As I have alluded to in earlier posts, I come from a dysfunctional family.
This is probably the chief reason I feel "at home" on joeuser despite being utterly pissed off a decent percentage of the time.
The anonymity of this site gives us freedom to vent readily, sometimes before engaging our brain, and feelings get hurt. Once we put our brain in gear, however, things get back to normal.
The things we right are things about which we are passionate; and the responses we get are from people who are equally passionate. The fact that we're a diverse world, of diverse backgrounds, of diverse opinions, of diverse likes and dislikes, means we're going to have conflicts, some of them rather inflammatory. If I wrote a blog extolling the virtues of strawberry cheesecake ice cream and inferred in that article that all other flavors of ice cream sucked, the chocolate ice cream defenders (they're pretty militant, for the record...I live with 5 of them) would be quick to the punch, and mass blacklisting and namecalling would ensue. But that doesn't mean we're not both right (get offa my strawberry cheesecake, damn you!).
One of the things that makes joeuser work is that most of the bloggers ultimately realize that the other bloggers, though they may piss them off, do actually make the site a better place to be. After all, a flame war is gold to any respectable points whore, right?
In closing, I just want to say: I appreciate you. You help me keep my somewhat odd eccentricities in perspective (especially since some of you are more screwed up than I am).
respectfully,
Gideon MacLeish