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Well.
After developing a pathological LOATHING for Morrison's Invisibles thing (I'm not joking, I detest it, I vastly preferred Doom Patrol and Zenith and things like that) when it veered away from plot into the deepest, darkest recesses of Morrison's head, I looked at Barbelith a few times, and thought, "No WAY am I going to hang out with all those people who are obviously going to be as disgustingly self-obsessed as GM himself".
I wandered back and forth a few times, microlurking sporadically, never being the least interested in actually registering. I was in a bit of a Magic Funk, having been a XXXAOS MAJIKAN or something before reading the Invisibles obsessively and furiously from cover to cover just to make myself even angrier about how VERY VERY WRONG GM was about things, and assumed that Barbelith was all about GM and his pals.
I wandered away, muttering obscenities under my breath, fumes of concentrated hate collecting around my furrowed brow, and frothing magic nonsense spontaneously and magnificently under street lamps to imaginary foes all related to or pals with Morrison, much to the trepidation of random passers-by.
I'm not joking. I was really, genuinely, very angry with him. I thought his work was properly magical and NEGATIVE, dangerous and destructive, useless to ordinary people, infectious and unhelpful to the Comics scene, misleading to people who wanted to practice magic and basically a wankfest of epic proportions. I was horrified at his hubris. Essentially I thought he was using his audience as dumping ground for his own psychic toxins.
You can imagine my reaction to "The Filth".
So, anyway, I got over all that and started peering at Barbelith round about the beginning of this year after having spent a couple of pleasant years involved in nice, wholesome, unparadoxical drumming magic which cleared my head of quite a lot of nonsense thoughts about magic and how the whole thing was invariably awash with amazingly irritating people (that wasn't at all just Morrison's fault, I hasten to add, not by a long shot). It was good, and I decided not necessarily to forgive him but at least to go and noise up some of his pals to see if they had anything interesting and non-patronising to say.
Imagine my amazement when I actually sat down and read the board!
I thought: "Oh dear. There are lots of unhappy people." (The board was Under a Cloud at that time. Numerous harrowing bannings and arguments had taken place and everybody was a bit... fractious) "I know! I shall go and post some nice threads and make people happy and an unambiguously silly, self-deprecating way and make some new pals, which is always good fer a larf. And in the process I shall spread love and delight!" I'm not joking about that, either. I made a conscious effort to try and make my threads fun to be in and fun to take part in. I had this idea that the board was a little too dry.... And I think I was right at the time, although subsequent explorations of the board's past revealed that there had been silliness and delight in abundance long before I showed up.
Over the past few months I have wandered away, to Wales, to Arran, to Bordeaux, to various drumming places, leaving Barbelith to trundle on happily, assuming, with hubris equal only to that of Morrison himself, that I had helped to turn the tide, and that people were a little more open to having fun with the board as well as engaging in the very dry stuff, with every intention of returning to re-engage in my love-spreading exploits, only to find upon my return that "everyone had gone back to hacking lumps out of each other".
Which was not, perhaps, strictly true.
I was disenchanted.
And I kinda stopped posting.
Before anyone sticks the boot in, there was nothing consciously "magical" about my attempts to make people have more fun. I'm good at getting groups of people to join together, usually. It's one of my skills. And, generally, even though people haven't necessarily asked for that sort of input, they are appreciative of it. It's very often the case that communities that have a tendency to fall to bits are missing "glue" people, and such communities benefit tremendously from even one person putting conscious effort into coming up with ways for the group to walk about together on common ground. It doesn't have to be wondrously exciting or inspiring common ground (and the person doesn't even have to be terribly good at it, they just have to be conscious enough of it so that they can do something about it), it just makes it easier for people to *choose* between a combative or cooperative approach in a situation which can be mistakenly perceived as *necessarily* combative, which is a big, big problem in groups of very intelligent people, particularly when they're talking about things they know a lot about... Many highly intelligent people get well into their 50s without ever really realising that the desire to skewer your debating opponent with a hideously keen and accurate linguistic lance is rooted in exactly the same instinct that motivates 8 year old thugs to sit on skinny little boys and stick pencils in their ears. The 8 year old thugs have the opportunity to revise their natures as they get older. The highly intelligent skinny kids sometimes don't...NOT that I'm pointing any fingers.
The experience of narrow, combative discussion along prescriptively channelled lines doesn't foster the sensation of the participants occupying common ground, and this sensation is necessary for a community. There's rarely anything to be gained from banging your head against an intelligent brick wall, even if the wall's right and has become a wall through being intelligent and usually in the right.
I joined Barbelith to try and create some (more) common ground.
So. There you go.
In fact, I've got a lot more out of it than I put in.
I really feel a bit silly about the whole approach now. |
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