No, he's right, it's pretty bad. Just because a poster is ESL does not mean they stop learning how to use capital letters and periods, I'm pretty sure that shit is universal. The politics section has half a dozen active threads in the past week, and another 75% of those are Vetarnias posts bitching about liberal techno-utopians and America's exporting of its shitty culture. The other half are posts bitching him out, and Sinij. What's strange is that for all the people kicked out that supposedly disrupted the forum... trolling and bad faith posts are now a norm in the gaming section, as if there were several dozen zero-content ingrates hiding in the shadows just waiting for their time to usher in a new Pedantowar 2012.
The imbeciles who infest the front page whenever Tom posts a review which metacritic decides to feature really baffle me. Admittedly, this happens everywhere, not just QT3.
Really? I thought that was from a joke thread, where someone was trying to get all Poirot on Kitsune's disappearance. kk, now it comes back to me. http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=35507&highlight=kitsune The triumphant return of JMJ. Holy shit that post was funny.
He's gotten pretty impressive about it. That last, in the immediate aftermath of the Newton shooting, in a thread on the subject. Yes, the exact, precise, same emotionally retarded thing he was banned for here. (well, one of them.) This can't be real, it's some kind of psychological experiment. Also, he thinks I should stop writing about things on my blog, too. Despite his saying on his own blog a few weeks earlier: I would thus question why he is even bothering to read my blog, which is a now very infrequently updated journal of a person who works on games. At least the person he's responding to, although apparently still chapped in the nethers that I actually took a job doing things over a decade ago instead of continuing to write for free on the internet, apparently enjoys games and gaming and would rather I write as I used to. Yet Vetarnias, to all apparent evidence, hates literally everything about me, from my nationality to my vocation to my career to my writing. Why would he bother? Oh, right. He likes being miserable and wants you to know. In blatherskite detail. Backwards, insular, arrogant man.
You're right. The only conclusion that makes sense is that he hates himself. I'm just not sure whether or not he knows it. It seems like the cognitive dissonance should be burning a hole in his head, but I think that's ignored and then turns into the anger of a man who thinks he has the knowledge needed to change things, and then is exasperated that his methods aren't working. Except it's never him that is ineffective, it's always you, or the forum, or the country or culture. He should have been an art critic (and it's not too late for him), instead of trying desperately to re-insert himself into relevance by hovering around the people he hates and trying to get them to listen to him.
Honest question here if I may, Lum: have you engaged with Tom to ask what is his thinking behind allowing such a mortally toxic member to continue on his forum? I don't know if forum-topics are like a topic for polite non-discussion for you guys so maybe not, so I'm just asking out of general curiousity.
The last time I spoke with Tom he made his opinion on the way I ran this forum pretty clear, so I don't think my feedback on the way he runs his would be taken well.
I think it's easy enough to imagine. I suspect it was superficially friendly, and how of course he was welcome to run his living room however he liked but it was really disappointing. The usual passive-aggressive text over subtext of How Dare You in that kind of situation. I've seen Vetarnias' type around in various enjoyably unproductive hangout places on the net from Usenet days on. There's a certain type of person who gets emotionally vested in the idea that they're an intellectual because they may read whatever philsophy (let's talk Wittgenstein!) or history or whatnot and therefore proclaim themselves to be an autodidact (that's always a warning sign) and probably have developed a larger vocabulary than the common man. Which isn't exactly a high bar to clear, but stuffing one's head with words doesn't actually make those words do anything interesting, so what you get instead is a kind of one-man cargo cult of intellectualism, generally increasingly bitter that their planes of higher thought don't take off even without the bamboo treadmill. I think I lost control of that analogy along the way.
It's bizarre to me that he would have any opinion of the way you run this forum, but maybe he's lurking and reading everything we say. (Hi, Tom!)
Unless he's pointed here for whatever reason (which at this point is most likely going to occur if Vetarnias barks around about it), I don't think he does.
But Tom would never stoop to uttering opinions that aren't based on prolonged rigorous study... would he? So either he's reading the forum and spouting off to Lum about how its run, or he's spouting off to Lum about how Lum runs the forum but has no idea what he's talking about. (I'm sorry, I know this is tacky but it just seems really odd that Tom would know / care about BF.)
In fairness, he could be reading the forum and spouting off to Lum about how Lum runs the forum but still has no idea what he's talking about.
The idea that Tom wouldn't know about this place is pretty silly. It's not like we left quietly in the night without leaving a trace. That said, I imagine Tom pre-judges the forum based on the fact that it became a refuge for everyone he didn't like and leaves it at that. No need to actually browse BF, he knows the quality of posters that Lum allows here, so obviously it's dreadful and hateful.
Why in the world would anyone assume Tom isn't aware of everything that goes on here? If he wanted to read every single thing, even this dumbass thread obsessing over him, he can. One could assume he just chooses not to, but I don't know why one WOULD assume that. If there were a thread about me on a breakaway forum, I'd read it.
Because that would be creepy and weird to spend much time reading a forum filled with people that you banished from your own forum, people whom you've decreed as unfitting for your living room. If you threw a group of people out of a party at your own house, and they went over to a party hosted by another friend, would you head right over to that party and peer in the windows while lurking in the shadows outside?
Tom is too lazy to read and moderate his own forum. Like he's going to spend time looking at anyone else's, particularly this one.
No, that would be weird. I'd probably bribe/coerce someone who went to the other party into telling me about it. Maybe send a spy if everyone who left hated me.
Sounds like we need to find the spy. I accuse Hanacker! His clever ploy to reveal the existance of the spy is obviously a ruse to divert attention from himself. Well, your ruse has failed!
Nah. It would have to be someone nobody knows or trusts. Someone who hardly ever posted at Qt3 but acts as though he read every post ever. Someone older like Tom who looks down on you kids and your rare beef and ear-bleeding 80's music. Someone who just showed up here one day, as though dropped in a balloon by the west wind. Someone . . . Uhm, err, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
While in most cases yes, I would be perfectly willing to let things hang (since I'm all about my things hanging), in this case back in April I brought a particularly contentious thread on BF involving cross-forum drama between BF and Qt3 to Tom's attention. I won't divulge our discussion since it's not my place to do so, but I will say that I strongly believe that is the first and most likely last time Tom has ever visited BF, and his opinions could probably quite easily be derived from the general gestalt of BF among Qt3's current posters; namely that it's a wretched hive of scum and Japanese visual novels with no moderation whatsoever and where Adree is allowed to roam free to consume surprised Christians.
