Question [Solved] What happened to the Lounge, Writing Prompts. ect. ?

Something we can all relate to....

Slightly Odd Things All Book Lovers Have Done

 

Buzzfeed, really? You... might have arse cancer. You'll want to check that.
Okay article though. I see their worst comes from the civil right side. (Shudders) They have a non-ironic check your privilege test.

 

Cats fling their mousies around to get all the poop out.

 

I had a puppy once who went to live on a farm, but considering that I gave him directly to the farmer, I know it was true.

 

The Internet is what happens when all the crap people toss around in private becomes exposed to a larger audience. Make a snarky comment about someone to your friends? Lazy, but short-lived. Make one on Facebook? It can remain for years to anger faces in entirely different countries.

In a way, it's more honest, but that's half the problem. Our impulses are clumsy in person, when we fear to express them fully; behind the platform of a keyboard, they become something almost diseased. For all the Debate Room's hyperbole, it is an oasis next to the average Facebook or YouTube argument, and I have no love for it myself.

For reasons known only to me, I have often involved myself in the same process (I was much worse on other forums), even in subjects where I was fully aware of my own ignorance. I spent large amounts of time trying to calculate an acceptable level of aggression and sensitivity, becoming too entrenched to do the neccesary research. My recent break was driven by an attempt to get my crap together, and I know now that those emotions can never fully be reconciled. There is no formula for it, or at least none purely mathematical. But I have begun avoiding those old arguments, here and elsewhere, and I urge others to treat that element of human behavior as fog, rather than breaking out the First Amendment to defend it on a social level. It would be a mistake to punish the vast majority of insults with legal measures, but they are weapons all the same, and their use works more to promote conformity and prevent us from relating to each other than to serve any greater end. Even logic suffers, confronted with a barrier of personal attacks. They are tools of tribalism, perhaps necessary on some level for cohesion and self-defense; they rarely hold value beyond that.

 

I've found in the past I've felt the need to debate when depressed, kind of like a wounded animal striking out at others. In those moods it mattered little whether my opponent was a fundamentalist Christian or atheist, someone I had nothing in common with or a friend trying to help me, and the topic likewise ultimately wouldn't have mattered if I had calmed down and gotten from out of the mental fog. So given that experience, sometimes when I am tempted to shout "What's wrong with her?!" All indignantly. Maybe I ought to pause and think that perhaps something else is wrong with the stranger just like it at times was with me, provoking the wounded animal striking out from within.

 

Heh. This thread has the most activity when I come back....

@Adenosine Triphosphate if I understand correctly you're suggesting that some insults should be punished through legal channels?

As far as cats and prey, I don't think the words cruel and sadistic are particularly good descriptors, though it can appear that way if the anthropomorphize them too much. They're following instinct and millions of years of evolution.

 

I used to work at Petco, and you have no idea how many people seem to forget this little tidbit of info.

"My cat won't use the litter box! I have one box for five cats, it's in the middle of the living room with scented litter and has a hood! I need an additive to draw my cat to the box!"

No, you need five more litter boxes, moved into a private space with unscented litter and no hood. Cats are territorial -- you need one box for each cat. They bury their poop on instinct so that predators won't track them -- the central location doesn't feel safe and the scented litter confuses them (and often isn't good for their lungs). And a hood only traps the smells, so what's the point of burying their poop if the whole box smells like it anyway?


-_- People......

 

I can only relate to like 2 of those things. The rest are a bit out there, even for me.

 

I can relate to at least ten.... But I don't save receipts as bookmarks. I just dog-ear the pages.

*cowers* Don't kill me!

 

Oooh ...shiiiit ...what have you done.....

 

Use playing cards instead of dogearing. I use Magic the Gathering cards as book marks. Dogearing has the potential to annoy the next reader. I got in trouble a lot growing up for dogearing pages. So if you have a business card floating around, or a deck of playing cards (use the Joker in case you use the deck later on) then you always have a book mark. Alternatively tear a strip of magazine or something unimportant and use that. Dogearing is not a nice thing to do, and you should work on not doing it. Your books will thank you.

 

Well, I'm a cat lover from way back BUT there is no way I'd be playing tickle kitty with a tiger either. No matter how friendly they appear to be, I know how their minds work. Jannert's Rule: Always stay bigger than your cat.

 

I Got a guppy for my fish tank...It will fit right?

 

There is no "next reader" for the books I read. I own all of mine, don't use the library, and don't loan them out. Plus, dogearing to me is like a photo album. I see all past creases and it reminds me of the first time I read it, how I felt throughout, how many times I read it, how many times I'll read it in the future.

So it's not just book abuse. It's sentimental!

You mean like this?



Three months old, that cat. Three. Months.

 

This thread is a safe space.

 

El problema aquí no es el contenido, sino el enfoque. Cuando la gente considera el DR como la totalidad del foro, ese es el problema. Esa gente se pone anteojeras y se olvida de que la inmensa mayoría de nosotros llegamos a este destino por algo completamente diferente a lo que ellos están haciendo y argumentando. Se convierte en una distracción que es tan y tan molestosa y fuera de lugar como un post escrito en Español.

 

Are Spanish posts really annoying, though?

 

¡Imagínatelo! Si fuera a postear constantemente en Español, desviando toda conversación con la necesidad de filtrar mis respuestas a través de un traductor.... 'Chacho.... Y eso presumiendo que me limito al uso del Español correcto, que no hay un segundo filtro de lenguaje idiomático que hay que aplicar. No, no, no. ¿Quién va a aguantar eso por más de un ejemplo o dos? Nadie vino a este lugar pa' tener que bregar con otro idioma. De igual manera, no llegaron aquí para combatir estupideces políticas.

 

¿Qué tan malo tenía Google Translate traduce esto en español?

 

Heh, true @Wreybies. Particularly on my phone where it is more of a pain to translate. A few posts are cool but if a whole thread was like that it would be burdensome. But, if you had a subforum just for Spanish speakers, I don't think people would be put off (or I wouldn't).

 

What? Did you use Google Translate to translate your answer??

 

Agreed. Now extend the fanciful example out into what we have now. The Spanish speakers in that subforum have become so accustomed to posting in Spanish that they start to post in the rest of the forum in Spanish and figure that they've been doing this for long enough and that there are enough of them that the members who don't speak Spanish - and have no wish to because this is not a Hispanophone forum - are expected to just deal with all the Spanish.

ETA: Add to this a restrictive clause indicating that the forum asked for greater latitude, it was granted, and that this is included in that concept of greater latitude.

 

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@Cave Troll there are 10 types of people in the world...