What's your flirting style? revisited 5 years later

[matt1993]

In case I don't post some other new entry between now and when this scheduled entry goes live, sorry I went a week or so without checking my friends page (finally checking it once more on the 24th, and hopefully more times after that) - I had to get two programs for Game Graphics class almost finished.

But anyway, it's finally time for another quiz rerun! (Well, actually the first quiz rerun, since the one before that was a survey.)

Originally posted by matt1993 at Shy guy (Mario reference not intended...OR IS IT?)

Anyone have a time machine so I can go back in time and take this quiz BEFORE my girlfriend moved? :(

Repost to your journal? Or are you too shy?

And 5 years later...

Yep, same thing. The only difference is at least I'm finally smart enough to know that I should've referred to her as my crush and not my girlfriend.

Finally summon up the courage to repost to your journal

Comments

[kandigurl.livejournal.com]

Ooooh, okay. I will admit that I didn't read every post you linked to, but I read a bunch and I think I get the idea.

It sounds like you are getting down on yourself for Internet Drama.

I have a lot to say about that, and I don't know if any of it will actually make you feel any better, because I know how easy it is to get sucked into that sort of thing and let it affect your mood for a long time, but I'm going to try anyway.

I think the most important thing to realize is that when you get into a heated argument on the Internet, people are not actually arguing with you. They are arguing with the threat they feel when their beliefs are challenged. To them, you aren't a whole, complex person, because you're not standing there physically in front of them. You're just a small sampling of words. To them, those words represent their opinion of you, even though it is just the TINIEST FRACTION of who you are. That is why worrying about what people on the Internet think of you is depressing...they make snap judgements based on what they THINK they know.

I'll never forget the first time I got flamed online. I wanted some fun new LJ icons, so a friend of mine who knew how to do graphics made some up for me, and I posted them asking for advice on which ones to use (because at the time, I could only have three, this was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY back in the day).

One of the icons was of a young girl in pigtails. My friend had colored her face blue and captioned it "Working Undercover As A Smurf", which I found hilarious. :)

Well, somehow, and I HAVE NO IDEA HOW, the little girl's mother found the post, took offense, and posted to HER LJ about how mad she was. Then, all of her friends came onto MY LJ and began telling me how awful a person I was, how I didn't know how to photoshop, how I should kill myself, how I'm scum, etc., etc.

These people didn't realize I was only fifteen years old. They didn't know I wasn't the one who had made the icon. They didn't know it was not made to tease the little girl, but just for fun. They didn't know ME as a person at all, they just took offense and came after me.

I felt horrible for a very long time about it. I messaged the mother directly and apologized, and took down the post, and made an apology post that I doubt any of those people even saw.

Another time, I made a post about how I kept forgetting to buy cat food and my cats were very upset with me. I intended the post to be funny, but then a BUNCH of people got very mad at me and told me (once again) that I was a horrible person, that I shouldn't even have cats, that I was abusive to my animals, etc., etc.

Again, these were people who didn't know me. They weren't my friends. They weren't people I cared about. They saw this one mistake I'd made (because I'm a human being, and human beings make mistakes) and assumed that I was an awful person. I'm not an awful person, but I did make a mistake (and this mistake is largely due to my poor executive function, it's hard for me to remember what I need to buy when I'm at the grocery store if I don't make a list, and I had only been living on my own for a year at that point so I hadn't learned how to work around that problem yet).

I felt horrible about that post for a long time, too. I also deleted it, apologized for it, and took it way to personally.

(cont'd)