Warning!

This blog contains effusive rhetoric and profligate diatribes. Read at your own risk.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

Kill Your Fear of Death!

One of the most dominant factors of my recent life has been my association with a tiny Internet message board that about 20 people in the entire world have ever heard of. It started when I was on the official forums for the card game Magic: the Gathering, which I have played for 15 years and discussed on its forums for the past 6 of them; I got tired of having several posts of mine to those forums deleted for being too controversial and breaking the impossibly vague Terms of Service of that site, calling the non-democratic nature of message board softare into focus and making me feel that my freedom of speech had been sacrificed on an altar of other people's squeamishness and the company's fear of a frivolous lawsuit or the like. One of the posters on the boards who I had occasionally encountered, a woman who I will call "Nancy" to protect her real name and forum identifier, had decided to learn HTML at the time, and was apparently also getting tired of the Magic forums, though for a different reason. So to further her web-design education, she started a forum, and invited me and about 10 other people from the Magic forums to join it. There, we would be free to swear, make crude jokes, impugn the company's good name, and flame each other as much as we could handle (several of us had been branded trolls on the Magic forums, myself included, although I never wanted the arguments that I unintentionally created, so if I was a troll it was not on purpose).

So for the past year or so, I've been on "Nancy's" forum, and in that time, we've disagreed often, and with increasing strenuousness. She has known this whole time that one of my hot-button issues is the deletion of my forum posts, and until recently, even when we were in the deepest strife and hated each other's guts thoroughly, she never threatened to do that to me. But apparently, I just hadn't pushed hard enough; recently, I finally did, crossed one line too many and had her threaten to do exactly this. Whenever we would disagree severely, I would try to take a conciliatory tone and behave myself to avoid further aggravating her, because I was afraid to lose access to the forum and the record of my presence there.

But finally, this last time, I got so sick of her my-way-or-the-highway attitude (perfectly justified since she was the one doing the work of running the forum, but just because it's fair and logical doesn't mean I have to like it) that I decided I didn't even care if she deleted my profile and all my posts; I had fought so hard to avoid this miniature virtual "death", for so long, that it was liberating to finally accept the possibility of it happening because I was too tired of trying to avoid it. Those who have read a certain graphic novel, or watched the movie adapted from it over the writer's objections, will recall that the main plot twist of the entire work is a manifestation of this same principle. (I do not name that work as an attempt to avoid spoiling the plot; those who have read it know what it is, and those who never will can deduce its identity with moderate trouble from the information in this paragraph, but those considering reading the book or watching the movie hopefully won't know at this point which of the many works of that author I'm talking about and can still be surprised when they find out.)

I'm not yet prepared to say that this is a good experience across the board, nor will I advocate that anyone or everyone pursue it, and I certainly won't advise flirting with literal deaths instead of metaphorical ones in hopes of liberating oneself from what may be a perfectly sensible and healthy degree of fear. All I'm saying, under these exact circumstances and for myself personally, it seems to have worked out well, and this is a revelation I believed was worthy of sharing.

2 comments:

  1. It's worked out well? So...did you get banned?

    The idea is a cool one--a place for the bad Magic boys and girls to play. Too bad you didn't all get along, but I guess it's to be expected.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm not sure there was ever a formal ban, but "Nancy" did pretty much tell me to GTFO. Bannings have since become an intimately familiar experience for me; I'm thoroughly tired of them, and still hope to someday manage the necessary resources to create my own forum, one that I can't possibly be thrown out of, where I can say whatever I wish. Currently this blog is about the closest thing I have, which is probably part of why I've gotten back into working on it this year, after neglecting it seriously for half its existence to date.

      Delete