The cat angers the internet

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Okay, so I'm a blunt fellow sometime, and while I'm a pretty nice guy in person, I tend to be a little too blunt.

Recently I managed to not only tick off most of the forum goers from CoH, but apparently a few FR players as well.

So anyhow, I'm coming here asking for help.  Obviously, I'm a bit of an internet jerk at times, and I want to change that.  You all know me, or at least the way I post.  What are some of my bad habits?  What should and shouldn't I do to come across as more of a decent person and avoid alienating--well--everyone.  Please be honest here, I really do need to now so I can learn to do better.

[AfghanAnt]

I didn't catch your wrath but it happens. We are all human. No big whoop.

[murs47]

Well, I'm more of a dog person, so...

[Reepicheep]

I'll be blunt back.

People like you are likely to tick people off from time to time. Not everyone can take your sense of humour. Sometimes nobody can. Sometimes people will object to your opinion.

But if I had to pick friends between a person like you, and a person who sugar coats everything they say, I'd pick you without a thought.

Don't bother changing. Let people get annoyed. Its what they do sometimes, for a myriad of different reasons. Just use your quality - being able to tell the world as you see it - for the most productive purposes you can find.

[lugaru]

You are not a troll, a jerk or a manipulative poster... so I'll take blunt any day. Especially on the internet where everyone else IS a troll, a jerk or is trying to take advantage of poeple.

[captmorgan72]

Wow Cat, I can really relate. I am very blunt as well, almost to blunt. I have hurt people's feelings and angered many with the way I talk to people. I don't ever try to do these things, I just tell people the way it is. I don't carefully select my words to avoid hurting feelings or none of that. I just flat out tell the truth or at least how I perceive it to be. I won't change who I am and neither should you. 

[crimsonquill]

To be honest... I'll take blunt over any other kind of flaw in personality and I hardly see "blunt" as a flaw really because if you want to be critical of stuff like movies, skins, meshes, skopes, games, or whatever then sugar coating it just makes it far more complicated then it needs to be.

And like lugaru said above.. there are far more trolls, jerks, or manipulative people to worry about on the net to get too worried about hurting someone elses feelings. We all just have to take things in stride and learn as we go.

I sure don't remember incurring your wrath or disagreeing about anything to extreme levels in my time here.

- CQ

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

No one's "incurred my wrath."  I don't go after people or anything like that.  I do perhaps let slip things that I shouldn't.  Like in this particular conversation that helped trigger this topic.  Of course, I turned out to be absolutely right, but I'd rather not tick off everyone in the process.

[Mr. Hamrick]

No one's "incurred my wrath."  I don't go after people or anything like that.  I do perhaps let slip things that I shouldn't.  Like in this particular conversation that helped trigger this topic.  Of course, I turned out to be absolutely right, but I'd rather not tick off everyone in the process.

I sent you a PM on the matter.  After reading that thread, I can see why some of them got ticked at you.   Like I said in the PM, you sometimes get a bit of a "better than thou" attitude with people.  No worse than some others that online or off that I run across but abrasive nonetheless at times.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Yeah, and that's the type of thing I want to learn to avoid.  At the same time, I don't want to just bow before everyone else.  In that thread I linked to, I knew that the advice that I was discarding was indeed wrong.  I had already considered and disproven those things, but I'd rather do so in a nicer way.  Maybe just asking for other ideas would have been better.

It didn't help in this case that I was in a foul mood over the whole thing.  That was the first time I have ever had to ask for help in a computer issue, and the very fact that I did made me feel like an idiot.  Maybe in a way that was part of the problem--I felt a bit like I had to prove that I wasn't an idiot and justify myself for having to ask for help in the first place.

And the last guy was right, it is something I should have caught.  He did ask the key question after all.

[JKCarrier]

It didn't help in this case that I was in a foul mood over the whole thing.

A bit of advice that's easy to say, but hard to do: When you feel yourself getting frustrated or angry, that's the time to walk away from the keyboard and go do something else for a while. Nothing good can come from posting when you're ticked off.

[catwhowalksbyhimself]

Considering that I was in a foul mood over having a problem I couldn't solve, there would never be a time when I wouldn't be upset over this.

It's good advice in general though.

EDIT:  I think a good comparison is my little nephew.  I went to visit my sister when he was just five or so weeks old and he kept trying to turn over.  He was too young to do so, but he thought it was something he should be able to do so he get really upset everytime he tried and failed.  I may be a little bit the same here when it comes to computers.

[daglob]

Ahhhnnn... coulda been worse.

I see where they got ticked off (the line about "somebody reading this [paraphrased]"), but it was pretty obvious you were stressed out over the thing. The return snide comment, how do I say this... while felt to be appropriate by the poster, was really unnecessary. Then you did apologize for your attitude when you realized that you may have gotten out of line.

There is a lot I could say about "thin skins" or "act like adults", but that might not be fair. Maybe they were stressed out that day also.

Don't change. You have in no way denied us our right to confront you if we feel you are in some way insulting us (or something similar). Then you can re-think your actions, and decide if we are full of it or if we are correct.

[BlueBard]

Well, I didn't get involved in the conversation that prompted this, but I can still put in my two cents.

Blunt can be honest, which is a good thing.

Blunt can also be a willful lack of consideration for the feelings of others, which is not.

So, do you think you're being honest?  Or is there also an element of disregard for offending other people?

I think it may be safe to say that asking whether you are offending others with bluntness shows that --

A) you DO in fact consider the feelings of others, and
B) maybe this time you were a bit late to consider the feelings of others, and
C) an apology was in order, which you did, and
D) we all fail to be patient with others sometimes, I've been guilty of the same thing, so
E) pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and try to keep doing the right thing.

And the right thing, I think, is to temper honesty with tactfulness and consideration.  Honesty is the best policy, yes, but it's important to be kind when you can.  After you've tried kindness and it doesn't work... that's when it might be time to be blunt.

[BWPS]

Maybe you should try upgrading your kindness processor and bluntnessboards. Your KPU is really old and not designed for any kind of serious conversation (even a low-end conversation that has run fine in the past). If you're experiencing any kind of tactful bottlenecking (despite the fact that you have explained you have not), you're definitely going to have to do a $500 upgrade to your personality system despite the fact that these conversations are clearly not a personality issue.

CoH board members seem to give the same advice for everything. When I first got CoH several years ago I had a weird graphical issue where everything was black and white static lines and split screen. I should have just troubleshooted it myself. Some guy came in and started telling me my system couldn't run the game EVAR and I needed to upgrade, so I asked if a $50 card would help. "No!" He said, "that's barely better than the onboard graphics chipsets! Also, you need a new power supply!". What I actually wanted to hear was "there's a settings slider you can move to the second highest level and it will instantly fix everything." I swear those people seem to think CoH is Crysis or something. It wasn't even top of the line THEN and it could run from onboard graphics just fine.

As far as angering people goes and I really should not be allowed to give advice I never take, just think about others before you post. Click "preview" and then pretend you're the target of the post (but also for safety that you're really sensitive) before clicking submit.

[Sevenforce]

In that thread, and in some others, you do come across as...well. Hamrick put it best with 'holier than thou'.

Admittedly, your patience will have been short, and reading it back from this vantage point (i.e. not real-time) will have made you come off a bit more snippety than usual. However,in that thread you did come off as a bit "It can't be that because I would know". You sometimes come across as such here, especially in the TV/Movies threads, as if your opinion is law, but we know you a bit better and don't take it as personally as the COH crowd did.

Don't get me wrong, your input is always interesting and welcome, as you usually don't flim flam with your opinion - you say what you mean and mean what you say, even if what you mean is not especially nice. I enjoy threads you take part of, and to be brutally honest, I think the liability lies more with the COH crowd reading a bit too much into it.

I don't feel you should have to change to 'fit in' with the internet crowd. However, you asked for honest feedback, and so I would say - put yourself in the shoes of whoever will be on the receiving end of one of your posts. Is it a bit too scathing? Is it possible to misconstrue the meaning? A lot of the problems people have online is that things get lost in the translation, and with a persona like yours, which is to say, you say what you think, even offline that can be taken the wrong way. I mean, considering someone had to come up with a symbol for sarcasm, that says something.

As others have said, I'd prefer you to say what you think and be a little tactless than sugarcoat your opinion to avoid offending somebody and miss getting your point across. After all...everybodys offended by SOMETHING. You can't avoid it forever