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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-US link=blue vlink=purple style='word-wrap:break-word'><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><div style='border:none;border-top:solid #E1E1E1 1.0pt;padding:3.0pt 0in 0in 0in'><p class=MsoNormal><b>…</b>> <b>On Behalf Of </b>SR Ballard via extropy-chat<br><b>Subject:</b> Re: [ExI] list intimidation<o:p></o:p></p></div></div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>>…Many people over the years, especially women, have been particularly nasty to me about it, including screaming in my face, telling me I would die alone, and no one would ever love me…<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Bah! Nonsense. We love you SR, and we haven’t even met.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p></div><div><p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'>>…So I gave in and made a fake personality. Now every time I try to be more authentic I get labeled “a troon”. SR Ballard<o:p></o:p></p><div><p class=MsoNormal><br><br><o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>Easy solution SR, hang out with the non-hipsters who have no idea what is a troon, or don’t care even if they knew because the online forum is just that way: no one knows how you look or act in the meat world. All that unpleasant social clumsiness business is irrelevant, it goes away. Cool! That was so liberating for me. Now I get to replace all that with fresh, new online social clumsiness business. Tests show that to be 30% less awkward.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I am not alone however. Back in the days when we could only speculate about what appears to be happening now, there were a lot of us in the area. But we seldom met for much of anything in person. That way, we could all assume the others were meeting and having a great time without us, that we had been intentionally excluded from the cool-kids club. This reinforced our oddly-comforting self image as a lonely pariah. It was most disturbing on the times when we met to learn that the others really didn’t meet in person since last time either. We can’t all be pariahs. It invited a competition for the title of most pariahey, so we would know who had best mastered the geek skill of pariety.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>The few occasions where we did meet, it would become easy to explain why those infrequent meetings were so delightfully weird, yet socially unrefined.<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>It was really cool when one of us brought a sweetheart or spouse or innocent uninitiated soul who was unaccustomed to… us. Melanie Swan’s boyfriend, oh he made a great example. Party at my house, that poor lad thought he had stumbled into a pit of geeks. He was right of course, but escaped unharmed (depending on how one defines the term.)<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>I could go on and on. But I already did, and besides that, your imagination of a geek party suffices. <o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal>spike<o:p></o:p></p></div></div></div></body></html>