treehouse club

[kerosene]

Jeb, I understand what you are saying. If you don't mind, I think I can provide a bit of perspective.

First of all, thanks for being honest about what you feel. It takes guts to reveal your thoughts and feelings in such an open way, without a defense mechanism already built in. Good on ya.

Secondly, I am familiar with your posts, yet, so I have no real context from which to address your specific situation.

But!

Here's what I see:

The grammar and spelling thing gets irritating to some people. It doesn't bother me, much because I see much worse at my workplace everyday. Some people find it more difficult to see the specific meaning in what you are saying if it isn't articulated well. The nature of text communication is problematic in that way.

Because it is difficult to accurately express *anything* in its full form using text (unless, of course we all write 150 page dissertations) we're all going to take things the wrong way, once in a while. On a message board, there is no body language or facial expression. No amount of fun little emoticons can capture and express human emotions and the dynamics around them. I truly believe that 85% of the shit storms that happen around here can be attributed to that. Well, maybe 80%. Anyway, quite a few. If you feel yourself getting pissed off, or hurt, let it go and come back in a few days.

These, I think are the main reasons why it is so easy to think you aren't part of the "popular" crowd. Despite all the "<enter cellar user name> is an asshat" and "Let's see more of <enter cellar user name>" threads, there is no popularity contest. It's much easier than that. Here are some ideas on how to be more involved in the cellar:

- Post a lot of interesting points.
- Don't call names.
- Be funny. No matter what kind of sense of humor you have, someone is bound to think you are funny if you let that part of yourself go, here.
- Post a lot of mindless fun in the Nothingland forum.
- Get to know other members and what they like, how you can relate, etc.
- Think of the most interesting thing that happened to you, this week and start a discussion about it.
- Find a picture of something you care about and start a thread about it.

Of course, those are all just ideas. I don't make the rules around here (and wouldn't want to.)

I like to make a game of getting my post count to a certain point, because that means I am more involved. It's a personal thing, to me. Not a popularity thing. And you can see by my post count, that in 5 years, I haven't been a heavy poster, really. But that is just me.

I think the investment you make in this place determines what you get out of it....(maybe there is some famous quote like that?)

So, anyway, Jeb, Cloud, Fresh and whoever else is new around here, I hope you stick around, because the vast personality differences are what make this forum so interesting.

</soapbox>