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[Professor Snuggles]

The way the board, or like boards in general work is really interesting to me, and this one has a pretty crazy dynamic. Like that 9 page thread is kinda whack because maybe I just don't understand it at all but the way this forum works is so totally unique as far as like, the codification and stratification of it. I guess like at this point I am probably just confused because the board doesn't work the way it used to, and I'm still trying to figure out exactly where I fit into the whole thing in its crazy new form, but yeah.

The subtext of message boards is crazy.

[Professor Snuggles]

Like, aside from the fact that say, hannah and ben live together/are gonna get married any day now I am sure, the fact that you guys like LIVE together is just crazy. I guess it's just been a long time since I was on that kind of messageboard level, and like, it made sense to me when I was a teenager or when I was on Dumbrella and all and people met and got married and moved in with people form message boards and I'm still friends with some folks from those days, too, but ultimately it's just like, what.

[Lunchbox]

Pfft, like they're gonna get married.
We have way more couples/hookups than those guys, anyway!

I don't know if there is a 'dynamic' really. It is just a place where there are people I know and like so much I come here and read it every day. Although I guess we don't seem to have as many 'alpha posters' like, say, you and Tommy back in the day.

[Inlander]

We have way more couples/hookups than those guys, anyway!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apu_585SW18

[johnny5]

this board seems to have its own way of talking/typing/accent. i can't place it right now without pulling up some good examples, but hopefully some of you know what i mean. other msgboards i'm on don't seem to have this, but maybe because they aren't as personal as this board (i'm guessing, with all the sex)

[Lunchbox]

I am sorry Harry. I have found my own special beard.

[Inlander]

Eww, didn't we recently establish that that would be kind of incestuous?

[Lunchbox]

Allow me to snort and punch you gently in the bicep, Harry.

[Johnny C]

this board seems to have its own way of talking/typing/accent. i can't place it right now without pulling up some good examples, but hopefully some of you know what i mean. other msgboards i'm on don't seem to have this, but maybe because they aren't as personal as this board (i'm guessing, with all the sex)

it's a community that functions in the way its members choose to treat it. here, they treat it like basically a conversation between a large group of friends, which in a lot of respects it is.

[KharBevNor]

Man you know what I'm really interested in these days? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Completed on December the 18th at the Scott-Amundsen station at the south pole, it's the worlds largest high-energy Neutrino Observatory. 5160 seperate optical sensors buried up to two and a half kilometres deep in the antarctic ice shelf extend the limit of observable neutrinos up into the TeV range, allowing us to explore and understand high energy astrophysical processes that produce such neutrinos, and search indirectly for dark matter by looking for the remains of decaying weakly interacting massive particles, as well as forming part of earths supernova early warning system. Did you even know the world HAD a supernova early warning system? Well it does. Not to protect us from anything mind, but in order to give astronomers a pointer where to aim their telescopes. Neutrino emissions from a supernova peak several hours before the actual explosion (or rather peak photon emission), so you've got a bit of warning there.  The other elements of SNEWS are the Borexino, Super-Kamiokande, Large Volume Detector and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Neutrino Observatories are pretty interesting anyway. They detect the Cherenkov radiation (sort of like a sonic boom, but with light) from the passage of a neutrino through a medium in which the speed of light is slower than the theoretical maximum. Ice and water generally. Cherenkov radiation is the thing that creates that terrifying ghostly blue glow around submerged nuclear reactors btw: cool stuff.

What cool things are interesting the rest of y'all right now?

[Cernunnos]

Presently I am reading a very interesting if frustrating book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. This book is about a lot of things (it is quite long), but it mostly deals with the peculiarities and self-contradictions of logical systems. A really classic example of what he is talking about is the idea of a Strange loop. Hofstadter seems to try and describe each concept he finds pertinent in at least three or four ways in quick succession, if not simultaneously, mathematics (Gödel), visual art (Escher), and music (Bach) being the most obvious. Right now I'm only about 3/8" into the 2" thick book so there's only so much I can describe but at this stage I can recommend it heartily.

Tangentially related and also really interesting: godspeed used this weirdass loopy thing on one track off of F♯A♯∞ and it sounds really creepy.

[David_Dovey]

this board seems to have its own way of talking/typing/accent. i can't place it right now without pulling up some good examples, but hopefully some of you know what i mean. other msgboards i'm on don't seem to have this, but maybe because they aren't as personal as this board (i'm guessing, with all the sex)

Basically we're all trying as hard as we can to mimic the speech patterns of T. Rex and/or the characters of Achewood, in the main.

[Johnny C]

Presently I am reading a very interesting if frustrating book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

huh, i was reading a david foster wallace interview from around the time he released his book about math (a book called everything and more: a compact history of ∞), and he said basically the exact same thing about the book you're reading, jon: that it's good but also that dude's ability to lay out his arguments is scattershot. in terms of pop-math books i want to read, there's dfw's and charles seife's books on zero and "proofiness." i'm so bad at math though, i'm probably just going to wind up reading jess walter's the zero instead and settle for "close enough"

[Professor Snuggles]

Man you know what I'm really interested in these days? The IceCube Neutrino Observatory. Completed on December the 18th at the Scott-Amundsen station at the south pole, it's the worlds largest high-energy Neutrino Observatory. 5160 seperate optical sensors buried up to two and a half kilometres deep in the antarctic ice shelf extend the limit of observable neutrinos up into the TeV range, allowing us to explore and understand high energy astrophysical processes that produce such neutrinos, and search indirectly for dark matter by looking for the remains of decaying weakly interacting massive particles, as well as forming part of earths supernova early warning system. Did you even know the world HAD a supernova early warning system? Well it does. Not to protect us from anything mind, but in order to give astronomers a pointer where to aim their telescopes. Neutrino emissions from a supernova peak several hours before the actual explosion (or rather peak photon emission), so you've got a bit of warning there.  The other elements of SNEWS are the Borexino, Super-Kamiokande, Large Volume Detector and the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. Neutrino Observatories are pretty interesting anyway. They detect the Cherenkov radiation (sort of like a sonic boom, but with light) from the passage of a neutrino through a medium in which the speed of light is slower than the theoretical maximum. Ice and water generally. Cherenkov radiation is the thing that creates that terrifying ghostly blue glow around submerged nuclear reactors btw: cool stuff.

What cool things are interesting the rest of y'all right now?

Y'know, that is actually really interesting. I think probably if you were to make a thread where the last line of your post was the thread title it would probably be pretty successful as a thread, because, like, I mean this is a pretty thoughtful group of people and I would be willing to bet they are interested in some pretty cool stuff.

[Cernunnos]

i'm so bad at math though, i'm probably just going to wind up reading jess walter's the zero instead and settle for "close enough"

Well, lucky for me, GEB doesn't have all that much real math problems in it, just logic problems that are constructed like math. it's a good thing too, at this stage i think my brain would implode if i had to do a simple long division problem. If this book had been this scattershot and also mathematically difficult i would have given up a week or two ago.

[Professor Snuggles]

The board theory stuff I am talking about has less to do with "this is the way this forum is" and more to do with "why is this forum the way it is." Anyone who has been posting here, or at least in the off-topic zone, has an awareness of the fact that this forum is a fairly personable place, whatever. The amount of people who know each other by name here is to me at least fairly atypical of most message boards, but it is definitely the way it is, here.

I think part of it, and a part we don't think about at least anymore, is that this board is to some extent a spiritual successor of Dumbrella. Not entirely, because Dumbrella doesn't even exist anymore, but the first people who registered here were all Dumbrella boarders, because Jeph was and they followed him over to support him in his new endeavor. I think a lot of the personability of this forum is actually a side effect of taking cues from that board, at least on the part of the people who were responsible for board culture in those earlier days.

The relationships on this board have a lot to do with that, I think. The fact that we all met each other early on, either through like, Comic-Con or just random board meet-ups, or me showing up at your house while I was traveling, or when Tanya came and met me at Coachella... there's a lot of reasons, and I don't think we would have interacted with each other that way if there hadn't been a precedent set for it on this other forum so many of us read. And obviously the fact that we have broken bread together, gotten drunk together, makes it kind of silly to then call everyone by their forum names. I have people I know from real life on hipinion, or people I've met, but there's no chance I'd ever refer to them by first name on that board.

[Jimor]

I probably have way more to say on the subject than is healthy. I'll come back to more later, but while time permits before I head out for the day.

One important factor in how an online community develops is the board software/interface. Some forum software just seems more conducive to general conversation, while others seem to be better at keeping topics separate and on track, but lose a personal touch in doing so. The former is better for "communities" while the latter would be better for say a help forum on a piece of software.

One feature that I've seen people come to virtual blows over is "threaded" vs. "unthreaded". QCForum is unthreaded, in that when you open a topic, you're given a straight chronological list of every post, and who is replying to whom is determined by context or quoting. Other boards, you'd have to untwizzle the thread tree to get to a specific line of conversation, and so if you're following that line, you may totally skip and miss a different branch of the tree (and miss a lot of what other people are talking about). I've even been on some boards where each person has an option of viewing it either way, so you get some people who never quote because it's obvious to them from the tree who they're replying to, but people who view it unthreaded lose all the context of that post.

I think I like the forum software here the most of just about all I've seen because it really emphasizes the real estate given to the posts. Some web forums squeeze that so much with sidebars and such that they naturally lead to a style of all short posts and replies, maybe 2 paragraphs at most. A post like this would really be a Wall-O-Text on those sites. We value conciseness here, but we still can post at length if needbe.

A subset of this is a rule here that I think makes more difference than people realize: the no sig image rule. I've been on so many sites where the sigs just overwhelm everything else and it becomes more work to scroll through and read a thread than is really necessary.

I think these things is why a good multipost here is appreciated, it really doesn't make people scroll much more than a single lengthy post would.

More later perhaps.

[johnny5]

this board seems to have its own way of talking/typing/accent. i can't place it right now without pulling up some good examples, but hopefully some of you know what i mean. other msgboards i'm on don't seem to have this, but maybe because they aren't as personal as this board (i'm guessing, with all the sex)

Basically we're all trying as hard as we can to mimic the speech patterns of T. Rex and/or the characters of Achewood, in the main.

yeah, that seems right

it's a community that functions in the way its members choose to treat it. here, they treat it like basically a conversation between a large group of friends, which in a lot of respects it is.

also seems to be true, are you able to tell if this board is very busy/large, active users-wise? discounting the forum about the comic, i would probably place regular active members below 500.

[Drill King]

I would agree with Tommy in a lot of ways. Because people are able to talk over instant messages it changes the dynamic a lot. Also I think the fact that many members have been consistent and sharing(a lot and openly) over the years has created the same atmosphere as with old friends.

[Jimor]

I see there's been a membership purge at some point in the last year. There used to be about 30,000 registered members, now there's about 15k.

There's a pretty good rule of thumb that follows boards like this. You take whatever attracts people to the web site in the first place, in this case, the webcomic, and ~10% of those people will at some point sign up to the forum to post or lurk. Very fuzzy data from elsewhere suggests that QC has a following of around 300k, so the pre-purge number works there pretty well.

Of those, about 10% ever bother to post more than 1 or 2 introductory posts before disappearing completely, or going into lurker mode. Of those, you cut down to another 10% who become "active" in that they've posted sometime in the past few months, and might possibly show up again later. Here we're roughly in your 500 territory.

Next, you get the 10% of those who probably compromise over 50% of the posts committed on a daily basis. So maybe 50-100 here. Then the last tiny group is your power posters that seem to be everywhere and really rack up the post count (and as the other thread notes, it's not like they have to be here 24/7 to do this, just be semi-interested in many of the topics being discussed).

Another surprisingly consistent number over the years has been the lurker/(active) poster ratio. Of sites that can track it, 8:1 seems to be the sweet spot.

[Patrick]

I think this forum is the way it is becau-- nah man I can't do it I can't overanalyze dongs

Because it all comes back to dongs in the end

[Professor Snuggles]

Which is funny cuz even that early dong fixation is a side effect of the dumbrellic  roots of this forum.

[Ozymandias]

Bro, I think dong fixation is a side effect of dongs existing.

[the_pied_piper]

LOL

[est]

There was a Dumbrella element, but I think that's more of an adjunct?  We mostly came over from another smaller forum that went belly-up due to the owner kinda going a bit nuts when her online & RL identities collided.  We brought over a chest of in-jokes/memes with us (Which were probably derivative of other places? Not sure, that was my first forum, really), but slowly the people who got them moved on somewhere else.

After that the feel of the place definitely became heavily influenced by DB though, no doubt.  Dongs, this is why we can't have nice things, and I'm sure a host of other stuff I can't remember or wasn't involved in DB enough to realise are imports.  A lot of the threads you started way back were DB imports too, so there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas.

[McTaggart]

Presently I am reading a very interesting if frustrating book called Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.

huh, i was reading a david foster wallace interview from around the time he released his book about math (a book called everything and more: a compact history of ∞), and he said basically the exact same thing about the book you're reading, jon: that it's good but also that dude's ability to lay out his arguments is scattershot. in terms of pop-math books i want to read, there's dfw's and charles seife's books on zero and "proofiness." i'm so bad at math though, i'm probably just going to wind up reading jess walter's the zero instead and settle for "close enough"

Man Everything and more is the best pop maths book I've ever read, and mostly because it doesn't seem completely out of place next to the hard maths textbooks on my shelf. 'cept it's rarely on my shelf because it's probably my most lent out book over all. So much pop maths is awful crap that feels like the author just wrote it to show how smart he was rather than because it's something they want to share or have a real enthusiasm for understanding. Also I guess the way Everything and more is written by an author and not a mathematician probably helps it's readability a whole heap.

[Professor Snuggles]

There was a Dumbrella element, but I think that's more of an adjunct?  We mostly came over from another smaller forum that went belly-up due to the owner kinda going a bit nuts when her online & RL identities collided.  We brought over a chest of in-jokes/memes with us (Which were probably derivative of other places? Not sure, that was my first forum, really), but slowly the people who got them moved on somewhere else.

After that the feel of the place definitely became heavily influenced by DB though, no doubt.  Dongs, this is why we can't have nice things, and I'm sure a host of other stuff I can't remember or wasn't involved in DB enough to realise are imports.  A lot of the threads you started way back were DB imports too, so there was a lot of cross-pollination of ideas.

Oh I am completely not denying that my posting style and all isn't incredibly influenced by both DB and my hipinion habit, I'm just saying that it definitely has played a role in this board.

[Professor Snuggles]

Wait who else on this board frequents hpn? Or like, posts there. Mad curious. That overlap is one of my favorites ever, the constant criticism of QC over there compared with the fact that for some reason people from here still post there. We're all so closeted over there though. I think I admitted it once over there last mark and thankfully the board crashed.

[BlahBlah]

Wait who else on this board frequents hpn? Or like, posts there. Mad curious. That overlap is one of my favorites ever, the constant criticism of QC over there compared with the fact that for some reason people from here still post there. We're all so closeted over there though. I think I admitted it once over there last mark and thankfully the board crashed.

I read it and post occasionally but, like Tommy said, I only really started reading it when I realised people I liked from Electrical were posting even more, and sometimes better, on hipinion.
I always kinda assumed that apart from you nobody from here went there much.

[jwhouk]

I'm a refugee of Halfpixel myself. Still do some stuff over at Halforums, which was the fan-started response when ThaKurtz and Straub went nuclear on the forums.

[KharBevNor]

Man stop derailing this thread guys, it's supposed to be interesting.

[Johnny C]

i don't think the dumbrella influence is all that played-up or that a lot of us take our cues from it. i honestly just think it's the size of the community and, as tommy said, the extra-forum communication. i call dudes over on SA by their first name all the time. it's just how it goes.

[Patrick]

I KNEW that had to be the same Johnny C. Your internet identity and mine have converged more than once, old man, I know your secrets.

[Professor Snuggles]

i don't think the dumbrella influence is all that played-up or that a lot of us take our cues from it. i honestly just think it's the size of the community and, as tommy said, the extra-forum communication. i call dudes over on SA by their first name all the time. it's just how it goes.

I don't think the Dumbrella thing is like, the dominant influence today, but in the origin days I think it had a lot of sway that still has a sort of subtle influence in terms of helping start the in jokes that we carry over today. Obviously the communities are very different in almost every way today, especially since Dumbrella doesn't exist anymore.

[Professor Snuggles]

Obviously the biggest influence on the board and the way it works today is the meebo/gabbly/irc thing. I had actually completely forgotten that there WAS an IRC channel back in the day, and how completely pronounced the divide between the IRC crew and the Gabbly crew was. I mean I haven't been into Meebo in a really long time, I don't think I even know the link for it anymore.

I definitely think the chat aspect prevents people from making the threads they'd be making about all the bullshit they're talking about in there, which I guess probably has a big effect on the fact that we have megathreads all over the place and no real quick flash-in-the-pan threads aside from the ones I make that are mostly bullshit. Like this thread could have happened in a chat program, probably, it just didn't.

Johnny it blows my mind sometimes that you post on SA. Sam I'll try to get your hpn account approved I kinda spaced on that. Khar I am sorry you do not like the thread.

[KharBevNor]

I'm really interested in like, how a certain poster on this forum, every two-three months like clockwork, makes two or more seperate threads where he 'discusses' aspects of this forum. It's pretty intriguing how he posts serially in these threads, continually bumping up the page until he gets bored of them, in lieu of posting in other threads on the forums, almost as if said threads are some sort of desperate cry for attention arising out of that individuals unexamined egotistic narcissism, a bit like your boorish friend of a friend who rather than trying to engage in the conversations of others will constantly and clumsily steer every conversation round to the thing that happens to interest him, which is of course, underneath it all, himself.

Let's talk about that for a while.

[KharBevNor]

Wait no actually, let's talk about something people give two shits about.

Let's talk about the game of petanque.

[Ozymandias]

Man, Khar, for the longest time I thought you were an insufferably arrogant twat and I guess you are but I love you and I want to choke on your cock.

[valley_parade]

Petanque was supposed to be in the Incredibly Mundane Olympics that we devised in Meebo a few weeks ago.

As was "drink the beer".

[Professor Snuggles]

I'm really interested in like, how a certain poster on this forum, every two-three months like clockwork, makes two or more seperate threads where he 'discusses' aspects of this forum. It's pretty intriguing how he posts serially in these threads, continually bumping up the page until he gets bored of them, in lieu of posting in other threads on the forums, almost as if said threads are some sort of desperate cry for attention arising out of that individuals unexamined egotistic narcissism, a bit like your boorish friend of a friend who rather than trying to engage in the conversations of others will constantly and clumsily steer every conversation round to the thing that happens to interest him, which is of course, underneath it all, himself.

Let's talk about that for a while.

I mean I think there is a lot of validity in this statement. I have this weird relationship to this forum because I definitely remember with a certain degree of fondness the time a couple years ago when it was like, me and Tommy as megaposters on a board that was basically going one of two ways, either towards my desire for a bunch of jokes all the time and a lot of talking about dicks and Tommy's "cult of personality(remember that?)" and like, back then I was a really well respected member of this forum, y'know? And I think part of me wants to reattain that, because having people respect you in any context is pretty cool, but at the same time I have to be aware that things have changed around here.

And like, a big part of the reason my relationship with this board changed is that I went out and made a bunch more friends in real life than I had previously had. Or at least I had a more active social life, so the times when I was sitting around my house by myself drinking, or just wasting time on the internet, diminished drastically. I have way less posts on all the boards I visit than I used to, just because I honestly had less time to board, and that's not a bad thing. It's just weird, because like, to some extent the people I 'hang out' with on the internet generally I find have more in common with me than the ones in real life, but then again living my life for the occasional times I have with those friends seems kind of an odd thing to do.

It's part of why I like hipinion so much, the people on that board, despite having the same interests to a lot of extents, also have a more 'well balanced' understanding of life, or at least it seems like that. Of course then you get threads on there about OkCupid, or someone makes a thread about how much sex people had in 2010 and like a quarter of the board votes 0 and it's just like, woah, I'm still on the internet.

[valley_parade]

4? 5 times maybe?

I was astonishingly drunk for good portions of 2010.

[Professor Snuggles]

 And I do not at all mean to say that the majority of people on this board are fucked up like 'social misfits' or something, it's just that something has to attract us all to the internet as a viable alternative for socializing as opposed to doing it all in the real world exclusively. I talked to this girl from the old Dumbrella boards about it a couple years back, and mentioned how I felt I'd used the internet as a social crutch when I was younger, and she said that for her it had always just been the fact that she honestly feels slightly more comfortable online than she does in real life, and I bet that's true for more people than I realize, I guess.

So really I feel like this board is an old friend, or you guys are all old friends to some extent (I even remember when you and I were cool, khar, or maybe that's a rose colored glasses thing, but I think I remember that) and I keep trying to reconnect in some way, but its a lot like when you go off to college or leave town for a year or so and then you come back and all your friends are still your friends but you're surprised that their lives have continued on as opposed to holding still, so you try to fall back into the old patterns, try to make it be the same as it was but it's not and things change and I am, I suppose, having trouble accepting that.

[Professor Snuggles]

And lastly cuz I have to go to the dentist as much as I'd love to listen to the insults I know are gonna fly at me after this series of posts from whoever feels like taking the easy shots at my ego or whatever, the reason I come in and make my own threads, not always about the board but probably mostly, is a combination of the fact that yeah, I'm still trying to understand how this board has changed in my time away, but also the fact that most of the threads on here are 100+ pages is actually a little intimidating. It's hard to just jump into the relationship thread and start reading about someone's most recent problem with their boy/girl/feelings if you haven't heard about what went wrong before, and what went right before that, and so the only reference point I have is replies to posts I made. I don't know enough about a lot of posters on here to really seek out their opinions in most cases, with a few obvious exceptions, so I'm not trawling through those threads for the awesome jokes that I look for on other boards, and a lot of them time when they are there they're just comments that I don't really understand or jokes I'm not in on anymore ( ) so it's just kind of hard to grab a foothold, and then I do through threads like these but then I'm back off to school again or something to that effect and I'm busy and I slow down on the internet front once again.

It's kind of a cycle.

[Lunchbox]

Dude, like, the only person I am friends with IRL is my boyfriend. Luckily he has friends that I can hang around so I don't look that hopeless.
Internet is my social life, I am so bad at talking to real life people.

[pwhodges]

you're surprised that their lives have continued on as opposed to holding still, so you try to fall back into the old patterns, try to make it be the same as it was but it's not and things change and I am, I suppose, having trouble accepting that.

In a nutshell...

Learning to accept and handle change is not just a matter of dealing with one great growing-up experience - it's actually a necessary skill for happiness at all stages of life.  And it's not just a matter of letting the past go, but also of finding what can or should be carried forward.

[KharBevNor]

[Patrick]

Bawx, if it makes you feel any better, while I have a social life outside in the real world, most of the time I would much, much rather just talk with people on the internet for my social interaction fix. Unfortunately, I've definitely had to realize that going your entire life without actually interacting with people in person at all is a pretty rough way to live life. My problem has been in finding the balance between maintaining a presence online and not neglecting my overwhelming need for human interaction.

I think one of the reasons I spend so much time on the internets is because it is really difficult to feel like somebody is judging you without knowing you when literally all they ever see of you is the things going through your mind. Because that's what I usually wind up writing down. It's a special kind of security that I don't typically have.

[Eris]

Petanque!

[tania]

And I do not at all mean to say that the majority of people on this board are fucked up like 'social misfits' or something, it's just that something has to attract us all to the internet as a viable alternative for socializing as opposed to doing it all in the real world exclusively.

this is something i was thinking about recently as well - obviously not everyone who pursues a social life on the internet is completely dysfuctional, but i think it's fair to say that most (if not all) people who do so do it because they feel like they're missing something in their "real" social life. when you get enough people together who are missing the same thing from their lives, it's inevitably going to lead to a really intimate and tightly knit community like the one we have here, not to mention all the relationships that have sprung up from it as well. it seems weird at first that this board functions as a matchmaker for so many people here but when you really think about it, well, yeah, of course it would.

[pwhodges]

because they feel like they're missing something in their "real" social life.

Alternatively, there is now a way of adding  something which there wasn't before the Internet; at least, I like to think so, as my meat-life social life is as active as ever.  Just because something can be disfunctional, it doesn't mean that it always is.