User blog:Cerne/Back again...but I'm leaving another board

Okay...WOW. Six months since my last blog entry.

It's well into the month of May, well past the time of the year where I shut myself inside and go into hermit mode, and well past the time that I said a few entries back I would be too preoccupied with other things to participate in the Conworld Wikia. I think the problem was partly due to a late spring. It's funny, actually, because we did have spring. Just a cold and wet one, that's all. Warm weather started very early in February and then in Late March we got pummelled with cold weather. Mostly rain, but there was some snow, too. In any case, I was still heating my house well into April and early May. Not as often, but it was very hard to get into the habit of re-starting my blog. That, and I sort of have this habit of avoiding things I've started If I leave them for too long. I dunno...I start getting anxiety and then I procrastinate. The solution to this, of course, would be to reconcile with the fact that everything I had planned on saying next when I left my last blog entry will need to be forgotten. That won't necessarily be the case this time (yes I know I said I would stop accumulating my ideas) but I am going to introduce them later on. It's not like I started the entry as an entry - more like a bunch of jot notes from research on my conworld - so it will be easier to delay it for another entry. There was also an entry I wanted to do that was going to go with my profile page and I would like to get that done before I continue to edit my profile. This should be easy to hold back, too, since it is a glossary of sorts. What I am typing now, in the kind of casual prose typical of something on-the-spot, is the kind of thing I would not be able to delay or hold back, and would need to be deleted if left for too long.

How was that for a first paragraph?

I have a couple of things to mention before I continue with the main focus of my blog entry, as evident in its title.

FIRST: I think I am five hours behind the site's GST. My last entry was published more than five minutes before midnight on November 27th. This entry will also probably be five hours later than its intended post date because I haven't figured out this whole time thing out yet.. I will look into it before I post my next entry.

SECOND: In my last entry, rotation velocity should be ~500 m/s, not 581 m/s. I would go back and edit the entry if it weren't for my own editing policy. I'll just need to remember this correction before I type my conworld article. There might be other things to correct as well...it's been so long since I've even visited the Conworld Wikia that I will need to do some re-reading to get back on track.

Now, on to the main part of the entry.

I regret to say I am getting bogged down again. You've noticed how long it has taken me to get back to the Conworld Wikia? Well, it's happening elsewhere, too. So something is eventually going to need to happen if I am to fix this problem. I don't know exactly how I would like to put this - I may once have known, about half an hour ago, but my ADD and memory have gotten rid of a lot of it - so I'll put it in the best way I know how to right now. As of right now, I am still a member of the Zompist Bulletin Board (ZBB): one of the most well-known conlang communities on the internet, owing to the reception and following that Mark Rosenfelder has attained for his Virtual Verduria site. I like the ZBB; I like it now just as much as I did in my earlier days there. But too much is too much. To know what I mean, recall the last entry in which I brought up the ZBB. It is always difficult to generalize against an entire community so whatever I say about the ZBB in particular is bound to leave out a certain number of people. In this case, perhaps a lot. Ergo, I will not say anything of the ZBB itself but rather of my experiences there. And as much as I would like to point fingers, I am not going to mention any names. So I cannot do any finger-pointing, either. However, since what makes a community what it is are the people who make it up, the community label itself needs to stand for at least a few people. So, if it needs to refer to someone, then let it refer to the people who make the ZBB what it is when we think of the ZBB. For me, these would be the board members who have made my experiences there the very reason why I am typing this entry. If you know why I am typing this entry then you know how I feel about the board in general, and hence how I feel about the people who make me post my entry. To put it simply: if I had a problem with the board itself then it would only be with those people who were the problem and not those people who weren't, because those people who were [the problem] would have made the rest of the board a problem for me. If you weren't a problem for me then you may have literally been a part of the ZBB but you were not a part of the ZBB that I speak of here.

It's funny, but the conditions that led to my less-than-positive experiences on that board have existed since day 1 ...OK, maybe not that long. No one knew me then. I do seem to have been incompatible with the ZBB since day 1, however, and I suppose I never really noticed - or cared - about that incompatibility until it gradually built up to what it is now. I was never a hard-core conlanger (though at one time I was more into it than I am now) so I could not contribute to member interactions in the same way that everyone else there does. Consequently I don't fit in there as well as most other members have learned to do. But it is more than that: I just don't think the same way they do. And by "they" I mean those who characterize the ZBB (see preceding paragraph). Not that being "straight" or "neurotypical" had anything to do with it. I just didn't fit in. And a lot of the time, not even I knew exactly why. I am a xenocentric misanthropist with a radical left-wing ideology, a pacifist and anti-progressive environmentalist worldview with (secular) anti-humanist undertones, and a Cynical egalitarian outlook on life. Not to mention a very empirical and relativistic philosophy...whether any of this helped or hindered my existence on the board, or made any difference at all, is still not for certain. All I know is that whenever I post advice or ideas in an active thread I get criticized for it, which leads to an argument, and is followed by repetitive trolling when or if I manage to finish the argument. This happens less now than it used to. Now I mostly make threads inactive whenever I post in them. I hardly get any responses to threads I make unless they are questions in the C&C Quickies forum, and even that was starting to dwindle. Only one other member posted in the last question thread I started, only one other member posted in the last and only CC thread (Conworld Comparison - a themed thread asking about other peoples' conworlds) I started, and only one member posted in the last thread I started about my own conworld. It was posted in the Conlangery & Conworlds forum, and for the time being, none of the threads there are being pruned so you may view the thread here. In the first WIP thread I started, more than half of the posts in it were mine because I needed to keep the thread from being pruned. Less than a year later, one of the other members posted a WIP thread featuring the same subject (conbiology) and got loads of responses, most of which were compliments, and with only one light-hearted constructive criticism (more of an inquiry) from one board member. The only truly successful thread I started can be found here, yet even that wasn't as successful as your average NOTA thread. I'll admit it was an odd topic, though, and I only posted four times in it. There were a few well-known and reputable board members in that thread, and now one of them doesn't like me anymore because of an argument with a well-known troll which resulted in my placing him on my ignore list. I ended up providing a screenshot of my now empty ignore list later on but I am skeptical that made much of a difference. There are two moderators who don't like me for some reason or other and who - when not criticizing or downgrading me - will not read anything I type unless I ask them a question involving their own expertise. There are certain members I now need to regard as trolls in order to avoid pointless arguments. The rest of the board gets the privilege of not having to see them that way, because they're (more or less) agreeable everywhere else.

The attitude in general was just downright toxic sometimes. The ZBB has a seniority hierarchy whereby prominence is given to those who have either been on the board longer or who have posted more often, or preferrably both. Lots of online communities have this. Then there is the typical moderator and administrator worship...and sometimes there are nationality lines that split the community up. The two nationality majorities on the ZBB are American and U.K. though there is a substantial continental European presence there as well. You sometimes get generalized criticism exchanged between American and British members, for example. The point here being that if you get into an argument or flame war with someone from one of the other nationality majorities then other members who share that nationality will join in, too. So there can be a hierarchy by number. This still could be expected anywhere, but on the ZBB there seems to be a perceived correlation between hierarchy and esteem. The higher you are in the hierarchy, the more you know. Those who are relatively new are assumed to know nothing until they are accepted by the rest of the community. Nevermind the notion that this is clearly biased; if you have been on the board for a fair amount of time and yet no one likes you (to use a more extreme example), then - as far as the board is concerned - you still don't know anything. This is how the characteristic elitist attitude seems to have evolved. How this all relates to me is thus obvious: I am Canadian, I joined four years after the board began, and I am not egotistically biased, among other reasons (many of which were brought up in the preceding paragraph). There exists on the ZBB the idea that if someone is lower than you are then you can downgrade them and/or demean them until they stop getting in your way or give you what you want. In this case, most commonly authority or esteem. So there is clearly some form of hierarchy at work here. The result can be a very toxic experience until you stick it out or unless you show some form of inferiority complex and decide to listen to everything the senior members tell you.

All in all, I don't think I can take this anymore. Not when contributing to the ZBB costs me time and participation away from other online communities, like this one, without taking away too much time from my personal life away from the computer. Which has always been - but especially now - a priority to me. As I said in that earlier paragraph, not everyone on the ZBB is that nasty. In fact, probably more than two-thirds of the board are not responsible for my complaints in this entry. Which is unfortunate, because the ZBB does get criticized for its nastiness on other sites. But those few members who do give the ZBB its bad reputation are the few who post most often and/or are the most well-known and esteemed by the rest of the board. So, since they are the ones who make the ZBB the community it is, they are the ones who will - and should - receive the bulk of the generalized criticism aimed at the ZBB in its entirety. Again, this is unfortunate, but I can no longer invest my time there for what I am getting out of it. The purpose of this entry is to say that I am leaving the ZBB for good this time. Like the CWBB, I will no longer mention it here in this blog, or anywhere else, unless asked to do so. In its defense, I will say that the experiences I had in the ZBB were quite different from those I had in the CWBB - largely because of the way the two communities were organised and managed - so my reasons for leaving it were altogether different as well. I could certainly tolerate being on the ZBB if I had a better reason or purpose for going there. Alas, I don't. So I do regret this decision but I still have to make it. As of now, both sites no longer exist to me.

One good thing about all of this is the time I can now invest into other things like the Conworld Wikia. This Wikia is now my sole repository for my conworld material. If I ever get any of it up, it will go here. I left another online community earlier this year, at the end of Janruary, but I joined it for personal and non-conworld-related reasons so I cannot name it here. That's still more time to spend online, though. I do post a bit on Xhin's Gametalk X.0 but it isn't a stable place for conworld material. And then there's the SpecEvo site... I may rejoin that board and start posting my conbiology ideas on it now that I have the time. Some idiot there with a superiority complex seems to be posting in a lot of threads and telling people off... I knew him since I was last there but he has since then become a moderator (don't they all?). Ugh... I'll see how it goes.

As for the Conworld Wikia, I will try to make more progress on both my blog and my conworld pages. I have the time to actually work on these now so stay tuned.

Thanks for reading.