The platform everybody serious here uses rewards turning up. Posting, commenting, being about, being seen doing something. I live forty minutes out on a line that stops running before most things finish, so on that platform I am a set of paragraphs nobody has ever stood next to. On the dealt out kind I do perfectly well, because a deck does not care whether you were there last month.
Forty one, in the belt, submissive, nine years in. I did not move out here on a whim. I moved for a mortgage, a garden and a job that is now nearer than it used to be, and I would make the same decision again. What it cost was the thing nobody mentions: the slow platform is a village, and a village is made of people who are present.
So I run both, badly. The fast one hands me strangers who are three stops away and gone within a fortnight. The slow one has given me a reputation I cannot cash, because everybody who knows my name has never once been in a room with me.
What I want is an ongoing dynamic with somebody who reads a Sunday afternoon as a real option rather than a consolation prize. Service, standing rules, somebody who notices patterns I miss. Not looking for anyone who will say the distance is nothing and then resent it in week six. Not looking for weekends only. And not looking to be told I should move back in, because that is not going to happen.