Here in The Cellar - Is It *Real*?

Elspode · 03-12-2006, 01:40 AM

Yeah, I said it...is it *real*? Our relationships, I mean (this is, after all, the relationships thread).

Few of us know each other or have ever met IRL. Essentially, to one another, we are all letters on a screen and little else. Oh, yeah...some personalities come across loud and clear. Some of those personalities are easier to stomach than others. Some are more interesting than others. Some are more irritating than others, some apparently more glamorous, still others more attractive, literate, intriguing, provocative, and lots of other adjectives...just like reality. But...

...if we are just batting around words here, with few ever having to face another Cellarite and look into their eyes - Is any of this *real*? If I tell LJ he's a cocksucker, does he get pissed, and do I feel sorry for being out of line? If TW propounds on the morality of international politics and Kagen tells him he's a left wing weenie, is anyone responsible for their words and "actions"?

I guess what I'm looking for here is this: how much weight/value/import do *you*, as a member of this virtual community, place upon your interactions here? Do your feelings get hurt when someone nails your ass? Do you actually feel supported when you open up your guts and let people know that things suck for you and you could use some strokes/input? Do you visualize a real, flesh and blood person sitting somewhere at a computer, carefully considering their words (as I am desperately trying to do now), and ending up making you happy/sad/angry/confused?

As in real life (and magickal life as well), things have only as much power as you give them, but don't you need to give a certain amount of empowerment to what goes on here on The Cellar to make it worth bothering with at all?

zippyt · 03-12-2006, 02:04 AM

for me it is beter than the realy real world , but realy about the same .
If'n I ever got to Forks I would be the guy tending the fire and listening to all the conversations , adding a bit here and there but tending the fire none the less .
I do this on camping trips with friends , I allways have , sorta in the back ground but sorta up to date as well .

Griff · 03-12-2006, 06:20 AM

I think it is real. I've found myself in real world conversations referring to something that was said here. You guys are real to me.

WabUfvot5 · 03-12-2006, 06:46 AM

It's real to a point. I find myself thinking about stuff on here from time to time. In all my years on net forums there has been only one person I want to outright kill and maybe three or so I'd be rude to. So I don't worry about it much.

lumberjim · 03-12-2006, 07:06 AM

pat, if you want to call me a cocksucker, just come out and say it. there's no need to create this whole big 'philosophical smokescreen' around it.

but cerealy, this is absolutely real. i'm a little bit surprised that you ask this instead of stating it. seems like maybe that's what you're doing.....reminding us that when we call each other a fucktard that we might actually hurt someone's feelings. ya bleeding heart nancy boy. I know more about what makes you guys tick than many of my real life friends. you don't get this level of intimacy without the 'anonimity' that this medium provides. it's like a confessional in some respects. granted, you have to sort through a lot of lies and posturing, but I, for one, can tell when someone is being real or coming off. those that treat this as a place to fluff their own ego or try to impress us with how cool they want to be are typically reduced to rubble forthwith. I think that is the main reason i read the cellar. it's definitely what hooked me....the thread UT started about his divorce, specifically. I come off as a hammer from time to time, but i think that most of you know that i would have your back in a time of need.

lumberjim · 03-12-2006, 07:10 AM

this new revision fucks with paragraph structure. the above had a couple of breaks in it that have been squished down by the software.....

Griff · 03-12-2006, 08:02 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lumberjim

this new revision fucks with paragraph structure. the above had a couple of breaks in it that have been squished down by the software.....

I can't wait to see tw's next post...

Undertoad · 03-12-2006, 08:19 AM

Is it real - funny because that's the point I made to Dinty Moore when he interviewed us in 1995 for his book about the internet, and the one he took from it. It most certainly is real, just a different way of being social.

In the olden days, people's letters to each other were considered so vital and important that they were carefully collected. Can you imagine what it must have been like, when it was a near-impossibility for people from a different town to get together for dinner or what-have-you, without having to involve beasts of burden and a back-breaking trip? They were social with their family and people in their immediate vicnity, but people three miles away were separated by a wall of distance.

When the telephone was invented, it made us think that talking directly to each other was the only way of being social. That's been the convention. Well now it doesn't have to be. And frankly what an advantage, because now I'm being social with the lot of you, not just one.

Undertoad · 03-12-2006, 08:20 AM

My paragraph breaks were kept in place LJ... I'm using Firefox/WinXP

and both advanced and quick reply editor

lumberjim · 03-12-2006, 09:40 AM

ya. firefox and xp here too.

test.

must have been me

xoxoxoBruce · 03-12-2006, 09:47 AM

Better than real, you can't smell me.

03-12-2006, 10:44 AM

Yeah, its real. Psychologists have actually written papers on the social interactions of groups on the Internet.

Everyone who sticks around here for any length of time is usually intelligent and witty and has some interesting stuff to say, even when I completely disagree with them.

I've learned a lot of stuff here that I would never have known about otherwise, and this forum and a few others help me feel more a part of the world since my circumstances currently force me to lead a rather cloistured life.

I look for posts by the regulars and if someone suddenly stops posting for a while, I wonder if they're OK and what happened to them. I like the fact that this forum has a core group of posters who have been here for years. It gives the place a real feeling of continuity and community.

I also post on some huge forums and, while interesting, those forums just don't have the same comfy feel of the Cellar. UT has done an outstanding job tending to this place, and I really like his "hands off" attitude where he pretty much lets members police the forum themselves. I don't know of another place on the net that is so open.

And to continue UT's comments on the fine art of writing. Its a form of communication that almost got lost for a while there. Discussion groups on the Net have kept the art of correspondence alive. And people's individual personalities do come through on their posts.

This place and the dwellers here are certainly "real" to me.

Trilby · 03-12-2006, 11:03 AM

Yeah, I get upset when someone calls me (or thinks of me) a fucktard. I also feel lifted up when I get support from you all. I like it here because the cellar is much more liberal than people here in my town. I was given a lot of very real support a while back--more than anything I could get IRL here. I find less judgement and more acceptance here. My sis lived in Philly (well, Swarthmore) for ten years and she LOVED it. She felt very ok expressing her pagan beliefs, etc. there. When she moved to Cincy, she found herself smack in the middle of the Bible belt, finger-wagging, soccer-mom hell. That's what Ohio is like.

Elspode · 03-12-2006, 11:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lumberjim

but cerealy, this is absolutely real. i'm a little bit surprised that you ask this instead of stating it. seems like maybe that's what you're doing.....reminding us that when we call each other a fucktard that we might actually hurt someone's feelings. ya bleeding heart nancy boy.

Truely, I am curious to know how others view the interactions here. I *know* my own opinion (which is that this is totally real and a valuable part of my real life, in case you were wondering), but as I learn more and more each day, my view of things is not always enough to form an accurate picture of consensus reality. I actually had no intention of chastising or otherwise trying to caution people about treating each other with respect. Adults ought to know that in the first place, IMHO, and if people mistreat other people online, I think it is a safe bet that they probably do that IRL as well.

I have made friendships here with people I have never met and very well may *never* meet. I value those friendships as much as those based on face to face interaction and shared in person experiences. I just thought it would be cool to see how others see things, and spur a bit of discussion about the whole concept.

slang · 03-12-2006, 02:10 PM

This community is real to me, of course.

The American structure of working a job has been that of continous toil year round with few if any real breaks for as far back as I have any personal experience.

Once you get out of school, whatever that might be, you are stuck in a lifelong journey of working and working and working.....only to have short breaks to recharge. During these short breaks, weekends, holidays and vacations (that are not only short but that you cannot take as you wish ), you are most often competing for time and space with every other person that has exactly that same short time away as well.

The weekends? There are too many people in my way to do anything. Holidays? Same thing. During the time that most everyone else is at work. Absolutely the best time to do anything. You arent competing with everyone in the world to get anything from a sub sandwhich to just getting somewhere on the road without a LAWS rocket and your face painted red.

Once I took the first contract and experienced the pure freedom of having both time and money without the bullshit of having to check in, get permission (?? fuck you ??) or somehow be tied by the gonads to some corporation, I was hooked. Direct jobs? With very few exceptions, I've recieved an offer from the contract that I'd finished at that time for a direct job. I'm not a direct job guy though. I know the freedom of taking time off to go abroad for months at a time......without some assbag requiring that I check in or file a report every week.

The "security" of direct jobs? I've seen those directs hit the door as a contractor more times than I can count. The security these days is only if you pimp yourself out CHEAP and bust your ass long and hard from my observation.

So anyway.....this means that I'll always be a wanderer. A FREE wanderer. A free wanderer that has time to get his head straight once a year with a real vacation.

What does the Cellar mean to someone that makes new friends, moves to a completely new area, has to ramp up instantly with a new company's policies once or maybe twice a year.

Familiarity.

When I leave a company, there are always people there that would somehow like to keep in touch. That's ridiculous. I dont tell them that to their faces because in their mind, they like me and want to stay friends. The reality is that I'll be 700 miles away 10 days from now and even if I did take the time to chat with them or take the time to e-mail, they would not.

Their lives are that of the real world, face to face friendships. They dont have any idea how to have friends any other way and only see face to face friendships as real.

Many times these same people "try to help me" by inviting me out for some social thing or that. Most often I politely decline saying something like..."I have friends online that I stay in contact with regardless of where I am...and those people are accustomed to being online, so we stay in touch long term...I'm not lonely nor depressed about not coming out of this little place that I've rented here."

Thanks for the offer but your life is completely different from mine. They most always think that my life is somehow lesser......until I send them a collection of postcards from places all over the world.....or the company that they have invested their entire life on lays off 15,000 people in one city...in one day and they suddenly realize that the house that they paid way too much for will be on the market competing for buyers with 15,000 more homes, at exactly the same time that all those people will be competing for jobs to pay for those mortgages.

Sucks to be me???

The Cellar is someplace that people know me, like me or not. I know most of the regulars here and people take this place seriously. People here often overlook my jack-ass-ish-ness or just put me on ignore, which seems to work out good.

There are a variety of topics to look into, learn from and contribute to. This makes the Cellar just what it used to say..... a little coffeeshop without the coffee or the shop.

There are also a wide variety of life experiences here as well. You can get some opinion or suggestions on so many things here from rebuilding a drum to surviving a divorce.

Most all people give the real deal too. It's not showmanship for the board.

This is my group of friends regardless of where I am at.

03-12-2006, 01:40 AM	#1
Elspode When Do I Get Virtual Unreality? Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: Raytown, Missouri Posts: 12,719	*Here in The Cellar - Is It Real?* Yeah, I said it...is it real? Our relationships, I mean (this is, after all, the relationships thread). Few of us know each other or have ever met IRL. Essentially, to one another, we are all letters on a screen and little else. Oh, yeah...some personalities come across loud and clear. Some of those personalities are easier to stomach than others. Some are more interesting than others. Some are more irritating than others, some apparently more glamorous, still others more attractive, literate, intriguing, provocative, and lots of other adjectives...just like reality. But... ...if we are just batting around words here, with few ever having to face another Cellarite and look into their eyes - Is any of this real? If I tell LJ he's a cocksucker, does he get pissed, and do I feel sorry for being out of line? If TW propounds on the morality of international politics and Kagen tells him he's a left wing weenie, is anyone responsible for their words and "actions"? I guess what I'm looking for here is this: how much weight/value/import do you, as a member of this virtual community, place upon your interactions here? Do your feelings get hurt when someone nails your ass? Do you actually feel supported when you open up your guts and let people know that things suck for you and you could use some strokes/input? Do you visualize a real, flesh and blood person sitting somewhere at a computer, carefully considering their words (as I am desperately trying to do now), and ending up making you happy/sad/angry/confused? As in real life (and magickal life as well), things have only as much power as you give them, but don't you need to give a certain amount of empowerment to what goes on here on The Cellar to make it worth bothering with at all? __________________ "To those of you who are wearing ties, I think my dad would appreciate it if you took them off." - Robert Moog

03-12-2006, 02:04 AM	#2
zippyt LONG LIVE KING ZIPPY! per Feetz Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Arkansas Posts: 7,661	for me it is beter than the realy real world , but realy about the same . If'n I ever got to Forks I would be the guy tending the fire and listening to all the conversations , adding a bit here and there but tending the fire none the less . I do this on camping trips with friends , I allways have , sorta in the back ground but sorta up to date as well . __________________ "Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. " Brother Dave Gardner

03-12-2006, 06:20 AM	#3
Griff still says videotape Join Date: Feb 2001 Posts: 26,813	I think it is real. I've found myself in real world conversations referring to something that was said here. You guys are real to me. __________________ If you would only recognize that life is hard, things would be so much easier for you. - Louis D. Brandeis

03-12-2006, 07:06 AM	#5
lumberjim I can hear my ears Join Date: Oct 2003 Posts: 25,571	pat, if you want to call me a cocksucker, just come out and say it. there's no need to create this whole big 'philosophical smokescreen' around it. but cerealy, this is absolutely real. i'm a little bit surprised that you ask this instead of stating it. seems like maybe that's what you're doing.....reminding us that when we call each other a fucktard that we might actually hurt someone's feelings. ya bleeding heart nancy boy. I know more about what makes you guys tick than many of my real life friends. you don't get this level of intimacy without the 'anonimity' that this medium provides. it's like a confessional in some respects. granted, you have to sort through a lot of lies and posturing, but I, for one, can tell when someone is being real or coming off. those that treat this as a place to fluff their own ego or try to impress us with how cool they want to be are typically reduced to rubble forthwith. I think that is the main reason i read the cellar. it's definitely what hooked me....the thread UT started about his divorce, specifically. I come off as a hammer from time to time, but i think that most of you know that i would have your back in a time of need. __________________ This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality Embrace this moment, remember We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion ~MJKeenan

03-12-2006, 07:10 AM	#6
lumberjim I can hear my ears Join Date: Oct 2003 Posts: 25,571	this new revision fucks with paragraph structure. the above had a couple of breaks in it that have been squished down by the software..... __________________ This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality Embrace this moment, remember We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion ~MJKeenan

03-12-2006, 06:46 AM	#4
WabUfvot5 Operations Operative Join Date: May 2002 Posts: 634	It's real to a point. I find myself thinking about stuff on here from time to time. In all my years on net forums there has been only one person I want to outright kill and maybe three or so I'd be rude to. So I don't worry about it much.

03-12-2006, 08:19 AM	#8
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	Is it real - funny because that's the point I made to Dinty Moore when he interviewed us in 1995 for his book about the internet, and the one he took from it. It most certainly is real, just a different way of being social. In the olden days, people's letters to each other were considered so vital and important that they were carefully collected. Can you imagine what it must have been like, when it was a near-impossibility for people from a different town to get together for dinner or what-have-you, without having to involve beasts of burden and a back-breaking trip? They were social with their family and people in their immediate vicnity, but people three miles away were separated by a wall of distance. When the telephone was invented, it made us think that talking directly to each other was the only way of being social. That's been the convention. Well now it doesn't have to be. And frankly what an advantage, because now I'm being social with the lot of you, not just one.

03-12-2006, 08:20 AM	#9
Undertoad Radical Centrist Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Cottage of Prussia Posts: 31,423	My paragraph breaks were kept in place LJ... I'm using Firefox/WinXP and both advanced and quick reply editor

03-12-2006, 09:40 AM	#10
lumberjim I can hear my ears Join Date: Oct 2003 Posts: 25,571	ya. firefox and xp here too. test. must have been me __________________ This body holding me reminds me of my own mortality Embrace this moment, remember We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion ~MJKeenan

03-12-2006, 09:47 AM	#11
xoxoxoBruce The future is unwritten Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 71,105	Better than real, you can't smell me. __________________ The descent of man ~ Nixon, Friedman, Reagan, Trump.

03-12-2006, 10:44 AM	#12
marichiko Guest Posts: n/a	Yeah, its real. Psychologists have actually written papers on the social interactions of groups on the Internet. Everyone who sticks around here for any length of time is usually intelligent and witty and has some interesting stuff to say, even when I completely disagree with them. I've learned a lot of stuff here that I would never have known about otherwise, and this forum and a few others help me feel more a part of the world since my circumstances currently force me to lead a rather cloistured life. I look for posts by the regulars and if someone suddenly stops posting for a while, I wonder if they're OK and what happened to them. I like the fact that this forum has a core group of posters who have been here for years. It gives the place a real feeling of continuity and community. I also post on some huge forums and, while interesting, those forums just don't have the same comfy feel of the Cellar. UT has done an outstanding job tending to this place, and I really like his "hands off" attitude where he pretty much lets members police the forum themselves. I don't know of another place on the net that is so open. And to continue UT's comments on the fine art of writing. Its a form of communication that almost got lost for a while there. Discussion groups on the Net have kept the art of correspondence alive. And people's individual personalities do come through on their posts. This place and the dwellers here are certainly "real" to me.

03-12-2006, 11:03 AM	#13
Trilby Slattern of the Swail Join Date: Jul 2004 Posts: 15,654	Yeah, I get upset when someone calls me (or thinks of me) a fucktard. I also feel lifted up when I get support from you all. I like it here because the cellar is much more liberal than people here in my town. I was given a lot of very real support a while back--more than anything I could get IRL here. I find less judgement and more acceptance here. My sis lived in Philly (well, Swarthmore) for ten years and she LOVED it. She felt very ok expressing her pagan beliefs, etc. there. When she moved to Cincy, she found herself smack in the middle of the Bible belt, finger-wagging, soccer-mom hell. That's what Ohio is like. __________________ In Barrie's play and novel, the roles of fairies are brief: they are allies to the Lost Boys, the source of fairy dust and ...They are portrayed as dangerous, whimsical and extremely clever but quite hedonistic. "Shall I give you a kiss?" Peter asked and, jerking an acorn button off his coat, solemnly presented it to her. —James Barrie Wimminfolk they be tricksy. - ZenGum

03-12-2006, 02:10 PM	#15
slang St Petersburg, Florida Join Date: Oct 2002 Posts: 3,423	This community is real to me, of course. The American structure of working a job has been that of continous toil year round with few if any real breaks for as far back as I have any personal experience. Once you get out of school, whatever that might be, you are stuck in a lifelong journey of working and working and working.....only to have short breaks to recharge. During these short breaks, weekends, holidays and vacations (that are not only short but that you cannot take as you wish ), you are most often competing for time and space with every other person that has exactly that same short time away as well. The weekends? There are too many people in my way to do anything. Holidays? Same thing. During the time that most everyone else is at work. Absolutely the best time to do anything. You arent competing with everyone in the world to get anything from a sub sandwhich to just getting somewhere on the road without a LAWS rocket and your face painted red. Once I took the first contract and experienced the pure freedom of having both time and money without the bullshit of having to check in, get permission (?? fuck you ??) or somehow be tied by the gonads to some corporation, I was hooked. Direct jobs? With very few exceptions, I've recieved an offer from the contract that I'd finished at that time for a direct job. I'm not a direct job guy though. I know the freedom of taking time off to go abroad for months at a time......without some assbag requiring that I check in or file a report every week. The "security" of direct jobs? I've seen those directs hit the door as a contractor more times than I can count. The security these days is only if you pimp yourself out CHEAP and bust your ass long and hard from my observation. So anyway.....this means that I'll always be a wanderer. A FREE wanderer. A free wanderer that has time to get his head straight once a year with a real vacation. What does the Cellar mean to someone that makes new friends, moves to a completely new area, has to ramp up instantly with a new company's policies once or maybe twice a year. Familiarity. When I leave a company, there are always people there that would somehow like to keep in touch. That's ridiculous. I dont tell them that to their faces because in their mind, they like me and want to stay friends. The reality is that I'll be 700 miles away 10 days from now and even if I did take the time to chat with them or take the time to e-mail, they would not. Their lives are that of the real world, face to face friendships. They dont have any idea how to have friends any other way and only see face to face friendships as real. Many times these same people "try to help me" by inviting me out for some social thing or that. Most often I politely decline saying something like..."I have friends online that I stay in contact with regardless of where I am...and those people are accustomed to being online, so we stay in touch long term...I'm not lonely nor depressed about not coming out of this little place that I've rented here." Thanks for the offer but your life is completely different from mine. They most always think that my life is somehow lesser......until I send them a collection of postcards from places all over the world.....or the company that they have invested their entire life on lays off 15,000 people in one city...in one day and they suddenly realize that the house that they paid way too much for will be on the market competing for buyers with 15,000 more homes, at exactly the same time that all those people will be competing for jobs to pay for those mortgages. Sucks to be me??? The Cellar is someplace that people know me, like me or not. I know most of the regulars here and people take this place seriously. People here often overlook my jack-ass-ish-ness or just put me on ignore, which seems to work out good. There are a variety of topics to look into, learn from and contribute to. This makes the Cellar just what it used to say..... a little coffeeshop without the coffee or the shop. There are also a wide variety of life experiences here as well. You can get some opinion or suggestions on so many things here from rebuilding a drum to surviving a divorce. Most all people give the real deal too. It's not showmanship for the board. This is my group of friends regardless of where I am at.

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