Blandness is evil, or why Dissensus is shit

padraig (u.s.)

a monkey that will go ape
the place is big enough to sustain discussions on things i dont know about/dont care about/want to eradicate
if the world was only things that I liked or you liked or any one person liked it would be a sad, gray place

veering into variety is the spice of life cliche territory here, but it is
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
a thing - there are big areas where my tastes just don't overlap w/dissensus. for example, I don't care at all about drill, ATL rap, or tbh modern rap in general.

I'm not going to contribute to those kinds of threads, but I'm still glad they exist. I always enjoy people dropping expert knowledge on a subject they are or were passionate about.

my aim when single-handedly ushering in the silver age of dissensus was to have monday-friday have at least one substantive, plentiful, thematically-cohesive conversation going on every day. ideally each poster would have at least three of those days have a conversation they can enjoy and participate in.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Maintaining the Eurocult Film Thread is my only real commitment and I can't even do that properly.
 

craner

Beast of Burden
Scottie now seems to be solely committed to retweeting young female students on Twitter. Not really sure what happened there!
 

luka

Well-known member
craner you need to throw yourself into the silver age, with gusto. rediscover your gift.
vimothy is making a massive comeback too and just messaged me to say he is commited to joining in at least once a week
despite having kids and a job and doing a phd in ne0-reaction. (NRx for short)
 
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craner

Beast of Burden
I just turned 40 right now, so my opinions no longer matter on any subject. Pure decline and accretions orbiting a decrepit gyre (or whatever Droid said) is my path from here.
 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
I just turned 40 right now, so my opinions no longer matter on any subject. Pure decline and accretions orbiting a decrepit gyre (or whatever Droid said) is my path from here.

IDK I think championing me was a step in the good direction of belying your maturity. (I mean this with affection and sarcasm)

I've definitely seen zhao get loose with the word in older threads and been quoted by other users with a "Uh...?" but I'm not going to waste time digging around for the posts of someone I don't like, nor do I think he's able to be bogeyman-like summoned

I'm just under the perspective that while I personally don't hold droid's issues to be the same sort of issues of finding fault (while recognizing hey, maybe the luka & barty show isn't always entertaining for some) I do personally find the nostalgia for a guy who I found to behave like a churl and a prick as intelligent as he was (because he was) wrongheaded and the joking desire to reinvoke him into the forum certainly repels me.

Which hey, I'm not saying I'm anyone special, but I'd like to think the board wasn't supposed to just die with a certain generation getting bored with it.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
IDK I think championing me was a step in the good direction of belying your maturity. (I mean this with affection and sarcasm)

I've definitely seen zhao get loose with the word in older threads and been quoted by other users with a "Uh...?" but I'm not going to waste time digging around for the posts of someone I don't like, nor do I think he's able to be bogeyman-like summoned

I'm just under the perspective that while I personally don't hold droid's issues to be the same sort of issues of finding fault (while recognizing hey, maybe the luka & barty show isn't always entertaining for some) I do personally find the nostalgia for a guy who I found to behave like a churl and a prick as intelligent as he was (because he was) wrongheaded and the joking desire to reinvoke him into the forum certainly repels me.

Which hey, I'm not saying I'm anyone special, but I'd like to think the board wasn't supposed to just die with a certain generation getting bored with it.

I find the pretty one-sided character assassination a bit repellent myself (suspending judgement on the other things you mentioned), I have to say. Smacks of everyone bonding together as a little club after a fairly heated internecine argument, to project most of the bad bits of the board onto a third party who isn't here any more. Lots of us here have acted like churls and pricks over the years, and have been wrongheaded/thought others so. That's part of the function of a board like this, surely - people have said some things on here that I think personally are beyond the pale, but well, that's public life isn't it? As the thread title says, blandness is shit.

Agree with the last point.

Edit: That wasn't aimed at you alone - I just find what I perceive to be the general closing of ranks against someone who did give a lot of positives to this board (whether people choose to remember them or not), to be offputting.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Smacks of everyone bonding together as a little club after a fairly heated internecine argument, to project most of the bad bits of the board onto a third party.

yeah maybe but doesnt seem a very fruitful avenue to explore. a lot of people here met him in real life and found him to be excellent company. why dont you contribute to the this or that thread instead?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
because this one is more interesting to me :) Rewriting the past to fit a cute narrative is one of my personal bugbears.
 

luka

Well-known member
alternatively you could consider the possibility that people really didnt like him and are not rewriting history.
perhaps they hated him and are now soft-soaping that repulsion.
your experience might not tally with those of other people.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
just to return this thread back to the dissexistential crisis thread:

my favourite threads seem to be alienating to everyone else. one reason i was taken aback so much last week was because i thought the feminine pressure thread was a new zenith. it was the new ideal for dissensus. a unified field theory of the forum. it incorporated the silly and the serious, metaphysical discussions with stupid jokes, politics with poetry, literalists and interpreters, music, art, poetry, etc. it was an expanse that wasn’t just inane, unconnected thoughts. all of us and our perspectives simultaneously in contrast and in tandem centred around a single, open theme.

obviously other people felt differently.

i'm trying to figure out how to get everyone on board with these types of threads (not just me and luka). maybe it's not possible, but i don't want people being put off by them ('this or that' being another examples). if you're not getting anything out of it, impose something you want in it; you'll attract the kind of people and conversations you want.

there's a three decade age gap across the members of the forum. talking about atlanta rap post-2014 isn't going to appeal to a lot of people. talking about hardcore punk in the 80's isn't going to appeal to a lot of people. open, thematic threads are the most viable option for getting everyone involved. it would be nice if we could make them work.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
alternatively you could consider the possibility that people really didnt like him and are not rewriting history.
perhaps they hated him and are now soft-soaping that repulsion.
your experience might not tally with those of other people.

I tried as far as possible to take him with a pinch of salt but there's no getting away from the fact that he was incapable of separating an opinion from the person expressing it and could be very personally aggressive at times. Quite a lot of the time, in fact.
 

luka

Well-known member
i get that peoples situations are different. i know, for example, that craner is bled dry by his job and im sure a lot of others are too, some of you are parents, which always leaves people on the brink of a nervous breakdown, while me and barty swan around getting out of bed at 10 and making a living by poetry or music respectively.

so i dont want to be too pushy or demanding. on the other hand we would like to make things a bit livelier here. and we would like to involve the rest of you. so we're trying to get the balance right. as this thread attests, we fucked up the first time. maybe it'll transpire that you dont want to be involved in what we're trying to do and we'll have to give up, lick our wounds, retreat. that remains to be seen.
 

luka

Well-known member
sometimes we all get depressed, feel down, our heads become a fug. thoughts wont crystallise and cohere. we cant formulate sentences. we're distracted, irritable.
 

luka

Well-known member
there's always a danger in saying you want to make something better. it's hubristic. you could just end up like the overeager new manager coming into a KFC to shake things up. and the staff say, nah, leave us alone. it's fine how it is. just sit back. it runs itself.
 
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