Hindsight, and an Interesting Side-Effect of Online Forums

[VEGANGELICA]

Originally Posted by MoonlitSunshine

I went looking for my original "introduction" thread - which is a barrel of laughs, in itself - but was distracted by a number of other threads that I saw lurking at the bottom of my search. Threads like This.

Now, I don't know about you all, but whenever I think back on the way I used to think, I (think :P) I used to think in roughly the same manner that I think now. As a result, I can never see how immature I was at any stage, because I always felt mature for my age, and I can't remember how I thought. It's an interesting little problem, to say the least.

I had thought that I did most of my growing up before I was 17, but it's astonishing looking at exactly how much I've changed as a poster, as a person in these 4 years. And not only that, but how it's been a continuous change over that time. Yeah, there's been an epiphany or two over the time, when i can say "that's when I started really being myself" or "that's when I realised who i really was", but overall, the maturity and the change in my posting has been a gradual process.

The other thing I find interesting is how quickly we lose sight of what it is to be like we once were.

Moonlit,

I like your thread idea and I love your intro thread! I've never seen someone pack so many Irish jokes into a couple sentences.

In answer to your third question, since I haven't been part of MB very long I actually only noticed you recently due to the Meat is Murder thread. Then I saw elsewhere that you similarly post thoughtfully about a variety of topics. I felt your old thread about what is spam wasn't bad at all. I feel spam is in the eye of the beholder since something off-topic to one person may seem relevant to another. That, and an awful meat product people make by killing and grinding up pigs to satisfy human tastes but not needs.

In answer to your second question, I think you are very right that your sense of self may not change even as you yourself do, so that you don't recognize the changes.

This is one reason I feel the idea of an immortal "soul" is untenable. Which self of mine would be the one that remains immortal: the shy little girl me? The quirky, cocky high school me? The more experimental, self-focused college me? The troubled post-college me? The level, more outgoing and caring me of my late 20s? And if you were to say ALL of them...well, that wouldn't really be me, would it? Ergo: the concept of an immortal soul fails, since who we are is temporal and ever-changing.

(That, BTW, was an example of slightly off-topic, wasn't it! But was it spam? )

I think my posts (and the self behind them) haven't changed much since I joined, except that I now know some people better so we share a history that can be the basis of jokes. Also, I now try to separate my l o n g paragraphs into short sentences after having received several complaints. Apparently some of you don't read books, so you aren't used to reading real paragraphs. (And by this I mean mr dave.)

Here's one of my early posts that I still feel stands as a great monument to all that "Vegangelica" is:

http://www.musicbanter.com/introduct...tml#post677204

[MoonlitSunshine]

The post you linked to is fantastic, I love finding people who in the face of argument will approach it with gusto and good humour I've also had problems with the... length of my posts before: My record on any forum thus far is 3000 words in one post, on the subject of moderation (the reaction of one of my friends when he saw it was "oh sweet jesus, I have to read all of this?" ). Personally i'm a great fan of expressing one's self, and so long as the paragraphs don't go above 10 lines or so they're generally easy enough to read!

I wouldn't, however, say that you are going off-topic. The "topic" in itself, is primarily how Forums can reveal interesting information about who we are and how we develop. Surely whether or not our souls are eternal as evident by how we change is an interesting concept? certainly if forums can be used to argue this immortality, it is related, and relevant to the topic by definition of its interest...ing...ness. I have to say though, that I would disagree with you with regards to your reasoning: I was me 4 years ago, 16 years ago, 21 years ago, and I still am me. And yet, everything that is me is different to how it was then. I have grown, and changed, and yet I am still me. If I can grow in such a way, who is to say that my soul cannot too?

I think however that you hit the nail right on the head when you said

I think you are very right that your sense of self may not change even as you yourself do, so that you don't recognize the changes.

This is, I think, the effect that fascinates me the most out of everything that I came to realise when writing this post. It is quite incredible that even as we change so much in who we are, that the way in which we view ourselves can remain so constant. Originally I had thought that it is because the change is so gradual that we simply don't recognise the change over time, but if that were the case, we would be able to remember how we used to see ourselves, and once a sufficient amount of time had passed, we could see that distance growing between our past and present selves.

Hmm. And now we reach the reason why one should never write a post while thinking about the same ideas. But what about those moments in life, those epiphanies, in which our perspective of ourselves and the world changes?

For example, July 2009 I met a group of people who were to change my life forever, and how I saw myself. It's funny, before I met them, I thought I was happy, and that I was totally comfortable with who I was. But when I met that group... it was like I suddenly realised who I actually was, what I liked, what I didn't like, how I acted. It suddenly didn't really matter what other people wanted me to be. I was me, and that's what really mattered. Up until that moment, I hadn't realised just how much of who I was I was suppressing for the benefit of people who thought I should be different to who I was, namely my girlfriend at the time (amusingly enough, i think she wanted me to be who i was but she didn't like who I really was, which resulted in the problems that occurred :P) And yet, as I look back on who I was, I can't detect that suppression at all, I can't "see" myself the way I used to, i can only see myself back then the way I see myself now. Does that mean that there's an intellectual block which means that we literally cannot see ourselves in any way other than the way we see ourselves now? Or does it mean that, deep down, I haven't changed at all?

[Guybrush]

Originally Posted by VEGANGELICA

Here's one of my early posts that I still feel stands as a great monument to all that "Vegangelica" is:

http://www.musicbanter.com/introduct...tml#post677204

Oh man! That's a pretty good back and forth we had there, Erica

I don't think I've had time to change much since I came. In MB age, I'm still fairly young. I came here in november 2008 I think, so two years. That's nothing!

I've dropped by other forums I spent time on years before I ever came to musicbanter and thought that I was a bit different, but I've generally been well behaved at least. I wrote helpful guides and stuff back then too, but I think I do it better now.

Pictures of me as a young teenager, now those are embarassing!

[RVCA]

Hindsight is definitely an interesting aspect of foruming. The first forum I ever regularly posted in was over at Wizards Of the Coast's Magic The Gathering forum back in 04. I was... 12. My account has since been deleted, but shortly before it was, I went back and looked through my posts. Scary stuff.