From: salsbury@ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU (The Caterpillar Cannot Understand The Butterfly)
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.fnord-l
Subject: This was posted to Leri-l, but I think it fits here, too...
Date: 19 Aug 92 16:35:44 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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Date: Tue, 18 Aug 92 15:43:30 CDT
From: "Richard E. Raby" <rraby2@ub.d.umn.EDU>
Subject: The Deal
To: leri-l@iscsvax.uni.edu (House of The Gods)
X-Envelope-To: fly@acsu.buffalo.EDU, majcher@acsu.buffalo.EDU,
 salsbury@acsu.buffalo.EDU
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Kay, here's the deal. I've gotta unsubscribe for awhile. I'm doing some
really heavy research and trying to finish a couple classes at the same
time. There's more than 200 messages in my personal mailbox that I've
not even read yet. I don't have great enough filter to raise the signal-
to-noise ratio of my mailbox, so I'm designing a graphical interface to
my mail file to make more sense of it all. I'm writing the software in
X Windows, so if you've got an X terminal or workstation you'll be able
to use it someday. I hope this product will help reduce alot of the noise
we all suffer from occasionally on this network.

How can I make you people realize what you're *really* doing when you
send "I'm bored" to leri-l@iscsvax.uni.edu? You really have NO IDEA how
much work you create for probably thousands of computers all over the
world whenever you hit "send" to that address.

You people (some, not all) really have NO IDEA how much work you create
for me, and many others, when you put things in my mailbox that I will
most likely just delete after a few days of my not reading it.

Quite literally, I'm trying to tell you that some of you people WASTE MY
TIME by posting useless crap to EVERY member of the list every time you
cry out in boredom or tell me your sister just went to the bathroom.

REALLY! I've got PLENTY of personal lives to worry about, and they're
connected to people that live in close physical space to me.

I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT *ALL* YOUR LITTLE PROBLEMS! Find a friend that
lives close in *physical* space to you.

Please. Let's stop wasting this valuable resource on discussion that you can
get right at home. You don't go to Tokyo to buy your bread, do you? I hope
not.

LERI-L is for MIND EXPANSION. If you don't want to use it for this any
longer, then you've lost my membership. I'll go create a new network if I
have to in order to maintain some focus.

What I'd like LERI-L to do is throw "reality" ENTIRELY out the window! Put
yourselves in outer space. Make it AGAINST THE LAW to discuss "real space" on
LERI-L. Allow nobody to speak about their personal lives on LERI-L in
anything but metaphor. If you want to learn something about your personal
life, you have to extrapolate that information from the "story" that is being
lived on LERI-L. I have enough adventure in my own personal life right here
in Duluth to live just fine without LERI-L. Personally, I find little
adventure on this list today. In fact, I find almost none anymore. The only
way you'll get me back is to focus. Keep the whole adventure in your mind.
Don't tell me that you just went to the grocery store, or that your Mom and
Dad got divorced. That shit's for personal mail. I really don't want to hear
about it. I got enough problems of my own. If you're looking for personal
advice, do the role-playing thing and translate your problems into virtual
space. Whenever you're forced to make an abstraction of a problem, you
achieve a new level and gain a higher level of understanding. NEVER ask for
specific advice like "what should I do?", because it never works. You never
end-up doing exactly what people tell you anyway. It's impossible. Whenever
you're given more that one solution, they can't all be done without just
introducing new problems to which there are more possible solutions to, to
which you'd just ask for more advice on. Give it up. Quit bugging people.
Figure it out for yourself.

M & M (Rich Raby)       rraby2@ub.d.umn.edu     Ph, FAX: (218) 728-3128

"Humans were created by water to transport it uphill." -anonymous
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU