So, last night, there was hilarity. There was this guy, in Rift, who was… well. First off, I believe he was about 14. So he was being generically homophobic, as a lot of young teens are, and people were teasing him about it. And he responded, as 14-year-old boys often do, by trying to be abusive and sexually harass people with female names. Whereupon he asked Katrinka (aka me) to “show me your milkshake”.
What followed was probably the most hilarious three hours of my MMO gaming career. I persistently refused on the grounds that I am not interested in felony charges. He explained that this meant that Katrinka was:
- A lesbian.
- Actually a guy.
Ooookay. So he continues to assert these simultaneously, and then it starts getting weird. For one thing, while I admit I don’t spend enough time hitting on lesbians to really have a strong feel for the strategy, my initial impression is that an obsessive focus on how disgusting you think gays are isn’t gonna be a winning strategy.
But it has not yet gotten weird. At one point, I observed that I had been married longer than he’d been alive. His response, “pregnant bitches need lovin too”, manages to somehow encapsulate the essence of the conversation; it’s pretty much incompatible with both of his other claims.
Furthermore, he put a great deal of effort into establishing that he was not actually a teenager. He never asserted a specific age, but he did tell the story of the time he and some friends did “oxycotteen” and had sex in a hot tub. Later, he referrered back to it, asking us how many 12-year-olds said they’d done that. (Note: I don’t think anyone else had mentioned 12; I was sticking with 14.)
The whole thing was just sort of surreal. At one point, when I’d been off actually slaying dragons and stuff and not bothering to chat, he said “where did katrina go?”, a question to which at least two people responded with variants of “New Orleans”. He didn’t get it. (This sort of suggestts to me that 14 is on the old end of likely guesses; I would expect a 16-year old to remember a massive natural disaster from 8 years ago.)
And really, “he didn’t get it” was the night’s theme. In response to his misspelling of oxycontin, I told a story about people who had tried to steal painkillers from a veterinarian’s office, and ended up with a large amount of oxytocin. I think I got that from This is True, where the tag the writer gave it was “… suspects are middle-aged males with sensitive, enlarged, nipples.” He didn’t get it, and pursued for some time the question of how the hell you’d use that in a line-up or something.
We made comments about his obsession with “queer assholes”. He didn’t get it. Puns were made; he didn’t get any of them. When he did something particularly offensive and entitled, it was observed that if the Massengil people found him, it’d cover their production needs for three years. He didn’t get it. And throughout it all, he persisted in trying to hit on Katrinka, while observing that she was a lesbian and also really a guy.
And it really did turn out to be sort of creepy, even so. Particularly creepy was the part where he started talking a whole lot about milkshakes, and then announced he had to go for “a smoke”, then stopped posting for a while, and when he came back he was suddenly less sex-obsessed for a while.
Couple of take-home lessons:
- This stuff really does still happen. Guys still hit on people they think might be girls, and call them “lesbians” if turned down.
- It’s really creepy.
- It’s also, at least in MMOs, now pretty much a target for open mockery because the vast majority of the player base knows better.
Comments [archived]
From: AJ
Date: 2013-06-03 22:24:27 -0500
This is absolutely wonderful. Oh, internet.
And yes, creepy.
-Metricos@Shatterbone