one tell the "just upset" from the genuinely psychotic? Is it even our business to know?
I'm probably going to regret saying this, but here goes. In the early 1990s, I created a full-length ZZT adventure that requires the main character to blow up his own school. For obvious reasons, I haven't circulated it, and it is definitely not hosted on Z2. But in real life, I never killed anyone, never beat anyone up, never learned how to build bombs, or even fire real guns. The angst came, it went, and I moved on.
The thing is, it's good for people to talk about it. Somehow, ZZTers "talk" about their problems by creating a world, and yet we can still fall into the trap of mindless hostility for desperate want of being taking overly seriously. The feeling isn't even unique to us--forums everywhere on the internet routinely explode with people 100% certain of their sky-high moral pedestal to lecture others.
Gregory Janson wrote:I like how that was a snipe at ando and burstroc at the same time without mentioning either of them by name
Zenith Nadir wrote:ando's so psychotic, he'll probably hunt down and murder each and every one of us...
dave2 wrote: hey ando
you're a stupid bastard and everything you say is retarded.
zamros wrote: [ando] are you retarded, or gay
Dr. Dos wrote: Ando sucks.
Dr. Dos wrote: ignore ando. He's retarded.
Also Ando here's why we chose zaphod over the rest of the internet:
belsambar was a ONE TIME PAYMENT.
I mean if you want to buy some hosting and spend cash every month out of your own pocket for z2 you're welcome to do so.