Why are you not posting

the book is on my shelf, it was part of my partner's studies. i've never once read it or even opened it. it's just a big thick book from a philosopher that says "You Must Change Your Life" on the spine, and i believe it

there's nothing in that book that is more convincing to me than the immediate things that come to mind when i see it

A superb way to interpret all self help and or philosophical titles imo

good stuff Karl. If I am not posting much it is in this positive mode yes. I read here daily and enjoy it. By the way I just remembered to give "Binasu" another shot and it's extremely pretty yes.

As a left-field closer to a sonnet about a rundown statue of Apollo, it's a terrific line, especially in the original German, where it rhymes.

xp

Glad some serious replies showed up. In a mix of self-loathing, insecurity and a shameful need for validation I shy away from posting because of all those times I'd put in efforts to contribute which end up getting unacknowledged in the conversation, making it feel a little like walking up to a group of people talking in closed circle and trying to shoehorn in a thought over a few of their shoulders but nobody really hears you. Then you kind of listen a little longer and maybe try again or move on defeated. Then you see someone they all know say anything at all and everyone trips over themselves to reply. Dumb to be that insecure, but when none of your few IRL friends really care about the niche music you like and you reject regular social media anyway, the craving for interaction becomes a little more desperate. Also when you have ADHD keeping yourself away from distractions like this during work hours is a good idea!

Heh, I had a screename once that riffed on source of that Rilke quote, although I had forgotten it was via Delmore Schwartz.

Nice. I like it.

Evan, I appreciate your posts! I know we’ve both posted similar thoughts on a previous thread.

And KM, you are a gem. I hope you don’t read that as germ, even for a second, because it says gem.

Thanks epistantophus! Appreciate yours too!

this is meant to be a nu zing era not some cuddlestein fucking piffle

evan you are a shoegaze. epistantophus you are a longname. KM you are a former cartoonist

I recognise a lot of what Evan says. Not being around enough (hey, I work for a living, unlike you feckless wasters), the dread of coming across as dumb, portentous, humourless, or worse, barely there at all. It's all ego-bollocks of course and often I just like reading all the smart people on here. Like just yesterday I have wanted to applaud the Coen brothers thread.

epistantophus, germs are people too, so no worries :)

imago i am a future cartoonist as well, and you are a word that i only came to fully understand in the last year, when i was trying to write a REALLY weird post here that involved insects and i had to look up the life stages

I love the Coen brothers thread!

Imago, don’t worry, I’ll come up with a compliment for you, too. Just give me a few hours.

A clever writer realizes the more autobiographically h/she posts, the higher the screen between him/her and the world.

I miss just about everybody here. Let's say ILX is a more welcoming place than when I joined in December 2004.

mike-t diva : brilliant post, massively OTM.

it may have helped if i had created a sock account back in the day so i could let loose more, but that's never been my thing.

Thanks, Mark. I've just been thinking about this while smoking in the porch, and maybe the lesson I need to learn here is that it's probably healthy to disentangle myself from the Beloved Community Lynchpin narrative which has characterised my interactions in other offline and online places. In other words, it's OK to be Just Another Member. This might even encourage me to post more in future.

I characterized the star posters as "ILX blue checkmarks" offhand and it seemed to resonate. I don't need to be that but I also don't want to keep being the record holder for "most often to be last post on thread ever or for months until someone revives it for unrelated reasons".

"most often to be last post on thread ever or for months until someone revives it for unrelated reasons".

ooh boy do i relate to that.

I see what you're trying to pull. Nice try.

We both know this thread might die right here and now and you can't take my record away from me, not without a fight. Though I do respect your comedic timing.

Evan, I refrained from posting for several months before leaping into the fray, as the conspicuous cliquishness was too much to bear at first, even though I was briefly around in the mid-noughties. These days, as long as you're not being an ass, I see no reason not to post if you feel like it. This place will always benefit from a plurality of socks voices.

Also, if yours is the last post on a given thread, you can imagine that you have so completely incapsulated the topic that every one reading just falls mute in admiration, giving you the last word.

caca

i just wanted to share some of my early thread attempts. not even early posts (those are worse), but just a sample of my first new thread attempts under the Z S handle

Interkosmos (Califone + Dirty Three members + others) (anyone? anyone? bueller?)
90 Day Men S/D (thirteen days after the previous thread, lol)
Blonde Redhead - 23
Girls and Electronic Music

honestly i understand if people want to tell me to fuck off for that last one. for what it's worth, i apologize and i'm glad no one ever posts on it. it's 14 years old and i was 23 when i wrote it, but i should have been smarter than that, especially when i was desperately trying to sound mature and smart. giving up the burden of trying to sound mature or smart has been my way of becoming more mature but not more smart. i'm posting that garbage thread here just because
A) it seems wrong to conspicuously skip over your worst early thread,
B) i don't recognize the person that wrote it, while also feeling really, really dumb and recognizing that's still me,
C) i've always wanted to apologize in some form for that thread but never wanted to bump it to do so,
D) there's no way anyone on this thread has ever said something dumber or less-informed on ilx and if anyone here posted anything resembling that today, they'd probably get FP'd that afternoon (i would probably be one of the people being strangely extra-harsh on whoever did it, i would hope). so come on, you're fine!

I miss just about everybody here. Let's say ILX is a more welcoming place than when I joined in December 2004.

― So who you gonna call? The martini police (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

otm

I suppose it's too late to change the title of the thread to "Girls and IDM", which is really what I meant.

― Z S, Friday, March 30, 2007 2:00 PM (thirteen years ago)

i have to tip my cap at my first follow-up post though

after a useful conversation with euler, prompted by algerian goalie or whatever he's called right now reaching out to me, i have seen pomenitul's thread here and i thought it might be a good place to say why i ceased posting several months ago.

a more intense than usual discussion flared up in the free speech and creepy liberalism thread, around some point about how to deal with transphobes who will be viewed sympathetically by some people (like some terfs can be but also like celebrity transphobes tend to be because of their celebrity). i understood in that discussion that kate was taking it rather personally, but i didn't bear her any animus and was broadly not in disagreement with her position in the discussion. all the same, my perception was that i was not speaking out of bounds, but was being treated by her and others as if i were doing so, in fact severely so. i don't fault kate for that, it's clear she was going through a lot at the time and she made every effort to draw lines and let everyone have their say. but i felt that other people involved in that discussion were rather eager to treat me unfairly, intemperately so, and i was surprised to find aimless stepping in as a voice of moderation of ME without bothering to assign the fault accurately.

i don't feel attached to that discussion i have no great wish to 'defend controversial opinions' or something like that. i understood myself to be pursuing a somewhat academic discussion of limited appeal in a thread with a well-attested record of doing it, sometimes for the sake of doing it, sometimes because with that principle, it can never ultimately just be academic (as suits a 'principle of free speech' thread). i understand the difference between doing that and trying to force unwanted discussions in places where they are not welcome, and ilx is well set up to manage that by this point in its history.

still, i thought that some people in that discussion, and in others in the more recent past that i had participated in or read people participating in, had leaned in, with an alacrity that gives me a sinking feeling in my stomach, to reflexively disparaging people as soon as anything they say can be identified—with little concern for accuracy, understanding, or charity—as falling into some pre-identified range of proscribed content. everyone knows how much of a hot-button topic this behavior is nowadays and i'm not wont to identify myself with any stance on it that associates me with disreputable sorts, but all the same, i think it's true that ilx has collectively, or in pockets, become more prone to this in specific ways during the past several years. shitposting is fine, shitposting is eternal, but shitposting fused with censoriousness and sanctimoniousness does not bode well for the health of a community based on discussion. the marker of it that's familiar to us is the disparager's belief that they are given cover by their superior political affiliation, morality, or insight into some issue, or even personal experience that others are supposedly barred from accessing or sharing. but aside from that, the way it seems, and feels, is that there are just a lot of posters right now who think it's fine, even good, to shit on other people, and refuse to truly be held accountable or reflect on their behavior. at best they say oh bad i got too heated, it's just my views, my passion, you understand. and then they turn around and do it again, over and over. ilx gives them the latitude to do this because its moderation practices are set up to deal with more egregious cases, and individual posters misbehaving singly. but whenever there is a shared sense that 'people' are of one mind or a shared sentiment, the opinion that tends to rule says that these behaviors are just the expression of a community's values and can only be accepted or changed by changing the community—however that is supposed to be accomplished by scattered people who find themselves falling out of step with the community.

i could have pushed back on this at the time of the discussion i mentioned above, or just tried to steer clear of it, but i felt very acutely at the time that my voice was being treated as unwanted on ilx and that there was no real way to respond to that except by withdrawing my voice from it. i have posted more or less continuously—there have been some lulls—on ilx since the beginning. twenty years. so it saddens me to feel its decline finally touch me. i had been willing to wait it out and just accept that it was a legacy community that would never quite satisfy in the way that it used to—that the life was departing as its posters continued to. ilx was my home and i need a home. but if you remember the spirit of its earliest discussions, then i think the best feature of them was how people would go out of their way not just to make arguments or cases that really moved others to reconsider or see something new, but to SEEK arguments and to try to entertain the idea that other people might have a case to make even when they've said something few people are inclined to credit with much insight or authority. mark s, for one, was an exemplar in this regard. we would be blessed if we could enjoy people capable of his generosity again.

i don't really feel like resuming posting, but given the thread, i thought there might be a chance i was heard.

B) i don't recognize the person that wrote it, while also feeling really, really dumb and recognizing that's still me,

Karl your presence is requested on the "What is your take on continuity of self?" thread

Have missed yr posts around the place j.

same

Good to hear from you, j. Given the type of discussion you favour, I'm not surprised you've decided to take a break from ILX. For better or for worse, I've come to think of this website as a safe space that stands apart not only from the usual nastiness that spoils online discourse writ large but also from the ethos of academic debates, which generally require a greater degree of detachment on their participants' parts. I don't think we can rightfully expect that kind of collegial dispassion here, which is something that bothered me for a long time but that I've adjusted to over the years because I ultimately believe kindness and gentleness to be necessary for this place to grow – to survive, even – despite the oversimplifications that occasionally prevail as a result.

Besides, there's always ILM.

yep, and that's a very thoughtful appraisal of a strain of moral purity-test I've occasionally lost it at as well

that said I'd need to read the relevant thread again to adjudge the motivations and good/bad faith of your various interlocutors

what I will say is that, bless Kate and I hope she's able to return to ILX now, but her disdain of, for example, Contrapoints' extremely sensitive handlings of public-eye transphobia demonstrated a sort of extremism that I think did her no favours above all

xp too late eephus! :)

lmao i opened that thread to play post-hoc adjudicator and found alphie's most cuntish treatment of me and my most powerful counterblast, great times

funny how a thread about not posting is full of posts with high character counts

I don’t post on the bobbins thread because I’m a poser but I feel ok posting on specific artist/label/style/scene threads

oh god i was really on a tear ahaha, definitely had more reason to quit than j. did but my obtuse self-confidence kept me here ffs

I did not expect (or intend) this thread to be taken seriously but I'm glad it happened.

Part of the reason I keep posting is so as not to have to answer questions such as these. DO U SEE?

what I will say is that, bless Kate and I hope she's able to return to ILX now, but her disdain of, for example, Contrapoints' extremely sensitive handlings of public-eye transphobia demonstrated a sort of extremism that I think did her no favours above all

― imago

This is completely boggling to me. I think Contrapoints has done some worthwhile stuff but most of my trans* friends are wary at best and outright damning the majority of the time. I can't see disdain for her as "extremism" at all.

(I tried to go into that thread and see any evidence of aforementioned "extremism" but it's far too big to slog through)

Fwiw I don't think lj was referring to that thread in particular, but maybe I'm misremembering.

The free speech and creepy liberalism thread was where I lost the plot at some of my UK compatriots and also attempted to engage Kate at length about some of her statements. This was long after j. had been warded off I think. I found Kate to be at least...arguable-with. We were having an argument, it was fine. I was much more irked by certain others. But in general I think it was a losing move to post to that thread, which is a shame, but I was always going to be on the defensive

I also hope we're able to fully have it out over Contrapoints one day

Is this about the stuff she discusses in her 'Canceling' video or is there more to it? I haven't been paying close attention.

I think it's largely about some people saying CONTRAPOINTS IS A TRANSMEDICALIST and other people saying WE STAN WE STAN and the actual truth being that Contrapoints is just a very open-minded person who thinks about important and thorny issues from a lot of different angles without ever being particularly dogmatic, whomst we stan ;)

Hyper-consequentialism ftw.

I was also going through a weird personal time during my outbursts in that thread, which can't have helped! But I really do think I felt similarly to j. - that I was engaging in what I thought was good faith, only to be dismissed as coming from a morally inferior position

It struck me as a massive misunderstanding that had no chance whatsoever of being resolved on ILX.