*headdesk*
I like that I manage to fail online interaction, too.
Basically - I meet someone, and do something that I think is common courtesy. Turns out it offends them, or I was supposed to have been able to pick that information up some other way, I'm not sure which, and the interaction is public, so everyone else finds it really hilarious.
I mean... it's not all bad. I'm getting to know some people online again for the first time in a while. Just between this being ~public amusement~ and my managing to break up two conversations between different sets of classmates in different classes just by trying to join in, I'm feeling unusually inept.
And as long as I'm whining, Internet, you know what I'm sick of? Being in pain from when I wake up to when I fall asleep.
ETA: You know what? I was trying to do the polite thing. Yeah, if it's in fandom unless it explicitly says "guy" I tend to assume female. But I don't like to run on assumptions when I'm forming a personal relationship, and given that I had recently done that mistakenly with someone - assuming that fandom+androgynous username+20s+offspring+married to a man=female - I just wanted to make sure. I actually read her damn page just to check, and phrased the question so as to make clear that I was fine if this was information she didn't want to reveal. To be fair to her, after posting the initial "OMG I have no idea why the fuck anyone is confused about this!" she messaged me and apologized for being pissy. But apparently most of her friends found the idea that someone might have thought she was a guy hilarious, and wanted to make a ton of jokes about it, which she proceeded to go along with. So I was left sitting there torn between going "Well, jeez, sorry for trying to get to know you" and "I CAN'T EVEN TALK TO PEOPLE ONLINE RIGHT. ;_;"
If the timing had been a little different I'd probably be sitting here going "Oh well that was silly of me, whatever," but like I said, it was third for third of me trying to initiate contact with homo sapiens sapiens and failing spectacularly for no cause I could see. I mean... I don't think I was tactless, in this situation or either of the others. I was just trying to initiate conversation.
Fun part of the edit: I went back through some of The Sci-Fi (which needs a damn name) and realized that the things that Alan and Natalya do that make people think they're a couple - such as sitting with their arms around eachother or holding hands in public - are things that my friends and I routinely do. ^^; Their excuse is that they're an asexual girl and a nebulously queer dude with a total lack of understanding about social mores, which... might be applicable in our case too, come to think of it. (At one point Stephanie tries to explain to Alan, who has actually had a relationship, that this is something that he did with his former boyfriend, and hence should not do with Natalya, and he... monumentally doesn't get it).
ETA III that probably no one except maybe kuzujuk cares about. The last thing made me wonder how much romance per story I had, and how much queer, and came to these conclusions: there are no straight people in The Sci-Fi. Uh, well, that's a bit of an exaggeration - rather, there are no straight people who have on-screen love interests. The only people who date are Nico (Kimwana, probably other girls) and Edward and Alan (eachother). (Uh, related - I never worked out Kimwana or Alan's sexual orientations, as such. I'm pretty sure Alan just has a huge case of Single Target Sexuality, but as for Kimwana, I'm not sure if she was straight/gay identified and Nico's just special, or if she was pan, or what). Also Nico's foster parents. I mean, all the young characters have straight families they come from, but the parents don't really play a role. The majority of characters are straight, they've just... never done anything about it. I feel maybe I should change this? Not to fill any kind of straight quota - I think it's kind of amusing right now - but, for example, Sanjay spends enough time being a POV character that I feel he would realistically probably be interested in someone during that time span. Ekua kind of does too, but I feel like she is too professional to go around worrying about dating in the middle of a counterterrorism operation, and just... don't see her with a partner at the time.
Meanwhile, on the absolute converse side, Arcadia has absolutely no queer couples. There's only one queer character (male, bisexual), but he's so emotionally repressed he won't even consider looking at women for most of the story, so that's kind of going nowhere. (I say kind of - someone at one point tries to set him up with a guy, who he kind of likes... but is too Edwardian and messed up to acknowledge this fact, and it goes nowhere). Honestly, if there were to be another one, they would have to be New World fae, or some of the younger generation who show up in the end and have grown up with considerable exposure to the mortal world, because there is no way Underhill society as it is would be okay with queerfolk. :/ However, ooooh boooy does it have straight people. Those damn noble houses spend the whole time marrying each other. :P I didn't have my genealogies on me, so ended up writing things like "Lord Prosper's sister/M". And honestly, the only character I feel like I could de-straight and not feel like it was totally shoehorned in is Lady Kara. And she, whatever her orientation, is pretty damn depraved, so unfortunate implications ahoy. This one might just have to continue being all heterosexual on us. Also, I used "lord" and "lady" on the pairing list so I could keep track of who was married to another sorcerer/ess and who wasn't, and it looks hella pretentious.
(I was totally going to do another ETA to explain why that distinction is totally important guys~ but decided I'd spare you until another post. ¬_¬).
Basically - I meet someone, and do something that I think is common courtesy. Turns out it offends them, or I was supposed to have been able to pick that information up some other way, I'm not sure which, and the interaction is public, so everyone else finds it really hilarious.
I mean... it's not all bad. I'm getting to know some people online again for the first time in a while. Just between this being ~public amusement~ and my managing to break up two conversations between different sets of classmates in different classes just by trying to join in, I'm feeling unusually inept.
And as long as I'm whining, Internet, you know what I'm sick of? Being in pain from when I wake up to when I fall asleep.
ETA: You know what? I was trying to do the polite thing. Yeah, if it's in fandom unless it explicitly says "guy" I tend to assume female. But I don't like to run on assumptions when I'm forming a personal relationship, and given that I had recently done that mistakenly with someone - assuming that fandom+androgynous username+20s+offspring+married to a man=female - I just wanted to make sure. I actually read her damn page just to check, and phrased the question so as to make clear that I was fine if this was information she didn't want to reveal. To be fair to her, after posting the initial "OMG I have no idea why the fuck anyone is confused about this!" she messaged me and apologized for being pissy. But apparently most of her friends found the idea that someone might have thought she was a guy hilarious, and wanted to make a ton of jokes about it, which she proceeded to go along with. So I was left sitting there torn between going "Well, jeez, sorry for trying to get to know you" and "I CAN'T EVEN TALK TO PEOPLE ONLINE RIGHT. ;_;"
If the timing had been a little different I'd probably be sitting here going "Oh well that was silly of me, whatever," but like I said, it was third for third of me trying to initiate contact with homo sapiens sapiens and failing spectacularly for no cause I could see. I mean... I don't think I was tactless, in this situation or either of the others. I was just trying to initiate conversation.
Fun part of the edit: I went back through some of The Sci-Fi (which needs a damn name) and realized that the things that Alan and Natalya do that make people think they're a couple - such as sitting with their arms around eachother or holding hands in public - are things that my friends and I routinely do. ^^; Their excuse is that they're an asexual girl and a nebulously queer dude with a total lack of understanding about social mores, which... might be applicable in our case too, come to think of it. (At one point Stephanie tries to explain to Alan, who has actually had a relationship, that this is something that he did with his former boyfriend, and hence should not do with Natalya, and he... monumentally doesn't get it).
ETA III that probably no one except maybe kuzujuk cares about. The last thing made me wonder how much romance per story I had, and how much queer, and came to these conclusions: there are no straight people in The Sci-Fi. Uh, well, that's a bit of an exaggeration - rather, there are no straight people who have on-screen love interests. The only people who date are Nico (Kimwana, probably other girls) and Edward and Alan (eachother). (Uh, related - I never worked out Kimwana or Alan's sexual orientations, as such. I'm pretty sure Alan just has a huge case of Single Target Sexuality, but as for Kimwana, I'm not sure if she was straight/gay identified and Nico's just special, or if she was pan, or what). Also Nico's foster parents. I mean, all the young characters have straight families they come from, but the parents don't really play a role. The majority of characters are straight, they've just... never done anything about it. I feel maybe I should change this? Not to fill any kind of straight quota - I think it's kind of amusing right now - but, for example, Sanjay spends enough time being a POV character that I feel he would realistically probably be interested in someone during that time span. Ekua kind of does too, but I feel like she is too professional to go around worrying about dating in the middle of a counterterrorism operation, and just... don't see her with a partner at the time.
Meanwhile, on the absolute converse side, Arcadia has absolutely no queer couples. There's only one queer character (male, bisexual), but he's so emotionally repressed he won't even consider looking at women for most of the story, so that's kind of going nowhere. (I say kind of - someone at one point tries to set him up with a guy, who he kind of likes... but is too Edwardian and messed up to acknowledge this fact, and it goes nowhere). Honestly, if there were to be another one, they would have to be New World fae, or some of the younger generation who show up in the end and have grown up with considerable exposure to the mortal world, because there is no way Underhill society as it is would be okay with queerfolk. :/ However, ooooh boooy does it have straight people. Those damn noble houses spend the whole time marrying each other. :P I didn't have my genealogies on me, so ended up writing things like "Lord Prosper's sister/M". And honestly, the only character I feel like I could de-straight and not feel like it was totally shoehorned in is Lady Kara. And she, whatever her orientation, is pretty damn depraved, so unfortunate implications ahoy. This one might just have to continue being all heterosexual on us. Also, I used "lord" and "lady" on the pairing list so I could keep track of who was married to another sorcerer/ess and who wasn't, and it looks hella pretentious.
(I was totally going to do another ETA to explain why that distinction is totally important guys~ but decided I'd spare you until another post. ¬_¬).