Doing the Flounce

Urban Dictionary is your friend:

1. Flounce
When a member of an online community announces they are leaving, usually after a protracted disagreement with other members of the community.

In my case, it’s actually not so much online disagreements with my community, in this case the commentariat at the Pharyngula blog, that led me to finally do the flounce, it’s mostly a matter of time management, and trying to get my life back onto some kind of track that may lead to positive and constructive outcomes.
I thought I’d write this post to explain my move a little, since there may possibly still be the odd person who will care enough to wonder why I’m doing this now.

When I first came to Pharyngula sometime in 2007, I was pretty much a clueless gobshite with regards to matters of social justice, or the degree of religious influence on life and politics in the USA. I don’t think I’m in any way to blame for that, I had never been to the US or had any correspondence with residents there, and only lived in countries where religion was but a fringe movement, when it comes to political influence anyway, like Germany where I grew up, or even Australia where I live now.

I had gone through Med school and followed my path towards specialisation in that profession for 15 years, and had long stopped reading anything outside my field bar fiction novels.
So when my personal life went through some hard times around 2007, I came across Pharyngula, and eventually started commenting there a few months after starting to read the blog. And that became a kind of second full-time job over time, with the community of commenters there turning out to be equivalent to the local pub you go to after work, for a few beers and a nice chat with people you like.
And those commenters opened my eyes, pointed me to literature to read, to blogs to check out, and it was a steep learning curve indeed. I also got to meet some of the Pharyngula commenters in real life over the years, as well as some of the public faces of the atheist and skeptic movement, for whatever that is worth.

So now, 5 years later, I am hopefully a little bit less clueless than what I was before. I think I am. But it’s time to quit this second full-time job now, and concentrate on the first, and on getting a few personal goals in before the curtain falls.

So, it would have been easy to make this a post about all the stuff that I think went wrong with the Pharyngula commentariat over the last year, but that site has over 100.000 visitors each day, so if I don’t like it, and have other priorities now, I think I just move on, no hard feelings, and all the people who know me there know how to contact me anyway.

I’m just making room in my personal calendar for some real life. That’s the plan, anyway.

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