I’ve had what feels like a very busy week. I think that means it actually was a very busy week, but I can’t quite be sure Huh.
\nOne symptom: having lots of scattered thoughts which don’t coalesce into anything bloggable. (Not that I orient my internal mental life around blog-coherent thoughts, nosirree.) But I’m gonna blog a bunch of stuff anyway.
\nTETSUJIN28 AND ONLINE COMMUNITY
\nI used to spend a hell of a lot of time on RPG.net. It was my main online community, essentially taking over from the old Vic Uni BBS when that bit the dust. In recent years the blog-and-LJ community has become my focus, and time being short as it always is, RPGnet is just an occasional stop to lurk nowadays.
\nIt was a shock to hear that one of the better-known members of the RPGnet community had died in a vehicle accident. Unlike the old Vic BBS and the new blog\/LJ-crowd, the RPGnet people were only known to me online (with some exceptions, having met up with a fair number at different events down the years). So hearing that Britt Daniels, online handle tetsujin28, had died was deeply weird. He was a part of my community, but I find it hard to claim I knew him at all. He was a familiar presence with a familiar voice, but… hell, I dunno. All these questions of knowing and connecting through a text-only medium raise themselves again, the same ones that used to send my head spinning in ’94 on the BBS, the same ones that the world at large is wrestling with right now. We’re still in the earliest infancy of understanding what this new communications technology is doing to our understanding of community, of social relationships, of identity. It’s changing stuff, that’s for sure. Big things are afoot.
\nI like to point to the cellphone and say ‘this is the beginning of the new era’, and I’m deadly serious, even when I say it in a cheesy kinda way. The near-ubiquity of the cellphone *changes what it is to be human*. The digital revolution was huge, but that was the prologue; the cellphone is chapter one.
\nAnyway. Thoughts spinning out – I said this hasn’t remotely coalesced. I never much got on with Tet online, but he was a part of that community, and I’ll miss his presence every time I drop back in. I wish him peace.
\nWE SIT IN JUDGEMENT
\nAt the film fest, I watched ‘The Heart of the Game’, a really rather good doco on a girls’ basketball team in Seattle. I might talk about it in a later post, as it provoked a lot of thought in different directions. One scene I want to mention now: a girl in the team ended up the centre of a regional controversy, and the documentary included some radio talkback where listeners called in to express their opinions on the girl and the decisions being made around her. It was a scene explicitly designed to get a rise out of the audience, and it worked: How could these people say these things? By what right can they pass judgement on this girl? Whatever happened to ‘judge not lest ye be judged’?
\nI was thinking about it later on, and it occurred to me that a feature of our current discourse is that we are constantly called to sit in judgement on others.
\nMedia outlets, politicians and other public figures are constantly appealing to us, implicitly or explicitly, to pass judgement. This goes beyond just seeking our opinions – we are encouraged to act like the apocryphal audience in the Roman arena, marking with thumb up or down the fate of the defeated.
\nIn fact, I’m beginning to think that’s a key part of the technology that structures current public discourse. We are encouraged to have an opinion, and because we buy into that, we walk right into the hands of the opinion-makers. The propagation of rhetoric would fall apart without an eagerness to pass judgement.
\nWhere is the counter-value to this? Where are the voices in society asking that we not sit in judgement, that we seek better information, that we keep our minds open to different explanations for what we see? There are some, but they are meek voices, and they do not carry much weight. Is this inevitable? Is the eagerness to judge something fundamental to ‘human nature’ or a product of our current socialisation?
\n[I’m well aware that I’m here arguing the precise opposite of my argument in comments with Andrew a couple weeks back, where I said that holding back on passing judgement for more facts was a poor way of coping with the world. I still think that. I guess I’m containing multitudes again, or there’s some hypocrisy going on somewhere. Like I say, not yet coalesced.]
\nCLOTHES FOR THE TALL DUDE
\nWhy is it so damn hard to find some casual trousers with long legs and a medium waist without going to a tailor? There’s a lot of us tall skinny guys around. What’s the story? I’ve had it with poor-fitting clothes, but I’m not seeing a lot of other options. (This is the true and actual reason why I wear jeans all the time. They come in a size that fits me.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve had what feels like a very busy week. I think that means it actually was a very busy week, but I can’t quite be sure Huh. One symptom: having lots of scattered thoughts which don’t coalesce into anything bloggable. (Not that I orient my internal mental life around blog-coherent thoughts, nosirree.) But I’m gonna … Continue reading Thought Collection<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-6h","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}