skykiii
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 17, 2018
Yeah sorry this turned into a bit of a rant: TL;DR guy in a livestream over-reacted to a joke I made and caused unnecessary drama.
So here's the story. I'm being intentionally vague about some details.
This year I became part of a private chat, and it's legit been one of the best things ever. The people and the moderators are all chill and friendly, unblinded by politics (both real wold and internal). In fact when the drama broke, they actually were just as fair to me as to the other guy, who actually had been with them longer. That alone should tell you how cool this place was.
This chat was united around a couple of shared interests, mostly horror-related. I was the oldest person there but a lot of them didn't mind my attempts to introduce them to older media.
Oh and by the way... these people are not Social Justice Warriors. In fact the chat just isn't extremely political at all. Both the mods are devoutly religious, actually.
One of the coolest was one guy I'll call Bob, who seemed to like a lot of the same stuff I did.
One of this group's routine activities was livestreaming (nobody there is a big name--the biggest only ever had ten views at any one time--so these streams were basically a social hang out). We were all a very jokey bunch and liked to riff the games, which the streamers tolerated and even encouraged.
And since this was a bunch of horror enthusiasts, our humor could get dark. If we didn't like a game's character we would joke about ways to kill them, for example. This stuff was routine. I'm emphasizing this for a reason.
So, swinging back to Bob:
One thing we all quickly learned is that Bob had a five-year-old brother who was a bit of a demon--not just his description, either: Bob was sometimes on voice call when we would hear his brother acting up or randomly busting in to the room. This is apparently something the bro did all the time, along with other things like wrecking stuff or forcing Bob to drop whatever he was doing (even if he was clearly in a social engagement) and play games with him. And from Bob's own account, this was very much one of those "the parents always take the little kid's side" deals.
The phrase "what the hell is the deal with your brother?" had been asked by basically everyone at some point or another.
So one day, we're watching a member of the chat stream a horror game and Bob says the little bro has burst into his room and is for some reason just bashing his head into the walls.
So at this point, I joke "you know, you could make it look like an accident and nobody would ever know."
Bob's response was "I don't want to talk to you anymore."
I should note... Bob had said this to me twice before, and both times it was clear he was joking (as he kept speaking to me both times. One of those was during a livestream where he was clearly chuckling as he said it).
Two more relevant comments I made--first, I said something like "all joking aside, the kid's not doing any serious harm to himself, is he?" (Bob never replied to this). Later on, I made a joke about how the game being streamed was so bad that it was turning me evil. Bob did reply to this... and it came up again in the drama two days later.
So I spend the next two days not thinking anything is amiss. Then I talk to Bob and have something to tell him, and suddenly he's like "did you forget we're not on speaking terms?"
I ask why, there's a bit of back and forth, and the mods quickly start paying attention. Very soon the situation is explained to them, though with an additional caveat: Not only was my joke brought up, but Bob also made a big deal out of how I had been "refusing to take responsibility" by "trying to blame the game for it."
Now like I said, the mods are cool--they basically tried to be fair to both of us, going with a "the joke was in poor taste, but Bob... you were basically inviting it" response.
It could've ended there but to be honest, I didn't handle it gracefully. See, my day had actually been going really well at that point, and now suddenly it was crashing down because some manbaby was trying to make me out to be the bad guy over an obvious joke. Even the little leeway that "it was tasteless" seemed unreasonable when--and I pointed this out in chat--we make those kind of jokes all the time, even Bob had contributed.
Full stop, you can't spend months saying black comedy is okay, then get pissed off when someone indulges in black comedy.
And what really bothers me now is it feels like the fun times are over. Now, any time Bob is around or in the stream chat, I have to watch what jokes I make on the off-chance that I might set him off again. So far Bob hasn't returned to the chat, and honestly I hope he just stays gone, because even if we make apologies that don't ring hollow, I'll always know in the back of my mind "this is the guy who flaked out that one time."
Yeah sorry for spamming up KF with this, I wanted to vent in a place where I thought nobody I knew elsewhere would see it. Also wanted to see what Kiwis thought--how would you have handled this?
So here's the story. I'm being intentionally vague about some details.
This year I became part of a private chat, and it's legit been one of the best things ever. The people and the moderators are all chill and friendly, unblinded by politics (both real wold and internal). In fact when the drama broke, they actually were just as fair to me as to the other guy, who actually had been with them longer. That alone should tell you how cool this place was.
This chat was united around a couple of shared interests, mostly horror-related. I was the oldest person there but a lot of them didn't mind my attempts to introduce them to older media.
Oh and by the way... these people are not Social Justice Warriors. In fact the chat just isn't extremely political at all. Both the mods are devoutly religious, actually.
One of the coolest was one guy I'll call Bob, who seemed to like a lot of the same stuff I did.
One of this group's routine activities was livestreaming (nobody there is a big name--the biggest only ever had ten views at any one time--so these streams were basically a social hang out). We were all a very jokey bunch and liked to riff the games, which the streamers tolerated and even encouraged.
And since this was a bunch of horror enthusiasts, our humor could get dark. If we didn't like a game's character we would joke about ways to kill them, for example. This stuff was routine. I'm emphasizing this for a reason.
So, swinging back to Bob:
One thing we all quickly learned is that Bob had a five-year-old brother who was a bit of a demon--not just his description, either: Bob was sometimes on voice call when we would hear his brother acting up or randomly busting in to the room. This is apparently something the bro did all the time, along with other things like wrecking stuff or forcing Bob to drop whatever he was doing (even if he was clearly in a social engagement) and play games with him. And from Bob's own account, this was very much one of those "the parents always take the little kid's side" deals.
The phrase "what the hell is the deal with your brother?" had been asked by basically everyone at some point or another.
So one day, we're watching a member of the chat stream a horror game and Bob says the little bro has burst into his room and is for some reason just bashing his head into the walls.
So at this point, I joke "you know, you could make it look like an accident and nobody would ever know."
Bob's response was "I don't want to talk to you anymore."
I should note... Bob had said this to me twice before, and both times it was clear he was joking (as he kept speaking to me both times. One of those was during a livestream where he was clearly chuckling as he said it).
Two more relevant comments I made--first, I said something like "all joking aside, the kid's not doing any serious harm to himself, is he?" (Bob never replied to this). Later on, I made a joke about how the game being streamed was so bad that it was turning me evil. Bob did reply to this... and it came up again in the drama two days later.
So I spend the next two days not thinking anything is amiss. Then I talk to Bob and have something to tell him, and suddenly he's like "did you forget we're not on speaking terms?"
I ask why, there's a bit of back and forth, and the mods quickly start paying attention. Very soon the situation is explained to them, though with an additional caveat: Not only was my joke brought up, but Bob also made a big deal out of how I had been "refusing to take responsibility" by "trying to blame the game for it."
Now like I said, the mods are cool--they basically tried to be fair to both of us, going with a "the joke was in poor taste, but Bob... you were basically inviting it" response.
It could've ended there but to be honest, I didn't handle it gracefully. See, my day had actually been going really well at that point, and now suddenly it was crashing down because some manbaby was trying to make me out to be the bad guy over an obvious joke. Even the little leeway that "it was tasteless" seemed unreasonable when--and I pointed this out in chat--we make those kind of jokes all the time, even Bob had contributed.
Full stop, you can't spend months saying black comedy is okay, then get pissed off when someone indulges in black comedy.
And what really bothers me now is it feels like the fun times are over. Now, any time Bob is around or in the stream chat, I have to watch what jokes I make on the off-chance that I might set him off again. So far Bob hasn't returned to the chat, and honestly I hope he just stays gone, because even if we make apologies that don't ring hollow, I'll always know in the back of my mind "this is the guy who flaked out that one time."
Yeah sorry for spamming up KF with this, I wanted to vent in a place where I thought nobody I knew elsewhere would see it. Also wanted to see what Kiwis thought--how would you have handled this?
