WALTON GOGGINS (tearfully, kneeling before own grave): You are shitting on my mouth and calling it a sundae...you are fucking me in the ass, Spirit...

EDI PATTERSON: This is you bitch. This is your fucking grave you sleeping cap old wearing a dress to bed bitch.

I think a lot about the structure - both forums and blogs are doing the same thing in the back (creating a database of a Text and Replies), but made readable so differently. In a blog the Post is presented differently than replies, and you don't have the flattening of anyone-can-start-a-thread forum

it's notable, in one of those ironic turns i hear you find in history, that the FYAD folks got so big as "Weird Twitter" and defined so much of that platform, since the entire bit of FYAD and its children was "the forum where where you you post like people who barely know how to use a forum"

the fact that i am actually addressing no one--mostly scribbling down thoughts i have--is in fact what allows me to Post. recalling my forum days, there's so much i did not say because it seemed redundant, extraneous, or unimportant to the larger group conversation. here, i'm contemplating in public

the weirdness of modern social media is how i am simultaneously always addressing nobody in particular here (such as with this thread) and, from the perspective of other users reading me, being taken within the context of conversations of which I'm personally ignorant or don't care to address

contrast this with a forum or chat room, which could certainly be subject to the tensions of competing cliques or tendencies, but if well maintained, was geared toward keeping some people having a certain type of ongoing discourse around particular topics. engaging improperly could be frowned upon.

the social media era took the form of the online community space (the forum, the chat room) and hybridized it with its contemporary but individualized "personal soapbox" form (the blog). stuff on YOUR blog was what YOU wanted to talk about, even if you were responding to someone else on THEIRS.

it's a - deliberately? - puerile misunderstanding of how freedom of expression is supposed to operate, married to a pessimistic view of the world in which people lack the capacity to examine and hold in question their own beliefs in the absence of direct contradiction

i think commentariat discourse distorts this stuff so the framing does sort of become "LISTEN, if you AREN'T listening to [whatever extremely bad opinion], you're DOING YOURSELF AND SOCIETY HARM" because it's rather about partisans arguing for their place in visible society than inspiring growth

and i think it's interesting that "echo chamber" rhetoric implicitly dichotomizes this stuff, as well as never really highlighting the exercise of individual education and judgment? apparently if you just listen to everyone holler you all spontaneously evolve as people to some unspecified good

if you take your beliefs about the world seriously and keep around you those whom you trust in their own commitments to the same, you can safely ask yourself at a point of difference "well do i really think i know what's up here, or should i make some reconsiderations?"

this is odd because i've definitely learned and grown as a person in my time and in no instance did this happen because i sought out someone oppositional to me, but because someone i'd already brought into my ecosystem BECAUSE THEY AGREED WITH ME IN ONE WAY, turned out to differ with me on another

oh i was also talking about Rudkin lmao what i'd seen said his other stuff is more realist which seemed kind of bizarre?

I have not but I was reading around and got the same unfortunate sense that this one was a tonal outlier