Dept. of This and That

[kaffy_r]

Mice and Considering Community  

There is not enough paper in the world, not enough pixels in the Intarwebz to give me the room to talk about how much I loathe discovering mice in the larder.

Again.

After cleaning and supposedly - supposedly - mouse-proofing one of our two larders.

Again. 

So we'll go out and get more coarse steel wool, and we'll drag everything out of the other larder - again - and I swear to every god there is, that I will stuff steel wool into every hole I possibly can, even the ones BB was so sure were too small even for mice to come through. BZZZZT wrong answer. They can.

*Heavy sigh, goes looking for the soju*

***   ***   ***   ***

I've been thinking about community over the past few days, the most recent thoughts that started, oddly, with a YouTube ambient radio station that's been playing steadily since November of 2024.

I like the music as background music that I don't find boring, but a few days ago I found another reason to find it intriguing. I started noticing the conversations that were taking place during the day next to the music.

People seemed to know each other, and they seemed to enjoy the conceit of this particular station - a bar at the top of some building that looks similar to some of the buildings in the original "Blade Runner" movie. People would come in and ask the bartender for a drink, then check with each other on how they'd been since the last time everyone had been together. 

Although I enjoy the music, I wasn't interested in becoming part of what seemed like a small and happy little group of people. I have a community here on Dreamwidth, or at least I like to consider a community, and despite not being here as often as I should, I still find this to be one of my online homes. I enjoy conversations, I enjoy dropping by other peoples' journals (not nearly as often as I think I should), and I like the long-form potentialities of Dreamwidth, for discussions, for presenting writing, for putting out my thoughts at undoubtedly too much length. 

Recently I've also been making another community over on Discord, with a group of KPop fans. I like the fast pace of conversations there, probably because I type quickly enough to make conversations feel almost as if they're taking place in my own living room. It's a bit addictive to have that kind of interaction, with just enough delay to ensure that one's comments are, if not always witty or elegantly constructed, they aren't too awkward. 

This Discord community reminds me of the first online community I was involved in, over on Usenet, of blessed memory: Rec.Arts.SF.Fandom, or Rasseff, as it was known. I met some extremely intelligent, funny, intriguing and unforgettable people there, all of whom I was lucky to interact with. I learned to find my own online voice there. It was that community that convinced me that what I call 2D friendships - ones where people probably won't get to meet everyone active in the group in 3D real life - are nonetheless real friendships. 

(Mind you, Rasseff was peopled by folks who did know each other in 3D life and I was among those lucky enough to meet or re-meet community members at SF conventions, but that didn't cover the entire Rasseff population, so I think my point stands.)

Humans crave company, crave communication, crave belonging. But sometimes 3D life isn't where they can get it. Sometimes it's because people don't deal well with 3D life, whether that's because of actual geographic distances between people, or physical or neurological challenges, or both, or other obstacles to 3D close friendships. 

We hear so much about the dangers of the internet, and there are indeed toxic and dangerous corners therein. But we shouldn't forget that impulse to come together via pixels. It can be Dreamwidth or Discord. It can even be the community built around an ambient YouTube station.

I like that. 

 

Comments

[muccamukk]

Sorry about the mice. That's the worst.

I do like how if there's some ability to comment, people will start making friends.