Well I think I almost immediately pick up the TONE of a post. And it does seem that most posters, myself included, have sort of a default tone. But I have noticed some changes even in some posters' default tones during the past three weeks. Some default tones are more to my liking than others. But so what?!
Also I've had times when there was no post I wanted to reply to. But then my mood improved and there was lots that interested me. And I've noticed that it's much more empowering if I stop waiting for *interesting* to appear outside of myself! It's like Maharishi said, one day we throw our friend off. The friend is the same. But now they are no good (-: Yeah, I can feel a certain INTENT in myself. sigh... ________________________________ From: turquoiseb <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, September 3, 2013 10:34 AM Subject: [FairfieldLife] The Issue of INTENT Some, whom many suspect are just pissed off that their posts have been deemed "not worthy" of reading every word of :-), have suggested in the past that one cannot get a true picture of what a poster is "trying to say" from Message View. I disagree, but it might be because of my training in the more occult arts, plus long experience on the Internet since before it was called that, and on FFL itself. I find it difficult to believe that *anyone* here can't figure out what a poster whose stuff they've read for years is "on about" from the first few words of most of their posts. Once you know that, and when you realize that you've seen it all before, why read through all the verbiage again? Sure, they may "do a Robin" and say the same thing over and over again, twenty different ways in one post, but in my experience the "what" they were trying to say was clear in the first few words, so why bother with the rest? More important, I've found that one can get a reliably clear picture of the INTENT of the post just from those first few lines. For example, if a poster is replying to pretty much everything another person writes, even though that person has informed them in the past that they have no intention of *ever* replying to them again (as a couple of people have done with Curtis), the INTENT of such a poster is pretty clear. They're either trying to "get" the person they're replying to, or trying to taunt or insult them into changing their mind and falling into yet another sucker-bait, endless, tarbaby argument-trap. The same is true if the person has a long, long, long, long track record of dumping on another poster on the forum, and chooses to mention their name in the first few lines. You know the instant you see this that it's going to be a "hit post," so why bother to read it, unless you're one of those people who *gets off* reading such stuff. My take on Fairfield Life is that very few people seem to notice the INTENT of people's posts. They get sucked in by the flowery language used, or by other things, and often don't seem to notice that there is often no other conceivable purpose for the post *other* than to dump -- once again -- on someone they've developed an obsessive habit of dumping on. For me, the "deja vu" characteristics of such posts just leap out at me from the first few words of them. I've done experiments in the past -- assessing what the INTENT of certain people's posts are from the first few words and then reading the whole thing to see if my original impression was correct -- and I've found that I was rarely wrong. If you CAN'T do this, I might suggest that there might be something lacking in *your* reading skills, rather than mine. Just sayin'...
