Commonalities

[Payne]

Many of us here have something in common. I don't know precisely what it is, but I would like to explore it a bit further, because if we can find out what that is, we can perhaps be more successful in interesting others to our ideas.

Generally, one idea I have an affection for is LHXs concept of personal apocalypse. Many of us have indeed gone through a traumatic experience, that caused us to re-assess our lives, and how we think. It happened to me, and it ultimately led me here. There are some others on these boards that have had similar epiphanies, I'm aware of, but not everyone. This is not a universal answer. We cannot say that everyone who has had a traumatic experience will ultimately end up sharing our perspectives.

Another concept is that many of us are different for other reasons, be it sexuality of lifestyle choice or general hyper weirdness. It could be that for some of us, dealing with the consequences of who we are leads us to identify with this "community", and our perspectives. Again, this is no means the rule, but it does account for a decent percentage of the posters here.

We all generally have a curiosity about things, we want to know things. A signifigant percentage of people posting here direct this to intellectual ends, and a high amount of very clever and insightful posts are made. At the other end of the scale, curiosity is satisfied in gossip and speculation. This affects almost all of the posters here, to a greater or lesser degree.

To follow on from that, many of us manifest other emotions, such as hate, again spread out over a range, from Art-Form, to weak and watery Fail-Hate.

Some of us come to the boards and only later evolve into "productive" posters, some arrive fully formed.

But we still have something similar, something that connects us all, to some extent. Those of us that have it tend to stick around, those that don't tend to fail away into obscurity.

I'm not suggeting labeling people to find out, by dictatorship of the majority, who is best suited to join us, as that smacks of elitism. I do believe, however, that we can identify people, independant of their opinions and other extraneous bullshit, by some other common factors and lure them here.

Any thoughts on this anyone?

EDIT: there goes originality http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=11953.0

Sorry folks, thought this was a first

[AFK]

I don't know.  It may be as basic as the same kind of ties that hold any clique together.  I guess generally, we all have mind frames that are conducive to Discordian or Discordian-esque thought.  I think some come for the comradery, some come for the philosophy, some come for the productivity.  And then there are blending of those and others. 

I'm pretty sure, like you say, as people we are all pretty different.  (ooh, brilliant insight RWHN)
Of course, I imagine we would also experience each other different meeting in person.  The Bostonites can probably attest to this.
I know I can from when I met ECH in person. 

I originally came here for the comradery.  Because I knew only one Discordian IRL, and I wanted to converse with others from other areas.  And then it got really exciting when the BIP stuff started up.  It felt good to be a part of some original thinking.  But even without that, I'll still stick around because I like exchanging ideas, jokes, barbs, etc., with you cats. 

[LHX]

restless

short attention span

not mentally lazy

critical thinking

tough to fool

difficult to catch off guard

ability to see bullshit for what it is

generally annoyed

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I agree with LHX's list, although I would add one thing.  Instead of just "tough to fool" I would put "tough to fool, but wishing to God something that seems like a troll could actually turn out to be real."

Because in general I get the 'generally annoyed' thing, but I think it isn't just being cantankerous.

Personally, I feel cheated by knowing that I've only got a few ticks on the clock to begin with, and it pisses me off to no end to know that so many of them are wasted because people in general are such moronic fools.  If it weren't for the fact that everyone seems to buy into the "Humanity At Its Worst" craze, there'd be a lot more Slack-time for everyone.

Also, I like to blow shit up, and this is a Terrorist organization, right?