Quote:
Originally Posted by Titan2
Finally, you owe WhiteTiger an apology. Your comments about him, making fun of the essential work that he does to make a pissy selfish point was totally offside.
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While I do appreciate this, I'm not at all fussed by Sliver's remarks. Aside from the insult (which is one I hear daily at work, almost always from adults who are doing a thing I am required to tell them they probably shouldn't be doing) he's actually right, though not for the reason he likely suspects.
In it's essence, he's accusing me of being the 'fun-police', and honestly, he's not really off the mark when it comes to online stuff. I have never set off a bear banger, but I do like explosives, guns and the like (I was in the military Reserves for a few years, after all). I imagine that it IS fun to do.
But I am constrained in my online 'face' by something he is not. I run all my posts through mental "filters" before hitting 'Post'. No one cares if The Sun headline reads "Small Business Owner Sets Off Bear Bangers For Funsies"; but the headline "Local 911 Dispatcher advocates for misuse of emergency equipment" would likely cost me my job.
The 'me' that I allow online is not the 'me' that you get offline. I am very, VERY aware that there could be some journalist out there trolling around, looking for a story, coming across something of mine and deciding to make a story of it.
Since I still like my job, I make sure that their headline on 'my' story would be something that most people would roll their eyes at with a "Yeah, so?" feeling. It's one of the big reasons you'll never see me, anywhere, engaged publicly with someone like this thread went last night. I may fall into an engagement for a post or two, but I have no problem just rolling my eyes and 'walking away' from a post reply to me, and I DGAF that I didn't "get the last word" in.
Also amusingly, I am a big advocate for knowing how 'your tools' work before you need them to work. For instance, if Sliver had said "Yeah, my family and I hike a lot, so I've made sure that every one of us has fired off a bear banger before, so we know what it feels like, what it sounds like, how it works and reacts and just what generally to expect if we need to actually use it." I'd have been cheering him on and suggesting that is a good thing and more hikers should be doing that. But that's not what he said.
In the past I've suggested, and I still feel, that if someone is going to be carrying bear/pepper spray, that they should always buy two. One for the actual emergency situation, and one so that they can use it and figure out HOW it works (for instance, you'll only forget to check wind direction once...). I've also said before that I strongly feel that everyone who drives should, late one night, go to an empty, snow/ice covered parking lot in the vehicle(s) they drive, and practice donuts, drifting and power slides...I mean, loss of traction/control and recovery events...
So yeah, I may be a bit of a killjoy/fun-police around here some days. It's so that anyone digging through my posts (today, tomorrow or 20 years from now) doesn't find any 'dirt' of journalistic interest. I do try to keep a limit on it, though. No one likes the fun-police.