After several years of unregistered lurking in threads I’ve pointed him to, my husband became a member, who reads mostly threads I point out to him.
He did stop calling y’all “invisible friends” on Friday night, at the Vegas Dopefest Opening Ceremonies. Perhaps Silenus’ shirt helped – that isn’t invisible in ANY universe!
Anyway, I like him being a member. Then again, my brother, sister in law, one aunt, 2 cousins, at least 3 coworkers, 2 step kids, and a couple of RL friends are members, and my father lurks. The SDMBs are rather like a small town for me.
I wish I had an SO who partook of the SDMB, or was at least sympathetic to it. It would be like making peace between two parts of my life.
Of course, I have the same wish with respect to Esperanto. And rammed-earth solar-heated and solar-pwered houses. And an SO interested in all three would be amazing. But that’s so improbable as to be not worth worrying about.
Esperanto-speakers, being familiar with loved ones who do not comprehend the attraction of Esperanto, have an expression for this. We say, Havi pacon inter la biblioteko kaj la geedzo: “to have peace between the library and the spouse”. The library, of course, is one’s collection of Esperanto books, and by extension the Esperanto-speaking world.
A spouse that understands or even takes part in one’s unusual pastime is a rare thing indeed.
Because of a thread on this Board, I joined POGO. As a result, babygirl would meet me in the POGO rooms. So, I talked her into trying out the Dope. She is, and will be a lurker, but we do talk about what we are reading. She reads a lot that I skip and vice versa, so we see more of the Dope.
Ditto for me. I actually kind of hide it from my IRL life for that reason. In fact I’ve had several IRL firends that would have loooved this board, and most likely would have become long standing members, but ya know worlds colliding and all that.
And since my username is my IRL name, it wouldn’t take long to track me down.
My husband was a Doper for a while (the infamous Dread Pirate Jimbo), but he left because his computer wasn’t very compatible with the Dope and then it became pay-to-play. He still likes most of y’all. He actually has a different message board that’s his home, which I tried and didn’t like. I think it’s actually good that we have our different communities - too much closeness is not ideal either.
ETA: I don’t encourage real life people to come here, either. This is mine, where I can talk about all of them when they piss me off.
The SO is in fact a Doper, and we do do the whole “hey, have you seen this thread?” to each other, he finds he threads I’d be interested in and miss and I do likewise. Its rather nice.
You might want to change your user name, essell. The mods will let you do that. Write to one of them if you do. Then, PM or email your SDMB friends with the new name and your colleague will remain in the dark.
And…uh…do you suppose anyone would care to tell me the joke?
My husband posted a few times but let his membership lapse a while back. I loved what he wrote and wish he wanted to participate here. He doesn’t really enjoy debating. But he writes beautifully.
My husband is a Doper, albeit one who rarely posts (never outside the poker threads that I know of).
He occasionally gets marginally exasperated that I am also a Doper (which is his own damn fault, since he directed me here in the first place), but this is not because of any privacy or need of his to have his own space.
It’s because even before he pointed me at the Dope, I was notorious for asking random questions apropos of nothing (like, while driving down the road on our way to dinner with his mom in a slight lull in a conversation about baseball, “Where do you think I can find some rhubarb?”). This is because my brain has a tendency to wander off on its own and bring back souveniers.
Since I started surfing the Dope, the random questions have only gotten worse. And since I fully expect him to answer these questions to the best of his ability, he gets exasperated. He gets really quite ruffled by the occasional thread about the infamous lists of love, because then the questions definitely get less fun for him to answer.
My husband isn’t a Doper either, he just doesn’t do message boards. However, he does know about this place as I talk about it frequently. I even read him posts I find interesting and that will usually cause us to remember something similar and funny that happened to us.
It’s not always humorous , though. Some posts are sad and remind us of things that make us cry. Sometimes he gives me the thunk on the noggin I need to be a member in good standing. A few weeks ago I was drunk and stupid and posted some dumbass shit that made me cringe. A whole day passed before I could even think about coming back to see the damage I had done. I’m going to refer to my husband as Damon_Otto_Jackson* from now on. DOJ urged me to just get in there because the worst they could do is ban me, right? And if I was just chastised heartily that wasn’t so bad since I had it coming.
Well, he was right. I wasn’t banned, and for reasons unknown to me I wasn’t even warned. He knew how I felt about the board and never belittled me about it. I still don’t know if I want him to be a member. I may need to rail on him.
Sheesh, now I sound like a loser who needs a message board to make my life complete. I have a life, really, I do.
*Damon, Otto and Jackson are our boy cats.
My husband isn’t a Doper, although I shared this place with him when he found me laughing hysterically at some thread and asked what I was laughing at.
He will read some threads, but won’t actually join the board. He’s afraid he’ll be mocked for his sentence structure.
He met some Dopers a few years back when there was a Dopefest in Seattle in honor of Swampbear taking at trip there. He had a great time and thought the folks there were all great.
Intaglio lurks extensively. But she’s usually over in Cafe Society, a forum I usually don’t visit. She can find me and my posts, if she wants to, but I don’t think she bothers often. Anything I post, that she has questions about, she asks me - I don’t post anything I can’t explain to her, but most things I post are immediately obvious to her anyway - She knows me better than I know myself (and vice versa).
I kind of wish my SO was a doper. She joined fleetingly a few years ago but only posted twice. She has read some threads with me but she more or less sees the Dope as one of my geeky endeavors that she’d rather not get in to. I suppose it’s ok though since I can have this to myself but I often find myself uttering little Doperisms like “Penis Ensues” or “1920’s Style Deathray” and she just looks at me like I just told her I kissed Abe Vigoda’s eyebrows.
She is aware, however, of how much (well spent) time I spend here. As she catches me gazing off into my own little world she asks what I’m wondering and I tell her, and she just says, “Heh, you’re going to look it up on the Dope tomorrow arent’ you? You’re such a geek, I love it”
) It perfectly describes what my mind does as well.