Skimmers wipe out

E-life would be better if everyone refrained from replying until they have actually read the post/comment/thread in question.

Read it. Not skimmed it, not glanced at it in the middle of reading one of the fifteen other windows they have open, not blipped over from some convo for five seconds to dash off a reply just for the joy of hearing their own voices. Read it.

Possibly even, and I know this is a pipedream, here, read it with a small amount of care and attention. Maybe even pausing to dismount from personal hobbyhorses and consider for a brief moment that the poster might mean something different from what they would mean if they wrote the post in question.

Is it really so vital to have your existence noticed that you'll consent to be noticed for being a blithering hot-air bag who totally missed the point?

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305

Having given the matter sober and measured consideration, I have come to the following conclusion.

Konomi, you suck.

In the space of two pages you have totally slaughtered all the characterization you have previously built up.

For one, Ryouma is a brat, and has the Mouth that ate Manhattan, but he is not, or has not been to date, the kind of evil little fucker that would perpetrate indignities on an unconscious opponent.

For another, as Michelle points out, NO ONE STOPPED HIM. Not even Tezuka.

And that says some pretty nasty things about Tezuka himself, things that I had not thought to be true. That Tezuka does not, in fact, care for good gamesmanship and respect for the game and the opponents nearly as much as he makes out.

Getting back to Hal's observation about this not really being a typical sports-story, this is the kind of thing that the VILLAIN-TEAM does.

If I accept what those couple pages say about characters I love, I'm just going to have to cry. And I'd really rather not.

So Konomi? You suck. Get your shit back together, man.

If the web were a hexagram...

Sometimes, in I Ching, hexagrams go in pairs. Heaven over Earth and Earth over Heaven is one of those pairs.

One of the most common readings of this pair rests on the point that the movement of Heaven is upward while the movement of Earth is downward.

So Heaven over Earth, rather than being the happy, natural way of things, is a recipe for instability. Each of them flies off in its own direction, without any countervailing influences at all. It's a model of solipsistic extremism.

Earth over Heaven, on the other hand, is the concept of balance. The movement of each presses against the other and is held stable. Earth over Heaven can move in any direction at all, as long as both choose and move together. It's freedom, but also constraint, because, without that partner to balance against, it all unravels again.

Another interesting thing about I Ching is that each of the six lines in a hexagram can be stable or moving. A moving line will change into its opposite, solid to broken and broken to solid. So, for example, Heaven (three solid lines) with all three lines moving will be on its way to becoming Earth (three broken lines).

And now we come to the point of this. Our online text interactions with each other can be either Heaven over Earth or Earth over Heaven.

In either case, though, the lines are invariably all moving.

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