True Fortress Ameritrash Confessions

Matt Thrower has hammered me in every Vassal game we've played, even if he's never played the game before .

I often comment on front page articles having only skim read the article, sometimes this is very apparent.

Secret Satan is one of my favourite things about this site. And I love getting complete crap if its funny. The SS thread is awesome.

Often i mentally decide someone looks like their avatar even if they don't. Ironically the exception is Barnes because i found his writing before this site and must have seen a proper picture of him with it at some point.

I sometimes relisten to the start of the Coctavian FAT cast because the intro is so funny.

If you don't know the obscure cultural reference for my avatar, watch Cinemassacre's series of Japanese monster movies. Jet Jaguar.

Strangely, I was never scared by movies that were supposed to be scary. The only movie that has ever really scared me was this: www.imdb.com/title/tt0045470/

It's an "Arabian" fairy tale (written by a German guy, thus the quotation marks) and there's a part in it where the kid eats a couple of figs and grows donkey ears. 8-year-old me totally believed that it's possible, and for years I was living in fear of my ears turning into those of a donkey's.

Jurassic Park is the only film to scare me. I was some what sheltered as a child and did see many scary films. but JR scared the crap out of me. The next 'scary film' i saw was Aliens when i was 14 and it didn't really bother me that much (great film though).

Barney, where do you live? Coffee is also a no-no for me, though. That's okay... I'll drink tepid tap water and eat stale bread.

The water thing to me is only visual. I've been snorkeling in the Caribbean and it was awesome, but I could see everything in the water. And I like to swim, but even swimming into the deep end of a pool, I get some serious heebie-jeebies. I really need to just get some swim goggles.

Grudunza wrote: It may be that while I'm very much into F:AT culture and gaming stuff, I don't feel as connected in some respects because a lot of you guys are partiers and such, and I'm more laid back in that respect (a recovering addict children's entertainer Mormon is probably not the face of F:AT, ya know?). It's sort of like, because I couldn't really hang out with some of you at a convention when you want to go out drinking (just not safe for me to do), I project that a little bit into my relationship here on the boards, and that makes me more tentative or whatever. Whereas on BGG and other sites, it's a much bigger melting pot and I'm more comfortable being me, if that makes any sense.

WHOOO! I am also the child of addicts and teetotal and obsess on how much others drink and so forth! And I opted in to Orthodox Judaism! We should hang out.

Well, I honestly don't care what others ingest... I just know I can't do that anymore if I like my sanity and ability to continue living.

I've been down your way a few times, though. Did shows at a mall in Thousand Oaks a couple times. If I'm heading that way again, I'll definitely get in touch.

Barney, I haven't been to Montreal, but I go to upstate NY once in a while. That's not too far.

I still lurk here, but despite being here since it was a blogspot site, have never really felt like I have anything to say that the cool kids would care about. Including this post, of course.

I mostly play RPGs these days anyway. I don't have the patience to learn board games and then teach them to other people.

Here's a good example of a very interesting thread where people are opening out far more than they usually do. So, in the interests of full disclosure:

I was bought up in a scary Christian family church community where all books were censored (even from the library) and TV was essentially banned. My father was a priest in the Church of England and the 'guru' of this community, which consisted of roughly 3 families bolted together until the established Church told my Dad to lose the community or his job. He chose to lose his job and that was the end of that. Some semblance of normality returned to my life at age 16 when this happened as the 'community' essentially fractured. I was happy that I didn't have to get up at 5am every morning and 'confess my sins' to the whole community (or make shit up, which was far more likely), as I had done for the last 8 years, and read what I wanted to. My father is still an evangelical but we agree not to talk about controversial issues now (ie the past, evolution, christianity, science etc). I count myself lucky to have survived relatively unscathed (if you don't count 2 marriages blown up). Best thing , for me, was marrying an ex soviet woman, bought up as an atheist.

Had my addiction to alcohol in my 20's but vehemently disagreed with AA methodology (no more successful than mere moderation or simply modifying your own behavior, according to the stats) never went to rehab and essentially moderated my drinking from a bottle a day to nothing at all, to only when I go abroad or to the embassy (now) and I no longer worry about it. Fly the flag for militant atheism and believe religion is actively harmful to society while alcohol and recreational drugs are less influential and far less of a problem (not really surprising, given my childhood).

Never saw a scary film until the Community had finished although my grandparents used to let me watch Dr Who in their house (they hated the community) so I guess the Patrick Troughton story where the Tardis ends up in a different dimension of make believe characters was my scary time or perhaps the start of Captain Scarlet with the scary 'this is the voice of the Mysterons....'. Also had a few nightmares staying up and watching Journey to the Unknown (a British competitor to The Twilight Zone in 1968) at my grandparents.

Next.

In reading all these posts about people getting nightmares as kids made me think that you all are a bunch of pansies because I never remember ever having nightmares as a kid. So I called my mom and asked her. Her recollection mirrors my own, and that they were pretty liberal with what they let us watch. She even remembered coming home one night while I was being watched by my aunt when I was 3 or 4, and found us sitting on the couch watching Prom Night or Carrie or something of the sort. She was a bit irritated that she let me watch that, but I had no nightmares or other issues. Nerves of steel, apparently.

Of course, my niece and nephew get scared watching Disney movies, so who knows?

dysjunct wrote: I still lurk here, but have never really felt like I have anything to say that the cool kids would care about.

I keep trying but it never seems to happen.

Scary movies. How about Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer. The Bumble scared the shit out of me. Of course, that was almost five months ago so I'm pretty much over it.