Mike wrote:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Fishermike
Hi Wade, got your PM, thanks. It wasn't a matter of personal offense - you didn't owe me an apology.
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Mike, as I mentioned to you in the last PM I sent, what I do whenever anyone seems offended or angry over something I've written is immediately go read through some of their posts from other threads, so I can try to determine the sort of personality the other person has.
Just briefly skimming through another person's posts can give you a fairly reliable snapshot of their personality, or at least the personality of the public persona that they want to project.
When someone is an egotistical blowhard, it's easy to see that right away (says the man who's been accused of that more than once.) When they're strident, aggressive, dismissive and quick to see insults when none are intended, that shows up.
One of the more difficult online personality types is what I call "the last honest man" syndrome, where the guy is being a jerk because only he - and
he alone - is brave enough to tell the truth. Everyone who disagrees with him about
anything must be cravenly trying to win approval from some indeterminate powers that be.
There was a guy like that on the UseNet acoustic guitar newsgroup rec.music.makers.guitar.acoustic. Watching that guy foam at the mouth (so to speak) got SO tiresome, because no matter what anyone else said about anything, they were frontin' for the MAN, and our hero was the only one who wasn't blind and could discern the true path that everyone else should be taking.
Naturally he developed an intense dislike for me, because I wouldn't sing harmony and hum along to be a back up band for his fictions and stilted, profoundly misanthropic views.
Once I wrote a post describing a visit I'd made to the late, great music store Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island. They had the biggest selection of acoustic archtop guitars I'd ever SEEN. In that post I described how the Strombergs sounded when I played them, compared to the Gibsons and how both of those compared to the Epiphones.
He told me I was full of the four letter word we don't use on this forum. Because Strombergs sound THIS way and Gibsons sound THAT way and I was completely wrong about what I
claimed I'd heard.
Because, clearly, I had sinister ulterior motives and was deliberately misleading all the poor innocent lambs on the newsgroup.
Mind you, he'd never played ANY of the guitars I mentioned, and admitted as much. But he'd read a book or magazine column by George Gruhn about these instruments that described their characteristics, and I'd gotten it wrong.
Because we've got such dedicated moderators on this forum, that extreme sort of online grandstanding is minimized. (Thank you thank you thank you thank you.) But no matter what you do, some folks just have that sort of congenital disdain leaking from all their pores, and - astonishingly - some of them are fairly intelligent people who know just what they can get away with. So they'll sometimes take things right to the very limit of what the moderators here will tolerate, and feel that they're being clever and triumphant when they do.
That's not you, Mike, or me or any of the genuine contributors to this forum. The droids I've described are actually pretty rare on this forum because - being contemptuous of others by sheer reflex - they dislike what they see as the petty restrictions keeping them from having their fun.
I'm just delighted that those guys are the minority here, though, and that the vast, overwhelming majority of participants on this forum are sincere, pleasant, knowledgeable and often downright hilarious contributors and part of a truly enriching exchange of information.
So thank you ALL for that.
To finish this post, I want to say that I don't care much for writing or reading posts that are more about forum mores and behavior than about the core subjects we've come here to discuss. Those posts are generally tedious and self-important, and who cares, anyway?
I definitely include my own posts on the subject in that description.
But I do think it's worth mentioning how positive and fulfilling the online culture of this particular forum really is, which is why I've written this enormous doorstop of a post.
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Okay, so it's a
virtual doorstop for a
virtual door...
Anyway, I hope you all will forgive my rambling at such length, but because this forum
does give so much back to us in terms of a feeling of community with our shared interests that I think it's helpful to stop every once and awhile and say that out loud.
Or type it out loud, as the case may be. It's a blessing, in every sense of the word.
This forum has done so much to keep my spirits up as they can be during this catastrophically depressing pandemic that I just needed to say as much.
Thanks again for providing such a great forum JR. You too, Kerbie and Tom and all the other even-tempered moderators who keep this forum so readable and enjoyable.
Wade Hampton Miller