Turning the Page

I'd like to apologize for my recent rant, though my loss of patience is not entirely unjustified. What this place needs more than anything right now is a crash course in Humility 101, and it's not the easiest lesson to teach.

It's amazing how much energy we invest in keeping our egos afloat. You don't realize this until the day you decide to stop building that monument of what you want people to see and actually build the life you desire instead.

Unfortunately, like so many punks on this site, I too fell short in this department.

In fact, I have a confession to make that will change the way many of you see me. Never planned on telling anyone, but after years of preaching the No Shame Game, it's time to for me to come clean:

In a nutshell, I've posted here under various screen names.

I'm sure some of you will remember a certain Don Ronny and his highly unorthodox advice (and consistent b!tch slapping).. yeah..that was my own brand of shock therapy, trying to wake you guys out of your slumber and shake up your rigid mindsets.

How about that Crotch-Sniffer fellow? Always cracking jokes and making inappropriate comments.. basically trying to get you tightwads to lighten up and have a good laugh. Sometimes I got carried away but it was all in good fun.

I had a couple others but those two were definitely the most memorable.

Despite the questionable tactics, my intentions were noble. It was obvious to me how important rep was to you guys and I needed a persona whose word you respected without question. That's why I reserved my Fingers alias for the most practical lessons.. things that got learned the hard way and made me wish I'd been prepared for.

And it worked out rather well. A lot of you actually listened and advanced to the next level without getting burned. Congrats for being much wiser than I was!

Of course, the ethics of all this are debatable, and I'm certainly not above criticism.

I was on a mission to get my message out and did whatever it took to make myself heard. When I first showed up here I resorted to bumping my own threads (with rave reviews even). LOL.. yes even I can be that pathetic! That's the whole point of this post. Even your greatest heroes have egos to deal with and we are far from perfect.

I am swallowing my pride right now with hope that it sets an example because few things will impede your progress more than an out-of-control ego - it's like trying to run a marathon inside a hamster wheel.. you can run till your dead without actually getting anywhere.

Many of you come here in search of confidence and end up confusing it with false pride. It's an honest mistake, but here's a news flash - cruelty, pettiness and intolerance does not make you a DJ.. it makes you an assh0le and leaves nasty skid marks on your karma.

I understand that this post has real scandal potential for those of you with nothing better to do, but before you say something cruel or belittling to me or anyone else on this board, stop and ask yourself:

1. Is it really necessary to break people down when all of us deal with enough BS in our day to day?

2. Isn't SoSuave supposed to be a refuge from the ignorance and hate that surrounds us?

3. What is the real reason for your frustration and anger?

If you can't control yourself and need to be a b!tch about this, then go right ahead. You can flame me, put me down or just throw everything I ever said out the window. I really dont care anymore.

Your reproaches or validations are no longer of any interest to me. In fact there is a good chance that this will be one of my last posts. Unless I see an incentive to hang around, I really do have better things to do than deal with a bunch of pompous jerks who interact like bickering women on their periods.

I know its tough and that I am asking a lot. One of the hardest parts of growing up is learning humility, so I dont expect an overnight utopia here. When all is said and done though, this community will never evolve until we put our high horses out of their damned misery and truly understand what it means to be free.

Fingz pulls out a sawed-off shotgun, tenderly escorts his ego to an open field and shoots it between the eyes.

So.....are ya Iqqi?

Seriously, although SoSuave lead many of us to a life changing transformation, perhaps we get too involved. Perhaps we should leave, just to experience life, and not get tied to personalities/arguements on this board.

Fingers, what you've singled out is cognitive dissonance. I don't think being humble is the issue. It's asymptomatic but not the problem. The problem is the belief that we need to put our fvcking ego as our default facade.

Most men, those as yet unenlightened to the ways of the world, will fight tooth and nail defending thier ego rather than admit that they are defunct in a comment they've made or an action which was blatantly out of line.

Why?

Because it's easier to stand your ground than admit to yourself you've fvcked up and need to reassess a decision you made. That's it.

The first thing you stated in this thread was the fact that you acted out of line and apologized for it, recognized it for what it was and will remember it as a lesson to not repeat. This is the lesson I hope the brothers take away from this. There are so few of us who can appreciate how schooled we can be by understanding the motive behind an ego driven, salacious decision.

Good job.

LOL! I'm definitely not iqqi.

Karma, your sig says it all. Great quote!

I think the thing is that the DJ bible teaches us to have confidence and stuff like that but not much, if any really teaches humility. It teaches us to be a man we have to 'not take disrespect from anyone'. This results in us putting our ego aside. It is truly hard to do because like it or not it is human nature. Caring what people think about us and trying to impress them is evolutionary. They have found remains of caveman jewelary, showing that even then we were trying to impress other people.

Despite this I am not saying that having an ego or this attitude is a good thing. It's not. It is far better to outgrow it, as Senor Fingers has shown he has done. Someone immediately comes to mind... Like him or hate him Pook (if you believe his blog is him, which I do) has no ego whatsoever.

Even if you have outgrown your ego you still have to be able to tolerate other peoples. Senor Fingers is trying to help us here, but as for the general public, well I don't think ego will ever dissapear from the average person in human society. Hell I'm still in high school, where everyone is more ego fueled and judgemental than ever. However I still manage to put mine aside, most, of the time.

The thing is even the average person would agree the guy without ego is the bigger man, the better man.

yea for a while i had a big problem with ego too - AND STILL DO!.
Lateley i've realized that i'm starting to let it go. I can make fun of my self now - even in public. And instead of denying my mistakes and hiding them, i can now accept them and try and remember them for next time around

It's a nice feeling to have when you know your self enough that you don't need to be right all the time, or have approval all the time. It's like your at peace.

excellent posts Senor and Jester,

Either way you look at it Senor, I loved your posts and some of crotchsniffer's posts were awesome as well. Usually very comical too. I still use the "take a girl on a date to the grocery store" and they are usually the most fun dates possible.

senor fingers said:

And it worked out rather well. A lot of you actually listened and advanced to the next level without getting burned. Congrats for being much wiser than I was!

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Your posts are amazing and even your alter egos were awesome and fun to read. As long as you weren't capi crimini, but were you Dr. Bird? He was a true DJ!

SinJester said:

The thing is even the average person would agree the guy without ego is the bigger man, the better man.

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I have a little story for you guys. I am trying to teach this to my friend because he thinks that he can rule the world because of his rich family and connections back at home. He doesn't realize that he became a small fish in a big pond when he went to college.

A person in authority decided to get upset with who he was and does because it is against the rules. So he bad mouths him AND goes searching the room whenever he gets a chance to look for things. So, in retaliation, my friend goes and does even stupider sh!t than that and is blinded by rage to even see that maybe it was stupid sh!t that he did to make him the eye of the person of authority.

The problem with an ego is that it blinds us and actually is a detriment to personal game. It makes it so we cannot find things that are wrong with us. It states clearly that we are perfect and that if something doesn't work it was the other person's fault or timing was off or what have you. It never comes down to "I fvcked up."

Think about when we all first came here, we had a little ego from being bruised and hurt. Than we learned the DJ techniques that made us impervious to hurt, but we also got pride with what we are doing. Which probably was one of our worst problems.

comic_relief

Señor Fingers said:

...I have a confession to make that will change the way many of you see me. Never planned on telling anyone, but after years of preaching the No Shame Game, it's time to for me to come clean: In a nutshell, I've posted here under various screen names.
[/i]

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Oh... For a minute there I thought maybe YOU were responsible for 9/11, or maybe the assassination of J.F.K. It's cool dude. Kinda' strange, I have to admit... but not a big deal, really. You know, there are still quite a few good people on here. If you'd stick around for awhile you might start to notice them. Making posts like this is just going to bring a flame war down on your ass from the other side of the community.

Stop glorifying what you claim to despise. Compassion beats hate, knowledge defeats ignorance. Teach them. Show them the logic of your ways, and they just might start to listen. I remember reading your 'Weapons of Mass Seduction' on here years ago, and it really helped me alot. Who wrote that?- We need that guy. Bring him back!

LOL you started that flame thread?
haha... Thats cool.

Did the mods ever do IP checks on you and know you were using those other screen names?

I remember when I first came to this site almost five years ago. There was a huge problem with 16-, 17- and 18-year-old kids (no offense to anyone) coming on here and trying to play guru after reading the DJ Bible once. All their posts were written with a lot of OBNOXIOUS CAPITAL LETTERS, sentence fragments and bad English in general. It was like a huge pi$$ing contest between all of them to see who could be forum king.

Now, the issue is less with ego (I think I'm disagreeing with you here), and more with guys who are generally just pi$$ed off with women and life in general. Every movie, every book, every action from every woman in society, every post from iqqi, and every little fragment of pop culture will be made into an offensive indication of the evils of "the matrix" somewhere on this message board. And sure there is a "matrix" that has helped distort the traditional values of men. I'll agree that feminism has gone way too far, and I will even agree that our society sucks. But I'm not offended by it or angered by it. That's just life. This is kind of the challenge that men face. They have to sack up and become men and not fall into the trap society has set for them. But I'm sure women face difficult challenges too. Every person on Earth has the deck stacked against them in some way. A lot of guys seem to come on here, read about the matrix and come to a revelation that life isn't fair. Well, I have news for them because life isn't fair for anybody. AFC guys don't have any worse of a disposition than the majority of people on Earth.

I think the notion of "the matrix" has manifested itself into a misogynistic attitude that a lot of posters carry, even if they don't realize or admit it at all. I think the matrix has also contributed to just a lot of angry posters in general. If you don't agree that the male gender has it worse than anyone else, then you can expect eight different guys to angrily gang up on you in a thread. The gang-ups that occur on threads are ridiculous as well. I don't have time to even keep up with them. I don't know when they became the trend on here, but it's obnoxious.

Internet forums often breed a lot of fanatics. Take a look at some of the 9/11 conspiracy message boards. You'll see more nuts than a Planters factory there. SoSuave has, in some ways, bread its own brand of fanaticism as well, with all the angry talk of the matrix and the shortcomings of the male gender.

I've been wanting to post this for months, but I haven't had the balls to. I'm glad you made a thread like this Senor.

I just wanted to add that I do think ego is a problem on here as well. But the biggest problem, in my opinion, is the obsession this message board has with "the matrix".

I just wish people would be a little more light-hearted and laid back about things on here.

I'm sure some of you will remember a certain Don Ronny and his highly unorthodox advice (and consistent b!tch slapping).. yeah..that was my own brand of shock therapy, trying to wake you guys out of your slumber and shake up your rigid mindsets.

How about that Crotch-Sniffer fellow? Always cracking jokes and making inappropriate comments.. basically trying to get you tightwads to lighten up and have a good laugh. Sometimes I got carried away but it was all in good fun.

I had a couple others but those two were definitely the most memorable.

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Great, just what we needed... Another Black Italian / h20.

I really don't get what people like you are trying to accomplish here. You're definately not the first member to try and "save" this site, and you probably won't be the last.

Yeah, this site's best days were between 2000 and 2003, but things change, things evolve, and there's been a lot of turnover since then. Not only have new people come to this site since then, but MORE people come to this site. We have more people contributing, more people who are clueless, more trolls, more spam, more of everything. You're NEVER going to retain nor regain what this site was in its infancy.

There's two things you can do. You can either deal with how the site has evolved, or you can leave. Or you can stay and b1tch and complain about it like many of the "old timers" still do.

Your forum trolling hasn't changed a damn thing around here. We still delete lots of spam, we close even more threads based on race and politics, women still post here, flame wars still exist, AFCs continue to ask the same questions, and we still ban trouble makers like Don Ronny and Crotch Sniffer.

You could have been out learning new things about women, men, and how relationships work and don't work. Instead, you spent the last couple of years trolling sosuave. What a waste.

@Capt. Jack

As far as I know, the mods never tracked me down. Maybe they did know all
this time but kept it under wraps. *shrugs*

@MikeYikes122

I feel what you are saying. I too am annoyed by the fundamentalism that goes on here. But if you peel away the layers of this Matrix obsession, you will see that it's just another escape hatch for one's ego.

After all, its much easier to blame an establishment, social norm or culture for your shortcomings, then to really deal with your personal problems.

This is why so many guys here are on the Matrix bandwagon.. its a comfortable cop-out.. an easy way of thinking that you are enlightened when you haven't really put in the effort.

I'm not totally against the analogy.. we do indeed live in various matrices and are being manipulated at every turn, I dont doubt it for a second.

The real trap here is complacency.. thinking that you know some special little bit of info that most people are not clued in on, like it makes you some kind of transcendental authority figure.

Once again the ego has landed and you painted yourself in a corner without even knowing it.

Aboleo said:

Making posts like this is just going to bring a flame war down on your ass from the other side of the community.

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I'm actually pleasantly surprised by how you guys are reacting so far.

Aboleo said:

I remember reading your 'Weapons of Mass Seduction' on here years ago, and it really helped me alot. Who wrote that?- We need that guy. Bring him back!

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I'm really not the same dude anymore.. nor would I want to be. I was arrogant, pushy and thought I knew everything. I'm glad that despite all that my posts were helpful. I plan on writing some more practical stuff soon when I have time.

comic_relief said:

Think about when we all first came here, we had a little ego from being bruised and hurt. Than we learned the DJ techniques that made us impervious to hurt, but we also got pride with what we are doing. Which probably was one of our worst problems.

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This is the Pendulum Effect at play.. any radical change usually makes you swing from one extreme to another. Shy guy becomes Super Jerk, or the supplicator falls into the neg trap.

At some point though we need balance... anything in extreme is not healthy!

SinJester said:

Even if you have outgrown your ego you still have to be able to tolerate other peoples.

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When you are not controlled by your ego, tolerating other people's is a lot easier.. you learn to laugh at them exactly the way you laugh at yourself.

SinJester said:

...as for the general public, well I don't think ego will ever dissapear from the average person in human society.

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Like I said, I'm not that huge of an idealist that I expect irrational perfection. There will always be assh0les, haters and jackwads out there trying to piss on your parade. In fact they tend to be the norm as opposed to the exception.

But DJs are supposed to know better, and as a community we should be moving forwards, not backwards!

I KNEW You Were Crotch Sniffer I KNEW It I Knew It!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

^^I actually don't know how to feel about this...

I'm with Desdinova. You guys really whine too much about how imperfect this site is. Who cares? If we were all perfect men then we wouldn't need this site.

Unfortunately, these boards DO suck right now.

All the so called quality posters are the ones supporting some crazy matrix anti-woman proganda on this site. Society is out to get you, and dammit, MEN are the victims, not women! Us vs them, and WE MEN are going to be extinct!

There were always posters like that, but their was some balance with guys like Slick, Giovanni C. (aka Mr. Penkitten), and Tesquered, and a few others, who would balance out such extremist viewpoints with a little common sense and PURE intelligence.

The poster closest to any of that is potato, but he definately has a few issues himself. He is one I have my eye on.

Most sadly, is there aren't many posters like Master of the Universe, and God's Gift to Women aka Gigolo DJ, aka whatever, and FINGZ, and Pook, and the likes posting DJ BIBLE material. There aren't any truly uplifting life guides being posted. Victory Unlimited is close in being the best thing here that could compare to that. And he is GOOD.

Then there were the comedians, like Starman and Crotchsniffer (wiping away a tear), and there has NEVER been anyone like the two of them around here since. That was pure comedy!

We only had one incident where a mod upset everyone by acting like this was his forum, and he stepped down. Very valiant. The mods back then were pretty neutral, and well respected by everyone.

People were banned for REALLY being a troll, not having a somewhat obnoxious personality, like John-467 (?), and even Wyldfire.

Wyldfire only got banned because as a woman, and the state this place is in, she was attacked attacked attacked, and wouldn't back down, with NO ASSISTANCE. Back in the day I was always assisted when someone would flame on me solely for being female. These days, I have to sugar coat most of what I say, and just back down after I've properly cyber backhanded a few people.

AND things are getting better.

The not so bitter posters are starting to assert themselves more, and people seem to be questioning things that just a few months ago were Law 'round these parts.

A couple of months ago I never would have been able to post that romantic rivalry thread, and get actual quality perspectives! It would have been insult after insult after insult, without addressing anything I was saying. This time around I think there may have been only ONE real insult without substance, and yeah, a few relunctant advisors, but for the most part I got what I really love about this place, some REAL perspective from intelligent people.

When people like Comic Relief stop posting here because it is so bitter and negative here, we have a problem.

OH YEAH, and there were more girls. Not a lot, but a couple more. Remember Sexy Malibu? Tamales? And Mystery Woman?

People were banned for REALLY being a troll, not having a somewhat obnoxious personality, like John-467

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You mean John-467 aka Gerard-890 aka John-DJF aka DonJuanForever aka DONJUANFOREVER AGAIN aka DONJUANFORVER2 aka DJF AGAIN! aka DJF or John aka DJF or John Again aka DJF or John BAN THAT aka DJF/John wasn't a troll? Wow, learn something new everyday!

Desdinova said:

You mean John-467 aka Gerard-890 aka John-DJF aka DonJuanForever aka DONJUANFOREVER AGAIN aka DONJUANFORVER2 aka DJF AGAIN! aka DJF or John aka DJF or John Again aka DJF or John BAN THAT aka DJF/John wasn't a troll? Wow, learn something new everyday!

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John 467 was a good contributer, and so was Gerald. Many have been banned in the past, and came back a little wiser and less offensive. Those last ID's shouldn't have been banned based on old sh!t.

Are we going to ban FINGZ now that we know two of his alter egos have been banned?

FINGZ and John are not the only one with multiple ID's, many other posters had those. When was it ever against the rules? Gigolo DJ had like 3 or 4 other names.

We ALL know now that IP address means SH!T.

What are you going to do when 7 brothers from the same house become members? Assume they are all the same person based on IP address? Because now we know iqqi can work at one place, and Daven Juan can work for the same HUGE chain company far far away, and STILL be linked.

You're NEVER going to retain nor regain what this site was in its infancy.

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What if I told you that I think we could surpass what we had?

Your forum trolling hasn't changed a damn thing around here. We still delete lots of spam, we close even more threads based on race and politics, women still post here, flame wars still exist, AFCs continue to ask the same questions, and we still ban trouble makers like Don Ronny and Crotch Sniffer.

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Aww c'mon, were they really that bad? You know what.. dont answer that

You could have been out learning new things about women, men, and how relationships work and don't work. Instead, you spent the last couple of years trolling sosuave. What a waste.

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Like I said before, I am not above criticism. I deserve a lot of what you guys have to dish out.

But I think it's a stretch to say I've done nothing but troll here.

I've taken some long breaks from this place, precisely to be "out and learning new things"

Everything I posted was based off my experiences, and I gave freely of all that I learned.

If you want to ignore all that, then we probably don't have too much to talk about.

Obsidian said:

I'm with Desdinova. You guys really whine too much about how imperfect this site is. Who cares? If we were all perfect men then we wouldn't need this site.

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You are right, I am totally whining like a 2-year old. But that's a good sign.. it means I still care about this little niche of the interweb.