Posts by Emma Hart
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IP blocking might be on the next list o improvements at the lab
I can't speak for CactusLab, but the reason we've never introduced IP blocking at Bardic Web is that it's quite a blunt instrument. Especially there, we have a lot of people using communal computers - libraries, universities, etc. Also to compensate for the small shifts in IP number if you're on dial-up you end up having to block whole blocks of IP numbers. And a really determined troll will just go down the road to the internet cafe anyway. You end up causing more problems than you solve.
Still, one(1) persistent troll after three years, that's not too bad.
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Okay, cleaned up the thread, a task made much easier by all the 'not rising to troll bait'. Thank you all.
And Ben, enormous effort has been put into dealing with li'l p/conseismal here, which Russell has already stated on this thread, and it would be nice if you took him at his word, instead of simply assuming everyone was over-reacting. Some of his posts which I've deleted from threads of mine were by a very long chalk the most vile repulsive things I've ever seen written here. Nothing else even comes close. No, we don't have the power to exclude him, or we would have done it. Can you please accept this?
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It seems that it is important to assess the 'status quo' opinion from the original, or sentinel, blog post and then take sides.
Given how often (ie about 100% of the time) comment threads go off topic - like, say, this one - I don't think that's particularly helpful. The most useful thing you can do as a new commenter is read comments carefully, work out the accepted tone, and try to comment in that register. The worst thing you can do is make your first comment really aggressive and abrasive.
Certainly I have had my rhetorical arse soundly (albeit deservedly) kicked when venturing a half-formed opinion, and that makes me a little bit wary about posting musing comments.
I find, if you explicitly say that you're pondering something or exploring a half-formed idea, people are pretty patient and helpful. Most drama that doesn't involve someone deliberately being a tit comes from mis-reading, so the more explicit you are about what you're doing the better.
The reply to pollywog is so obvious and has been said so many times I didn't think it needed repeating. If you just let everything go, what you end up with is Kiwiblog, and you lose far more speech than you gain. Except in really extreme cases, it's not the opinions that cause the problem, but the way they're expressed.
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Unless I'm misremembering I don't think I've ever had a relationship end due to someone screwing around (though screwing around was a feature in a few of them).
Yeah, me too. I know this sounds like a cliché, but it was Dan's constant lying that made me leave him. I knew he was sleeping with Jane. For years, 'squash game' was a euphemism for illicit sex in KAOS. But it was when he said that he'd move in with me, then kept coming up with increasingly stupid reasons not to, that's when I turfed him.
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Dude, you know from experience I can do this all night. Knock it off.
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Okay, I'm going to let this thread keep running (obviously, as is my wont) and make the call on the story on about Tuesday.
And Tom is right, I'm surprised we've got as many as we have, walking that line between not being too squicky or upsetting someone else, and still being entertaining. So I've been scouring my memories for a story that makes me look worse than it does anyone else, yet doesn't involve me doing something that I shouldn't have been doing due to someone else having dibs on me.
Let me tell you about Dan. Not that Dan, the other one. I went out with him for about three months at the end of 1990, for the entirety of which he was sleeping with his ex-girlfriend, Jane, who was going out with another one of my friends. I eventually broke up with him, but didn't stop sleeping with him for several months. He might have been a dreadful human being, but he was Good At The Sex.
I did manage to stop doing this, and then one afternoon he phoned me, because I wouldn't let him in the house any more. He loved me, he said. He'd been out with four women he hadn't told me about in the six months or so since we'd broken up, and he just couldn't find what he was looking for with any of them. Possibly because he was trying to find it in my vagina. Ergo, it must be me he was supposed to be with. He was having a party that night, and I should come over and talk about getting back together.
So I suggested that perhaps, given her faultless - nay, mindless - devotion to him, perhaps Jane was what he was looking for. Perhaps he should try going out with her again. And he swore blind that it was me he loved, and please, wouldn't I just come, and give him a chance.
And because I am an idiot, I went. And to this party, he'd invited me, and Jane, and this other girl he'd been out with after me who had purple boots. He was completely trashed by the time I turned up, and very happy. Because you see, it turned out I'd had a fabulous idea. I'd been right. It WAS Jane he was supposed to be with, and they were already back together. Wasn't that nice?
Anyway, that saved me having to make any kind of decision. But I went back about a week later, and had sex with him, just to prove that she had no greater hold over his penile loyalty than I'd had. That proved, I walked away, and never saw him again.
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Sounds like you might get on with our man of mystery.
There's a considerable difference between 'unsettling' and 'tosspot'.
Although I do remember saying to Emma that there were a number of PAS men that if I were younger and not married, and they were not married either, I would have been jumping some bones that night.
Aheh. Aheheheheh. There was a point at the Wellington launch after-party, where I was sitting in one friend's lap, leaning all the way over backwards so another friend could light my cigarette for me, and I thought, yeah, I kind of miss this.
I've run into a few people who I've never been quite sure if they were flirting or not.
I've been told (by possibly the world's least reliable source) that I come across as flirting when I'm not, and because the background Flirt level is so high, when I am flirting it's off-puttingly over the top.
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And it's the (in)ability to read those nuances that makes the difference between a charming rake and a dirty old man.
And my inability to codify this in some kind of bullet-pointed form really disturbs me. You just know. At one point at the Great Blend I believe I left Bart, staggered out to Jackie and said, "Safe flirt. Brilliant."
When I was being all annoyed by someone's behaviour on the trip, I asked myself if I would have been annoyed by the same behaviour from the very lovely guy I met the next morning. And I was perturbed by the answer. But of course, my own responses would have been completely different.
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if you think I'm stupid enough to give you a picture of me naked ...
But I thought you LIKED me!
(One should note that, now I've met Bart, I feel completely comfortable teasing the hell out of him.)
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the other thing i've noticed about on line disputes is if the mods would just let it ride, things tend to even themselves out in the long run and people, as has been noted tend to filter out the bullshit anyway.
What utter crap. But y'know, that's just my professional opinion. Can't see my face, so I'm obviously not a person.