ashtree house wrote:
Children have always been bad, and now they have iPhones.. Truer words have never been spoken Kroatz. Kids today scare me, I'm 26 and totally get intimidated by teenagers hahaha

Haha, me too! I'm 21 and get a little bit nervous around teens, which is totally ridiculous. I think I forget sometimes that I'm not in high school any more, and don't have to worry about them mocking me (or if they do, I don't have to care any more).

I don't think bullying has gotten worse, just different, as you said. When my dad was a kid he got chased home every day by the school bully (Ronnie O'Tool - I always thought that was a perfect name for a bully). I think that kind of physical bullying has largely been supplanted by other forms, like cyberbullying. I also think adults take more notice of bullying now, which makes it seem more prevalent. Not so long ago, bullying was seemingly just a rite of passage in the eyes of most adults.

genejoke wrote:
Still not sure I di the right thing, but I figure if I stepped in then he will get more shit for getting his dad to fight his battles for him.

That sounds like a really tough situation. I really don't know what the best response would have been. I think at 9 years old it would still be appropriate for parents to get involved, though. Actually, when I was bullied in high school my mom took it upon herself to call the girl's parents and even then I (surprisingly) didn't face any backlash from her or her friends. Although I'm not sure it was all that helpful either.

Kroatz
Imagine not having a gender. You wouldn't share a gender with anyone, and none of your little quirks could be attributed to something you have no control over. You'd just be you. It seems like a much better way of being.

I like the idea that no one should feel that they have to act a certain way because of their gender, but I'm not so sure about gender-blindness. Or are you talking about a pretend world where physical differences don't even exist?

Yesterday was my birthday. I think I'm older than all of you, except for maybe one or two others DDers. Or not. But it was a lovely birthday, and I'm just as glad that school days are long gone. I never much liked school because of the kids and teachers. I learned early on to view it all as a game. Find out what they wanted and, if it didn't cost me anything, then give it to them. I ended up with good grades and a few good friends.
But then when I didn't want to play along …

in Kindergarden my Mom was called in because I wasn't meshing well with the sudents. “Mrs G, please encourage D to not call the other children ‘rambunctious hooligans’, it only serves to distance her from her classmates”

in 4th grade my Mom was called into the Principal's office because I led 3 or 4 other kids into his office to complain about a lunch lady (she was a dreadful Fascist and had no business being around children – I rather said words to that effect)

My parents weren't entirely surprised. Afterall, to This Day they've kept my first complaint letter, To the Toothfairy, who had really fallen down on the job.

Then there was the time I was taking care of my much-younger sister while our parents were on vacation. She came home from school and told me about a fight she had gotten into with two other girls, twin sisters. I called the girls' parents, introduced myself to their Dad and apologized that my sister had overreacted when she had kicked one of them. “She had just been scared by their threats and when the first one hit her, she was so frightened that they were about to carry o—” “I'm sorry, but did you say they Threatened her?” “Well, yes, I'm sure it was onl—” “Hold on please” And then this Dad roared out to his daughters, thanked me for calling and mentioned he had something he had to deal with. Those girls did not bother my sister after that.

My son is autistic. Very high-functioning. He's learned to recognize when people are mocking him, and these days he does very well for himself. But there were some incidents when he was little where I stepped in. And I continued stepping in until some changes for the better were made.

There is no single right way to make complaints, or to handle bullying. But wringing hands – gah, I've seen too much of that. Imo, if you truly believe that there's a bad situation going on, even if it may not be within your power to remedy it, at least speak out. Maybe I've had success with this because I don't look physically threatening and I'm soft-spoken. But the “silent majority” is assumed to be a consenting majority – until they speak out.

Happy Birthday, Ayes! Hope you have a chance to kick back, relax and look at the ceiling. With shades on!

Banes wrote:
Happy Birthday, Ayes! Hope you have a chance to kick back, relax and look at the ceiling. With shades on!

Oh. The shades come off on B day. :)

Merry birthdaymass Ayes!

Speaking of iPhone and bullying those bloody things are a whole new vector. My young niece has one and on one occasion I know about some kids that were mean to her got a hold of the stupid phone and changed settings, made posts from her Facebook account and used her phone as an internet hotspot.

IPhones unfortunately make that sort of thing much easier. With a different model you can lock down some of those functions.
Another issue is that kids are becoming LESS technically adept, unlike their parents, because now they mainly interact with very dumbed down userfirendly devices, Android, IPhone, Macs, Xbox, PlayStation etc.They can't troubleshoot problems as easily, they can more easily be taken advantage of by people who actually understand the tech they're using.

Hey, Ayes! Happy Birthday!!! :)

Hopefully I'm one of those DDers who may be older than you (I'm 43 at the moment).

Waitaminute… so we go from a generation who is tech savvy to the next which is less so? If I ever have children I'll make sure they learn tech so they're not going to be easily victimized. Especially by people who call you on the phone with a heavy Indian accent who claim they're from the Windows corporation who then tell you they detected something wrong with your computer…

Happy belated birthday Ayes! Hope it was great. Happy 29th birthday. Unless a woman indicates pride in her advancing years she's 29. (Like my sister saying “I'm 60 and you will worship your older sister”)

As far as parental interferance with bullying? Just use the policing technique “presence”. It's a varifiable authority technique. You see something wrong going on and you just walk over and check on stuff (indicating your position if you don't have a uniform.)

“Hi son, let me know when you want to go home. What are you guys up to?” The teacher glare at the other kids is optional. Make an innocuous statement that is not correcting the behavior just indicating that you are aware of it. Often that is all that is necessary. Presence. I'm here and I'm watching. Wanna find out what I'll do if I see you misbehaving? Try me mutha-fucka'

Happy Birthday Ayes'!

I too had assumed tech savvyness would continue to increase. Ozone's point explains why this isn't happening. I hadn't thought of that before and was completely bemused in those constant pointless traditional vs digital media debates, when younger artists turned out to be sticklers for pencil and paper.
It's like they would try one type of software, not like it much and then decide digital wasn't for them. It didn't seem to occur that there were other software options and that you'd have to customise these things to suit yout needs. Or maybe that just seemed too much like hard work.

I think it's a fine line on the tech thing, but I agree that because softeare is so user friendly it doesn't take much to get by. There is definitely a case of kids being software savvy but it ends there.
My job is all about mobile devices. I see the good and bad on most models, be it hardware or software, build quality, support from the manufacturers and so on. There are some distinct reasons I won't touch certain manufacturers with a very long barge pole.

Interesting: I need a new phone. Any pointers you can share?

Howdy people on the internet. I'd like to wish you all a wonderful valentine's day. Even those of you that believe that love does not exist. And those of you that believe that love is nothing but a chemical reaction in your brain, and therefore has no meaning at all. And those of you that believe that love is just a way to ensure that the species keeps procreating, and therefore has very little meaning. And those of you that believe that there is such a thing as fate, and believe that they have no control over whom they are meant to love, and therefore believe that their love has no meaning, because they have not ever made a decision regarding it. And those of you that believe that who you love is a choice, and that love is therefore nothing but a comparison of which partner is best, and therefore believe that love has no true meaning. And also those of you that believe that their love is all part of some god's plan, and therefore believe that they are nothing but a pawn, and that even though their love is important for some reason, they themselves are not.

I love valentine's day, because nothing is better than forcing concepts into small boxes. Valentine's should be the only day of the year that you show any kind of love, just like christmas is the only day of the year that you should show any kind of compassion, and new year's is the only day that you are allowed to think of the future. It's just so productive and creative to make sure that everything and everyone has a place, a little box, and that we all work hard to ensure that nobody ever thinks outside that box.

- - -

Tips on buying a phone:

- Ask your friends which phone they like best.
- Play with their phones, make a call with their phones, test their phones.
- Buy the one you think is best.

I usually buy older products, phones of a few generations ago, cheap videogames, second hand books. This year I broke that pattern, and bought a pretty new phone, and I am not really regretting that yet. I guess there just isn't one right way to do things.

Good call on phones Kroatz. Bad pun intended. But yes, good advice.

Good lurv definitions and comment on ‘days’ as well.
But I think that people do go outside the box naturally though for those concepts, it's just that they reserve the “grand guestures” for the “days”

Re: your love definitions, I'm one of those that sees it as a complex interplay with hormones and various chemicals in the brain, obviously as a way to ensure procreation and the continuation of the species; but it also has a lot of social and cultural layers overlayed on top of that as well to give us expectations for how things should go, we have specific cultural ways of interpreting and understanding certain signals and interactions… love is about a social bonding more than anything, so it definitely has a meaning in that regard.

“The power of love”
“love makes the world go round”
…and things of that nature.
Passion, lust, infatuation, obsession, sexual desire, caring, concern, protectiveness, etc. that's mainly about the social bonding of a pack/herd species (if it was just about procreation it'd be a far simpler process). There's not much “power” in it unless you're obsessed with the process of individual bonding ritual… though it does make for very strong bonds. That's it I suppose.

That's my Mr Spock take on it.
Now I need to go to bed dammit!

tips on phones. kroatz summed part up pretty well. also, know what you need/want. so many people spend an assload and get a superduper phone that has more processing power than they do, just because someone said it's cool. GSMarena is pretty cool for getting the tech specs.
Personally I have a Moto G. its an excellent budget phone that has so far stood up to more rain, dropping and bouncing than any 500 phone I have had in the past. What would I change? well the camera is rather low spec but everything else it solid. I've had the expensive phones and not used even a third of the features, I've had them break after a small drop within months. Insurance isn't cost effective on them in my opinion, especially with Apple as the excess is always much higher. So I buy a phone I can afford to replace every two months. So far it has lasted 14 months… touch wood.

I have my Samsung Note 2. That's lasted me very well since I got it. It was very expensive at the time, but it's been worth it. It's one of the longest times I've used the same mobile phone, and definitely the longest I've had a smartphone for. It's getting a bit long in the tooth now though, but still pretty good.
I'm not sure what I'll replace it with when the time comes. At the moment I'm thinking something a touch smaller or thinner with a much beter camera.

well there are plenty that fit the bill. The notes are a good range.
That seemed to have killed the conversation off.
I've noticed some of the older users seem to be showing up again on DD, perhaps it is a sign that DD is finally getting on track again. We just need to get active on these here forums again so that when newbies come a posting they feel alive.

Well said that man! Actually I think it was my fault for killing the conversation with the phone comparison thing.

Anyone here into Ouija boards?

I was just talking about Ouija boards today, I am not particularly a
superstitious nor a religious person, but demonology scares the crap out
of me. My co worker asked me if I had/would ever use an Ouija board and
I said I have enough horror movies to know that opens the doors, no way
is that thing getting near me and have being haunted hahaha.

Ironscarf wrote:
…
Anyone here into Ouija boards?

I've always been curious about Ouija boards myself but, honestly, I have to believe making contacts would probably be easier with a phone.

I saw an interesting ouija board experiment once, I can't remember the show now. They had the same group of people use the board three times. The first time, normally - they got answers that made sense. The second time, blindfolded - they continued to get answers that made sense. The third time, still blindfolded, they flipped the board around without having told the participants. When they used the board this time, they went to where “Yes” and “No” had been previously but weren't any more. The obvious conclusion is that the people themselves are moving the thingy around subconsciously/without knowing it.

—

@ashtree house: FYI quotes get kind of messed up on the forums. I find it way easier to just go into html editing and do it myself, like so:

{quote}{b}someone{/b}wrote:
Blah blah blah.
{/quote}

Replace {} with square brackets.

—

Remember those perfect boots I found? Romeo ate them.

I just deleted the quotes all together haha

I'm in the preliminary stages of running a kickstarter and vying for steam greenlight…all my fears of failure are screaming at me, but i've got to put myself out there. I can't let these last few years end up with a couple thousand downloads of the game.

go for it, and of course once stuff goes live let us know here so we can take a look see.

And then there was the psychic war over a ouija board that I was asked to arbitrate.

Ideomotor effect. :D
I think it's me that kills the forums.

All Sunday and yesterday especially my brain was MUSH! I was finding conversation really hard, sounding like a person with a brain injury- you know, when they get a bit of a humourless, robotic personality? I couldn't think in clever concepts. and I've been getting really tired.
Maybe I just haven't been eating enough?
Not brain dead now fortunately!

Did you know that Hyenas are related to cats? I didn't. Blew my mind!
Also mongooses and civits.
Bears, badgers and weasels are related to dogs… And a bit earler down the line they all have a comon ancestor with the cat line of course.

Also, contrary to popular myth, cats kills “humanely”, dogs do not. Cays kill with a choking bite to the throat. Dogs rip their prey to shreads, typically disemboweling the creature to death. EVen though Hyenas are more closely related to cats, they kill like dogs do.
…I was really interested in Hyenas for some reason.

I had always thought hyenas were related top dogs. guess you learn something everyday.

I have not had a cell phone since November 2012, so I have one less device to feel connected to. I still think flip phones are the easiest to use and they serve the purpose of dialing and receiving calls.
__

My sister was gifted a Ouija board when we were both in elementary school and I feel that any type of “power object” with any sort of dark energy should not be given to children.
__

I watched the SNL 40th Anniversary episode and the original cast members from the 1970s look like they are really getting up there in age. It is a shame that I was too young to watch the original cast. John Belushi seemed like he was a really funny cast member.

I think I laughed for a minute straight because they kept making a joke that Jon Lovitz had died and even added him to the “In Memorium” portion of the episode. It was morbid, but his reaction was, oh, so golden. I really miss his cartoon The Critic it was one of the most well-written animated shows that I have ever seen.
__

I am finally getting started on the Better Call Saul series and the cinematography is so reminiscent of Vince Gilligan's other work that it is filling the hole that Breaking Bad left last year.

Better call saul is excellent. Recently ploughed through fargo, which was a fantastic series.

Thanks for the intersting ouija board comments! I only recently learned this was once a more popular board game than monopoly, prior to all the horror movie tropes. My search to find if it was still freely available revealed that it is. I would want to own one of these, just because it's such an iconic item, but Mrs Scarf probably feels she's already had quite enough bad luck, being married to a starving cartoonist and so on.
The search did turn up some wonderful product reviews though, such as:

A Ouija Board will scream if you try to burn it. People who hear the
scream have less than thirty-six hours to live. There is only one proper
way to dispose of it: break the board into seven pieces, sprinkle it
with Holy Water then bury it.

What is neat about it, is that it seems like my
dead cat Mrs. Bickelsworth can actually talk to me from beyond the
grave, something she couldn't do in real life.

Lecherous spirits from the Ouija board will sometimes ask young women to
do rather . . . ah, odd things. Ignore them and always remember that
your Ouija partner (i.e. boyfriend) has nothing to do with this.

My daughter loves it. Just minutes after using it she and her brother
were able to summon the spirit of “Dick Butthead” who died in “Ass”
nearly 1000 years ago. He apparently has come back from the dead to
“kill evry1” and “poop”.

Ironscarf wrote:

My daughter loves it. Just minutes after using it she and her brother
were able to summon the spirit of “Dick Butthead” who died in “Ass”
nearly 1000 years ago. He apparently has come back from the dead to
“kill evry1” and “poop”.

Yeah the dead come back to “poop” there are no free toilets in hell and even less toilet paper.

Those reviews are hillarious! ^_^
It's funny how our culture coalesces around those mythologies… With a grain of truth like the ideomotor effect a whole new magical thing is created.