Sometimes you have to dig deep, grit your teeth, clutch tightly to the inside of the turret, and trust your comrades to left and right as you hold the line against the bellowing thrashes of monstrous Internet trolls. Sometimes you look for a friendly charge from your flanks to help ease the pressure, but it rarely comes.
Regardless as to how clear, positive and constructive you might be, however much you appeal to a sense of support as progress is finally being made, the trolls, armed with a vicious and uncaring sense of entitlement, will rain poorly aimed blows upon you, twist your words, and ask for the unreasonable.
Ah well, that’s TTRPG publishing for you.
By coincidence, I think, I’m reading Jim Fallon’s The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain. Perhaps, somewhere in the dulled function in certain parts of the frontal and temporal lobes, I will gain some insights, if not respite.
Oddball : “Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves? Why don’t you dig how beautiful it is out here? Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?”
Sorry folks, a dark one. I won’t be able to pull myself out of the line for a while, so will just need to find some strategies to keep going. Writing this has helped a bit.