Otakufander

I however do not have a good blanket for this

Patton: Why?

Logan: Because he kept sending me this shit

Patton:

Logan:

Patton: What kind of conversations were you guys having?

YOU THINK JUST THE NOISE IS FUNNY AND FITS WITH THE GIF REALLY WELL

BUT THEN

THEN

THE LYRICS START

When you go to a haunted house, it may seem like you’re being funny by trying to scare the actors or jump out at them when you go through a second time, but guess what? ITS NOT FUNNY.

You pay us to scare you. It is your choice to go, so don’t fucking go through if you’re going to ignore the rules and get too close to the actors as a ‘joke’.

These bruises happened because over the course of 4 hours, several people ignored the instructions that CLEARLY stated that they were to wait in the front room until told otherwise. Rather than listen, they ran into the next room and slammed into me- effectively throwing me into the wall. This didn’t only happen once. It happened ten times at LEAST.

Then we had this asshole who thought that once I ‘died’ for the haunt, he could pretend to kick me to see if I’d moved. I, being used to people abusing me- jumped back and slammed my head into the concrete wall.

YOU ARE NOT FUNNY BY BEING RUDE AT A HAUNTED HOUSE. WE ARE PAID ACTORS THAT YOU CHOOSE TO COME AND SEE PERFORM. YOU PAY US TO SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF YOU, SO DONT HIT US WHEN WE DO

I work at a Haunted House every October, and have been for the past few years. Our house in particular is staffed by Volunteer workers who are either earning credits for Graduation, or people who know the Family that owns the haunted attraction. In our City, we’re one of two Haunted Houses, so while we open in late September, we tend to get incredibly busy during the month of October and often work from 6pm until 2, 3am on weekends. 

We do not get paid to help out. Due to our location, we get a lot of drunk guys coming through, and a lot of ‘funny’ teenagers. In my several years working there, I’ve seen Actors get grabbed and thrown, stomped on, kicked, bitten, everything. A lot of the Actors at this attraction are young teenagers, Middle and Secondary School students, so this kind of abuse is terrifying and potentially emotionally scarring.

There’s a position half-way through the house we call ‘Psych Ward’, and it’s essentially a jump scare. The scare is a corner-room, boxed in with walls and broken windows, that the Actor pops out of and shouts and taunts the people going through. October, 2012, a couple were going through the Psych Ward corner and the scare went off as per usual. The girlfriend of this couple got very startled but laughed it off and continued on. The boyfriend, however, back-tracked and went up to the broken window and punched the Actor in the face for scaring his girlfriend. The Actor, who I’m going to call Tracy, had a black eye for a good two weeks solid and the couple had to be escorted out of the house and were banned from the property. Ever since we’ve ruled that Veteran Actors (someone who’s been there for 3+ years) are the only ones allowed in this particular Scaring Spot.

He paid to get scared and then got violent when we delivered.

There are so many stories I can tell of ignorant customers banging back on scares and injuring the Actors inside, grabbing props from the actors and hurting them with it, destroying props because they thought it would be ‘funny’. 

I just want to raise awareness that the ACTORS ARE STILL PEOPLE. We’re instructed to get the best kind of scare out of you, sometimes with no pay at all (like this particular attraction), so please respect our work.

I work at a haunted hayride and a guy tried to dropkick me in the chest and knee me in the face because he thought it was funny.

I got in trouble for breaking character to tell him to fucking stop.

Ive been hit so many times this season it has left cuts and bruises. Back in 2015 I was fucking choked and dragged behind a wagon because a lady was drunk and her son had to pry her hands off me because IM NOT ALLOWED TO TOUCH YOU OR FIGHT BACK.

Most recently, a customer groped my breasts and twisted my fucking nipples. Apparently, she did it to AT LEAST twenty other actors.

THAT IS SEXUAL ASSAULT YOU ASSHOLES. ITS NOT OKAY.

Most recently a customer fucking kicked me and sent me to the goddamned hospital.

WHEN YOU GO TO A HAUNTED HAYRIDE / HAUNTED HOUSE, REMEMBER YOU LITERALLY PAID US TO SCARE YOU.

THE ACTORS ARE REAL PEOPLE.

If your family or friend(s) force you into a haunting, be upfront as best you can and tell actors as they come up “please do not scare me i am too anxious / scared” and 9.99/10 times we will listen and leave you alone. just communicate with us even though we most often cannot communicate back.

We may be playing monsters, but we are NOT monsters.

Also, please remember to keep your hands off of us during your haunting, and also please try to step in or speak up if you see people trying to touch us, assault us, or talking about planning to touch or hurt a staff member.

We cannot do anything and will most likely get in legal trouble for touching you in defense.

I mean they should know you’re…justacting.

You paid for a ticket which means you consented to be scared!

(this one wants to be a beyblade when it grows up)

the idea is to include as many unique moves as you can, to make your shrieking deathbot difficult to counter

or dodging. that works too.

also, some of the speed demons have… unorthodox attachments to fool other bot’s sensors

WIIINGS MOTHERFUCKERRRRRRR

robot sumo is also a sport where spectators may end up taking a small robot to the shins if they aren’t careful.

FLYYYYYYY

Here enjoy.

“she gave up looking for the robot and sent us a photo of her having a beer. the crowd applauded this act of supreme crappiness.”

The demise of Vine is drawing closer. I couldn’t stand the thought of all those cat videos out there being lost to the abyss, so I gathered a few (i.e. nearly 50) of my favourites.

“anakin, what do you have?”

“a wife!”

when i’m lonenly, which is translated to most of the time, i make them; green, yellow, pink, blue, white, purple.

and, believe me, it’s kind of a relief to make them. not only for the colors and cute shape, but also for the fact that the time i spend makin them i am entertained and don’t have to think about my loneliness anymore.

i learnt how to make them like two months ago, by the way. and i have made over 300. 

This is for everyone. Guys, girls, both, neither, and more.

When you’re upset, make a star. When you’re stressed, make a star. I make them in school when the teacher yells at our class for being lazy or dumb. I make them at home when I’m in my room, wishing someone would notice my feelings and give me comfort. I’ve always made them with whatever I had around, and write a number on each and every one because its therapeutic. I can see how far I’ve come and how many times I haven’t given up.

Right now I’m at around four-hundred and seventy, and it really puts everything into a perspective.

Thats four hundred and seventy times that I could’ve given up. I’ve gotten pretty close on some of them - scarily close, but every one of those stars is a reminder to keep pushing forward, because I wake up every day and on my dresser is a box full of stars, and when I’m happy I think of how far I’ve come.

I think this idea should be passed around as much as possible. Its calming and distracting from and panic I feel. It gives me something methodical to do: Fold here. Fold there. Crease that line. There you go, Create. Produce. Make something solid and focus on it. Make another if you need to. Write a number. Fill up the jar, box, drawer.

And when you’re breaking and feel everything crashing down, you can look at your stars and think:

Of course, it does occasionally happen that a student has a legitimate reason to be in the hallways outside of designated passing times.  In those situations, the student carries a pass (”hall pass”) which can be presented to any member of staff who stops and interrogates said student.  Usually, the pass is written on a form that is signed by the teacher who authorized the student’s presence in the halls:  at my school, the form had spaces for student’s name, date, time, where the student is going, and from whence the student is leaving.  

Filling out the entire form every time a student wants to go to the toilet is a pain in the ass, so some teachers use some other form of pass.  In my day, it was either just a regular pass that was pre-filled and laminated, or a block of wood with the classroom number and “Bathroom” written on it.  Apparently nowadays, using some cumbersome and humorous object as the bathroom pass is A Thing.  

Over here if a teacher sees you (they’re all in class anyway too so it’s unlikely anyone would be in the hallway during class unless they have a reason) they mind their own business, unless you’re dicking around or actually doing something troublesome or loud, or if they know you and know you’re supposed to be somewhere else, and you’re clearly not going to the bathroom. Or if they’re in a shitty mood and wanna yell at you for sitting on the windowsill which was forbidden in my school but nobody cared anyway.

Short answer is, the second one.  Long answer is, the American school system is permeated with a sense that teenagers are this chaotic force that must be contained at all costs.  (I’m right now having this very clear sense-memory of a hall monitor * saying “You can’t just roam the halls any time you feel like it!”** in the same sort of tone in which one might say, “You can’t just stab people any time you feel like it!”)  It’s not even so much a matter of what you might do while out in the halls unsupervised; the very idea of teenagers Roaming the Halls (of a school, which is full of both teenagers and halls) is understood as being inherently contradictory to the purpose of a school.  It isn’t even that you might go somewhere you’re not supposed to be; it’s that at any given time, there is only one place any given student is supposed to be.  A hall pass creates a temporary change in your prescribed location, without undercutting the fundamental principle that your location should always be prescribed.  

(*My school had professional hall monitors–grown adults who were paid a salary to keep order in the halls.)

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If a teacher sees a kid hanging around the corridors instead of being in class, they may ask them what they’re doing and wait to see if they head off to where they say they’re going (the usual dodge is “Miss/Sir, I have to get my books out of my locker”) but there’s no Hall Pass or any of the rest of this.

Because it’s more important for adults to have the FREEDOM to amass huge arsenals of guns than it is to protect the physical and emotional safety of children.

My daughter has been in school for six years (she’s 10), and she and her classmates have had to practice hiding in the classroom corner in silence with the lights off about twice a year.

American students and teachers now go about their business every day with the background knowledge that at any moment, a kid with his dad’s guns can show up and try to slaughter them all.

My school started at 7 am. It got out at 2 pm. Our day was broken in to six periods and a lunch.

For those keeping track, that is seven hours in school.

In my school district periods were fifty-five minutes long with ten minutes to pass in the halls. Our schedule looked something like this:

7:00 am - First Period 8:05 am - Second Period 9:10 am - Third Period 10:15 am - Fourth Period 11:20 am - Lunch 12:00 pm - Fifth Period 1:05 pm - Sixth Period 2:00 pm - School gets out

Seems reasonable, right? Except that the bus ride was an hour and a half long. To be at school by 6:50 (the latest a bus could arrive - we have to have our ten minutes after all) I had to catch the bus at about 5:20. Most people allowed an hour to get up in the morning. So now our schedule includes waking up at 4:20.

This, by the way, is in fact when I woke up every morning to go to high school.

It gets better though. Our teachers? They are allowed to assign an hour of homework every day. That is in addition to any in-class work that you didn’t finish. If you were in an Honors or AP class, the teachers were expected to assign an hour of homework every day.

I assure you. Teachers did this, especially for grades 10, 11, and 12.

That’s six hours of homework a day that I was expected to do. And I got six hours of homework a day on a regular basis. Easily three out of the five school days. This is district policy by the way. They think it is perfectly acceptable.

To be clear, that means waking up at 4:20 in the morning. Getting to school at 7 am. Spending roughly six hours in class. Getting out of class at 2pm. The bus left at 2:30, got me home at about 4:00 pm.

By the time I walk from the bus stop to home, get out of my school clothes, get stuff sorted for homework, etc., it has been roughly twelve hours. I am still expected to do six hours of homework.

And here’s the thing… this was just for the required courses to graduate. If I want to get into college? If I want to stand out? That means extra curricular activities.

Those take place at two times; the Zero Period, and Seventh Period. That is, from 5:55 am to 6:60 am I had the option of orchestra, band, jazz band, choir, jazz choir, and a few others. Seventh hour was of course from 2:10 to 3:05. This was all the sports, cheer leading, student government, gay straight alliance, chess club, whatever.

We are taught, by the way, that if we do not take at least one 0 or 7 period class every semester that we will not get into college.

And you can bet your ass there was homework in those “optional” classes. Want to be in orchestra? You better be practicing on your own time. Drama club? Learn your lines on your own time. GSA? Bet you sure as shit are making posters and flyers and all that on your own time.

This is what high school looks like in the US. There are days where you are literally expected to do 20 hours of school related stuff and that is normal.

Of course, you point out how that leaves only four hours to sleep and the answer you get is, “Well, that’s what weekends are for.”

They tell us that high school is to prepare you for the “real world.” It’s not. It is about teaching you to accept unrealistic expectations as normal so that you will be a good worker.

Taking out the passing periods and the bus rides, I put more hours into school in a week than my parents worked. My mother worked 40 hours a week. My father worked about 55 hours a week. Between lectures, in class work, homework, I regularly had 80 hour weeks.

20 hours a day with only four hours to sleep sounds ridiculous - and it should! But my junior year? I almost failed because I was averaging less than 4 hours of sleep a night.

We had 4 mins to make it between classes, no matter how far apart your classes were on campus. No one could make it to their lockers on time, so if you didnt want to get detention you carried all of your books in your bag. You needed the text book for each class, so I carried about 5-6 books in my bag daily. No one was allowed to keep their books in the classroom because “kids would steal them” (no one wants to steal a fucking math book. They probably just get lost and the school cant shellout any cash to buy new ones.) The bag was so heavy that it frequently ripped and I had to buy new ones (probably 40lbs). In highschool I was about 100 lbs soaking wet.

This made my hips and knees hurt like a bitch and killed my back, but hey, at least I was on time to my 7 overcrowded classes where we didnt even have time to learn anything and were given an average of 2 hours of homework per class.

In England our day was as such

8am - up and get ready 9am school starts 9-10 Registration period / Form Class (A form was what group you were in. I as Form O) Folks would get last minute homework done but this was where wed get marked in for the day 10-11 first period 11-12 second period 2-1 lunch 1-2 third period 2-3 fourth period 3-10 school out

After passing GCSEs (age 15-16) wed then move onto “Sixth Form” age 16-17 there were two years of it to take and these were your “electives” things you got the choice to take up that would provide work experience in that area. Only you didnt get that much of a choice depending on your grades. Since i only got a C in science i had to take the slot that had science in it which meant i did childcare instead of theatre During sixth form youd lnly take the classes that you got low grades in and the ones in that slot you “picked” So when say english class or math class is running and you aced it, contrats you have a free period and can roam around school Hell they even let you LEAVE to go home for an hour and then youd come back. I for kne would leave and go into town that wasnt too far away, go buy some food and then come back for childcare class.

I would also use free periods to go to study hall where id get last minute homework done or just catch up on a book or a game id brought with me. Homework would take about 5-10 minutes depending on difficulty and was a single sheet of paper with like 10-20 questions on sometimes it was double sided. Biggest piece of homework i ever had was coursework for my GCSEs and i could crank it out in one night if I focused.

Id still have plenty of time after homework Out at 3-10 home by 4:30-5 (id walk pretty far) Get homework all done and sorted by 6 and go play with my friends across the street until dark or 9 sometimes 10pm Watch tv with my folks, shower, go to bed by 12 and still get 8 hours

Hearing the shit america pulls… Its insane and im super glad i stayed out of college when i moved here! When we had to go the bathroom typically it had a key, all teachers had a key and if we got caught walking to it just holding up the key was enough to show where we were going. If we didnt have the key and were roaming around not in a class and not being where we should be wed get asked “where should you be right now” we had schedules that we could show if we had free period and be let loose with a “stay out of trouble” and that interaction was so rare it was possible for my friend to skip PE class by sitting on a bench in a hallway outside of the music class.

Some kids could skip a class entirely if they had a music class to go to, id be let out to go for flute class which i took three sessions of and hated lol

In my school I need to get up at 6 am to make it too the bus by seven. School for me starts at 8 am ,and everyone has to be out of the halls five minutes before 8, unless you go to breakfast.

Breakfast at school once it is 8 am, no matter who you are, you are forbidden to get breakfast, and are signed in as late to homeroom. If you stay in breakfast, that was like 20 minutes, you got 4 minutes to sprint to homeroom, or else you are late.

With the classes, they are pushing too many classes at once. My school has 10 classes a day, including the half an hour lunch, and my brain just melts from it. We get 4 minutes to get to each class, with my luck, I cant go to my locker. Instead of putting away books, I carry them around all day in a backpack, which sucks. Also we can roam the halls, cause it is considered bad and something is going on, apparently.

Each class that is not lunch is 42 minutes each and most has 20 minutes-1 hour homework assignments. Dont even get me started with tests, because some students get up to 8 tests on the same day.

With hallpasses now with classes, I had the woodblock pass, until they switches it to a signout sheet online. That hellspawn of a signout sheet can take students 5 minutes just to sign in and out, taking up over 10 minutes off class, which is less time to work, and that makes so much more stress!

Warnings: Abuse, physical abuse, transphobia, alcohol mention, the first few paragraphs are angsty but it goes uphill from there.

Ship: Analogince

Plot: Logan had a rocky upbringing that gave him a few scars, Virgil is getting comfortable in his identity, and Roman is just trying to live his best life. (Logan-centric for the most part)

(Demisexual!Virgil) (Trans!Logan) (Pansexual!Logan)

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