Why do people leave ILX for good?

if nobody answered andrew farrell upthread, hot couch guy

if you can, ignore the article and read the tweets. they are truer to the concept than the commentary, which paints a too-specific (and kinda hacky) image. real hot couch guy hours in the tweets tho

I get the initial "hot couch" concept of it being a faux-leather sticky situation, but imo the concept of a dude who spends way too much time on the couch, maybe even sleeps there regularly, is the base for me

coffee table covered in fast food containers and empty cans/bottles, maybe an ashtray or bong that is always sitting there. game controllers and tv remotes.

I've... approached hot couch times in my life

i feel like an important element of hot couch guy is that, like, he always has people over to crash after drinking/getting high, so it's less about him sleeping on his hot couch and more about you/someone else sleeping on his hot couch.

i clean my couch environs on the reg, theres ways and means of gittin er done without slipping into hotcouching

this thread in particualr was what spawned the hot couch guy thing iirc

Hey man we’re all going to hang out at this dudes place again for some reason even though he has like three places to sit, smokes inside, plays the same shitty rap and the only source of light is from one shitty overhead

— smiling again (@intellegint) February 24, 2018

Thank you all for coming together as a community for me!

warming the cockles of your couch

there was a great bar conversation I overheard a couple years back where these guys were talking about having all lived together in a rented house and it was the house version of hot couch

i'm also reminded of an ilx thread where -- I think it was gr80? -- was talking about taking a shower at someone's place and there was loose change in the bathtub, had been there long enough there was a green crust cementing the pennies

the lack of diversity around here can be pretty glaring. everybody i know on twitter has been talking toni morrison for days but here only 6 new answers?

yes

idk that I have much of value to say about her. Read a bunch in college as part of lit course curriculum, obviously an amazing and hugely important writer.

but yeah I suppose one would have expected more traffic on ILB on her passing.

I come here because I want a break from books.

I read Sula and Song of Solomon in college. They were both great books, but I don't remember enough about them to have made any comments of significance.

it depends on what kind of "diversity" you want to see on ilx... after the shooting in my hometown two weeks ago, I was fed more local posts, and got to see plenty of "thoughts and prayers" people that I usually filter out, as well as friends, who have fairly compatible political values to me, apologizing to people for being "too negative" and "too divisive" about calling for gun control and blaming the current government on the increase in racist mass murderers.

But yeah, my fb feed has been heavy on Toni Morrison since she passed ... I don't expect ilx to mirror my irl community, like if it did, I wouldn't post here?

I was meaning to post the following in that thread, which would have brought it up to 7 new answers:

The most “I don’t see colour” thing I ever heard was when my friend claimed not only that he didn’t realise Toni Morrison was black, not having seen an author photo, but that he got halfway through reading BELOVED without realising the CHARACTERS were black

i guess the question is one of mostly static board growth. i think there's, on average, about a hundred to 120 people active on ILX at any given time, lurkers aside. It's the same group we've had on her for a half decade or more. Racist alt-right gun nuts are obviously not our target audience (no pun intended) but it's hard not to argue that we wouldn't benefit from an infusion of twenty or thirty new voices, preferably bringing in greater diversity of views while not being overwhelming assholes/trolls/chuds

e got halfway through reading BELOVED without realising the CHARACTERS were black

this is amazing. more like "I don't see words" than "I don't see colour" lol

I was like “...they’re literally former slaves” and he said “that’s not apparent right away”

we used to have more don weiner types, it's true.

the lack of diversity around here can be pretty glaring. everybody i know on twitter has been talking toni morrison for days but here only 6 new answers?

― marcos, Thursday, August 8, 2019 10:23 AM (thirty-three minutes ago)

yes, it is bad, and it's been a problem for a very long time. and as ulysses says above, it doesn't get any better because we're not really getting many new posters, for the most part. it's very noticeable not just when a prominent person of color dies and there's not much discussion (in the aftermath, or even of the person's work beforehand), and also in political threads where so many of us have the privilege of referencing deportations and institutionalized racism in a detached, joking manner because we're not the people directly targeted or affected

the point is not that we need to gin up response to events outside our experience but that the community's homogeneity is showing and it's part of the reason why the petri dish is souring a bit

― Fuck the NRA (ulysses), Thursday, August 8, 2019 11:32 AM (twenty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ulysses u posted this in the other thread but i'm bringing it here because you are right

it doesn't really have anything to do w/ toni morrison specifically but more the general notion that, say, a black woman who made art mostly about and for other black women isn't really being talked about on this board primarily because we have no black women who actively post on this board

or, in another form, when more terrible abortion news comes in, and most of us are in the position of being a bunch of dudes criticizing some shitty state for electing a bunch of dudes to make a decision about women's bodies. "look at that photo of a group of overwhelmingly male legislators passing a bill to ban abortion, it's so sickly ironic!", says me, sickly and ironically, as a dude on an overwhelmingly male posters

xp

am I the only gay Latino here? It often feels like it.

My take is that people are more prone to be demonstrative about "omg I totally have read a lot of this black author" on Twitter and Facebook than they are here.

xp - that's another aspect of the diversity issue -- like, aspect 1 is a lack of posters from certain marginalized groups, that marcos brought up. Aspect 2, is the issue of posters from marginalized groups who are a part of ilx, not engaging with the dominant group on political issues (or certain political issues). ... I was kinda happy the other day when the "marketing of masculinity thread" saw an influx of posts by feminine/non-masc ilxors

and then there's Aspect 3 -- which is, "expecting members of marginalized groups to represent that identity and speak for that group on relevant issues" ... like, maybe they don't want to?

I happily do #2, don't get enough of #3.

Aspect 4: OKCupid is boring.

have we done a general age/race/ethnicity/location/gender/sexuality/income/occupation/political leanings census on here in the past decade? i can think of twenty reasons why not to but would still be fascinating to discover how the numbers break down.

for me, i would also be interested, but it's more like, i can think of at least twenty reasons why the results wouldn't be accurate

if people are casually joking about institutionalized racism and deportation on a political thread, that doesn't really make me want to post on those threads more. it seems aggravating and exhausting to me.

not casually joking, exactly, that's not a good way to put it. more like gallows humor, you know, or using humor as a way to process disturbing information.

and, i mean, people who are directly affected by things often resort to humor as well, as a means of coping.

i don't mean to criticize it, i think it's a normal way to deal with things, i'm just saying there would probably be less of it on a more diverse board

fwiw in the last couple of years there have been RIP threads created for Philip Roth and William Gass, both quite short and short-lived but more than 6 posts in 2 days. Probably does say something about demographics yeah (among other things)

I know I was pretty snide in that thread but honestly I was tearing my hair out at that violent video games thread, esp when I linked a tweet about how most of these shooters have a history of domestic violence. Thread just kept steamrolling on and going through the same arguments again and again - and I don’t see that anyone had acknowledged the link, that, shockingly, propensity to violence irl might be linked with propensity to violence irl.

I tend to only stick to a few threads for this reason (“nothing of value was lost” - ilx) but I don’t think people realise how this can come across. And it’s not as though I’m uninterested in the topic of gaming or misogyny in gaming - I play with a ton of friends, almost all of them are female, and we all behave differently in “gamer” spaces than we do elsewhere online, even under pseudonyms.

it was a really bad way to put it tbf, and im not having a hard go at you km

am I the only gay Latino here? It often feels like it.

― TikTok to the (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Thursday, August 8, 2019 12:08 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

hi another queer latino here!

Also I didn’t contribute to TM thread because I’ve never read any of her work & idt the thread needs a comment from me about it. Though actually I should have linked Diane Abbott’s piece about her, that was great.

Re the Beloved thing, something similar happened with Anansi Boys where people didn’t realise the characters were black?!

beloved is certainly one of the best books i've ever read but i feel no need to do a public rip thing when an 88-year-old person passes. idk, that's just me.

i am turned off by gallows humor tbh because i feel it's insensitive . i lost my sense of humor in the 80s with Reagan and i have been humorless since! if it works for some people that is great for them but it's at least part of why i don't engage with political threads on ilx.

also yes, TM was elderly and lived an awesome life. i also lost my dog this week so i have been managing a ton of grief.

aw, Lechera. Hugs.

political gallows humor, i should say
other types are actually fine w me

thanks alfred. she was my perfect baby :(

my friend claimed not only that he didn’t realise Toni Morrison was black

Wait, you sayin' he wasn't Italian?

not casually joking, exactly, that's not a good way to put it. more like gallows humor, you know, or using humor as a way to process disturbing information.

I definitely do this. And I realize that I do a significant amount of "code switching" depending on to whom I'm communicating. If someone is likely to be dealing with stuff on a personal level, or processing "trauma" differently than I do, I am way less likely to employ gallows humor. And even when everyone is processing the same trauma, there are different degrees of it, so being, as they say, gentle, or sensitive, is the way to go, if you don't want to hurt people or come across as an asshole. ... or, end up with a conversation that ends up excluding people or viewpoints because they choose to avoid it, whereas on social media, there's more of a tendency to call out insensitivity, whereas on ilx, well, there used to be more calling out, now there's more avoidance. ... idk, on some other thread, not long ago, Morbz made a comment about my "moronic wokeness" or something like that ... which to me, was funny, because ... I have been called out here for using the "R word" and definitely irl, I am ... not that person in my social circle.

The minefield that was social media for me right after the Ghost Ship fire was ... a minefield.

And I think there's also a general feeling of "emotional detachment" on ilx -- like at one point I was arguing about specifics of tax policy, and dayo was super otm at one point, saying I was "too close" to the issue. ... Like, there is a tendency here to pile on posters or make them feel uncomfortable, at least, when they are "too close" to an issue, or get emotional about it because it is personal. ... I know, for me, that when Ghost Ship happened, and ilx response was largely "welp, this was tragic, let's make lists of things," meanwhile my response was shock, grief, and survivor's guilt.

xps to reiterate i'm not saying every white ilxor needs to pay their respects to toni morrison by posting in the toni morrison thread whether or not you just have an empty "RIP to one of the greats!" post to claim your seat. i'm saying the reason the toni morrison thread is not particularly active is because toni morrison's core audience does not post to ilx, and perhaps that is a reason that some of us don't hang out here a ton? again this really doesn't have anything to do with toni morrison! i haven't even read toni morrison!

and btw i feel the same about RIP threads as many of you especially for octogenarians but like let's be real about the reason that the david berman RIP thread has 100 new answers and everyone can speak eloquently about how meaningful his lyrics have been to you personally but the same conversations about toni morrison are mostly happening in other online spaces and not here

i'm not saying every white ilxor needs to pay their respects to toni morrison by posting in the toni morrison thread

lol too late :)

ILX's overwhelmingly white male demographic breakdown is actually kind of an outlier from most of the spaces I inhabit. Like it's easy to forget but (looks around work space) I'm literally the only white dude among several rows of women of color, the place I tutor is 100% female staffed and serves black and latinx youth, what little social life I have is predominantly female-dominated, etc. So it's weird to note both that I'm part of the homogeneity 'problem' here and that this is the very rare place where I feel comfortable conversing openly with other white males.

i did have something to say about toni morrison only it took a few fucking days -- don't shame me for finally getting around to it

sniping on ilx doesn't exactly make ppl want to stay