Have You Ever Had a Stalker?

By communities, you mean the boards? I'm sorry about that. Hope all is okay.

Agreed, of course. And my real life is as good as its been. But for the first time I'm starting to experience what it's like for the board drama to leak into my real life, and I don't like it. Lot of anger out there.

 

No.

 

One of the best posts I've ever seen on this board.

 

I have professional and personal experience with stalkers. No, I wasn't stalked, a long-time former friend lost her shit and stalked her peer counselor.

Also, there's stalking and there's just being a transgressive asshole. The internet can make people weird and mean and sometimes it can spill over into offline life, especially when someone thinks you have something they should have gotten.

 

One thing my sister told me long ago that I never forgot: Most if not all women experience a stalker at some point.
It could be an ex, it could be the creepy dork at work, anything.
I agree the web is the ideal habitat for bullies/bully culture, with an even more convenient escape hatch for the activity - simply logging off.

Psychic vampire - Wikipedia

 

I always wondered what SJ would end up like once it reached it’s oldies, playing at state fairs era. Might have even done a (theoretically) humorous thread about back in the day, though I can’t check for sure because of the shithouse state of the site.

(Who owns this site these days anyway? Is it the same MF’er who bought it five years ago or so and wanted to make it overly nicety-nice? I can say now what I never would have said 10 years ago, because I would have feared a ban, but fix this fucking place whomever you are. There’s still a lot of people who contribute and care about it. Stand and deliver. Don’t be the digital equivalent of a slum lord.)

I actually think it’s pretty cool that some long-time board enemies can break some bread these days. And I also think it’s kind of cool you still have people being dicks to one another too! I believed in its heyday and I believe now that this place was at its best when it was a mixture of both. When it veered too far one way or another is when it got tiresome or boring.

Me? My behavior here and the very nature of message board communities in general were/are a mass of contradictions.

I’m pretty shy, socially-awkward even, in real life. (I never had the financial ability or freedom from family responsibility to do the outings back in the day, so I’ve actually only met a handful of SJ’ers in person. The few I have met have likely been surprised I wasn’t really a deer-fucking loon.)

This place allowed me to live through my id or superego or whatever the fuck. It wasn’t a persona, it was genuine, but a genuine side that I suppress our of fear of social embarassment elsewhere. Here? I could be myself and If I was judged? Well, at least I was judged on the same level everyone else was.

Eventually, I got sick of it and left for five years, but I can’t deny it’s a part of my life and that I know and love a lot of people because of it.

That last sentence seems absurd to even write, because it comes off as both self-indulgent and self-parody, but it goes straight to the contradiction I’m talking about.

This place is meaningless and meaningful ... often in the scope of one post or one thread. And that’s always how I’ve felt about it.

What is the point of any of this? Who the fuck knows? I read a few posts that smacked of the good ole “state of the board” threads from back in the day, so I chimed in. It has zero to do with stalking, but as Tommy Lee Jones said, my mind wanders.

I’m old too, I put my time in on this site, so this post is the SJ version of a Pete Townsend concept album about obscure deaf English farm animals doing a musical together that actually stands as a metaphor for Townsend’s youthful confusion about his own penis. In other words, self-indulgent bullshit.

Same as it ever was.

 

If you're playing the home version of our game, we've reached the "deleted posts/unhinged PMs/signing of loyalty oaths" portion of the program.

Yahtzee, etc.

 

My post is gone. I didn't delete it so you'll have to uncheck your Yahtzee card.

 

I just want to know what this place was worth at its peak. To me that would answer a lot of questions about what happened thereafter.

 

It was like the sharpest kind of newsroom circus you could imagine, and want to work in.

The Decline of SJ™ would make for a good post if posters could stay on point.

SJ was the first Gawker, the first Deadspin, the first Barstool.

It's amazing that SJ is still around.

 

So about $15K at its 2006ish heights? Because that would be my informed guess.
I would rather this site were owned by a outsider than a self-appointed cool kids clique.
Jeff doesn't give a shit about the culture of the site and there's nothing that says he has to.

 

Penis.