Role Playing

One of the favorite pastimes on the threads is trying to figure out who's who amongst the posters. It's not so much a fascination with who a person might be IRL but, rather a curiosity about who else a person might be posting as. Obviously you can sign in with as many names as you can think of and you can register a name for every e-mail address that you have. I recall one poster mentioning that she had 10 registered names. I don't recall who this was nor their reason for the multiples. I use troll names generally as a theme to correlate to what I am posting about and perhaps this person did the same but went to the trouble of registering. You just wonder how different each of those personalities could really be. I think it simply has more to do with wanting to use extra cute avatars and funny names than so many extensions of one's personalities. It's pretty common on the political threads to use different names, all posting the same rhetoric, to puff up your sides' all important numbers so that ( for example) it really, really looks like Obama IS a communist/muslim/socialist/facist/etc. because DOZENS of anonymous people think so.

But, what if a person used multiple aliases to create a sort of virtual world for themselves? And what if it were done to draw in others to this virtual world?

It's quite possible that this is what happened on the Chicago forum with the dregs and ninnies. Lets say that at their peak there were 20 dregs, spread out all over the country, who posted all day, all night, every day. It's reasonable to expect that 20 people might habitually gather to discuss advice columns every day. It's down now to maybe 10 on a good day. What happened to cut that in half?

Well, 770 left. Perhaps she took a few people with her?

Seriously, where did those other 10 go? Why did they leave? Attrition is always a factor. Some might have tired of the fighting and found better forums to post on as I did. Some, I suspect, decided or were forced to concentrate on their work and not risk unemployment in these hard times. Good call there. I didn't know it at the time but, when I was working regular and often around people in office settings, feeling sorry for them being stuck looking at computer screens all day, I did not realize that half their day was spent surfing the net, probably on Topix. I'd walk by a cubicle and hear someone LOL and wonder what could be funny on their computer. Now I know. ME! Well, a pre-Ferrerman version of "me".

Recently, a friend who is familiar with my blog and my ninnie/dreg dealings, suggested that many of those people were probably just one person with a lot of time on their hands. She hasn't ever posted on the Chicago forum but, a thread's a thread and she feels this happens on "our" thread so, why not there? This is nothing I haven't thought of before. I always thought that rational was also Raptor and thought it was cute that they would post to each other. Well, kinda creepy too, like talking to yourself is okay until you start to answer. Or argue.

Rational people (and I do not mean fictitious internet posters) look for reasons why people do the things that they do, good or bad. There are supposed to be good reasons why people kill- a motive. Joe killed John because he wanted his money. That's the reason. It explains why Joe killed John and, as horrible of a motivation that is, we understand it. Makes sense.

Why would someone create virtual people on the internet and have them interact with others as well as each other? Men in there 30's still play Dungeons and Dragons. Thousands of men and women like to dress up as Civil War characters and act out battles. I had a neighbor gal who practiced this role playing but with people who were into medieval times like she was. To each his/her own. Certainly thousands of people on the net pretend to be characters they wish they could be so as to enhance their self esteem to people they will never meet. No surprise- the internet is a great place to be all that you can be. And then some.

It is very likely that several of the dregs were creations of 770. It's kind of a no- brainer if you've read her many stories which are little better than the ramblings of a very sophomoric mind. Fantasies themselves. Though after the first few I only skimmed, I have long thought they only served to illustrate how she perceived various peoples ranking in the gang. Graffiti. If you were off in the bushes with another dreg, you were in her favor. If you were off in a boat by yourself on a lake, you were not.

I don't know who actually was who and who was a figment of her or anyone's imagination. I don't think it's at all important. It's something quirky to write about but, like most things on the net, it is a slice of real life. Just as I listen to peoples bullshit IRL, I pay attention to what others write on the threads. I am curious as to why someone would spend so much energy creating virtual people. Perhaps she was a con artist cunningly working herself into peoples lives but just for her own gratification rather than to steal their jewels. The real action in her world surely happened "offshore". I have no knowledge as to what may have transpired there. I doubt she was collecting social security numbers. But, I fear that she gained peoples trust and confidence as she played her game and I do feel sorry- to an extent- for those real people that she left behind. She certainly had a hard on for me and did not at all play fair in her quest to discredit me but, well, Ferrerman likes to fight. If I were scared or uninterested, I could have walked away. You may have noticed that I stayed. There wasn't much else going on at the time and I've been known to sit through a bad movie or two just to see how it ended. I'm extremely bemused that people who have never met me, absolutely HATE me based on an internet feud and anything they may have heard about me "offshore". People- real and imaginary- have wished me dead and even expressed desire to kill my IRL self, because of the feud. Wow. Better than TV!

And all because of 770, someone who may or may not be a woman, may or may not be a therapist and may or may not even be from anywhere near, Portland Oregon. Again- wow. I don't know who or what she was. I never accepted her at face value. That was for others to do. Some lined up to drink the bubble tea. Others just wanted to post their thoughts on Amy or Abby. I've seen enough threads with people lauding Bush as a good president that I'm not surprised that people would still- always- believe 770 was all she claimed. No one likes to be fooled. They like even less to admit they were fooled.


I have no idea what became of 770. Perhaps they upped her meds. Maybe she's reinvented herself on another forum elsewhere in Topixland. Yes, it could be she was a therapist paid to study Topix posters, write silly stories about them and see if she could get them to turn as a group against a Ferrerman. Your tax dollars at work... I, for the record, fucked with her for free because it was fun. You can't blame this on Obama or Bush.

I do wonder what happened to Ivory Dove. That chick was bat-shit crazy!

Good times...