Today I realised for the first time how heavily I am invested in this place, emotionally speaking.

I finally finished pruning and honing my biggest newbie boo-boo, a project that has taken up much of the last couple of weeks. Full of proud contentment, I ran a user search and prepared to bask in the warm glow of my own accomplishement.

Nothing doing. I have dozens of nodes in the red - admittedly, more than half of them are part of the aforementioned boo-boo. But still.

A dreadful suspicion crept into my mind - perhaps I'm not a quality noder at all. Perhaps I suck. Perhaps whoever it was that's been playing at spending all their votes in the negative recently actually has a point!

At the same time I am happily aware of the fact that hey, it's just someone else's opinion. But the shock of discovering how much I cared was jarring.