(By chris the cynic)
So, on the one hand, these threads never seem to work, on the other hand the Monday Meet and greet is on the verge of tradition. We did one at typepad, we did one during our short stint at blogger, and now that we’ve found a hopefully permanent home we haven’t done one yet.
The reason they never work is because the lurkers seldom come out and the regular commenters assume that everyone already knows everything there is to know anyway.
So I’m calling on the lurkers to delurk for a bit to introduce themselves, and to the regular commenters: Assume for a moment I know nothing. Based on that assumption, introduce me (and everyone else) to you as you see fit.
Sound off.
I’m just going to go full on too much information, but please don’t let that scare you off if all you’re willing to say is, “My name is [your name] I like [thing that you like],” and leave it at that. Because that’s fine to. (As is not giving your name but just saying something about yourself, or the reverse.)
I’m chris the cynic, the name comes from trying to find a unique user name (at the time it was unique, now there are other chris the cynics on the web) and the fact I’d been referred to as a cynic in the past. In retrospect the fact that Chris Knight (Val Kilmer’s character in Real Genius) described himself as a cynic may have played a role, but if it did it wasn’t a conscious role.
I read the Left Behind books so quickly (I think it was at a rate of five a weekend) I didn’t notice how bad they were. I noticed that they were bad, but not how bad. It was them that brought me to Slacktivist. More than once I recall, but what got me to comment was wondering if ako had any intention of continuing her Children of the Goats fic at Right Behind. I became a regular commenter after that.
When Fred moved to Patheos he didn’t expect it to be a problem for the commenters, but it was. Some refused to follow him there because viewing his work there meant supporting Patheos via adviews (I note that some of the most vocal refusals ended up there anyway) so a compromise was reached. Fred gave the typepad domain to three people the community had voted as leaders. (Which I, for one, think was quite nice of Fred.) And thus the Slacktiverse was born. I followed Fred to Patheos and stayed at Typepad Slacktiverse.
Fast forward to troll invasion that never actually ended, and those three retired leaving the leaderless community you see now.
Which is how I came to be here.
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When I was little I wanted to be a stand up comedian and an author (and probably other things too) not a lot to show for that, but I do write fiction fragments, some original, most based on deconstructions (Fred’s of Left Behind, Ana’s of Twilight) and I started my blog to collect them into one place. (A project still not completed.)
I make puzzles. See. But they’re too expensive so nobody buys them which means I haven’t had enough money to make a new puzzle in more than a year. (A year and a half, I think it’s been.)
I’m currently in university, mostly because it’s easier for me to get grants and student loans to be a student, thus allowing me access to the university’s health services, than it is to actually get health services in a more straightforward way. I’ve been there long enough that all I need to say is, “I want to graduate,” and I can have two degrees. One in Math, the other in Classics (broadly defined as everything that happened on or around the Greek and Italian peninsulas before 300 BCE, including the languages used.)
Had most of my life spent with depression, seem to have finally gotten that cleared up only to be hit by the ADHD the depression was keeping in check.
I think that Bella Swan (narrator of Twilight) is, unintentionally I believe, an extremely realistic portrayal of a depressed individual. As for ADHD, haven’t had as much experience but maybe that dog who can’t help but be distracted by SQUIRREL!
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My favorite color is orange. My favorite bird is a tie. Ducks and Eagles. It’s not that I don’t like other birds (crows are awesome, for example) but they’re not my favorite.
I have a cat named Pandora, but no one ever calls her that. We just call her, “The Cat,” and “Kitty” and such. I have a dog named Wally. We do call him that.
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Stuff.
I go by Firedrake when I don’t want to be immediately known; my actual first name is mildly uncommon, and my surname is unique.
I got referred here – well, to Original Slacktivist – when Fred’s posts on the first book were just winding down. Disqus generally doesn’t play well with Linux – since the upgrades last year it’s been either close to unusable (if you turn off all security and run the latest bleeding-edge browser) or completely unusable (otherwise) – so I knew I couldn’t be part of the move to Patheos.
When I’m not here, I live in the southern UK, where I play with computers and people are foolish enough to pay me for it. I enthuse about beer and computers and role-playing games. I am attempting to get to the point where I can legitimately call myself a polymath but it’s hard work.
When I look out of my window during daylight I can usually see a red kite.
I’m one of those lurkers. I go by Casus Belli. Sounds like a very belligerent alias, but it was not meant to be. I was into wargames (the actual board games, not anything computery) when I was young, and Casus Belli was the name of the most prominent French magazine in that field. It’s still published today, but it deals exclusively with role playing games now (and I still read it religiously). I live in Quebec, the French speaking province in Canada. I’m a physician and University professor.
I came to Slacktivist around 2006 I think. Contrary to many, I didn’t come for the Left Behind deconstructions, but for the second YNATKC post (You’re Not Allowed to Kill Civilians). I’m not sure how I got there. Maybe a link from an anti-Iraq war article or something like that. Anyway, I liked it so much I saved the post on my computer… then read the LB posts and discovered a culture I was not aware of. I read back all the posts and stayed for those posts. I didn’t start reading the comments until about a year later.
I stayed at Patheos and here… as a lurker. Not sure why I don’t comment, but it’s mostly the fact I don’t have enough time to keep up with comment threads. I usually read whatever comments are posted soon after the OP, but seldom go back for the rest, with a few exceptions (I did read all the comments of some of the… hmmmm… more “historic” threads for lack of a better word).
Anyway, I do feel part of the community even if I don’t comment. And that’s my story.
CB
I’m Froborr. I like animation and overreaching myself. I don’t really belong to any communities, online or otherwise, but there are spaces within which I exist and occasionally talk on what I assume to be a probationary basis.
At this point, except for the weekly deconstruction round-up, I’m pretty close to being a lurker. I’ve more or less run out of things to contribute and spoons to contribute them with.
Sorry to hear about the lack of spoons. I’m now one week into vacation and I’ve manged to, in spite of theoretical free time, accomplish nothing -fun, useful, important, or otherwise- because I just haven’t had it in me so I know what that’s like. Also, don’t even know the last time I contributed an article.
Obviously I’m not trying to draft you against your will or anything, but I’ve always considered you a member of this community.
Thanks, chris, that actually means a lot to me. I really wish I could contribute more–of the three or four places I’ve been neglecting, this is the one I feel guiltiest about. Unfortunately it’s also the one that requires the most spoons to write for, because there are actual standards to live up to and people whose opinions matter are reading.
I’m depizan and I sporadically comment here and over at Fred’s blog (among other places). I’m pretty sure I wandered in because of the Left Behind decons. (I want to say that they were linked to from rpg.net, but I couldn’t swear to that.)
I’m a library circulation clerk, a servant to two cats, and I like rather a lot of geeky/nerdy/fanish things. I play MMOs (okay an MMO at present) and pen and paper roleplaying games, read/watch adventure fiction (particularly space adventure), write space adventure (fanfic, at present), enjoy anime/manga, and am once again trying to learn how to draw.
I also care about social justice issues and periodically tie myself in knots trying to figure out how one writes adventure without contributing to bad things.
I’m TRiG. I’m lucky enough to have no particular need to care about privacy/anonymity, so I can tell you that I derived that name for myself in primary school, based on my initials (Timothy Richard Green), hence the odd capitalization. I honestly can’t remember how I first found Fred’s blog. Linked from somewhere, no doubt. I’m Irish, ex-Jehovah’s Witness atheist, and gay. The subculture Fred is writing about is often completely alien to me, but I occasionally get odd glimpses of facets which match my own upbringing.
I read slacktivist occasionally, and being an inveterate archivist, would sometimes plunge deep into the everlasting comment threads, enjoying the wit, the intelligence, the amazingly broad knowledge of the community, but I very rarely (perhaps never) said anything myself. Then, after a gap of a good few years, I came back, and began to post reasonably frequently. This wasn’t long before the Grand Divide.
When Fred moved slacktivist to Patheos, I understood the concerns some had at not wanting to be part of that community, but I didn’t share them myself. And when he declared that the original blog would be donated to the community, I was fascinated to see what would happen. I was at that time too new to consider myself part of the community, but I soon found my niche. I made a few missteps. Got scolded a few times (generally for good reason). Learned my lessons, apologized, and moved on.
To anyone who’d read only Fred’s posts, the new Slacktiverse must have seemed a strange aberration, but to anyone who was familiar with the slacktivist comment threads, the content of The Slacktiverse, and its existence as an expression of the community for which it was a home, was perfectly explicable. I began to brew up ideas of posts I could contribute myself: one, perhaps, on how I lost my faith (perfectly on topic); maybe one on copyright law and the free content movement (relevant and useful to the community); perhaps one on being gay, and what labels mean to me. I never got any of them written. I never get anything written. Maybe one day. (Play that last sentence on a loop.)
The Slacktiverse was run well, as far as I could tell, but its eventual implosion was perhaps inevitable. But I discovered some excellent blogs through it, and really began to understand to concept of the “bloggosphere”. I like the open Internet, not the walled garden of Facebook (which I’ve not signed into in the past few months) or similar services. And the way blogs can exist independently, and yet feed into and react to each other, is, to me, a wonderful demonstration of exactly what the Internet should be. My own blogs are a small part of that. A very small part. (I never get anything written. Maybe one day. (Play that last sentence on a loop.))
I’m here at the new Slacktiverse because I like the people who hang out here, because the writing is excellent and the concepts discussed are interesting (and useful, in the way they make me think sometimes), and because I still nurture a hope that one day I’ll get more than a quarter of the way through an essay which might be worth submitting here.
TRiG.
I’m Storiteller, which I’m terribly inconsistent about capitalizing. I took the name 17 years ago when I was about 13 years old and needed a handle for my very first email account on Hotmail. (I still have the Hotmail account, although they wiped all of my archives after I didn’t check it for years.) I use my full name on my regular blog, but like to keep my local/subject-based blogging and interaction with the larger blogosphere a bit separate.
I think I originally found Slacktivist through the Bad Christian blog, which is now long defunct. The Bad Christian guy ranted a lot and Fred was a calmer, less repetitive voice that addressed a lot of the same issues. However, I always had trouble keeping up with the comment threads because of their length, especially in the earlier days of Slacktivist with some of the more aggressive commenters. I also felt a bit overwhelmed, afraid that someone was going to rip apart my argument and I wouldn’t be there to defend it. I realize now that while the comments weren’t always the most “friendly,” I was also showing my privilege a bit and at the time being unwilling to get called out on it. When Fred moved over to Patheos, I continued to read his blog while also adding the Slacktiverse onto my blogroll. I became a contributor/moderator on WordPress Slacktiverse because I wrote a couple articles when it was on Typepad and wanted to see this space continue even though our moderators moved on.
In terms of hobbies, I’m passionate about food, bicycling, and where they intersect with environmental and social sustainability. I’m also a big nerd and enjoy comics and tabletop gaming (a recent addition).
I’m EllieMurasaki. I write (mostly fanfiction, which is mostly Supernatural), complain about plot inconsistencies in and broader social problems poorly portrayed by Supernatural (go on, ask me why it’s a problem that Meg is the longest-running female character, and why it’s a problem that Rufus is dead) and occasionally other shows (which Greek deity governs television, Hermes? thank somebody, anyway, that Chevy Chase left Community, that should produce a massive drop in the number of offensive jokes), write some more (I am signed up for five challenges with a minimum word count ranging from 5K to 20K words), get into fights in old Slacktivist threads about abortion (seriously what is wrong with me, why can’t I just let it drop), write some more (I’m trying to write a collection of ‘original’ fiction based on Child ballads such as Riddles Wisely Expounded and Scarborough Fair), work for the state (pay’s shit, benefits are good), occasionally make vids, jewelry, and other crafty things (and my love of Supernatural continues to show through in the subject matter), and overuse run-on sentences (and parentheticals).
I’m a white, sometimes-cisfemale-sometimes-agender-always-genderfluid (pronouns: ze/zir), middle-class (unless you look at my personal finances), temporarily able-bodied, socially anxious and possibly depressive, bitter ex-cradle-Catholic, pansexual feminist atheist. I’m thinking about exploring the concept of ‘atheist Hellenic Reconstructionist’ or ‘atheist Wiccan with emphasis on Greek deities’, but the things I want to write and the things I stress over insist on taking up more memory and brain-CPU than the things I want to read and the things I want to talk about (‘talk about’ is distinct from ‘write’ even when both are on the same Internet platform). Most of the social justice activism and lifestyle changes I want to do would be much more doable if I worked a better-paying job and didn’t work nights, but I do donate to several local charities (Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, YWCA, legal aid for those who can’t afford it, arts and culture for inner-city folk, and public television), the local Green Party, and Strike Debt.
I should think television would be governed by Thalia; what the Greeks called “comedy” covers almost all television drama.
Genre-wise, yes. Medium-wise, not so sure. But you make sense. Thank Thalia Chevy Chase left, then.
The muses have always seemed to me to be divided up by genre more than medium (separate muses for comedies and tragedies rather than a muse of stage drama; separate muses for epic poetry and love poetry), but that may just be me.
I have heard an argument made that Hestia (goddess of the hearth) would be patron of TV because TVs are these glowing things that we’ve structured our life around. Or something like that.
Ooh, I like that, Chris. Can I switch my vote?
middle-class (unless you look at my personal finances)
I resemble this. I think it might be the hot new thing. Ye gods I hope not, but…
Ooh, I like that, Chris. Can I switch my vote?
You might not need to. There is, as you said, a distinction between medium and
messagegenre.Greek theaters are all, by definition, temples to Dionysus. He is the god of theater. But as you point out there are muses for Comedy and Tragedy, both of which take place in theaters. So the muses, at least in those two cases, are for genre* while Dionysus is for medium.
Thus we could have Hestia for the medium (TV) and Thalia for the genre.
All of that said; yes. Of course you can change your vote.
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* For the record, it took me forever to realize that that word wasn’t gen as in “genetics” and re pronounced like “ear”. The second part of which is probably less defensible since I don’t think “re” is ever pronounced as “ear”. Pronounced as “re” (reduplicate) and “er” (driver) yes, but off the top of my head I can think of no “re” pronounced “ear”.
I’m another lurker, except when I post ridiculously long blogaround accounts of my singing and cooking adventures. Being in Australia, I seem to be asleep when the good conversations are happening, and being a full-time worker and part time student with a lot of hobbies, I’m usually a few days behind on my blog reading. I can’t even remember how I found Fred’s Slacktivist site – it would be something to do with my general fascination with religion and theology – but I think I was following it for two or three years before the Slacktiverse bit began.
Anyway, I’m Catherine, and I live in Melbourne, Australia, which actually has really brilliant weather, despite what you may have been told (admittedly, I like cooler weather and wildly inconsistent weather patterns, and also, I have an agreement with Melbourne that I love its weather, and Melbourne doesn’t rain on my outdoor events. This agreement has been in force for nearly two decades, which is pretty good, frankly). Also, I digress a lot.
I work as a Scientific Co-Ordinator at a medical research institute, which mostly means I help with grant writing, budgets, travel, and generally deal with administration and paperwork things so that the 90-odd (very odd) scientists I look after have more time for actual science. Also, I try to keep things interesting, with silly competitions during the Olympics, lots of cake, and sarcastic emails. My two Divisions both work on apoptosis, which is a form of programmed cell death, and relevant to just about everything, but our focus tends to be cancer and autommune diseases. We have some stuff going to the clinic at present, and I can go on about this at great length if you like, but I’m not actually a scientist, so I tend to anthropomorphise a lot.
In my spare time, I’m studying singing of the operatic variety, sing in up to four choirs depending in the time of year, and run a small choir at work. I also bake a lot, as you’ve probably noticed, and occasionally organise dramatic readings of Shakespeare plays, with related feasts. And I have little study projects, too. Right now, I’m reading a really interesting annotated translation of the Old Testament, by Robert Alter, and it’s brilliant, because he justifies every single word choice, points out all the puns and homonyms and word associations you’d get in the Hebrew, and also notes cultural and geographical bits and pieces and the ways in which chapters parallel each other or particular characters have motifs in their stories, and incidentally, he points out (politely, but firmly) all the places where other translators have got it wrong, linguistically or aesthetically. It’s as close as I’m likely to get to reading the Hebrew. But lest you think it’s all academics and highbrow around here, I’m alternating books of the Bible with romance novels and cookbooks and young adult literature, and these genres, to be honest, make up most of my reading normally.
Also, it’s just about impossible to get me to shut up.
Speaking of which, I’m also a recovering Ricardian, and if you think I went on and on about Robert Alter, you really don’t want to get me started on Richard III…
That’s probably enough for now.
Catherine
I’m Brin, and after two years and two months part of me still squees inside when people call me a name I chose myself*.
I don’t generally make introductory posts at places where introductions aren’t mandatory (and struggle with places where they are); I prefer to just talk about me whenever it’s at least somewhat relevant and let people build up a mental file on me.
(I also have my gender public on every profile where one can and put the pronoun in manually on the rest. My goal is for people to be able to find out I’m a “she” within the amount of searching that I personally would do. Sometimes people call me “ze” anyway. I guess other people have different searching standards.)
My forget-me-not icon was donated to Wikimedia by some kind Cyrillic-using person. I could in theory have taken a picture of the forget-me-nots in my own yard, but at the time I had never used the family camera and I wasn’t sure how good a reason I would need to borrow it. (Though the first pictures I took ended up being because I told people at Ana’s site I would, and that went well.) My favourite colour was blue, but after Typepad assigned me a green icon I grew rather fond of green as well. The blue flowers and green leaves of forget-me-nots incorporate both.
*Though I have always been brought to you by the letter B. (By the way, I have long been fond of parentheticals, but it was Slacktivites who taught me the joys of footnotes.)