Agreed.
Aside from the initial shock and sense of up-heaval, it seems to me that a helluva lot of all the sniffling and huffing on the part of some individuals who claim “the lounge was elitist” is just straight up sour-grapes that they didn’t/don’t bond well with certain groups of specific individuals; and I gotta say boo-fucking-hoo to them.
It’s not anyone else’s fault if you ‘don’t play well with others’ or if your persona is somehow repellent, and blaming your feelings of rejection on the existence of the lounge is just disingenuous at best.
So are all the comparisons to cliques, country clubs, and Mean Girls (although that is totally my jam, as far as teen movies go.)
We didn’t choose the Lounge, the Lounge chose us, via our metrics.
It’s been stated repeatedly anyone could achieve regular status with enough interaction, and that’s true; there were plenty of mutants who were regular status for whom I had no love lost and with whom I rarely engaged.
Enso was a perfect example; we didn’t care for each other at all, despite having many similar viewpoints and core values.
But as both he & @Donald_Petersen rightly said, there was a sense of familiarity therein that was comforting, even if everyone wasn’t buddy-buddy with everyone else (and please believe it, we weren’t.)
It sucks that that ‘comfort zone’ is gone, and the members who will miss it have a right to vent their feelings of disappointment.
For everyone else who never got the opportunity to experience all the in-jokes, rambling discussions and meta-insanity of spending way too much time on the BBS, here’s to you:
##(Just look at it.)
