woops
is not like other people
Speaking for myself I was told about it by @bunnyhausen in 2003, signed up and have been here ever since. How about you? What led you to waste so much of your life in the company of a load of needy idiots?
What brought you to this forum in the first place?
- Thread starter woops
- Start date
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Dopamine
mixed_biscuits
_________________________
Needed somewhere to put my graphs
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shakahislop
Well-known member
genuinely can't remember, it was probably a reference on a blog somewhere. i read it without writing anything every now and then over the years on an irregular basis. and now i am one of the participants that will be studied millenia from now when dissensus will be treated like the qur'an and hadith. scholars will argue over the meaning of my pronouncements.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
Endless wrangling over whether certain posts endorse domestic abuse or anti-Semitism.
john eden
male pale and stale
Part of the blogerati. Also exodus from https://www.uk-dance.org/.
ETA: On Oct 12, 2004, which I think was the first day.
ETA: On Oct 12, 2004, which I think was the first day.
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IdleRich
IdleRich
The truth comes out... I created the monster that is Mr Tea by discussing this place IRL. Loose links sink ships I guess.
As for me. I had a friend who was into similar kinds of stuff as me and we would very often swap music and films and so on, talk about books. At that point I knew very few people in real life who had any of the same interests as I did - growing up in the middle of nowhere and so on - so my friendship with this guy was particularly important. Anyway this friend of mine - whom I really do miss - recommended this blogger guy I had never heard of called Woebot and I started reading his posts and that took me to dissensus and, after an age, I finally summoned up the courage to try and say something.
So yeah, my friend may have sadly gone to a place where we can no longer discuss things, but one of his last acts before he left was to show me the way that led me here - almost as if he knew what was going to happen and he wanted to look out for me. And so dissensus in fact often reminds me of him and brings him back for me, which is sort of strange cos he was never actually a member, Or perhaps he did join but was too shy to do anything more than lurk, which was very typical of him, in some ways he was either shy or curmudgeonly, I could never quite work out which. Whatever, as he sadly shuffled off and I lost one of the few people with whom I could discuss the things that were important to me, he was instrumental in my discovery of a whole community of people who actually read books and talked about them, and watched films and so on and so forth - I guess by that point I had discovered a couple more like-minded people, but to suddenly find a hundred of them there at once was really life-changing for me. With dissensus and vinylulture forum which I also joined around the same time I not only met people on line but some of them became friends in real life. Up to that point the idea of meeting people from the internet would have seemed crazy to me, but they became kinda replacements in a sense for that guy. Though who knows, possibly if he gets divorced or something he might get properly involved himself one day.
And once I had found it and been brave enough to try a comment I threw myself into it fully, I think it was around 2006 and I was working for Borders Book Shop in their head office with very little in the way of oversight, so really there was a period where I did literally nothing at work except read dissensus all day every day with a break at lunchtime when I would rush out to play squash with my friend who worked round the corner and then rush back to try and make Borders' payments for the day. The fact that I wasn't paying attention cos of dissensus and that I was always doing those transfers under very tight time pressure cos I tried to squeeze in as much squash as I could before returning to the office did mean I made a few huge cock-ups but I think it would be too strong to say that Dissensus actually put Borders out of business, it would be more accurate to say that Dissensus was simply one of many factors that combined to destroy a badly run company which would have probably gone tits up fairly soon anyway.
IdleRich
IdleRich
That statement in itself may be slightly unfair but when Borders UK was separating from the parent company and they sent three people across to Ann Arbour to find out how the finance part was gonna work - and they picked me as one of those three, well that could be seen as indicative of the calibre of people they had working for them And the fact that while we were there there was an announcement made by the London office which rendered our whole trip a completely pointless waste of time could be seen as indicative of the way the company operated as a whole.
WashYourHands
Cat Malogen
Not to be confused with
www.gov.uk
UK Border Agency
UK Visas and Immigration now manages applications for people who want to visit, work, study or settle in the UK. Previously, this was part of UKBA (UK Border Agency) which closed in 2013.
IdleRich
IdleRich
Probably just as good at selling books... well, I'm being a bit unfair I guess. Borders had no chance. If you want a book you buy it off Amazon, if you want to resist that corporate behemoth and buy local even if it costs a little more then you go to a little shop run by some hundred year old eccentric with foggy glasses who has had a little place piled high under mountains of higgledy-piggledy paperbacks, where does that leave Borders? Also, you got Oxfam which gets its books for free and pays no business rates cos it's a charity and which I think is the biggest seller of second hand books in Europe or something. Always seemed a bit unfair that Oxfam crushed so many little book sellers like that - obviously all those prostitutes and stuff need paying but did it have to come at the expense of so many local businesses?
Leo
Well-known member
back in the 1990s, there was a borders book store on the ground floor of one of the World Trade Center towers. it had a huge magazine section, and I used to camp out there a few times a month and read back issues of the NME and Melody Maker because I was too cheap to buy them.
not saying the towers got attacked because borders was poorly run, there was probably more to it than that.
not saying the towers got attacked because borders was poorly run, there was probably more to it than that.
Mr. Tea
Let's Talk About Ceps
But in reality, it's quite likely that the 9/11 terror attacks, the subsequent disastrous US-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the general tailspin the world's been in for the last two decades, are consequences of Rich spending all his time when he was supposed to be working playing squash and fucking about on Dissensus? I mean, that's sort of the unavoidable conclusion here, isn't it?
droid
Well-known member
Yeah, me too. Excited at the time to join a community that valued mutual respect, solidarity and equality.
Leo
Well-known member
IdleRich
IdleRich
It was VERY badly run though. And that was before my steadying hand on the tiller, l dread to think how it was back then.
The constant and pathetic lying used to annoy me. When a new Harry Potter came out they used to talk about nothing else for six months and on the actual release day the top brass all got dressed up as wizards or whatever and haunted the stores as though they would somehow magically increase he sales... and then as soon as the crushingly disappointing sales came in they would always say "well it's not really a bookshop book, was never part of our plans" as though we were all completely fucking stupid.
