Rambling response. Not very ninja. Must be pithier.
I don't actively dislike my colleagues, but there is a sprawling, rugose cold war going on between the management and the rest of the office, which I'm determined not to discuss with my coworkers. Barbelith is an escape from loaded and arch comments about how I'm enjoying the job.
I particularly like Barbelith because I don't feel one has to lay the groundwork to such an extent as I would with my co-workers. Whether I'm arguing some kind of obscure point, or making a very small joke, I don't have to do as much explaining as I would in a conversation. In part because if people don't get something, they can google it. Also, because I feel the place is quite queer friendly and there are a lot of posters interested in critical theory and politics.
At work, a small anecdote or querky observation gets endlessly derailed as I have to explain practically every element (how can someone have two husbands, why would you have a women-only disco, and often, indeed, what's a bulletin board). None of which I mind answering, but it does tend to eat into one's repartee. And totally change the point of the chat, which was for two coworkers to lightly amuse each other, not to conduct a seminar. I dislike very much feeling as though some components of my life are weighty when they seem so simple. I like Barbelith because they feel much more lightly carried, here.
I don't really use other boards as much as I might. I've been looking at livejournal communities a bit - there's an odd additional feature, that you can follow back comments to personal blogs, which doesn't happen here. Although one can find the journals of posters, the mechanisms are more tricky. It's sometimes good to be able to read more of someone's writing, if a poster is very intelligent and likeable, or to find out straight away if someone else is always an unspeakable idiot. On Barbelith, it's much more fragmented; people crop up in different threads but it takes time to get a coherent sense of them. Meeting people in real life speeds up that process for me.
Hope you have fun here, woolly. |
