My reaction, somewhat less articulate than Patrick's, was basically "Entitlement much?" I complain less than that about things I do pay to read.

Of course, now I see that the offending comment has been deleted --- not just disemvowelled, but removed entirely. That sort of sanitizing moderation is one of the things that makes a blog less interesting to visit. Alas.

The BoingBoing comment threads are a bizarre place. The instant they started back up, there was a sizable minority of people on them who already had that peculiar sense of entitlement. Why four people so obviously decent and aw-shucks thrilled about a lot of the world around them should attract such a crowd of naysayers is beyond me.

As for "oversensitive," sorry, no sale.

Does anyone really need to know exactly who they are?

Judith, #7: Teresa's work with Boing Boing has been extensively and openly discussed on Making Light. What I said about Boing Boing applies here. This is a blog, not the New York Times, and just as neither you nor I are responsible for what we do in other people's dreams, I'm also not going to take any crap for failing to live up to your imagination of what disclaimers I "should" post on my personal web site.

The fact that there are so many people out there willing to give "free ice cream" does not, in any way, mean that they are required to do so. If I, as a reader, no longer like the flavor, I have no right to demand they change it. Besides, it's not as though there aren't plenty of other places giving out free ice cream.

Or cheeseburgers. :)

I gather it's not quite that blindingly obvious to everyone. Well, tough. Welcome to the real Internet.

As for whether or not Cory can be criticized for having 6% of his posts be about him: sure, anyone can criticize anyone they want, including me criticizing people who complain about free content on the web.

I have to say, however, that I've noticed that a lot of his posts are about things that could be considered as 'promoted' by the post. Clearly I'm not the only one to have formed that opinion. My attitude has been, well it's his blog and if he wants to do that he can, but if it gets much more blatent then that may be one less blog I read.

Due to constant exposure to spin, I can't help but ask if the quoted 3 of his last 55 posts have been about 'himself' does that mean that 4 of his last 56 posts have been like that?

By the way, you need to do something about spam and this blog. The comment form requires an email address and posts it to the site thus forcing its exposure. It took under 24 hours for me to get the first spam to the (unique) email address I used for my first comment on here. Spam to that unique address now represents 5% of the spam I get (and I get a lot).

where in response to the question "WWCDD (what would cory doctorow do)" on an RIAA post the response was:
"Complain. Incessantly. Maybe throw in some indignant posturing. And then, gradually but with utter certainty, become distracted by knitted papercraft subway anagram cozies like a raccoon is distracted by something shiny. Then get a bad haircut and maybe another Apple tattoo, masturbate in a fit of gut-wrenching loneliness and call it a night."

somebody actually wrote that! ON METAFILTER!!!

should definitely have started: my incredibly crappy story of which I am deeply ashamed. This is how I announce anything of mine and it has been a real winner for me, I highly recommend it.

Put something in as a URL; it will appear instead of the e-mail address.

Fruitcake-maps? Again?

So not only are most of the Cory haters a bunch of wieners they are also an extremely parvenu bunch of wieners that cannot measure up to the level of fortitude exemplified by me in my own Cory hating.

Ok, a confession here - I am seriously thinking of quitting the whole hate Cory hobby because most of the people who do it are technically douchenozzles, by my reading of the douchenozzle spec. And I have read that spec, thoroughly.

I have already resolved not to hate on Xeni because it would be unchivalrous to do so. Maybe I can move to hating Mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yN_oWSEizec

And, just to let you know, By the way, you need to do something about spam and this blog isn't really phrased in the most polite way. We are guests here. Try again.

actually if that strategy was worth it for Spambot writers to take into account breaking the strategy would be trivial. That spambot writers have no need to solve this problem does not mean that it is a surefire strategy.

Since the answer to that question is, literally, right in front of you, it would seem that you have no interest in the facts that would conflict with your opinions.

scroll up to the top. First sentence, second paragraph.

Yeah, it's hard to believe that NOSPAM actually works. It's a one-line perl script to remove it. (Of course, what isn't?)

I used to write my email address backwards (ude.yelekreb.htam@tja), but that turns out to be a bit too effective. Real people have trouble reversing things. These days, I just settle for some nonsense that googles well.

Patrick -- and all of you people -- as one of your biggest fans, I have to say you should stop using this space to push your own opinions, interests, and viewpoints. There is something more than a little ugly about defending someone you have some kind of (cough, cough) professional relationship with -- I mean, what's in it for you, huh? I'm here as your captive, worshipful audience, and now, I just don't know . . . I think you are leading me astray! Where will I go? What will I do? Who'll be my role model now that my role model is gone? I demand that you respond to my concerns with a full accounting of your online activity for the last year. Otherwise I will consider you guilty of self-expression outside the well-established boundaries of blogger ethics.

Did I get a BINGO???

Wait . . . the game was to replicate the stupidity of the Boing Boing thread on this thread, only with irony, right? Please tell me there was irony.

Recursive discourse is so confusing.

As soon as I realize a Boingboing post is about a CC work being translated into a language I don't read, I move on, so I don't have an opinion about whether Cory was being too immodest in this particular one. I see those, and I think it is Cory crowing about how well the Creative Commons idea is working. "Look, more people are doing more great stuff with the Creative Commons stuff I'm putting out there! Isn't Creative Commons great?" It doesn't read as self-congratulation to me, it reads as excitement that the idea is working. Does he post about other CC work getting translated occasionally? Less often, I'm sure, because no one keeps him informed about it, but hasn't it happened at least once or twice?

There has been no support of torture in this thread yet people, everybody remain calm.

As Boing Boing is "a directory of wonderful things", there is something a little crass about frequently posting about oneself. Of course Doctorow has some wonderful things, but the ratio of Cory to non-Cory bits seems a bit excessive, especially when compared to other BB editors.

If you really meant 'in the last week', you really should have said so at the time, instead of complaining later that we misunderstood what you said. Your best defense is to put in those qualifiers, rather than make absolute statements.

(And yes, "I'm Your Biggest Fan" are the creepiest words in the English language.)

I highly doubt that anyone who runs a blog tags their entries with "Stuff that some yay-hoo might get bent out of shape about" so as to be able to run some script and spit out a number of how many posts they made that some yay-hoo might get bent out of shape about.

Do you?

And if you take issue with the lack of data, then again that's simply more of the "flaming Cory for doing what any other blogger does". No one keeps those kinds of statistics on their own blog, because it's stupid statistics to try and divine what may get some yay-hoo bent out of shape.

That's the problem with yay-hoos: you never know what's gonna make them bend.

You want to know how many posts are about Cory versus non-Cory, and you'll toss a fit if the ratio doesn't meet your satisfaction. Some other yay-hoo might get bent due to an underrepresentation of posts about bagpipes, cause, you know, there just isn't enough talk about bagpipes out there.

What's the saying, make something foolproof and the world builds a better fool.

Is it me, or does Boingboing attract an equal number of wonderful things and Internet nutjobs? I'm glad to see comments back there, but (without wanting to get all brown mustachey) they're nothing like as interesting or informative as ML's.

thnk th bttm ln s "d nt prvd nythng thr thn pstv fdbck r thy'll dlt/dsmvwl/bn y."

ts rlly sd tht sch plt, tm, blncd crtcsm ws trtd s hrshly.

Fannish entitlement. It's an amazing thing.

I think most of what I was going to say to you has now been said, but I will add that "a directory of wonderful things" is just BB's self-description. If Cory thinks it's wonderful that one of his stories has been translated into Swedish, he has every right to post about it. If you don't think that qualifies as "wonderful," then you can skip that post or go elsewhere...or you can whine about it in comments, but IMO that's pretty gauche.

If I'm getting free ice cream, and they give me butter pecan (my favorite) frequently, but occasionally serve peppermint (I cannot STAND peppermint ANYTHING), it's unseemly of me to complain that peppermint is being served too often, or to suggest that they serve peppermint somewhere else. "Beggars can't be choosers," as my mom taught me.

I think you're thinking of yourself as a customer of BB, and I think that's wrong. You're a guest in their space, and if they don't like what you say they don't have to put it up on their wall (by publishing your comment). Ordinarily they are quite moderate about these things, but there are lines you can't cross.

If you visited my house, you could play with the letters on my refrigerator door. If you arrange them so they spell "Christopher is a duh-head," I won't object, but if you arrange them so they say "there's too much lemon pickle in this refrigerator; please get rid of it" I will not only not let that stand, I probably won't let you come back to my house, because you've just been extremely rude. I didn't ask you to EAT the lemon pickle, after all; you just saw it in the refrigerator while you were looking for the mayo (or whatever).

I respectfully submit that readers and commenters on a blog are much more like guests in someone's home than customers in a store, or readers of a magazine. Also, I can subtitle my blog "Discussions exclusively of marmota monax and its ability, or lack of same, to propel large pieces of cellulose through the air, along with hypothetical questions of degree" and then write about nothing but food, and anyone who complained about the lack of papers on marmota monax could really just go to hell.

BuffySquirrel 42: Yeah, or the classic "I know who you are and I saw what you did," which really will scare just about anyone. Doesn't matter if "what you did" was Swiffering your living room.

NoneSuch 43: It's possible for a critique to be rude by its content. Cory has a right to blog whatever he wants. People who read a blog are his (usually welcome) guests. If they don't like what they read, they're entitled to complain—within the limits of courtesy.

It's discourteous to complain that someone's blog posts are too much about hir own life. Not to mention ridiculous. I did not see the post that was deleted, but Cory's response to it was quite measured, though his annoyance showed through. Flying Squid, for hir part, was gracious in the posts of hirs that remain.

The Internet, I find, is not so big
that I cannot poison the parish pump,
upon my kind hosts' best intentions jump
and on their bare heads dance a merry jig.
Here I can come clad both in mask and wig
and drop my anger in a single lump,
in the most public space just take a dump
and then complain when I am called a pig.
It seems the way to exorcise our ghosts
is just to shout that life is never fair
to those of us who lack honour and shame.
You feel much better annoying your hosts,
letting your flatulence pollute the air,
and that way others will think of your name.
The whole thing's nothing but a childish game
of shouts and shadows, loud and anxious boasts,
but nothing matters since my anger's bare.
I'm not the guilty one. I'll take no blame
for what I've written in my silly posts.
You cannot shut me up. You would not dare.
And so one boring life is given worth,
while others wonder at the monstrous birth.

Ys t's thr blg, bt fl ppl shldn't b cnsrd, prvdd th cmmnts rn't ffnsv.

ls, d fnd t bt hypcrtcl tht BB hs pstd svrl ntrs n cnsrshp rltng t Ggl r Ytb, bt whn Bng Bng ds t, w'r tld tht thy cn d whtvr thy wsh, nd chw t ths wth n ppsng pnn fr hvng sns f nttlmnt.

ls fl tht th "dsmvwlng" t b smwht mmtr, s sw ths blg s cllctn f prfssnls wh wldn't wst tm dng sch thng.

Booch, they don't waste their time doing it. They hired someone to do it for them. Someone, by the way, who is your Hostess here.

Somewhere Kurt Colbane is saying, "I told ya so." (here we are, now entertain us).

Fr thrs, prhps nfmlr wth trm d hmnm:

n d hmnm rgmnt, ls knwn s rgmntm d hmnm (Ltn: "rgmnt t th prsn", "rgmnt gnst th mn") cnssts f rplyng t n rgmnt r fctl clm by ttckng r pplng t chrctrstc r blf f th prsn mkng th rgmnt r clm, rthr thn by ddrssng th sbstnc f th rgmnt r prdcng vdnc gnst th clm. Th prcss f prvng r dsprvng th clms s thrby sbvrtd, nd th rgmntm d hmnm wrks t chng th sbjct. (Wkpd)

ll fr xprssng n pnn bt n dtr. Fr shm y lkly lbrls. gn, rsn mch?

'Marmota monax' ... oh, my aching ribs, that had me nearly on the floor. Do you ... never mind, yes, you did have to.

(BTW, save the peppermint icecream for me.)

I wish I knew when and how this phase change happens. But Cory's long overdue for it. He's not just some guy with a blog, anymore. I know he wishes that he still was.

About those last two paragraphs of yours ...
(1) We know quite well what ad hominem arguments are. Just about every troll or wannabe troll uses them.
(2) Are you always this rude to your fellow guests?
Just asking, before Our Hostess decides to bring out the disemvoweller.

Oh, hogwash. You're whining about BoingBoing. I called you on your whining. You want to make it an argument about some linguistic technicality because you don't want to make it about the fact that you're whining.

Waaah! Cory talks to much about himself! We need hard data to prove Cory talks to much about himself! Why doesn't Cory have hard data to prove that he talks too much about himself!

#22: what is the ratio of Cory to non-Cory postings?

#32: the question then refers to the overall ratio.

#47: And, btw, compiling that data is actually quite easy.

Then shut up and do it rather than whining that no one did it for you.

Booch says he views it as A) censorship and B) not worthy of a professional's time. Except that A) the comment is still there to be pieced together if'n you really care about that sort of thing, and B) that is how the professional in question has chosen to deal with all outbursts of that nature. They (in this case, Teresa) have to deal with it in some way...and this way has proven effective in other venues (namely here). It doesn't ignore a problem, nor does it give extra oxygen to a troll's flame. It merely makes it difficult for a troll to propagate their message.

In this case, the folks in question may or may not be trolls, but seriously, how many times does the internet need to bang this lesson into people's heads? People's blogs are their home turf and dictating somebody's behaviour on their home turf is rude. I don't think Boing Boing has misrepresented itself as being anything other than a collection of links to things some people might find interesting.

Also, famously, you can catch more flies with honey, or something like that anyway. There are certainly more positive, less rude ways to get content you like up on Boing Boing, one of which is to compliment the stories you do like. (Although all things in moderation. I bet even John Scalzi, just to pull out a random example, gets tired of hearing that Bacon Cat was the best thing EVAR.)

I don't know anything about your comments. I do think it's a little precious to surf over to a blog which is about things that Cory Doctorow thinks are wonderful and get bent that occasionally some of them are his own.

I was thinking of making a comment to the effect that coming in here to defecate on the carpet because one is not allowed to do so on BoingBoing is really classy (not), but you've said it so much better than I ever could. Cheers!

I figure Remus @55 is right, though. +4 Insightful.

Xopher@48, that was the funniest thing I've read in a long time. I don't actually normally laugh out loud when reading things online, and very rarely have to take off my glasses to wipe the tears out of my eyes. Good one.

Alex Cohen #63: YOMANK!

Grg, yr nm cllng dsn't mnt t mch f n rgmnt. nd ys, yr rrr n rdng frmd th bss nd sbsqnt fr fr yr flm. Dfnsv prd? Rnt wy, bt myb y wnt t ctlly ddrss th pnt. Smply dsmssng m s whnng dsn't qt ct t.

Trs, th cmmnt md ws fr dffrnt pst nd smply nvr md t t pblctn, yt sm f my pnts wr ddrssd n Dctrw's rspns t Sqd.

Hv fn wth th tpc ll. Ths s gttng tds. T.

I have noticed that there are a lot of comments from him that promote his other work, but that's probably just because a lot is happening in his life currently. Sometimes things run in trends (political blogs and elections, sports around the Olympics and World Cup), and it doesn't surprise me that once in a while a lot of things happen in a short amount of time.

Now, if he only promoted his other work, then that might be a problem, but if you're going to offer criticism, try to make it constructive criticism. He's a writer, I'm sure he can take a critique of his work.

Now we have CeCe here, being condescending (though not very well) about the fine points of language, and explaining that Cory talks about himself too much. This is nonsense. Cory spends most of his time talking about other things. So do the other boingers. In fact, the frequency with which they talk about themselves is unusually low for nonpolitical bloggers.

Besides, CeCe talks about himself/herself a lot oftener than the boingers do.

Upshot: I'm not buying it.

Bryan (23) and Fragano (49), thank you for your reassertion of civilized values.

CeCe (29), are you familiar with the word "bingo"? Also, in re (32) and (38): Greg, he's yours if you want him.

Folk on LJ (41): I'm working on it. The commenters are slowly getting the idea of reading and responding to each other.

Booch (50), reconsider the part about "provided the comments aren't offensive."

CeCe (53): "I chose to make a fairly polite comment about the frequency of his self-referential posts." You did nothing of the sort. How far this statement depart from truth depends on which one of the disemvowelled posters you were -- assuming you were one at all.

CeCe, I think your point -- the ratio of Cory to non-Cory bits seems a bit excessive -- has been heard. Most people so far have disagreed with it. It's your opinion, you have a right to it, but your implication that you are being reasonable and other people are attacking you unfairly is unsupported by any evidence. The ratio of Cory to non-Cory posts at BoingBoing proves nothing; if the ratio were 10 to 1, it would still not prove that Cory is posting about his own achievements too much, because what is "excess" is a subjective judgment.

As is the judgment by P. J. that you were rude. It was not an ad hominem argument, because you did not make an argument, you simply expressed an opinion. You have been disagreed with and told that you are perceived as rude.

The music stops, and one of you is now without a chair.

Since you said goodbye, I'm probably wasting time here. Oh well...

Our thoughts are parallel; I found myself wishing Susanne was about so I could ask her what the music was like for the ancient dance called the Troll Flounce.

"Teresa, the comment I made was for a different post and simply never made it to publication, yet some of my points were addressed in Doctorow's response to Squid."

Second, your initial claim regarding your status, made in a comment thread on Making Light that was discussing a specific Boing Boing entry and the comment thread pertinent thereto, was:

"As someone whose anonymous comment criticizing Doctorow's frequent posting of self-referential articles was moderated and denied publication, I think the point of the criticism is missed by his defenders."

Do feel free to go away. Arguing with a liar is a waste of time.

Finally:

"Have fun with the topic all. This is getting tedious. Ta."

In this day and age I think that people are used to becoming emotionally invested in things that are not tangible. I myself am coming off a long term commitment to a web community. I understand that people can form deep emotional bonds with the things that they interact with.

Is it an amazing thing? Perhaps, but I don't think it is that odd. In the publishing industry, Debra is on one side of a very clear division. With online communities (and BoingBoing is a community by virtue of their setup and their solicitation of leads) the line is a little less distinct. I don't find fannish entitlement in any situation all that surprising, least of all in these online communities.

*helpless laughter*

You wanted to know how many posts Cory made about himself, ever. You then said at #47 that it would be easy to figure out. So I told you to shut up and start counting.

Your point has been addressed. Let me know when you have a number.

Continued blather from your end means that either you lied at #47 and it really is a difficult task or it's an easy thing to do, but you'd rather hear yourself talk than actually do the thing you think is so important.

If you actually shut up until you report back with a number of Cory's total posts, ever, compared to his total self-referencing posts, ever, then I will submit a public apology to you on this thread.

Any post by you prior to you reporting that number forfeits my offer.

I swear, some people are like slinkies. Absolutely useless. But fun to push down stairs.

[a dreadful way to express "Please would you consider..."]

... take personal responsibility for the sense of entitlement that has readers telling blog-owners what to write about.

After all, as is well known, here readers can demand a sonnet or sestina or some-such-verse on any odd topic, and it will be obligingly written within the day.

That sort of thing raises expectations, and when other blogs can't raise their game to the same level, there's bound to be disappointment.

Now what I think you really should write, just to make up for that, are the first five chapters about an immortal from Atlantis, suitable to kick off a five-book series. Preferably something original, mind you. Not necessarily something good. Perhaps along the lines of this:

Ayup, I remember back in the days of good old Atlantis, the floating island that would lean east in the morning and lean west in the evening, floating from pole to pole over the course of six months and then back again, how I would have to trudge to school and back again every day through six feet of snow, uphill both ways....

This you call polite?

Incidentally, I'd never read 0wnz0red before, and had thought I had. So if all this furor hadn't kicked up, I wouldn't have -- and I find I really like it. So really, Yeago, I guess I have to reluctantly thank you.

Ta!

CeCe at #47: Reason much? Enjoy your righteous indignation. Ta.

Yes, ladies and gents, there's the flounce. Righteous indignation indeed!

But wait, at #53, s/he's back! The re-flounce! Fine form, for a first-timer - we've obvioulsy got a potential champion in the making here!

And at #67, the re-re-flounce! Such ambition in one so young! Is it nature or nurture? Sheer talent or hard-won application?

This has been Vian, reporting on the inaugural Making Light Make a Pillock Of Yourself Competition, where we've seen the debut of a doughty young contender for the title ...

Michael 64: Thanks. You mean the marmota monax thing, I suppose?

CeCe 67: Asking you if you're habitually rude is not an argumentum ad hominem. Answering your criticism of Cory by saying "Yeah, well you're a [religious or ethnic group], so who cares what you think" would be such an argument. You misunderstand the term if you think P J was employing one.

Lila 71: That's exactly what I said, but in academic language.

glinda 75: *fiendish chortle*

Sometimes it's as important to maintain the appearance of fairness as it is to be fair, especially when people are already looking for something to be annoyed about.

In light of Doctorow's oft-expressed belief that the answer to bad speech is not censorship but more speech, perhaps this could have been avoided by leaving both the complaint and Cory's response untouched, then refusing to approve anything further on the topic from either side.

Of course, everything looks clearer with the benefit of hindsight.

Thank you for writing this. I had been bothered by the fandom entitlement radiation on those posts for a while, and truly troubled by the bizarre, hostile, & self righteous attitude of some of the posters.

I haven't seen anyone mention it yet, but Eric Burns wrote an excellent (if discursive) essay a while back on Entitlement and the Modern Fandom, just substitute "Cory Doctrow" for "Brad Anderson" and "BoingBoing" for "Marmaduke" and you're all set:

Almost all fandom members feel a certain sense of entitlement. This is normal. This is healthy. This is even slightly legitimate. The overall feeling is "I have invested something of myself into Marmaduke. I evangalize Marmaduke. I spend a portion of my day on Marmadukish things. I affirm Brad Anderson. I deserve some recognition for this." And yeah, they do deserve some recognition. They certainly deserve Brad Anderson saying "guys, thank you so much for supporting Marmaduke. It means a lot to me that you like the strip."

And... well, that's about it. They're already getting Marmaduke for free (or for the cost of their newspaper). They don't get part-ownership of Marmaduke by virtue of liking to read it. And if they offer Brad Anderson sex and he takes it, that just means that Brad Anderson got some. It doesn't mean they get to dictate what Marmaduke would or wouldn't do. The majority of Fandom members get that.

There is a minority, however, that dives into Entitlement, butt naked and way over their heads.

The thing is that I don't think anyone reasonable thinks anything horribly unfair took place. Some trolls jumped out from under the bridge to feed on small children, and they were cut down in their tracks.

The only ones I know of who are crying "no fair" are the trolls who were denied their supper. And a troll will never call anything fair unless it involves them eating small children.

P J Evans, #54, particularly if it has bits of peppermint candy in it!

(Somewhere in that is a "just kidding.")

I am your biggest fan . . . .

(Or by using "censor" to refer to actions that have nothing to do with a governmental agency, but that's another issue.)

nd thy cnsr nythng tht dsn't gr wth thm.

Cory: This cool thing happened with one of my stories and it proves that CC works. This kicks ass! I'm excited!
Commenter: You talk about yourself too much and that's lame.

Whoa, hold on. Wrong context, my friend.

It reminds of a thread here on ML. Patrick posted an entry about Teresa getting a job with Federated Media. Most of us responded in the most appropriate way (i.e. "Congratulations"), but after a 100 posts or so, someone posts a comment to the effect of "FM is like a pay per post scheme or something, and that's bad."

Again, not appropriate.

As has been referenced many times in this thread, people's blogs are like their homes. Nobody likes to take shit from a guest in their home. It's amazing that Cory and the Nielsen-Hayden's let some much crap go on before putting their foot down.

There are plenty of good places to express your views and opinions on anything you choose. So exercise some discretion. Find a relevant post (i.e. a post titled 'How much self pimping is too much?'), find an open thread, or, better yet, start a thread in your own blog (no, you won't have the readership BoingBoing or ML or The Whatever have. Deal with it.) Don't crap on someone's carpet, you may find that you've worn out your welcome.

This is obviously different than expressing a contrary opinion than the one expressed by the blog author.

Good form:
Host: I think the Ford Taurus is the best car ever.
Guest: The Toyota Camry is better.

Bad form:
Host: I just bought a 2007 Ford Taurus. I've been wanting one for long time.
Guest: Ford's are lame, they break down all the time and guzzle gas. Toyota Camry's are better.

Please, use some judgement when posting comments.

t's cnsrshp whthr th gvrnmnt ds t r nt.

f y'r gng t cwr bhnd dctry, t lst gt yr dfntns rght.

t smply bls dwn t BB'rs bng cmpltly gnst ny typ f crtcsm.

Whch bgs th qstn, "Why d thy llw cmmnts t bgn wth?"

Dn't sk fr npt f y dn't wnt npt.

"Anyone who tells someone, directly or by implication, what that person ought to be writing on their own weblog is an asshole."

Gee, Scraps, that's what I've always called "an _argumentum ad hominem_" and also "argument by assertion", so you've lost the Debate on two counts.

Of course, your statement is also Perfectly Accurate and identifies & settles the crux of the discussion. This seems now to be a Thread that can be of value only for its potential tangents & digressions.

Now I think I'll go and fix some food for the two kittens that the neighborhood semi-feral cat has left in my back yard, and maybe nibble on a bit of 78% cacao dark chocolate for my own delictation.

I don't imagine misusing "to beg the question" is a square, but it sure is something.

"lrx s brd nd hck f nc gy" is terribly ambiguous: were the words "bored", "hack" or "hick", and "gay" -- or was I saying "lorax is a bard and a heck of a nice guy"?

Well, at least no one shot President Reagan in order to impress Cory.

Yet.

And calling someone immature is... what, exactly?

If you search her name,

Just to clarify, what is her name?

you'll find that a majority of her posts are more trollish and openly insulting than anything they actually censor.

Did you seriously bumble your way into this blog and not even know whose house you're insulting? Seriously. Look around you. Go outside and check the name on the mailbox.

And they censor anything that doesn't agree with them.

I like you. You're silly. You make me smile.

It's a big internet. Surely there are other places in it where you could choose to be.

Just because there's a box marked "Suggestions", doesn't mean you can drop your drawers, take a dump in it, and call it "input".

Don't like it? Buy your own press. Be as insightful, caustic, or funny as your personal talents allow (or can hire). With any luck, you'll attract your own audience of people who will think they're entitled to tell you how to run *your* press.

Cory
Huge selection, great deals on Cory items.
shopping.yahoo.com

And that leads to a page that starts out:

# Cory at Amazon.com - Buy books at Amazon.com. Low prices and easy shopping. Search the full text of books.
Amazon.com/books

# Cory Areaguide - Your Cory Areaguide for Cory.
crossvillagemi.areaguides.net

# Find A Cory, $9.95 - Get phone number, address & more on A Cory. Instant results.
www.peoplesearch.public-records-now.com

# Cory - Over 11 million pieces of china, crystal & silver - old & new.
www.replacements.com

# Mortgage Troubles? - Mortgage Help Available in Cory. Fast & Free.

Well, I thought it was funny....

If Cory will pay my mortgage, he's welcome to come post about himself on my blog!

f smthng s mmtr, "mrkd by r sggstng lck f mtrty", 'm frd thr's n ncr wy t sy t.

Hwvr, ntc my cmmnt hs bn rpld t t @96 wth nm cllng, @101 wth dsngns, snrky cmmnts nd @104 wth rdcls hyprbl.

'v ntcd tht ths blg hs lt f cnvrstn, bt n dbt. Myb tht's fn fr hr bt 'd ht t s t sprd t Bng Bng, whr frdm t spk, ncldng frdm t crtcz, s lwys ndrsd by th dtrs.

r t sd t b.

Well, at least no one shot President Reagan in order to impress Cory.

Yet.

Unless and until another Reagan (Ron? Michael?) takes office.

Lots of debate, friend, but no trolls.

Please don't miss the difference.

BTW, Teresa isn't the only moderator here. She's undoubtedly gone to sleep by now, but I haven't.

I came here because she linked it. I didn't realize it was also moderated by her.

It's not just moderated by Teresa; it's her personal blog. (One that she shares with others, but still.)

I've noticed that this blog has a lot of conversation, but no debate.

Are you making this call based on this thread alone?

That's fine, however. Conversation is good, not everything is a debate.

I have noticed that both you and CeCe refer to the editors of BoingBoing. Just so we're on the same page, they are not editors. BoingBoing is not a newspaper or magazine. It is a blog. They are content creators/authors, even posters is a better term. Yes, they may edit their posts or the comments, but they are not editors in that editing is not their primary function.

If you want a debate, here's my argument: Content creators have the right create, post, edit, or delete anything they so choose on their blogs, including comments. If a reader disagrees or dislikes the content of the blog or how it is managed, they are welcome to say so. If the blog owner, or his agent, tolerate it, one can even post his opinion on the blog itself, otherwise, they may post elsewhere.

Rebuttal?

And what does that say about you?

I've noticed that this blog has a lot of conversation, but no debate.

Since you just confessed this is your first time here (and your "view all by" reflects that as well), how, exactly, can you make any sweeping generalization about what goes on in this blog?

You didn't even realize who moderated this blog until we told you. So how exactly are we supposed to take your sweeping negative generalizations about this blog as being something based on your keen powers of observation when you have clearly demonstrated said powers are lacking?

And if your sweeping negative generalizations are NOT based on observation, aren't you, for all practical purposes, indistinguishable from a troll?

If you didn't notice that the BB moderator's name was Teresa Nielson Hayden

By the way, in post 94 you said:
It simply boils down to BB'ers being completely against any type of criticism.

And in post 109 you said:
I'd hate to see it spread to Boing Boing, where freedom to speak, including freedom to criticize, is always endorsed by the editors.

Which is it? Or do you think that the moderators are acting outside of the authority granted to them by the content creators? Or do you mean something else entirely? I'm confused.

Re: My mispelling Teresa's name. Oops. I should lower the resolution on my monitor if I'm going to post after 10pm. It looked like an 'o'.

This time change thing is a trip. Pyre's and Katherine's comments were inserted before other existing comments. Kinda screwed up the references to other posts. Oh well.

Xopher:

It's amazing
Trolls are fleeing
Flaming takes its toll
But in the comments

Greg:

Typing them quickly

Xopher:

I've got to keep control
I remember seeing the trolls flounce
Watching the postcount mount
The nonsense would stun me

Both:

And the vowels would be falling

All:

Let's do the Troll Flounce again
Let's do the Troll Flounce again

Narrator:

It's just a snark from the left

All:

And then a wank from the right

Narrator:

Put your hands on the keys

All:

Hit the send key in time
But it's "you're so immature"
That really drives you insane
Let's do the Troll Flounce again
Let's do the Troll Flounce again

Greg:

It's so easy
Their argument's cheesy
It's going to please me
To see them fall
Getting a Bingo
We have our own lingo
Can't outlast me
Having a ball.

Xopher:

With a bit of a bird flip

Greg:

It's better than bean dip

Xopher:

And piñatas are all fair game

Greg:

We'll give trolls education

Xopher:

Like there's strong moderation

All:

Let's do the Troll Flounce again
Let's do the Troll Flounce again

Fragano:

Well I was reading a blog saying just what I think
When a first-time flamer said I needed a shrink
I wrote a triolet, wrote a sestina too,
He stared at me with his brains turned to goo
Trolls meant nothing, never would again

Narrator:

It's just a snark from the left

All:

And then a wank from the right

Narrator:

Put your hands on the keys

All:

Hit the send key in time
But it's "you're so immature"
That really drives you insane
Let's do the Troll Flounce again
Let's do the Troll Flounce again

Can only snork in my whole-hearted appreciation of this post. Liquid throughout my sinus cavities leaves me unable to do more.

There are a LOT of posts at Boing Boing that rub me the wrong way. And judging the people by the blog, I doubt I'd really get on with any of them. And sometimes, I get a bit irritated because their blog should CLEARLY be about "x" instead of "y". And I've even been tempted to comment to that effect. But I always stop.

Why? Because what would be the point? It's *their* blog. They aren't my upsatairs neighbours being loud. They write a blog. And it is, in my view, often self-indulgent (in a bad way) or boring or pointless. So what. Their blog, not mine. I read it in Google Reader and zip through the whole thing in a couple of minutes once a day. I get the tidbits I like and ignore everything else. And nobody has to put up with MY self-indulgent twadle that criticises THEIRS. I think we can agree that less twadle is a victory for everyone.

All that said, I am still composing the ultimate Boing Boing parody post IN MY MIND where each Boinger (?) gets a Nash Metropolian and then writes about it.

Teresa's (and my) approach to online moderation isn't remotely about being "fair to all views." Some views are wankery. Some arguments aren't so much trenchant as tiresome. The object of the game is to create a space where good conversation flourishes. If some tendentious dingbats feel they've been unfairly shut out, that's a bonus a reasonable price to pay.

(As for the charge that there's "no debate" on Making Light: snort.)

If you want a place where your every word is golden, start your own blog. And I'm pretty sure every one of the Boingers will be right in there fighting for your continued right to do so.

This is an interesting comment. As a reader and only very occasional commenter, I see a lot of debate on this blog.

What I don't see very often are belligerence, aggression, innuendo, narcissism, dishonesty, and general spite. Mostly because when they do turn up they're beaten back by force of reasonable argument.

I get the impression that modern culture has been trained to think of "debate" as a confrontational verbal cockfight, the point of which is to impress onlookers with your toughness and willingness to buck conventional wisdom. Contradicting everyone in the general area is proof of your brave iconoclasm and a desirable end in itself, even if you have to stake out and defend a really stupid position.

To anyone with this attitude, respectful, reasoned, genuine debate is invisible.

Christ’s end-time Word
Brings the chosen into Kingdom Age God is judging man with the word
endtimeworkofgod.org

Which brings us to ...

Typical Cases of Leaders in Catholicism and Christianity in Mainland China who Resist Almighty God Being Punished

Two hundred cases selected from among tens of thousands of cases

And they may well have a good case, depending on what He was being punished for.

You know, you could just set up a paypal link - to buy them each a Nash Metropolitan. I'm sure it would be a big hit. I'd donate to that. I'd be cute!

Sadly, the two (!) boingbong parody sites I know of dissappeared. Your turn jdc.

[Name of person] a member of [name of denomination] in [city] came was approached by two sisters preaching God's end-time message. [Name of person] said "Take off, lusers!" or words to that effect, and later [Name of person] had a stroke! Whaddaya think about that, eh?

The names of the various denominations are ... not what we see around here:

• the Praise denomination
• the Great Praise denomination
• the Justification through Faith denomination
• the Three-Self denomination
• the Breaking Bread denomination
• the Three Grades of Servants denomination
• ...and many, many more (collect the whole set!)

And, of course, the Catholics, who for some reason aren't the same as Christians, but who seem to have strokes too after telling the sisters preaching God's end-times message, "Get a life, n00bs."

Ah, the persuasive power of uncheckable anecdotes piled high.

But sooner or later everyone suffers some kind of misfortune, gets ill, or dies (be it at 100+ or not) -- which only proves what, exactly?

So let's get this straight: after Jehovah's Witnesses come to your door and are disinvited, they hang around to keep track of your troubles and then gloat about them to the world via the Web? Creepy. Stalkerish. Even less nice than they'd seemed. What a great impression to give on their website.

Why, oh why, can't everyone take that reasonable precaution?

From the self-reported cases on this blog alone, there seems to be an epidemic of liquid-spouting onto keyboards and screens.

Please, people, Just Say No! Resist the temptation to Drink-While-Blogging! Turn away from your screen, to your beverage on another table; drink; swallow; breathe; then, and only then, turn back to your monitor.

The computer you save may be your own.

It's like those people who really, really believe they know a celebrity because they watch Entertainment Tonight every day. They develop an expectation that the celebrity will respond to them like a long-lost brother if they happen to meet in the street. Then they get offended when the celebrity acts as if they are strangers, so they DEMAND an acknowledgment. And forever more they bore everyone with the story of how that celebrity is a snot who treats everyone badly.

At the wrong end of the spectrum, it makes police blotter headlines.

Two hundred cases selected from among tens of thousands of cases

That's an incidence of 1% or less. Pretty good odds for the doubters.

It's all buried in The Xi Files.

Wtch hw prd th ppl wh rn ths blg r f th prctc whn ths cmmnt hs ts vwls rmvd lk my cmmnt bv.

Thinking of this summer's Harry Potter #7 thread on Making Light, where I was interested to look at the book with some people who had more experience with speculative writing than I, to read about what it did well, and what it might have done better. But someone jumped in with a negative opinion at the beginning, and the discussion came to be all about him, and whether he had the right to do it. Left the book behind.

In the lone writers' workshop I've been to, was told to stay positive in comments, and that's a good idea in the situation, because we don't want writers storming out of the room in tears, and we also don't want flame wars on line. So maybe that's a good rule to follow, plus reading the FAQs and practicing 'netiquette.'

Still, when reading message lists, especially when a celebrity author shows up and adds a comment, it has the feeling of turning into a pure admiration session, unless the majority opinion is that a thing is bad. Then, as with that plagiarism thread here a few weeks back, it feels like a middle ages mob in front of the pillory. I suppose for me, the pure number of comments becomes overwhelming.

Anyhow, my point is that it seems to me that groups don't handle minority points of view, or dissent very well. At least I often find myself either on the dissenting side, or at least saying "yes you're all right, but it's not as clear cut as that...."

I'd be happy to see some counter-examples of discussions people here have participated in. Because a spirited, well-reasoned defense, or an honest expression of how something could have been better would make for better books and stories, to my mind.

Of course this is only possible if you believe in the good faith of everyone participating in a discussion, and considering the online environment with anonymity and "drive-by posting," it's difficult.

If I have doubts about JK Rowling's books, or want to take issue with something Eddie Campbell or Neil Gaiman has to say, I suppose I can put them in my own blog, or Lifejournal.

Does it seem to you-with-some-plural-marker
that it's the same mindset or am I in the wrong
nest?

That was me. And none of my posts were disemvoweled or deleted.

my point is that it seems to me that groups don't handle minority points of view, or dissent very well

Sure they did. I told people what I thought. They told me what they thought.

If you disagree with someone's view, you've got to allow them to disagree with you back. Which is exactly what happened.

Alice: I love Britney Spears.
Bob: Me too.
Charlie: She's awesome.
...
Dave: Britney is a musical train wreck.
...
Alice: no, she isn't.
Bob: Britney keeps the trains running on time.
Charlie: She's the steel wheel on a smooth track.
...
Dave: You aren't allowing my dissent!

If Dave's gonna disagree with Alice, Bob, and Charlie, then Dave has to allow Alice, Bob, and Charlie to disagree with him. Otherwise, it's Dave who has a problem with people who disagree with him, not Alice, Bob, and Charlie.

Dave: Britney Spears sucks. And anyone who disagrees with me can't handle disagreement!

Er, no. that isn't how it works.

I don't know what it is about BB, other than (possibly) its size, but it attracts nutjobs in sufficient numbers to overwhelm a normal blogger's patience and endurance. And my heart goes out to Cory for his patience in putting up with these fuckwits.

(Full disclosure: not only do I know Cory personally, but one of these days we're supposed to finish our collaborative novel. So, obviously, I'm biased.)

This? This is not helpful. It distracts from what you're trying to say, and it undermines the point you're trying to make.

There are problems inherent in the weblog comment format, and the dog-pile and derailments are both problems with the form. I think they spring from more innocent sources than being unable to tolerate minority opinions. In one case, multiple people reacting in similar ways to the same post. In the other case, not being willing to let someone else have the last word ('agreeing to disagree', to so speak).

I have seen a few sites that let you know during the composing/previewing process if other people have posted on the thread. I think that's a good thing, but it's hard to completely solve social problems with a technological solution.

this is only possible if you believe in the good faith of everyone participating in a discussion

Why would anyone believe that? I think your hypothetical discussion rules need to handle the case where that's not true - and Ms. "I'll sue you for pointing out that I plagiarized" is not the best evidence for universal faith in good faith.

I notice you're vague about whether the reaction to dissenters is hurting the feeling of the dissenters or the dissentees. There's no right to read or post to the Internet without getting your feelings hurt, and that goes for all sides.

the important thing is that everyone has to listen to each other

In the land where everyone is forced to listen to everyone else, the person who Will. Not. Shut. Up. is king.

Prsnlly, th whl thng s strtng t tk n crtn crpy lmnt - n, csl rdr s nlkly t knw wh s dltng cmmnts - ftr ll, th c-wnr f ths st sys sh ddn't, t lst t th strt, nd t vn mks th pst whch prmptd ths cmmnt srrl - n n cn vn rd th cmmnts whch csd sch trg.

wndr f th plgy frm mdrtr bt th rgnl dltn f n pstr s stll thr - r f tht gt dltd t.

Thr s smthng fr t msng n wtchng ths sprl nt nnty. spclly t st whch ls mks hbby f pntng t hw sm Wkpd dtrs mk mckry f thmslvs thrgh dltng ny cmmnts whch pss thrgh th dtr's bs.

At ML, the deleted posts don't actually disappear either (except for comment spam). But for a post to be deleted seems to require a fairly high level of trollishness, more even than simple disemvowelling does.

At BB, maybe the various people with edit access are handling it in different ways, so it's a bit confused about what's going on. (I don't hang out there.)

So, when I see such a post, I ignore it and/or avoid the comments.

Amazing how many people demand that every post on every blog they read be interesting to them.

I wonder how they manage to read a newspaper or a magazine without steam coming out their ears.

In other words, Cory's blog doesn't necessarily attract assholes, but the assholes percentage of its readership is still enough to overwhelm the regular readership at a smaller blog.

[Or if this is specifically Cory hate, I'm curious where it comes from. He has been remarkably consistent in what he evangelizes. What is he doing now that he hasn't been doing? Why is it just now that it has started to anger people?]

As for CeCe et al., they strike me not so much as trolls but people who felt hurt, and, inexplicably, have decided that to hurt other people was the best way to make themselves feel better, or at least to get some restitution or satisfaction. I hope they've realized now that hurting other people, in the long term, really doesn't help anyone in any way. I think the failure to recognize this is how trolls are born.

[To the people arguing against disemvowelment, it's a gentle art, purely self-defensive. The allegedly offending text is there for all to decipher, assuming a certain amount of human intellegence and context. The "why can't they just leave everything up unaltered" scenario sounds appealling in theory. In practice, that's to argue for no moderation at all. There are lots of examples, all over the web, to show that no moderation does not lead to the utopia of rational, intelligent, and honest discourse.]

I could do that. But I don't actually want to hear what they have to say about the Nash Metropolitan. Rather, I wish to put words in their mouths in a manner that reinforces my prejudices and is reasonably amusing. For example, Cory's would be some sort of Haunted Mansion-themed papercraft Metropolitan. Or something.

Also, it gets posted regularly but once again, PA's law of green blackboards, just in case anyone missed it: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19

That depends on how you define "derailed". The thread was still discussing Harry Potter, just that the subthread I was in was me raising issues I had with the plot and others saying why they didn't have a problem with those plot turns.

You can't say Making Light has an issue with disagreement, then point to a thread where I disagreed and was never disemvoweled or deleted and say that's proof of intolerance, and say that's an example of a minority opinion being disallowed.

*ducks*

I put the vowels back in and read your comment on boingboing, and I think the person you're quoting is probably right about Cory's fiction writing; a lot of it is self-indulgent, and plays to a very particular crowd who are in some sense easy fish to catch.

But pointing people uninvited at privately-published bad reviews of their work is in no sense civil, and here and boingboing are some of the few blogs whose moderation aims at civility.

If you want a vigorous but mostly civil argument in this sort of direction, wander over to Charlie Stross's blog at www.antipope.org and read "New York City Math Teacher"'s contributions to the comment thread on the most recent post.

(AFK @109:) "I've noticed that this blog has a lot of conversation, but no debate."

"Are you making this call based on this thread alone?"

I'd make a similar call (using "little", rather than "no"), based on several years of reading ML more-or-less regularly and being acquainted with some of the participants for up to almost 50 years -- _if_ I were defining "debate" (as some people do) as a "score points & defeat your opponent" game.

Not that we don't sometimes use techniques of the Formal Debate in our conversation, but the major point here is, generally, quite different. Mostly, I think, we want to express our opinions, discover other people's opinions, and maybe learn something & modify our own attitudes. For that, I'd say, Discussion works much better than Debate. And yes, it seems to me that this is exactly what ML (ideally) accomplishes.

Everyone's mileage is likely to vary.

I've been a reader of BB for a few years now and the reaction by them to what I thought was an honest criticism was a bit jarring.

Yes it's their blog, but I feel people shouldn't be censored, provided the comments aren't offensive.

Also, I do find it a bit hypocritical that BB has posted several entries on censorship relating to Google or Youtube, but when Boing Boing does it, we're told that they can do whatever they wish, and chew out those with an opposing opinion for having a sense of entitlement.

I also feel that the "disemvoweling" to be somewhat immature, as I saw this blog as a collection of professionals who wouldn't waste time doing such a thing.

(Note: the two main disemvowelled posts at Boing Boing were by Yeago and Nutkin, who turned up there in tandem, writing in not terribly dissimilar styles. Yeago had first appeared on BB the day before; Nutkin was posting there for the first time. By itself, this doesn't prove anything. It's just a pointer.)

Nonesuch got disemvowelled here and on the thread in question at Boing Boing. Here's a reconstruction of his comment at Boing Boing:

It's funny, really. If YouTube threatens to revoke your ability to post, BB editors post about it like it's a violation of the constitution. Yet here they are, happily screening their own content for even less reason than YouTube. At least YouTube had an excuse: they can be sued over the stuff they're revoking. What's the excuse here?

At the point that I suspended TC for two weeks on account of some serious bad behavior, he went spla and started spawning sockpuppets, among them CantStopTheSignal, FreeTibet, Mr.Universe, and TruthFriction. (By the way: in situations where TC was uncertain of himself, the sockpuppets tended to turn up in tandem to support each other.)

Whenever I identified another one of TC's sockpuppets, I'd take down all of that identity's comments. Here's one of them reacting:

Oh say, I noticed the moderator deleted my other posts, including the ones she replied to. Why can't you have a mature discussion without silencing anyone who disagrees with you? I am flabbergasted that such draconian censorship is occurring on BoingBoing, which features "DEFEAT CENSORWARE" as a prominent link on the main page!

He has no idea how I'm able to spot him.

Even if I identify a sockpuppet long after the period during which it was posting, I'll still go back and delete its comments. This will continue until I'm certain that there's been a two-week period during which TC did no sockpuppety posting at all.

People have understandably complained that this leaves holes in the discourse, and screws up the message numbers. I keep telling them to blame TheCynic and his sockpuppets. He's known almost from the start that that's what would happen if he ignored the suspension.

If trolls weren't slow learners, and earless to boot, they wouldn't be trolls.

Yes, his audience. Cory owns his readers' attention in a way that very few people in this world own any commodity. The reason so many people read him is a direct consequence of his hard work and the high quality of his writing. He is completely entitled to use that attention to make money by putting ads on his blog, or to promote his books, or to reward commenters who have something intelligent to contribute. But why should a troll who has done nothing to earn that attention get a share of it?

I'm not understanding your objection. If I'm reading someone's message, or visiting their blog, and they seem interesting, of course I want to find out more about them. Even buy their books, if I want to. And P.R. people, critics, and journalists can get facts wrong. So why not push one's own stuff? Too many writers are far too modest.

I don't believe in you for a second. All you've done is reduce my belief in the reality of the person who posted that comment.

I am flabbergasted that such draconian censorship is occurring on BoingBoing, which features "DEFEAT CENSORWARE" as a prominent link on the main page!

Wow. It's been a while since I saw somebody missing the point quite that badly.

spclly msng ws th rply frm Hydn (s h nts ''m nt "Mr. Hydn."') t n f my psts, syng hw shld b lk nthr pst -

'Y'r nttld t fnd th mg lss ppst thn d, nd thr's plnty f rm fr snsbl dscssn f jst hw mch lrm r trrr w shld fl s w mv nt wrld f lss nd lss prvcy. s Tssrct bsrvs n #40, sm T rgnztns r lt lss blndrng thn th Strlng qt mpls.'

hv lwys wntd t pnt t tht lttl jxtpstn, nd thnks fr th chnc. s mttr f fct, pntd t tht lttl stry n n f th frst dltn fsts t bng-bng, whn t smd s f ll cmmnts crtcl f mdrtn wr dmd t b frm n r tw srcs - whch ws wrng.

d wndr f th crrnt #29 pst t th bng-bng thrd wll b dltd - lt m chck - np, 'tmk' s stll thr - wndr hw mch lngr?

gn, thnks fr lnkng t fw f my prvs psts - spclly th 'Thr r lt f fcts whch r smply nt dscssd n pblc - lk th fct tht vry sngl -ml snd hr s mntrd.' r n ths cs, vry P ddrss. Wh knws, y mght vn nt tht fct smwhr n th st - nt tht t wld mn nythng, nywys.

n th ntrnt, t s prtty sy t fgr t wh th dgs r.

ctlly, t ws vgly dsppntng, nt tht dltng psts wtht cmmnt s xctly nknwn whn pstng cntrry pnns n th rght wng wrld - s ntd bv, bng-bng cld b mprvd by t lst ntng cmmnt ws dltd - thn ppl cld s hw ftn tht hppns.

My gss, t hppns lt mr thn mst ppl knw.

Bt s wht? 'm mch mr cyncl thn y, t lst n trms f dt ntwrks - pnt prvd bv - nd hv nvr hd ny nncnt dlsns whn t cms t hw ppl wh rn thm ct.

I started to try to answer this with some examples, but gave up due to lack of time. However, please note that threads on this site regularly reach into several hundred posts and sometimes pass a thousand. That's unlikely to be happening so frequently if people were not having discussions about the topics in question. The threads would get boring if everyone was just agreeing with one another, and would fizzle out much faster.

Of course, the wanderings into poetry, cookery, knitting etc. help as well!

That sounds fascinating! Good lord, get started already, I want to read it!

alternatively...

Cory, if you are still reading this, I'd love for you to get/make a Haunted Mansion-themed papercraft Metropolitan, preferably life-size, and available for reproduction under a CC-SA-BY attribution.

Ugh. How vulgar.

s fr vlgr - dltn sn't vlgr, t sms t b vr mr n fshn. spclly whn th prsn n chrg f dltn nts 'nvr bn sn bfr n nln dscrs' whl nthr n f hr c-blggrs lnks t psts hr vr cpl f mnths frm n P ddrss.

trly clssy ct, n whch my vlgrty stnds t.

Making multiple posts under different names doesn't strike me as showcasing one's authenticity, either.

s fr vlgr - dltn sn't vlgr, t sms t b vr mr n fshn. spclly whn th prsn n chrg f dltn nts 'nvr bn sn bfr n nln dscrs' whl nthr n f hr c-blggrs lnks t psts hr vr cpl f mnths frm n P ddrss.

trly clssy ct, n whch my vlgrty stnds t.

s fr vlgr - dltn sn't vlgr, t sms t b vr mr n fshn. spclly whn th prsn n chrg f dltn nts 'nvr bn sn bfr n nln dscrs' whl nthr n f hr c-blggrs lnks t psts hr vr cpl f mnths frm n P ddrss.

trly clssy ct, n whch my vlgrty stnds t.

Bt n trms f tht bng-bng thrd - n, thr r ctlly psts stll lft (lst tm chckd) tlkng bt dltd psts.

Th whl thng lks mtrsh, s cmprd t my vlgrty.

Nyah, nyah-nyah, nyah nyah!

JESR 176: I share your croggle at this phenomenon. I wonder if she/he/it (say that fast) realizes that she/he/it has just announced "Hey, everyone! Not only am I a total asshole, I'm an even bigger asshole than you realize!"

lk sch blf n hmn dcncy, n prt bcs dn't rlly shr t. (Bt thn, dn't rlly xst, ccrdng t t lst n prsn, nd f d, 'm vlgr, ccrdng t nthr.) Hr cmmnt #29 bt hw dsppntd sh ws t bng-bng's dscnnct s nlkly t b rnsttd, snc sh dsn't xst, t lst n th ys f th nly ppl wh mttr - th ns wth th dlt ky.

Stll, cmmtng hr s bttr thn brkng th lw (s sggstd by n bng-bng wnr) nd dwnldng wrtchd psd f th T Crwd - thgh th d f svt cmmnt r sms lk brllnt strcl d t ths pnt.

And having given the crumb of attention, I turn back to more interesting tasks. Ta.

What I meant to say was, I've never seen Teresa (or any other moderator) try to stifle debate or dissent on Making Light, and that if she wanted to, she could. So accusing her of doing that seems to me to be plain wrong.

Also, I don't think Teresa meant to say that the person posting your comments didn't exist, only that your various online personas don't exist as real people. At least that's how I understood it.

Trs s lkly t rmmbr th stry bt pstng wth tw dffrnt thrl vcs, snc wrt t ftr sh dsmssd my cmmnts s bng trckry ftr bng-bng's frst dltn fst. McDnld mrly gv m chnc t brng t p n n pn frm. Jst lk rght wng blg ws s dsgstd wth my pntng t tht Grmns n lngr blv n mss slghtr s wy t mprv th wrld, h pstd th (fk - 'm nt dmb) -ml ddrss t pnt t hw cwrdly ws, ftr th sbmssn frm sd -ml ddrsss wld nvr b pblcly shrd. (Th rght wng s rlly tchy whn y brng p xmpls f scts tht rjct mss mrdr - g fgr, t b trt.)

Thgh hv n ccss t ny lgs, 'm prtty sr ths Tmr s rl prsn, f pssbly bt nv, nlk th sphsctd dnzns f th ntrnt hr. nd f wht sh wrt s tr (mght nt b, ftr ll - 'm nt n pstn t chck ny dt), thn t lst Trs wll b n pstn t s f sh md mltpl rrrs n dsmssng ndvdls wh sh thnks dsn't xst, bcs thy dn't sm t ft nt hr wrld vw. mght b cyncl, bt tht dsn't mk m th cync.

Gd ngh fr m.

Bsds, Slcktvst s lt mr fn. f y wnt rl prsn wh s bynd blf, chck t th wrld's mst Cmpssntly Whckd t Lbrl Lbrtrn (TM). t lst t Slcktvst, w ll thnk h s rl prsn - hrd s tht mght b t mgn t tms, h hs dstnctv styl ll hs wn.

I guess that's what happens when you turn the lights on.

Hm. Was it worth it? Yeah, I think Jim's little musical number at 122 made it worth it.

Only thing is, with little more than rugrats with conspiracy theories for opponents it seems like shooting fish in a barrel. Fish too stupid to know they've been shot. Ah well. It was fun.

Wow.

Someone who admits he posts under multiple identities, and not only seems to see nothing wrong with it, but to feel that it's normal.

That is... disturbed.

This is one of the most "EWWWW!!!" inducing comments I've ever read.

Seriously, it made me draw back from the keyboard with a "What the fuck...?" and the hackles rising on my neck.

I'm not using "disturbed" casually here. This is genuinely sociopathic behavior.

Patrick, remember that correspondence we had about a common acquaintance who you described as "a feral nut"? I think we can add another name (and a LOT of aliases) to the list.

Teresa, I'd be very happy to see this character not just disemvoweled, but deleted and banned.

Ewww. Just... ewwwww.

I'm still not sure what s/he means to achieve by proudly declaring the Sockpuppet Nature. Wouldn't it be more efficient to just say "Please, ignore all of my posts under these names" and give a list?

Ths thrd strtd t tlkng bt 'cnsrng' (dltn s bttr - nd sr, th ppl rnnng th st cn dlt whtvr thy lk, ny tm thy lk) t bng-bng, whr n f th blggrs hr t lctrlt (yh, mkng lght ws th nfrr blg - tht s hw lng 'v bn rdng hr) sms t hv dy jb.

hv lrdy hd sm xprnc t nt bng bl t cmmnt t bng-bng, nd th rny f thrd hr dscssng dltn wtht ctlly lnkng t llw ppl t rd th 'hrrbl' psts ws t mch t pss p.

Thn whn nthr blg wnr hr pstd lnks t my prvs psts t mkng lght (sm cncrnng hw sy t s t s ntwrkd dt fr thr prpss thn rgnlly gvn), t gv m chnc t pnt t hw ws th thr f tw psts, smthng hd cmmntd pn n nvr pblshd bng-bng pst - nt xctly dmnstrtng my xstnc, bt t lst prvdng crtn bss fr Trs t qstn hr crtnty tht ppl wh dn't gr wth hr dn't ctlly xst.

Sm f s r ctlly qt dstrbd t sm f bng-bng's rcnt ctns (rsl L Gn cms t mnd), thgh why w cr s prbbly nfthmbl - ftr ll, nlk th wnrs nd mplys, w dn't hv ny fnncl ntrsts.

Ths sms ncmprhnsbl t ths wh gt pd t b nvlvd, bt sm f s blv(d) n wht bng-bng smd t b spsng. Bt whch n prctc sms t hppn vr mr rrly. Lk t rl blg - ncldng ths n - hndrds f psts. Lk t bng-bng - Th Rgstr ds bttr, nd t lst n thr thr mcks mch f Cry's cncrns - nd th fct tht rlwsk dsn't llw cmmnts sn't dstrbng, s h sn't th n strdntly prclmng frdm s gd n nd f tslf.

Sdly, t sms s f bng-bng s slwly strtng t rprsnt wht s wrng wth th ntrnt, nd nt wht s rght wth t. nd d ntc tht th mst srs pstr, Pscvtz, hs prtty mch drppd ff - bng-bng sn't rlly plc t fnd mch n th wy f hrd scnc nymr, s t?

That's okay. Silly request. I hang around here a bit, and there is interesting stuff. Sometimes, however, it gets a little like the bar in "Star Wars." Esp. when commenters do verse, or casually slip into ROT13.

I'm very sensitive, and the political topics can be dismaying, not to mention all the writing scam and bad "agent" stories. It's addicting, though, as you probably know! And the response time and rate is pretty phenomenal.

Still, I get too verbose in comments. Should save it for my own blog (or better yet, my 'real' writing), to avoid littering the internet with words I might not want to have hang around. Not that any of it's easy to control, but I haven't dropped too big a brick yet, that I'm aware of.

Tht s... dstrbd.'

Jst bt my bd tm, bt y knw, wht dstrbs m s smn wh thnks tht thy shld nt kp thmslvs prvt n th Nt, t th xtnt cslly pssbl. spclly s th thrw wy sr nms r mnt t b t lst ptntlly n xtr lvl f txtl cntxt.

My chldrn hv fr ntrnt ccss - n fltrs ('m lkly rlly bd prnt n yr ys t) - bt thy hv t drlld nt thm t nvr s thr wn nm, -ml tc. spclly t ny st tht ggrgts dt - s hs bn prvn tht ths st ds. nd thy shld nvr hv th sm 'dntty' - f nly t stp th mrktrs frm sly cllctng dt.

Smtms, t s dprssng t s hw mny ppl sm nwr f wht vst cmptr ntwrk/dtbs mns. Prsnlly, nvr s cks, mgs, Jvscrpt, r ny Mcrsft prdcts. vn mr dprssng s hw ld ths mks m fl. Ds cln nstll frm stndln systm n rglr bss mn nythng t y?

Lk t th lnkng f my P ddrss, s cslly md - nd thn lk t th rctn. pst frm hm, nd frm fw cmptrs t wrk - lk mst ppl, hv mr thn n P ddrss.

s fr dntts - hp my txts r wrth rdng by thmslvs, nt sm md p prsn. Why wld y pssbly ssm tht nythng prt frm th wrttn wrds n th scrn s 'rl?'

W wll vd th phlsphy, bt th d tht mst ppl wh sm t b mrcn hv n cncpt f th mprtnc f prvcy s trblng. t s smthng tht rpns dn't nd ny lssns n.

1. Jon Pescovitz's most recent BoingBoing post was made just a little while before a comment here mentioning that Pescovitz had mostly stopped posting.

2. Ursula K. LeGuin's unhappiness seems to have been directed toward Cory Doctorow in particular, not BoingBoing in particular. The paragraph which refers to this unhappiness conflates it with the unhappiness of various persons whose reasons, such as they are, appear to have nothing to do with LeGuin's personal and legitimate response to the unrequested and unauthorized republication of her writing on BoingBoing.

People are certainly entitled to be disappointed when their hopes for (say) the way BoingBoing will operate are not fulfilled. This is not the same as an entitlement to have the angry, insulting, and moronic comments with which they respond to having their unjustified expectations not met preserved intact and presented as part of BoingBoing's content.

Speaking of sociopathic behavior... I have Google locked and loaded.

Who wants it?

never @ 196 Sadly, it seems as if boing-boing is slowly starting to represent what is wrong with the Internet, and not what is right with it.

Right, which goes back to what a very earlier commenter had to say: Start your own blog. You don't like boing-boing, that's fin --- move on. Boing-boing doesn't belong to you. It isn't a public free-for-all. Register your own domain and have a hay day. Just stand-by for the same dose of criticism you're happy to dish out.
Lastly, quit trolling about the internet for attention. Conduct unbecoming -10pts.

I'm sure Teresa doesn't mind you having fun, but do remember to put the bat & blidfold away and tidy up afterward. Last time we had papier maché, little strips of tissue paper and candy wrappers all over the floor.

'Never....' is one more instance proving my father was a man of great wisdom.

I'm disemvoweled rather frequently,
but that's the lot of the iconoclast.
(My several dozen sockpuppets agree.)
I'm disemvoweled rather frequently
because I dare to say that none are free
when trolls like me are scorned, mocked, and outcast.
I'm disemvoweled rather frequently.
but that's the lot of the iconoclast.

I'm killfiled by everyone I meet
Which only serves to illustrate my point,
Since I'm so wise and handsome and discreet!
I'm killfiled by everyone I meet---
They're clearly nazi censors, who compete
to squash my eruditic embonpoint!
I'm killfiled by everyone I meet
Which only serves to illustrate my point.

I get banned from a blog or two a day.
It must be since I'm so mature and smart,
with grace and rhetoric both in my sway.
I get banned from a blog or two a day,
by jealous thugs who can't stand repartee,
or anybody who won't take their part!
I get banned from a blog or two a day:
It must be since I'm so mature and smart.

(Line 6 of stanza 2 is sic.)

So yeah, I don't hand out my full real name, or my main email address... But I do have a consistent personality and (when I choose to be part of a particular community) a consistent experience in that community.

You seem to have a stake in not fully participating in online communities. Is this accurate?

I wouldn't be too hasty to make that assumption, if I were you.

Whoever you are.

This is the internet; you can call yourself anything you want. But if you're going to call yourself Little Bo-Peep one day, and SheepGirl the next, and Ms. Peep on the third, you can't expect readers to give your assortment of shifting identities the same good faith and credit that they would have done if you'd picked one name and stuck to it.

Well, actually, you could expect it all you wanted (and based on your past performance here, you probably would.)

Actually getting it, though . . . not so much.

The only voice worth hearing now is mine,
you have not said one thing to make me think
that in my argument there is a chink
since all you do is complain that I whine.
Of course, I could my words and sense refine
and take a pause to wash and eat and drink,
but then I might miss knowing nod or wink
and that would not be in any form fine.
I've got to force you all to suit my whim,
compel your awe, and see you all bow down
although i've never been an honest guest.
I'll shout and slobber in pretence of vim
disguise the fact that I'm another clown,
and not think for one second I'm a pest.

And even later, [name of person who had a stroke] plagiarized David Gemmel and then was attacked in a Making Light thread!

Jack Ruttan @ 149:
"In the lone writers' workshop I've been to, I was told to stay positive in comments, and that's a good idea in the situation, because we don't want writers storming out of the room in tears."

Heh. I'm in a gradute writing program. The semester I started, I took a course called "Writing for Film" with Irvin Kerschner, and he made not one, not two, but three students cry. None of whom stormed out.

Now, whether or not that's good or bad . . . I've been on the receiving end of criticism. Kersch called one of my scenes "Nothing but 'As you know Bob' expository scientific gobbledygook," which I found amusing, coming as it did from the director of The Empire Strikes Back. In another class, Syd Field basically criticized ten pages of my screenplay for more than an hour, the moneyquote of which was "With all due respect, it's just bullshit," after which he continued to delineate all the ways it was, in point of fact, bullshit.

Wasn't fun, exactly, but I learned way more from those moments than I did when I got feedback like: "These were great pages. Keep writing. But add more subtext."

(my reaction to that is: "WTF is subtext, and can I blow it up?")

Positive comments can be encouraging, but you don't really learn much from "that was awesome." You can learn a bit more from "x worked, and y worked, and I think you should continue in that vein," but I think one learns most from "well, this worked and this worked, but this didn't work, and here's why." Or, anyway, I always have (and yes, of course I know different people learn different ways).

Waayupthread, Ian @ 18 said "that the referenced thread ... started out "My Nebula-award-nominated story...". That sounds self-congratulatory and is likely to attract adverse comment."

Which struck me as odd. "0wnz0red" was nominated for a Nebula (in 2003, for best novelette). Cory, more than congratulating himself, was really just stating a fact.

There is an interesting discussion to be had about moderation at the beginning of the life of a community, when one must be looking to both the short term (content of the thread) and the long term (tone of the community). Should one take a slightly lax tone to encourage more people to come in? Or a more stern tone, to weed the trolls out until the community can help police itself?

Unfortunately, we're not having that discussion, because we're indulging Quoth the Raven's self-absorption. Waste of bandwidth, IMHO, but I'm enjoying the poetry.

Note: see also Alice in Wonderland, Tiny Toons, chipmunk speed, Fullmetal Alchemist, Slayers, Sailor Moon (cosplay) Star Trek (classic & Voyager), and of course, The Doctor

Also, disturbed to find the number of music videos synched to "Fergalicious" - using Disney characters.

*honorable mention.

The poetry is, I think, generally the best part of such discussions.

:)

I had a producer who would read and say to you "it's goo-od" but you had to watch out for the drawn-out dropping and rising tone, which meant there was a lot of work ahead.

Wait a minute! "Never," are you "Scott" on Slackivist? Because that explains a lot in terms of tone and attitude. And honestly, I can only imagine Scott calling Fred (Slackivist) by that sort of ridiculous title. (For those who don't read Slackivist, Scott is a mega-libertarian who brings up points completely irrelevant to the thread with a similar snide attitude.) Of course, Scott only seems to use one name, so perhaps not. But please don't pollute Making Light with your rudeness either way. Even if your points are valid, your attitude in making them is quite condescending, even to people outside of this thread. There was no reason to bring Fred into this.

This, this, thing that is clogging up the thread with pointless blather is choosing to be miserable. I say give it the freedom to be miserable.

[Name of person] a member of [name of denomination] in [city] came was approached by two sisters preaching God's end-time message. [Name of person] said "Take off, lusers!" or words to that effect, and later [Name of person] had a stroke! Whaddaya think about that, eh?

Fred* wrote about that story in his Left Behind series a few weeks ago. Apparently it's one of the prime end-time signals for the dominionists.

*the, um, world's most Compassionately Whacked Out Liberal Libertarian (TM) - nevermore @ 192, announcing that you've managed to pick a fight at Fred's place is not really a great way to make the case that you're wandering around the internet with a lantern looking for reasoned debate.

It's just that you're not entitled to Cory's audience, or to Teresa and Patrick's, just because they're in some sense handy.

The rest is just self-justification for stupid bad behavior.

That makes a good 50 or more posts in this thread that all are diligently fighting "the man" and shouting from the rooftops that their posts are being unfairly deleted, that they are suffering the slings and arrows of censorship because their posts are all being deleted for disagreeing.

At what point does irony set in?

I'm just asking, is all.

I mean, does it take a hundred posts that don't get deleted before these yayhoos figure out that they're not getting deleted?

Maybe when CeCe comes back, I'll ask what the ratio for this thread is of posts by people complaining that they're being censored versus total posts in the thread.

I mean seriously, you get some yayhoos who think that CNN suppresses criticism, so they get together and make a commercial that says CNN won't show criticism, then they get that ad played on CNN, and then don't get the irony that they just got criticism aired on CNN?

(at which point, all the trolls are covering their ears going "blah, blah, blah, you keep talking, but I'm not listening, blah, blah, blah")

I almost feel sad for the little creeps.

Almost.

*More fascinating than the review of The Invention of Hugo Cabret that I'm supposed to be writing for class tomorrow, anyway.

'm hnstly nt gng t b bl t hv lng cnvrstn wth th ppl t thr wh smhw dn't qt rmvng ll vwls wth cnsrshp. W dsgr t t fndmntl lvl.

T ths wh g n frthr nd cndmn cnsrshp xcpt whn ts ppld t "Scrd", "flms" r "bs", wll, f th cmmnts wr lft ntct rlly dbt y'd b bl t ssgn ny f ths dscrptns t thr tn. Thy wr vry rspctfl, blncd, nd wll-thght t. Vry dsppntng t b blwn t f th cnvrstn wth frhs. Sdly, s tht whn th srcs r fdgd, llgtns g lng wy.

Bt whn tblt th rspnss, vryn nvlvd wth BB r Cry ll sm t ln-p n dfns f t (wht r th dds...). ht t nvk Rmsfld bt t s jst ths srt f clbbshnss mxd wth ntlrnc f cntr-pnts tht mks ths whl ss s plrzng nd dststfl.

Typng knwng tht thr s gd chnc th thghts cmng frm yr hd--whch y fl r gnn, msrd, nd nt htfl--r gng t b dsmssd trght nd cnsrd / rndrd nr-nrdbl s nt nly dshrtnng bt vry txc t th bsc d f cllbrtv, pn, dmcrtc ntrnt, whch s strngly th sbjct f s mch dtrl n ths prts f t.

Sm f y tk strngly Cthlc stnc f "w cmmnt t th bhst f th ns mst hgh, nd w r ndsrvng". Tr ngh, sm blgs dn't ccpt cmmnts. T ths sy chs n, nd f smthng rlly vltl cms lng, by ll mns dlt t. Bt whn yr wn cmmnty gvs y lt f blwbck vr t, hv th dcncy t ntrtn thr cmplnts.

I had never heard of The Invention of Hugo Cabret before. Thank you for bubbling something interesting to the surface. (Pity the official site is Flash encrusted.)

Likewise, the ability to post again and again and again about a subject doesn't tell us what most people think, only that someone posted a lot.

* and for a new slant on my very favorite music video.

Hm. I can't say that there's anything wrong with posting under multiple identities in different fora, -in general-. Posting under multiple identities to the same blog and thread, OTOH... that's well into WTF territory.

Glad to be of help, or at least of interest! Hugo Cabret is the first book in a long time that I've randomly picked up at a bookstore, flipped through, and then been absolutely unable to walk away from - it's a pretty attractive piece of bookmaking, aside from the actual story. It honestly never occurred to me to look for an official website, though; I've just been looking at reviews on Amazon (sadly, it doesn't currently have a Search Inside option, which might give a better impression of what's so cool about this book).

There's been a certain amount of confusion inside Boing Boing over implementation details, resulting in cockups like the deletion of the first post in the thread about Cory's Swedish translation. This is inevitable when multiple people are using newly hand-rolled software. Also inevitable: people who think every stumble is an example of the violence inherent in the system, help help I'm being repressed. Anyone for whom an argument in a blog comment thread "feels like a middle ages mob in front of the pillory" has left reasonable perspective about six interstate exits behind.

Well the description of the plot plus the length + lots of interior illustrations fills me with hope.* I'm a sucker for illustrated stories, which has led me to read almost exclusively manga (like Fullmetal Alchemist) or webcomics (like Girl Genius). I remember well my disappointment as a child that the older I got, the fewer (and often, worse) the pictures were in the books I read. I have a hunch that I wouldn't have read nearly so much SF in my youth if it hadn't been for the inevitable map a the front of each book.**

Now that I think about it, my delayed entry into hard SF probably had a lot to do with dull, uninformative illustrations. Have I mentioned, that as a reader, I despise inaccurate cover art? Sorry. Rant over.

*last February ‡, there was a rumor Sorsese was going to direct an adaptation(!)
**the imagination needs some seed to grow upon, aside from the text.
‡ I wonder why I don't pronounce the R in that month?

Yes, we understand, you find us clubbish, intolerant, polarizing, and distasteful. Message received. The thread is full of posts by you saying how Making Light doesn't allow criticism, the irony of which still escapes you.

Anything else?

Unless you want us to throw ourselves on our swords or something, I think you've pretty much covered everything.

Must we confess to your accusations before you'll leave? Or can you tolerate dissent and allow us to disagree with your opinion of us?

Subtext is a vulgar heresy. The belief in the real existence of subtext is a sign of insanity.

Thus, no, you cannot blow it up. Only real things can be exploded.

Myths can be exploded. Therefore myths are real.

Subtext does not rise to the level of "myth."

O my gods.

Yeah, you're a bad parent in my eyes, but not because you don't filter the internet from your kids. I think you're a bad parent because you're teaching your kids to be paranoid nutbars like you.

But then, I guess it would be pretty unusual for an abusive, obnoxious, troublemaking, rude fugghead troll like you to be a good parent, so I'm not surprised.

But seriously...you're in tinfoil-hat land. I hope your kids eventually recover from the damage you're doing them every day.

"Stay thy sword!" the heads all shout, "do not my posts delete!"
"You must allow the multitude to hear my grand conceit!"
"Removing all the vowels as well would be just immature."
"Besides," they say, "without them, I'll lose my bingo score."

The Moderator takes no note, she's heard it in the past.
It all comes down to trollishness, impoliteness unsurpassed.
So many heads have reared up now the point is hard to see.
She'll cut off one or two of them to be replaced by three.

Eventually the socks run out or get lost in the wash;
'Cause no one's even listening to all the puppet tosh.
The threads have turned the trollery to poems and to song,
The monsters all have gone away, their act has got the gong.

Let me help you out for a second. Every webpage, blog, forum, etc. you visit has the potential to collect and aggregate data regarding the visitors and commentors to the site. Every server has access logs, which collect the IP addresses of everyone who has visited the website. You see, the site must have your IP address in order to push out content to you. Most of the blog and forum software I've dealt with records the IP address of each poster, specifically for moderation and preventing abuse.

So I don't really see your point about using multiple identities. How does this help? 'They' are still going to know who you are and what you said. You cannot hide from 'Them'.

If you are really worried about blog owners collecting data about you and selling it to marketers or the government or whoever, the only 100% effective method is to STFU. Otherwise, you may as well give them your name and address, because they can get that info without your consent, anyway.

What you said smells like a steaming pile of crap anyway, but I figured I'd help out, just in case online security is an actual concern of yours.

BngBng sms t hv bcm fr y mstly PR vhcl fr yr strs. 'm sr y r bsltly thrlld vry tm n f yr strs gts trnsltd nt nthr lngg, bt t m, t jst sms lk ndlss slf-ggrndzng.

"...but to me, it seems like endless self-aggrandizing."

Calling someone self-aggrandizing in his own blog is not polite, calm, reasonable, or any other of the words used to defend the comment and fight against censorship. It's not criticism, either. It's just a rude comment. The fact that the commentor calls it 'honest criticism' does not make it so.

Why not just send Cory an e-mail, instead of posting it for everyone to read, if not to build support for your perspective and/or start some shit. Neither of which falls under the umbrella of 'criticism'.

That's not what I meant to say. I meant that the disagreement seemed to dominate the thread in that one case. People were trying to get back on track, but it certainly killed my enjoyment, at least.

And seeing this going on, one is a little less eager to venture into the conversation, for fear of getting singled out, too.

Hugo Cabret looks wonderful-- I recently had that same experience Mary Lou described with The City of Dreaming Books . It's whimsical and gruesome and all about loving books and words and reading. It also has many fabulous illustrations, so I thought I should share, just in case you haven't encountered it yet!

(At least, I have never considered invitations to be sold plasticware/timeshares/Landmark anything but shaky imitations of social life. Of course it's natural to have one's professional and personal lives intersect, but it's also naturally fraught and vexed.)

So semi-professional blogs are veering, more or less weakly depending on their success, into a different patch of the "Voice, choice, or exit" continuum. No party involved should be allowed to hop between definitions to gain advantage; most humans will try to instinctively; and we'll usually disagree about where on the continuum a blog is, let alone what OK behavior is.

It doesn't really change the tone of the comment or my point, but I just noticed that and figured I'd call myself on it before someone else did.

I've reread the BoingBoing post several times, and I can't for the life of me think of it as self-congratulatory nor self-aggrandizing. I'm not familiar with Cory's work save Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, but characterizing him as an 'enthusiast' seems terrifically appropriate. The tone I got from the post was nothing so much as "Hey, this neat-o story I wrote just got translated! How rad is that?"

To which I say: rock on. Rock on indeed.

But there's something else: given the sock-puppetry, I wonder if this is all the work of one troll named Scott who posted first as "FlyingSquid" and who also frequents the Slacktivist. It seems that much of the argument in the comments section of the original BoingBoing post cites "honest" or "balanced" criticism, as if calling someone "self-aggrandizing" is actually either. I know the IP addresses mightn't match, but given the comments made here by never-whoever, I'm not sure it matters.

Jim @ 232:

Posts like that are precisely the reason I've convinced at least half of the USC writing program to read Making Light. The other half; well, I think our program is unique in that the work is so divided and just about anyone can find a home. Sure, there are the smaller, more "literary" stories one might find in MFA programs, but me, I've been writing about time machines and vampires and things that go boom in the night as long as I've been there.

Jack @ 241:

I understand the sentiment, but one guest to another, I wouldn't worry about it. I'm often intimidated by the sheer number of distinctly intelligent people who frequent this site (to be honest, I sometimes feel like the kid who scored a place at the adult table), but rarely do I feel unwelcome to contribute (and heck, even the moments I lodge my foot in my mouth [which doesn't happen often only because I don't post often], people are generally pretty understanding). I think it's at least partially because the one thing that gets singled out is not ignorance but rather rudeness. Everyone's ignorant about something, but not everybody feels the need to be an asshole about it.

Actually, those are only a few of my posts here - do you honestly think I post from a single address? (Though it looks like the IP tracking is pretty good - and notice 50% of my posts concern data retention and freedom.) I have been posting here for years - and you can only find 4 of them?

I have to leave right now. Yog, Avram -- if either of you feel like disemvowelling yon self-confessed liar, do please.

My internet exhaust port seems to be packed with lint and I haven't cleaned the trap lately.

(Christopher, remembering that Greg is straight, thinks better of making "tailpipe" jokes.)

I wrote that, decided not to post it, then pushed the wrong button after previewing because something was neglected on the stove. Oh, well.

Something I shouldn't do, which I did on the old usenet "writing" group was to write in and complain the discussion wasn't to my liking.

Well, back to poetry, cats, and knitting for me (at least the first two).

Try this instead; it's quicker:

Ingredients

2 cups packed brown sugar
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking soda
2 tablespoons ground cinnamon
2 tablespoons ground cloves
2 tablespoons ground allspice
2 tablespoons ground nutmeg
4 eggs
2 tablespoons lemon zest
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup brandy
1 1/2 cups raisins
1 1/2 cups chopped nuts
1 1/2 cups dried mixed fruit
1 1/2 cups butter, melted
1 3/4 cups brandy

DIRECTIONS
Preheat oven to 225 degrees F (110 degrees C). Grease and flour a tube pan.
In a large bowl, combine sugar, flour, soda, spices, eggs, lemon rind, vanilla, 1/2 cup brandy, fruit, nuts, and melted butter or margarine. Mix thoroughly. Pour into prepared pan.
Bake for 1 hour, or until a tester inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool on a wire rack.
Wrap cooled cake in foil. Sprinkle 2 tablespoons brandy over the cake everyday for 2 weeks.

I recently had that same experience Mary Lou described with The City of Dreaming Books . It's whimsical and gruesome and all about loving books and words and reading. It also has many fabulous illustrations, so I thought I should share, just in case you haven't encountered it yet!
I had not yet. Now it is on my Amazon wishlist, as a reminder to find it. (Hmm. I wonder if my new library has a wishlist function. That would be a useful bit of Web 2.0)*

*Question for copy editors: I think the construction "Web 2.0." with the period arriving after the 0 due to the end of the sentence looks awkward. Is there a preferred usage other than rewriting?

That would be a useful bit of "Web 2.0".

Of course, I'm not a copy editor. This may be a good thing.

Midori: Pardon me for asking, sir, but what good are snub limericks going to be against that?

Greg: Well, the Piñata doesn't consider a small one-man posts to be any threat, or they'd have a tighter defense. An analysis of the ip addresses provided by Princess Nielsen Hayden has demonstrated a weakness in the battle station.

The approach will not be easy. You are required to maneuver straight down this thread and skim the text to this point. The target area is only two paragraphs wide. It's a small internet exhaust port, right below the main port. The shaft leads directly to the humor system. A precise hit will start a chain reaction which should
destroy the keyboard.

A murmer* of disbelief runs through the room.

ISTM that the reaction of such a fan to a blogger or other writer who doesn't jump through hoops to provide whatever content the fan wants is very similar to the reaction of some customers of prostitutes when the prostitute tries to place limits on the kind of services provided or acts performed. The thinking, as I see it, is that anyone who provides pleasure or entertainment to another is in some sense selling themselves, and such a sale cannot, by its nature, have any limits.

Similarly, if you give something away, you're in some sense submitting yourself to the recipient, maybe subjugating would be a better word, and they have the right to demand more and better. I want to be clear that I think this notion is outright batshit lunacy, but I know it exists in the case of some customers of prostitutes*, and I get the impression of it in some of the things that this sort of fan says.

So, am I overly sensitive or maybe in need of a new foil hat, or has someone else felt this too?

* and sexual predators and criminals of other sorts, too.

;)

My girlfriend (with whom the sexual aspects of our relationship had recently begun) told me her father wanted to meet me, and so we went to his place for dinner.

Over the course of same various stories were told, one of which was my girldfriend telling him (a few years earlier, when she was about 16) that she was going to her boyfriends place, and wouldn't be back until morning.

He then said, "I knew, when the doctor handed me a baby girl that someday she was gonna get laid."

I damn near shot '79 bordeaux across the table cloth. I think he may have timed the comment to just when I was drinking on purpose.

That training is the only reason I've not lost a couple of keyboards.

Greg, 261
Thank you!

Bruce Cohen, 260,
I agree with the general thrust of your argument. If you haven't read it yet, check out the essay I linked early on in the discussion. Precisely this kind of problem of entitlement has been a problem for the webcomics community for many years. I would love to discuss it further, and I can provide examples. Just not now :)

257, Chris Davis,
Thank you for the example, that was interesting. Do scare quotes always take "double" quotes, or do you sometime use 'single' ones? I would have thought single was more akin to how quotes are used to delineate an example of a word rather than a verbatim quote.

256, Teresa Nielsen Hayden,
Ah, that's what I thought. Thank you.

I'd say y'all owed me a new keyboard, but in fact I'd swallowed before I got to that point in the thread. [LOL!]

Well, you know, you could continue the theme...a reference text to abuse exists here

...I mean, we haven't gotten anywhere near "Evacuate now? In our moment of triumph?"

Good luck, and may the Verse be with you.

Does anyone here need an explanation for why that makes me feel like I neither need nor want to read his comments?

My parents first opened up a restaurant when I was 7. They finally sold the business and retired when I was 25. This means I'd been doing service sector work since around the age of 10 or so. I like to think I have some experience behind me when I say this:

The customer is not always right.

Just because you're paying money in exchange for goods or services does not suddenly make you incapable of being unreasonable. However, there are people who think precisely this. That they have handed over their coin allows them to have their way with whom they've paid.

These are people who get righteously angry because Apple has the gall to lower the price of iPhone, even though they bought it at what they had considered a fair price. (If they hadn't considered it a fair price, then why did they choose to pay that much for a cell phone?)

So, yes, these are the people who get angry because a blogger didn't blog about what they wanted to read. (Wouldn't it be more sensible just to read a blogger who is blogging about what you want to read instead? It's not like there is a shortage of blogs.)

Interestingly, this ties into the discussion about who owns the characters in published works. Lots of fans clearly feel they do. So they get annoyed at the author for going in directions they would not have. (Again, in that case, wouldn't it be less stressful just to ignore the author and go on your own alternate path? Or read works which don't annoy you?)

I don't have the historical perspective to know if it has always been like this. However, I do see it everywhere.

[BTW, just so I don't get taken as espousing an extreme position: Obviously, if you are poorly served, or the other side doesn't live up to its end of the contract, complain away and get restitution. I'm talking about people who've gotten what they've asked for, what they said they wanted, then it suddenly turns out not to be enough. I said the customer is not always right, not that the customer is always wrong.]

But then again, I was copy editor for a psychiatric nursing journal, which just goes to further show what do I know, anyway?

Teresa @ 268: can I speak for lots of people to say "'Course not"?

The notion that all this is due to one guy, posting from different IPs with different names -- that's just kinda scary. And I've been around the Internet for a long time now (not, like, since BBS days, just since 1994 on a professional basis) and I've seen some scary, but this guy makes me shudder. Reminds me a lot of my dad when he's drinking, the weave-and-bob and changing the subject without saying so, and crap like that.

My kids have free Net access, too, and no filters, and nothing except their word that they won't give contact information without asking me first. And they do. But frankly? I don't worry about it, because the Internet is not actually that dangerous -- physically. But Patrick, you're right about the crazy rubbing off. I can feel a little slick coating on my neurons tonight.

Anyway. Entertaining! Not always the way you imagined it, but ... entertaining.

Previous hydra comments cause me to have this strange vision of you pulling the sock off Neverwhatsit's hand to reveal five fingerpuppets, all babbling the same nonsense.

Absolutely. What you said. "I bought your book/saw your film/played with your action figures - you therefore owe your success to me, and I am The Piper, so dance to my tune, you pixel stained techno-peasant."

It's bollocks, of course. What next? Should Cory take a poll on what book should write? How the plot unfolds? Or is he simply obliged to refrain from telling his fans, via the medium of his blog, when cool things are happening to his work?

Also, Paul@253, that was hilarious.

The other Ethan seems pretty reasonable, at least.

It's not -quite- a Sybil attack, but it's pretty close, yes ;)

Took me a bit to figure out why total quantity of brandy listed in the recipe didn't match the amount added to the batter. (Well, maybe it goes into the cook?)

I've saved the recipe, and may try it (I like fruitcake, if home-made and not full of citron and other artificially flavored and colored substances).

I should point out that I have not actually tried that recipe and cannot vouch for it. I was at work, nowhere near my recipes, had an idea for a joke and had to go with the first one I could find that sounded decent... but it does sound good, it's simple and it doesn't contain anything I don't like in a cake or anything notably fake.

Completely off topic, but I've been meaning to ask you: you've been switching back and forth between "not necessarily good" and "occasionally good". Do these involve different levels of good, i.e. are you getting better or worse? Or are you just getting bored with the same old monicker?

"The neverending trollery"
results in great hilarity:
''The greatest jerkwad, that is me!
Along with my sockpuppets three
(or more; it's all the same to me)
There's more to me than what you see
Which proves my cleverosity.''
Before we can cry "woe is me,"
Madam Hospitality
makes posts go disemvowelly.
Rule for aye, civility!

If I dream tonight in iambic tetrameter, it's your fault.

--

Xopher @ 247: Given the going hypothesis that the troll hydra du jour has a connection to that one Scott who plagues Slacktivist, I think the phrase "steaming pile of crap" will need to be rewritten as "steaming piles of produce, drenched in butter" in future.

Mind you, when I read his post, I couldn't decide whether he was Scott, or was talking about Scott, when he referred to "th wrld's mst Cmpssntly Whckd t Lbrl Lbrtrn (TM)" whom we all believe "is a real person." Scott wouldn't call Fred a Libertarian, but someone making fun of Scott wouldn't call Scott "Compassionate" (though they might make reference to his use of the term Compassionate™ that's become his--no pun--trademark).

--

Paul @253, that was *wonderful* and I may have to try that one this year rather than my usual procedure. Too, the wonderfulness only increased when I tried to pass it on. I only chuckled when I read it, but when I tried to say to my husband, "Any blog can call a troll a fruitcake, but only at Making Light do they hand you the recipe," I broke down into squeals of laughter with tears running down my face. Now my husband thinks I'm a fruitcake. (He's thought this for some years, mind you. But thanks to you he now has additional evidence.)

I think you'll find that an increasing cause for posting from different accounts (but in this case, usually from different IP addresses) will be people who post from home, from public libraries, from work sneaking around a nanny filter, and from mobile devices while commuting (hopefully not while driving, though). Not sure the "view all by" feature can handle all that yet, though. I wouldn't mind a future upgrade to ML where we just logged in to the website before viewing and posting. That might give you a better database resource for sock puppet outing analysis.

I am guessing that (view all by) mainly works on similarity of what I put in the three text inputs. I would presume that not being taken for a troll masquerading as me works on the stylistic similarity of what I put in the textfield box. (I'd say, "works by the virtue of", but that sounds a little self-congratulatory. For all I know, all my posts read as stylistically similar and consistently non-virtuous.)

But I do see posts I could swear I remember posting from work alongside posts I know I posted from home. So there you go: confusion!

Good night, all, before I eat my toes again!

Fr th wnrs f ths blg -
snc ths s Grmn T-nln ccnt, t s lkly tht th P ddrss chngs vry 24 hrs, bt pls, d lnk t ny f my ldr psts tht cm frm t - lkly, thy wll b cncrnd wth trtr, dt prvcy, nd th cntrsts btwn Grmny nd th .S.

s fr fw gnrl cmmnts -
my chldrns' ntrnt PC s n th sm rm s r PC - dn't hv ny fltrs bcs thr ntrnt s s pblc (nd bcs thy nly s Lnx). Strng hw sm ppl thnk th ntrnt s prvt spc n trms f th wrds n scrn, whl n trth, t s th lrgst dt cllctn systm vr crtd. Cll m prnd - bt thn, t s prn whch s cnsdrd hstrclly wll fndd n Grmny.

nd s fr nttlmnt - thgh cmmnty s nttld t dfn tslf s t wshs, why r th mmbrs nttld t nfrmtn whch s nt thrs?

s hv wrttn n nthr st dply cncrnd bt ts cmmnty mg, my vwpnt hs bn qt cnsstnt - ppl wll frm thr wn pnns, rgrdlss f th fcts r trth, nd wrryng bt wht thrs thnk s gnrlly wst f tm. (nd tht st ss th 'm' tchnq fr trblsm pstrs, whch sms t m t b mr cmmnty bsd, nd nt sbjct t th whms f 'sftwr prblms.')

wll rfrn frm dng mr thn mrly ntng tht th dltns t bng-bng cntn, wth t lst 2 ppl nw hvng cmmnts 'ncrrctly' dltd, th scnd ftr bng ccsd f bng sck pppt f th sm drk nd mystrs ntrnt frc t whch sppsdly blng.

t mst b fscntng t lv n wrld whr nyn tht sms t rsmbl sm drdd nmss/fl s prt f vst ffrt t dstry wht s rght nd gd. Lckly, th clsst cm t tht xprnc n dly lf s rdng mrcn bsd wb sts. My wf thnks ths s prtty sck hbt, nd s vry trd f hrng bt llgl mprsnmnt, trtr, wrtppng, gvrmnt bss nd ncmptnc - s sh sys, w dn't lv n th .S., s why shld sh cr?

Sh hs gd pnt. Tschs.

Thinking of this summer's Harry Potter #7 thread on Making Light, where I was interested to look at the book with some people who had more experience with speculative writing than I, to read about what it did well, and what it might have done better. But someone jumped in with a negative opinion at the beginning, and the discussion came to be all about him, and whether he had the right to do it. Left the book behind."

I understand your frustration with the HP7 thread--it's irritating when neat discussions get side-tracked into nit-picking or point-wrangling. But discussions aren't about what 'you' want to talk about. They're about what 'we' want to talk about. So when you say they left the book behind, what you mean is they left what you wanted to talk about behind. From what I could tell they were still talking about Harry Potter, albeit an esoteric facet. There's nothing wrong with being irritated by that, but there is potentially something wrong with thinking that that's our problem, and not yours. The people on the HP7 thread manifestly wanted to discuss Greg's arguments, viz. they were doing so. Why should your desires weigh more heavily than theirs?

"Anyhow, my point is that it seems to me that groups don't handle minority points of view, or dissent very well."

Depends on what you mean by dissent. There are a great variety of opinions expressed on ML regarding the quality of various sf and fantasy stories. There's a lot less variety of opinion on, say, the moral worth of the Iraq war. Venturing an opposing view regarding one will meet a lot more, ah, blowback than the other. This has nothing to do with a Fascist-like adulation of the party line, but with the basic fact that people who enjoy discussion with each other, and thus end up hanging out at the same website, tend to have similar views on subjects of importance.

One subject of importance to MLers is forum moderation. It's frequently discussed here, and our hostess TNH is something of an expert on it (so good that Boing Boing hired her to moderate their comments, don'tcha know!). So when someone blows in and starts talking nonsense, they'll be smacked down pretty hard. We have zillions of hours of discussing moderation under our collective belt, and as a result, we're pretty well-equipped to tear apart a troll's half-formed bloviating. It's kind of like going to Ezra Klein's blog and saying, "Well, but is single-payer healthcare REALLY any better?," or going to Pharyngula and voicing doubts about the merits of evolutionary "theory." You'd be lucky to even receive the privilege of being ripped a new one: far more likely you'd just get banned. Because they have better things to do, far more meaningful arguments to have, than rehashing their basic precepts for the zillionth time just because some clueless idiot popped up. So are we hostile to dissent? Only when we perceive that dissent as being primarily an attempt to waste our time.

I in fact once filked a Christmas carol thus:

Woodchucks we have heard on high,
Cordwood flinging o'er the plains.
And the ferrets in reply,
Echoing their joyous strains:

Lignum, jacentes marmotae!

Generally, it doesn't seem to be what you're saying that annoys people, but how you're saying it. You sound accusing, defensive, rude and whining - and you have sounded this way, to me, in every comment you or your sockpuppets have made in this thread and on Boing Boing.

If you at least made some attempt at politeness and manners, I think you would find that your comments did not get deleted or disemvowelled and that you would not find commenting privileges suspended. You would also find that people wanted to engage with your opinions instead of your behaviour.

Try it and see.

Onward.

Consider Never (285): I'm starting to agree with the people who think it's a sociopath. Notice how it makes its motives sound almost reasonable? What it's actually talking about is massively selfish and disruptive behavior. This thing tells lies as naturally as it breathes.

This weekend, it launched a vicious, spiteful attack on Cory Doctorow that appeared to be coming from multiple readers of Boing Boing. In form, it was the kind of emotionally crushing nastiness that takes all the joy out of having a weblog; and because it appeared to be spontaneously coming from several different commenters at once, the attack had extra impact and apparent credibility.

This isn't just some guy who doesn't want to give out his true identity.

Being German has nothing to do with being paranoid. None in my extended family is, and we're all online.

Sociopath? I'm not too sure that I would call it APD, but it does feel like Cluster B. Like most toxic trolls I would lean more toward narcissism that's well on the way to NPD. High functioning and way too much like some people I am dealing with these days.

Bttr s th nw frly cmmn prctc f sng mgnt strp rdr t gthr nfrmtn frm drvr's lcns bfr cstmr s llwd nt br - ths nfrmtn s nt prtctd by ny dt prvcy lws (Dtnschtz s frgn wrd n th .S., f nt dngrsly n-mrcn), nd yt, f y dcd nt t hnd vr th lcns, y cnnt ntr th br.

wn't vn gt nt th fct tht f yr mplyr pys fr yr hlth nsrnc, ll mdcl nfrmtn cncrnng y nd yr hlthcr blngs t yr mplyr, nt yrslf.

r th fct tht s n prvcy t n mrcn wrkplc cncrnng tlphn cnvrstns r -mls. Snc th tlphn r PC blngs t yr mplyr, yr mplyr hs th lgl rght t mntr ll yr cmmnctns - whch s nthnkbl hr, f crs, nlss y rmmbr wht Sts ws lk.

cld g n, nd n - bt why bthr? n mrcn wh bjcts t sch dly ftrs f lvng n th lnd f th fr s gnrlly cnsdrd prnd. s th thngs hv dscrbd r ctlly nt lgl n Grmny (wll, f y hnd yr sws t smn s yr chc - bt n n wll fl th plc shld b nvlvd f y dn't shw t whn ntrng pblc bldng), 'm nt sr wht y mn bt Grmns nt bng prnd. Grmny frbds mny cmmnplc prctcs n th .S., gss bcs Grmns cn't mgn why sch prctcs shld b llwd.

s fnl xmpl - th sländr-/rdnngsmt dsn't rlly kp cmptr rcrds (thy r bgnnng t, thgh), nd ths s n prps, t lst ccrdng t n prsn spk t, svrl yrs g. f th plc nd prtclr fl plld t 3m, Bmt s clld, bt thr s n rsn fr th gvrnmnt t hv trly ffcnt rcrds cncrnng ctzns - Rstrfhndngn r stll cnsdrd prblm n Rchtsstt, ftr ll. dn't knw hw mch lngr tht wll b tr - Schbl s prtty mrcn n hs dtrmntn t wrtp vryn nytm, fr r wn gd, f crs.

The formulation I've heard was, "The customer is always right. Logically, this means that if you are sufficiently wrong, you are no longer a customer."

If you don't like how things are handled in the US, don't go there. It's the same as with blogs. :)

I'd like to discuss it too, but also not now. Right now I need to dip my brain in dilute hydrofluoric acid to get the slime from neverhydra off it.

That you're a troll? We could pretty much figure that out. That you're a multi-headed sockpuppet? I was going to suggest that a few hours before you were officially outed. You're a troll. And if a troll puts on a pointed hat one moment, and then a bowler the next moment, you're still a fricken troll.

Seriously. You. Are. A. Troll.

people will form their own opinions, regardless of the facts or truth

Right. Back. At. You. Babe.

Whatever opinion you've formed about BoingBoing or MakingLight, they werent based on observation. We've already established that. You've got some burr under your saddle about Cory, and you just won't let it go.

The great advantage of the old days was that once you were in the desert, it took some considerable effort to come back out of it. There were serpentine arroyos to be followed, water holes to be found, small rodents to be caught and cooked. Plus humping everything out you humped in.

This made it harder to head back to civilization than it was to stay in the desert engaging in contemplation, spiritual-renewal, and all the rest of it. In short, going into a real desert was far more likely to lead to enlightenment than going into the fake desert of swearing off the internet for a while.

These days, it actually requires will power, for heaven's sake, to stay in the desert. The horror is: all you have to do is read one comment thread and you are instantly removed from the therapeutic wilderness. No heavy humping required. It's a breeze to never have to look at yourself in a spiritually intimate way.

It's great that the web has brought humanity together in a new way. Now all we need is a way to reliably pry ourselves apart again.

However, employers do not own health records here, and indeed there are health record privacy laws in the US (though handled with the usual American sloppiness in practice).

The requirement for presentation of a government-issued identification to enter various places of business is indeed onerous and for the most part of no practical use. As a friend of mine pointed out to me recently, most people in this country had never given a thought to their security from terror attacks and are at best catching up with what's needful and useful. I have some hope that practicality and the need for security from corporate data collection will occur to more of the population as time goes by.

ID checking at bars is related to astoundingly draconian laws regarding liquor licensing and the way the burden of keeping out the under-aged is placed on the proprietors in the US. Card readers are an easy technological fix and raises the bar on ID forgery while shifting some of the burden of liability for letting children become inebriated away from bar owners.

Really, every society has to explore the consequences of social control decisions for itself. The DDR (no, not "Dance Dance Revolution!") learned, among other things, that a full-blown Stasi has costs far beyond its benefits and far more than German society could afford. The US and post-reintegration Germany have lessons to learn about the cost of data collection and integration and we're still working though the early part of the curriculum.

The actual exam will be a snap quiz, not scheduled ahead of time. Our test in the US will be written differently from yours in Germany, and may be given on a different day.

I have to admit to deep curiousity about what a 'magnet strip reader' is. I've recently discovered how lovely welding magnets are as a fence for my drill press - are magnet strip readers similar?

'"Mdcl prvcy s jk n th wrld f mplymnt," Mltby sys.

Bcs mplyrs nrmlly prvd mdcl nsrnc, thy ftn hv ccss t yr cmplt mdcl rcrds. Thy r, hwvr, rqrd t kp yr mdcl rcrds sprt frm yr prsnnl fl, nd yr sprvsr shld nt hv ccss t thm.

mplyrs my ls rdr crdt chcks n mplys r jb cnddts nd, n mny css, gthr bckgrnd nfrmtn ncldng rcrd f th lwsts y'v bn nvlvd n, yr crmnl hstry, vn yr prscrptn rcrds.'

f crs, ths s ld nfrmtn. m sr tht sch dt prtctn lws hv bn mprvd ndr th Bsh dmnstrtn.

Jst lk th fngrprntng t th brdr fr ll nn-ctzns ntrng th .S. s mttr f fct, n prsn wrk wth dcdd n 2004 t n lngr trvl t th .S., mch lss by rtrmnt hm, smply bcs f hw nn-ctzns wr bng trtd.

r th dt ntry f ll nfrmtn prtnng t ll ndvdls flyng wthn .S. rspc, vn f th flght s btwn ttw nd Mxc Cty - tht's rght, crtn mscl prfrmr wll nt b bl t fly btwn ths pnts, bcs h s n th lst whch ds nt spk ts nm.

dn't hv ny plns t trvl bck t th .S. ny tm n th ftr - twc n th pst 8 yrs ws ngh. Nthng hr mks m mss th plc.

P.s. Was that Martin Luther King in the "Stand Up" speech in your "blowback" link? Being dead in 1968, how could he have been talking about Afghanistan?

MAO

AFAIK the Stasi did it with bits of paper - costly in manpower and difficult to search. What's happening now is totally different. The Land of the 'Free', and similar advanced societies, are doing it with computers which, as Google has demonstrated, can collect vast amounts of data very easily and very cheaply. Google, however, is an unstructured collection of data linked by a very smart search mechanism. Surveillance data is more structured because it includes 'keys', like SSN, ID card number, driver's license number, credit card number, etc., which link together data from different sources. This enables mass surveillance on a scale that the Stasi could not have dreamt of, though they would have loved it.

Yeah, right. As if evil, or just plain wrong-headed, practices couldn't possibly be conceived independently by people of other nationalities. Must be the water or something.

In case anyone's interested in what he meant with the Schäuble reference, you can read a couple of articles in Spiegel Online here or here.

Yes, data collection, ownership and privacy are issues everyone is facing, and definitely worth discussion. That's the point. Discuss the issues, don't sidetrack a legitimate debate with accusations of censorship and ill-will. Especially when the accusations are unfounded.

I understand your frustration with the HP7 thread--it's irritating when neat discussions get side-tracked into nit-picking or point-wrangling. But discussions aren't about what 'you' want to talk about. They're about what 'we' want to talk about. So when you say they left the book behind, what you mean is they left what you wanted to talk about behind. From what I could tell they were still talking about Harry Potter, albeit an esoteric facet. There's nothing wrong with being irritated by that, but there is potentially something wrong with thinking that that's our problem, and not yours. The people on the HP7 thread manifestly wanted to discuss Greg's arguments, viz. they were doing so. Why should your desires weigh more heavily than theirs?

I weigh in on Jack Ruttan's side here. Multiple people in that thread expressed a desire to have a conversation that wasn't about Greg's arguments, and some of us tried very hard to post about other things. But when every time I go back to see what's new on the thread, and there's one response to "Wasn't this cool?" and seventeen posts of people being very articulate about something that makes me angry...

Well, even if I really want to talk about what's cool in the book, and Jack Ruttan wants to talk about it, and a few other people want to talk about it, it's hard to continue happily doing so when three people have seventeen posts that are all about something that's making me angry.

At which point I either:

1) Respond to the what's making me angry and bury the thread further in the snarl;
2) Try to continue responding to something eighteen posts earlier and hope that other people haven't given up, which seems unlikely by the time I've repeated this process a few times;
3) or give up myself, in frustration.

I don't think that the people on the HP7 thread "manifestly" wanted to discuss that argument; I think that a very aggressive argument was made, people responded emotionally, and people who can and want to post very, very quickly made it impossible for anyone who didn't want to discuss that argument to hold a conversation.

It may well be a fact of internet life that all threads will belong to those who post most often and most quickly. It's sort of how in real life, conversations tend to belong to whoever talks the most loudly over everyone else. But I still find it very frustrating that one person with an emotional argument can remove the fun from a thread. It takes exactly two people to get into an argument that's heated enough that twenty people who wanted to talk about other things will leave rather than trying to work around the angry. And usually there's more than two people willing to argue, if one person's willing to keep poking until they do.

I suppose someone can point out that it's a moral failing on my part to not be able to ignore posts that make me angry and respond to ones I like. They're probably right. I do not have the zen calm necessary to read through eighteen posts that make me angry and then post a happy little "And I liked this too!" at the end.

But I'm still frustrated by it, and still annoyed by the implication that if a thread devolves into angry nitpicking, it's because "The people on [any particular thread] manifestly wanted to discuss" the angry nitpicking.

The people on the HP7 thread manifestly wanted to discuss Greg's arguments, viz. they were doing so. Why should your desires weigh more heavily than theirs?

Just because the torture thread turned into everyone arguing with CRV, it doesn't mean that everyone who read that thread and wanted to participate in it really wanted to discuss CRV's views on torture.

And some of us who post more slowly than others do get frustrated when it seems all threads belong to the first person to express a sufficiently controversial opinion to turn the thread into the Story About Them.

I honestly don't know. I'm a moderator on one forum elsewhere, and I have occasionally stepped in to tell people that they're getting too hostile, and they can either take a breather or get the thread locked. Or that if they want to discuss Item X, when the thread is explicitly about Item Y and there are people still trying to talk about Item Y through the midst of all the X, they can go start their own new thread on Item X and take the conversation there.

But that's a set of official company forums, which is a very different thing from a personal blog. And I don't know how much of my frustration here might come from having different cultural expectations.

TNH #289: Nope, not me. I was just surprised, as I had assumed (based on no information at all) that only unique names were allowed in the BB registration system. Not a big deal. On, as you say, ward.

It's a matter of etiquette, like announcing "this party sucks," turning off the host's tunes and putting on your own music. You might think it's what's needed to liven things up, but more likely than not, you'll get kicked out.

Better in such a case to ignore the fight, and just post your opinion as if the badness was never happening. If it's interesting, people will take it up, and the argument will peter out on its own.

If not, well, there's nothing you can do about it, and you may as well not draw attention to yourself, because you'll start having rotten cabbages thrown at you.

Anyone who wants to save vowelled copies of Never's comments should do it now.

As to the actual thrust of the discussion:

No one can accuse me of being an uncritical Cory Supporter, but count me boggled as to the complaint of the trolls. I read Overclocked, and liked it, ditto about 60% of Cory's output, but I still skim over the "X translated into Y" or "X as a Z" (where X is a Cory Doctorow-authored writing, Y is a language, and Z is a format) posts. Even more apropos, I just roll my eyes at much of his IPLaw posting, as I've made my views known (here and on my own LJ, mostly), and I (unlike these Trolls) don't feel the need to freak out and spawn a score of sockpuppets every time Mr. Doctorow prophesies the doom of scientific innovation, or the western critical tradition, or radio.

Also, if that comment by TNH with the sockpuppet-tracking analysis is a preview of The Book on Comment Moderation, I'm even more looking forward to it than I was before.

Well, while I'm quiet sure that Scottbot is very often not the person posting as "Scott" at Slactivist or the multi-named-idiot-of-the-day-who-may-or-may-not-be-Scott here, it wouldn't surprise me if it/either occasionally posted as Scottbot as well.

This type of name-swapping is really messing with my head - how can one be sure that the name I recognize isn't this idiot posting under the name? Is Teresa really Teresa? Am I really me?

Help!

Well, your metaphor is a really visceral, button-pushing example of the general issue I was trying to bring up; I would say, blurred distinctions between gift transfers and paid ones. (And in your example, it is my assumption that submission and helplessness are the actual thing being paid for; there's a horrifying SF short about genegeneered living ...muffs... in a boarding school, and I can't remember the title or author; Willis? Tiptree?)

I didn't notice any extra brandy, beyound what would be left in the bottle. The numbers all balanced for me. (1 3/4 cups is, um, 28 tablespoons, divide by 14 days ... yup, nothing left over but what's in the bottle. I wonder about basting it with Triple Sec instead, a few times.)

Somewhere ... (rummage rummage ... ah, here) there's a paper on turning Perl into Latin from my favorite mad scientist, Damian Conway; word order doesn't matter there either - the programs still run.

I told you he was mad.

Was the last line "naq vg fpernzrq?"

*heads to Google*

Looks like that's the one I was thinking of, yes. Thanks.

Joe McMahon, that is an interesting example of why treating code and speech as legally distinct is so illogical.

"They laughed at me at the University! But I'll show them. Bwahahah!!!"

In russian "ya ne znaiyu" = I don't know.

"Ne znaiyu ya" = it is unknown to me.

Please stop. You're just embarrassing yourself and giving the rest of us the heebie-jeebies. Go get offline. Spend some time with your kids, take them outside, for God's sake, while the weather still permits it. Instead, you're spending time trying in vain to convince a bunch of people that you have the right to be a jerk in at least three venues you don't own, that we know of. Twenty years from now, when your kids are grown and gone, you'll say, what the hell was I thinking, wasting their entire childhood trying to convince other people I had the right to be a jerk?

Note to all: yeah, I know don't feed the troll. But that's because of the Usenet trollery-for-fun thing. Real people with psychological problems, like this prize case, deserve heartfelt replies, I think. But Nielsen Haydens, feel free (ha) to correct me if you think otherwise.

Hmm. But then -- if he is a sociopath, then nothing I say will make him change his mind, right? Can anybody with some notion of psychology clue me in on this? Am I being too much a softy when I respond to this kind of person?

Incidentally, in re entitlement of the fannish. Yes. I once had a Web comic (and may once again) with a readership of, oh, at least ten people. One of them was such a fan. Big time. Two, actually, come to think of it, because the one I wasn't thinking of complained that I was too disdainful of his conservatism and never came back. Wow.

Teresa, if this isn't Too Much Info, is the FlyingSquid also one of never's puppets? I'm thinking no, but it's hard to say.

If you found your way here: http://stripesnoop.sourceforge.net/ , for example, you might be reassured to know that there's a community of people who want to defensively read their own magnetic stripe info to find out what they're revealing when they let someone else "swipe" their driver's license.

Anyway, I went and read the story, and never forgot it. Creeped me the hell out.

As I said, I may be too sensitive, and am seeing more than is really there. Some of the ranting I've seen seems to me to go beyond a mis-evaluation of the importance of one's own desires, to a denigration of the humanity of the provider relative to the consumer. As if the very act of providing were an admission of lesser worth. And I'm wondering if the common denominator is that what is being provided is entertainment, or pleasure in some sense, as if that's less dignified than providing physical goods or more abstract services.

It may very well be that you are right, and what I'm talking about is simply an example of the type of entitlement thinking that pushed my buttons and led me to see a connection that's not deep as I thought. I'm just curious if anyone else saw that connection.

I think materiae is used instead of, say, lignum to retain the idea of the rhyme & alliteration of the original; one of those translation issues.

BTW the standard for biological Latin binomials is for the first word to be capitalized and the second and others, whether or not they are based on a proper name, to be lower case. Named hybrid varieties or cultivars, put in quotes, get their registered capitalization, like Pandorea jasminoides "Bower of Beauty"

Mr/Ms never is very unlikely to receive either.

Never?
Well, hardly ever.

Russian is more inflected than English, but word order matters MUCH more in Russian than in Latin. "P'at dollarov," five dollars, but "Dollarov p'at," about five dollars.

Epacris 338: Yes, I have that on a t-shirt. That's what made me think of using it. So is "Materiae Marmotae jacentes" correct too? That would sing even better!

Ys, lts t sy... bt t nly gts mr trrfyng =). nd vn sng plt tn rnd hr s ngh t gt yr vwls rmvd. Th rny stll scps m, nd s ds th rsn fr my cnsstnt cnsr.

Bt 'm nt rlly n fr hstl cnvrstns, nd ths thrd s ssntlly bst-frnds gng-bng f smrm nd cndscnsn. f y hv rl qstn, y'r fr t ml m bt f crs tht's prvt mdm, nd y wll gt n grndstndng pnts.... =(

On the assumption that you have a faulty understanding of politeness:

Making threats (Yes, lots to say... but it only gets more terrifying) is not polite.

Making accusations without evidence (And even using a polite tone around here is enough to get yer vowels removed) is not polite.

Being dismissive (around here, yer vowels removed) is not polite.

Name-calling (best friends gang of smarm and condescension) is not polite.

Assigning suspect motives to people (grandstanding) is not polite.

I don't understand how you can possibly think you're using a polite tone. If you do think you are being polite, then I'm afraid you're just wrong.

Also, did you notice that Flying Squid's polite and genuine sounding posts - apologising for causing offence - on Boing Boing were left alone?

Why, if this place treats you so badly, do you keep coming back?

I don't mind it. It's cut down on the "out of state license, more likely to be fake, let's delay the line" trouble for me.

And, knowing the thin operating margin some of these clubs have, i doubt they can spare the effort to do data mining.

Of course, if we're all figments, then we are all equally real to each other, and therefore, relativistically, we're ALL real.
Now if only I had tangible hands with which to make that fruitcake...

dn't t trts m 's bdly.' Crtnly, cn hrdly pprct hvng my vwls rmvd bt ll-n-ll y sm lk gd ppl wh hppn t dsgr.

@nkk

Mkng thrts (Ys, lts t sy... bt t nly gts mr trrfyng) s nt plt.

Thrts? Y msrd m. (whch s why ws ds'mv'd n th frst plc).

Bng dsmssv (rnd hr, yr vwls rmvd) s nt plt.

Rmvng vwls s k, bt hvng prblm wth yr vwls bng rmvd s mplt? Gtch.

Nm-cllng (bst frnds gng f smrm nd cndscnsn) s nt plt.

Y'r rght. m srry. tk tht bck. Lt's s f th zlln-r-s thr stbs tkn p tp r ls tkn bck. r f Thrs vr plgzs fr wrngly ccsng m f sck-ppptry[sc] nd dl'ng my ccnt.

ssgnng sspct mtvs t ppl (grndstndng) s nt plt.

W'll s bt ths n. f h shts m prsnl pn-ndd dscssv[sc] ml, 'll tk ths n bck.

dn't ndrstnd hw y cn pssbly thnk y'r sng plt tn. f y d thnk y r bng plt, thn 'm frd y'r jst wrng.

lrdy ndrstnd th crrltn y nd mny mk btwn th ds f 'dsgr' nd 'mplt'. hppn t dsgr ( gss tht mns 'm mplt t).

ls, dd y ntc tht Flyng Sqd's plt nd gnn sndng psts - plgsng fr csng ffnc - n Bng Bng wr lft ln?

nly hs sbmssv, slf-dsmssv psts wr lft ln.

That's wisdom which should be inscribed on a marble plaque and inlaid with gold. Bravo!

Pyre, #119 & James, #122: SPLORFLE!

Wesley, #132: Not only that, but it's perfectly possible to disagree without debating at all. Sometimes, for example, all I want to say is some version of, "I don't agree with that statement because of X," and (having added my datapoint) go on to other things.

Emma, #144: "It would be interesting if X did Y" is one of the mainsprings of fanfic.

Individ-ewe-al, #170: Yes, exactly. If J. Random Kook stood up at the Hugo Awards ceremony and tried to trash-talk Cory (or anyone else) -- they'd be shown the door in short order, because they don't own that audience. The fact that the same principal holds online seems to be lost on a surprising number of people.

There's also a disturbing tendency, increasingly frequent in recent years, to conflate "the right to say what you like" with "the right to MAKE other people listen to you, in any venue, whether they want to or not." Correlation != causation, but I do notice that this seems to correlate very strongly with the rise of Christofascism in American society.

Lighthill, #205: Brilliant! Triolets -- er, Trollolets -- are even harder to do well than villanelles.

Midori, #230: I believe that whether or not to pronounce the first "r" in February is a dialectical distinction in America -- some linguistic subgroups do, while others don't.

Jack, #241: What you're describing here is a good example of "thread drift". It happens -- and if you're a Usenet veteran, you should be accustomed to it by now!

John Chu, #269: Well said. The fact that bad service does happen does not mean that there aren't sucky customers as well. Question: Have you ever known it to occur that the owner or manager of a business establishment finally lost their patience and said something to the effect of, "Having your business isn't worth putting up with your attitude -- there's the door"?

Epacris, #338: That's the form we use on our bumper sticker.

NO!!! *Puts aching head in hands. Goes to bed.*

Michael Roberts -- and goodness, I enjoyed that -- if Flying Squid turns out to be another sockpuppet I'll be very disappointed. He's one of the most reliable posters on Boing Boing.

Bruce Cohen (335), I think you're on to something. In the game wherein one undertakes to assign relative rank to all human artwork along a single linear scale of respectable to disreputable, one of the strongest determinants is whether the art form acknowledges that it gives a damn whether you enjoy it. Ballet is thus more respectable than Broadway musicals, and Gainsborough is more respectable than Hogarth and Rowlandson.

Columbina (who writes an interesting journal) wrote about the recent dustup. I only disagreed with her a little bit. Later, I went on to disagree quite a lot with one of her other commenters. Here's what I said to Columbina:

I don't think it's inarguable that people have a right to hold celebrities to some higher standard; but whether or not they have that right, the fact is that they do it, so those who are on the receiving end have to cope with it.

My take -- and in my experience, what I'm about to say holds true even down to the tunneling electron microscope-gauge celebrity of fandom -- is that as soon as you're perceived as a celebrity, there will be people out there who believe you can't be hurt. To them, you're now an action figure, not a human being.

If you decide a writer is a celebrity and can therefore be held to some kind of higher standard, what you say to or about them in pursuit of said higher standard will hurt just as much as it would if you were dealing with a non-celebrity writer. Celebrity has no analgesic value whatsoever.

I gather the thing that started this was a fan complaining that Doctorow was trying to sell carpets from his free ice cream truck.

No. It was an extremely nasty multipart attack by one sockpuppeting troll who's fixated on Cory, pretending to be a half-dozen people at once. Saying that Cory was doing self-promotion was just the excuse for the attack.

... the flipside of saying to the fan, "If you don't like it, don't read it," is saying to the professional blogger, "If you don't like criticism, turn off the comments field."

Would you say that to any of your friends on LJ if the same thing were happening in their comments?

When one seeks celebrity, one can't simply turn it off when it becomes inconvenient. Princess Diana could have lived a perfectly anonymous existence, but instead chose to take a very public job as Princess of Wales, used that position to advance her agenda, and then got all unhappy when she couldn't turn off the paparazzi spigot. Boo hoo. If you seek celebrity but don't want fans bothering you or criticizing you, become Thomas Pynchon and/or get a thicker skin.

I've known a number of people who became celebrities. None of them were seeking it. They were trying to write good books or good comics, or play baseball well. They wanted to be good at what they did, and succeed in their chosen field. That's not the same thing as wanting to be a celebrity.

What you don't understand is that celebrity is a function of the way the celebrated person is perceived. It doesn't inhere in that person. The status is bestowed by the people who see them as a celebrity. It's the ones doing the perceiving who are in control of it, though they don't like admitting that because it spoils the illusion for them.

I can prove this. Let's go back to that phenomenon I mentioned earlier, where people who perceive someone as a celebrity will lose track of the fact that they're still vulnerable and human. Here's the proof: it's completely unnecessary for the "celebrity" to have any real fame or prominence or privilege in order for this to happen. All it takes is for people to perceive them as a celebrity, and the effect kicks in. That's got nothing to do with the supposed celebrity. It's 100% simon-pure fairy gold.

Look at the way you're talking about celebrity. You're envious of a gift which you've bestowed, which you control; and you think it gives you the right to be unkind. It doesn't. That permission to be unkind is a gift you've given yourself. If that's what you truly want, then that's what you'll do; but don't pretend there's anything but your own desires at work.

Dork.

This from the guy who invented a bunch of sockpuppets to grandstand how important his opinion of someone else is? It wasn't anonymity, or some fear of privacy, you nutball, you were trying to stuff the ballot box, you were trying to make your opinion have far more weight than it really did.

You're a lone nutcase, and you have a gaggle of imaginary friends to keep you company. And when you use these imaginary friends to reinforce your sole opinion, you really are doing nothing more than an electronic version of self-gratification. The British might call you an internet wanker. "Why, yes, I do agree with myself."

Just to make it really clear so that you'll have to block your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth to keep this from getting in:

Did you publicly post your criticism to Cory?
Or did you email it privately?
Did you publicly criticize everyone on this blog?
Or did you email them privately?

Exactly, you grandstanding fool, you made your complaints public. And you continue to make them public. Because the game you're playing is to see how many imaginary friends you can get to agree with you on a public forum, so as to make you look more important to yourself.

It's called Narcissism. Look it up.

I'm clearly hoist by my own dry sarcasm here :)

If you found your way here: http://stripesnoop.sourceforge.net/ , for example, you might be reassured to know that there's a community of people who want to defensively read their own magnetic stripe info to find out what they're revealing when they let someone else "swipe" their driver's license.

... or the interesting collection of cards from various hotels, to see what the hotel shouldn't be storing on the magstripe in question, or any number of other cards with magnetic stripes on the back :)

This is reminding me that I need to get a USBgame port dongle so I can get my reader going again...

not to sidetrack, but my parser jams due to a lack of contextual experience with either ballet or musicals. Ballet gives a damn if you enjoy it and musicals don't?

The immediate question that follows is what to do if you give a damn, but no one seems to enjoy that art you created? Because at that point, not giving a damn might actually feel better, if you could somehow make it true.

Is there any chance that the word we're groping for here is objectification?

Yes, indeed, that's exactly where I was going, without quite knowing it. Not only is it turning people into objects, it's considering those objects as important for only one attribute, in this case whatever product the fan wants from the celebrity. All else is invisible to the fan. So even if the celebrity produces other things, if they're not part of the obsession, they really don't exist for the fan.

There is another thing going on here, though. There's the need to punish the celebrity for being or having more than the fan. That's a phase change like the one Remus Shepherd was talking about @ 55. At some point, even if the celebrity continues to produce what's wanted, it isn't enough, or it's too much, or something, and it becomes necessary for the celebrity to be taken down a peg or two. Hence the cycle of praise and criticism that writers and other artists get from critics: at first, if accepted, they can do no wrong, after awhile it becomes their turn in the barrel and they can do no right.

Rikibeth, 346, et al.
re: magnetic stripe driver's licenses
And, knowing the thin operating margin some of these clubs have, i doubt they can spare the effort to do data mining.
Sue Grafton used that very bit as a plot device in one of her more recent* books. Does anyone recall which one?

Dave Hutchinson, 351,
...I am intrigued by the use of the essentially English slang word `wanker.'...could give me some background on how it managed to cross the Pond I would be honestly grateful.

A huge part of the U.S. trade imbalance with the UK is due to the import of British Humor by local PBS affiliates. I don't know for sure, but I bet we can blame Red Dwarf and East Enders. (Possibly Chef, The Vicar of Dibley and Ballykissangel.) A more parsimonious explanation would be to just blame Hugh Grant.

Unless you mean, why it became popular? That's easy. Imported swear words sound silly more than threatening. I suspect the increased awareness of the 'incorrectness' of conventional swear words - that it's now obvious that they can easily be harassing, something not permitted as much in the workplace - leaves an void that must be filled with something that at least sounds vulgar. A bloody bunch of sodding hypocritical buggers, if you ask me.

*er, post 1995?

You want everyone here to agree to play the game by your rules, most notably that you get to define who it is who is "sincere" by demanding they step to your tune and send you a private e-mail. That will prove their good faith.

That's a sucker play. You get to make points, and the only dispute you will accept is that which is invisible. Silence = assent and you are dismissing all those who won't let you have the last, public, word, as being possessed of dishonest motives.

I call that impolite (I also call it rude, and it borders on trollish; but that's my opinion)

Me, I don't have much of a dog in this fight. I don't think dis-emvowelling is evil. I happen to think it a good thing. I've borrowed it, when possible, to show disapproval, without actually censoring. Part of it defensive. No one can come along and say I refused to admit there were those who disagreed.

I think your assertions about the level of debate allowed here are risible. We just had a couple of threads which were full of heat. There was some fairly snippy commentary. In none of those threads was there the need for anyone to suffer the lost of vowels.

Most telling, when the heat spilled from one thread to another we (the denizens, not the hosts) took each other to task, for letting baser emotion bleed into places it wasn't deserved.

The thing I see most here, is that each post is treated sui generis (though in a given thread it may be that one is trying to dig out of a hole, and that colors the starting value). I've disagreed. Been told I was being an idjit. I've been part of a "dogpile", and usually hold some spot in the middle.

Of the places I hang out, this is probably the one I like best. People who have ripped into me for one thing, have supported me (both qua me and in argument) in other threads, at the same time.

So, from my personal experience, your claims of narrow mindedness are nonsense (literally, they make no sense to me). Your assertions that we, as a group, insist on things being in accord... well that's either wilfull ignorance (given that you have had some days to poke around), inability to digest the facts, or mendacity.

None of those option speak well for you; but that's how it looks to me.

It's more than just impolite. It violates the social contract of interactive discussion; establishes a double standard, and is, fundamentally immorral.

So all in all, I'd say you've gotten far kinder treatment than such behavior warrants, not least from me.

ws lnkd t ths cnvrstn v Bng Bng. m n f th ppl wh hs bn ccsd f bng sck pppt t Bng. m nt nd d nt lg n s mltpl ppl n BB r hr.

Lt m ssr y tht ths s th frst tm hv pstd n ths st, nd hv n dsr t rgstr mlln nms t try t mk pnt. f cn't d ths n fw prgrphs, thn wht wll b th rslt f hndrds f mssgs?

nly sk tht y, th mdrtr, gv m jst ths mssg t pst my pc wtht t bng dltd r grbld.

hv bn wrngly ccsd f bng sck pppt. Th rsn s mst lkly d t th fct tht my frst fw psts n BngBng wr md sng th Tr ntwrk. hv sttd my rsns fr sng Tr n Bng s t prtct my P ddrss.

Snc ws nmd sckpppt hv trd t d vrythng t prv tht m nt t n vl. hv ffrd t snd y cpy f my d, t gv y phn cnvrstn, nd hv vn stppd sng Tr s tht y cn s th cty nd stt pst frm.

hv n dsr t b trll. jst wnt t b bl t pst. Nn f my psts hv bn ffnsv, mn-sprtd, r bltnt cnjctr.

smply sk tht y drp whtvr y hv gnst m. Whtvr dd, r wht y thnk dd, dd nt d. m nt mltpl ppl. brly vn pst t Bng nlss hv slw dy t wrk.

Pls tll m why y cntn t thnk m smn ls? thght tht whn strtd pstng wth my rl P tht y wld sly s tht m rl, lv, nd brthng prsn. vn thght tht w hd tht ndrstndng s y llwd m t pst s TrthFrctn, nd vn rpld t my psts?

Wht chngd, nd why? D y wnt m t scn n d nd ml t t y?

m n f th cslts f y wr n trlls, nd m dng my bst t rmn clm nd crdl dspt th rspnss hv bn gvn.

f y nswr s n t gvng m th chnc t prv myslf, thn pls t lst gv m nd xplntn s t why.

thnk tht Yg nd sm thrs gt dltd bcs f my lst psts dfndng thm, nd wnt t ssr y tht m nt ffltd wth ny f thm.

Thnk fr yr tm nd th spc t wrt ths.

midori, with respect, which part of the word 'troll' don't you understand? Yeago doesn't need any provocation at all to attack someone, because he's a troll.

Teresa@358: one of the strongest determinants is whether the art form acknowledges that it gives a damn whether you enjoy it. Ballet is thus more respectable than Broadway musicals

not to sidetrack, but my parser jams due to a lack of contextual experience with either ballet or musicals. Ballet gives a damn if you enjoy it and musicals don't?

No, the other way around. It's like the old argument about literary fiction vs. common genre fiction. Genre fiction usually has two things going for it: a frame of expectations for what kind of story it is (mystery, romance, etc.) AND a focus on storytelling that pulls you in. If you don't enjoy it, chances are the author screwed up.

Literary fiction means you have to bring your own frame, set it up, check if it's level, and carefully usher the experience through. Storytelling chops became more or less optional over time, as the storytellers became more dependent on the frame manufacturers (the literary-industrial collegiate complex) than a close relationship with fans. In other words, if you don't enjoy it, it's your fault.

Note: the preceding two paragraphs are a parody of reality, presented strictly for illustrative purposes, and not intended to reawaken that flame-winged strawBalrog of lit vs. genre arguement.

Anyway, ballet is accessible if you know how to decode what you are looking at - or if it's really, really, good - human beings moving around to music can be pretty neat. Once upon a time, the genres in ballet were commonplace enough that you didn't need lots of training or experience to decode it - still true for some people, in much the same way the original Star Trek series is still watchable to people my age, but not my younger cousins.

The genres in musicals are pretty accessible to us - most of the tropes are still in use in modern sitcoms and romantic comedies. Really hummable tunes, clever wordplay, and spectacle are the equivalent element to the focus on storytelling in genre fiction. Those properties are transitive when musicals are filmed, unlike ballet.

Start your own blog. Write clever interesting things and build a following, and you will then be able to communicate with as many people as you would on BoingBoing. Quit crying about being banned and quit trying to get around it. It may be unfair, though I highly doubt it, Teresa's powers of observation are not to be underestimated.

Moreover, this is really not the right place to make your appeal. If Teresa will not respond favorably to an e-mail from you, why on earth would she respond to an off topic post on her personal blog?

If you are trying to build support for your case over here at ML, then you are really barking up the wrong tree. We guests at Making Light may disagree over a great many topics, however we all respect Teresa (and Patrick, Jim, and Avram), otherwise we wouldn't hang out here.

So, I tell you what. Start a blog. Post the address here or go to my blog and leave a comment with the address, and I will come over and read it and engage in discussions with you.

Other than that, you need to knock it off. Seriously. I've seen you on BB, and you really need to stop.

John Stanning, #308: The costs I had in mind go far beyond the implementation costs. There are less immediately obvious costs associated with massive surveillance: for the HUMINT part you have a lot of indirect costs due to making everyone worry that everyone else is an informant. Me, I just inform on myself and cut out the middleman.

Teresa, #318: Cue Fred Astaire singing, "How can you believe me when I said I trolled you, when you know I've been a liar all my life?"

Shorter recent comments on BoingBoing generally and from TruthFriction here, "I am NOT Spartacus!"

One of the lessons about data security is that identity can't lift itself by its bootstraps: source IPs, postmarks, copies of identity papers sent by fax or in the mail, none of these are worth anything. Plausible content and stylistic markers are probably as good as it gets and more than good enough for blog comments. Unfortunately, a nose for stylistic markers is probably not something that Teresa can give anyone through a book, though she has a superabundance of nose for style herself.

N.B. I'm nobody's sock puppet but my own.

I keep trying to post comments on BB. I'm registered. I just keep getting redirected to some weird page with what looks like a comments log.

Ah, well. I shall try again tomorrow or so.

I think they may be more like restaurants or bars than living rooms, in that anyone can wander in, and anything you say may be overheard by complete strangers. (In general I don't let just anybody into my living room.)

A blog owner determines the menu of ideas and the commentators can pick and choose among them, or in the case of open threads, make suggestions as to interestiing topics.

At the same time however, a minimum of polite behavior to the other diners is required and those not meeting it will be escorted to the door. Those with a history of bad behavior may be requested not to darken that door again.

What constitutes bad behavior is determined by the owner and is subject to their whims and fancies. (This is a haute cuisine restaurant! Do not discuss novelle cuisine here!)

If you don't like what the restaurant serves or how it's decorated you're not required to go there.

I'm thinking that this analogy is a little more workable than the living room one, in that it's my perception that people behave a little bit better in public spaces (Yes, I realize that this shouldn't be true, but it's my opinion that it is.) and a little more likely to remember that their behavior is witnessed.

I also think that people might find it a little less raw to be tossed out of a restaurant than out of someone's living room. On the other hand, would a troll care? Probably not.

And the thing that started this all? A restaurant/bar/coffee house is expected to advertise; behavior that some people find grating in a living room. (Grating or not, it does not excuse subsequent bad behavior.)

Of course, analogies are suspect, and I may be whistling in the wind.

I have been whining and it serves no purpose.

Goodbye.

generally some art, and some art forms, are more about money than talk, and vice versa.

I don't agree with this statement at all. I will agree that some artists, and some impresarios, patrons, whatever are more about money, or talk, than art, but an art form is an end product of human work; it has no bias towards any purpose beyond that of the creator or the user. There are Broadway plays and musicals written and produced strictly for money, and there are others* done for the love of the work.

* Julie Taymor's plays, and Bob Fosse's musicals to give just two examples.

(Not original with me, but I don't know who said it.)

Midori, #371: That's a good description of the difference between "literary" and "genre" fiction. The point at which we disagree is that I believe "literary" is now a genre, subject to its own tropes and stereotypes -- one of which is that the story no longer matters. And I'm very much an elitist about that; if the author can't write a decent story, then I refuse to accept the blame when I fail to enjoy it. IMO, that author is not living up to the terms of the (implicit) contract between author and reader.

Note that "decent story" != "my enjoying it". It's quite possible for an author to write good, solid stories that simply aren't to my personal taste, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Secondary note: I don't know how old you are (and I'm not asking!), but I'm over 50 and most ClassicTrek episodes aren't very watchable for me either. Way too much outdated sexual stereotyping.

Margaret, #377: I think of my LJ as the online equivalent of my living room; more precisely, of my living room in which I'm having a party. My friends are all welcome, and they can bring their friends, and I get the occasional drop-in from someone who just thinks it looks like an interesting place to be, and that's a lot like my annual Chocolate Decadence party. OTOH, I don't allow anonymous posting on my journal, and I've thrown a couple of people off (permanent ban) for bad behavior, just as I would out of my home. I think, however, that the structure of LJ is more conducive to that approach than the structure of most blogging software. For example, I can make locked LJ posts which are not open to the public, but can only be seen by a group of people I select; I don't think that can be done on most blogs.

Those properties are transitive when musicals are filmed, unlike ballet.

If you're saying that ballet can't be filmed so that all of its interesting properties are apparent, I'd say instead that it's very hard to film ballet (or modern dance, as opposed to show dance) well, but it can be done. It's not the same experience as seeing it live, any more than a live production of a Busby Berkeley musical could capture all the spectacle of a film. But I can think of one or two films that were reasonably, if not greatly, successful. The Royal Ballet Company production of the Tales of Beatrix Potter was one of them, I think.

Ever since I had to request some people leave a party, I've been more careful about who I invited in the first place.

And my home is a very personal space. I may be more private than some, but I don't want all and sundry dropping by, even if I'm having a party. I'm not saying this is good or bad, or better than how you do it; it's just how I am.

This may be why I'm more comfortable with the restuarant analogy.

I assure you, I am a person.

A minimal amount of research on teresa's part would have turned that fact up. Had she looked up my boingboing login name, "mecenday," or my email, she would have seen my path splashed across the internet. I'm a recently outted mtf transsexual so she would have only seen 6 months of my current name, but had she really wanted she could have traced me back further via associated names.

I don't get why she doesn't think I'm a person, and she won't tell me via private email.

Th sm wy nthr rl prsn sms t trt nmbr f ppl wh r (lkly - sh hs th srvr lgs, whl Scttbt s nt prgrmmd t rspnd n tht r) rl s prt f hr mgnry drk sd f th ntrnt, whthr t s hydr r scpth. Th smpl nswr tht myb fw ndvdls hv bn flsly grpd nt tht rl prsn's wn mgnry wrld s th srt f rny tht Scttbt cld nvr mng n ts wn.

Scttbt ssms prt f th prblm s tht n dbt t nthr frm, Scttbt nt nly vgrsly spk t gnst Wb 2.0 (nt t mntn prvcy cncrns, pt pv f Scttbt's fmbl fngrd bldr), bt md fltng rfrnc t ts pln fr ntrnt dmntn - lng wth shwng Scttbt's wn ptntd(TM) ntrnt shrkng. Mrcflly, Scttbt wll rfrn frm dmnstrtn hr.

Nnthlss, Scttbt ndrstnds hw sm ppl jst cn't chng thr vw f thngs - fn rfrnc s wht hppnd t Jms ngltn t th C, wh ftr bng srsly brnd by Km Phlby, strtd sng hs wn nghtmr vsns vrywhr - http://n.wkpd.rg/wk/Jms_Jss_ngltn#ncrsng_prn
(Bt y ddn't knw tht th hd f th C cntr-ntllgnc blvd Kssngr cld hv bn KGB gnt f nflnc - wr crmnl, sr, bt KGB?)

Scttbt s nt ll tht cncrnd bt whthr nyn blvs n ts mgnry xstnc, nd cnsdrs ll ths prtty phmrl, t pt t mldly. Thgh ths dt wll b strd n vrs dtbss fr lng tm, n n wll cr bt t n th lst, ncldng Scttbt. nd s nly mkng gst pprnc bcs t sm pnt, t lks t sy 'tld y s.'

Bt Scttbt s nvs t th xtnt tht y t lst pprd, f fr mr thn yr 15 mnts f Wrhl tm, snc nn f th psts Scttbt's bldr md (myb 5? 8? mst n Sptmbr - nd dmttdly wtht rgstrng s sr) hv vr bn pblshd t bng-bng, snc rmrkng t hw hvy hndd th nw mdl mdrtn ws. Scttbt s prd f tht nw phrs, vn thgh n Grmny, w rn't brnng ny ffgs f nyn.

This is getting tedious. What do you hope to accomplish by coming here and bitching about being banned or disemvowelled on BoingBoing? If TNH is the ogre you think she is, how exactly are you helping your situation by complaining about her on her own website? I don't know why you were banned and I don't care.

Fucking. Get. Over. It. Already.

I see you have a LiveJournal account, why don't you talk about it there? You can post whatever you want there, with no fear of the evil Teresa or any other of the monstrous BB'ers trying to block or censor you.

I still your think that you are a sock-puppet whose hijacked a real person's online identity for your own twisted ends. I've bookmarked your LJ page, if an entry about this shows up there, I'll be suprised. I still won't feel sorry for you being banned from BB, since you clearly have your own forum for communicating your ideas. Use it.

never-scottbot-whatever: You are obviously mentally ill. Please seek help before one of your delusions causes you to hurt yourself or others. I thought you were leaving this thread anyway. Who asked you to come back?

Not to mention the fact that those two things can quite easily go together. People can have more than one reason for doing the things they do, and there is no reason that a desire to make money can't go hand in hand with a love of the work.

I used to work for a full-service financial planner who used client tracking software designed specifically for his line of work. You could call each record a Prospect, Green Cherry, Red Cherry, Client, etc. There was also a special category called Jerk.

Sorry to go OT. Lurked on this blog a long time, drifted away and just came back, but...

When did we stop using English in here?

Sorry if I'm tragically unhip and so 20th century, but wtf?

This guy and his interaction style reminds me very much of the run-ins I've had with various Usenet kooks in past years. It's not the good-natured trolls or even the petty vandals you have to worry about, it was the ones who would create endless subterfuges and identities because they saw themselves as vengeful freedom fighters out to protect the Internet from anything that would get in the way of, well, themselves, creating endless subterfuges and identities to spew vengeful venom from. I was stalked all over the Internet for quite a while by one character who called himself Jai Maharaj, because I'd helped create a moderated newsgroup, and that was an intolerable restriction on his freedom to spew random lunacy onto all newsgroups, not just some.

So, harking back to Bob Webber's comment @ 297, I think he's certainly nailed the personality connection. I believe Rebecca's said that character in Time's Child (a very fine book) was modeled closely on a real person she got to know through her anti-spam activity.

Teresa @ 289 & Claude @ 292: The current thinking seems to be that the major personality disorders are never really distinct conditions; rather, they fall into clusters and blur together. You'll rarely find someone who has pure antisocial personality disorder without strong narcissistic tendencies; the narcissistic form may be blended with borderline personality or histrionic, etc. I believe my wife (professional psychologist) said they're thinking of lumping them into much broader diagnostic groups in the next DSM release.

The kind of people who are attracted to disrupting online fora, while fervently believing that they're making it all better and liberating it, I think inevitably combine some narcissistic, histrionic and antisocial aspects. Fundamentally what CeCe, Yeago, never, and aliases object to is that BoingBoing is not about him, and that's deeply offensive to him. (And it is usually a him, in my experience.)

Personally, I think it's a great invention. Some of the recipients disagree. (Not all and not always; I've seen some people here occasionally ask if one of their posts could be disemvowelled, because they'd said something intemperate and regretted it.)

I feel like Rip Van Winkle. Won't happen again.

Perhaps you are a person, but you are not a particularly polite one. I haven't seen what you might have posted at Boing Boing and I don't care why you were banned or whether the reason has any basis in reality. I say you're impolite because you, having been banned at Boing Boing, have chosen to follow one of the employees there back to her home to bitch about it. If this were happening in the physical world, police would be en route right about now.

SW Erdnase: See Disemvowelling .

Oddly, while Googling for an explanation of disemvowelling I came across How To Keep Hostile Jerks From Taking Over Your Online Community. The people who still want to sputter about Cory and Boing Boing and censorship and alleged hypocrisy should probably read it, note the author's name and the fact that it predates this current kerfuffle and realise that they had it coming.

Eastenders would be a lot more enjoyable if it had a laugh track.

Is the next DSM going to include MIPD (Modem-Induced Personality Disorder)? I've been observing it in the field since the late '80s.

Over the weekend, Cory got hit with a really vicious multipart attack in one of the BB comment threads. I wound up spending most of the World Fantasy Convention in my hotel room, dealing with the mess.

What I eventually sorted out was that almost all of the initial attacks, and almost all of the protests over the actions I took to deal with those attacks, were the work of one person. He's a sockpuppet-generating troll, and has been making a pest of himself at BB for some time now.

I knew there was a chance you were real. There was also a chance that you weren't. Troll Sockpuppet Guy puts a lot of work into generating false identities. Also: (1.) you instantly assumed that any moderation was censorship and therefore oppression and hypocrisy; (2.) you kept insisting that this had happened solely because the commenter had "disagreed with the moderators"; and (3.) you suggested I be replaced with a Slashdot-style rating system. Those responses are all characteristic of this troll.

(Of course Troll Sockpuppet Guy favors a Slashdot-style system: it would never detect him.)

I made your comments disappear because they were inextricably part of a larger and uglier mess I was cleaning up. I temporarily banned you until I could figure out whether you were one of the sockpuppets. You would have received a note telling you it was a temporary ban, but the WiFi service at the hotel didn't connect with my mail account.

I've seen your denunciatory letter to Boing Boing. My entirely sincere advice to you is to always remember to spellcheck your flames before you send them.

As far as I'm concerned, most of the people who complain about moderation want to simultaneously have the behavioral latitude they enjoy on junk message boards, and the kind of audience that only exists on moderated boards.

In short, they're making the not-grown-up-yet wish: I want to stay exactly like I am, and do exactly what I want to do, and have that get me the results I desire.

It's very unusual for people capable of and inclined to do commercial work at all to have precisely one viable idea for whatever their field of work is. Usually there's a whole spread of things you and whoever you need to work with might do, and a big part of the creative process is figuring out which one you want to try next, whether it might pick up pieces of works that overall seem not so good for right now but have these elements you'd hate to leave behind, and so on. At least among those of us who have commercial and artistic ambitions, "What can I do that there's an audience for and will satisfy me?" is the stock question. It's basically the same impulse as having fun cooking for a mixed crowd or hosting a successful party - you want it to be rewarding to all involved, creators and audience alike, whether the reward is laughter, cathartic tears, stimulation to fresh ideas, or whatever.

When money's involved, there are times when it's more important to satisfy the customer than to have fun just for oneself along the way...but a lot of the best work does reward people on both sides of the creative and commercial process. It is certainly a thing to hope for, and to work to achieve whenever possible.

What's the emoticon for rolling your eyes? All I can do is wink.

;)

I stumbled in here to find some sort of explanation of why I might have been removed. Y'all were talking about me here, so I posted a reply. I hope that can be understood.

I was going to leave BB after my third comment. That comment was retracted by the mod. So I stuck around slightly longer trying to be heard. I'm not some vindictive monster... I'm just someone trying to get their voice heard where it is most relevant to the conversation, and where I don't really make the rules.

I'm sorry if I'm out of line to bring my discusion here. But teresa how now given me at least some sort of explanation and that's enough for me to be satisfied.

Teresa,

You've bullet pointed my views pretty fairly. I think they're valid, you think they constitute trollery. It's a difference in opinion that's unlikely to be resolved.

But I guess I've always been taught that trollery is personal attacks, and griping without explanation. Sure, I've been griping. But I thought I was reasonable in my explanations.

As to the spellcheck... I noticed some of the errors too after I sent it off, "hypocracy," lol. But understand, I *am* on a mobile device without integrated spellcheck or easy access to a 3rd party spellcheck. Also understand, I was quite upset when I wrote the message and wasn't at my best. I missed some things.

It's been typical of your tone to pick at something like spelling. That was one of my complaints, as you have read, that the tone isn't the issue, only the viewpoint. My tone probably did get out of line at times, but you and the others matched me blow for blow, yet those posts stand.

It is almost universally accepted that griping over someone's typo, spelling, or grammar is the emptiest and pettiest of flames. And now you've thrown that out there. I hope it doesn't reflect the dialog behind the scenes at BB, because that's a weak defense against what I had charged.

I am not Teresa, but I'd just point out that that is not what she said. She said, "Those responses are all characteristic of this troll." (emphasis added)

You came up with a set of arguments and opinions that made you sound like a particular troll who was active in the thread at the time. It's like if I dressed up in the uniform of a football team and wandered onto a football field, then wondered why everyone assumed I was on the team.

-----
* I hereby promise to pay Xopher a kudo every time I use the term

David 396: I was thinking of using Church Latin pronunciation to match the original: "yah-chen-tes."

David 397: In the original, you sing a long melisma on the 'glo' in 'gloria', with a long stressed note at the end (still on 'o'), then you sing the 'i' and 'a'. I would sing the melisma on 'ma', but the long stressed note on 'ter'. Then the 'i' and 'am' match the 'i' and 'a' of the original exactly.

The best filks are assonant with the original text, don't you agree?

Teresa 400: That reminds me of the place most Americans want to vacation: lush vegetation, no rain, low humidity. Such places do exist (unlike totally free but moderation-quality fora), but they're completely artificial and waste important resources in an unconscionable way.

It also reminds me of what Judy Harrow has called the "last house in Staten Island" syndrome: many people in Staten Island certainly thought THEY should have a house, but then they wanted all further development to stop, so they could have their house on the edge of undeveloped land.

A friend of mine was once working the door at a WorldCon art show. Up came Famous Guy, who my friend had heard of but never seen, not displaying his badge. She asked to see it and he lost his temper and became abusive. I don't know whether he just thought his name recognition should translate automatically into face recognition, or whether he just thought badge-checking was for everyone except him, but either way he was being a jerk.

abi 408: I hereby promise to pay Xopher a kudo every time I use the term

The term...? Which term? Or are you just trying to make me shiver with anticip

I don't listen to the "shock jock" and confrontational talkback stations, but someone rang up the local ABC radio in Sydney claiming to be a shopkeeper with Bindeez in stock, and proceeded to very loudly and forcefully deploy "it's the customer's responsibility to look after themselves" and "I have to feed my family" and "I haven't received any official notification" and a few others in a hectoring and contemptuous tone. He really got a rise out of the Radio Guy, and was successful in getting himself cut off because (the radio guy claimed) he started swearing. His voice seemed a bit familiar, and his whole attitude reminded me of one I've heard propagated at different times across my local ABC radio listening. My impression was shared, 'cos RG later on said a number of people had called/emailed/SMS'd to say they thought it was a "prank call".

But seriously.

I deleted the paragraph using the term "jackhole"*, but left the footnote. Oops.

-----
Xopher.kudo++

I know that you think that picking on spelling is petty, but you need to realize that you are dealing with an Editor. In particular, a well-known and respected Editor. Spelling, grammar, logic...this is their world. If you had done the same amount of research on TNH as you expected her to do of you, you would have seen this. I misspelled Nielsen earlier in the thread and was called on it almost immediately. My response, and what I feel is the most appropriate response, was 'oops', not 'you better have something better than that if you want to go against me'. See the difference.

Now it's time for us, at least for me, to unclench. This discussion is bothering me more than usual. At least it's inspired me to start writing in my own blog again. Apparently, I still have some thoughts and ideas in this pretty little head of mine that want to come out. Who knew?

The effect is the same. If you see BB's moderation system as overeaching and suggest a community based solution would be a better fit, (a natural argument that makes sense together,) you're labeled one more avatar of some unknown troll. Your comments are deleted as well as the comments of anyone else who agrees with you... because they're obviously also part of some shadowy conspiracy that probably doesn't exist.

The final effect is that all those who disagree are silenced.

I don't care if she thinks I'm my own troll or someone elses. She thinks I'm a troll. She thinks I'm a troll because of my viewpoint, not my tone. Therefore I think that means she thinks the whole viewpoint is trollery.

::shrug::

Oops I commented again. I was supposed to be done. =). Aw well.

                                                                                     *

You're ignoring the time-based element. You posted during an active sockpuppet attack; the puppeteer admitted he* was doing it right here in this very thread. I could wander onto my metaphorical football field at any time when there was no game on and not be mistaken for a player.

It is perfectly possible to see BB's moderation system as overreaching, to prefer Slashdot's system, and to say it on the blog. You might consider doing it when there isn't an active flamewar, and maybe use a more calm, persuasive approach**.

-----
* assumption
** for the avoidance of doubt, that includes not calling any of the people you're trying to persuade a hypocrite. Even in situations when it's true, it's hardly effective.

Also, even if Teresa didn't say it, I will. Tamara, you are now a troll. Get off of this site, step away from your keyboard, and give your budding tusks a chance to stop aching. Go eat some goat if you think it'll help. I know a good Ethiopian place in SoHo you should try. Just please grow out of the wounded "Who me?" phase of your newfound vice as soon as possible, for the benefit of everyone on tha intranets.

Thgh wh bthr, prt frm wtchng hw mb frms, s bynd m. t s bt s bd s bng t hsng bbbl blg whr th cmmntrs r crtn tht llgls r th rt f ll vl.

nd ntc th clm tht n 'ld' trll ddrss ws bng rctvtd. cmmntd n th frst dlt fst t bng-bng, nd m P ddrss hs vr snc bn n lst, n tht Snt wll nvr rd.

Sm f s gt md t bng slncd, r wtchng thr ppl gt slncd, thgh crtnl grnt th rght f frm's wnrs t d prtt mch s th pls. Whch th d.

Wh bthr? wndr bt tht t, xcpt t s tld y s, xcpt tht lkl, th grcs hsts nd cmmntrs f ths wb st, wh sm t thnk 'm scpth nd sffrng ll srts f psychlgcl prblms bcs kp nsstng tht m m, nd nt sm vst fgmnt f thr mgntn, r lkl t trt t wth s mch grc s th d wth smn wh mrl cmmntd tht pstng dssntng pnns t st smngl dvtd t frdm sms prtt dststfl.

[Posted from 212.86.201.242]

It has a W!k!pedia page, unless someone decided it was not notable.

I can't make any sense out of this paragraph at all.

It isn't the multiple IP addresses. It's the multiple usernames that are clearly the same person.
Not to mention the repeated claims of 'I'm innocent and I'm being banned because nobody likes me.' (Banning is, in my experience, the remedy used when nothing else gets through the solid-steel ego-encasement.)

More here:

bzr, bzrr, ccd, prcd, sprsd, brbc, cqnt, ccssry, ncssry, dscct, Cncnnt, ccrrnc, nclt, ccmmdt, rcmmnd, hrssmnt, sprss, mbrrss, crllry, grmmr, hmrrhg, rtllry, bttln, brccl, grrll, rdscnt, bttr, mscllns, mllnnm, vrmln, mllnrn, dlttnt, mnscl, prlllsm, cppll, cmmtmnt, cmmttd, cmmtt, stllt, pnstt, cnslr, clndr, cmtry, strtgm, srcrr, rstrtr, srgnt, prphsy, phrh, cmflg, prnnctn, flrscnt, sd, lgy, psdpd, brcrcy, prphcy, fchs, fd, slhtt, jdhprs, lsn, hrrchy, svrgnty, scrlgs, dty, sv, frz, rcv, sz, sg, wrd

You haven't said anything new, or even come up with new insults, in your last several posts, or even your last several guises. Do you really enjoy this that much? If you were certain that your rude and obnoxious posts being disemvoweled proved you were right, you'd've been satisfied a while ago. That you are not is just increasing evidence of a serious personality disorder.

And no, you're not a hydra because of the multiple IP addresses. You're a hydra because of the multiple names under which you post, many of which are from different IPs, making it harder to whack all those moles. The hydra of classical myth grew two heads for every one that was chopped off. It thus had multiple identities (heads) but only one personality (monstrous). The analogy to you is obvious.

No, I don't like you. No one here likes you, except other sockpuppets you've created yourself. Narcissistic Personality Disorder is tragic for the person who has it, but worse for the people who are unfortunate enough to interact with them.

Why DO you bother coming here, where everyone hates you? Can't you go among people who love, or at least like, or at any rate are willing to tolerate you? We don't, don't, and aren't.

If you still think you can convince any of us that we're wrong about you, give it up. You're as familiar as a mosquito in Michigan, and just as likely to persuade anyone to your point of view. You used up all the tentative credit given to newcomers here, persisted in being obnoxious after multiple warnings, and keep coming back even though you KNOW that anything that can be identified as coming from you will be disemvoweled, and that NO ONE will care what you have to say now. And that's even if you start being reasonable. It's way too late.

If, instead, you're still trying to prove something to yourself (that is, that we're wrong about you), I can suggest a better method. You've said you have children; go hug one of them and say "I love you." If you can do that, even if you're just going through the motion to make a point, you're a better person than I currently think you are. If you can do it with genuine love in your heart, I'm wrong about you. If your kid hugs you back and says "I love you too," then you must be a completely different person in meatspace than you are online.

But DON'T come back here and tell me about it. I won't believe you anyway, and neither will anyone else.

Why are we continuing to provide it?

OTOH, I have to admit that I really enjoyed writing that.

Teresa #399
Wow, you have more patience than I. I simply locked a forum over a weekend when I had no time to deal with a troll invasion. The regular members understood, and the trolls found some other place to play. They have a short attention span when life gets boring. :)

What I learned from James Branch Cabell is that art is a game of solitaire.

These are two parts of the same elephant, but the latter is what's under my fingers.

One of the best songwriters I know can only work when he feels he's learned something that people should hear about, and when he feels people are in fact listening. But when I try to write that way, it's a disaster--the way I get good results is to say "hey, I feel like playing in the studio today," or "I wonder what it would sound like if I did this..."

Brian Eno famously writes his lyrics by pacing around the studio singing nonsense syllables over the backing track until something congeals. I don't think he's any better or worse a lyricist than Leonard Cohen, who painstakingly distills hard-won life lessons.

In the end, you have to dance with the muse what brung ya.

It can, however, be a difficult distinction to make sometimes. Especially if you make your living by your art, the temptation to "play to the market" can be irresistable, and not necessarily conscious. And if you DO resist it, it can be crushing to watch other artists become successful as you starve in a garret or, worse, live in your parents' basement.

I moderate a meatspace discussion group - see my url link above - and have been doing so for a few months shy of 6 years (the group turned 6 on the 1st). I am humbled by the patience shown by TNH and her fellow moderators, both here and at BoingBoing. I look forward to "The Book on Comment Moderation" (thanks BSD #319, quoted that from you), I think it'd be a great read. Even if I can't emulate even a quarter of the "troll whispering" techniques hinted at here, it'll likely be at least entertaining.

We have had a troll or two show up to our meatspace group. Usually, if they are of the "my beliefs are sacrosanct and any challenges to the ideas my beliefs are based on will be interpreted as an attack on myself" type, they don't come back after a while. I make it plain that "we have no sacred cows here, any topic is open for discussion" and if they can't handle it, they usually leave. Generally with minimal disruption to the group.

We don't have any hydra or similar (that I know of...) - very difficult to pull that off in meatspace - but there are trolls and there are trolls. We had to engage the host building's (combination public library and gov't center) security policy in one instance. Restraining order. Messy. Not fun. When it gets to the point that other people who have been regular attendees are telling me that they are leaving because the troll is there, and new people are being scared off, the welcome mat has suffered a blowout and is in danger of causing a major derailment. (how's that for mixing metaphors?) 'Tis a fine line, and I'm more patient than some of my fellow moderators... It can be painful to tell someone "no" when they obviously need help...

I don't think I have anything else to add to this discussion - looks like any point I'd make has already been made, and more eloquently to boot.

As for this here Making Light place, looks nice, maybe I'll get a chance to read more from time to time, and occasionally I may have something post-worthy. I like TNH's style - and that she recognized me felt rather interesting. (Found that out via private e-mail exchange where I asked about a thread that had many disemvowellings.) My own internet micro-celebrity moment, as I told my wife: "Honey, I've been noticed by the blogosphere!". Trez cool.

Later,
-cajun
P.S. I engineer are, grammar my strong point ain't. Verbose, I tend to be...

(N.B. I post on the internet for a living. I take this sort of discourse quite seriously.)

Greg: I got a piece of e-mail too. I stopped a short way into it. The chummy tone of condscension I got was most off-putting.

Bill(#432): That's one of the best explations of the Comminications Theory aphorism, "The meaning of the message is the message that's received." If the audience can't make out what you meant to say, you; effectively, didn't say it.

What I remember Brian Eno for is that he's the one who composed the Windows 95 Startup sound. I did tier two tech support for one of the Windows 95 launch teams and I still shudder every time I hear that sound (lots and lots of reboots under my belt on that particular operating system). So, of course, I hammered myself just now by firing up WinAmp and listening to that sound over and over again until I couldn't stand it any more. "Congeal" is right; perhaps even "clot"....

Or the die-rolling method, which was suggested some months back as a method of reducing unthinking-reaction posting. (Use a die of at least 10, and only post if you can roll a 1, or other one-number-of-your-choice.)

Well, that's a big problem, because there aren't any teams. So what's really happening here is stereotyping.

midori @ 371: As, apparently, one of the few people posting on this whose experience of Reputable Literature wasn't ruined by school (good teachers? math major? YMMV??), I will point out the inverse view: that genre literature is required to facilitate a known story and its expected pleasures; reputable literature is supposed to play better poker, and not tell you what pleasure to expect. Hence the great surprise that Austen and Melville are funny. In literature, you find your own adventure. (All complicated by the greats that started genres.)

Margaret Organ-Kean, #377: I really like your metaphor of blogs-with-monetization as restaurants. Further analogies: most of them lose money; the backrooms are untidy and exhausting. Also, it plays into the ambiguous-systems thing I was thinking of, that a successful pairing of restaurants and customers can often play 'gift economy' all night long (hosts' greetings, favorite table, chef's compliments amuse-bouche), but they aren't really. I imagine the game breaks down unpleasantly sometimes.

Anyone bored or obsessive enough to still be reading; one of the particularly odd things about the fannish outrage against the current troll is that the troll is, to fandom, a lot like fandom is to reputable literature. I don't mean that the troll is right, or fandom wrong, or even that reputable literature is more right than fandom; the goodness-function of this peculiar social variable is anfractuous.

But remember a while ago when a ?linguist? reported that SF fans have speech and body-language patterns wildly unlike, sometimes opposite, those of most other people? To the others, fans send conflicting and often insulting signals, and are convinced they're right, and insist on making their own versions of everything (often on grounds of If This Goes On millenarianism), and are just generally an exhausting confusion of a system that worked well enough. And the general feeling about this, at ML, was of happiness and self-recognition.

So we have a cosy dinner restaurant on a not-quite-gentrified block of L-space, run by surpassingly genial superbly professional hosts; and there's a leering face slobbering on the window. But out of the corner of my eye, I thought it was my reflection against the dark.

A... hydragon? (I don't think I remember how to count up to hydra.) I suppose higher-order hybrids would be hydrahedra and hydratopes....

Welcome to Making Light!

I find the idea of dealing with meatspace trolls pretty intimidating. Well done you for managing it.

You don't, by any chance, write poetry, do you?

You, sir, are a hoser. I hope you don't feel the need to flame back at me.

Hydrogen?

Assuming arguendo that there is a genuine hamper of sock puppets in a thread, acting in a co-ordinated way because they're all the same set of fingers on the keyboard, then yes, there is a distinguishable "team".

Stereotyping* would be the belief that tamara was a separate person, but still a troll. Maybe her actions show that; I'm not convinced, myself. But Teresa's initial belief that she was an assumed identity of our rather verbose guest was not stereotyping.

The litmus test is whether someone could post the set of views that tamara espouses on a thread not packed with sock puppets and still be considered a troll. I suspect that someone who posted a well-thought out and not unpleasant argument in that direction would not be so labeled. (Someone who harrangued and ranted probably would be, but that would be based on tone and not content.)

-----
* It is really, really difficult for me to talk about stereotyping and sock puppets without making some kind of pun about typing comments for two different puppets in stereo.**

** Actually, clearly, it's impossible.

My vein is technological stuff, I guess one would call it prose. Try this one: Nuclear Parking Brake.

The bit near the end, about the green glow? Yeah, I know that isn't true. Though if you use an unshielded source, and paint the truck with a phosphor-based pigment (like the stuff they used to mix with radium to make watch hands and the like glow green) you can create the effect...

Yah, that has my name in it, but all the other contact info is woefully out of date. And I don't have the trucks anymore. {sniff} :-(

Later,
-cajun

C'mon. You know wanna.

C'mon. You know you wanna.

I don't know. They keep running away every time I try to get near enough to hear them.

(And if 453 & 454 aren't intentional, they're the most fortuitous double-post EVAR!)

And fiery flatulence? Now, that's a kind of flame war I'd stay away from.

Sockpuppetry as a tactic is overstated; the masses of real people with concurrent views are inevitably louder. It's more valuable as a tag to hang on someone in order to dismiss them, since right or wrong it is irrefutable.

Moderation is of course necessary. Those of us who remember back to the pre-internet know that, back when we all had kill files to filter out obnoxious subjects and posters. But just as clearly Lord Acton's statement about absolute power applies.

I've been a fan of Sue Grafton pretty much since the first Kinsey Millhone was published -- perhaps I didn't discover them until she'd reached D, I forget, but all the rest I remember eagerly awaiting as they came out, and I'm having trouble placing "club does data mining" as a plot feature.

Maybe in "O is for Outlaw?" Something about big boxes of stuff in the back rooms of a club?

If this feels like a spoiler to our hosts, please feel free to ROT-13 me. I haven't got all of the novels to hand (one loses some books when households split) and can't just look it up.

I dunno whether proof of deliberate motive is nec'ly required (frex, I don't think CRV/PRV was just coldly amusing himself by poking ML with sticks without any real interest in the topics at hand) as long as the effective interaction remains identical: egregious repetition of the same arguments as statements of dogma, seldom acknowledging any merits of logic/evidence from the other side except by rhetorically weaselling out of the way for a moment or two.

These people either get banned as dissenters or stomp off on their own; their censoring isn't usually that great a loss because it's really impossible to have discourse with them anyway.

And I think that's really the key question-- regardless of motive, are they amenable to a true exchange of discourse, or are they mainly fixated on their own unchanging monologues?

The thread started with a lot of praise and some discussion, with a thread of dissent running through it. The dissent itself wasn't the problem; the irritant in that discussion, the thing that pushed it toward the unpleasant side of argument, was that some people were giving the impression that their likes equaled a superior value judgment... that one kind of story was more mature or more 'real' than another.

If someone had simply said "I'm not a huge fan of the Harry Potter books," that would have attracted little comment. If someone had said "I'm not a huge fan of the Harry Potter books because the writing is amateurish" you likely would have gotten a good amount of support on either side... people saying they liked the books despite the writing, some saying they disliked the books for the same reason, some saying they found nothing wrong with the writing (I say this because I've seen it happen before in threads where a book/movie is discussed, and HP books specifically).

But the problem was when someone said "I don't like the Harry Potter books because they use Plot Device A and that is [something perjorative... silly, illogical, immature, what have you].

That's when people started to be turned off. Now during the discussion of this point, some explanations were offered and eventually people agreed to disagree and all was civil again. I'd like to make something clear though, as this example is especially illustrative:

What you like or dislike is not rude in most cases. Implying that a dissenting opinion is a sign of greater logic/intelligence/ethics/toughness... that's what gets people angry.

It's an easy road to go down... hell the ML community as a whole has had some fun with our communal distaste for and mockery of the DaVinci Code. However if you read those threads, you'll notice something very specific: when someone does comment in them that they actually don't understand why the DaVinci code is so hated, they read it as a popcorn book in three hours one day, no one responds by mocking that person.

Basically you have to realize that while noticing, thinking, or believing something may make you feel smart and superior, that doesn't mean people who don't feel the same are inferior or stupid.

Sometimes a normal, usually humble person gives that sort of impression accidentally, and people turn on them. I think that's what happened in the old HP7 thread... a lot of people originally thought the dissenter was condescending, and thus responded in attack mode. The thread devolved for a while because of this conflict, but it wasn't because of the disagreement. It was because people felt the dissenter was saying they were wrong/foolish for liking things they liked.

That's what trolls DO. Professionally. They try to make you feel guilty or wrong or bad. And if you let them do that, they've won.

They try to make others feel bad for not sharing every little opinion of theirs. They never listen, they never concede, they never truly respond. Sometimes there is carnage when someone who is well meaning and humble most of the time accidentally makes people feel that s/he is putting them down because of their opinions, and people will lash out like wild beasts. Hopefully some troll whisperer comes in, tells the confused normal person what they did wrong, and all is mended with compromise and daisies.

That's the difference between a real troll and a normal person who is too passionate or having a bad day. A normal person will say "oh hey. I guess I might have implied that stuff. Sorry, let me rephrase." Or a normal person will back off.

A troll will just keep posting the same opinion, over and over again. They don't want to understand. All they want is to make anyone who doesn't share their opinion feel wrong and stupid and evil.

I'm not abi *or* Teresa, and both of them can look after themselves, but I think you are missing the context here. (It may help to re-read Teresa's post at #399.) Teresa was in the middle of dealing with a known attack by a known troll who was known to be using sock puppets. Tamara walked into the middle of this and happened (entirely innocently) to use arguments characteristic of this known troll - so Teresa temporarily banned her as well as a kind of quarantine measure. Once it was clear what had happened she restored Tamara's rights and explained the situation. All a bit unfortunate, but I don't think really evidence of intolerance or malice.

Nobody (as far as I can see) is advocating that trolls should generally be recognised by their particular views. On the other hand, trolling is a form of behaviour, and so there is no way to recognise a troll except by their habit of engaging in unacceptable behaviour. Admittedly this can sometimes lead to intemperate accusations of trolling against the well-meaning. Just as often - here at least - it seems to me to result in surprisingly patient invitations to obvious trolls to join in the debate. And admittedly there is the occasional dogpile.

Social life is difficult, even on the internet. It tends to need patience and goodwill all round. And inevitably we don't always get it. That can lead to unsatisfactory exchanges, and can even extend to whole threads. But sometimes my conversations in the real world go wrong too. Sometimes it's even my fault. (But very rarely, obviously, me being so extremely well-adjusted.)

Mind you, I don't know where you are going with the Acton. Discretionary powers in a very limited field (ie. comment moderation) are hardly likely to corrupt, and, even if they do, the worst that can happen is that people stop posting. It's hardly a threat to civilisation.

Behold the bonacon, a bull-like heraldic monster with horns that curve inward, making them not particularly useful for defense. To compensate, the bonacon ejects either flaming excrement or flaming and/or noxious gas from it's hinder regions (accounts vary). This feature was first descrined by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History.

Well, the reciprocal question is, how much are we fixated on our own unchanging monologues? The temptation when faced with an opposing statement is to categorize it as something already known and simply repeat back at it the Standard Argument. And more subtly, one is likely to harbor others who agree with one, but who are not amenable to rational discussion either. Suppressing one's own dittoheads is quite a bit harder, because the tactic of simply driving them off through obstinancy isn't available; it's their obstinancy that powers chasing the opposing hardheads off.

That's simply not true. Trolling is a behavior; whether it's caused by the desire to piss people off, a mental disorder, or a bet the commenter lost, is not only unknowable but irrelevant. The question isn't whether you're being an asshole in your own mind, you know. The question is whether you're being an asshole in your outside voice.

"Pliny, man, this stuff is hot sh*t!"

For my part, I would disagree. It doesn't really matter what someone's motives are. If they post things that weary the spirit to read, if they call other people names and argue points into the ground, if they generate more heat than light, then I tend to look at them askance. If they continue to do so when it is pointed out that they're behaving poorly, then I reckon that they're trolling.

But I also think trolling is something people do, not something they are, as a rule.* The same person can foam at the mouth and go all irrational on one subject, and be perfectly pleasing on another.

this blog is hostile to anyone who doesn't take the correct line on a long list of issues. These people either get banned as dissenters or stomp off on their own; their censoring isn't usually that great a loss because it's really impossible to have discourse with them anyway.

Agreed. One way to avoid that and still enjoy the community is simply not to post in certain threads. There are areas I venture into with great caution, if at all.

People whose views don't fit into the standard pigeonholes or who otherwise aren't committed partisans get accused of being trolls too when their first appearance is on the wrong side of an argument.

I've been really trying to get people to stop doing that, but I'm just a backseat moderator. I often think that, in online communities, the best thing to do is start bland and get interesting later**. But not everyone is of a character to do that†.

Sockpuppetry as a tactic is overstated; the masses of real people with concurrent views are inevitably louder. It's more valuable as a tag to hang on someone in order to dismiss them, since right or wrong it is irrefutable.

I was under the impression Teresa had a reason to use the tag. And our friend with the names like Raven quotes was certainly very open about socking here, there and everywhere.

- o0o -

I would point out that no matter what I think about moderation, of course, this is not my blog. My blog doesn't have the kind of interesting and strange community that Making Light does, for whatever reason. So I don't really have the long experience as a moderator to back up my hopelessly naive and hideously Polyanna-ish views.

-----
* I have less patience for sock puppeting, because I think the matter of identity online is tenuous enough.
** My first comment here was about Culture Club. There was nothing to do from that but improve.
† By which I mean that not everyone starts bland. Very few people aren't interesting, in the right context.

I haven't read the whole thread (and it seems unedifying to do so), but I had the gist of the situation in hand. Perhaps you underestimate the frustration involved. Tamara, (apparently) innocent, found her words here entirely at the mercy of Teresa, who could say more or less anything she wanted against Tamara without significant risk of penalty. It's not the sort of situation that inspires calm delliberation, on either part.

"13. If someone you’ve disemvowelled comes back and behaves, forgive and forget their earlier gaffes. You’re acting in the service of civility, not abstract justice."

Anyway, I am merely responding to questions about my USPS Zip database argument to an fellow-interested techie.

If someone reads this before the vowels are gone, could you please tell Midori I am attempting to answer his questions (since my comments have no vowels, I'm effectively censored as he's not catching that I am referring to him. I'd email him directly, but he's using a bunk email).

Midori, please email me (or contact me through my website) regarding my USPS ZIP database. I tried to email you about it but the address you give does not work.

At any rate, I feel confident that the current comment (mine) will keep its vowels, so your message (minus the offensive part) will be read if Midori looks at this part of the thread.

People will do all sorts of things for you if you ask nicely.

I don't think anyone is objecting to the mistakes that Teressa made in her moderation so much as how she dealt with the complaints afterwards. Innocent people were shouted down, stereotyped, deleted, and ignored.

When you read the pruned thread now you might get the impression that indeed there were several sock puppets who all sounded the same and were causing problems... Though, if one were to look at a pristine version of the thread they would see that the deleted posts were clearly from many different people with different writing styles and voices.

The appearance, if not the actual fact, is that those posts were deleted to cover up the mistake that was made. Since all of those who were deleted were dissenting voices, many of them civil, one has to question the motives of the moderator in this instance.

Others have disagreed with your argument that motive is required for "true" trollery. I don't think that sockpuppetry stems from a desire to avoid some sort of ban or censorship. The classic Mary Rosh and sprezzatura case studies are a strong argument

If you're trying to evade a ban to complain about the unfairness of that ban, sockpuppetry (pretending to multiple identities to create support for your position) is precisely what you aren't doing.

Finally, anyone who believes that comment moderation is absolute in power needs to embiggen themselves and embrace the larger Internet. Sadly, No does an excellent job mocking right-wing lunacy without being allowed to comment on the sites they're commenting on.

Above should read: The classic Mary Rosh and sprezzatura case studies are a strong argument that sockpuppetry is not about evading censorship, but about faking third-party support.

...in front of which you must not blink.

A lot.

--

Yeago,

I can't see any reason why your just-a-moment-ago post, being benign and engaging in conversation, should be disemvowelled, unless the moderators know something about your IP that I don't know.

In any case, what's in your zip code database? I mean, zip codes and what - cities? Counties/parishes? or does it get even more granular than that? (I have occasion at work to have to look up counties by zip code. Since the need arises one at a time, I typically use the USPS.gov site's zip code look up and then click for the "Mailing Industry Information" pop-up.)

But--like Hunter S. Thompson--I am having trouble properly explaining myself in this climate.

If you, in your own living room, say "Xopher is a faggot and fags burn in Hell," and someone tried to silence you or fine you or (gods forbid) imprison you, I would object most strenuously: you have a perfect right to such speech, at home or even in the public square.

If, however, you were standing in MY living room when you said that, I would throw you out at once, and you would never be welcome in my home again. And I would have a perfect right to do so: I alone decide the criteria for who is allowed to visit my home.

As a matter of fact, if I knew you were saying things like that about me in YOUR home, I wouldn't invite you to mine, and if a guest of mine brought you there I would ask you to leave.

The problem with people like you and Kristen is that you think the comments you make on someone else's blog are in your space, or the public square. They are not. They are the blog owner's (or in the case of bOING bOING owners') space, and insulting them there will quite properly get you kicked out.

Again, I defend Kristen's right to post her screed on her own blog, and yours to quote her on your website. I think you're both jerks, but jerks have rights too.

I'm sorry its terrifying, but its not some hateful, ignorant screed. nywy, I mght s wll sv trs th wrk.

Well yes, but the same is true of, say, my power to refuse someone entry to my home, or a bouncer's power to refuse someone entry to a club. This was the point of some of the analogies upthread, I thought. The power may be absolute but the limitations in scope *really matter*. I have absolute power when it comes to what TV channels I watch in the evening. I don't think Lord Acton is quaking in his grave. Well, apart from the obvious reasons why not.

Perhaps you underestimate the frustration involved.

Fair enough. Probably I do. I don't really get the frustration at not being allowed to make my own announcements in someone else's space. Teresa can say what she likes about me and ban me from replying here, if she wants. But then, I can complain about Teresa to my friends in public and not invite her to reply - and there's not a thing she can do about it.

No doubt that *is* frustrating. No doubt also:

It's not the sort of situation that inspires calm deliberation, on either part.

I agree. This all seems like a misunderstanding based on innocents getting caught up in an actual flamewar. I have no reason to doubt that Tamara is genuine, and Teresa explicitly accepted as much @399. Maybe it looked like dissent was being suppressed. Maybe that impression was mistaken. Accusations of hypocrisy or abuse of power aren't helping. I hold out some hope for polite debate.

Meanwhile, refusing or deleting or (still less) disemvowelling a comment doesn't seem to me to amount to censorship. We've had that discussion on the blog before: there may be limits to free speech, as when it comes to your right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. And actually, you may still have that right, but it's not unreasonable if the owners throw you out. Indeed, the idea that it's "censorship" if people won't listen to you - and I don't mean you personally here, but the phenomenon in general - seems pretty closely related to the original point of this thread. Maybe it would in fact be edifying to read the whole thing?

(Xopher #487, I wouldn't compare it to gay-bashing exactly, it's just... pointless and unpleasant.)

Also, I suspect Yeago just lost twenty dollars.

For anyone who doesn't want to read the screed, here's the list of authors which Yeago apparently thinks is obscure or wide enough enough that it's unlikely Xopher has read all of them:

Frank Herbert
Isaac Asimov
Larry Niven
Orson Scott Card
William Gibson
Neil(sic) Stephenson

Yeago, among this crowd I am just an egg. I'm not really a Fan -- I've been to just two cons my whole lifek for instance. And aside from Stephenson, I'd read all of those authors 20 years ago, when I was 15. Stephenson I didn't discover until around 1997 (and yes, I kicked myself for having wasted 5 years when I could have read _Snow Crash_).

Herbert wrote one really good book, which was overrated (good, but not that good) because he took advantage of Americans' ignorance of Arabic culture to make it look like he'd created something new and fascinating. Even allowing for that, it's a damn good story, but it's his only one.

I read all his older stuff right after Dune, and it's all trash with titles like The Green Brain. I kept reading the Dune books for a while, but found Children of Dune so tedious that I gave up after that.

Asimov is a good storyteller, a good worldbuilder, and a very funny humorist, but too often I find his prose style (in his fiction only) clunky. His Treasury of Humor is a textbook-quality treatise on what makes jokes funny, as well as a pretty good collection of jokes; I read it cover-to-cover when I was a teenager.

Niven can spin a good yarn, and is really good at Thinking Big (and I don't just mean the enormous size of the Ringworld etc., but the size of his concepts), but his hammering away at a Libertarian/Survivalist/Social Darwinist polemic saps all the enjoyment from his work, at least for me. Once he started writing with Jerry Pournelle his work degenerated into foaming-at-the-mouth xenophobic tripe.

Card...well, speaking of homophobic jackholes...he really enjoys having homosexual characters kill themselves because they just feel so dirty. There's an example of the kind of guy who wouldn't be welcome in my home because of things he had a perfect right to say elsewhere.

You owe me $20. However, you're off the hook, because I am not at all inclined to give you my mailing address.

But you don't understand me at all, if you think it was Kristen's OPINION I was objecting to. She has a perfect right to her opinion. To post it in Cory's blog comments was rude, intrusive, and arrogant; only someone who was trying to pick a fight (i.e. a troll) would do so. Note I am not going to post my comments above at Niven's or Card's sites, if they have them, or even at sites whose owners are big fans of theirs.

Gibson -- I have read AND enjoyed everything I could find by Gibson. Idoru wasn't so fascinating, but in Neuromancer there are some sentences that quite took my breath away, and I went around reading them aloud to anyone who would listen.

Stephenson -- here's where I'll get into trouble with some fluorospherans. I read Snow Crash and frankly I'm disinclined to read anything further by this writer, whose ignorant prejudice against "primitive" religion in that book quite turned my stomach. I love his jerky main character, though. Hiro Protagonist, indeed!

There. NOW you owe me $20.

Besides...even if someone said that about me, that's not gay bashing. I've been gay bashed. Words can hurt, but not as bad as actual violence; trust me on this.

for what it's worth, Kristen, who Yeago quotes on his blog is also The Rev. Farrah Frocket on Stumble upon, who says Yeago is "My personal friend and roommate". So multiple posters with the same ip address = multiple posters?

-relurks-

BUT - I can totally see that anyone trying to spread the meme "ZOMG these moderators can't handle dissent they SUCK!" needs to be handled with care. Many people will inexplicably believe such claims over the evidence of their own eyes if the claims are made passionately enough. I recall Teresa telling me something like that when this very meme was described: "If the troll gathers disciples who will echo this claim after you ban the troll, you waited too long to ban the troll," was the gist of what she said. Soooo.... if Yeago tried to post that post to BB in its entirety, with all the assertions of censorship and Can't Handle Dissent included, and it got disemvowelled, I can totally understand why.

I do agree that Yeago owes Xopher $20. At least, I do assume so, based on Xopher's comments over the last few years.

What I did find offensive, or at least annoying, was Nutkin over at BoingBoing (I finally followed the whole dang thing full circle and tried to read some of the disemvowelled posts) saying something like, "If I wanted to read about Cory's career, I'd read his blog." No shit, Sherlock! What do you think BoingBoing is? (In part, anyway; it's also Xeni's blog and so forth.) Where the heck does Nutkin or anyone get off on lecturing the bloggers on what the point of BoingBoing is? I'd think BoingBoing's authors are the ones who get to define the point of BoingBoing.

Yeah. Fannish entitlement sounds like the right description.

Maybe part of the problem are oldtime readers of BoingBoing-the-magazine, expecting BoingBoing-the-blog to be exactly like the magazine except online? They don't realize it is a blog? Could that be it?

I do not agree that it is always rude and inappropriate to post a negative opinion of a book in the author's blog's comment's threads; but I do agree that the circumstances under which it would be appropriate are very circumscribed, and it would take a very circumspect commenter to manage it without looking like a total dick.

Have a circumlocuted enough today? ;-)

Speaking as someone who's also read the terribly obscure Yeago Six, if you were interested you might try Herbert's God Emperor of Dune and Stephenson's Zodiac. Life is too short to read things that don't work for you, so it's your call.

I think they may be more like restaurants or bars than living rooms, in that anyone can wander in, and anything you say may be overheard by complete strangers.

Well, I have described Making Light as my favorite on-line watering hole.

For a while now, I've thought the whole web experience is like living in a small-ish city or a large-ish town. There are the Store Fronts (sites selling stuff), The Schools (how-to sites), City Hall (political bloggers), Eateries and Watering Holes (popular blogs that function as a place to gather and talk about whatever crosses the collective mind) and so on all the way down to Private Homes (blogs with limited readers and/or no active comments where the posts are "All About Me" instead of "Hey! Look at what So-and-So did!" ).

Mmm. It is unfortunately common for arguments to end up being irreconcilable because of clashing moral axioms, or at least something which one side considers to be a moral axiom but which the other considers to be a question open to proof or disproof.

In this case, I suppose the disputed principle is whether the disruptive nature of protean sockpuppeting is sufficient to justify a broad sweep of potential socks and the sweep's effect on initially misidentified non-socks. Or something.

And more subtly, one is likely to harbor others who agree with one, but who are not amenable to rational discussion either.

True, but would you consider them to be somewhat mitigated by the presence/leadership of rational debaters whom they may be dittoing?

There are just as many rules guiding how one should behave in the metaphorical Watering Hole as there is in a Private Home. Some are the same, some are different, but their ultimate goals are identical. "Mind your manners, and don't be rude or start fights."

Tamara, you're arguing with a woman who edits books for a living. Then you do this on a blog for professional writers and editors. Telling her she's being a troll because she adheres to known standards is like wearing cut-offs and a T-shirt to a fancy party and then wondering why no one wants to let you in the door.

My mother has a phrase for things like this. "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."

Tonight, "Sockpuppets in mythology". Chapter One: Achilles.

I'm afraid that I fall into the category of people who find the Baroque Cycle aptly named - and not in a complimentary way. Over ornamented excess, even. Stephenson's strength, IMNSHO is as a light, entertaining read. 'Cryptonomicon', and the rest of the "surely you must be being paid by the word, but you, sir, are no Dickens" volumes are sluggish and meandering, and don't play at all to Stephenon's strengths.

Of his earlier works, I'd have to say that my favourite remains 'Diamond Age' - and I've generally observed that people seem to have a strong preference for either 'Diamond Age' or 'Zodiac' - 'Snow Crash' oddly enough doesn't seem to evoke nearly the same strength of reaction.

As for Stephenson, I don't see the bigotry (and yes, I know it's not about gays, but rather religions). I like his plotting (though his exposition is sometimes tedious, and smack of talking down to the reader). What I don't care for (and Snowcrash did it, in spades(is the weak endings).

I thought that book violated the genre standards for mystery, because I don't think the solution is something the reader (outside a very narrow subset of the population) can deduce.

Oh, and Yeago... I've read them all too.

I think the only points I might get have to do with his thinking I ought to have been drowned at 13, because at 17, when he was being more obnoxious than usual, I gave him no more respect than his age deserved.

On the plus side, for Jerry; though it's small plus, he gave me the best advice I got, before I went to basic.

But yeah, to come in here and say, "You aren't widely read enough to have a real opinion on X" where the genre is SF... well that's just foolish.

Can't argue with that. In fact, I'd go further and say that you pretty much always have to suck it up when other people misunderstand your idea, no matter how clear you've tried to make it.

I've had the liberating experience of seeing people walk out of shows that were far better than any I'm ever likely to give. It really helped with that whole Pastor Niebuhr thing.

Earl Cooley III @ 437: What I remember Brian Eno for is that he's the one who composed the Windows 95 Startup sound.

That's understandable, as his musical profile has been quite low for a while, but unfortunate, as his Seventies albums were brilliant and hugely influential. Check him out.

Xopher @ 493, 496: It's a good thing Kristen didn't mention Michael Moorcock...

(If so, I've read at least some work of each of those six. Card and Stephenson don't exactly work for me, either. YMMV, etc.)

I should think that depends. How nice is your ass?

You know, I have a young friend who agrees with FungiFromYuggoth 504 that I should read the later Dune books. Says they get better. I shall take it under advisement that I may have given up on Herbert too easily.

mjfgates 512: Others have explained, but it's Stephenson's discussion about how (IIRC) people who practiced ancient religions did so because their brains just weren't developed enough that frosted me off him. While I'm glad to know he's not also homophobic (per your account), there are different prejudices. There are Wiccans who believe that homosexuals cannot be initiated, that the rituals simply will not work. There certainly are gay people who think Wiccans are just weird.

Tim 522: Hmm. Have I ranted about Moorcock to you before? I suspect I may have. All I'll say right now is that if his name had been Mostcock, he probably would have been a better writer...less to prove.

Bill 523: Absolutely. You get to talk authoritatively about what it's like to have a locally famous author put his hand on your ass!

Not better enough, apparently. :-)

At the time? Small but spectacular.
He had to stoop to reach it so I'd hope it was worth the trip.

"Yeah, that whole [plot about curing 'sleep toxiins'] was more or less a mod-podging of Slashdot topics--'whoaa coool!!!' and '....what if one day x could do y....?'. speculative and naive techie-anecdotes (what is the constant obsession with finding a 'cure' for 'sleep toxins'?).

Forgive me for a moment for my weekly channelling of L. Mumford in despondency over analogies between organic and mechanical systems. Rar...the human body is just this goddamn thing that's coded all wrong, rarr.

And yet it was published as late as 2002 and so for the most part it, with its constant references to caffeine, blood-sugar, l33tspeak, government cyber-intrigue, sub-laymen technical explanations in the vein of N.S.... it couldn't be a more derived pander-piece."

Leah Miller @ #463

I agree with pretty much everything you said, but I'm having trouble applying it to that particular conversation. I probably annoyed the hell out of everyone in that thread (and I'm sorry about that) but my motivation wasn't so much about the tone of the comments as it was about the fact that the person making the comments was right up front that he hadn't read the books he was criticizing and wasn't willing to commit to reading them in the future.

At any rate, it is an understandable litmus test to anyone who dismisses it as a big long inflammatory hate-message. At the very least I expect you to be as well read. That you are. You win this time, gadget.

I don't have to send your $20 bucks to you. Perhaps you can come up with some random address?

I don't think the expressions of characters ought to be seen as the opinion of the author. If it trends across a lot of books, which are ostensibly different (which is how I read card, 20 years ago, when I gave up on him), then yes.

But as a single speaker (or plot point) I'll give it a bye.

I know, I'll send you twenty different addresses, with slightly different names, all starting with 'never', and you can send them $1 each!

That was how it worked in the universe he created.

Much as torture gets real answers in 24, to push one of your buttons the way that pushed one of mine. See what I'm saying?

Without Kristen's comments, we can't compare.

Yeago: Please don't post Kristen's comments here. It will cause nothing but trouble.

It's like Greg and VfV. It doesn't make The League of Extraordinary Gentleman wrong from the get-go.

I'm sorry, I don't really see why its bad practice, but I'm obviously willing to respect that (I haven't returned to BoingBoing in a similar manner since). I don't see why its an invalid conversation for discussion. If he's sensitive about having those discussions at BoingBoing he should 1) just openly say so or 2) place the phrase "do not comment general criticisms of the author's / their work here".

I'd really appreciate the benefit of the doubt here. Just once. Henceforth I shall request no such benefits. But please, make an effort. I'm not a bad person and I have no beef with Mr. Dctrw. I had no idea what the community thinks of him and the only thing I was "trolling" for was reflections/responses, positive or negative, to a perspective I found educated and enlightened.

Also, quit the sckpppt talk (at least in reference to me). You name the evidence you require of me to prove I am who I am, or you show me the log that confirms I'm not. Otherwise, own the fact that you have nothing but anecdotal comparisons of garbled text to work from and suspend your judgment as best you can.

Also, admit that the suspicions about sockpuppetry are getting a little weird when myself and kristen are accused of being the same person. Does Occam's Razor really support a three-year long campaign by a cyber-hydra-transvestite hatched to Besmirch a writing 5 years old?

Ahh, no. You misread me brotha. What I meant was that obviously, if you have read the first four you'd almost had to have read-by-association the final two. I was assuming you were really 6/6. I see the comment I missed now, and it follows. Have your 20 'never' names to me by the end of the week, please.

It was said merely to point out that saying she was reasonable and well thought, in comparison, was ill-done, absent her words.

Sort of like the bait and switch he recommends for discourse (answer him his public messages in private).

Ill-done all around.

No, I just happen to think one-on-one communications have more of a chance of being civil than those on public internet forums.

Reading this girl, are you sure about that Devil thing, Xopher? >=)

I ran that list past a housemate, and the two he'd not read were those.

I believe Stephenson was riffing on Julian Jaynes' The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which he also does in The Big U. So that's two books. That said, it might just mean that he considers it an intriguing crackpot notion to hang SF on, rather than that he actually believes it.

I've read Jaynes' book, and think that it's pretty much a load, but I'm not sure I consider it bigoted. There's no implication at all that modern pagans are in some way mentally deficient, and IIRC the Old Testament is "explained" by his theory as well.

Terry 539: I take your point, but the analogy falls apart, because false beliefs about the world are one thing, but prejudice is another. The Sumerians are all dead, but their religious practices are not, and neither are their gods.

Yeago 540: I think you read Chuck exactly backwards. He was pointing out that in your case, you and Kristen actually live together, so the fact that you post from the same IP address is not evidence of sockpuppetry.

Terry 542: Wait, wasn't it neverhydra who wanted people to answer in private? Yeago is not a head of the hydra, you know that, right?

Xopher @ 411 - You've described Ponce, Puerto Rico. Just sayin.

Leah @ 463 - That is good enough to bookmark. And re-read a few times next week.

Teresa somewhere upthread: squee.

Never: I note there was no response to my impassioned advice. Didn't think so. (Possibly your kids don't even exist...)

Tim 545: It's been too long since I read the book. I really don't want to read it again to find out. I remember being really offended by it. I'm afraid that's where I'll leave it. Though it is possible I will try reading Cryptonomicon, since reading this thread.

The analogy between one's living room or club and one's blog is inaccurate precisely where it counts here. One does not ordinarily broadcast what is discussed in one's living room, whereas a blog is precisely that broadcast. Likewise, a blog of commentary on other blogs is exactly the disease it is supposed to be palliative for. It doesn't allow replying; just mutual ranting.

One thing the old usenet news software did that html does not is provide the reader with content management. (I mean, beyond the all-or-nothing of reading or not reading.) Back in the old days I had a nice big killfile which allowed me to ignore certain subjects and people. The blog is something of a step backwards (at least as it is supported these days) because while it provides tools for readers to pick through articles, it doesn't do the same for the comments, which in very many blogs is where the real action is.

I have to say, in all honesty, that to me disemvowelling reads as an act of public humiliation. Used out of season, it is flatly abusive. It's uncomfortable for me to go back through this thread because Teresa has seized the moral high ground and made it effectively impossible for me to assess things for myself. Yeah, I could decode the stuff; in practice, and especially among 500+ comments, it isn't practical to do so. Mind you, I'm not rising to the defense of anyone here except maybe Tamara. And it's not about rights at all, as far as I'm concerned; there's only what one can do, and what one cannot do. The thing is that I've seen this get out of hand on every blog on controversial topics I've seen, with but a couple of exceptions. Every blog I've seen run by someone with a passionate commitment to one side of controversial issues has pile-on outbursts where the coterie attacks new posters who appear as dissenters.

Changing the subject entirely: I gave up on Herbert about midway through Gawd Awful of Doon. I've since gone back to the original and find it unreadable these days. OTOH I've found it interesting looking at the older Asimov we have; it's surprisingly dystopian.

Ayup. I still think an author deserves to be judged by his best work rather than the books he wrote in two days each to finance his desperately broke magazine, and think that you might enjoy An Alien Heat. But I also understand that sometimes the turn-off is too strong.

Xopher @ 548: And speaking of turn-off, I think that Snow Crash goes way off the rails during the infodump in question regardless of its offensiveness (and I should make it clearer that I was nitpicking the word "bigoted"; I can completely see that it might be offensive). I believe my summing-up was that, at that point, SC turned from a parody of third-rate cyberpunk into an example of third-rate cyberpunk.

But I like Stephenson's non-fiction a fair amount, occasionally overheated though it be, and plan to try Cryptonomicon at some point, in the hope that it shares the same virtues.

I find it interesting that they would hold up that list of writers as exemplary figures against whose measure Cory Doctorow seems, to their minds, small. Doctorow is at a fairly early point in his career as a science fiction writer, not too far from the point in Asimov's career when his published work was bad enough to make even the Good Doctor I's ego blush when he republished it after achieving fame.

Orson Scott Card's early short fiction in Omni was truly nasty work, too -- the story which springs to mind featured fetuses rising from a toilet and fastening lamprey-like on the Evial main character, if memory serves. And the first published version of Card's Hot Sleep: The Worthing Chronicles had enough problems that Card did not allow it to be reprinted, instead overhauling the work for reissue. For that matter, I think even A Planet Called Treason caused the latter-day author to go for a rewrite before a reissue.

Then there's Stephenson, whose The Cobweb and The Big U (and the presidential election one with the title that's slipping my mind) were not Great Novels. Snowcrash was definitely not up to the standards of his later work, and while Zodiac was fun, Stephenson was clearly still developing as an author.

Early Frank Herbert I don't recall much about, but like many professional sf writers he produced a significant amount of hack work, as one had to do to keep food on the table and a roof over one's head as a professional writer.

Niven perhaps didn't have to push to get work at that level sold and perhaps there's less of it in evidence, but he didn't spring full grown and armored from the forehead of past Grand Masters of the genre. Some of you may recall learning that Niven had published a story where the Earth was rotating in the wrong direction or seen the mimeographed pages which described how he had not noticed the instability of the Ringworld.

Bill Gibson of course did very well, and the fix-up that Terry Carr got out of him and published as Neuromancer set his feet on the path of fame. He's always been a hugely talented writer, but a careful reader might find some inspirations from Robert F. Stone in Gibson's fiction. I wouldn't want to praise Gibson for, what was it, Dogfight (?) more than I'd give Doctorow credit for After the Siege.

I recently wrote some comments on the stories in Overclocked, and frankly I didn't particularly enjoy I, Robot, for example. Doctorow is not the best writer of polemic, and sometimes does seem to lose the beauty of the story in the process of making the plot conform to his political beliefs. But relative to the writers to whom he was compared in that list of six, he's still starting out. Doctorow has years to go before he reaches the mature peak of an Asimov, Card, or Herbert, and still more years after that before his career has been as long as those writers' were when they jumped the shark.

What I find interesting, in contrast to the lack of claim for professional writing credentials or ambitions on the part of these two sad sacks of bits, Kirsten and Yeago, is that while apparently in early in their third decades of life they don't see that Doctorow could still be on his way to his own zenith, that they don't see that he has some brilliant stories as well as the thousand natural schlocks that flesh is heir to.

C. Wingate at 550: that's interesting, your comment about Dune no longer being readable. It was once on my list of 10 best SF books -- and I'm a bit nervous about trying to read it again, for fear that I, too, will find it unreadable. Sigh. How are the mighty fallen, and like that.

I deeply hope you did that on purpose.

Lizzy 553: I think he's quoting the villain from the Inspector Gadget movie. I didn't think it was rude, in fact I thought it was kind of clever.

If I were going to reccomend a piece of his I would make it "Zodiac".

As for the "in private thing" Yeago asked people to take it to private conversation, after he made his arguments in public. He thinks this makes it, "more civil".

I think it makes a mugs game, where he gets to have the last, public, word, and still claim to be debating the points. He has sent private e-mails, to public comments, to both myself and Greg London.

On the subject of the Obscure Authors: my tastes are clearly different from many. I reread Dune a few years ago, and enjoyed it. On the other hand, from God Emperor on down I thought the books got more and more pro forma; it sure seemed that Herbert was given a contract he couldn't refuse. But I find that "Under Pressure", his first novel* is quite readable, and shows some interesting use of structure to build suspense. I also liked "Whipping Star", and "The Dosadi Experiment", and most emphstically did not like "The White Plague". Giveaway: Finding out gur avpr uvccvrf ner ernyyl rivy cbq-crbcyr vf abg zl vqrn bs n tbbq gjvfg raqvat.

Card, feh. Oh, and Xopher, I agree about a lot of Moorcock's writing**, though some of "The Dancers at the End of Time" series is good.

I'll agree that "Neuromancer" was terrific; chock-full of great throw-away ideas like the Rastafarian Space Navy. But the two books he tacked on to it to make a trilogy were not as good IMO. The later books like "All Tomorrow's Parties"are getting back to the level of Neuromancer, though.

* also titled "The Dragon in the Sea", a much better title IMHO.
** You can't blame him for his name.

That makes perfect sense to me. Of course, based on the "Dialogs" I always thought of Plato as a troll.

You are always qualified to commit puns. Whether we can stand them is another question entirely.

He sent an e-mail to me, too. At least he wasn't rude, and I was rude to him on his own site.

I have to admit, he/they are doing a fair job of keeping me off balance.

I even sent e-mail to Tamara to find out if she is actually the one posting lately. The tone and the way her arguments are constructed here, at BB, and at Yeago's are very different from her posts on her LJ or MySpace pages. Maybe I just have a problem with a 28 year old nurse claiming to be an "old timey gnu-hippy". I have my own prejudices to get past.

"Fix it or Fork it" indeed.

LO-frick'n-L!

Neuromancer was a fix-up? What stories is it a reworking of? Or am I missing a joke?

I can't however, agree with Abi totally. Yes, trolling is really just an aggregate of boorish actions. But I think we are legitimate in calling certain people trolls. After all, what are we ourselves but aggregates of actions along a fouth axis? If you act like a troll, you are exactly a troll. And I suppose that Tamara, however annoying, was not.

Xopher, Herbert's Green Brain is really quite fun if you ignore all the sexism, racism, patently absurd squirt gun fights and Herbert's silly habit of narrating thoughts. The titular brain itself predates Sterling's brood mind in "Swarm" by a couple of decades. And at least he was trying to make a point about ecology as a gestalt. Like Silent Spring but with more acid burns and emergent sentience.

Xopher, #411: What hit me in the face, back in 1985 or thereabouts, was a rerun of the episode "Shore Leave". Okay, you have the female security guard, which was a breakthrough for the period -- but then she spends the entire episode doing exactly 3 things: scream, cry, faint, lather, rinse, repeat. Somewhere not very far in, I caught myself thinking, "And THIS they put on a STARSHIP?!" Compare and contrast with Tasha Yar... or, even better, Susan Ivanova.

There are still a couple of episodes I can watch without cringing ("The Trouble With Tribbles"), but they're very much the exceptions.

C. Wingate, #444: There was a post here not very long ago that started with a line to the effect of, "On the Internet, if you do a perfect imitation of an asshole, then you are one." This is not stereotyping, it's pattern-matching.

Dave, #464: Also, out-of-culture swearing isn't as likely to get you in trouble. Just this afternoon I substituted "bloody" for a less-acceptable American term in a room full of teenagers, and may (to my chagrin) have started a bit of a fad.

Todd, #492: Oh, good grief. Even I have read something by each of those authors, and there's a lot of SF I don't get around to reading for various reasons. But beyond that, the authors one likes are a matter of personal taste, nothing more. Even if I hadn't read anything by any of the cited authors, it wouldn't matter; my opinion is my opinion, and neither Yeago nor anyone else has any right to tell me who I should and shouldn't like. What a twit.

Someday I will get around to writing my book-length essay on gender in Star Trek. Right around the same time as I write my depressing Yeoman Rand fic. Right around the same time I write that Twin Peaks fic I want to write about Audrey and Pete's fishing trip right at the end of the series. Right around the same time I write that campy post-apocalyptic novel I keep meaning to write. Right around the same time...

Tamara R.@405: Yes, it's an extremely weak defense. Teresa was, it seems to me, implying that your comments weren't worth the bother of deploying any stronger one.

Also published under the far worse title 21st Century Sub.

Not accurate, either. We're here, where is it?

I might have been more tolerant of it if I'd watched it from the beginning, week by week, but I didn't see it until 1968, well into the seond season. The first few episodes provided a more gentle entry into the universe of Star Trek than getting dropped into the middle, I think.

* "There's acid in the grass!"**
** Or even worse, racial intolerance portrayed as bilateral assymetry.

I was raised on Doctor Who, so TOS production values look like James Cameron to me. Yes, TOS is sexist, but I'm actually more irritated by the projection of 20th century US racism into the 24th century of TNG/DS9.

bill willingham once hit on me (in a non-obnoxious, non-threatening way) for two hours at a con once. if he figured out i had no idea who he was, it didn't seem to bother him.

eddie campbell once told me at a con that one of my watercolours was very good, & another one was no good. what kind of authority do i get?

(quick, serge! what marvel comic is this from: "one of them is very, very good ... the other one is very, very bad!")

Quite right: Patroclus is totally a sockpuppet.

I am ashamed to say I don't know the answer to that one.

Is that a sock-choppy movie?

To clarify:

When I wrote that snippet about 0wnz0red, my neighbor was trying to tell me that because it got nominated for a Nebula, it was therefore "good" and should be read. The label "award winning/nominated" is too often a cue for people who don't know how to distinguish one text from another to decide they like the awarded text. Basically, my neighbor will only read "acclaimed" work, yet he had never read any of these historically acclaimed authors. I am not particularly a fan of any of the authors I cited, (except maybe Asimov's shorts), though I've read them all. They were simply the first handful of widely-read Nebula awarded/nominated authors that sprang to mind. I don't have to be a fan of these people to believe that they technically have more reason to be awarded/nominated than Mr. Doctorow did at that point in his writing career, or for that particular story. To be fair, I have only read two short stories and Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town by Mr. Doctorow, so perhaps in the last few years his style has developed and he's able to write more human characters, and if not, I'm sure he's more than capable of getting to that point in the future if he chooses.

Personally, I don't really put much stock in the award system at all. Not the lesser ones anyway. It's mostly just a big .edu circle-jerk of judges. I mean, sure, I'll check out what the Ivory Tower has to say every October, but that's more a matter of curiosity than blind fanship.

I believe a majority of the people here will jump at the opportunity to talk garbage, censor me, or tell me I don't know anything at all, and that's okay.

Starring Sockard Channing.

Have you no modesty, no maiden shame,
No touch of bashfulness? What, will you tear
Impatient answers from my gentle tongue?
Fie, fie! you counterfeit, you puppet, you!

I believe a majority of the people here will jump at the opportunity to talk garbage, censor me, or tell me I don't know anything at all, and that's okay

I don't have any interest in discussing or arguing literary merit with you, but I will tell you that the language of your post is confrontational and insulting, and that those are not good things.

If your intent is to start a fight, that's a good way to do it, but that does in fact make you a troll. If your intent is to start a reasoning discussion, it's not a very productive start.

Puppet? why so? Ay, that way goes the game.

You forgot dismiss you as a troll. Doh!

While you are very well-presented and I even got a lot out of reading your response, because you missed or mis-read the basic focus of the source text, the tangents you raise are awry and make claims that were never up for defense to begin with.

The first edition of Ringworld, actually. IMO, it reads better than the corrected version. (I think it was in Lucifer's Hammer that the San Bernardino mountains were described as being *west* of Pasadena. Larry's reaction to that was 'Oops.')

I met Randall Garret. Westercone 31.

Whether that means it should be given more or less weight than any other F&SF award is a matter for individual tastes, but to dismiss it in a post that focuses on academic awards betrays either disingenuousness or a shocking lack of knowledge of the field--your pick.

One more thing, before you start arguing points of relevance to the F&SF community, you might want to pop up to the front page and figure out who the hosts of this blog are and their relationship to the F&SF field. Then, take a moment to extrapolate who might hang out at this sort of blog.

Though my in-house work at Locus in the Eighties and Nineties introduced me to quite a few famous or about-to-be-famous writers, the coolest encounter came in the pre-Clarion Seventies, when I attended a writers' workshop up north, led by Frank Herbert and Jack Vance (whom I later got to visit at his home in the Oakland hills, meeting his wife and son).

Right. A work has to get ten nominations within a year after publication from members of SFWA. I know.

When I said "...the award system..." I mean to say ALL the awards given out. It seems nowadays like every work is up for something, whether it be a Nebula, Hugo, Booker, Pulitzer, O. Henry Prize, Newberry, Carnegie, or blah blah blah. There are so many awards, that the awards mean less and less as the years go by. True, all these awards are supposedly "major" awards, but which winner or judge will ever label an award as a "lesser" award?

You sir, are not a sockpuppet or a troll. You are an idiot.

Faren-ough. He who puns by the word shall be punished by the word.

Gursky 567: Oh, I liked the message of TGB a lot. It just wasn't very well written—and since I was about 15 when I read it...well, it takes a lot for a 15 to notice bad writing.

Lee 568: Compare and contrast with Tasha Yar... or, even better, Susan Ivanova.

Or the radiant Aeryn Sun, my personal favorite.

Reyrct Todd: Now, now. We're trying to bring Yeago into the fold.

ethan 569: I believe that time that you're going to write all those things right around is called "Real Soon Now" (often abbreviated RSN). By a curious coincidence, that's the same time I'm going to write my book on Radical Pantheism.

Serge 581: Ugh. I thought Pulasky was a ham-handed stereotype "irritating character." I HATED her.

Kristen 584: If you took out the phrase 'impassioned idiocy' from your first paragraph, and dropped your last paragraph entirely, this would be a pretty decent post. I'm willing to be polite to you if you're polite back, but those two things were rude. Does this qualify as "talking garbage"? I hope not.

Yeago 586: Just calm down. Not everyone has gotten the memo. It will take a while for it to die down, but posts like 586 don't help. See Emma's response at 601 for an example of why.

For a while you're going to have to be nicer than the people who are talking to you. That's just how it works. Rant to me in email if you want/need to; I'm not unsympathetic.

My goal is nothing less than to successfully integrate you into this community, because I think you could be a very interesting addition to it. But that can only happen if you learn how we play and try to play our way.

Kristen 591: THERE we go! I like this a lot.

Ibid. 600: Another good one. You're right that no one ever calls their own award "lesser," but the larger literary/fannish/whatever community knows what awards mean what. The Nebula means that other writers think you're good, and that you haven't pissed off a lot of them recently enough for them to vote against you out of spite, and...well, a bunch of other stuff.

This blog is of a free and open nature,
That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
And will as tenderly be led by the nose
As asses are.

I have't. It is engender'd. Hell and night
Must bring this monstrous birth to Making Light.

Point taken. =)

I hated Pulaski too!!!

Until we get used to it.

Kristen 607: Well then we have to be friends!

re 568: The thing I liked most about Original Trek was the swing-for-the-fences mythic quality. It made for a lot of really bad episodes, of course. Next-Gen never really worked that well for me, unless Frakes was directing. It's rather ironic that it took getting all the way to the 2nd movie to find Troi's real calling: Chief Interrogator of the Unsuspecting.

As far as perfectly imitating an asshole, that doesn't really interest me. Once we get to statements like that, I tune out, since most people's imitation of jerks, or reasonable people, is imperfect.

Ah well... To me she was a breath of fresh air in the ship's starch-laden atmosphere. The only character I gave a hoot about was Geordi, who behaved like a real human being. If I think back to ST-TNG's episodes I watched before I gave up, only two stand out (in my opinion, which is just that and nothing more). One is the episode where Picard meets Sarek, who's suffering of Alzheimer's and who won't admit it, not even to himself. The other is the episode after the Battle against the Borg at Wolf 359: Picard is recovering at the vinyard of his brother, with whom he had always had a tense relationship. They actually come to blows before Picard breaks down at the powerlessness he had felt when he'd been taken over by the Borg.

Only this, and nothing more? Careful! :-)

The torture episode ("There are four lights!"—and he admits later that he actually believed there were five) didn't do anything for you? Or the one where Picard lives an entire alien lifetime, and ends with him playing the pennywhistle? (That one made me cry for real.)

I think some of the episodes of TNG were as good as anything that won an Emmy in their respective years.

Ummm... who's bill willingham?

[Googles] Oh, the FABLES guy.

(Not a series I've read. In fact, I'm about a year behind on actually reading the comics I -do- buy.)

Thus from infernal Dis do we ascend
To view the subjects of our monarchy,
Those souls which sin seals the black sons of hell;
'Mong which, as chief, Faustus, we come to thee,
Bringing with us lasting damnation
To wait upon thy soul: the time is come
Which makes it forfeit.

I was reading the comment thread to a post about the WGA strike at THE ARTFUL WRITER, and came across a number of angry, insulting comments by one particular poster.

The poster's nom-de-Internet was... "The Hammer".

Yes, I do believe it's THAT "The Hammer", the same one who was such a pain in the ass back on the old GEnie boards in the 90's. Particularly convincing was his apparent belief that the striking WGA members are Communists.

If you want, his comments in that thread are 39, 45, 52, 54, 61, 75, and 81. Or, for a more constructive way to pass the time, you could just hit yourself in the head with a, err, umm, hammer.

I think the two-part episode that ended one season and began the next -- the one where Number One's line at the very end of the first episode was "Fire!" -- was one of the best pieces of dramatic/adventure writing I've ever seen on television.

TNG was good. We watched them religiously for years, in about mid-series, and I have uniformly loved the movies. But you remember the start of Voyager, where ... argh, not good with names, but somebody rails about "You Starfleet types" being stiff stuffed shirts, and damn if that realization didn't make me reevaluate all the TNG episodes when I watched them again later.

And that goes particularly for Geordi always telling Data that stuff isn't appropriate. Where he pushes Crusher into the drink on the holodeck, for instance. Damned Starfleet stuffed shirts. Data was perfectly right, it was hilarious.

My favorite episode, btw: can't recall the name, but it's the one with the time loop, where they all get deja vu from the last fifty times around. But I'm always a sucker for time travel plots.

So is our current theory that Yeago is not a sock? Because I can't help but notice that Yeago and Kristen post in odd synchronicity. Maybe they have similar work schedules? I notice I never see either one of them at the same time as Wonder Woman. Draw your own conclusions.

It seems to me that a really good puppeteer (the one-headed, non-capitalized kind) would act in just such a way, becoming a trusted member of the site over the course of weeks, months, or even years, then when you least expect it, pow!

In fact, at this point, I'd be willing to finger Xopher as another head. It would be the least expected possible ploy. [Disclaimer: this paragraph is a joke. Humor not valid in MA, MO, WV, or ID. Redeemable for 5 cents in ME.]

I need some syrup to get rid of that sudden quoth. (By the way, I made that earlier comment because I didn't want you to think I'm the arrogant type.)

Yes, the torture episode of St-TNG was a good one, and there's what I think is the one where the Kardassians first appeared, in which Picard sacrifices a friend's career to delay the coming war with the Kardassians.

But... There was a lack of humanity in that cast. In the original show, people were trying to be the best that they could be. By the time of the NCC-1701-D, we had a crew where people were the best. I think it was Melinda Snodgrass who said something to the effect that, since those characters were perfect, the only way they could have stories was to bring conflict from the outside.

They are close friends and roommates. Sometimes an IP address is just an IP address.

I have to say I liked DS9 better than TNG. Especially "House of Quark", which deserves to be made into comic opera.

"No. But they may rest easier."

I have to dismiss my personal love and favoritism for TNG, though, because my bias might lie in splitting an entire package of chips ahoy with my dad every Saturday night at eight.

@622
The bed, eh? Pulling out the big guns against the charge? =)

If so, that explains a lot. People tend to defend their partners, and get exceptionally bent out of shape if they feel their partners are being attacked. I do that too; I don't think it's unreasonable behavior.

C. 623: Me too. I think DS9 was the best of all the series, not least because it was dark and morally ambiguous. I knew I was going to like it when Sisko said "We're very different species. It will take time for us to understand each other," and the Prophets replied "What is time?"

Kristen 625: The bed, eh? Pulling out the big guns against the charge?

Only you would know, of course. And only if...I guess I have the answer to the question I asked above!

No! I am not Prince Trollet, nor was meant to be;
Am a sockpuppet tool, one that will do
To swamp a thread, start a fight or two,
Support the troll; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Echoing, captious, and repetitive;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, in flames competitive—
Alas, most times, a fool.

Some of us think about it, but not much. They could have had fun with it, if they'd lost the time-war plot complication. (I thought that was a really bad idea, because it didn't connect to anything in any of the earlier versions.)

No, I don't think so. Maybe you are thinking of another episode? I was talking about "The Best of Both Worlds". Written by Michael Piller and directed by Cliff Bole:.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzsnortzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

I think the franchise ran out of steam before Voyager. Enterprise was like a zombie version: it's dead, but somehow still moving. Quick, blow its head off!

"Ah, you represent Earth's best, then."
"No, sir, I'm not; I'll make plenty of mistakes."
"But you'll learn more about us that way; and I'll get a better officer in return."
- The Corbomite Maneuver

Later I realized that they just didn't care, and nor did I.

I have to say that Patrick Stewart as Picard never did much for me. He does wonderful voice work, but his face seems to have only three settings: general seriousness, slight amusement, and decided annoyance at Q/Troi's mom/etc.

However, I did notice some 'red flag' behavior. So as a word to the wise, I offer some pointers:

Don't start a post with "this will probably get deleted" or "I hope I don't anger you" or anything like that. Self-fulfilling prophecy, as it were.

If the Moderator is identifying folks as Trolls or Sockpuppets, do not repeat their arguments or use the same kinds of phrases. You will be linked to the puppeteer, especially a nasty one like TheCynic, who using IP masking techniques and multiple identities (he admits as much). The only way folks have to ID these guys is the words they use and the way they use them.

And finally, if you're linking into a forum or blog from another site, check out the site a bit before you start posting. Check out the hosts and read some of the other threads. Get a feel for the community, if one exists, before jumping in and, potentially, starting trouble for yourself. And, for God's sake, don't say, "I was linked to this site from X", especially if you are going to post a criticism. You might as well say, "Hi, I'm a Troll. Please flame me."

All that to say, if you don't want to labeled a Troll, don't do trollish things. If you don't want to be labeled a Sockpuppet, don't do the things that a banned/deleted/disemvowelled person did.

So there, more cosmic wisdom from your friendly neighborhood CosmicDog.

I have to say, I really appreciated the e-mails I received from Tamara R. She really does seem to be a thoughtful person.

As long as we're there, Riker had about 3 as well: flushed angry-serious, miffed/surprised, and "I'm going to do you".

Episode "Sarek," teleplay by Peter S. Beagle.

Frank Herbert
Isaac Asimov
Larry Niven
Orson Scott Card
William Gibson
Neil(sic) Stephenson

A real critic who actually knew something about science fiction could come up with a much better list of comparisons for Cory's work. This one is just generic. But then, I doubt that the essay in question was ever intended to be a real examination of Cory's work.

Your right, the essay in question was 'never intended to be' a 'real examination'. It had some insidious secret purpose yet to be divulged. It was carefully crafted as part of a sting--so was, in fact, all criticism of Doctorow ... ever. Oh, and its invalid on your say so, and so is my identity.

David Gerrold used an almost identical situation to illustrate how not to write Star Trek characters in his Tribbles book. I guess it was more important for the Voyager writers to demonstrate that Captain Mommy, despite being in charge, was Still Womanly.

Yes, I admit that I lost track of the point about the Nebula award status of the writers listed, but please note that I encountered the essay from Kristen for the first time in the context of a more general Doctorow-bashing.

In the larger picture this error would only change my point if one of us did some research and found out what fraction of Doctorow's work was nominated for or won Nebula awards (or any other awards for which all nine authors were qualified) at similar points in their careers and found Doctorow to significantly lead or trail the others. I suspect that both Asimov and Herbert would ring in no nominations at all because the awards available now weren't yet being given out at this point in their careers; Stephenson might not have been writing genre fiction, so even if he had been nominated for a Nebula, he likely wouldn't have received it. I'm too ignorant of the award-related aspects of the careers of the other writers to even guess whether or not knowing something about such things would make me want to change what I've written in that regard.

Unless the other authors were comparable with Doctorow in terms of this "Nebula metric," it still seems to me that comparing him with them in this way is a faulty approach.

Also, I agree to some extent with Kirsten that judging the quality of a work by its status with regard to award nomination or even award awarding is at best a flawed approach. Many of the sf genre awards are particularly problematic because the judging body changes in composition between years, so it's not even possible to develop a reliable "feel" for how well the awards will agree with one's own tastes.

I'd go along with a number of other folks writing here and note that I go back and sample the works of a writer I didn't care for from time to time, and I'm particularly likely to try a writer whose work I didn't like again if people whose tastes I've been able to calibrate against my own do or don't recommend a particular work (whether thumbs up or thumbs down will make me try again would of course depend on the results of the calibration process). Their writing changes and my tastes change.

Based on my experience reading Overclocked, if you didn't like Doctorow's writing because of issues with the way he writes his characters and because his purpose seems more political than literary, it's not time to try his work again, yet.

Dancers At The End Of Time started out well, I thought, but ran into trouble towards the end (actually in collection of short stories subsequent to the third novel of the trilogy), when Moorcock tried to deal the actual end of the universe. But in the meantime he did some funny things, like bring Elric into the story as a buffoon more than a Champion. Elric was all "I'm Chaotic Evil, and a real bad-ass" and the End-Timers were all "Want to be in my menagerie?"

Re: Star Trek.

I think the producers of Enterprise wanted to seem like loyal Americans, and Manly Men of Valor in the light of 9/11, so they stuck to the "Set phasers on Snooze" style of martial SF, where they showed how our doughty crew could deal with terrorists and saboteurs. At times it played exactly like a classic John Wayne war movie.

"Andromeda" made a similar mistake shortly before the invasion of Iraq, with a story that presented all the same arguments that BushCo was just then giving out for the invasion. It was completely extraneous to the arc of the series and, like most Author's Messages, attempted to pound the viewers' heads in, ever so subtly, of course. / snark

I am ashamed to say I don't know the answer to that one.

oh, ok. it was a long shot anyhow. i was quoting nth man, a limited, self-contained series that apparently only ran for two years.

i remember it being well-written, absorbing & really spooky, but you maybe shouldn't take my word on it. looking at the dates in that reference article, i was eight-to-ten-ish when i last read it.

If you could manage to keep track of basic facts about this discussion you'd realize how off-mark this comment is, in a technical sense.

Foremost, its not my list. Sheepishly I have to admit that I didn't even recognize all of the authors Kristen listed. I've read some Card (thanks to her), Herbert and Stephenson. While I'm a mere dabbler, there was something utterly missing from 0wnz0red (NO, not more works and NO, not his entire works) that kristen's illustration seemed to capture (aside from my own complaints that, topically, it seemed, strangely, derivative of its own audience).

I shared it to get a real response from someone in the community (of which I have seen only glimmers because of all this name-calling/dismissal). I wonder if I hadn't posted admidst this whole suckpoppet business if--in context--my original psot would have seemed more tame. Maybe I would have achieved my result.

For the original Star Trek, I was pretty young and didn't register the women-as-decorative-objects message; what did stay in my head ever after was the one episode where they found a planet full of happy peaceful people and Kirk decided that they had to interfere because it was unnatural for people to not want to fight. That episode still bothers the hell out of me.

If we're thinking of the same episode, that is.

I don't recall Andromeda well enough to be sure, but I bet that's the arc that all the fans I knew at the time considered to be where the series jumped the shark. If it is, most of them blamed it on Kevin Sorbo getting more creative control, though I have no idea how true that is. I do know that when they started talking about it was right around the time I lost interest. I think it would have been the beginning of the second season.

Someone had a really excellent drug source for the last season. It made no sense to me at all. (Yes, I kept watching for at least two full seasons after it got uninteresting. I'm an optimist.)

Didn't work. Teen angst will never die ...

Given the rubbish the ST franchise put out since, leading to the current effort to restart from Kirk's early career, perhaps they should have listened to Wolfe.

Are you seriously trying to argue that a Nebula nomination qua Nebula nomination is an absolute guarantee that something isn't crap?

It looks to me as if Kristen is an SF reader and a teachable (if defensive) human being who doesn't like Cory's writing. The Boing Boing entitlement and troll explosion is a separate thing at this point. She and Yeago are acting like people right now. Yeago quite happily agreed to pay Xopher the $20 for recognising all the writers.

I disagree with her -- I haven't read the short in question, though I've very much enjoyed a lot of Cory's work and I think Little Brother is absolutely brilliant. But I think "The Nebulas are not the award they once were" and "Doctorow isn't Asimov" are reasonable positions for a human being and SF reader to hold, and not inherently dismissable as positions.

Of course, this doesn't mean it's reasonable or kind to go and post them on Cory's blog.

On a different subject, with respect to award-winning authors: I've never really held with comparing writers to other writers, trophy-laden or not. A writer suits the wiring of your brain or they don't; why are we comparing kumquats and mangoes?

Or muskrats and mosquitoes.

Yeago - Look who's the devil now!

Good joke. Nice point.

"Forgive me if it seems like trolling."

There's only one possible answer to that: Non!

I can't comment on Voyager because I've never managed to watch a whole episode. Ditto Enterprise.

I've just started watching DS9 for the first time. Does it get better after the first series? I was a bit meh about most of the episodes. And, WRT to women in the Trekverse, I was incensed to hear Keiko being addressed as "Mrs O'Brien". What, we manage to survive as a species all those hundreds of years into the future, develop space travel and encounter vastly different intelligent lifeforms, and women are still taking their husband's name on marriage?

I think it's very, very bad. Crap science and jaw-droppingly stupid characters wrapped up in a poorly paced story padded out to twice its natural length with Dilbert out-takes.

I now think Kristen's comments were extremely restrained on this particular story, although she does imply that Asimov, Niven et al. wrote on a different plane, and 90% of their output was crap too.

And Mrs. William Riker in an episode of ST-TNG.

There's nothing plotworthy in Keiko taking O'Brien's name.

No, DS9 gets even worse after they lose the crib-sheets from Babylon 5 and don't know what to do with the Mysterious Aliens Who Think The Captain Of The Space Station Is A Religious Icon.

Wait until season 3 when a black woman appears as a merchant starship captain: you'll never guess what happens!

[posted from (probably faked) 128.221.197.20]

Not sure why, but that made me laugh and laugh and laugh and laugh.

And OK, I shouldn't bother, but TheCynic said at #681: If you disagree with [Teresa] she mangles your post and that's no secret.

To which I say: stuff and nonsense. Most of us have disagreed with Teresa from time to time. I'd be willing to bet that Jo's #663 will keep its vowels. I've disagreed with things Teresa has said, and I even once got pretty shrieky on her husband, and to my knowledge I've never been disemvoweled. There are ways to do things, and ways not to do them.

BS. You usually have to be majorly rude here to get disemvowelled. You're almost always warned first, by one of us if not by Teresa.

BTW, if you want to argue BB's posting policies, please argue it over there.

One thing they assiduously avoided - travelling home at near c in normal space. In subjective time they would made it in a few months, and travel 70 years into the future to boot.

Militaries still exist? People still call their military superiors "Sir" or "Ma'am" depending on gender (except in a few episodes where they're both called "Sir")?

Families are still nuclear most of the time? Children do things in school that make sense to us? Women still carry babies in their bodies instead of using some much safer (not to mention less career-limiting) approach?

Even allowing for the language change that seems not to have happened, we can even comprehend what they're saying about their computers and their science—or even their jobs?

Humans from Earth still have races? (This one in particular is NOT the future I hope for.) Almost everyone marries a person of the same race? (Keiko and Miles are the only exception I can think of...in fact, interSPECIES marriages seem more acceptable than interracial ones...a human can marry a Betazoid, but a white human had better marry a white Betazoid.)

My point is that they tell the story to a 20th Century audience, and not to science fiction fans. In the particular case you cite, yes, that was silly, but I'd ascribe it to an unimaginative writer wanting to communicate that she was married to Miles. Yeah, it's sexist. But it's just one example of the many, many unlikely unchanged aspects of our world that are put in there without thought.

Yeah, I really think it does get better. I can't get into it, really, without spoiling a bunch of stuff, but the Sisko is God thing turns out to be much more complicated than it looks at the beginning, and the villains are magnificent.

There's a fair amount not to love - among other things, they did a nice job on their holodeck-world, but they spent far too much time there - but there are some magnificent supporting characters (Garak, Kai Winn, Quark and Gul Dukat are absolutely wonderful) and Sisko turned out to be my favorite captain.

The first season he was trying too hard not to be Hawk. After that he came into his own.

Mind you, there was that foot-washing marry-a-clone episode of TNG which only needed leprechauns to make it frameable as a piece of Darby O'Gill Paddy-whackery, so perhaps we're only even with the TNG crew.

Alas, it won't. One of the mods will have to do it.

If only you'd self-destruct, the world would become a minutely better place. Unless you exploded or something—that might hurt someone. Dropping dead in your tracks is relatively harmless, however, and I urge you to give it a try.

As an aside, Quark is my father's all-time favorite Trek character. He says he likes a full speed ahead rogue...

OTOH, I wish they would just red rid of the flipping holodecks. What, you're going where no ONE has gone before and you don't find it entertaining enough? Pfui!

And Quark, of course, being an ugly, sneaky, lying, money-grubbing little alien was always leching after tall white women (with spots). And short white women (with nose ridges). And white blackjack-table girls in metallic bikinis.

At least they didn't do Triumph of the Will.

cue:

Xopher #685: Yes, I'm aware of all the other improbable 20th century assumptions that underpin the Star Trek world, but I was writing about women in the Trekverse, as per the start of this particular off-topic discussion.

I'm also frequently irritated by the make-up masks all the female characters apparently want to wear on TNG and DS9, and the bias towards 'feminine' jobs for the women. Sympathetic, wishy-washy counsellor person? Female. Sympathetic, emotional doctor person? Female. Primary school teacher? Female. Gardener? Female. Enigmatic, wise person in the service industry? Female. I've been very much enjoying Major Kira, for not being part of this pattern. And Tasha Yar too, if only they'd known what to do with her when they had her. Obviously, I'm also irritated by the pushing of male characters into stereotypically male roles, but they do at least get more opportunities of shooting at stuff.

ethan: glad to have entertained you!

Quark was a caricature, but they did address it - the episode with his mom insisting on wearing clothes was a nice counterbalance to the surpassingly lame episode on TNG about Troi's mom finding the moral courage to get married naked.

Many of the characters developed into real (for the lack of a better word) people after they started out as plot contrivances. I found myself much more engaged by it than I had been by previous ST series, although I found it a little difficult at first.

Anyway, I'm sorry if this has bored anyone. I know it's been off-topic, but I saw the word being used ever-so-slightly out of context and I was interested in how it got there and how it had come to be adapted. And it stopped me obsessing about which of you is real and which of you is the figment of someone else's imagination.

Which is a concern, actually. I don't have the link to hand, but there's an article by Cory Doctorow where he describes Teresa as a `troll-whisperer.' It's a talent I don't have, so I'm left with the options - leaving aside the mods, people whose posts I'm familiar with over the past year or so of lurking, a couple of people I've bumped into elsewhere and Charlie Stross, who I saw in the flesh this weekend - of either accepting everyone as real or rejecting everyone as unreal.

My own opinion, for what it's worth, mirrors what some people have alluded to upthread. A blog is like inviting people into your house, and if someone does something in your house that you find offensive, you have a perfect right to take some action. Making Light's house: Making Light's rules. Boing Boing's house: Boing Boing's rules. Most people who post here, I think, would accept that quite happily.

I'm going to go and look at some pictures of LOLcats to take my mind off this madness.