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I registered for Poly half a lifetime ago. I haven't been a regular poster for over a decade but poly was the first online community I ever joined back in the days when the idea of with random people on the other side of the world still seemed incredible. In all the years since I joined Poly I don't think I've ever been part of any online community in which I could expect the majority of people reading my posts to remember who the hell I am from one post to the next.
Although I don't post much anymore, I still lurk every so often and it's interesting to see which posters have received what look like complete personality transplants and which ones seem most the same as they ever were.
So how have the rest of you changed since joining poly?
Well, I've gone from being a nerdy teenager with so many ideas and no place to put them in real life to married with two kids and a mortgage in the suburbs. It's a lot harder to get worked up about people being WRONG ON THE INTERNET when your main focus of the day has been keeping the youngest from falling off of things. Having a family moves everything else down a few rungs in your priorities.
If anyone remembers from the real old days my obsessive hobby horse was how awesome employee-owned corporations are. Well now my wife and I own our own cram school and that's all the work I do these days and having my work be mine is better than I can describe. Despite how shouty I was as a teen I never quite got what old school socialists like Marx meant by "alienation" until work stopped being a chunk of a my life that I rented out and started being something I had complete control over and I got to experience all the implications of that. Also I can play D&D during the workday whenever I want.
Politically Bush II pushed me a good bit away from spittle-flecked teenaged radicalism towards mainstream liberalism (hard to be all "Republicans and Democrats are all the same maaaan"
when the news was giving me obvious reasons that they weren't every single day) but you can only put up with Democrats for so long while the constant grating moralistic pop culture Lit Crit 101 that passes for political discourse in large swathes of the American left is just 
So I've settled back down to something round-about Thomas Paine-style Classical Liberalism, which is pretty much where I was when I was posting actively here except older, more cynical and more focused on the small stuff. After all, it's a hell of a lot easier to find a place in the world that fits with what you want than to transform the whole world to conform to your desires. I'll settle for small victories like raising my sons rights and maybe convincing a few of my students that being Chinese doesn't automatically make you "dirty."
Another thing I still try to hold to is that the best ways to spend your time is to do stuff yourself rather than watch someone else do it, whether that's running Dip and Story games or making your own beer or teaching junior how to play Settlers of Catan.
Overall the second half of my life has turned out pretty damn well, not what I thought I'd be 17 years ago, but I'll take it.
Although I don't post much anymore, I still lurk every so often and it's interesting to see which posters have received what look like complete personality transplants and which ones seem most the same as they ever were.
So how have the rest of you changed since joining poly?
Well, I've gone from being a nerdy teenager with so many ideas and no place to put them in real life to married with two kids and a mortgage in the suburbs. It's a lot harder to get worked up about people being WRONG ON THE INTERNET when your main focus of the day has been keeping the youngest from falling off of things. Having a family moves everything else down a few rungs in your priorities.
If anyone remembers from the real old days my obsessive hobby horse was how awesome employee-owned corporations are. Well now my wife and I own our own cram school and that's all the work I do these days and having my work be mine is better than I can describe. Despite how shouty I was as a teen I never quite got what old school socialists like Marx meant by "alienation" until work stopped being a chunk of a my life that I rented out and started being something I had complete control over and I got to experience all the implications of that. Also I can play D&D during the workday whenever I want.
Politically Bush II pushed me a good bit away from spittle-flecked teenaged radicalism towards mainstream liberalism (hard to be all "Republicans and Democrats are all the same maaaan"
when the news was giving me obvious reasons that they weren't every single day) but you can only put up with Democrats for so long while the constant grating moralistic pop culture Lit Crit 101 that passes for political discourse in large swathes of the American left is just So I've settled back down to something round-about Thomas Paine-style Classical Liberalism, which is pretty much where I was when I was posting actively here except older, more cynical and more focused on the small stuff. After all, it's a hell of a lot easier to find a place in the world that fits with what you want than to transform the whole world to conform to your desires. I'll settle for small victories like raising my sons rights and maybe convincing a few of my students that being Chinese doesn't automatically make you "dirty."
Another thing I still try to hold to is that the best ways to spend your time is to do stuff yourself rather than watch someone else do it, whether that's running Dip and Story games or making your own beer or teaching junior how to play Settlers of Catan.
Overall the second half of my life has turned out pretty damn well, not what I thought I'd be 17 years ago, but I'll take it.
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