12-29-2008, 04:02 PM
Little Arminius Wrote:I'm glad to hear that your absence from the DL fora wasn't due to either a) the outrageous criticism from a vocal group of DL experts or b) the vicious attacks of Neilist (sp?). No one can legitimately criticise you or your tenure in the DL universe if you left on your own terms as you have now told us. Perhaps part of the problem was that people inferred something else, due, in part, to the uncharacteristic silence surrounding your most recent departure.
Yes, the timing wasn't perfect. December 2006/January 2007, when I vanished more or less from the face of the Earth ... well, there are a few people who know exactly why -- and it's as far removed from DL or its participants as one can get. That my departure followed a rather nasty bit of DL-fora ugliness ... well, man proposes and God disposes ... it's not like I could have planned the timing of all that. My mind is far removed from all the goings-on around these places. Every so often I do a search on my name to make sure I haven't been declared dead prematurely ... and that's about it.
I once put a great deal of effort into trying to understand just what the heck is going on in these fora. I looked through literally years of emails and so on, correlated dates with public events, read commentaries others had forwarded me, and tried to wire together a frame of a statue of what it was all about. As I did this, and cross-checked my facts with emails and forum posts et cetera ad nauseam, I (at the end of November 2006) -- I had an epiphany moment -- and that was: what a load of crap.
Yes, I realize that's not very poetic, and not very mathematical. It's not at all eloquent. But sometimes a big load of steaming crap is just a big load of steaming crap.
So I shut my mental doors, archived the load of crap, and moved forward into a new life, the details of which I don't share because, well, it's nobody's business and it's all rather pedestrian and boring at best.
I can't imagine having any new insight into the DL world ... although some of the stuff that's happened in the last two years I could never have imagined either, so who knows?
Cheers,
Quinn