Watcha doin???

Serious question Tom, unless people are planning on going back to BF what is gained by reaching a kinda-sorta-reconciliation where one side is willing to clear names without even admitting they made mistakes in the first place? Although it's arguably implied in clearing someone's name that the charges against them are dropped, and therefore implied that the charges were inappropriate in the first place, if they aren't willing to accept the charges had no basis in the first place does anything actually change?

Forgiveness can be offered, and to a large extent I think it's safe to say that grudges have long since faded away. I continued to post as a regular member for something like three years after being stripped of the red suit. My reasons for moving on were more about getting sick of casting pearls before swine (as I mentioned before when a post saying "i think X is true" is met with someone asking how I can possibly think X is false because it's obviously true it makes me wonder why I even bother posting) and a general sense that increasing numbers of the people I liked interacting with were disappearing, replaced by the likes of episkopos and his apparently growing army of minions. I forget timelines but vaguely recall being active on OCF and BF for a time, for a time I was checking out ChristianForums (which I grew to dislike for all sortrs of reasons), then here.

I can understand the notion that FireFighter was seen as a ringleader of a renegade group (even though they pushed the group out) and somewhat vitriolic about it all, but even then if you let someone spend a significant amount of time helping you run a board only to throw them out without even a word of thanks for their efforts you don't get to act surprised if they express feeling hurt and taken advantage of. Many of the bannings (I suspect my own included, if I was actually banned - I still don't know for sure) seemed to be little more than a bout of vindictiveness.

If we as a group were exonerated and reinstated, and all started posting on BF again, maybe it would potentially make BF a more interesting place to be. I just don't want to find we're grudgingly cleared with no admissions that anything could have been done better, only to find the amazing one continues to strut his stuff as some kind of untouchable overseer and we all end up leaving again if his ego gets bruised by something else in the future.

So I guess the short answer is that if I was banned I need to know why (and given a sensible reason) and be properly exonerated, but I still have mixed views on whether I particularly want to resume posting there at all based on the way the user base and thread selection looks to a visitor.

 

I understand this completely. The place can be extremely frustrating.

Many people there are immature. Many are poor in their thinking skills. Many are both immature and poor in their thinking skills.

I think many have free roam and think they are Christians but aren’t.

My goal with each encounter is to leave a stone in the shoe of the one I don’t agree with. I don’t expect to change them that day or week or month or year.

All I want to do is put a thought in their mind that eats at them. Eventually, probably long after they leave BF, hopefully the stone I put in their shoe makes them have to remove their shoe some day when they can’t take it anymore.

So I put a stone in the shoe. After a couple crazy replies, I leave it there and go have a sandwich. Or a pie.

 

I guess my concern is that it would seem like a colossal waste of effort if we all go through the process of getting our names cleared and our accounts reinstated, only to then decide not to stay after all.

I'd love to know what hold the amazing one has over that place. Every other person who stepped out of the red suit is simply a former administrator with no fanfare. But he has to stay on as a "retired administrator", thereby being either retired nor an administrator. It seems to me that if he's retired he needs to return to normal letters and normal membership, and if it's an administrator he needs to stay in the red suit. Maybe Rookie will be open about that too

 

I don't have so much of a problem with the people who appear unable to put together a coherent argument. Especially in political discussions you always come across the types who are practically foaming at the mouth because they are so rabidly left-wing or rabidly right-wing - the ones who would vote for a turnip if it had the right rosette on it. I can even tolerate, up to a point, the people who construct endless strawmen because they can't address the actual argument they are facing. But when they act surprised that you think something, in response to a post where you say you think the exact opposite, there's little point continuing.

I'm not sure what you mean here. Did autocorrect mangle it?

I remember liking this very analogy a few years back when I was dealing with the chrasimatic church I was attending, and taking every opportunity to put stones in their shoes. As I put bigger and bigger stones in shoes they simply decided not to attempt to address my concerns.

Speaking of pie....

 

After the damage he has done maybe moderating the poetry forum, with no other input whatsoever, is well suited to him.

 

The voice and the vote are the problem. If his only voice related to the Poetry forum I wouldn't consider it inappropriate. To have a say in matters of board direction means he's not actually a retired admin at all.

 

/off topic
Han Solo: A Propaganda Story

 

How’s it off topic? Watcha doin?

Haven’t seen it. Hear mixed stuff about it.

 

It's definitely mixed. The politics are thickly applied, and the story on its own is just kinda meh.

 

BF rants aside I'm trying to figure out whether it's worth replacing a load of my pipework. In the basement I've got a weird hotchpotch of pipes, where copper pipes come out of the furnace and link into honking great cast iron pipes that run for a few feet and hook into smaller pipes that go all over the place. Much of it is at head height, which makes for some interesting experiences when I forget where they are.

I'm thinking about replacing it all with either some kind of manifold, or putting in new copper or plastic pipes as a backbone and running thinner pipes to each individual radiator. I think the system has evolved from something that existed before pumped systems and nobody has ever taken it apart piece by piece and started over. Since I'm going to have the house in pieces, it seems like as good a time as any to do just that.

 

My house was built in 1910 and then extended and divided some time later, I think around 1930-35.

I don't know for sure if my system is gravity or pump driven. I think it's pump driven but can't be 100% sure. I've got my heating man coming tomorrow so I'll ask him. Most of the realy large pipes are horizontal and in the basement, so I suspect they are remnants of an older system. In parts of the basement I've got big pipes that are sized down to smaller pipes, that split into smaller pipes still, with each one feeding a radiator. Each of those two pipes is then stepped down. I figure I can replace much of it with the smaller pipe size.

Ordinarily I would agree with "if it ain't broke don't fix it" but I need to take every single radiator off the walls to fix up the wall behind it, and in the process may end up causing something to break. If stuff will go back together exactly how it was before then all well and good, but another benefit of replacing pipes is to stop hitting my head on them in the basement. That gets pretty tedious after a while....

 

That's what I thought but it seems to be trickier than that. I don't know if it is just down to the fact the cast iron radiators are too heavy for me to move unaided or if there's something else I need to do. It could be that after however many years they have been resting on the wooden floor they have become attached to it in some way, but I'm struggling to make any headway with them. Once I've got them out of the way I'm going to talk nicely to a bodybuilder friend, who can probably carry one in each hand.