And for the record, Ilsa, I have come close to pitting you myself on at least one occasion. If you’ve read my infamous telemarketer thread, you know that I do not pit people lightly. I subscribe to something like the SDMB version of the Powell doctrine: Don’t go in unless you have good reasons and know what you’re doing, but if you’re going in, go in with overwhelming force.
But instead of starting my own thread, I told you with absolute deadly seriousness in another pit thread within the last few weeks to Shut the Fuck Up. From your response, it seems you thought I was kidding. I wasn’t.
The world does not revolve around you. We do not read the boards hoping to see what you have said about a particular issue. We do not hold our breath waiting for your wisdom to be offered. And we certainly do not appreciate the way you express your opinion in such a way as to pull the discussion towards yourself, to make it about you instead of the original poster and/or the topic at hand. It isn’t cute. Over time, it has become infuriating.
I liked you at first. You know your movies, a subject dear to my heart, and you have strong opinions, which I respect. Many aspects of your worldview seem to be closely congruent to my own (which I know because you post eighty-four thousand times a day on every conceivable topic).
It is your personality that has cumulatively come to feel to me like a large pine cone slowly shoved point-first up my rectum.
I don’t know if you know this. I don’t know if you’re aware of just how much you rub people the wrong way. Perhaps you’re oblivious. Maybe you’re our version of Gilligan, generally cheerful and totally clueless. Or, possibly, you don’t care; you know you push buttons and you enjoy it. I don’t know which it is. I guess it doesn’t matter.
But you should know that you’re perilously close to the point of no return, and if you don’t carefully consider your posting style and how the attitude you bring to the boards actually manifests as a virtual personality, and knock off with the “me! me! me!” shit, it won’t be long before I, at least, completely give up on you.
It’s possible my opinion makes no difference to you, and that you’ll roll your eyes and dismiss me. But given a few things you’ve said about me, I’m willing to hope you give this some thought. Bottom line, you have the potential to be a contributor instead of an irritant. Please, choose wisely.
Memo to self: NEVER piss off Cervaise. He doesn’t bluster or threaten. He uses the steely calm voice which is MUCH scarier.
In re Ilsa: Meh. He’s what? 16? They’re supposed to be annoying and self-important at that age. I just flip over his posts and pay little attention. Eventually he’ll snap out of it.
Wow. Cervaise can do it with hellfire and brimstone and then he comes in here and does it with steely Clint Eastwood cool. I am in awe. That’s probably the best calm pitting ever.
I do care greatly. I value your opinion more than most other posters. Any suggestions you may have as to how I could improve would be most appreciated. I suppose I was simply oblivious. I’m having a hard time figuring out quite what you mean. If you could find some examples and suggest ways of improvement, I would be happy to adjust.
In the thread you mentioned, the OP asked adirect question of me, “Where is Ilsa” or “Why hasn’t Ilsa pitted him?” I’m not trying to defend myself, I’m just having a hard time relating to what you are talking about.
As I’ve said on many occasions, I’d rather have friends than enemies. If you could give me a bit of direction, I will do my best to change.
I will do my part to, in some small way, begin prying that spiky pinecone from your rectum. (Well, it sounded better in my head.)
Goddammit.
Oaky, I just read through the last several hundred of my posts. You’re right Cervaise. I am annoying as shit, aren’t I? That is depressing as hell.
Ok, I will do my best not to be such an attention whore from now on. Don’t give up on me yet.
As a person who didn’t like you all that much but wasn’t quite sure why, let me just tell you you’re on my list of Dopers I Like now, because of your above post.
It’s not a distiction of which to be proud or anything but I just thought you’d like to know.
Isla, there’s a big difference between saying “You aren’t very bright, are you?” and “I don’t think bumping a five year old thread is very bright.”
Try criticizing the action, not the person. I do “not very bright” things. Somethings I do incredibly stupid things. However, I consider myself a reasonably bright person.
I change pretty easily, but for some unknown reason I usually have to get kicked in the ass to do it. I’m really not trying to be an asshole. I’m not an annoying git in real life. I just sometimes have a hard time to relating to how other people perceive me. This is just another lesson for life, I suppose.
I appreciate this, really. Part of the reason I’ve been so annoyed, I think, is that you obviously have such potential.
I’ll take you at your word that you’re serious, and offer what seems to me a possible approach to consider.
It isn’t a specific behavior. It’s not about this choice of wording, or that habit of phrasing, or frequency of posting, or anything particular. It’s a gestalt thing, which is why I use the word “approach” instead of saying that this-or-that needs to be fixed.
When I participate here, I am extremely conscious that these little paragraphs of text on my monitor represent the contributions of individual people. I’m not just looking at words on a screen; I have a vague sense of thousands of people, sitting at their desks at work or in their pajamas with a laptop on a breakfast tray, or whatever. Real people. They’re all merrily clicking away, scanning the accumulated contributions of their fellow Dopers, and occasionally adding something of their own. Some people are young, some are old, some are happy, some not so. Some are men, some are women, some straight and narrow, some decidedly kinky. But all people.
So when I write a post, I am careful to take into consideration who will be reading it, and what they might get out of it. I’m halfway visualizing those thousands of people in their swivel chairs or at the kitchen table or wherever they’re browsing the Dope, and I adjust my material as necessary. Will somebody understand what I’m getting at here? is what I’m thinking. Can this be misunderstood? And what does this add, exactly?
This may seem somewhat self-evident in terms of writing, but, and this criticism is based entirely on my perception of your approach, I’m not writing for myself. I’m not doing this purely for my own amusement. Sure, I get a lot out of it. But I don’t entertain myself to the exclusion of all else. All those thousands of people, the potential audience, are at least partly present in my mind when I add a post to a thread. And as I compose this very message, I am extremely conscious that after it’s been added to the thread, there is a very real sixteen-year-old person sitting somewhere, in his bedroom or at the library or wherever, who will be reading these words and possibly taking them to heart.
I can’t know this for certain, but I suspect that when you post something, you do it mostly for your own benefit. Either something makes you laugh, or is important to you in some other way, and those are the criteria by which you judge “do post” or “don’t post.” I’ll tell you, I start a fair number of messages that I either don’t finish or that I don’t post. Most of them mean something to me; it’s a silly or sick joke that makes me chuckle, or it’s an obscure fact I’m proud to know, and so on. But if I think it won’t add something to the thread for the majority of its readers, I don’t submit it. I either close the window or hit Back, secure enough with myself that I don’t need to make my private amusements public.
Now, it makes perfect sense that a sixteen-year-old guy would be having trouble with this kind of thing. I know this, because I remember being a very bright and articulate teenager, and I remember how goddamn insufferable I was. I know where you’re coming from. You’re young, but you’re also on the cusp of adulthood. You want to be taken seriously, but you worry that you don’t have enough of a life to warrant it. From time to time, you will overcompensate. That’s normal for a sixteen-year-old. Hell, a lot of adults still can’t help it.
But here’s the thing: That feeling is about you. It is not about the community, of which we are all, justifiably, very proud. It’s not about becoming part of something, about adding to the whole. It’s about claiming as yours part of what’s already here; it’s about taking away. Instead of putting a post in a thread with the intent of offering a part of you and increasing the value of the discussion, it’s about taking the thread into your orbit, about approaching it only as it applies to you or as it can be used to project yourself into it. That’s the “me, me, me” thing I referred to above.
Naturally, it’s impossible to find the exact place where one draws the line between “this is about me” and “this is about us.” There’s definitely a gray zone there, because, obviously, this message and everything else I’ve written here is being generated by me and me alone and reflects greatly on who I am as an individual. And further, we’re not a lot of selfless martyrs building up the SDMB as some sort of idealized collectivist utopia. Far from it: I personally get a hell of a lot more out of the SDMB than I put into it. But I know that what I get out of it is the result of a vast number of other people putting a lot into it. I try to do my part, and I get rewarded many times over.
It’s also true that there are a fair number of people here who don’t really make an effort to contribute, and who use this place for personal entertainment. That’s fine, too, I guess; as the cliche goes, it takes all kinds. But I don’t think I’m out of bounds when I observe that, by and large, the people who treat the SDMB as a personal playground are, largely non-coincidentally, the same people who don’t see all the faces behind the little gray-boxed paragraphs. These are the people who approach trollhood without ever quite achieving it; they know there are rules to be followed, but less in the sense of simple human social decorum and more in the sense of the SDMB as a massively complicated improvement on the old Infocom games, i.e. an amusingly interactive generator of text that can be steered about with the right input. I’m thinking of one recently banned relative longtimer who, more and more, would use the boards as an outlet for outrageous opinions you know he’d never tell his friends and neighbors.
I know you’re not that guy, because you don’t go out of your way to be inflammatory, but nonetheless I sense a disturbing equivalence in terms of the recognition of the humanity behind the technology. Make no mistake, this technology is truly astonishing. We have people all over the world reading and writing here, with a huge variety of demographics represented. Pretty much anybody can fire up a computer, type in a web address, read a few messages, click a few buttons, and in short order add a paragraph or two or twenty that will be seen by dozens or hundreds of people within an hour or so. As a technological achievement, if you think about that, it’s really quite mind-boggling, despite how we all take it for granted these days.
But it’s a technological achievement that facilitates human expression. Everybody here has regrets, failings, triumphs, desires, and disappointments. Everybody here has a point of view, even if it can’t be clearly articulated. Everybody here has parents; many have children. It’s the rare person who doesn’t have at least one friend, and some have many. We all have things in common: movies we see, TV shows we watch, books we read, sports we follow; and we all have things that make us different: careers, philosophies, childhoods, favorite cuisines. We are a seething mass of life, and I for one feel privileged to be part of it. The superficially simple tool that is the message board provides a remarkable window into the lives of thousands and thousands of people, a reality that blows my mind far more than the astonishment of the raw technology.
This is turning into something of a manifesto, which wasn’t my intent, but I hope you’re getting something out of it anyway.
The basic foundation I hope I’m getting you to understand is this: You can always, always, learn more from other people than you can teach them. Even the people who disagree with you. ESPECIALLY them.
The way you come across— and you’re probably not even consciously aware of it— is that you want us to value you. “Notice me,” your posts say. “Pay attention to me. Recognize what I have to offer. Value me. Love me.”
That’s a common behavior, but it’s a misconception. The way it really works is this: You become valued by how you value others. You are loved the way you love others. In a strange way, as you get older and start dealing with women rather than girls, you’ll find that interacting with this message board is very similar to handling a relationship. It seems contradictory, but you acquire and achieve your desires more by listening than by pressing for what you want.
Right now, you’re pressing. Just relax. Step back. Really see what an amazingly cool place this is. Don’t take it for granted. Don’t treat it solely as an outlet, or as a tool for triggering and soliciting reactions that you hope will validate yourself, either in our eyes or your own. All you have to do is join us. See me as a person. See gobear and Scylla and amarinth and Unclebeer and Biggirl and Broomstick and Shodan and Olive, the Other Reindeer and wring and Sampiro and carnivorousplant and Eva Luna and Lobsang and Scotticher and all the rest of this motley bunch of cranks and iconoclasts as people. When you read something from me, imagine me writing it, typing away at my work computer cluttered with random papers and pens and an unwashed coffee mug with the Eddie Izzard “Sexie” logo on it. Watch as I pause to consider the wording of a sentence, and stare out my office window onto a sunlit construction site next to the interstate. Now extrapolate that to the thousands and thousands of other people who are more or less like me and yet not me at all, congregating in this wonderfully unique corner of cyberspace.
I don’t know about you, but personally, I’m awed by that.
So. Take a deep breath. Think about who you are and how you relate to the SDMB. Think about what you want to get from the experience, and think about what you offer in return. Take time to completely internalize what this place really represents, and what it means to you. And then, when you’re ready, talk with us instead of at us.
Cervaise, can I get the cliff notes version of your post?
Just kidding, don’t hurt me!! That was a really cool thought. And it’s very nice that you would take so much time to guide a young man who so many seem to feel is beyond guidance. My hat is off to you.
~J
