Thoughts On Moderating My New Discord Channel

So when I sent out my last newsletter, about 80% of it was blocked as spam. That failure rate was due to various arcane mail configuration issues, but it did mean that most people didn’t even see that I’d sent out an email last March.

On my birthday, I said, “I am going to fix those email issues and send out my new newsletter.” So I spent about two hours mucking with SMTP to get everything running smoothly, then casually dropped a Discord invite into my latest newsletter because hey, nobody will see this newsletter anyway, I’d been kinda telling myself I’d open up a Discord channel, might as well have a light opening.

Then I went off for my birthday massage. And returned to about fifty people in my Discord channel, merrily saying hello to each other and striking up conversations.

Cue me frantically Googling, “How to Discord admin HALP.”

(And if you’re all like, “Hey, I wanted to be in Ferrett’s Discord channel, well, my newsletter is where I do beta work like “Experimenting with Discord” and “Asking for beta readers for my new work,” so either a) Check your spam mail for a newsletter sent from donotreply@theferrett.com on July 3rd, or b) sign up for future newsletters.)

Anyway, watching a fledgling Discord rise up is interesting, simply because there’s a flurry of debate on all the things that make a good community. The first channel I added (because I only had “General” and “Introductions”) was “mod-thoughts,” simply because right now there were fifty cheerful people but what happened when buttheads came in? Did we have firm rules on when it was okay to DM someone? Would it be entirely up to me to moderate, or did I need friends to help out?

And then there was NSFW stuff. Was swearing NSFW? How about explicit discussions of polyamory? What about selfies, and what kind of selfies?

Then there were the silos, because conversations tended to wander. We started a tech channel, but that rapidly led to lots of discussions on videogames, so I made a gaming channel. And then the question of whether there was enough discussions worthy to split off “gaming” into “videogames” and “non-videogames”….

And then there were all the fancy things I wanted that I’d seen from other Discords, but had no idea how to install myself – things like pronoun bots that added what pronoun you wanted, and gateways that forced you to post in the #introductions channel, and NSFW verification.

Right now, it’s interesting, because obviously this is all new and there are spats of like 50+ reply conversations I see, and this will probably die down into something more convivial. But it’s an interesting mix, and one of the things that I love about social media is getting to watch people I like meet up in some common space and decide they like each other, and then becoming fast e-friends based on my mutual acquaintance. It’s not ego; I just feel like I’ve done a community service, bringing awesome people together.

But it turns out, even a tiny Discord is a lot of work, and there’s not a lot of good resources that I’ve found on how to add all the bells and whistles. I feel like I should be organizing. But heck, I just got off my birthday weekend, so I’m gonna do some writing, and then attend to the ol’ Discord.

Well, not so ol’. Three days at best. But it’s alive, so it counts.

It’s My Birthday, So Now Is The Time Of The Great Sugar Experiment

“So what are you giving up for Lent?”

Ah, shit.

I hadn’t really thought about Lent, but my wife and I had started going back to church, and so of course she’d expect me to do all the rituals. I’d never been so religious as to give anything up for Lent before – I’d just made the usual joke of “I’m giving up Lent for Lent,” and made done with it.

But the priest had said that giving up things for Lent should be self-care – “Don’t look at Lent as a time of sacrifice, look at Lent as a time to abandon the things you know are making you sick.”

“Sugar,” I said. “I’ll give up sugar.”

And so I gave it up, for six weeks – which wasn’t actually hard, because that was the beginning of the pandemic, where we all took a deadly disease seriously for some reason, and all my usual ice cream parlors and cake shops were shut down. All I had to do was not order in sweets from the grocery, and I was out.

It was so easy, in fact, that I gave it up for ten weeks. Which you’d think wouldn’t be easy to do considering this overlapped with my Seasonal Affective Disorder, that lovely springtime – yes, springtime – but I was able to get through my time of suicidal ideation without gorging myself on cake. This year was actually light, thankfully, because I did not need crushing self-loathing during pandemic panic.

Then we drove past my favorite bakery one day – which was open again! – and I said, “I want an eclair.” Boom. Sugar-fast: broken.

One day later, I had an argument with Gini. It was a stressful argument, spurred by the pandemic, but on the scale of Arguments We Have Had it was probably a 6, tops.

But it destroyed me. The next day I could barely function. I was weeping, feeling like shit –

Right after the sugar. And a dreadful thought occurred to me:

What if my SAD was light this year because I was off sugar?

Oh.

Oh, I did not want that.

So I immediately went off sugar again, for the entire month of June, deciding that I will eat sugar on July 3rd, my birthday.

And today is the day. I have a cake. I have an eclair. I have chocolate milk, my favorite drink in the entire world, at the ready. And I will gorge myself…

And see what my mood is, come Monday.

It may be that sugar wasn’t a part of it. I’m kind of hoping it’s not; I really like ice cream. And even if it turns out that “Sugar makes me (more) depressed,” well, that doesn’t mean that I’m going to give up cake; I know the occasional bout of serious drinking makes me feel like crap, but about every six weeks I stay up until four in the morning and drink a lot of bourbon and play videogames until my head spins.

But what I have noticed is that I ate a big ol’ piece of cake today, the kind I used to like, and it tasted almost too sweet. Maybe it’s the cake; I’ve got the eclair and chocolate milk on backup. But I wonder if I’ll get to Monday and go, “Well, that was nice, but maybe I’ll just wait until August.”

Or not. I’ve posted plenty of essays in my journal over the last twenty (!) years where I had an epiphany like RUNNING MAKES ME FEEL GOOD and then I gave up running. I am astoundingly good at realizing what painful, tedious things I should do to maintain my welfare and then going right back to bourbon and videogames.

On the other hand, I have spent more time this year not eating sugar than I have in eating sugar. Which is a first in my history, anyway. And maybe I’m slowly creeping away from it.

Don’t know. I’ll see later next week. All I know is that there’s chocolate milk and a massage in my future today, and I’m gonna enjoy that.

(And for the record, if you want to help me celebrate my birthday, spreading the word about my upcoming book Automatic Reload – due out at the end of this month – would help. There’s a whole essay on what you could do to help my birthday book, if you feel so inclined. That, or you could always celebrate my birthday by donating to a local food pantry.

(…or both!)