2001-04-11 - 10:03 p.m.
#42: No Need for Newsgroup Obsessions
Note to self: Never take yourself too seriously, because there's always someone out there who's ready to burst your bubble.
You know, it's amazing how the more things change, the more they stay exactly the same. 9 months ago, I stopped posting to a newsgroup I regularly visited, alt.games.final-fantasy. Some of the reasoning behind it was that I wanted to concentrate on my studies (THAT didn't work out too well) but mostly I just wanted to get away from the people who were crawling over the entire thing and making a nuisance of themselves. Call them "trolls", cause that's what they were in internet jargon. Constantly trying to get a rise out of the regular posters, and baiting them with attacks of a personal as well as an utterly bizarre nature (though I didn't appreciate the humour at the time), it really wasn't a fun place to be anymore. So I left, cursing them as I let the door shut on my backside.
Anyway, I came back recently to an offshoot of that newsgroup and they were all still there. Still jumping and hooting over their apparent kill. They even remembered my name, which is touching.... uhhh.... I guess. Course, one of them still blames me for breaking him up with his girlfriend, so I guess he had cause to scream bloody murder at my return. But geez, you'd think he would have gotten over that already instead of bundling all the hurt and pain inside and using it as a source to attack me.... And besides, if he'd just analyse the whole situation closely he would have realised that it was him who screwed the whole thing up for being a complete mental retard. Note to all potential lovebirds out there: You do NOT write a story to your loved one involving you strangling him or her to death if you don't stay together forever, okay? That's not only a way of speeding up the time to breaking up, but it also shows what an absolutely demented psychopath you are.
But yeah, lots of these trolls who remember my name and they try to get another rise out of me and my old compatriots posting there.... But instead of really getting bent out of shape over it like I did just before I left last time, now I just delete their messages from the list I'm reading. I mean, I'm just posting there for fun now and catching up with a couple of old friends who I haven't seen in a while. I don't have time to get caught up in the internal politics of all this newsgroup space hogging et al. There's just so much time and effort one can waste on it, you know? I wish I'd thought of this before I went ballistic in the years previous when I posted to AGFF, but I guess I was a little caught up in the whole thing at the time. Plus, I didn't have a life back then. Actually, I don't have much of a social life now, but at least I understand there's more to stuff beyond the web than I'd previously thought. If I were so bold, I'd give a big "thank you" to everyone at the AAC and give them love and kisses. LOVE AND KISSES! But then they'd run away, so I'll wisely keep my emotions reined in.
The way I see it is: it's pretty fucked that some people would make their own little "internet culture" as a subsitute for real life, but it's even MORE fucked up that some people would put so much value over "conquering" that particular culture. But as I said before, it's all to do with getting caught up with the moment at the time. Heck, I'm probably to look at this diary in the future and wonder, "Okay, what the heck was I on at the time?" cause my philosophical outlook would have changed again due to my circumstances. I think that's kinda cool, don't you?
