@happyme - Well here's a how-do-you-do-it question. I copied this paragraph from a post by @aggroed introducing the PALnet community. I copied it because I wanted your reaction. But how would that kind of communication ordinarily be handled? By e-mail? By text? If a thought pops into your head and then the thought immediately runs over to tug your friend's sleeve and say to your friend, "What about this?" how does the electronic virtual space manage that interaction? "Hmmn," wondered the Luddite.
Here is the paragraph by @aggroed :
"Since I made PALnet I've been sucked into Discord. Discord isn't just a chatroom. It's a community. It's an extremely powerful community. Steemit is many things and many of them are amazing, but it's not really a community. Yeah, we're all interacting on the block, but at best it's like being pen pals with someone. Discord is an internet worth of people available immediately 24/7 always ready to chat, hug, laugh, sing, talk, or build something together. You log in and you see friends. You can talk about your problems. I see rough stories of sexual abuse, physical abuse, marriage difficulty, heart ache, and financial problems. I also see uplifting stories of raises, new jobs, new friendships, and often times just people playing together. What amazes me is that people will come in there and some just take one look and run screaming for the hills. But literally thousands of people come through there every month and share stories, friendship, and we're building something together."
@happyme , what is your reaction to these thoughts by @aggroed ?
(I think there is some proper way to indicate a direct quote, but I don't know how to do that yet.)
I'm not sure exactly what you are asking here. Are you asking about how to ask me or are you referring to the communication posted by aggroed?
By the way.. to do a quote like I did above, you simply use the 'greater-than' symbol (>) followed by a space and then the quoted text. 2 carriage returns breaks the quote and allows normal text to be written again.
I don't feel qualified to judge the comments by aggroed because I don't participate in the Discord channel, so I have no personal experience with it. I rather doubt that it is possible to give anyone a physical hug in discord any more than I can write the words
<big hug>here in this text, so I find it hard to imagine that what he says is completely accurate. I think friendships can be made via any form of communication.I just noticed that in the preview window, my 'big hug' in angle brackets was hidden, so I used the "code" markdown to make it visible. I enclosed the set in the little backslash that is located on the same key as the tilde.
~One backslash on either side of whatever I want to be indicated as code with no spaces between the slash and the code.@happyme - Yes, that's exactly what I was asking. As usual, you understood me perfectly.
I wonder if some people really do experience the electronic equivalent of a big hug when communicating in cyberspace. The fact that I question the possibility clearly means that I don't. So when people describe the Discord chat room in that way, I force myself to "suspend disbelief" and simply affirm the validity of their feelings.
On the Steemit platform, the only way to "contact" another Steemian is by replying to a post, or by sending a DM in Steemit.chat and waiting for an answer (which may or may not ever come because some Steemians don't ever use a chat room). Do you know if the developers are working on that capability?
I wanted to send you a link to an original song that I think Carl may have performed during "Open Mic," but pasting the URL would have retrieved the longest thread in history. So those are little how-to-do-it questions that I'm still working on. Thanks for the code instructions. Now you see what's taking me so long to "Introduce Myself." Congenitally resistant Luddite brain. But you knew that.
1.) I cannot speak for everyone, but when someone writes that they are sending me a hug or wishing God to bless me like you do, I get that warm fuzzy feeling and imagine the warmth the other person has for me. At the same time, there is some sort of energy field around living organisms that fades with distance. So a physical hug would place that energy field much closer than any non-physical hug could do. There is very little noticeable difference for the average person, but nevertheless, there IS a difference. Studies have been done with newborns that prove the importance of human touch. Physical touching IS important.
2.) I don't believe they are working on any interface improvements at this time. That is one of the big complaints... we don't know what steemit inc. is working on because they have been silent on any formal communications of such matters.
3.) There have been post made for mark-down and I believe I even linked to some in my old tutorials. The problem is that none that I found had all of it, so it means combining tutorials. Someone once posted a way to stack small images in a straight line horizontally across the page and I never copied it thinking I would not need to do that and that I could always look it up if I ever did need it. Well, the day came where I wanted to do that and I couldn't find that information. To this day, I still don't know how to do it other than to copy all the images to one image and post it as one image.
Here is a link to something I copied into the file that holds my posting key:
https://steemit.com/howto/@scrooger/text-divers-for-your-steemit-posts-copy-and-paste ALSO link to formatting!
That should help you out a bit. It has the basics in it.
@happyme - This is important. You say, "There is very little noticeable difference for the average person, but nevertheless, there IS a difference." I suspect that you may be an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person). What you receive "vibrationally" when I say, "God bless you," or when another person sends you a hug is much more than your imagination. It is the actual heart-wish and emotional energy that the sender feels for you personally. As a Luddite who avoided all social media platforms for years and had never sent an e-mail, my views on this subject were prejudiced. I believed that authentic human interaction without eye contact and body language was not credible and could not be validated. Then I began to read and write comments in the YouTube comment section and discovered that the unfathomable negativity of trolls is an "energy field" of pure hatred that can be felt. Before realizing that, I could not grasp the psychological effects of cyberbullying. Why would vulnerable teens commit suicide just because a stranger in cyberspace suddenly "un-friended" the victim and wrote the words, "Go kill yourself"? I was forced to admit the existence of an invisible but powerful spiritual reality. I knew that God is unseen but omnipotent. I knew that Satan exists, but I had never contemplated his avenues of influence. Jesus said, "The flesh profiteth nothing; the words that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." - John 6:63 So, I am learning.
Many thanks for help with formatting. I've actually written the introductory blog (finally), but just thinking about adding the artwork gave me a headache. Really. I believe the proper term for this is "mental block."
Congratulations... I'll have to check out your first blog post!
Actually, adding the artwork is quite simple and once you get the hang of it, you will do it without a 2nd thought. I personally use Notepad++ to write and save my blog posts (especially important now that Steemit is so unstable) then simply copy and paste from there. All the stuff I regularly use is now used as a template for future posts! All I need to do is alter the text while leaving the rest there and I have a new, fully formatted and pretty post! You could use notepad or any other text editor to do the same thing, but you don't want to use any of the fancy word processors that try to think for you! They mess up all the mark-down coding!
I believe that Satan is a human creation. When God says that Satan will be vanquished one day, that day will be the day that no human manifests Satan by thinking evil thoughts.
What you described above about real vibrations is practically the same thing. Our energy is much more powerful than most people can imagine or believe. We manifest our own destinies by the way we feel, and we create the evil in this world. All my worldly experiences (and some perhaps otherworldly experiences) have brought me to this conclusion. Of course the mind is very capable of playing tricks on us, so I could be wrong in my conclusion.
@happyme - Re your thoughts on the existence of Satan, it seems that "my mentor" agrees with you. Another meeting of minds? I hope this link eliminates that endlessly long thread preceding Carl's "Open Mic" original song, "You Are Not Alone." I wanted to avoid the unrelated comments and offer a link that is much closer to the performance. Not sure if that's possible. Maybe all comments and replies on the original post are inseparable, but what I'm trying to do is cut the thread. If it worked, enjoy! If it didn't work, scroll down a few miles and enjoy!
https://steemit.com/steemit/@carlgnash/my-upvote-and-resteem-service#@carlgnash/re-sarahspeaks144-re-carlgnash-re-sarahspeaks144-re-carlgnash-re-sarahspeaks144-re-carlgnash-my-upvote-and-resteem-service-20171012t025835139z
Your link worked perfectly. I didn't know you had a specific link in mind and were asking me how to grab it. I guess you found out how. I've never actually done that myself.
Seems I was lucky in my guess about why people choose certain names. His ideas of demonizing older Gods is slightly different than what I have in mind, but they are close.
I used your link to listen to the song, but also scrolled way up to read about his service. I'm thrilled to read that he does NOT use a bot and that his service is free. In his post he listed his SP and it is half of mine and I also have delegated SP of another 1,000 steem. It still gives me just 13 cents at best. It's a long road to becoming a Dolphin, never mind a Whale! I'm not even considered a minnow yet; I'm still just a Redfish. I actually prefer the term, Plankton; I think it more accurately reflects our relative size.
It seems Carl is quite the catch as far as a mentor goes. I agree whole-heartedly about the comment you made to him regarding the number of intelligent people found on this platform.
@happyme - No, I don't think Carl uses bots at all. He does everything himself or with the help of human assistants. He also has a family and has helped me just as you have. Where does he find the time?
I'll admit that I'm a very poor businesswoman. I launched a nonprofit which plunged beneath the ocean though my reputed "big heart" was certainly in the right place. But my thoughts about Matt and "The Mindshifters" probably had a particular imaginary objective in my head by which the group might conceivably need and purchase voting power on a critical issue. Such as what? I don't know. It was just a vague hypothesis. If an underrepresented minority IRL needs the voice of a trustworthy candidate to faithfully represent matters of concern, that minority group might pool its resources to ensure the election of its candidate. Likewise, if "The Mindshifters" as a group wish to elect a witness whose voice will be their voice, then "The Mindshifters" might consider a one-time lease agreement for the critical use of SP. But I don't have a specific idea in mind, only an embryonic thought. I certainly respect your decision to avoid that route. And I hope that I didn't misrepresent Matt. He thinks like a businessman with a conscientious heart and a sensitive soul. Any inadvertent distortion of that image is on me. My bad.
(Your chat room attempt to initiate a conversation was successful. I was notified when I woke up this morning. Much love, your friend The Plankton.)
OK @happyme , I'm getting there. I've found my artwork. Haven't used Notepad since I learned to use Word, but I suppose Word would be one of those fancy word processors that ruins Markdown coding. So I'll paste your instructions in a single document, take a long, therapeutic, preparatory nap, and try to post. Thank you so much and keep your fingers crossed!
(Don't forget to talk to @mattclarke about leasing SP for your group, which I've just named, "The Mindshifters," if that name isn't taken.)
I misunderstood... I thought you had already posted your article.
Yes, WORD will definitely ruin your mark-down.
I'll take a donated/borrowed delegation of Steem Power, but I will not pay for it (lease). I also refuse to buy votes. If someone is interested in supporting my cause and promoting the platform's growth then they can freely contribute to the cause. Otherwise they are just a business using their wealth to make their own pockets fatter and that is not what spreading the wealth is about. If mattclarke wants to help, he can contribute just a single full-power up-vote just once per week. It costs him nothing to do that unless he's using his VP to self-vote, in which case he's just another one of those who are draining the reward pool in an un-ethical way.
It's a strange distinction isn't it.
The community seems to despise self upvoting, but praise delegation leasing, which is really the same thing but with an extra step.