Dismissive posts and inclusion

At some point early in my marriage my wife and I saw a movie that she liked and I really didn't. She asked my opinion, and I laid into it. She basically said to cool it, and that I'm not writing a review, and there are no internet commenters to respond to so please back off. I'm really glad she did, and though I still have a lot of opinions on a lot of things, I've had to learn how to moderate how I talk about them in conversation. If I'm specifically asked, I'll share, and if I'm not I'll ask if it's alright, and when I do share I remember that not everyone thinks like a critic and sometimes disagreeing can hurt feelings. It may be stupid, but it's extremely common, and we all do it.

I'm not the most strident person on this forum by a long shot, but I am feeling a lot of the different opinions here, including ones that kind of disagree with each other. I definitely see the 5e-bashing that happens in the OSR community, like Michael says, and it's just exhausting. I have participated in the KS bashing, and it's never very helpful, but I do it anyway.

I remember once like 10 years ago we had a thread about The Smiths vs. REM, and as apparently one of the few REM fans on this site I don't think I had ever been more angry about a thread in my whole time here. I'm a pretty mainstream music fan, and I had never felt so belittled, condescended to, or dismissed as I did there. It was actually enough to make me swear off discussions about any other pop culture here aside from games, because there's always this little voice saying that I don't know enough to participate. And the thing is, it feels weird to point out that hey, maybe someone crossed the line and needs to cool it. I definitely feel much more like I am friends with people here then I did then, so maybe I would be better able to do so now.

So yeah, this is a thing that can absolutely happen. I know it still happens some, but I do think that since switching to TWBG, we've done better with it. No doubt we could all do better, because if there's anything true in life it's that we could all do better.

san il defanso wrote: ...
No doubt we could all do better, because if there's anything true in life it's that we could all do better.

YES ! Stop picking on my kickstarters, it's all I have to look forward to these days after eight of the last twelve months locked in

They're also bloody fun to play.


REM, great music in the 80s.

Yeah, I've learned to temper my feelings about Kickstarter and certain boardgame companies, both online and with real life friends. Some of my buddies love finding and backing stuff on KS, and one guy is clinically obsessed with anything Zombicide, so me being a shit doesn't really lead to anything. Rather, it's frighteningly easy to simply ignore/not support/not care so much, and instead spend that mental energy on being a good friend, player, critic, whatever.