~Communities
2005-03-06 - 4:29 p.m.

Well, I think the honeymoon period with "The Lab Lounge" is over. It was always a bit iffy whether I was really interested in this community anyway, but boredom plus over-sensitivity has kicked in and I think I'll give it up. I don't want to be a part of a giant community. It means that I have to take so much longer to get known and noticed, I have to work harder at it, and yet there's still that whole thing about being new and not jumping in and being opinionated all over the place. I'm not an especially judgemental person, but I like being opinionated sometimes. The last new community I was a part of and stayed a part of was Hogwarts, which was mine, so I could be as opinionated and loud or silly or quiet as I liked and there was nobody who could look down on me. I set the tone. I like setting the tone, I believe I set a pretty good tone!

I had to stick it out at Halls of the White Tower for a while. I didn't immediately feel a part of that group and it took longer that it did at some other places to feel accepted. Funnily enough, I think people there accepted me as one of the crowd long before I felt it! I remember finding myself in IMs with Heather or Kristie and feeling amazed. They were the Tower Officials, two of the toppiest of the top people there, and they were pleasantly chatting away to me. Of course, I couldn't go on feeling like an outsider!

Digressing for a moment, I find that situation interesting in retrospect. For a start, it just shows that Kristie and Heather are really nice people. That's so obvious that it hardly needs to be stated. It also, however, seems that I must have been more pleasant and likeable than I thought, for them to want to talk to me. Sometimes when I'm feeling a bit insecure (which is more often than not!), it's nice to look back on those kind of things. Especially when it involves people I admire so much, it's reassuring. I don't think it's arrogant to feel that I must be likeable, at least to some people - after all, we're supposed to like who we are, right??

Well, HotWT turned out to be one of the best communities I've ever been a part of. I think the Astral Tower, Hogwarts and HotWT were definitely my favourites. I also loved the Fruity Tower, but I still felt there were many people there I didn't know very well at the time. Netland White Tower was fun and I made so many good friends (I started naming them, then realised there were too many!), but it was another one of those large communities and I never really felt like I mattered. Most of the friends I have online now are originally from NWT, HotWT or both.

I still have my Babble Board, that pretty much nobody visits anymore except me (which isn't really their fault, nobody was posting, so there wasn't any point). I miss being part of a real community again. The thing is, I really want to already be interested in the people. I like the opportunity to make new friends, but I've already got a group of online friends I'm pretty happy with, and most of those I hardly talk to anymore anyway (even though I still think of them as part of my main group of online pals). Even at Hogwarts, I only made one new friend that I've kept on past its closing. All the others were already friends.

I just miss a place of silly posts and sharing things like "ow, my nail broke" hehe. I know that too much babble at a community board (for me, at least) often takes away from journal writing, and I struggle to update even my blog more than a few times a week (barring quizzes). Unfortunately, The Lab Lounge just feels too big. I'm not really interested in what other people are posting about and I don't really have anything of interest to them to post about. People post prolifically and in 24 hours a post with only 2 replies can be superseded by 10 more popular ones. Over the past three days I've barely been online.

P.S.: There are birthday pics in my blog.