Re: Re: bbsing
  By: Nancy Backus to Damon A. Getsman on Mon May 04 2015 16:59:24

 NB> Rochester always has seemed to have a good sense of community, on many
 NB> levels... bbsing being only one of them...  back in the day, with a
 NB> number of good bbses to choose from, there wasn't much rivalry (and what
 NB> there was was rather good-natured at that) and there was a lot of
 NB> cooperation... There's less of that now locally on the bbs scene, but
 NB> with telnet and all, the community just widened out globally..  :)

  I guess other than the cult that my parents raised me in I've never really
been any member of an organization that had much of a sense of community. 
Barring the military, of course; not that that community was one that I really
had a lot I wanted to identify with (though it was always nice to know that you
had hundreds of thousands of people that had your back).  So the BBS community
was very important to me.  Maybe some day I'll be able to bring my son to the
discussions here, as well.  ;)  Just to bring it full circle and back around to
the echo topic again.  ;)

 NB> It's good to find good lessons in the bad things of the past... :)  And
 NB> then to let the demons loose, to not torment you any more... :)

  As I've said before that's one of the things that I'm pretty bad at.  Though
I do notice it getting better every day with meditation.  Of course I say that
on a day where I realize I've missed my meditation for two days in a row now. 
I'm being a bad buddhist.  :)

 NB> It didn't bother me... I just figured his reasoning was, any female on
 NB> the scene must be young, "old ladies" wouldn't be
interested...   And
 NB> of course, there's no visual clues as to age...  :)

  It's cool that you're okay with it.  I've seen other women who have been a
little irate about it, at times.  Heh.  There does certainly tend to be an
early male (or maybe not gender specific) characteristic for believing that any
female that you can't see must be near the same age...  At least I remember
that a bit, myself.  Naivety, I suppose.  Combined with a little egocentrism
that seems pretty all-pervasive in either humanity or non-tribal culture,
perhaps.

 NB> I'd tend to go along with you on that.  And I suspect that some of that
 NB> lack of real community is what encourages the somewhat resurgance of the
 NB> bbs scene lately...  :)

  I guess I've only been around for a few years, so I don't know how much of
what is going on is uptick and how much are the common ins and outs since the
BBSen faded from common usage.  I certainly hope that it's swinging up again;
it'd be great to have a little more infusion around here.  Not that the current
company is lacking anything; it's always nice to have some of those gah-tam
kids around, though.  *grin*

 NB> [grinning]  I suppose there's a place for that...   I have to agree
 NB> that what exists nowadays in social media is generally a poor substitute
 NB> for real interaction.  I'm sure there are some pockets of it, but the
 NB> medium doesn't really encourage it... it tends to be pretty impersonal..

  Yeah.  It can be a lifesaver when there's a fairly complete lack of anything
else, but if there's anything better, it's a damn poor substitute.  I think
things started getting really poor when the php BBSes started coming around. 
Everybody I knew from back in the BBS days got into them for a bit, but they
never really had the same community.  It was too...  commercial looking, maybe?
I don't know for sure what it was; that, and perhaps the point and clicking
crowd of kids who weren't there for anything except flaming and rampant
douchebaggery.  Which is to be expected, of course, but at least on the
text-based BBSing forums there was a little bit of a higher bar to them getting
there in the first place.  Point & click just made it too easy, IMO.

 DAG>> iron out these last 3 bugs that are keeping me from putting it up
 DAG>> public.
 NB> I'm sure it IS a learning curve...  :)  Sounds like you'll manage ok
 NB> with it though...  :)

  Yeah.  I've fallen out of the habit of coding on it every day now, though. 
I've got to get back with that pretty soon here.  It's good to take a pause
every now and then so that I forget what I _THINK_ the code does and have to
start looking at what it ACTUALLY does.  That difference can be really
important.  Kind of like setting a manuscript aside for a few months before you
edit it so that you're not reading what you thought you put down, you're
reading what's actually on the page.  I'm gonna try to give it a shot in awhile
here today after I get a workout done (yay working shoulder!).  Motivation was
lacking this morning, but I think if I get the blood flowing a little bit
better things will work out here.  ;)
  Best wishes.

  -D
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