The Alcove at Three

[bursar42]

Recently, I've been giving some thought to the Alcove. We're far better organized than we once were. We've got a domain for pictures, messages, and email. We've got our three (or is it four, I forget) mailing lists. We've got our permanent chat (Ask for the room name.) We've always had a definite social structure. Now, we've got more people in quasi-official positions in that structure, though. Not emperor or Jesus or whatever, but webmaster, listmod, and code junky. I guess it's inevitable. We're large enough nowadays to require a sort of secretariat. Someone has to make sure the website doesn't fall apart at the seams. Someone has to do housekeeping. Someone has to figure out reunion transport. (We've always had someone do that.)

The fundamental thing, though, is that we've become too large. Any group which sprouts a civil service is too large to call itself a bunch of friends anymore. Of course, this may just be jitters for me. For the first time, there are non-Eishan Alcovists that I haven't already met at CTY. Maybe I'm getting too old for this sort of thing. Who knows? I definitely felt that this summer. I was so disconnected from the vast majority of the Alcove. I lived in the past. The youngest students seemed somehow "other", and the most of the older ones became boring. It seemed like we were busier being no-mores than we were having fun. That's one of the reasons I flung myself so wholeheartedly on the traditions: instigating the election cabal, dealing with the t-shirt, collecting the money for everything, editing the contact list.

With a group this large, people grate each others' nerves very easily as well. This may be why I think the chats have become more and more... well, dumb. While they were never examples of Great Discourse, the past month has seen a nearly endless string of "I'm Wittier than You Are" contests. Everything's turned into a joke, a nitpick about grammar, or a comment on screenname color. Pointless banter has a role in conversation, but when there's three hours straight, something's wrong.

As usual, I'm not sure what to do about this. Next year's group might want to consider being its own thing, without us old folks, though the Alcove is so diffuse that there's not likely to be a mass no-more-age any time soon, so it's unlikely to actually happen. I certainly don't want this thing to break up, but it already has to some extent. There's an older group and a younger group. There's the quasi-LLRT group, the moderates, and the quasi-Eish group. But the offenders in chats run the gamut from squirrel to null-more, quasi-Eish to quasi-LLRT. Formal splitting would do no good, and, from what I've heard, LLRT's method of dealing with it is really unacceptable.

I probably just won't be around as much as I used to be.