I thought about making a new thread in IRL about this, but nah.
I am having one of my "learning about humans" moments and researching why people gossip.
I trekked through some of the blogs surrounding the official Sims 3 forums. Wow. However - most of them are honest and post under usernames, so I can respect that. I might not be able to understand why they care so much about what Person A said about Person B and why they have to call Person A such names, but I give them props for doing so under a username.
And the one anonymous blog doesn't allow comments and has other stuff as well, so yeah.
It's like - like I said to John, they seem to fight on the side of good in the drama wars but it's still not something I want to be around.
Plus it gave me a headache trying to follow all the names and who went to whose chatterbox and who posted screenshots on their Facebook and who bought what SimPoints, and it also seemed - well, really boring. I suppose the stereotypical cliche would be to say that it seemed like high school, but I don't remember stuff like that in high school.
I wonder if that's part of my problem, if people who are more familiar with that sort of culture interpret my behavior through that lens and totally misunderstand me. And I interpret their behavior through my lens and totally misunderstand them.
Like, after reading these blogs, I can bet that someone out there will think my recent freak out was to get attention and bring those delicious troll tears back to my thirsty stats page.
Err, no. Panic attacks are not fun. And actually - I'm already trying to think of ways to protect myself emotionally should my stats page blow up Friday night. I would much rather it didn't, but looking at the searches and the number of referrals from LJ, even on a Tuesday - I'm betting that it does. Planning on staying the heck away from everything Sims related on the internet Friday night, including my stats page.
By the way, if anyone wants to try and persuade me to stop posting my reactions in public - telling me to be quiet so they'll move to their next victim is pretty much exactly the wrong way to do it. What did this future victim do, to deserve that? Why would I wish this pain on them?
I am many things, but a coward who pushes someone else in front of the bullets to save my own skin is not one of them.
I own foes, don't try to test me
always on top when I pvpI have been thinking the last few days, trying to tease out how I feel about this.
The winter I was nine, I read every book in the Holocaust section of the local library. It's only recently that I've learned that it may perhaps not be normal for a nine year old girl, especially one in a rural working class Southern town whose mother boarded socks for a living, to know what mussulman and Canada meant in camp slang and what the Sonderkommando was.
I was never exposed to religion. I am so clueless about Christianity that when someone at work asked me if I had a church home I got all flustered and tried to think if I'd heard advertisements for a building company called Church Homes on the radio.
The hells I learned to fear as a small child were Auschwitz, Birkenau, Dachau. And the devils I learned to guard against are oppression, hate, and conformity to evil.
And see, here we run into the misinterpretation thing. Imagine the secrets if I were to post this on the LJ, the Godwin's Law and the massive moral panic over me comparing the secrets to the Holocaust.
Which, of course, I am not. What I am doing is explaining how I came to create my moral system and how it applies to the secrets.
I swear I can't understand the whole thing about how it's morally horrible to compare human-caused atrocities to each other or to anything else. I think...I think it's because if we treat them as totally isolated incidents, we can pretend that they weren't born of human nature, that the same emotions and motives don't reside in us, that we would not act the same way in the same circumstances.
But ah - if we stand by and silently watch while people are torn to shreds in the secrets, what else will we stand by and silently watch?
That is what I keep coming back to. Silence is acceptance. If I stand by and watch, I am complicit.
The commandment I had seared into my young impressionable brain - "Witness."
There are evils too large for me to take on. But if I can battle this one evil, if I can win this one fight, if I can change a few minds here - it is a drop of change in the waterfall. And the people I influence may go on to contribute their own drops of change, and perhaps one day I will have helped, in some small way, to change the water's course.
What doesn't kill me only makes me stronger, and I am nowhere near death.
Stronger - Kanye West
I am not feeding the trolls.
I am feeding on their flames.
Stacy means resurrection. And when I do my mosaic, I will be using a picture of a phoenix.