A thread for you to share a story that may have happened to you or a friend. I'll give it a run first.
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I was reading the Screech article, and it reminded me of a bar fight that my friend got into...
Some years back, my GF and I befriended a guildie while we played WoW. We grouped pretty often, chatted on vent, FB friends and the like, but had never met in person. Really funny dude. He was very punk at the time; tatted up everywhere, mean mug, green mohawk.
He logged in one day with this funny/not-funny story about how he was recently arrested.
He had gone to his local pub with a friend to have a few drinks and play some pool. He was talking to this girl until her drunk boyfriend revealed himself and broke up the conversation. Fair enough, he thought, and he disengaged from the interaction to move on to play some pool. Throughout the games and the rounds of drinks over the course of the night, the boyfriend went out of his way to heckle my buddy. Called him a [homosexual slur], made rude gestures, and made other aggressive overtones that I won't get into.
My friend and his friend were leaving the bar pretty buzzed. They hadn't seen the boyfriend in a while and figured he departed before they had. But as they left, they spotted him outside the bar smoking a cigarette with his girl and their friends. The name calling continued. "Get out of here [homosexual slur]!", over and over again.
Inspired by the name calling, my friend said he thought, [homosexual slur]? I'll show you [homosexual slur]. He marched over to the boyfriend and started to dryhump his leg. This obviously wasn't the best decision, and the boyfriend headlocked my friend to pull him off his leg. My friends' friend had run over by then and decked the boyfriend in the face with a flying punch, knocking him backwards and head first into the wall of the pub. The boyfriend didn't get up. Cops were called, an ambulance arrived, and my friend and his friend were arrested. The boyfriend was in a coma for several weeks.
We talked about the trial and the whole situation for a while. We thought there might be a chance he would not need to serve time. We were wrong. He was sentenced to 18 months for the dryhumping, and his flying-punch friend was sentenced to 3 years jail time.
My GF and I told him that we'd write to him when he went in, as did his family, his RL friends, and our other guildies. I started to handwrite letters to see how he was, update him on the state of the game, my introspections regarding my smoking and MMO addictions, and any other jibber-jabber that might have been even remotely entertaining. But hand writing letters is really fucking hard to do. It takes a considerable amount of time to draft anything with some substance. So I slacked off (for about 6 months), and this was admittedly pretty shitty of me. I took the train to work at the time, and it occurred to me that I could type up letters on my phone to send over. I was pretty addicted to MMOs then, so trying to make time when I got home was implausible. I felt like I was cheating by not handwriting them, but he didn't give a shit if they were typed and I did want to stay in touch.
We sent him care packages on several occasions and we were allowed to order him books from Amazon. My GF and I were attending an art college at the time, so we would also send photos or printouts of the projects that we worked on along with the letters we typed. My GF had drafted a poem for a creative writing class that we sent his way with our then regular mail. In a later correspondence, he let us know that he got the poem tattooed on the back of a calf while he was in there. He said the poem helped him get through his time.
Unbeknownst to us during his sentence, we were among a very small percentage of people that actually kept in touch. Much more so, he said, than RL friends he had known for years. But it was one of those things where we didn't need to be thanked because he was/is always a pleasure to talk to.
He's out now and has been for some time. He lost his job because of the imprisonment but found a new job that he enjoys, met a girl, and had fraternal twins ("Go big or go home"). The boys' middle name is my first name, and the girls' middle is my girlfriends' first. Quite an honor! And we've still never met.
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I was reading the Screech article, and it reminded me of a bar fight that my friend got into...
Some years back, my GF and I befriended a guildie while we played WoW. We grouped pretty often, chatted on vent, FB friends and the like, but had never met in person. Really funny dude. He was very punk at the time; tatted up everywhere, mean mug, green mohawk.
He logged in one day with this funny/not-funny story about how he was recently arrested.
He had gone to his local pub with a friend to have a few drinks and play some pool. He was talking to this girl until her drunk boyfriend revealed himself and broke up the conversation. Fair enough, he thought, and he disengaged from the interaction to move on to play some pool. Throughout the games and the rounds of drinks over the course of the night, the boyfriend went out of his way to heckle my buddy. Called him a [homosexual slur], made rude gestures, and made other aggressive overtones that I won't get into.
My friend and his friend were leaving the bar pretty buzzed. They hadn't seen the boyfriend in a while and figured he departed before they had. But as they left, they spotted him outside the bar smoking a cigarette with his girl and their friends. The name calling continued. "Get out of here [homosexual slur]!", over and over again.
Inspired by the name calling, my friend said he thought, [homosexual slur]? I'll show you [homosexual slur]. He marched over to the boyfriend and started to dryhump his leg. This obviously wasn't the best decision, and the boyfriend headlocked my friend to pull him off his leg. My friends' friend had run over by then and decked the boyfriend in the face with a flying punch, knocking him backwards and head first into the wall of the pub. The boyfriend didn't get up. Cops were called, an ambulance arrived, and my friend and his friend were arrested. The boyfriend was in a coma for several weeks.
We talked about the trial and the whole situation for a while. We thought there might be a chance he would not need to serve time. We were wrong. He was sentenced to 18 months for the dryhumping, and his flying-punch friend was sentenced to 3 years jail time.
My GF and I told him that we'd write to him when he went in, as did his family, his RL friends, and our other guildies. I started to handwrite letters to see how he was, update him on the state of the game, my introspections regarding my smoking and MMO addictions, and any other jibber-jabber that might have been even remotely entertaining. But hand writing letters is really fucking hard to do. It takes a considerable amount of time to draft anything with some substance. So I slacked off (for about 6 months), and this was admittedly pretty shitty of me. I took the train to work at the time, and it occurred to me that I could type up letters on my phone to send over. I was pretty addicted to MMOs then, so trying to make time when I got home was implausible. I felt like I was cheating by not handwriting them, but he didn't give a shit if they were typed and I did want to stay in touch.
We sent him care packages on several occasions and we were allowed to order him books from Amazon. My GF and I were attending an art college at the time, so we would also send photos or printouts of the projects that we worked on along with the letters we typed. My GF had drafted a poem for a creative writing class that we sent his way with our then regular mail. In a later correspondence, he let us know that he got the poem tattooed on the back of a calf while he was in there. He said the poem helped him get through his time.
Unbeknownst to us during his sentence, we were among a very small percentage of people that actually kept in touch. Much more so, he said, than RL friends he had known for years. But it was one of those things where we didn't need to be thanked because he was/is always a pleasure to talk to.
He's out now and has been for some time. He lost his job because of the imprisonment but found a new job that he enjoys, met a girl, and had fraternal twins ("Go big or go home"). The boys' middle name is my first name, and the girls' middle is my girlfriends' first. Quite an honor! And we've still never met.