Dear Gasroom
I saw a tweet the other day that resonated with me and I thought I would share (if you had not seen it of course)...
Twitter 2009:
I like apples.
I like pears.
That’s cool.
Yeah.
Twitter 2018:
I like apples.
So you’re anti pears then.
No, I just prefer apples.
So you hate pears.
I never said that.
Pear hater.
I don’t hate pears!
Yes you do. You make me sick. Scum.
This made me think of the Gasroom and looking at some of the recent posts I have seen. An innocent statement becomes a full on personal attack on an individual and their thoughts.
I have loved the Gasroom since it came into its being but now its just a screaming match with so many threads going off at wild tangents its just madness. I tried to read the thread the other day about the terrific Norwich game and by the time I had scrolled through personal attacks I had clean forgotten what a good football game we had witnessed.
I'm going to give the place a miss now for a while as I just think it has lost its way and thats a shame. Who cares I hear you cry, well that kind of makes my point. But if you cast your mind back a couple of years to some of the names of the posters regularly on the site you will see I am not the only one disappearing off into the shadows largely because of the above. I speak to a number of former Gasroomers and the story is the same - I don't go on their anymore as it's just bickering.
I know this is largely social media as a whole but for me its not what I am looking for. If it were a pub of angry people I would give it swerve and find somewhere else and this is me doing just that.
Be well. COYB
Comments
Well said, totally agree....
But you do realise now that someone will come on and disagree with you, then everyone else will chip in and it will become a full on argument.
While this is a wider social media issue, it's easy to think everyone is doing it when really it's a loud, obnoxious minority. I no longer discuss politics on social media at all because the idea of nuance, never mind irony, seems to have been done away with, but I think for the most part the Gasroom is pretty civilised. Isn't there a block function for people you feel regularly abuse their voice?
Two Oxford fan friends of mine came on here to read the matchday thread and said what an intelligent, reasoned bunch we seemed.
@TheAndyGrahamFanClub see you in a day or so
Who doesn't like pears?
The discussions can get a bit fruity
I've always enjoyed a nice juicy pair.
obviously an incider joke
I think this calls for a conference.
The reason its so heated on here right now is purely because of the potential sale of the club.
It's dragged up a lot of very emotive opinions on the past, present and future of the football club, something we all care about deeply.
Once the situation is resolved I think it will calm down.
that is a perry good point
Is the Gasroom starting to crumble?
Be good to see a Williams out there on Saturday.
Probably best not to get yourself into too much of a stew.
Shame to see a core member leaving
Somebody's got under his skin
This kind of pome fruit-centric approach is not welcome on the gasroom. We need to acknowledge and respect those whose preference is for citrus and soft berries, and those who reject the labelling of fruit entirely.
I think perhaps the most important public skill/virtue people can have nowadays is how to disagree in the right spirit.
What about the pears who identify as apples? As usual society is dismissive of their problems...
Always respect the opinion of your pears
I was thinking the other day, Gasroom 2.0 seems to have gone from well moderated but a bit dull to almost unbearable without going through the friendly free for all stage that Gasroom 1.0 spent most of its existance in. ‘Society,’ I guess.
Brilliant!!!
The Gasroom has always had its critics in both incarnations - but those critics have always been crushed, and they will be crushed again.
Now watch this:
trying to see a tedious pun in that one @floyd
I sat in the Frank Adams for the first time in many, many years on Tuesday. Right on the half-way line. A wonderful view of the game with the chance to get a super perspective on play that is less easily attainable on the terrace.
Almost no-one was minded to offer anything much by way of vocal support, which is fine, I guess: each to their own. I was content to settle back and enjoy the game.
But what struck me was the smallish number of coarse-throated men dotted about the place who, once Wycombe were behind, started shouting baseless nonsense at the referee in coarse, violent tones. As a terrace regular, one is accustomed to a certain amount of irrational, angry bitching when things are going poorly. What was different this time, to my mind, was that these blokes offered no counterpoint of encouragement or support for their team. The first and subsequently only other times I heard any of them was them being extremely, apparently righteously angry at a referee. It was ugly and rather unfortunate.
I mention it because I feel somewhat similarly to @TheAndyGrahamFanClub at the moment. There is rather more angry invective, of a critical nature for which I see no well-evidenced reasons, about at the moment. I've enjoyed the apples/ pears puns but there's not been enough of it lately and a bit too much of people being cross. No-one likes an angry ranter, especially if it's not clear that he has anything to offer other than being angry nor an obviously good reason for being so critical.
Great stuff @peterparrotface, Nick Lowe is one of my favourites. I saw the Stiffs Live tour in Aberystwyth in '77, and when Lowe did Let's Eat, the rest (Costello, Drury, Wreckless Eric et al) threw loads of pizza slices into the audience, mostly hungry students so much appreciated!
@hcblue I also sat in the Frank Adams for the first time in many years on Tuesday (only third-time ever, if I recall correctly). As I said at half-time, when I bumped into the people I usually sit next to in the Family Stand, I don't plan on doing it again.
I was in the front row and had a great view, but the people around me offered absolutely zero encouragement to the team whatsoever and rather spent their entire time either mute, moaning, criticising or not paying any attention to what was happening on the pitch at all. All I could hear from behind or alongside me were people moaning and criticising, which started as soon as the teams came out of the dressing room, with lots of "Peters" making loud statements about Ryan Allsop being s***, where's Yves?, etc. and continued throughout the match with negative comments aimed at most of our team; supposedly humorous, sarcastic, backhanded compliments whenever one of our players did show a bit of skill; a grunt of "Give it five minutes and we're going" when Norwich scored their fourth goal (if there are ever times when the team needs supporters to be shouting encouragement rather than giving up and going home, that's one of them); and a particularly annoying person sat behind me who spent almost the entire evening watching other football results on his mobile, incessantly updating everyone within earshot (and he had a loud voice) how his accumulator bet was progressing, and who seemed to think it highly amusing to shout, "Come on Norwich! Oh, only joking," in close proximity to my earhole. The celebrations when Wycombe's goals went in were pretty muted also. All-in-all, whilst I enjoyed watching what I felt turned out to be an interesting and entertaining match, a lot of the potential enjoyment was sucked out of it by the atmosphere I watched it in.
So, for me, it's back to my regular haunts of the Family Stand for most games and the terrace for occasional cup and evening matches. I was, in any case, only in the Frank Adams because of an administrative error on my part: I had meant to purchase a ticket for the terrace but entered something in a wrong box when doing the online purchase. I'll be trying to make very sure that I don't make that mistake again and, in the event I do, will be phoning the ticket line to see if I can rectify it.
Nice not to be alone in having a certain perspective, @Uncle_T.
I'm reasonably relaxed about people not being minded to be vocally supportive - it takes all sorts and I recognise it's perfectly possible to be supportive of one's team and appreciative of the game generally without recourse to vocal expression. But, as you said, if one is going to offer no vocal support, one, to my mind, loses the moral prerogative to offer vocal criticism in any degree, not least the poisonous cant that came out on Tuesday and rather blighted the event from my perspective.
I am a reasonably quiet cove, but I moved after my first season of my present stint as a Season Ticket holder (as my first one was purchased as a present so had no choice where it was) as the block I was in in the Beechdean was full of people who started every match with 'How **** are we going to be today?' (admittedly it was the season we almost went down but still...) and spent whole games either silent or groaning (I tell you he's ****ing crap that one...) and always left before the end. I got the impression they also spent good money travelling to do the same. As the season went on it certainly sapped my strength and made getting involved in the games difficult. You do feel like saying...isn't there something else you would prefer doing? Feel free to go and do it.
Whereas all you chaps watch with a perfect mix of encouragement but not being too loud and doing nothing even slightly irritating to anyone.
Lolza
But if i can join you, shout out to our row that have a gang of about 5 or 6 regulars who all insist on arriving about 20seconds before kick off and individually.
With such irritating timing that it's almost like they watch and wait for the whole row to sit back down before the next bloody nuisance emerges