This is too much for my feeble mind to untangle, so 'splain something to me: On an Internet forum, if you post a new topic that has been covered previously in a different thread, you've done wrong. If you dare post that topic to a thread that has crossed someone's arbitrary idea of "old", you've done wrong. Regardless, it's obviously more important to waste time & bandwidth pointing out to everyone that you're emo and offended than to stay on topic.
This reminds of the Caps-lock police... a n00b posts a question all in caps and then the next 22 posters feel like they have to chastise the n00b. "It's like shouting," they say. "Get over yourself," I reply. Welcome to the oh-so-useful forum on the friendly, productive Internet.
Or the spell-check police. Here we have purportedly sophisticated humans who never make a mistake but can't cope with it if someone else does. So, the next 31 posters complain that someone misspelled "the". Alot of these folks pride themselves on being l33t h4x0rs. Even worse is when one of these bastions of grammatical grace has found their way into the losing side of a debate... and then they try to discredit the winner by pointing out a spelling error several posts back. Classy!
All this make me view my audiences as consisting of a bunch of Comic-Book Guy wannabees. You know... those guys who trifle over irrelevant details instead of concerning themselves with proper scope? These are the guys that when they speak, 95% of the time the first words out of their mouths are "Well, actually..." (or some derivative). These guys are so great and knowledgeable, but somehow they forgot to learn about human nature and built-in error correction. I work with guys like this, and no one can stand them because of it. What's worse, they have no idea why nobody care to be around them anymore than they have to.
Ever wonder why we don't elect a President by direct vote? Go figure.
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