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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Reynard" data-source="post: 9433794" data-attributes="member: 467">When I was young (mid 20s) I used to hang out at this bar. It was one of those places that had like 6 TVs on. Most of the TVs were dedicated to sports. There would be football or baseball or hockey or basketball, and even golf and whatever played on ESPN and Fox Sports and TNT between major seasons. But there was always a TV that was left on The History Channel or Discovery. This was back before those were about alien Hitler dinosaur conspiracies.Anyway, I liked to got to this bar, have a few beers and some wings, and watch the not-sports TV. Sometimes I would get in a conversation with someone -- I'm that guy at the bar that likes to talk a  little, but not pour out his heart -- but usually I would just watch the TV. I don't dislike sports, sometimes I even kind of enjoyed watching parts of games and seeing people react to plays or scoring, but I was never into sports in that way and so it was rare (but not unheard of) for me to get engaged in that.Anyway, something happened to that bar. The vibe changed (even if we did not call it that back then). It started when another bar got shut down and some of those regulars started going to "my" bar. That place was a serious sports bar. They liked to not just watch sports, but yell at the screen and each other. It got so it was hard to hear the Discovery channel TV, and then even hard to follow the games. Worse, a lot of the more chill sports watchers -- the kind of people I would have those short but interesting conversations with -- ended up leaving. It was too loud, too crowded, too raucous.Finally, I left too. It wasn't that it was a bad bar. The wings and beer were still good. They even still kept that one TV tuned to History/Discovery. But the vibe had changed. I didn't feel comfortable there anymore. And it seemed every conversation turned into an argument about which team was better, and although it was fun to talk about sports, I did not actually care that much.Goodnight, folks.</blockquote>

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