One of Those

I want to write something but don’t necessarily feel like combing the web to find something that outrages me to the point of making a post about it. I just don’t feel outragingy right now, I guess.

I joined the Arthritis Foundation’s web based support board which has a chat forum.

I hate chat forums. I hate them because they are just so….ugh. I don’t know. The people on the RA Connect board are knowledgable and nice. And as chat forums go it’s one of the better ones. The worst ones are the ones about Disney World, and I say that only because I’ve never been to the Mommy Boards, which judging by the content on the Disney boards must be HELL. Absolute Hell.

The thing about chat boards is that people are devoted to their .sigs. I’m an old-timer on this here Internet, starting back in 1988 when all we had was Unix uphill both ways. I make this point because it was a hard and fast rule that your sig (all text) couldn’t be any longer than 4 lines. And we only tolerated 4 lines if they were especially witty.

Then came the ASCII art. People started putting kitty cats made of 1s and 4s and 0s in their sigs, which seems like a cute idea. Except that invariably by the time the message made it to the other person half the numbers had shifted so your angel’s halo was over its left shoulder or your cat’s ears were floating in midair roughly three inches from its body. I hated ASCII art and was pretty vocal about it. I should have shut up.

Because the sig line (Notice that word “line” and how optimistic and wistful I am when I use it) has evolved into the inside locker door of an eleven year old girl. Little creatures bob up and down in annoying animation. Tiny Angels flit across the screen. And of course there are the Rob My House Ribbons.

Ah. The wonderful RMH Ribbons. I call them that because most everyone who uses them on the Disney Boards has them as the countdown to their next Disney Trip. But I’ve seen them to chart weight loss, countdown the months of pregnancy or whittle away the time until the next LOTR movie is released. They’re on blogs too but it isn’t so bad there. Because you don’t have to look at it fifty times in one thread. Although I still think that it isn’t all that wise to let people know you and your entire family will be away from the house in 82 days.

Of course that’s not as stupid as the pictures in sig files. Over at WDWInfo.com (The Dis Boards) there are a few people who have put gigantomo photos of their favourite hotel room door decorations (?who does this?) at the end of every message.

So if you’re having a threaded conversation on these places and the sig files take up ten times the space that the message info takes it’s really annoying.

I can’t believe I’ve gone on about this for 500 words now. That’s kind of sad. Can you tell that I’m procrastinating my work?