Aliroz-The-Confused

I guess, what I'm trying to say in this and the last two status updates is, "I'm planning on leaving these forums and not coming back for at least a couple of years, thank you for putting up with me as long as you have".  I've done multi-year leavings before (my account is quite old for one with so few posts, at least a third of which are in a single thread I started a few months ago).

I am not good at being a member of internet forum communities.  I argue harshly, employ excessive prolixity, make strong claims and then get frustrated when people ask for sources or examples, fixate on topics to the exhaustion of everyone's patience, try too hard to be funny, and have an unfortunate mix of sensitivity and imperceptiveness that gives me a tendency to both offend others without meaning to and get offended by others who weren't meaning to.

I tend to, within my first forty posts on any forum, get banned, get angry enough at everyone that I decide never to visit the site again, cheese someone off so bad that leaving is honestly the best solution, find someone I cheesed off somewhere else years ago (people who remember your younger days as an internet idiot are the scariest possible thing you can find as a new member of a forum), or otherwise fail to vibe.

This is a serene, mellow forum, peaceful and welcoming.  It is also intensely wearisome in how relentlessly high the barriers are for anyone trying to disagree with the userbase.  Any flaw in whatever you say will be noted and called out, any insufficiently-supported assertion will be questioned from every angle until it either falls or you get exhausted from the effort of defending your words, and whatever questions you fail to provide a reply to will be repeated.

It produces a high level of discourse, but at some point it's just not worth it to contradict what others say unless you're willing to run the gauntlet.

This forum is very inclusive, warm-hearted, newbie-friendly, possibly the easiest entry into a forum's culture I've seen, and at the same time it is a culture that makes theorizing aggressively unfun.

To theorize is to get shot down and proven wrong by a WOB.  At this point, if you put all the WOBs together it would be a full book, a "book" the userbase here has read and the newbies haven't, and seeing new posters full of enthusiasm show their carefully constructed theories only to get hit with information from the "book" that isn't out in print and then never seeing that newbie post ever again makes me feel like this place is missing out on so many insightful but not-possessed-of-immense-knowledge-known-only-to-this-forum's-giganerds voices that could be sharing enthusiasm and building something instead of being met with "nope, wrong" until they leave.

It's hyper-intellectual, scholarly, impressive, and intimidating in a way that discourages rather than encourages intermediate and entry-level analysis and engagement.  The gap between books+outside-of-books-lore oldtimer and books-and-only-the-books new arrival means that the latter, no matter how thoroughly he/she/they have studied the books, is fundamentally behind and comes off as ignorant.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that getting dogpiled by everyone for all those pages of the "So, there's no hope" thread was exhausting enough that I'm not going to make another such thread any time soon.  It is not fun at all to express my thoughts on the Cosmere here.

So, rather than mess up other people's threads with my unreasonable thoughts and turn them all into arguments I don't have the desire to prosecute, and rather than keep troubling the serenity of these forums and taxing the patience and goodwill of you all, I'm going to leave before this mutual exasperated affection becomes irritated toleration, and come back in maybe a couple years so you all can go "Ohmigosh, Aliroz!  It's been so long!  How've you been" and I can be "Ohmigosh my friends!  Yay happiness".