Like all good humor, there’s a grain of truth to it. Twitter, like most Internet platforms, can be a tool for sharing information and ideas. And like most Internet platforms, it is used for inane chatter as a substitute for real human interaction, or for that matter, thought. I’ve noticed with myself that the more I use things like twitter, online forums, social networking sites, and IRC, the more self-conscious, introverted, and insecure I become about interacting with people face-to-face. I don’t think any of these Internet services are bad in moderation. Without the Internet, I’d have been lost as a vegan living in the suburban Midwest, and I wouldn’t have met my husband. The problem is that all this connectivity can quickly (and frequently does) become addictions.
I’m not going to scream “NONE OF YOU HAVE ANY FRIENDS” and summon the Fail Whale. You probably do have friends. Give them a call. See how they are doing. Go hang out with them. Go talk to a random stranger and make new friends! Or if you’re really not feeling like socializing, at the very least go read a book, or walk in a park. Just pry yourself from your cell-phones, iPods, computers, netbooks, BlackBerries, and all those other gizmos that allow you to forget about the real world.
We’ve become a world of cyborgs, living in a virtual reality. We’re forgetting how to deal with real people. It’s time we remember again.
At that party the other night, where someone was complaining about the Vegan Freak Forums, I suggested that person join the Vegan Represent Forums instead. Someone else pointed out the various faults with those forums and some people on there. I won’t go into those alleged faults here, because I don’t do that sort of thing. (Notice a pattern here?)
Here’s the thing with the Internets and with all the other ways humans organize themselves: we’re human! We’re going to fuck up, make mistakes, disagree, upset each other, get pissed off, have misunderstandings, and not always like each other. It’s a part of being alive. We shouldn’t expect to find a utopia, on the Internet or IRL. They don’t exist.
Like I said before, if you really think you can do better, start your own online community. Eventually, if you’re successful, you’ll have to make hard decisions, and some people won’t like them, or you. You will be called a nazi, fascist, authoritarian, or just plain mean. You cannot make everyone happy, all you can do is try to keep some order. The Internet is full of trolls, attention whores, and idiots. Their behavior should not be tolerated. Not everyone agrees on what behavior qualifies as trollish, and sometimes people make mistakes. Sometimes trolls have the best intentions. Sometimes things that are seemingly unoffensive to the poster reflect that persons insensitivity or ignorance to the plight of others. Whether or not the cause is ignorance or malice, it shouldn’t be tolerated.
There are no utopias. We can only do our best in the communities we have, for now.
I would have had a lovely time at the potluck, were it not for the fact that there were some disgruntled members of the Vegan Freak Forums there, who felt it appropriate to spend the entire night complaining about how the forums are run, how the mods are Nazis (Godwin’s Law), etc. etc.
The people who run the forums are providing a service, of their own good free will, and they have no obligations or duty to do so. It is up to those people to run it as they see fit. If you don’t like it, you have no obligation to stay there. Start your own forums, or find a community that better suits you. If we ban someone, that’s our discretion. If you don’t like our decisions, go away. Honestly, why is that so difficult to understand for some people? Why do all these people feel entitled, like we owe them an explanation as to how we run things?
People need to grow up.
On the other hand, why should I give a flying fuck what these people think? I really don’t. They just wanted to vent about decisions we’ve made; so be it. I’m not going to read too much into what people say at a party after having a few drinks. I don’t think, in the case of some people, it was necessarily a personal attack. (Okay, the Nazi remark is, but so the fuck what?) I’m not going to read too much into this, as the complaints say more about the complianer’s sense of entitlement than about anything we’re doing. And the fact of the matter is, we’re still a vibrant and active community. So we must be doing something right.
With all due Christian love and respect, all I can say is fuck the haters. They can go play elsewhere.
I’m a relatively new convert to Protestantism (2 years). Having been raised Catholic, I feel I do not have the solid understanding of the Bible that I should. I’m also a geek. So naturally, I have bible study software on my computer. Here’s a brief overview of the applications I’ve tinkered with, and which I recommend.
JSword is a powerful free application that makes Bible study easy. It features parallel bible comparisons, footnotes, dictionaries, devotional readings, and is fully expandable through JSword bible and resource modules. It is available for free under the GNU General Public License.
This is the application I’m currently using, and I’m fairly happy with it. It still has some minor bugs that need to be worked out, but I’m confident that this will eventually parallel e-Sword in features and performance. I highly recommend using this.
E-Sword is a free, closed-source application and probably one of the best applications out there. It has virtually all the features of JSword projects, but is much more refined and stable. It also provides Bible modules containing the Deuterocanonical and Apocryphal books, Strongs concordance, and other nice features one would hope to find in a commercial Bible study application.
The only downside is that it is not open source, and it is restricted to the Microsoft Windows platform. It also lacks the easy module manager of Bible Desktop. Nonetheless, if you use Windows, I highly recommend trying this out.
This is another free, open-source Sword-based project. It features a very nice Aqua user interface. It is relatively easy to use, but lacks a lot of the more powerful features of Bible Desktop. If you are a Mac user, I recommend checking both Bible Desktop and MacSword to see which you like better. It’s not my favorite application, but it’s worth looking at.
As much as I like to support free and open-source software, one drawback is that many modern bible translations are restricted by copyright and cannot be used in these applications. Given that, I may cave-in and pay for a commercial application. But for now I’m happy with Bible Desktop, and using the hard copies of more modern translations when necessary.
Thanks in part to the generosity of a friend, when the heat sink on my computer died, I upgraded to a 64-bit processor. I was still running 32-bit Windows XP Professional. I got fed up with half my registers collecting dust, acquired the 64-bit version, and began the process of upgrading. My hardware, even some that is built into the 64-bit motherboard, didn’t like XP 64. So finally I said fuck it, and installed OpenSuSE. And everything is working as it should.
I know this is old news, but I just stumbled across it this morning, and I couldn’t believe the hypocracy. Those remarks are so outrageous coming from him, I couldn’t even laugh at them.
