Rose Tico defender

me when an npc is het locked:

1. Does OP mention an obligation on victims to forgive abusers who have learned from their past actions?

2. Does OP mention any work on the part of victims to educate their abusers?

I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.

There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.

So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"

So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.

The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."

So I take a few deep breaths.

Then I lie to her.

I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"

She does.

I ask her if she still needs help.

Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.

"What did that error message say?" I ask.

"What error message?" asks Client.

I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.

I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.

I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.

---

Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.

She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)

She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.

So, she asked, did they ever do that?

No! Of course not, was the answer.

So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.

The next week

She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"

She said, of course, can they tell her the error?

And the message was:

Does that make sense? People view fandom itself as diverse, queer, progressive, radical, woman dominated, etc so anything they do within it gets a pass, especially when it's backed up by fans with the same biases as them

I don't think fandom as a whole is worse than mainstream culture but I don't think it's better either. (Although ofc individual spaces can turn insular and rancid.) A lot of spaces formed around popular media just attract people who want their views validated with a progressive aesthetic but when someone pushes back on a micro aggression it becomes very clear that it's only an *aesthetic* and they're there to have fun and not be challenged

The infuriating part is when people want to have both at once: to write whatever they want because it's their silly lil guy hobby and not be criticised or made to self reflect at all (which is hard because they take discussion of wider fandom trends as a personal attack); but also for their fanworks to be treated not only as serious art but also as serious activism. You can have one or the other but you can't have both. And it results in unexamined biases being normalised and spread further because fandom's progressive reputation gives them undeserved legitimacy. (Especially given the tendency of some fans to claim that published books are all either booktok hetslop or written by dead white racists and AO3 is the only place they can read stories by and about queer people/women/people of colour. Which actively erases the contributions of many many published authors from marginalised groups but okay 😤)

First Edgar and Simon both posted this to their separate instagram accounts.

Then Simon posted this a few months later. If you don’t know the song he attached to it, look it up. It’s very clear Simon chose it intentionally.

There’s no way to predict what it’s going to be about but I’ve heard whispers that it might lean more towards drama than their other works so I wouldn’t be surprised if it deals with mental health.

Both Simon and Nick have been very open about struggling with depression and trying to slowly kill themselves, Simon with alcohol and Nick with food, due to feeling isolated (Simon’s depression is more of a hormonal disorder while Nicks’s is a reaction to trauma and PTSD) which was why Gary was a depressed and suicidal alcoholic in The World’s End.

They’ve also been very open about their queerplatonic relationship that’s far deeper and more physical than a regular friendship.

By now most people know about them sharing a one-person bed for nine months out of necessity when they were young and occasionally sleep and cuddle in the same bed for comfort even to this day, but also when Nick’s mom died he collapsed on the floor of his hotel room crying and screaming for Simon who rushed in to hold him and it didn’t even occur to them that Nick was naked the whole time until afterwards.

But also having to acknowledge that while they’re each other’s biggest comfort they haven’t always been the best for each other when it came to coping with their mental health. They had to get better separately to be happy and healthy together later.

Simon especially has talked about how being part of the Mission Impossible franchise saved him because it surrounded him with people who knew how to help him overcome his alcohol addiction.

Seeing how both Simon and Nick likes to play roles that are adjacent to their own situations and Edgar very much encourages them to normalize talking about mental health as well as be ambassadors for non-sexual male intimacy I wouldn’t be surprised if they lean into that considering the post Simon made. Everything around that is a complete mystery tho.

I can only assume they mean Olivia Coleman and Alexander Skarsgard and I am sorry to go full Dennis Reynolds here but

THEY'RE THE SAME AGE