1- I was banned because Shild was ready to jump at the slight occasion I gave, since he doesn’t like me and that’s his message board (no problem with this).
2- What triggered the ban was a bait that MJ threw himself, and I fell on it instead of replying to him in a PM like I should have done. It was him to call me out twice, on the Vault and F13, but the thread on the Vault was locked before I could reply.
3- I have no pathological, nor compulsive hatred for MJ. In fact I don’t have anything against MJ as a person. I don’t know him, don’t pretend to have any idea about how he is in person. I criticize MJ the game designer, solely on the public figure and what he does in practice.
4- MJ didn’t respond to any secret personas. He *thought* I had made accounts to troll him, but I have no responsibilities if someone else makes accounts on a forum and posts things from this blog without asking my permissions, in the same way I can’t be responsible for spam that may appear on the blog. MJ never apologized for accusing me of this.
There’s a very wide gap between truth and its perception. No one cares about these details but I’m always forced to explain. So if you want to accuse me then you also have to consider the details. If you don’t fucking care, then drop the thing instead of exhuming it again and again.
It is true that MJ is a “target” for me. It is true that I wrote many posts where I call him out directly. This is not representing any particular fixation with his persona. In the same way I never had any fixation with Lum, Dave Rickey, Raph Koster, Jeff Freeman or Tom Chilton. The frequency these people appeared in my posts is proportional to my interest. It’s not incidental the fact that for nearly five years I wrote about game design, in particular about PvP, and these guys have been most involved with those aspects. Especially lately Tom Chilton and Mark Jacobs. Both lead designers of the two mmorpgs I played in the last years.
This is alike saying to someone who has a blog about politics that he is obsessed with either Obama or Bush. So lets forget this stupidity, please. And when you explain why I was banned have the courage to say simply I wasn’t liked.
For some weird reason all the comments on the site were deleted, so I had to upload an old backup that is one month old. Everything in this month was lost.
DO NOT FUCKING LOCK THREADS ON THE VAULT. Why Mark Jacobs is allowed to bash me freely and I’m not allowed to defend myself?
This is what I was trying to post before the thread was locked.
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Haha, what amuses me is that no matter if I post under HRose or Abalieno, people still misspell my name ;)
he spent years attacking me personally whenever he could.
Oh please, you know it is false and my “attacks” have always been motivated. I’ve criticized your work, often harshly and inappropriately, sure, but not to bash the man outside his public role. I don’t know you personally and I don’t judge you personally.
He also had a tendency to create new accounts and post where I posted (like WHA in the beginning).
This is UTTERLY false. There isn’t one case you can name.
I post on three forums in total if you include this one (the Valut). F13 and Quarter To Three are the other two, and in both cases I was there before you (on F13 you registered first because developers were invited before the forums opened to everyone else, and I was there all along since Waterthread).
If with WHA you intend Warhammer Alliance then either you’re lying or mistaking me for someone else as I never had an account over there.
Really, I don’t know whether you’re trolling me (only to then accuse me of trolling you) or truly believe what you said. I have absolutely nothing personal against you nor I care on which forums you post. Recently I’ve bashed in a much harsher way Kalgan from Blizzard. Not because once again I have personal issues with him but solely because of game design. You don’t get special treatment, I only happen to play your game and so have something to write about it. In my usual style.
If I was fanatically egocentric then I’d think that *YOU* chase and stalk me around. But instead I’m not and simply think that you misunderstand what I write, as it often happens.
Think again if you think I’m obsessed with your persona. I’m just a passionate player who once had game design aspirations.
I read yesterday from Raph’s blog that Jeff Freeman died. It was a bad feel because I started reading and it wasn’t suddenly clear what happened, just a bad suspect. So I scrolled quickly the post and found out that the suspect was right.
I really felt awful. Then even slightly relieved when I read on Lum’s site that it wasn’t because of the job and that he was going to start at Zenimax next week. Then I felt hypocrite. If it was about the job I could more closely connect with that kind of frustration, but I was also thinking that I was considering it in a kind of selfish way. Which is what I’m doing again.
It was really unexpected. After so much time you read someone on the internet you get this stupid illusion of knowing him a bit, and I never perceived anything wrong. So it’s all about the smoke and mirrors, and the reality afterward.
Apparently running a blog for more than four years doesn’t get me even one humble spot in the blogger guild. They dismissed my application with a default message.
And they were complaining that Tobold got a free subscription with his blog! Me not even a guild invite from the same guys who were complaining!
Not that I’m too surprised. Not the first time I find unmotivated hostility toward me. “If you sit next to HRose you can’t hang out with us anymore!” Even nerds bully me.
Especially, I’m pissed when people die and had some true talent that goes wasted. You’ve got responsibilities in that case. Then he also died the day of my thirtieth birthday, and he is my favorite writer. His words are like a drug for the brain, they open it up, thoughts processes accelerate and meaning comes often through epiphanies. He is the only writer who (successfully) tries to write the way the brain thinks. And it sucks you in.
Now everyone in the world who recognizes his name is wondering, “why did he do that?”
I did too. In the attempt of trying to answer the question, I went and read the 50-odd pages story titled “Good Old Neon”, published in the “Oblivion” collection. I’d toss some quotes around but I read it in Italian and so it wouldn’t made a lot of sense here.
It’s a story of a suicide, written from the point of view of the suicide and it reads as a confession of the failure of his life (“my whole life I’ve been a fraud”) and the reasons that lead to the fact, one instant after the fact, or even during it. What passes through the mind in that exact moment. In the whole immanence of it. Only to reveal in the end, classic Wallace shocking way, that he, Wallace himself, is imagining the whole thing. Wondering why the man, one of his high school brilliant classmates, killed himself. What passed through his mind, imagining a possible story.
It comes out as a prison of the mind. Something that lures you in and then drags you into a bottomless, dark pit, and it’s scary. Because of meaninglessness, of redundancy. And yeah, also fascinating.
I really wish I could quote because there’s a part that I think is the real core of it all. The way the actual central thought is “cliche”, and the way Wallace hated it because of it: the impossibility to communicate.
Everything Wallace-an is trapped into paradoxes. What kills Wallace is what he was talented doing. Writing, communicating. Yet, the man who could do it like no other, exudes frustration. Read the last line from the link above. “if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing.”
The way he writes, the way he thinks, can lead where he wants. He IS god in the way he can say everything and nothing. A mind so powerful that defies every kind of formal limit, and yet is trapped within strict formal limits. Everything is hyper-logical, but to the point that lacks any stability. There is no top and no bottom, no sky and ground.
Frustration and “failure”.
How irritating and pretentious can be reading things out of context. Just to prove a false theory. So lets do it again.
Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education — least in my own case — is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
The writer: making the reader feel as if every character carries some pieces of himself. “My name is Legion, for we are many.”
Every man is alone. This is another cliche commented in “Good Old Neon”. But it can kinda work like a magnet. You can “align”, and somewhat make communication pass. You never really give something yours to someone else. It can’t happen for we are finished, there’s a dermatological barrier that cannot be passed. But in some ways you can be a mirror. You can imitate in your mind some state of mind that you recognize in someone else. So, hypocritically, you can pretend to know what passed through someone else’s mind. Know how he felt.
It’s a lie, but it a lie with the best approximation of Truth it’s possible to aspire to.
It’s sucks that Wallace died and I’m pissed. The most irritating, pretentious, hypocritical thing I could do to him is pretending to know what passed through his mind.
So I did it. I wrote what passed through his mind.
It’s my birthday today. I read this passage from “The Steel Remains” a couple of days earlier. It left me thinking but I didn’t completely get it. Then my birthday comes, and now I DO get it. Deeply.
It’s like if it’s talking to me.
‘But you didn’t die.’
‘No.’ Egar thought he heard something that was almost disappointment in the other man’s tone. ‘I didn’t. Not even at Gallows Gap, and Urann knows we came close enough there. Now that was a perfect place for a good death, if ever I saw one.’
And now it was Egar’s turn to chuckle. But it was a grim sound he made, not much humour in it.
Marnak’s lips bent in silent echo. ‘Instead of which, we all become heroes. You, me, even that fucking faggot friend of yours.’
‘Look, he wasn’t exactly my-‘
‘And next thing you know we’re back to fighting humans again. And that’s fine, you know, like I said, but …’ Another helpless gesture. ‘ It got old. Felt like some kind of massive wheel coming right the way back round to start. There were all these new Majak kids flooding into Yhelteth on the recruiting wagon, looking up to fill the gaps in the ranks, no fucking clue what it was all about-‘
‘Yeah, I remember.’ Mostly, what Egar remembered was wanting to break their shiny, enthusiastic faces for them. The fact they reminded him so much of himself a decade earlier only made it worse. ‘Weird times, huh?’
‘You know what it felt like?’ Marnak slipped off his cap, scrubbed vigorously at his scalp with the nails of a half-clenched fist. ‘You remember those round-and-round-about machines the Kiriath put into the tea gardens at Ynval. The ones with the wooden horses?’
‘Yeah. Been on them a couple of times.’
‘Yeah, well, you know what it’s like when the ride’s finished, then. Everything comes to a halt, you’re sitting there, getting used to the whole world not spinning around you, and you’ve got a whole new set of people, mostly kids, all swarming to get on. You don’t know whether you want to give up your seat or not, and then it suddenly hits you.’ He slipped his cap back on again, shot Egar a sidelong glance. ‘You realise you don’t want to go round again. In fact, you’re not even fucking sure any more whether you really enjoyed it the first time around.’
They both laughed this time, and loud. Quick bark of tension released, then the looser, more reflective stretch of genuine amusement, shared under the massive sky. The small, human sounds it made held briefly against the landscape, then soaked away into the vast quiet and the wind, like piss into the ground.
I’ve never ever looked at stats of my site over the years if not the bandwidth usage to check I wasn’t over the limit.
Today I noticed Dreamhost has a page with some of those stats. No idea how to read them, nor I really care.
I never wrote for popularity and I usually try to look at things and write from the critical perspective that most ignore or just plain refuse. Nonconformist, maybe, but always with a reason. I don’t build consensus around me, in fact I build dissent. Always the other perspective that is ignored or that people don’t want to hear. Fighting superficiality, because I think demagogy leads nowhere and what’s relevant is the merit of things, not their form.
I always thought my site was mostly a nest of spiders and spam bots. Google seems to like me a lot (and drives the ‘who’s online’ tab on the right, as the engine counts separately every session over a 10 minutes span). While the sporadic comments that appear should mean that what I wrote isn’t provoking many reactions, nor that I have all that many readers. On the other side my RSS feed has the full entries with the full html, so a few readers may as well never pass from here.
Anyway, if you are curious, here the stats that I gather from the hosting company.
That are kind of weird, as I stopped blogging in May 2007 and resumed more sporadically in September.
Could someone explain that, and the difference between “reqs” and “pages”?
Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending Sep 01 2008 at 2:46 AM.
Successful requests: 600,969 (122,329) Average successful requests per day: 19,374 (17,475) Successful requests for pages: 20,321 (3,582) Average successful requests for pages per day: 655 (511) Failed requests: 28,728 (769) Redirected requests: 129 (4) Distinct files requested: 16,154 (2,410) Distinct hosts served: 31,139 (1,296) Data transferred: 17.11 gigabytes (3.46 gigabytes) Average data transferred per day: 564.82 megabytes (506.06 megabytes)
Since 2005
Successful requests: 26,952,758 Average successful requests per day: 21,730 Successful requests for pages: 1,258,912 Average successful requests for pages per day: 1,014 Failed requests: 2,747,368 Redirected requests: 632,606 Data transferred: 1.82 terabytes Average data transferred per day: 1.50 gigabytes
