Wierd?

[Estella Brandybuck]

Er, I hope I'm not overstepping my newbie boundaries by posting here... if I bother anyone, feel free to ignore me, or give me five lashes with a wet noodle, or some other suitable punishment...

Anyway, I've found that the Barrow Downs is a lot more welcoming than some other big message boards, and at the same time it's a lot more intimidating. I learned early on that I needed to have tougher skin in order to post here, and to always be ready to defend my opinions in as non-threatening a way as possible. I think I review my posts here a lot more than at other sites, because I'm always worried about posting something that makes me sound like a moron, and then having someone tell me that I am a moron because of it. [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img]

But like I said, this place is a lot more welcoming than others I've been to. For example, I once frequented the message boards at TheForce.Net, but I soon discovered that the users there already had their own little cliques and they rarely payed attention to someone outside of these groups. Here at the Barrow Downs, though, older users will sometimes pay attention to what a newb like me has to say and respond to my posts, and if I'm lucky even debate a little with me.

The problem is that the newcomers are somewhat scared and intimidated.

This most definitely applies to me. [img]smilies/tongue.gif[/img] I stuck to the movies and novices forum mostly at first, but unfortunately I just kept getting this incredible urge to discuss the books. From what I can tell, however, a lot of the same people from the movies forum post in the books forum (I think, anyway - maybe I just don't pay enough attention...), and I found the discussion environment to be fairly similar for the two. And maybe I'm just weird, but I've come to enjoy discussing things in the books section more...

I have yet to even dream of looking through the RPG forums, even though I love to write.

I'm the same way; I peeked into The Shire forum once just to see what it looked like, but for some reason, RPG has always scared me. Maybe it's because I've never made a LotR OC and I'm terrified of creating a Mary Sue, or just someone uninteresting, should I ever get involved in RPG... But perhaps someday I'll summon up some courage and follow Child of the 7th Age's advice.

Okay, I don't know if any of that made sense, but hopefully I got my point across... sorry if I got off-topic. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]