In the interest of reaching an understanding and leaving on a more positive note, I posteth.
quote:
That being said, sorry for the trouble. I wasn't purposely trying to make you feel bad. It's not in my nature. I saw a wrong and I wanted to try to right it. I just did it in a dumb way.
I can understand that. I don't think you're like crabby, who enjoys hurting people. It just struck me as supremely bizarre that someone as good as you would try to make SC a nicer place by picking out two people by name to flame the living shit out of. But you were drunk, and you didn't exactly mean all of it. I have done enough dumb things while drunk that I'm in no position to hold it over someone's head, even if I wanted to. So it's OK.
What isn't OK with me is that you continue to read something sinister into my interaction with Tim and my presence here in general. It isn't there. It's not in my posts, and it wasn't in my brain or in my heart when I made those posts. Anyone who looks at a picture of a guy thinking and reads something hostile has only one place to look for the hostility. It has come from himself. It's certainly not in the picture.
So the "wrong" that you saw and tried to "right" in a dumb way was not there in the first place. Look at the picture. It's not there. You projected it there.
I have a whole artsy-fartsy semiotics treatise bottled up inside me, explaining just how I mean these sometimes strange-looking signals. But I'll spare everyone the agony of reading that horrible shit. I'll just say that people of artistic temperament can exchange all kinds of signs and get something out of it that they would not get out of some rationalistic, highly-determined verbiage. I feel that you and Tim/Ima are in a position to "get" that and profit from it and contribute back to it.
Is it exactly what he asked for or expected? Of course not. I figure if that's all you want, you can write love notes back and forth to yourself. The image is something unexpected, something to think about, a small challenge. (A very, very small challenge, as it happens.) I'm sure if I laid out the reasoning behind it, it would seem plausible to you. The fact that I've had to lay it out even this much is sort of embarrassing and counter-productive. The idea was to see where we could get by avoiding words and rationalism, showing, not telling, using images as a sort of direct line to the old right brain, and here I am stuck with blah blah blah words words words. It didn't work.
But it sort of did. If nothing else, we learned something that seems to me to be incontrovertible at this point: A person's value-laden response to a value-neutral stimulus comes from him and him alone. It says that this contested field of values and meanings that we call communication is absolutely laden with contingencies, and that these are determined at least as much by the "recipient" as by the "sender." Indeed, there is not so much a recipient and sender as there is a field between nodes where "meaning" and "value" are determined in a very complex way.
We also learned that alcohol affects judgement.
I hope you understand what I'm trying to say, or at least that there was something behind my actions other than the sinister leader of a sinister clique trying to make himself and his minions feel cool. Because, as you can see by now, that does not exist.
As for the rest: Scyess, if I read him correctly, is absolutely right. The way I would say it is that I lack a sufficient amount of whatever virtue it is that would allow me to rise above the shit-slinging. Because of certain (very common) flaws in my character, I find it hard to enjoy myself when I'm being personally attacked, much less when this treatment is aimed at my wife. If I grew enough as a person, I could get beyond it, but at this point I haven't. If Scyess thought I was above it, he gave me too much credit. Maybe someday, but not today.
So it's best for my own sanity that I go someplace where the forums are more tightly moderated.
Maybe I can make comics. But the forums and IRC are too whatever-they-are for me to handle.
BTW, here and elsewhere, I see some mutterings about users getting downvoted. FWIW, I have not downvoted anyone, ever. For example, I think Tim/Ima may assume that all this crap has caused me to dislike him personally and downvote him when neither one is true. I voted him "good" to begin with and I have not changed that vote because of a stupid misunderstanding. I have not even downvoted crabby, although he is scum, and I have seen him try to get others to downvote users for personal reasons. That's my policy, and I hope others adopt it.
Thanks again to those who voiced support. Many of you say exactly what I'm thinking.
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What others say about boorite!
