DAMN YOU CHICK

It would probably be interesting to only a few hundred people, but an oral history of Qt3 would be fun to read.

Much like the guys who used to be Fire Joe Morgan have decided to put out.

Sounds like a lot of work for no pay and less recognition. I nominate...someone else.

Which, on the internet, is about as uncommon as being warm-blooded.

Yeah, there was not a short supply of people on qt3 who could be a bit abrasive.

My favourite developer interaction was an argument with Tom about the Civ IV Civiliopedia UI, which I thought had some serious flaws and Tom disagreed strongly in his usual way. Then Soren Johnson showed up, basically agreed with my points (which I of course wasn't they only guy on the internet to bring up)and in the next patch the Civiliopedia was vastly improved.

I also remember being a bit annoyed because Civ IV wouldn't play on any of my machines and I found out on the official forums, that I wasn't alone. And Tom took me to task over it. It was just my machine and you couldn't criticize a game over that... when of course he later based his entire Fallout Las Vegas review on the fact he couldn't run the game..

Nah, he could. I didn't always agree with him and while he didn't suffer fools gladly, it wasn't always his opponent being the fool - but he was of course great with words, so going up against him was often a case of bringing a knife to a gun fight.
But yeah, he was a great poster and the place was less fun when he stopped bothering.

Guilty as charged.

My strongest memories of Qt3 are getting into flamewars with Tim Parlett back before Israel jumped the shark.

re: Qt3 and abrasiveness, this post from DrCrypt on jpinard's then-utterly-dire* posting behavior remains one of my favorites. It also speaks to the "what earlier Qt3 was like" topic. The ending sentences add some pathos to how it changed up through the exodus time, too.

*he got better, to his great credit.

By the same token though, I always liked how many people were able to fight it out in one thread but not take it personally, and then have a civil conversation in the next thread.

Really the only Chet-as-poster issue I recall was when he and Wardell went at it. IIRC the launch of HL2, which was problematic because Steam couldn't handle the brunt of everyone installing it (despite there being some early adopters of the platform) as well as HL2 (Steam's first Big Heap Release), prompted Wardell to concoct a litany of posts extolling the virtues of Stardock and Chet (definitely in the employ of Valve by that time) took serious issue with it. There was something else related to The Political Machine game (maybe) which triggered a flame war and Tom deleted the entire thread.

The only real dick move Chet ever pulled that I saw was back on OMM. He shut the site down for a few months to overhaul the thing. After bringing it back he asked for donations, received several, then shut it down forever a month or two later. Then he followed us to McMaster's site to call us all losers. That was sort of odd. Any other personal interactions I ever had with him were perfectly civil and decent, though. POE must have been a bitch to set up and maintain, I am not surprised he ended up working on Steam.

You've got to be kidding me. I remember getting into an argument with him over his ArmA 2 review, which he ended up describing as "broken" (not an unfair comment about the singleplayer campaign, but unrepresentative and uninformative about the rest of the game), based on his experience on his computers.

He was worthless. He harrased me via PM numerous times about not supporting the forum and other such nonsense with his whole "I'm gonna tell Tom on yooooou!" shtick. (This was back when the "blocking ads" controversy was first raging; funny thing was I didn't block ads either.) I ended up sending him proof that I had used the variou referral links to support QT3 over the years, simply with e-mail addresses that weren't tied to the board. He shut up for a few years until:

Years later he'd randomly PM or reply to me things like "Are you gay? Why are you still stalking me after all these years?" when I'd participate in a thread that happened to involve him, such as that big one concerning POE generating revenue by linking to other peoples' content, if POE needed/got permission, and so forth; just by being in the thread I'd get his lame-ass mails. Once he jumped in to one of the bannination threads to reveal the big news that I had changed nicks some years ago and this was a violation of Tom's rules. It was a violation of Tom's rules, but by this time Albert Woo had been generating his chart for some years and Tom was well aware of the change and by the way so is everyone else on the forum. That finally shut him up for good, at least to me.

eta: You know I think I remember what started it all. Chet had edited (not deleted spam or an offensive image, but actually edited the content) a post from someone assuming Tom's editorial privilege and tried to kind of paper it over with something like "I'm sure that's what Tom would have done". I and a few others called him out on it, in particular since he had administrative rights to the forum and backend (as host) does not make him an editorial admin. Yeah so he latched on to that and forevermore I was the guy who accused him of hacking his own database or something. It's all coming back now. sigh

Oh my fucking God, I forgot all about that thing. D:

Yeah, me too.

Your defense of Chick is A-OK with me, BlueJackalope, but I hope you suffer eternal torment for reminding me of the dancing cheese guy.

I was curious about this since I was a regular poster on that newsgroup at the time. Here is the original thread started by Mark, for those interested (courtesy of the Google archive). I must have read that and ignored it, heh.

The Qt3 Culture FAQ thread might be a good place to practice internet archeology. He rounded up a lot of good things there.

Actually, the most interesting thing there was that the place opened in 2000, and that we were using the old software for 2 years, because the current software has join dates in 2002 at the earliest.

Regardless of chet's history - and he's one prickly motherfucker - it's a shame that he's basically unable to post on QT3 these days without being jumped on by anyone with an axe to grind about Valve.

DEAR CHROME AXE IS A VALID WORD YOU FUCKHEAD

Although that does remind me of that one time that I had a go at WarrenM for something Epic-related and mumble mumble hypocrite mumble mumble he totally deserved it mumble

Made that more apropos.

And now he's banned.

Now I miss Umac. :(

YALL motherfuckers hold serious grudge.

that way madness lies

These days most grudges just fade into one another as I can no longer remember the details or why it was important, so I'm inclined to be forgiving.

But the collective memory in the group is pretty much one giant Big Book of Grudges as oral history. Someone always remembers.

Sniff his butt.

Circling back around to an earlier topic, I was just now thinking that I would pay good cash monies to see Tom debating Zero Dark Thirty with Lizard King.

This was my fave DrCrypt post. I'll put it in spoilers because it's awesomely, awesomely offensive. It's in reference to the Gone Gold diaspora where Golders were trying to assimilate into other web-boards after GG disintegrated:

That's probably the meanest thing I've ever read, but I laughed for like half-an-hour. What I'm saying is: I'm a terrible person.

Before I die I hope to see the Great Exodus version of Albert's chart.

Haha. Vetarnias is being a jackwagon at Qt3 again, and someone brought up that he'd been banned from BF. charmtrap noted that it's pretty bad to be banned from a "Japanese visual novel forum." Cue poor confused Vetarnias squealing that somebody must have stolen his name because he never signed up for no "Japanese visual novel forum."

Who can forget:

Wash dies.

The chickish logic against spoiler tags after that bomb confused me for a long time, I ended up deciding that Tom was just unable to install forum modifications and just wrapped that inability in an Internet-sophistic contruct to conceal that critical inability in a "new media" guy.

One other fucking thing. You can't read an ORAL history.

After all the autofellatio about how grammatastical and erudonculous we all are, YOU THINK YOU LOT OF TURD HURDLING CHUM CHUGGERS WOULD KNOW THAT!

(turd hurdling chum chuggening chim chim cheroo, the next bit is vulgar so I'll just spare yoooooou!)

Studs Terkel would beg to differ.

Anything ever said to Warren in a negative way was a good thing. I have never met a more loathsome motherfucker as that guy.

And I had entirely forgotten about him until now. I got all riled up just hearing Warren.

I have read several. That's the thing about speech - you can write it down as text.

DrCrypt famously spoiled a film of high geek-interest on the weekend of its release.

There was much wailing.

Looks like Aeon221 was talking out of his ass again.

ECUSE ME WHILE I BEER. AND I CHALLENGE YOU FUCKERS TO COMPOSE AN ORAL HISTORY OF A FORUM WHERE ALL COMMUNICATION IS TEXT.

MOTHERFUCKER!