The Cathedral Builders (IF Wiki finis)
I got the folks over at the IF Wiki to remove my real name. There are a lot of reasons this brings me angst, but at the core of it, it’s because I really don’t want the attention. I don’t want the spotlight. I have no desire for fame, even the droplets of fame that being on a wiki in interactive fiction can bring.
I have had the constant waking dream of being a builder of cathedrals — great men who did great things, but who never signed their names to their creations. That has always struck a deep chord with me, and that is what I want to be online. Their rewards were eternal and their names are known to the Great Architect. They were rewarded in secret for what they did without names. In a similar way, the private praise of those whom I have helped or whom I help is more than enough; if that were not present, just knowing that I helped would be enough.
I won’t fight a public listing of my works and contributions because I think that is “fair use” to borrow a journalistic term. I think there is a limit to what you can ask for without looking like a real tool, and that’s it right there. In any case, this skirmish is over.
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Return of the Stalinists (IFWiki Sux Redux)
Privacy-stealers annoy me to no end; they are vile human beings, like little miniature dwarves, chipping away at your sanity and hauling away pieces of it until you are nothing more than a bunch of raw nerve endings. Paparazzi and many journalists form these ranks. Oh, and also, keepers of the IF Wiki.
Looks like the little Stalinists are at it again. They not only deleted the work I did under my other ID, but purged the ID completely from the system, and put my real name up there instead of my pseudonym. Who did this? I could nail down the individual person, hiding behind their own anonymous ID, but what would it matter? It makes no difference to know the name of the dwarf that did this or that; they are all have the same worldview and share the the mindset of the rapist.
In the blogosphere, there is something of a code of honor. One of its tenants is that you never expose someone who wishes to remain anonymous, for you never know what their situation is. Could they be hiding from someone? Could they be located in an repressive country? Do they want to keep their professional life and personal life separated? Do they just like their privacy? In that world, you don’t reveal the real name of even someone who taunts you and defecates on your blog. I’ve been there and revealing their names, where they worked, and so forth was something I would never do. It crossed my mind only a handful of times, if that.
Yet here, the sanctimonious, and freaking holier-than-thou Stalinists have decreed “no respect but for the Politburo”. Very well. I’ve logged in to their system and will blank my page over and over again until it stays down, or they figure out how to stop Tor (in case they try banning my IP), or I get them taken off the Net. I’m taking this fight straight into the dragon’s maw.
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The Hands of the Chloroform Crowd
The status quo is often worshiped as something to maintain at all costs by the residents of small communities online; reality can also descend into this unthinking stasis, but it has the advantage of multi-channel communication and the fact that it is real and thus inescapable, to pull against such tendencies. Not so online where involvement, duty, and responsibility in any community are abstract first and usually wholly absent. Woe be to any who challenge the maddening wisdom of the crowd! It does not have to be this way, but in an immoral world, the only virtue is tranquility. Not utility; not freedom; not creativity; only the saccharine milk of false peace. Anyone who thus ripples the waters is the enemy.
The hands of the chloroform crowd will reach out for you and choke off your air. They will trash your house if you let them; they will hijack your threads; they will bury your reviews; they will wage a long, steady war against you like insane ducks, nibbling a little day by day, month by month, and year by year. The inferior spirits whose battle cries are “sameness!” and whom stand for nothing more than feeding the various cults of personality, inhabit every crevice in small communities. Like trolls, they may have once been thinking, once had the ability to discern moral truths, but have blinded themselves to history and have degenerated into lesser beings through endless repetitions of their empty slogans.
Most cannot withstand this Chinese water torture, and my mercies go out to them. It takes some kind of determination to press on through the sea of assailants, and I think it wholly impossible unless directed by the Divine. The lure of the warm earth-lair, the easy hemlock of “go along, get along” has seduced many to their deaths, allowing the reign of the imperfect to crush the rest underfoot. What reward awaits an endless resistance?
There are several, but chief among them is the sweet reward of integrity — of sticking to your guns and never giving up.
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TADS 3 Doesn’t Suck As Much
Ok, I take back my earlier post about the suck factor of TADS 3. It looks like there is a well-developed IDE for TADS 3: Uli’s Workbench for TADS 0.4. I don’t know if it will run on anything below Mac OS 10.5, but at least there is something. Strangely, it’s not mentioned by the official TADS 3 site at all.
I’ve written the webmaster to he can give Uli some link love. It would avoid some frustration for newbies at the least!
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The Rape Tree
I’ve discovered that when various know-it-alls and appeasers can’t comment on my posts here, they’ll hijack threads on R*IF where their own groupies will trumpet them with fulsome praise. Interesting.
One point that this proves: willful ignorance and historical amnesia are a necessary part of any dictatorship or oligarchy, even one online. As long as people are willing to forget the past, and/or as long as the past never applied directly to them, why they can act as sanctimonious as the alphabet networks in commenting on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like them they rise above it all to fine-sounding silver-tongued pronouncements that cause their groupies to have mental orgasms (much like reporters enter states of bliss whenever Obama opens his mouth). See, the experiences of others are either unimportant or so subjective that they cannot possibly be true! All that matters is the perpetuation of the status quo. Sure, we must crucify a few heretics and immolate a few dissidents, but as long as the community continues, all will be well. It’s much like Soviet statism.
Only life experiences (or perhaps a revelation) will ever wake these people up, but I’ll set up this rape tree as a reminder, burned in the electrons of this intangible world. When you reach this point in time, I’ll be there to welcome you to dystopia. I warned you and you would not listen, but when you arrive, you will know full well the awful truth and it will flow through your veins like fire.
Until then, as always, I am Cassandra.
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Espying the IFMUD
My initial impressions of the IFMud is that it is the watering hole of the Old Ones, the backroom where deals go down, and the hatchery of dark networks. Browsing through the FAQ turns up awesome gems like these:
Swearing is quite acceptable anywhere (there are several channels dedicated to nothing else). Insults are not.
The ignorance of a false dichotomy is painful to read. A whole channel devoted to swearing? I’d like to say I’m stunned or even surprised, but I’m just not. It’s another example of despotic excess. I guess you can’t expect much of the Old Ones, used to having their way in all things, to have a smidgen of self-control.
And insults are verboten? Excuse me, but if some Old One were to roast a newbie alive, who would stop him or her? Would the others not join in? How do you stop a king or queen from exercising their royal prerogative?
Time was when you had to turn on a special option to see who @emits were from, enabling people to hilariously torment the newbies. Then somebody decided to spoil our fun by making the option default.
I so love institutional cruelty. Don’t you? This is the truth behind all the mask; one-way torture is welcomed.
It’s been debated whether ifMUD is “newbie-friendly” or not. We don’t chop up newcomers with our +8 Swords of Dood, so to that extent we’re ahead of the game. We’re generally pretty darn polite as these sorts of places go. But here’s the “but”: we are, as noted, an established community, and not looking to change. MUD regulars have built up friendships with, and respect for, each other over many years.
It’s not an explicit “stay out”, but it is a warning sign about 10 feet tall. Nice. Screw you and your insider cliques! You are the very reason why the IF “community” is in such a sorry state! Here you meet to devise new dances for all the peasants to dance to, formulating tyranny while others sleep! I see your “change is not welcome” subtext, written in sick unholy fire. This is is just “go along or get out” said with a menacing leer. I’d like to say that I’m shocked, but I’m not.
If I could burn the IFMUD to the ground, I would — although it would be pointless. The Old Ones would just regroup somewhere else and find a new off-the-record, secretive, Journolist-like hangout to prepare their decrees.
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My Very Own “I Told You So” Moment
There’s been discussion on R*IF lately on how Paul Panks didn’t get his “I Told You So” moment, where he would’ve proved all his detractors wrong. It is a shame and not many people who take on the establishment get to have theirs. Something just clicked this evening and I realized that I was one of the fortunate few.
I got mine.
Here’s the backstory.
One of the reasons why the Ifwiki blows chunks is that it’s run by a clique of little Stalinists who try to prescribe their opinion about things as fact. I was one of the early contributors to the IfWiki, long before it really took off. I contributed to various articles and even wrote one (as memory serves). One of the articles I gussied up was about the history, present, and future of commercial IF. I wrote in admittedly-glowing tones that the age of commercial IF was not dead, as 1893 and Future Boy! had shown. Apparently two commercial entities weren’t enough. For daring to go against what the little Stalinists had decreed was truth immutable, my edits were flayed, I was personally attacked, and eventually, they took out what I wrote on the basis of majority vote.
Textfyre has released a commercial game. That makes three commercial games, put out by three separate commercial companies!
I TOLD YOU SO..
You can’t bury it any longer, guys. Commercial IF is resurgent, and long live all those who will make it glorious. Finally, on a personal note, there’s an awful lot of peace in being vindicated.
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Self-Congratulatory Hubris
I was back at the IF Planet thinking that I should add my blog back to the list. After scouring through a few blogs of my fellows, it became clear to me that Sturm Und Drang IF is a poor companion for the others. It sticks out like a bleeding thumb; it is the blood-red flower in a monochrome garden. It is one of the last voices of the lonely individual IF developer, amid the sick tide of masturbatory intellectualism and indie game developer snobbery.
Both of the aforementioned trends scream “look at me, look at me” as the blog authors attempt to make miniature deities out of themselves. The self-congratulatory aspect is what I find especially odious. It’s amazing to me, really, the need for people to brag about what they’re doing or their honors, as though anyone would be impressed by them. What you say to the people who write this or that means absolutely nothing to me, and will have absolutely no impact on my life, or my games, because it’s all small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. And no, honestly, I don’t give two stale turds about what board you sit on, what initials you have after your name, or any of the high regalia of an empty and dead society that you adorn yourself with. Those things are bones and ash!
Words outlast our lives and yet, instead of seeking something meaningful to say with them, here we all are, chasing after pointless honors. Two steps from death, we still fret about makeup.
(Note: After sleeping on it, I decided to take out the links to blogs that demonstrated these trends. There’s just no point in stating what everyone already knows or can find out by simply looking as I did. It’s much more helpful to take issues with attitudes and let people figure out if the shoe fits them.)
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Speed IF: Why?
Something that’s always bothered and amazed me is the concept of Speed IF. It’s a losing proposition from the get-go: create a game in some small amount of time (usually a day) for the purpose of winning a contest. What this does is litter the IF landscape with spartan, shallow, shoddy works, most of which aren’t even finished. For what purpose? To see who can code the fastest? Wow, that’s a plaque I want on my wall — I coded faster than the other idjits who entered this contest, and look at the pile of steaming turds I created with my ultrafast coding. I can’t think up any other reason why these contests recur like waves of the plague. They sure don’t create quality games. They don’t create interesting puzzles. They don’t even create finished works! Geez! Is this some kind of self-defeating contest, where we shout to the world, “Look at how much we suck?”
The IF “community” never seems to miss a chance to shoot itself in the foot and then brag about it to the world. In this case, Speed IF contests, are like holding a contest in foot-shooting and then not burying such juvenile antics, but preserving them, so that every Web crawler and idle passer by can look at the excesses of prior years.
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Farewell, Paul
Sometimes death makes things clear.
Recently, Paul Panks, one of the colorful authors of IF passed away, apparently after a long battle with mental illness. Muffy brought it everyone’s attention, and yet besides a few condolences, the event has passed virtually unremarked.
Sometimes death makes things clear.
A lot of my angst, disappointment, and sorrow with the IF community has stemmed from the belief that we were all in it together. That we were supposed to help one another, and that somehow, we all cared about each other. When I saw these fundamental assumptions being violated, I was furious. Furious because we are just a tiny group of people holding the flame aloft for a textual art in a world fascinated with pictures, and yet there was infighting and backstabbing and dark networks? We had so much in common and yet, still, unity was a fever dream.
Where are the Old Ones on this? Nowhere to be found. None of them have weighed in on the passing of one of their fellows. None of them care. Initially this surprised me slightly, but as the pieces fell to the ground, I could see the picture that I had missed all along.
Most people in R*IF just don’t see IF as a community. They don’t think that we’re all in it together. They don’t want to work together. They don’t want to present the best face to the world. I remember one time when newbies showed up in the newsgroup and were wondering what was going on, because the Inform website was broken. What followed was a bloodbath of recrimination and disparagement. Yet I still hoped.
Sometimes death makes things clear.
How many people contributed to Panks’ memory? How many even signed the online guest book? At last count, I saw no-one but myself, and you know what? That’s not to say that I’m righteous; that’s a horrible statistic. I should be among hundreds, not the only one (that I could tell). The same near-silence awaits all the rest of us non-stars in the IF world.
The IF community really isn’t a community at all, and maybe it never really was.
Pray for the family of Paul Panks in this difficult time.
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