Thanks to Google, this is the first time I’ve seen these posts since I made them about 5 years ago. It is quite an interesting experience. I seemed to be a pretty active poster for a short time, mostly talking about computer hardware. But definitely the most interesting aspect was seeing my contributions to threads about religion, evolution, homosexuality, etc… I wasn’t quite a fundamentalist, but I certainly defended the typical religious side of debates. I noticed that I frequently engaged with the rough equivalent of Der Trihs, and very often accused atheists of being just as bad as fundamentalist Christians.
The best moment I saw though was when I said evolution was just a “ridiculous theory” that “somehow” became mainstream and then got really annoyed when another poster dismissed me as a “failure of the education system”.
Also interesting was that I still see my posts as logical, even though they may have been based on irrational premises. In fact, if I was neutrally observing myself as I am now, I would guess I’d only be short ways from discarding religion. Confirmation bias, I’m sure.
I don’t know your age, but I’m 37. I absolutely cannot read stuff I wrote when I was younger. I wrote a LOT. I used to publish a print zine that was nothing but my own work, when I was about 22-25. It’s just unbearable. Was I really such a tool?
Oh, God, yes. Was I really that arrogant and snarky? (And with so little reason for it – kinda like the French :)). It’s a wonder that someone didn’t kick my ass each and every day of my life. Of course, by now life has pretty much taught me that I’m just not that freakin’ special.
Over the past few days I’ve been looking over some ofmy old threads. Some are quite amusing, but I’m really surprised at how angry and bitter I come off in some of my posts. And I thought I was being mellow at the time!
I have often said that, if I were to go back in time and meet my younger self, I’d kick my arrogant, pretentious ass.
I too cringe in shame when I see some of the garbage I let other people read - and scratch my head in wonderment at the praise some of it got. It was all crap, every bit of it. Especially some of the god awful poetry…still a poet, still a fan of poetry, just not the crap I wrote when I thought I was mysterious and dark and brooding.
Somewhere, there is a 30 page Morrowind fanfic with my name on it. I think I saved it on a floppy disk so it’s unreadable to today’s modern computers, but there’s a hard copy somewhere as I used to write it for a friend, using our characters.
If you search my then-email–which I’m not giving out–you’ll find some supremely obnoxious posts that I made on the Ace of Base Cafe sometime in 1997. Violations of general decency include the use of five or more exclamation points in a row, multiple posts on the same subject, and the introduction of annoying, redundant polls.
I haven’t reread my earlier posts, but I doubt if there is much I would disagree with (although there a few things just plain wrong that were pointed out at the time. Somehow this reminds me of my mother who said, on a number of occasions, “You will see things my way when you reach my age.” She was wrong.
Every once and a while I’ll run across a zombie thread that I’ll read, but not notice it’s a zombie thread at first.
There’s been time when I’ve been reading a post and think, “That’s exactly what I wanted to say” and look at the name to find out that I wrote it five years ago.
Yeah, sometimes I’ll be reading an ancient thread, and think to myself, “Damn, I really wish I could comment and set these motherfuckers straight”. And then I see a guy who jumped in 10 years ago and calmly and clearly made all the points I wanted to make. And I look and see it was me.
I’ve done the same thing (on another forum I posted on for years). A couple of times I posted in necroposted threads and then went back to read the thread only to discover that I’d posted already using the same example or metaphor. In my defence, I did have over 18,000 posts so there was no way I could remember them all. :smack: