veggie bus for sale perfect for burning man travel « Result #1 on May 22, 2009, 12:12pm »
i am selling my "short bus" which has been converted into a mobile home and converted to veggie oil. a perfect bus for traveling to burning man and setting up camp. if your interested i have it listed on ebay. here is the link... http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/Ford-ECON....parms=72%3A1205|65%3A12|39%3A1|240%3A1318
if youd like you can contact me directly. thanks lauren
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Image posting by guests: Please don't. « Result #3 on Apr 4, 2009, 8:33pm »
We like to keep this place looking tidy, fixing image links as they get broken. Sometimes my help is needed, because of one little oversight.
People will post images as guests, before setting up their accounts. The problem with that is that they're left without the ability to modify those old posts, because the system doesn't know that they're them. At that point, only the admin can modify the post.
I don't mind helping members, when help is really needed. I also don't mind helping to stop a stranded motorist. But if some guy shoots his own tire out, and then asks me to stop, I might feel a little annoyed.
That's all I'm saying. Please don't put yourself in need of help unnecessarily. Please don't post links or pictures or anything else that might need to be modified, someday, unless you're logged into an account on this board - and "guest" doesn't count.
BURNING MAN LIVE book (Piss Clear Mag) « Result #4 on Mar 17, 2009, 4:35pm »
Hey guys,
Do you all know about Piss Clear, the Burner zine, that was around for 13 years? It’s been called “the Vice Magazine of the playa” – sharp and funny with an alternative view of Black Rock City. Now, RE/Search Publications has published BURNING MAN LIVE, which has the best of all 13 years (1994-2007), including “Best of Black Rock City,” “Sex and Drugs,” “Playa Fashion Do’s and Don’ts,” “You Know You’re a Burner When…” “Borg Wars,” interviews with Larry Harvey (Burning Man cofounder) and Harley DuBois (Director of Community Services), and introductions by Brian Doherty, Adrian Roberts, and Malderor. This book is 320 pages, and HUGE (8.5 by 11 inches) of pure Burning Man history – highly recommended – with really great articles and photos.
Just go to this link to check out the book or make an order. Oh, also, if buy 2 or more books (and you live in the USA), it’s free shipping. Just mention in your order the code “Free Shipping Offer” in quote marks when you order:
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Read This! « Result #5 on Dec 30, 2008, 9:07am »
I'm feeling mild apprehension as I create this board, because the moment the word "culture jamming" is heard, the evil clown brigade usually gathers, wrongly imagining that it has been invited to come and play. To avoid any misunderstandings, I'll now belabor the obvious.
Vandalism is not culture jamming. If you drop by a wedding and pretending that the bride is a former prostitute, pose as her former pimp, you're not a culture jammer, you're a jerk. Culture jamming is not about giving grief to people who've done nothing to deserve that, and then whining about their missing senses of humor when they object. It's about sharing a funny, mind expanding expanding experience with somebody who will laugh about it later, having been left with a story to share.
Online trolling makes for stories that become incredibly boring after the first five seconds . This is an administrative board, purely created for the management of a ring, so no game playing here. Be straightforward, do what you were supposed to come here to do, and then clear out. If that makes me sound like a stuffy old admin, quite the contrary. I'm somebody who makes a point of spending as little time doing administrative work as he can, because he doesn't want to become that guy, but if I'm left constantly cleaning up messes others leave behind because they think doing so is funny, then I'm going to get stuck here so long that I really will turn into that cheerless admin.
There has to be a time and a place for everything, or first I'll stop having fun, and then, eventually, nobody else will be having fun, either, and I think that's a steep price for everybody present to pay, just so a few users can be inconsiderate without being asked to leave. So, if you're on the storytelling board or somewhere like that, be your own strange self, but if you're somewhere where we need to get things done, like here, behave or be gone. Understood?
Joined: Jan 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 1 Location: Ashland Oregon
Do you need transportation to and from the BURN 08 « Result #9 on Jan 20, 2008, 10:51pm »
See COG tours for info on a new service from southern Oregon. For a what you would expect to pay for a 2 week cruse, COG TOURS will pick up you (and your ticket to the burn) at the medford airport, take you to the playa for two weeks and bring you back. This is realy great if you live far away and can not drag the 300-400 pounds of stuff you would need to be on the playa for the 15 days of the event.
look for COG TOURS, they can make it happen for you
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A place where you can post your photos « Result #10 on Sept 10, 2007, 12:41am »
I've established a new group at flickr for everybody who has ever posted on ePlaya. If the ePlaya modstaff want to accept this group as one of their affiliates, cool, I'd be happy to accept that, but of course, I can't speak for them. Either way, though, it's a place to post your images.
How about just a large floating raft of interconnected boats and barges, like in Neal Stephenson's 'Snow Crash'? BurningMan could just sail the oceans year round,
How about buried deep inside a long period comet? We'd have to pack a little extra food, and I'd definitely recommend bringing long underwear because of the temperatures we'd be encountering when we passed beyond the orbit of Sedna, but the BLM would definitely be off our backs.
In case anybody doesn't get that K-Mom is probably kidding, two words on what would be a fun idea, if only it could work - ocean swells. Fragile interconnections would be torn apart fairly quickly, and the boats, being close together, would tend to get slammed together, sending the participants down to the bottom of an abyssal deep, two miles of cold, black water closing overhead. Even on one of the Great Lakes, a storm would spell major trouble. On the bright side, it would only be five hundred feet of cold, black water closing overhead? Still not too inviting a thought, maybe.
On the other hand, what if one had a broad, shallow lake? I wonder, how high do storm surges get in the Great Salt Lake? Yes, yes, they got fairly high in that even shallower lake in Louisiana, but those surges come in from a much deeper ocean and are powered by what's building up there. Such a location would have the advantage of presenting no fear of brushfire formation, and even if the Great Salt Lake is too deep for such purposes, maybe there's a broad salt lake out there that's even shallower.
Any thoughts? Leads on where we can get water wings?
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Re: ePlaya in exile - please read this first « Result #13 on Sept 5, 2006, 1:09pm »
This section of Travel to Burning Man is like the guestroom I'm lending out to the neighbor whose home was flooded out. The normal rules that guide the rest of TTBM are not the rules that apply here. The ePlaya community guidelines do apply to this section of TTBM. The heightened expectation (oh, there's that word again) of civility that defines the rest of our board does not. Flaming other users is a very quick way of getting yourself bounced off of Travel to Burning Man, in general, but regular flaming is a regular fact of life on ePlaya. In the spirit of letting my guest be himself, I'm going to turn a blind eye to many of the antics on this part of TTBM and warn those who feel uncomfortable with the atmosphere on ePlaya to not post to this section of our board, which should, to an extent, be thought of as being an unofficial extension of ePlaya. Those who ignore this warning should expect that they will be on their own, should they come under attack.
Even worse, the moderators from ePlaya are being invited to sign up for TTBM, and become moderators on this board, with the obvious exception of those who've been very publicly engaged in some very dirty politics at our expense on other forums, as I do have the sense to not leave the foxes guarding the chicken coop. If they accept this invitation, that means that if you've been banned from ePlaya, odds are that you're going to get banned from ePlaya in exile as well. You can be on great terms with the rest of us on the rest of TTBM and still be persona non grata here, because just as with that child who ran afoul of the grumpy neighbor, I'm going to expect you to give these folks their space. What the mods for this subboard say, goes - within reason.
There are going to be limits.
1. We are still on Proboards, which has its own Terms of Service (TOS), as any ad supported service must in order to hold onto its advertising revenue. No profanity, no nudity, no adult material, no hate oriented material - nothing that would go beyond TTBM's PG rating or fall into the usual realm of "offensive material".
2. This board can not be used as a staging point for attacks against TTBM or its management. As the cliche goes, we may be dumb, but we're not stupid.
3. There will be no baiting of the users of the rest of this board, the part outside of ePlaya in exile. If they wander in here on their own, then what goes on is between you and them and maybe your lawyers and clergymen, and I won't want to hear about it. But if one of our people hasn't been on this subboard for a while (or ever), and you start posting provocative material clearly designed to incite a response or draw him in, that's different. That would be like our hypothetical flooded out guest pulling out a bullhorn and pouring out the obscenities. That would be an abuse of our hospitality, and I would not stand for it or ask our membership to stand for it, either.
If somebody comes in here in response to such provocation, and I find out that this was the case, he is not going to be on his own.
4. Those who've been banned from the rest of TTBM are banned here. This is not open to discussion. Back to the flooded out neighbor analogy - if somebody was putting you up to help you out, and you knew that somebody else was not a welcome guest in your host's home, would you expect to be allowed to disrespect your host by bringing that other person in as a guest of your own, in your temporary home away from home? Or would you show a little gratitude, and understand that you have to make an effort to respect your host's sensibilities? This is not business and you do not have a contract. This is courtesy and so there's going to be a give and take.
4. Elastic clause - Remember, you are guests here, and hospitality is a gift, not a contractual obligation. If you create a genuine scandal here, or give your host ample cause to regret his kindness, that gift can, to the extent the host sees fit, be withdrawn, so don't try to play lawyer.
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ePlaya in exile - please read this first « Result #14 on Sept 5, 2006, 12:29pm »
Thought for the day - a thimble's worth of understanding is worth more than a tome's worth of rules. With that thought in mind, I will now inflict an analogy on the groaning lurkers, who will be expected to read and think about it. Such is life.
Let's say my neighbor gets flooded out of his house periodically. I don't completely like the guy and I certainly don't agree with him about everything, but he's still a human being and I'd like to think that I still qualify as one, so up to a point, I'm going to care about what he's having to put up with, especially when it just seems to be a string of bad luck. I'm going to do what I can to help. So I let him stay in my guestroom from time to time, and during his stays, that guestroom is his home away from home. Now, maybe there's a little bad blood between him and one of my kids. Odds are fairly good that I'm going to feel that my kid was in the right, but all the same, I'm going to tell my child to give the neighbor his space, and respect his sullen demand to "get out". His home away from home would be no kind of home at all were he to have no authority within it, and that would just be poor hospitality on our part.
There will, of course, be limits to our good nature. If he puts a poster up on his wall announcing that his host ... um, pulls in air really strongly (no profanity allowed on Proboards) .... or goes wandering into the rest of the home looking for family members to abuse, I'll show him the door with no further ceremony. I'm not going to take abuse from somebody I'm doing a favor for, and I'm not going to expect others in my household to do so, either. This is not oppression or censorship, it is a common sense expectation that others have the sense to not abuse the hospitality that they are enjoying. As much as the standard Burning Man mantra may run to the contrary, there are always a few expectations that we should hold, in any situation, because without them, a decent life can not be lived.
Recently, ePlaya seemed to have yet another outage, and at least a few of these seem to be due to pranksterism. On one occasion, according to a post I saw, somebody called in a meritless complaint about the registration information about the burningman.com domain and GoDaddy took the domain offline for about a week until all could be confirmed. The LLC was being harassed by some anonymous coward, and regardless of what we may think about how they conduct their own business, for somebody to do something like that is inexcusable. Even if they had a quarrel with the LLC or the ePlaya staff, or whoever they trying to strike out at, assuming that this was anything other just pure malevolent mischief - what did they have against the thousands of registered users of the ePlaya? Being in the middle of a conversation that suddenly is interrupted for a week just because some unknown party has engaged in unlawful activity has got to be frustrating.
One might also say something about the inconvenience worked on those who wanted to look somthing up on the burningman.com site, which was also unavailable recently, but one problem at a time. If you look at this subboard, you might notice that its structure largely parallels that of ePlaya. That is deliberate, as are the brief quotations from the descriptions of the sections on ePlaya. The idea is that if you're in the middle of a discussion on ePlaya, and some twit sabotages the place in some way, while their staff takes care of the problem, you can still continue the discussion.
Just go to the section of this subboard that corresponds to the board you were having your discussion on. The titles parallel each other, and I've even included brief quotations from the descriptions of each, so finding your way to the right place should be easy.
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 6 Location: Northeastern Illinois
Zealots destroy ancient Arctic petroglyphs « Result #15 on Aug 29, 2006, 9:43am »
Christian zealots destroy ancient Arctic petroglyphs
Randy Boswell, CanWest News Service Published: Saturday, August 26, 2006 Canada's only major Arctic petroglyph site -- a 1,500-year-old gallery of mysterious faces carved into a soapstone ridge on a tiny island off of Quebec's northern coast -- has been ransacked by vandals in what the region's top archeologist suspects was a religiously motivated attack by devout Christians from a nearby Inuit community.
For years, heritage advocates have sought special protection for the ancient etchings at Qajartalik Island, located about one hour by boat from the 500-resident village of Kangiqsujuaq. Experts believe they were created by the extinct Dorset culture, an artistically advanced civilization that occupied much of the eastern Arctic before they were killed or driven away by the Thule ancestors of modern Inuit.
More than 170 mask-like images, animal shapes and other symbols have been recorded on the island since the 1960s. Studies suggest Qajartalik was a sacred place, used for Dorset spiritual ceremonies and coming-of-age rituals.
But the site has been dubbed "the Island of the Stone Devils" because some of the faces -- possibly depicting a Dorset shaman in religious costume -- appear to be adorned with horns. In the past, crosses have been scratched on the "pagan" petroglyphs and some area residents have told researchers they believe the site is infested with evil spirits.
Long-running negotiations between Nunavut, Quebec and the federal government over the ownership of the Hudson Strait islands has delayed for a decade plans to protect the cultural treasure, which Arctic scholars have touted as a natural candidate to become a UNESCO World Heritage site.
Two ancient African rock art sites achieved that status earlier this summer, and Canada recently short-listed Alberta's Writing-on-Stone petroglyphs for a UNESCO designation.
Now, dreams of global renown for Qajartalik may be dashed after a visit to the island last month by Quebec cultural officials revealed extensive damage to the prehistoric drawings, including deep gouges across many of the faces ... more here
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Other Rideboards « Result #16 on Jul 27, 2006, 9:27am »
Why put all of your eggs in one basket? From time to time, as we hear about them, we'll be using this thread to tell you about some of the other rideshare resources availble to Burners, ones which have not been as frustrating to use as the ePlaya rideshare board has reportedly been for some. There's something to be said for keeping things simple, or at least having a backup in place approached in such a spirit. Using a tested service like Proboards instead of creating something from scratch, while not earning one so many bragging points, tends to result in fewer headaches for one's users than does an insistence on reinventing the wheel. Third thought seems to have occured to others, including this first gentleman with whom we are trading links.
He runs a yahoogroup with a very specific regional focus on the Midwest, called Unofficial Midwest Burning Man Rideboard. (Use the article of your choice), I guess. The owner asks that the egional focus of his list be honored, going so far as to post a listing of the states which are in the Midwest, for the benefit of people who seemed to have been under the impression that Oregon was going to make the list, some of whom had posted in the past.
The group seems tio be slowly picking up, a pleasant exception in the trend toward silence found in many Burning Man forums, as it serves a region often neglected. We'd like to thank Badger for helping us find the place, which we think wll prove a valuable partner for TTBM.
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Dustbuddy's censored post « Result #17 on May 23, 2006, 9:34am »
Some things are so sick and so outrageous that they simply can not be accepted. One of them you've probably heard a little about on this board, and it's been enough to make us seriously rethink our support for Burning Man.
This all began when one of users (Dustbuddy) checked a claim made by one of the regulars on ePlaya (Rockdad), alleging that a Prof. Van Romero of the New Mexico school of mining had spoken in support of an unusually loopy conspiracy theory that Rockdad was fond of - one that had the Bush administration conspiring with Al Quaeda to bring down the World Trade Towers. Dustbuddy did not have to look far to find contradictory evidence, including transcripts of interviews with the aforementioned Prof.Romero. He posted mention of what he found, along with links to relevant resources for documentation purposes. Rockdad had engaged in fraud to support a pet theory, and Dustbuddy called him on it exactly the way he should have.
I won't say that good men can't have bad moments, but there's a difference in the way good men and bad ones respond to those bad moments, and the way Rockdad respond to his own was disgraceful. Based on nothing that any sane man would consider evidence, he accused Dustbuddy of being a sock puppet of a user calling himself .Hughmungus. Hughmungus had gotten himself into a good many fights, and that was the point of the accusation. The idea is that one points to somebody, claims that he is a hated member of the community in disguise, and then counts on the credulity of many of those present, expecting that the one wrongly accused will then be attacked by the enemies of the person he is supposedly a sock puppet of. It's a method for orchestrating a campaign of harassment against the person so accused.
What more darnning truth could I tell about much of the staff of another site, but that they were supportive of this effort. As anybody who has ever run a board can tell you, when one looks at a post on a board one is moderating, the IP of the user appears at the bottom of the post. This doesn't necessarily allow one to distinguish between different users, because two from the same ISP may very easily end up posting from the same block of IP addresses, but in this case there could not have been a problem. Why? Because Dustbuddy was posting from a strictly local ISP based out of Naperville, Illinois and Hughmungus was posting from Reno, Nevada. The two locations are thousands of miles apart. Seeing the IPs, there could not have been any reasonable doubt.
Very reasonably, Dustbuddy asked that the mods vouch for the fact that his IP didn't match that of Hughmungus, and very unreasonably the moderator on hand (Spectabillis) clutched at straws, looking for any excuse to refuse to comply. Finally, Dustbuddy, after days of trying to reason with Spec, gave up and did the only thing he could. He made a Usenet post using his Googlegroups account, linking between the thread on eplaya and the post in the Googlegroups archives. This had the regrettable effect of greatly disrupting eplaya and somewhat disrupting this forum, because predictably this brought a wave of spambots. This did not make my day, but it was understandable.
What was not understandable, or should I say not acceptable, was what Spec the ePlaya moderator was up to at the time. Hughmungus had been riding Spec's back, so when Rockdad's wronngful accusation of sock puppetry got Hughmungus held up to ridicule, this served Spectabillis' purposes. It also got a perfectly innocent user mistreated, but Spec didn't care about that. The words he wrote in a private message to Observer (another of our users) soon came to mind. Hugh "sees everything in black and white", he said, a usage that should set off warning bells. Usually when somebody says "get a little grey into your life", he says that right before he does something he knows he shouldn't be doing.
Spec, in short order, would do exactly that.
Let us say that you are a moderator and you want to shaft somebody on a large board. How do you do it? Do you remember how I mentioned that as a moderator, I couldn't always distinguish between users? This is because most internet service providers use something called "dynamic IP". When a user dials in, he is temporarily assigned an IP that is good only for that session, drawing from a pool of IP addresses common to a great many users. This allows the ISP to take advantage of the fact that most people aren't logged in most of the time.
The bad news for a moderator is that this means that IP addresses can only be used to disprove the guess that two users are one and the same, and then only under certain circumstances. The two people being 2000 miles apart, obviously, would be one of those circumstances. But, unless the user shows signs of using static IP, the only valid conclusion one can draw from the fact that two people draw from a matching pool of IP addresses is that they use the same ISP. However, BBSes tend to be blessed with a bumper crop of idiots, especially ones for events at which there is as much drug use as there is at Burning Man, which brings us to what an unscrupulous moderator can often to do to stick it to a user, with public approval.
In any given metro area, there really aren't that many ISPs, so even if people were choosing their ISPs in a completely independent manner, odds are that on a large board, if there were a large contingent of people from your town, you would end up sharing an ISP with a number of other users. Dustbuddy was from the Chicago area, and as luck would have it, was doing business with Netsource Communications, the only ISP based out of Naperville, Chicago's largest suburb and Illinois' second largest city (pop. 140,000). A metro area the size of Chicago's is going to have a very large contingent on ePlaya, and Netsource is a very popular ISP in this area. The numbers being what they were, Spec would have known that some of Dustbuddy's fellow Netsourcers would almost certainly be on the board.
What an unscrupulous mod can do under such circumstances is go hunting for the other members who use the same ISP, claim that all are the same person and expose "his" sock puppetry to an audience of trolls who will always love to have an excuse to pounce on somebody and indulge their taste for Schadenfreude. It's an idiotic argument for reasons already explained, and one could use it to "expose" almost anybody posting from a major metropolitan area, but once the groupthink gets going, good luck getting anybody to listen to reason.
Spec was off the hook. He had more than slightly hinted that Rockdad's accusation that Dustbuddy was Hughmungus' sock puppet was a truthful one, and Dustbuddy's link to the Googlegroups archives had revealed that to be a lie, or at least gross equivocation. In taking advantage of the gross ignorance of some and the willful ignorance of others, he was able to distract attention away from that embarassing fact as he scapegoated a user who dared to object o having been used as a "stepping stone". All that he had to do was use some more of us as "stepping stones", and he wasn't shy about doing so.
I imagine that he now thinks that some of us see things in "black and white", too, because we definitely objected.
Part of the joy that Rockdad's game playing brought into Dustbuddy's life was that Dustbuddy was put into the position of having to defend Hughmungus' actions as if they were his own - at least, until he had the temerity to disprove the accusation, greatly offending Spec the moderator, who didn't understand why Dustbuddy wouldn't just lie back and enjoy it. But taking a block of just under 1000 IPs, and convincing the willfully gullible that everybody who posted out of that block was Dustbuddy in disguise, magnified the act of harassment thousands of times over. It was a vicious crank's dream come true, because now (Rockdad) could go looking for any fight that anybody from Dustbuddy's pack at Netsource had gotten into, and get Dustbuddy sucked into that fight, and some of us with him.
All of this, because he had challenged somebody's cite of an authority. This is the kind of thing that a moderator is there to crack down on, and instead we had the modstaff backing the effort, as they pursued their own individual agendas. Dustbuddy was morally outraged by what he was seeing, and I can't say that I blame him.
What he did was gather together some publicly available information, posted it to Usenet, and linked to the post, advising anybody who wished to pursue legal action against Rockdad to follow the link and look at the post. That post was deleted by AntiM on the usual basis ("the rules mean whatever I want them to"), after somebody (Kinetic) tried to claim that the post was illegal, but Dustbuddy's rebuttal left no room for doubt on that point.
Quote:
This is an exercise in futility, Kinetic. The "personal information" you refer to was posted to Googlegroups, so the mods on ePlaya are quite incapable of removing it. Nor can they keep the Burning Man community from having access to a link to that post, because I made sure to post a copy to Travel to Burning Man, where AntiM, Spectabillis et al. have no authority. For good measure, I've already taken to contacting a number of ePlaya's very angry and public critics, asking if I could post to their forums if my posts are censored on ePlaya. You might be surprised at how many of those critics there are, and some of their pages are doing very well in the search engine rankings. The responses I've been getting have been supportive.
Every piece of information I posted was publicly available, obtained through well known sources available for use by the general public, so regardless of what kind of trouble Rockdad manages to foolishly get himself into, there won't even be so much as a cause for civil action much less criminal prosecution. Public information is public and this has been tested out in the courts, so deal with it. Get as overwrought as you want, and I'm sure you will, but you can't change the fact that your complaint is without legal merit.
Indeed so, and so here is a link to that post, which I am placing at the very top of my board.
If the boy is going to continue harassing everybody who dares to question something he writes, or doesn't let him use a creative riding board as a springboard for launching attacks upon his enemies (ahem!), let him do so without the protection of anonymity. If he makes enough of a habit of that, he's going to get his sorry backside sued and he's going to lose that house in Tracy, California. That thought may have a salutory effect on what has been a lengthy history of outrageous and genuinely unlawful behavior on Rockdad's part. It's a little thing called "holding people responsible for their actions".
How interesting that so many burners have a problem with that, but like I said, there is a lot of drug use in Black Rock City. Sometimes it shows.
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 6 Location: Northeastern Illinois
Re: Playa Chess « Result #18 on May 23, 2006, 2:33am »
Quote:
\Have you considered Around the Coyote or some other local arts festival?
You do understand that we'd end up playing a $200 chess game if we did that, right? That's how much ATC charges registrants, and believe it or not that's on the low end for art fair entrance fees in our area. At the Gold Coast Art Fair, I think that the artists said that they were charged $350. I don't know about you, but I can do an awful lot with $350. Even if my finances could stand it, spending that kind of money would feel weird.
One also has to look at space contraints. Wicker Park used to have a lot of empty space in its commons, by cramped Chicago standards, but that's changed. Somebody just had to carve a baseball diamond out of one corner, and between that and the field house, there's not a lot of available dirt left on our little triangular patch of soil. Realistically speaking, I can't picture the theatre curators giving us even a 40 foot square patch.
What one could do is just get a permit to use some space in Lincoln Park, advertise by zine and keep it simple, assuming that one event wanted to stick with the "giant chess piece" concept. Doing it here, I'm not so sure that I would. Surrealism plays better in the otherworldly atmosphere of the desert, I think.
Re: Eplaya politics: "Hi, I'm you, except I'm not" « Result #19 on May 22, 2006, 11:03pm »
No, what is pathetic is that the ePlaya crowd thinks that this is OK. But, even if we can't reach those people on an ethical level, we can always give them something to think about, especially when they get careless with their contact information.
Am I the only one having a "why are we even here" kind of moment? I'll finish putting together that fish site because the notes for it were already written, but why are you guys here? You get lurkers, but do you ever hear from anybody you aren't running into at Kopi, anyway?
I'm all for playing around with this concept, but Burning Man is not the place to do something like this. Have you considered Around the Coyote or some other local arts festival?
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 6 Location: Northeastern Illinois
Re: Playa Chess « Result #22 on May 14, 2006, 2:42pm »
Quote:
not so sure about the uniform distribution stuff. I think that you're losing a layer of strategy right there.
How about giving the player a little control over "where on the square" piece lands, but not total control. Think of it like somebody's shooting at a target
I suppose. One could use a kind of truncated normal. Picture taking your usual normal density function, with the tails "chopped off" (the usual value of the density replaced by zero once one is a certain number of standard deviations out), the density then being renormalized to produce a new probability density? Or I suppose one could take a normal random variable, and cap it off by applying some function of this form to it:
f(x) = a if x<a, b if x>b, x otherwise
but this leaves us with a pair of large point masses at the endpoints of the support for the density, and I find that ugly.
What I wanted to avoid by not using a bivariate normal random vector for the scatter was the possibility of a piece landing outside of "its square", and maybe even off the board altogether. I suppose, though, if we're going to pursue the "chess as war" metaphor as we dispense with the most visiblly unbattlefield like stylization of the board (the establishment of discrete squares), we could decide that on a roll of 00, the piece "goes awol" and is lost to play. The King, however, would not go awol under any circumstances, because the old guy knows that it's his neck on the chopping block in the end. In this metaphor.
One stylization that I'd like to bring back, though, that was removed in the earlier chessvariants.com version, is the fixed length of the knight's move. I think that ungainly hop is too basic a part of what gives the opening its character. The base move should be what it would be in regular chess, translated to the continuous board, with the player allowed to adjust within the pieces "virtual square" (ie. move up to 1/16 of a board length along each axis of the board) before the random disturbance is included.
I suppose, also, that we could use a relatively low standard deviation for the normal we truncate, so that a serious amount of scattering would become that piece of bad luck one has to plan for.
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Re: Playa Chess « Result #23 on May 14, 2006, 2:22pm »
Quote:
Interesting, but I notice that you're a EE person, meaning that moving parts is not what you do. Do you have somebody lined up to handle the mechanic of the moving pieces?
Not at present, and you're right, that's a potential show stopper, or at least it would be if I were fixed in my plans. These are just very preliminary discussions in which I toss out an idea, I see who I can get interested and what skills they bring. I'm realistic enough to know that plans will have to change.
There are a lot of mechanics and mechanical engineers who go to Burning Man and to regional burns, and maybe a few of them will read this and get interested enough to want to take part. If not,. though, no big deal. Perhaps one might have a grid of electromagnets underlying a relatively slippery surface, along which smaller pieces awould be pulled by kicking the magnets on weakly in sequence, the last one kicking on strongly once the piece was in position, so that it would be relatively undisturbed by the passage of other pieces. One would need to cover the set, though, to shield the pieces from the wind and the surface from the dust. It would no longer be an outdoor game.
Or maybe one might dispense with almost all technology aside from maybe a little very simple surveying equipment to lay out the acceptable lines of travel, and just have the players carry the slightly comically oversized pieces, each one a few feet high. I think I like that idea better, and not just because it's a lot less work for me.
Quote:
I'd lose the random number printouts, because the referee would probably lose them. I suppose you could put them on a clipboard, but stuff happens on the Playa.
OK, point taken. I can already picture somebody water cannoning the referee. "Why are you upset, man?" Percentiles are easily computed, so using those is probably a good eye-saving alternative to dealing with a stack of printouts, and it's better theatre anyway. Thanks.
Re: Playa Chess « Result #24 on May 14, 2006, 7:11am »
I liked the idea of adding a little random scatter at the end of a move, but no so sure about the uniform distribution stuff. I think that you're losing a layer of strategy right there.
How about giving the player a little control over "where on the square' a piece lands, but not total control. Think of it like somebody's shooting at a target. He can't completely choose where the bullet's going to land, but he has some control and a spot near the bullseye is a lot likelier to get hit than a spot near the edge of the target. That way, the player still has to work the unexpected into his plans, but he's not being blown around by the wind.
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Re: Playa Chess « Result #25 on May 13, 2006, 5:41pm »
Interesting, but I notice that you're a EE person, meaning that moving parts is not what you do. Do you have somebody lined up to handle the mechanic of the moving pieces?
I'd lose the random number printouts, because the referee would probably lose them. I suppose you could put them on a clipboard, but stuff happens on the Playa. One way or the other, paper has a way of getting loose and blowing away. Picture your ref's random numbers being carried off by a dustdevil, while the players look up and go "now what".
What I'd do:
Take my probability distribution, whichever one I wanted to use for the piece scattering, and find the percentiles. Know what a 20-sided die is? You can pick them up in game stores, the fantasy role players use them. I'd get two small bags of them, different colors just to be safe. I'd roll the dice, ignoring the little bars on the bottom that let you tell the difference between 5 and 15, using one of the dice to determine the 10s digit of a number being generated, the other the 1s digit. That's why you want two different colors of dice - so you can tell which is which.
According to the conventional way of reading the results, the number than comes up will be somewhere between 1 and 100, but let's make life easier for ourselves and read "00" as being 0. What you now have can be directly read as a percentile. Let the displacement be that percentile on your probability distribution.
Instead of having a stack of papers the referee has to shuffle through, loosening them from their binder, he can have one table, maybe laminated and encased in acrylic for weight. If you're feeling really ambitious, maybe you can make your own giant sized dice and toss them out on the ground after each move, maybe a little smaller than bowling balls. Adds a little element of theatre to the action. What you'd need to make would be very regular icoshedrons (regular 20-sided polyhedrons).
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Playa Chess « Result #26 on May 10, 2006, 7:30pm »
Something to play around with, even if the person originating this seems to have lost interest. This arose on a thread entitled "Motorized Chess", back on the forbidden board.
Somebody calling himself "Rusted Iron" wrote
Quote:
Here's the concept:
Electric motor scooters, (the kind you ride standing up), turned into chess pieces, with the playa as our board.
Anyone want to join in?
going on to add, after a few other people had written in, that
Quote:
Wish I could provide scooters, but I can't do that.
I've considered doing it with bikes, but it doesn't seem right to have the pieces sitting down.
How to make the board? Two ideas:
1) sketch it in the playa... it's temporary anyway.
2) turn the city into a giant board... a bit anarchistic, you have to trust pieces who've been killed to stay dead. Okay, that probably won't work.
to which I responded with another possibility:
Quote:
3. Revise the rules of the game so that you don't need squares, any more. All you would need would be four posts marking the field of play, for pieces whose positions would be defined as coordinates on a grid aligned with the posts, the coordinates taking on continuous instead of discrete values. One piece of dust is as valid a center for a square as any other, so no need to mark out squares and no colored moop in the dust to deal with after BM2006.
The rules are set up for an 8" by 8" board, but scaling them up to a larger playing field should be easy. Maybe the biggest change in the rules is that these is no en passant capture. The rule limiting the nearness with which one pieces may approach another without stopping could be enforced by placing circular bumpers around the motorized pieces, with appropriate radii and trip switches temporarily cutting power to a piece on impact.
Two modifications I'd like to toss in ...
Were this game to be run on a computer, the moves suggested by the originator of the chess variant I'm referring to would be easily done. (Picture the board aligned in a standard Cartesian Coordinate system, with the edges running parallel to the axes. The bishop moves as far as the player wishes along lines of slope +1 or -1, the rook moves parallel to one axis or anotyher during a move (as far as the player wishes), queen moves as a rook or bishop, Kinght "leaps with a bearing of arctan(0.5), arctan(2), arctan(-0.5) or arctan(-2) up to a distance of sqrt(5)" , "1" meaning 1", or 1/8 of a board length. The King moves orthogonally up a 1/8 of a board lngth or diagonally (along a line of slope +1 or -1) up to sqrt(2)/8 or the board length. The pawn moves parallel to the y-axis, away from the x-axis, up to 1/8 of a board length, capturing other pieces along lines of slope plus or minus one, up to a distance of squrt(2)/8 of a board length, where squrt(2) is the square root of two. Captures are as you'd expect them to be: carried out by moving one's pices so the enemy piece is within a radius of 1/8 of a board length.
On a computer screen, this is easy, because we're just adding numbers together and keeping track of them. Out on the dirt, this is not as simple because even on the Playa, the ground is not completely level. Irregularities will through off the direction of travel.
Suggestion: Make a virtue of inescapable necessity. Instead of demanding that pieces travel in precisely the right direction, allow them to deviate from their course by some fixed number of degrees. Then, on arrival, before captures are taken, "scatter the piece" by dispacing the piece along a vector determined by some probability distribution, trying thbis into the "Randomocracy" them camp concept that I can't get anybody interested in. Yet.
Having our displacement random vector be a bivariate Gaussian would be a little mean. I'm thinking maybe something of the form [U1,U2], where U1 and U2 are independent, uniformly distributed random variables on the interval (0,L/16), where L is the length of the field. The referr pulls a pair of numbers of a printout of random numbers, scales, tells the player how much to move the piece my along each axis, and then captures are taken. The piece might be thought of as being randomly adjusted in the square that materializes beneath its feet, in a manner of speaking.
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Re: Eplaya politics: "Hi, I'm you, except I'm not" « Result #27 on Apr 9, 2006, 11:32pm »
I'm just frustrated all around. I can't believe that this much disruption has been caused for so many people in so many places by one user (Rockdad) who's been willing to act this stupidly over something this insane. It's just pathetic.
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Re: Eplaya politics: "Hi, I'm you, except I'm not" « Result #29 on Apr 8, 2006, 11:20pm »
Yeah, yeah, we knew about that. Dustbuddy was by and told us the whole story, but thanks for the heads up and the link. One of your trolls is one of my registered users. I need to do something about that.
Dude, I don't know. I understand the exasperation, but just stick around and see if it all works out.
Eplaya politics: "Hi, I'm you, except I'm not" « Result #30 on Apr 8, 2006, 6:35pm »
I recently discovered, much to my surprise, that I was getting bashed on Eplaya. I was surprised because I hadn't been in an argument with anybody there for months, and in most of the arguments I was in, I was defending Burning Man, Eplaya and the Burning Man Limited Liability Corporation against the people at Stopburningman.org and a few other detractors. While I wouldn't expect somebody to bow down and pay me homage for doing a thing like that, I would certainly have hoped that it wouldn't have counted against me.
I would have hoped in vain. It's a long, convoluted story, but I'll try to simplify it as much as I can. I was astounded to learn that I had been accused of being the sockpuppet of some guy calling himself "Dustbuddy", as had the moderator for this board ("Traveller"). Looking at Traveller's profile, I found a link to this board and decide to talk to you guys about the latest. This link will take you to a thread where ... oh, just read the posts. Just thinking about the summary I would write is giving me a headache.
Strangely, unintentionally appropriate. It's Fate, I guess. Somewhere, I can picture Rex Scates and Ed Mitchell saying "we told you so" and they sure did. I am absolutely staggered by the depth of the betrayal and by how much I didn't see this coming. I look back on so much I wrote in defense of this event and the people who surround it, and now I wonder why I ever bothered. All of that verbiage I posted about how the tone on Eplaya was improving and how much community spirit there was, and I was so incredibly wrong. Why didn't I see it?
Your names are showing up as well, so check it out and see what you think about your community. Do you still want to be part of it?
Re: Camp Big Bang « Result #31 on Mar 30, 2006, 2:23pm »
Ouch. You may be in for a wait.
The man you're looking for is somebody named Steve Capone. Mr. Capone was accused of financial improprieties in connection with his village by a member from Indiana. Shortly afterwards, the village mailing list was deleted and the camp homepage vanished a while later.
One might be tempted to say that Capone was acting guilty, but he had taken large amounts of grief on ePlaya during the months leading up to the accusation. Picturing him saying "I just don't want to deal with this c**p anymore" becomes very easy. Certainly, he wouldn't come close to having been the first burner to have said that in recent years, sad to say.
Just let it go. You're not going to hear from them.
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Some stuff that isn't welcome on this board « Result #32 on Mar 25, 2006, 3:31am »
This is stuff we're not going to haggle about. The following are not welcome on this board.
1. Announcements of dance camps or dance events, especially rave camps or raves. Burning is about art and participation and no, bouncing spastically to repetitious electronic noise does not qualify as either.
2. Announcements of events being run for profit, even if they are "fund raisers".
3. Posts about sex themed camps or events. That includes any and all Gay themed camps.
4. Information about political rallies, movements or action groups, unless one can make a serious case that one's announcement is about something that stands up as an artistic effort or event, on its own merits. If you're standing on a street corner yelling slogans, you can call that performance art, but it's not, so take that out of here.
5. Political arguments. You know which section to post those in. Take that over there.
This is not an exhaustive list. The question you should ask yourself before posting is "am I seriously engaging the participant creatively and/or intellectually and giving him an experience that probably takes him out of his everyday experience, or am I using burning as a promotional tool under false pretenses". If the answer is the second of those two choices, then you should not post to this board.
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What this section is for, and what it is not for « Result #33 on Mar 25, 2006, 1:36am »
Slightly editing commentary I posted elsewhere ...
A little practical philosophy: Some things are just destined to be, because they need to be. Somebody should provide them with a legitimate outlet, because otherwise they will seek an illegitimate outlet with disruptive consequences.
What is appropriate commerce in a Burning Man context? At the burn itself, not much should qualify, I think - we're there to get away from business. We do our buying and selling before we go. Given my druthers, I'd like to see us do our bartering back at home, too, but given how far apart we live, that might not be practical. Life is about compromise. I'll gut my way through the issue and you're invited to take my blatherings for what they're worth. Obviously, on my own board they make law, but whether or not they represent a good call on my part? Decide for yourself. It's an aesthetic choice, isn't it?
What I have in mind when I talk about the commerce I'd welcome on my own board in the appropriate section is best typified by somebody and something that got badly flamed on another forum: Funky Bunny's Sparkle Shack. The lady was making costumes specifically for people going to Burning Man, if I remember this correctly. This wasn't a serious business, certainly not something that was going to become her main source of livelihood. It was just her way of raising money to get to Burning Man, by selling something that would add to the look and the feel of the place.
Yeah, yeah, it's better if we make our own, no doubt about that, but there's a limit to what we have time to do. Some will claim that selling to burners just goes beyond the pale, that it is just unheard of. I disagree and point them in the direction of this page There is, in fact, ample precedent for the practice of commercial links being promoted in a pre-burn context, going back for a number of years. If professionals may sell to us, then why not the occasional talented amateur?
Where I would start in defining acceptable commerce on one of my board would be in this question: "In this transaction, is the money a means to an end, the end being related to burning, or is the money the main point of the transaction". No doubt there are some companies that put out fine products of great use to burners, but I'd like to keep a little more of the personal touch by limiting access to my marketplace board to the people who do for the love of doing and are just charging to pay a few bills - our fellow amateurs. Funky Bunny, yes, Benetton, no. Not even if they do seriously branch out.
The other criterion is whether or not there is a serious and specific connection between the product or service advertised and what somebody is going to specifically be up to at a burn. If some burner is making his own cell phones, more power to him and best of luck with that, but please don't advertise that product on my board, unless those cell phones are intended for use at the Burn. Say, like you've decided to set up a very local phone company just for BRC and want to sell the equipment needed to use your service, because you know you can't afford to give it away.
Last but not least, is the good or service being put to use in a creative or self-expressive context, ie. please don't advertise cheap insurance for burners on my board.
The question to me is "what is Burning". To me, a big part of it is like this. Go back to a time when you were still an undergrad and living in the dorms, and there you were stuck in this radically inclusive environment where you just had to take people as they were, because you guys were going to be stuck together for four years. It was a little early in your lives to be talking about your careers, or to be worried about office politics. Nobody had anything, but in a way, that was the beauty of the experience.
You did things with each other and for each other, not with that ill-at-ease feeling that comes from acting out of any kind of mercenary concern. There were no buyers or sellers, no employees or employers, just a group of people just being together for the pleasure of being, and being able to be on the inside exactly what they pretended to be on the outside. One did one's best at what one was doing, not because one would gain profit from doing so, but because one took pleasure in doing something well, and in the pleasure it was bringing one's friends in this experience you were having together. Was your motivation one of selfishness or altruism? A false dichotomy, because there was no seperating one person's share of that experience from the others - the pleasure of one was pleasure for all.
Then we got into the real world and we had more stuff, but we lost something along the way, that easy familiarity we had with each other when we had nothing, and we weren't just flitting shadows passing through each other's worlds, relating to each other for reasons ill-designed for putting us at ease. Burning to me is a recognition that there is something fundamentally wrong with that reality, and to escape from it however briefly, while we explore what life might be.
Yes, we make compromises. There is no escaping the fact that you are living in the here and now and whatever life may be someday, you have to deal with the practical realities of today, and that includes paying your bills. But we can at least keep those intrusions on our escape to a minimum, both in degree and in their psychological impact. Maybe XYZ Corporation could give me a better product at a lower price than the camp I just bought some LEDs from, but I'm not going to have a personal relationship with XYZ Corporation. I might just have one with that camp.
That's where I'm coming from on that one. Others may differ, and I'm sure a few of them will shortly, quite vocally if past performance is any indication. Why not, they're entitled. This is just how I see things.
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Please read and think about this « Result #34 on Mar 25, 2006, 1:04am »
Using a rideboard can be a lot like hitchhiking if you're not careful. As your moderator, I'd like to send the bad guys away, but I'm not much better equipped to do that than you are. I can see their IP addresses, when they post. If one of those posting does commit a crime against his companions, I'll be glad to pass the time and IP address of his post along to the authorities, and maybe with search warrant in hand, they'll be able to persuade the ISP of the offending party to cooperate in identifying him.
I hope it never comes to that, but we have to be realistic. The world can be a very dangerous place, even at what might seem to be some very innocent moments. How do you deal with that reality? By being smart, and trying to see the world through a criminal's eyes, so you don't become his next victim.
The Internet can offer a lot of anonymity, and what that promises to some of the nasties is a lack of accountability for the things they might do to you. If you want to scare those guys off, what you need to do is to leave those you do business with no doubt about the fact that if you come to harm, they can be found. Most likely, you're dealing with a nice person who would never do you harm, but a truly nice person will understand if you want to play it safe.
Never finalize your travel arrangements by e-mail. That's just asking for trouble. Insist on getting a home phone number, and call to finalize without setting a time to call, first. That part's important, because otherwise the "home phone" you end up calling might just be one of the remaining pay phones that still takes incoming calls. There are more of those around than you might think.
Having his number means that you know where he's staying and he knows that you know. That doesn't give you absolute safety, but it does give you an added margin of safety. If somebody doesn't want to give you that information or says that he feels "offended" by your lack of trust, walk away and do not resume contact, even if that person wants to make peace.
Enjoy your trip. I hope I haven't scared you off, but you have to be smart.
Camp Big Bang « Result #35 on Mar 24, 2006, 9:22pm »
It doesn't have to be about sex? Cool.
Years ago, i ran into these guys online, but before I could interact with them in the real world, they just kind of vanished. They ran something called "Big Bang Village" which sounded interesting. I think their director was named "Steve Capone".
What happened to those guys? I was wondering if they had morphed into another camp. Has anybody kept track of them?
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Maxing out « Result #36 on Mar 23, 2006, 10:59am »
The standard answer when somebody questions the direction that Burning Man is moving in is to say something like "Today's Burning Man is not yesterday's, so just deal with it, pops". Let's try moving past that kind of immature knee-jerk response toward something requiring a little more thought.
Checking this page, we find a population of 30,000 for BRC and an area of 4 square miles. These figures, together, yield a population density of 7,500 people per square mile, roughly comparable to that of some major cities, in what is a very low rise tent city, producing what is, in fact, a much higher effective population density, when one looks at floor space instead of the amount of dirt covered. The population in 2005 and 2006 was considerably higher, without a corresponding rise in area, apparently.
This is not just a matter of burners getting cozy. It strikes at the very rationale for holding Burning Man in the first place. If one has less space to play around with per capita in BRC than one does at home, then the creative possibilities of limitless space are in no way presenting themselves to one, by one being there. Such congestion moves Black Rock City toward an end state of becoming the worst of all possible worlds, presenting the visitor with the hardship of a remote location and the cramped quarters of an inner city location, simultaneously. If this has not seemed to present any problems recently, then let us ponder what would happen if the majority of participants decided that they did wish to fully participate, and suddenly had need for space. There is not enough to go around, as absurd as that might seem.
What to do? Suggestion: Implement what I believe was an earlier proposal by Actiongrl on the old ePlaya. If I'm remembering this correctly, she mentioned the dream of a BRC with over a million people, and pointed to an obvious impracticality in this: there are not the roads needed in the area, to carry that much departing traffic in a reasonable amount of time. Even at 25,000, clearing out of BRC was taking a while.
Solution: Accept that if one wanted huge crowds to attend something like Burning Man, one would need to have more than one event. Odds are, long before one reached the 1 million mark,. the state would insist on this, anyway. Consider the campus meningitis outbreaks of the 1990s. Packing that many people into a small area poses health risks that rise with the size of the population, which will only be worsened by the relatively primitive state of health care in BRC. An EMT is not a physician.
There are already groups of artists that seem to feel squeezed out of BRC by the growth of the raver culture there. Set up a parallel event, same date, far removed location, far enough that attending both events would be impractical. Invite the disgruntled artists to the newer, smaller event. Those looking for "the party, man" aren't going to pass up the big event to check out some art at the smaller one.
Small events don't require as much infraastructure, aallowing for lower ticket prices, which opens the door to more artist participation, given the low incomes typical in the arts community. Smaller population bases also tend to be associated with reduced theft and vandalism problems, among other reasons, because the would-be perpetrators have a greater probability of being caught and probably know it.
Just a suggestion. Let's see if anybody decides that this is flamebait and loses his or her mind, as so many do.
Re: Piña Coladas at 3 o'clock « Result #37 on Mar 23, 2006, 8:43am »
Comment on above: I never print a confessional without changing the names, speech patterns and maybe a few other identifying details, out of respect for the privacy of those who do me the honor of letting me fry their brain cells.
Piña Coladas at 3 o'clock « Result #38 on Mar 23, 2006, 8:23am »
How many bartenders have you heard start a story with the words "and in he walked"? And so he did, without a care in the world for all of the cliches to which his actions might subject an unsuspecting reader. "Make it a double", he said. I put a second umbrella in his drink, and waited for the usual tale of woe.
He looked like he wanted to tell it bad, staring at me like I wanted to hear it. If I was being paid for this gig, I probably would have pretended I did, but I wasn't. My bar was a ragged piece of cloth stuck on a piece of metal that should have been recycled a long time ago, a citybred campmate's idea of what a tent ought to be. We were halfway to where we wanted to get, and we were making this little stretch of nowhere home, our own little burn for just one night in a place we could never find again, even if we tried. It was three in the morning on a day which for me had begun at five, but the sound of the wind howling through the hills and my campmates howling at each other, over what I did not care to imagine, promised me an evening that would continue well past the break of dawn, no matter how many ambiens I dropped trying to escape it and them. I weighed my own options (bourbon or brandy) and then, deciding that both sounded good, flipped a coin, dropped a shot and started wiping down the dusty wooden planks that served as my countertop, waiting for my visitor to speak. And waited.
He was still staring on and off, not saying a word, like he was in a real bar and I was a real bartender, but what the H***? It was the mask I chose for tonight, so why not wear it? Figuring one good cliche deserved another, I cleared my throat and asked him "woman done you wrong", because it always seems to be a woman for some reason.. "No", he said, looking glummer than before, "man done me right".
I backed way the H*** up. "More than I need to know", I said, quickly remembering where Burning Man started. "What goes on between you and your boyfriend ..." "S**t, man, no", he broke in. "It's not like that. Just because I love the guy that doesn't mean that I love the guy. Mind out of the gutter, friend".
"How'd he do you, then", I asked, "and if I hear one word about lubricants, you're out of here". Off to where would have been a good question, since camp had been set by a ten car convoy. Our boy wasn't going to get very far, but if I was going to be a fake bartender tonight, I was going to be a real fake bartender, d**n it! He looked at me strangely, and started to tell his story. Sure enough, there was a girl.
There's always a girl.
He had met her during a date during one of his dry spells. "Long dry spell", I asked. "Is Nevada having a long dry spell", he asked. Got it. Go on.
Tina had met him through a dating service. "Don't look at me like that", he said, as I tried to wipe away a look I didn't know I had on me. "A city's a big place to get lost in for somebody who's just moved in. Catch 22. You don't know anybody, so you have nobody to hang with, so when people meet you, it's too awkward for them to stick around, and you don't get to know anybody". That was the chicken and the egg, not catch 22, .but I could tell he didn't need to hear that. I let him talk.
"I knew a few guys from work, and they were OK. No, you know what, they were downright decent, but I was the only American in the bunch. They were nice to me and all, but their English wasn't that good and my Spanish was terrible and they wanted to spend most of their time with their own people. I guess it's a way of forgetting that you're not getting back home any time soon; just bring your home with you. Cuba can be a little rough these days".
"So I hear", I agreed.
"I signed up for this service and the next day, Tina called. I guess that should have sent up a red flag, somebody calling that soon and then nobody calling for the next three months. What are the odds? What I didn't know at the time was the call was no accident. My future girlfriend had put a trace on me."
"Huh? She stalked you BEFORE you were dating, before you had even met?" This was hard to believe.
"No, she was stalking one of my co-workers. She had a thing about doctors, but not too many of us had a thing about her. Tina was nouveau riche in the worst sense of the word, white trash who had inherited a few million from a wealthy uncle when he died. This gave her the power that came with money without the discipline that having to earn it can bring. She wanted what she wanted when she wanted, and got angry when she got anything else".
"And you dated her?", I asked.
"Try hitting 30 without ever having even held hands", he said. "I guarantee you will not be seeing the world through clear eyes. You know all of those stupid stories your parents told you about walking twenty miles to school every day, through blinding snowstorms, even in July, and uphill both ways", he asked. Yeah, I had. "The thing about becoming a professional these days is that you can run into a lot of people who've told those stories so many times, that they've started believing them and expect you to follow in footsteps they never really left behind. It's kind of hard living up to somebody else's fantasy, so hard that you don't always have time to find out what your own are. "
He took a breath and continued. "You get out of school and people ask you 'can you tell me about yourself', the women especially, and there is no you, because you've never had a chance to be him. So yeah, I was open to dating freakshow". Reminding myself that I had chosen to serve him hard liquor, I nonchalantly slipped some iced coffee into the next cup I served him. "Sorry, didn't mean to be an a**hole", I said.
He calmed a little. "You weren't an a**hole. I've wondered the same thing myself, but that's how it is, isn't it? You take what you can get and then someday, when you've grown a little, wonder why you wanted it. Because if you didn't get it, you couldn't have grown, maybe? At that point, I hadn't grown enough to see that her interest in me was a side issue. Her real issue was in her exotic would-be lover Hans".
"Hans?", I asked, "Don't we have a camp member by that name? I mean, it couldn't be ..."
"How many Cuban emigre physicians named Hans do you suppose are running around? His mother had loved Danish fairytales and Tina loved him, at least in the sense of what she thought love was. She chased Hans but her wouldn't chase her back and she wasn't going to take that. Our girl hired a private detective who scoped out Hans' place of work. She told him to look for somebody who looked a little too trusting, like a good cult recruit, and to tell her as much about the guy as she could. She then bribed the dating service to fix her up with me."
"Why?"
"Because if you want to go after somebody's job, it pays to hit him from a direction he'd never expect to see trouble coming from, and I was dumb enough to make it work. I was on the review board for the hospital. I was also the man's friend. Imagine how surprised he must have been ..."
"About what?"
"Sorry, started thinking out loud. Guess that didn't make sense". A squeamish look crossed his face. "We dated for a while" "You and Hans?", I asked. "No", he said, laughing briefly and unconvincingly, "me and Tina. Tina got me to introduce her to half of my friends, and to tell her about the other half. Hans eventually, inevitably, came up. A look of horror crossed Tina's face when I mentioned him. 'You know him', she asked. Not like a brother, but I had known him casually for a while, and I guess he seemed OK'"
"'Jack, he's not OK," she said, telling a story about how he had abused her during an exam and how she couldn't get anybody on the board to listen to her. Of course, I listened to her. I was her f**king boyfriend."
"What does one do? I knew Hans and it didn't sound like him, but you're supposed to believe your girlfriend, aren't you? But when you get right down to it - why? Why is it so d**ned virtuous to let that organ do your thinking for you?"
"I don't know", wondering if I was even supposed to have an answer to that.
"Maybe part of me was asking the same question. I went up to Hans and asked him if he knew Tina. He immediately blurted out that whatever she had said, it was a lie. I thought that sounded a little suspicious, that panicked answer to a mild question".
"Could be ...", I started
"No, not really. I didn't know Hans like a brother, but I knew him well enough that I should have had more trouble believing that than I did. I should have also stopped to think that being an escapee from a police state might make a person a little jumpy, especially when approached by somebody with an official position in an officious manner. If I were him, I would have been nervous, too. There's a phrase for what I stumbled into. It's called 'conflict of interest', and this is why you don't do that. Lying to yourself is just too d**ned easy".
"Fine", I said, "you shouldn't have asked him that question. You're drinking the Bacardi distillery dry over that? Think you're going a little hard on yourself."
"If that was where I had stopped, maybe, but we young professionals are a thorough bunch, you know. I passed my observations along to the rest of the board, convincing myself that by recusing myself from the proceedings, that I had managed to avoid that conflict of interest, but that was bulls**t. Board members listen to board members, even absent ones, and the shock that had registered on Hans' face, as he felt the coming of his betrayal of a friend, became that betrayal as I fooled myself into seeing something that wasn't there."
"Self-fulfilling prophecy", I said, "he did it to himself".
"Did he", my nonpaying customer asked. "Our system of law mandated that response. 'Silence implies assent' is a legally supported piece of nonsense that goes back to the common law. Our staff attorney told me as much. Say nothing or say it too slowly and you are guilty. Say it too quickly, and everybody thinks that you sound guilty. That's a mighty narrow target I left a stalker's target needing to hit".
"Then how'd he manage to go on this trip", I asked. "You make it sound like you sent him up or at least trashed his career".
"I think I almost did both", my confessant said, sipping a little needed coffee. "and I know you're trying to sober me up. I guess I have been rambling".
"No", I said, "maybe you were annoying me a little at first", quickly adding as somebody started to get up, "but this explains a lot that I wasn't understanding. Come on, everybody's been talking my ear off through the whole trip and half of it hasn't even made sense. Wouldn't you be a little cranky?"
"Maybe not enough to put a bottle of habanero sauce in somebody's bloody mary, but I guess I see your point", he said. "You heard about that story?", I asked him "Yes", he said. "You know it's been exaggerated", I said. "Can we get back to Hans", he asked. Fair enough, I guessed. I had asked for this story. "Sorry", I said. He continued, barely stopping to catch his breath.
"Hans, already scheduled for a hearing, was spending his days looking for a lawyer who wasn't too sensitive to take his case. Meanwhile, believing every word Tina had told me, I nudged her into seeing a lawyer or her own, and then, the strangest thing happened. The word 'deposition' came up, along with the word 'perjury', and all of a sudden, Hans wasn't the only one I had seen with that haunted, nervous look. Tina wasn't willing to swear an oath."
"That seemed a little strange to me, so I asked her about some of the details she had shared with the board, when I sat there silently with her, 'for moral support', as I had explained to a board too willing to accept that explanation. Chronologies shifted, details were inconsistent, and I soon knew what I had been a party to, all along. I broke up with Tina and told the board what I had heard. She then tried to accuse me of the same thing she accused Hans of, saying that we had worked together during that abusive examination that had never occured, but by now her story wouldn't have convinced Andrea Dworkin"
"So, you did the right thing in the end", I said.
"I sold out somebody I knew to get a little nookie and then lied to myself about what I was doing. My application for sainthood may be a little slow in getting approved. When word got back to Hans about this trip I was going on, just to get away from the craziness, he decided to come with and give me a little craziness of his own, telling everybody in the caravan about those hearings, making sure that I'd get as much heat from my campmates as he got from that committee. It has not been a relaxing trip".
"I guess that it wouldn't be", I said. "Sorry you came?"
"A little, but not as much as some. Tina is not the only one who knows how to put a bribe to good use, especially when somebody else is so full of herself that she can't ever pass up the chance to tell everybody every tiresome detail of how she's living her life to the max, everywhere she goes, which these days is everywhere I go. Finding out what her vacation plans were was pretty f**king easy and with a small outlay of cash, I was able to help expedite her travel arrangements, on terms I found agreeable, purchasing a little loyalty from somebody I paid to volunteer to be her traveling companion. You know that car that just pulled in, about ten minutes ago? Somebody thought that she was going to roadtrip to Monterrey, and so she shall. She's just going to take a short detour with us, as we cross Arizona, renewing her old friendships with those of us who have missed her so. Call it a hunch, but I'm guessing that my fellow campmates are about to be a lot less fascinated with me than they were, a few hours ago".
The sound of shouting picked up in the background, a sound that I knew would be our constant companion every time we stopped. "Oh", I said, my ears already starting to ring, as I began to pour a double. "I thought that you didn't make those", he said. "It's for me", I said. "I think I'm going to need it".
« Last Edit: Mar 24, 2006, 4:52am by deletedbarkeep
»
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Free image hosting recommendation « Result #39 on Mar 23, 2006, 3:55am »
A lot of us still use free web hosting services, many of which provide surprisingly good service. The downside is that very few of them allow one to use their web space for the remote serving of images. This makes sense, because their ads won't appear on a remotely served image, meaning that their resources would be used at their expense, without any contribution to their revenue stream, were they to allow their servers to be used in this way.
Understandable, but the source of a real problem for many who post to forums, because few forums provide space for image storage, for their users. The good news for some of us is that a number of free image hosting services have started up. The bad news is that at the vast majority of them, the fine print is a pain in the neck. Images that can't be remotely served, files being deleted after a month, and a number of other nasty surprises turn up, sometimes hidden deeply in the fine print.
In order to save some of you guys a lot of needless looking around, I'm recommending two services that have provided good service with a minimum of headaches:
I hope you'll find them helpful, but as always, hold onto your own copy of anything you couldn't bear to lose. These places look like they're going to stick around, but I'm not in a position to guarantee that.
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Access to posting temporarily restricted « Result #41 on Mar 23, 2006, 3:17am »
I seriously hate to do this. I like the idea of having a place on the board where people can post without registering, first. Having some place like this encourages lurkers to get a little more spontaneous, I think.
The problem is spammers. Guessing where we're getting them from isn't difficult. One of our users (Dustbuddy) was being smeared on ePlaya through the use of a wrongful sockpuppet accusation. Our man asked the moderators to "vouch for the mismatch between IP addresses", proof positive of innocence when the IPs correspond to ISPs in different parts of the country, or at least darned close. The moderators refused, so the smearee set up a Usenet post to establish his IP in a public place.
There are very good reasons why somebody should not want to do that. Spambots harvest urls and e-mail addresses on Usenet. Shortly after that post, ePlaya started getting hit hard. One can't fault Dustbuddy for this. He had warned one of the moderators (Spectabilis) about what the consequences would be, if he took care of the problem himself, and practically begged Spec to not make him take that step. His reasonable request was ignored, a flood of spambots came in, and now we get to deal with some of the spillover. Thank you, Spec. I hope some day, in some small way, we can pay you back.
I had already made a small effort to talk up this forum on ePlaya, not knowing what was coming next. Links from ePlaya to this board provided a route for spambots to follow. When the number of spambots wandering ePlaya spiked, so did the probability that a few of them would find their way to our obscure little board. The same is bound to be true of a number of other forums off in the burning boondocks, all of whom can thank Spectabilis for this hassle.
All that I can do is wait for the spambot traffic on ePlaya to drop and my own posts to get old and drop out of sight. When the coast is clear in a few months,I'll try opening this board to general use. Your posts are still as welcome on TTBM as they've ever been, so please don't think you're being cold-shouldered. I'm just trying to get a problem under control.
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Re: Help has arrived from ePlaya! « Result #43 on Mar 22, 2006, 8:40pm »
Uh huh. So, if I were to go into one of the portapotties and scoop up some of those fine chocolate brownies the other burners gift us with after getting a little too much roughage and mixed some jimsonweed into them, that would work? I could just pass those bad boys out at Lamplighter Village and nobody would miss the usual "baked goods"?
Coffee is served! « Result #45 on Mar 20, 2006, 11:45pm »
I don't know if you guys remember me. I was the guy sitting on the Persian carpet out on the open Playa in 2001, dispensing small cups of Spiced Coffee and Arak, along with dubious bits of wisdom that I hope nobody was taking seriously. I'm thinking of returning to the Playa in 2006 or maybe 2007, with more coffee and less arak. That stuff gives you a hangover.
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Re: Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Result #47 on Mar 20, 2006, 10:00pm »
Sorry you feel that way about it, though I guess I can see why you would. But before you give up on Burning Man, may I offer a suggestion?
I remember you mentioning that you get into downtown Chicago a lot. Try dropping by one of Bop Camp's events. The warm weather is coming, and Liz Campanella and her friends will probably start spinning just south of Foster Beach. You don't even need to get your car. It's a forty minute trip up on the Red Line, or maybe a $20 cab ride. Url: http://www.bopcamp.com/ All I ask is that you take a trip to the beach and see what these guys are up to, and see if it looks like fun.
Even if you hate it, at least you'll be close to Argyle Street and some great Vietnamese restaurants, so your trip won't be wasted. Give it a try. I think you'll find that this is a much nicer crowd. ePlaya is just one stupid board. It's not all of Burning Man. Black Rock City isn't the place for everybody, but I'd hate to see you let a few loud jerks ruin what could be a good experience for you.
Re: Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Result #48 on Mar 20, 2006, 8:44pm »
I saw. Green Tortoise? Good choice, I guess. From all I've heard, they have a lot more of the spirit that made Burning Man what it used to be, than ePlaya does. I just wonder if that still matters.
If you've been following the drama, Spec has now admitted that I, you and whoever else we're supposed to be doesn't live in Reno, Nevada. We're supposed to be living in Olympia Fields, instead. He tells us that his IP lookup told him that.
Just for laughs, let's take a town I actually DO live somewhere near. Which one? Let's just pull a name out of the air, for no good reason at all: GENEVA. Now let's take a look at how far somebody would have to travel from there to get to this Olympia Fields place, supposedly just to drop by the library to pretend to be somebody else, or something like that.
Distance travelled: 59.1 miles Time required: 1 hour 24 mins
Far enough for the local accent and architectual style to noticably shift. Far enough that I had never even heard of the town until our good friend Spec had mentioned it and I looked it up on a map.
If you go to the thread and look at Spectabilis' postings from before I broke down and did that Usenet post, putting my ISP at risk for harassment, while he doesn't come out and say that I'm HughMungus, he definitely implies it. Note the way in which he talks to me, Hugh and Rocdad like we're two people, instead of three. I put my post up on Usenet, point to the IP address, and Spec gets caught in the act of playing along with a wrongful accusation. Shouldn't that cost him a little credibility? Wouldn't you think it would? But it didn't.
All that he had to do was come back with another bit of BS and express it with enough assurance, and like good little robots, the people on ePlaya played along with it, as if they had never been given any reason for skepticism at all. There's a line I heard somebody use for this: "amnesia on demand". It fits.
I've been trying to get some feel for what the Burning Man experience would be like, before getting too heavily invested in it. When I see people laughing and winking at somebody's decision to engage in academic fraud and libel, and screaming in outrage at the decision of another to uphold the truth and defend himself against that libel, I think I've found my answer. It's not the answer I wanted, but at least it's an answer that saved me from wasting hundreds of dollars on what would probably have been a pointlessly dismal experience. Dr.Cliff is right. Whatever Burning Man might have once been, it is dead. When one sees this kind of behavior from a moderator, what hope is there for the community he is moderating? What kind of leadership is it seeing and what kind is it asking for?
I hate to have to cut and run on you guys just a few days after registering for your forum, but I don't see any place for this to go. Nothing against any of you, you seem nice enough, but I think that you're wasting your efforts on a group of people who will never appreciate them. I hope I'm wrong and wish you all the best of luck, but with ill will toward nobody on this board, I'm out of here.
Re: Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Result #50 on Mar 19, 2006, 7:57am »
What a surprise. I was right.
I debunked the "you are Hughmungus' sock puppet" accusation by making this post on Usenet, pointing people in the direction of the origination IP line, an IP lookup page and cited the results they find. I'm in the very general vicinity of Chicago. HughMungus is known to live in Reno. End of accusation?
You'd think so, but not really. All that happened was that one of the mods - you know, one of the people who's supposed to be raising the tone of the discussion - screamed and wailed about how I was abusing the community by defending my own reputation, and then made a sock puppet accusation of his own. The time, I'm supposed to be some guy named "Observer". Oh, and Traveller - I'm supposed to be you, too and we're both supposed to be Dr.Cliff, who is supposed to have created this board as part of an evil plot to destroy Burning Man, by spamming his own board. Or something like that. At the rate things are going, I'll probably be everybody by next week. God willing, I'll be somebody with free airfare to Florida and I'll just be able to go hang out on the beach, and forget that any of this ever happened.
Observer has not specified where he lives, so the approach I used in proving that I wasn't Hugh won't work this time. Traveller is a fellow Illinoisan, so I don't know what I'm going to do with that, other than say sc*** it! I mean like, why bother? No matter how many times I clear my name, somebody will just set up another accusation and it'll never stop.
I washed my hands of ePlaya and walked away. I don't know why you guys link to the place. I have never seen a forum where the politics were this crazy and this dirty.
Getting scr**ed over on ePlaya « Result #51 on Mar 18, 2006, 7:57pm »
Posted in a private message by me to Spanky, the admin for ePlaya. Yes, I'm p***ed off, why do you ask?
Quote:
Could you please confirm the fact that I (Dustbuddy) and another user (HughMungus) are not posting from the same IP address? Also, that our IPs correspond to ISPs that are thousands of miles apart, meaning that we couldn't possibly be the same person? Given the IPs at the bottom of our posts, this is a simple matter of going to the Arin whois page, cutting, pasting and checking.
Currently, both I and HughMungus are being libeled by a user who calls himself Rockdad. Libel is, of course, illegal everywhere in the United States, meaning that these actions on the part of Rockdad are in clear-cut conflict with line 5 of the "Expected Behavior" section of the ePlaya Community guidelines. To be specific, I am being accused of being HughMungus' sock puppet, which I most certainly am not. I have asked one of your moderators, Spectabilis, to confirm that my IP and HughMungus' IP do not match, and have gotten nothing from him, to date, but a good stonewalling along with a little whining from him about the fact that I savagely teased the person I was being libeled by, about the ludicrousness of the accusation.
I live in the Chicago area. HughMungus lives in Reno, Nevada. How could we possibly be the same person? For anybody who can see those IPs with his own two eyes, the accusation isn't just wrong, it's laughable, but of course, most users can't do that, a fact that Rockdad has been capitalizing on, as he has fabricated evidence to support an accusation which you should be easily able to see is without merit.
Fabricating evidence is something that Rockdad has been doing a lot. This all began on a Conspiracy Theory thread called "A Sept 11th experiment 'Trough & Beam'", started by somebody who wanted to prove that the World Trade Center in New York was taken down by a government conspiracy, instead of the two planes some thousands of people saw hit the buildings. I guess much of the population of Midtown Manhattan is supposed to be in on the conspiracy?
Rockdad spoke in support of the fellow conspiracy theorist who started this thread, in a post where he cited some alleged supports of the theory, right beneath the words "more kooks". One of the alleged supporters was one Prof.Van Romero, reported to be located in New Mexico.
Just out of curiosity, I did a search on "Van Romero" and "New Mexico", and lo and behold, Rockdad had lied about what the man had to say on the subject. Romero had never supported the government conspiracy theory, and had expressed horror over the way in which some of his off the cuff remarks had been taken out of context to support a theory he had no interest in. Further - and this was easily found - he had retracted even the remarks that had been taken out of context and, on finding his resume, I found that the man wasn't an engineer specialising in demolitions work, as some presented him to be, but a Particle Physicist. Somebody had buttonholed a flustered college professor after the incident, pressured him to comment, and got him to practice engineering without a license, essentially. All details which had been conveniently left out.
I brought them up on the thread, shortly following Rockdad's post, introducing links to relevant news stories, and to Prof.Romero's own homepage, specifically to the resume located on it. Rockdad had engaged in fraud in order to bolster an unusually whacky cause, distorting what another person had to say, and I called him on it, not just accusing him of doing wrong, but backing up my criticism with relevant cites and links. Rockdad's response was to say that I was personally attacking him by doing so, because my documenting the truth made him look bad, going on later (in another thread we'll get to) to argue that since I had shown indifference to the murder of thousands of Americans by their government by not keeping mum about the fact that he had fabricated a source, that I no longer had any rights. Apparently, by debunking some of the rationalizations he then posted in support of his distortions of Van Romero's comments made me an even worthier target of defamation, according to Rockdad.
The sockpuppet accusations began shortly afterward, on the same thread, and persisted, leading me to joke about the absurdity of the situation in this thread. Which Spec (who had been dead silent while I and HughMungus really were being personally attacked, libeled and defamed by a crank who was angry about the fact that his crankery wasn't seeing as much support as he wanted it to) then whined about, which makes sense, I guess, because joking about the fact that one has been defamed is oh so very much worse than actually defaming somebody? Rockdad then entered the new thread to continue the libel, bringing a few of his troll friends with for support, bringing us to the present.
I have asked your moderator, Spec, to please vouch for the fact that my and HughMungus's IPs don't match. Spec has refused to respond to this request. Somebody has defended this by saying that you have refused to allow the moderators access to the IPs of those posting, leaving yourself the only person who can verify that those IP addresses very clearly don't even come close to matching. If this is so, would you please make an appearance in the "HughMungus, I need some advice" thread, and vouch for the fact that I and he are not the same person.
My apologies if, as I suspect might the case, the mods can take care of this themselves and there was no reason for you to be bothered, but I had to make sure that I didn't leave any stone unturned. If I do not see a reasonable level of support in this from the ePlaya modstaff, however, I will have to take care of that myself. Given the limitations of the resources available to me, the way I can resolve this is not going to be as good for almost any of those involved as the way you can resolve this. This is not a threat, this is reality.
My leaving myself in a position of being subjected to public ridicule for something that I didn't do, just because I talked back to a crackpot, is not an option. As much as I would regret having to go this route, if my rights are not upheld, I will make use of a Google account I set up last night, and prove my location (Chicago area) and my IP by posting an account of the whole travesty to alt.burningman, crossposting it to news.admin.censorship and maybe a few of the alt.sex groups, with the url of the threads in question included in the post. alt.sex? Why not? I'm getting s***wed, am I not? I'll then link to the "original copy" page for the post, as soon as it appears in the DejaNews/Googlegroups archives, from the relevant threads on ePlaya and the "Travel to Burning Man" board.
This will wipe away any doubt in the mind of any even remotely reasonable person, as to the fact that I am clearly not posting from Reno, Nevada (where Hugh lives) or any place remotely close, but it will have other consequences as well, ones you may not like as much. Usenet being what it is, my posting a link to ePlaya there is likely to bring a wave of spammers your way. But to leave those linkbacks out would leave me in the position of posting undocumented material in a public location. This I will not do. If this should work a hardship on your staff, please do keep in mind the refusal on the part of that same ePlaya staff to make this step unnecessary by verifying the IP address discrepancy, something that both I and HughMungus have already publicly requested, repeatedly, only to get stonewalled, leaving me with no workable alternative.
In order to clear my name on my own, I'll have to reveal my specific IP address and the identity of my ISP to the general public. Conspiracy theorists, like paranoiacs in general, are not noteworthy for being good sports and taking their defeats with good grace. If I am forced to take this step, the staff of my ISP is likely to be bombarded with abusive phonecalls and faxes, enough to shut them down for a day or two, if the past performance of the Internet's lunatic fringe is any guide. If this happens, or worse, the refusal of the ePlaya staff to take reasonable action is something that the staff and possibly the highly inconvenienced and deeply p***ed off users of (name of primary ISP deleted) are likely to take very, very personally, and they're going to know exactly which site to blame, because I'll tell them.
I'd rather not have to go there. I'd rather not have to even be writing this letter. I really am a nice guy, but I am not a doormat, and as I have already said elsewhere "enough is enough". I should not have had to fight this long and this hard to get a reasonable, fairminded and adult response, when the facts of the matter are this clearcut. I hope you log in today, because unlike some people in California, we take the concept of giving one's word pretty seriously here in the Midwest. I gave my word that one way or another, proof would be presented today.
If I don't see reasonable action on this complaint by the time midnight starts to approach (that's 10 pm, your time), I'll have no choice but to continue with the plan B that I just laid out for you. I'd prefer not to do that, and if I do, I hope the worst doesn't happen, but if it does, don't expect me to apologize for the inconvenience. I have jumped through hoop after hoop, trying to find some workable alternative to going this route, getting no cooperation from your staff, and eventually one does say "enough is enough".
Where we go from here is up to you. I'm done playing.
We'll see just how much the truth counts for, on the "new" ePlaya. I'm guessing that it doesn't count for a d**ned thing.
Re: Please hold onto this rant « Result #52 on Mar 18, 2006, 4:00am »
Just registered. Setting this post up as a benchmark to maintain my identity online, just in case my ePlaya account gets locked. Long story, which I'm about to get to.
Please hold onto this rant « Result #53 on Mar 17, 2006, 8:39am »
Just in case my post gets deleted, this is what I wrote in this discussion. It all started when I became the latest person to be accused of being somebody else's sock puppet. Joking about this, I wrote
You can imagine my surprise. I've never been anybody other than me before, so being transformed into one of your avatars completely threw me. Now that we're one and the same person, I was wondering if you could offer me some advice on how to be you.
That, and if you could tell me why, if I'm you (implying that I'm living in Nevada), why it looked like I was still in the Midwest when I was walking around a few minutes ago? Big tall trees and not a mountain in sight. Was I seeing things? Have I/you/we been hitting the sauce, again, and if so, as your avatar, will I have to worry about getting your headaches? All of this alternative epistemology has me so confused. Please clear things up for me while I ponder the wonder of it all in an irony-free way, of course.
and some drama followed, some it due to one of the mods sad to say, to which I responded. Profanity has been replaced out of respect for Probaboard's TOS. You can probably guess where.
Quote:
Quote:
gee, thanks for people spreading personal differences around, especially appreciate creating a whole new topic for it.
Spec, in the words of a longterm critic of this forum, "step back from the discussion, count to a thousand, come back to the discussion and see that you've been played". Shedding so much heat that nobody notices that he is shedding no light has been Rockdad's strategy of choice throughout. I know that you've had differences with HughMungus. One only has to do a search to see how many, and I'm not necessarily saying that you were in the wrong during all of those disputes, but that old saying about the enemy of your enemy being your friend is a crock. The mere fact of somebody else being Hugh's enemy wouldn't necessarily imply that the person in question was being a productive or civilized presence on the board at the moment, even if Hugh had been trolling nonstop - and would you really want to argue that he has been?
I've moderated forums before, so I know what a board looks like from a mod's point of view, and I know that you know darned well that I'm not Hugh. Somewhere near the bottom of this post, as you see it on your screen, you should find my IP address. A simple IP lookup - and there are a lot of sites where you can do those - will show you that I'm posting from a small ISP in Northern Illinois that has no out of state dialup numbers, a fact that my primary ISP will confirm. Hugh lives in Reno, literally thousands of miles from me. How could we possibly be the same person?
The whole thing is absurd and it's a kind of absurdity that ePlaya is getting deservedly notorious for - random sock puppet accusations, used as a form of mudslinging against the newbies whenever an argument isn't going the way one of the regulars would like. This is part of what Rockdad did to me, in response to the fact that when he was less than forthcoming about what one of his cited sources had to say, I called him on what he had done. That's not a "difference of opinion", Spec, that's just wrong under any civilized standard of behavior.
If I had gotten really angry about that incident and started venting about it, I would have been 100% within my rights, but I didn't do that. Instead, I joked about the absurdity of a scenario that keeps playing itself out on this board over and over, and will continue to do so as long as defamation of character continues to be a respected tool of debate in this forum. Demonstrating that somebody has lied about what one of his cited sources had to say is not defamation of character. That's just responsible scholarship in the face of fraud, and demonstrate the point I did - just follow the links. On the other hand, slinging irrelevant personal accusations designed to provoke ridicule for the purpose of constructing an ad hominem argument IS defamation of character, and I should hope that a moderator would know the difference. May I assume that you do?
If so, then with all due respect, I would say "please lighten the Heck up". Joking about a genuinely, outrageously offensive situation is a lot less provocative than screaming about it, and in the long run, friend, it is one or the other. Anger does not stay bottled up forever; it is either released at the right moment, in the rough direction of the person who has earned it, or it gets choked back, held in deep until the person who has been angered forgets who he is angry at and why, and his anger spills out, barely disguised, onto some innocent bystander. I'm not going to poison my own spirit and the lives of those around me, even a little, taking the next small step in the direction of becoming that kind of person, just to go along with an exaggerated and misplaced sympathy for a misbehaving member of the board, who wants to make a scene about the fact that he's been called to task for his misbehavior, by somebody who's backed up his accusations with solid evidence.
Like Hugh said, this is just a board. If the mods want to treat people fairly, and their good spirit sets a good tone for the place, maybe it can become a good board to post to, but if the rule is going to be "tread lightly around the crazy people, because they make the rules", forget it. Been there, done that, don't need another ulcer that badly and certainly not over a darned board. At every point, I'm going to do what I know is right. If that's good enough for the mods, cool, and I look forward to being a constructive presence on this board - an assertively constructive presence. If not, it's your loss and I sure as Hell am not going to work that hard to get out to spend $250, if being expected to swallow somebody else's excrement is now going to be a nonnegotiable part of this vacation package. I doubt very seriously that I'll be alone in feeling this way, especially given the reality of the glaring loopiness of the discussion that lead up to this, in the first place.
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Thread and member removed: The Black Truck limping « Result #55 on Mar 14, 2006, 10:15pm »
I had my doubts about this post from the beginning. There was no real narrative and it felt more like flamebait than like a story, but I wasn't sure. Was Rockdad trying to praise the locals, who I agree tend to wonderful hosts, or was he trying to pick a fight with those burners who had a little bad luck and ran into a bad time? I visited ePlaya today, and any doubts I had about somebody's motives vanished. All I had to do was look at the man's track record, more than a little of which was directly linked to from the main page at ePlaya. I had never seen that much trolling from one person.
I don't doubt that there are people who've been abused by some of the local authorities or some of the local people on their way to Burning Man. I've always been positively impressed by both, but there are both good and bad people anywhere you go. If somebody reading this had the bad luck to run into some of the jerks, I'm sorry to hear that. If by leaving Rockdad's story in place, I left you with the impression that I was endorsing somebody's attempt to taunt you over that bad time, I'm sorry about the misunderstanding.
Please understand that I'm just another human being sitting by his computer, pounding on his keyboard and trying to make sense of it all. I won't always know what's going on and sometimes when I do know what's going on, as much as I will try, I won't make the right call. All that I can do is ask you to accept that I am fallible and that I am doing my best to make this a friendly place for you to be.
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 6 Location: Northeastern Illinois
Infidel's Lamb « Result #56 on Mar 13, 2006, 3:23am »
Strictly speaking, what is sold as "lamb" in American supermarkets is really mutton, but you know what I mean. This is a variation on a Turkish dish, with one very non-Islamic ingredient: a bottle of Heinekin. Seriously. If the alcohol truly offends you, I'll have an alternative for you at the end of this recipe.
In the old days, you'd make this kind of thing with chicken broth as your cooking medium, and it was pretty good. You'd get that homey, soothing quality that a lot of us associate with Middle Eastern home cooking. But then along came the buffalo wing fad, and the cost of chicken wings went up through the ceiling, and you can't get decent beef stockbones anymore, so good, homemade meat broth is turning into rich people's food. What can you do?
You adapt. Heinekin I liked, and not just the color was right. When you mix it with water, half and half, you get a cooking medium that's great at picking up and enriching the flavor of the meat, and the cooking is going to take so long that nobody could possibly be intoxicated by the results. It's not halal, hence the name of the dish.
We start with about 4 tbsp. of butter, melted in a pot. We toss in a pound of diced lamb (yes, yes, it's mutton, go away), another pound of diced onions, two crushed and coarsely chopped cloves of garlic and a light sprinking of crushed red pepper. How light? Maybe a teaspoon and a half. You toss all of this lightly, just coating it with the butter and then cover it immediately.
That was not a misprint. Western Europeans, as they make a stew, start out dry and then go wet; Middle Easterns reverse that, you might say. You drop the heat to medium low and simmer for maybe another 40 minutes. At this point, you're glad that your "lamb" is really mutton; baby lamb would have dried out.
The onion is essential; without it, the meat will burn. The onion, as you cook slowly, releases its juices, and the meat cooks in these. While this is going on, you take a head of cabbage, shred it finely and then chop it up. Some people like to leave the shreds whole, but I think that's a lot of work for the diner. You cook it until soft in more butter. How much butter? I don't know, however much makes you feel right with the world. I'm guessing that 3 tbsp. of inner peace is probably plenty for anybody at this point.
You cook the cabbage over medium heat, stirring often, until it is very soft, but not browned - and then you set it to one side. At this point, the 40 minutes on your lamb should soon be over. Lift the lid, and you'll see water. Don't be fooled, it's not strong enough to be a broth, but we're on our way.
We take the lid off, and increase the heat to medium, cooking until the moisture is absorbed and the meat and onion are gently, just gently sizzling in the released butterfat. As the moisture nears the point at which it has evaporated, you want to be stirring this dish often, otherwise the onion will stick.
Continue for just a few minutes, until the onion feels soft and has absorbed some of the fat. Put in some finely chopped up tomatoes - maybe half a pound of them, I'm guessing - and cook some more until the tomatoes have released their juices and reabsorbed them, and softened. Put in the cabbage, and mix with everything else throughly. This is why we chopped it - the cabbage will become part of the sauce.
Put in the beer and water, equal amounts of each, enough to just cover the meat, along with a pinch of thyme and a few pinches of fresh dill leaf, and maybe the juice of one lemon, if you wish. (This will give you a tarter, stronger flavored dish; leaving it out you get something gentler). Simmer all of this until the liquid in the pan has been reduced to the point of becoming a gravy. I usually like to toos in a little extra dill and fresh thyme toward the end to perk up the results.
Islam frowns on the use of alcohol, but as is so often the case in so many places, limitations become a spur to creativity. In Western cooking, one has a very familiar procedure of braising meat in an acidic medium (wine) to produce a gravy. Muslim cooks, not being able to use the wine, found that other acids worked too, each giving their own unique characters to a dish - pomegranate molasses, vinegar, yogurt and of course, lemon juice, which is the nonalcoholic substitute I spoke of, above.
Try the juice of two (maybe three) lemons in water, in place of the diluted beer. What you'll end up with will still be a gravy and it won't, despite your expectations, taste of lemon in an overpowering way. Either way, I often enjoy this over rice, for a one-dish meal, or without when I'm in a mood for something a little more aggressive. To drink? Club soda, or something tart.
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Re: Help has arrived from ePlaya! « Result #57 on Mar 12, 2006, 7:41pm »
It makes sense after a fashion. What you're looking at is an in-joke that's just about run its course on the ePlaya: the Wormhole Thread. Something about shooting spammers down a wormhole.
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Policy statement: Don't backstart your threads « Result #58 on Mar 12, 2006, 7:31pm »
Yes, this has already come up.
What is "backstarting a thread"? It's the practice of starting a new discussion in an old thread, instead of clicking on the link labeled "new thread" to start a new discussion. Don't do this.
If you're going to bring up a whole new topic, I expect you to start a whole new discussion instead of burying your remarks deep inside somebody else's discussion. I'm an admin on this board, but I'm not the sysop. I don't have the access needed to move material from one thread to another or to retitle a thread. I have no way to uncover what you bury by doing this, except by reposting your material under my own name, and like I said elsewhere, that just looks sloppy.
It's also a pain in the neck for me, and seriously - how hard is it for somebody to click on that link? I don't know why this practice has become more common of late, but as the admin for this little place, I'm laying down the law on this one. This practice isn't just bad netiquette, it's inconsiderate. If I see somebody doing this in the future, I will most likely just delete his posts and be done with it.
I would like to see more people post to this forum and sorry if this scares people off, but we do have to have a few standards of behavior, and this one isn't all that far out, so let's just do this, OK, guys?
Re: Help has arrived from ePlaya! « Result #60 on Mar 10, 2006, 5:00pm »
You do know that's a black hole, not a wormhole, right? I mean, come on, it even says so in the filename. Check it out.
A stable wormhole would be like a bridge from one point in the universe to another, or to somewhere in a different universe altogether. A black hole isn't taking you anywhere but down to a singularity where you then get crushed into oblivion. Even the subatomic particles comprising your body don't survive. That's one very unpleasant rabbit hole for you to drop down, Alice.
They aren't the same thing. Why can't people get that?
Re: Dry them out « Result #62 on Mar 9, 2006, 6:41am »
What are they teaching the kids these days?
It's a song from the Beetle's Sgt.Pepper Album, lyrics found here. They claimed the song had nothing to do with drugs and fans have been skeptical ever since.
Re: Dry them out « Result #65 on Mar 5, 2006, 6:33pm »
Only if they're thirsty. No, I'm not going to serve bottled softdrinks at a burn. That's a commercial product that we consume without doing anything to create. I see burning as a chance to get away from that consumer-only existence.
I'm thinking more like a honey sweetened almond milk scented with cardamom and rose petals, or a mint flavored sweetened ayran. I like the yogurt drinks, especially, because a lot of people hit a burn feeling a little queasy and these drinks do a lot to settle them and their stomachs. They don't even require that much refrigeration, because you can make the yogurt more mold resistant by straining it first, condensing it, then mixing water into it as needed.
I'm not going to give anybody a reason to start singing "Lucy in the sky with diamonds", if that's what you're getting at.
Re: Dry them out « Result #66 on Mar 3, 2006, 2:37pm »
I don't know, dude. I hear a lot of generalities but not a lot of specifics. If you make a soft drink interesting, people won't mind it? How do you make Mountain Dew or Pepsi "interesting" and will the DEA get interested, if you catch my meaning?
Dry them out « Result #68 on Mar 3, 2006, 12:49am »
Talking seriously. Some messed up stuff has been happening during the last few burns. People have always pushed the envelope at Burning Man, and some of them have pushed a little too hard and gotten hurt, but now its different. Me hurting me is my business and my mistake to make. Me hurting you is what's messed up.
We had a few burners get sliced and banged up pretty badly in 2005 because of some yahoo's rebar garden, If you haven't heard about this, what the guy did was take lengths of rebar and leave them sticking up out of the ground, a whole forest of the stuff. This was not the only boobytrap on the Playa, either. The good news is that nobody got killed by these, but at least one very nice lady has years of reconstructive surgery to look forward to. Worst part: nobody ever caught whoever did this, so he's still out there doing it.
Somebody once wrote that Burning Man is a do-ocracy. I agree with a lot of that, so when I see something go wrong, one question I start to ask myself is "what did I do to help make that mess". I hope to be serving booze at a future burn, but I can't not notice how many out of control drunks are stumbling through the dust. You know the question somebody always asks when somebody else does something horrible. "What was he thinking about?" When somebody's that wasted, he's not thinking, and that gets people hurt.
What can I do? How might I end up becoming part of the problem?
At home, when I serve I've started working on this and it's made me think about what I've seen in Black Rock. A few of the problems, as I see them:
1. Hard, dry liquor on empty stomachs.
A lot of the people who tend bar serve hard liquor. That makes sense. You don't have a lot of space going out, and hard liquor packs a lot more flavor and punch for the ounce. Problem is that a lot of other people don't bring enough food, so we have some high proof stuff hitting the bloodstream almost directly and really fast. That's trouble.
The rule at my place is "if you don't eat, you don't drink,.and you got to eat first". Nothing fancy, usually something with a lot of grain and beans, something that's going to take a while to digest.
2. Dehydration.
We've all been to the med tent, right? We've seen the dehydration cases? Ever notice how much they look like somebody with the DTs?
What I heard is that alcohol works by taking some of the water out of the brain, so if you've already lost a lot of water, I'm guessing that it's going to hit harder. What I've taken to doing is serving homemade softdrinks along with the alcohol, make sure they stay hydrated. You make something interesting, people don't mind.
I'm also steering away from a lot of the mixed drinks. Like I won't serve mudslides or pina coladas. Those go down too smooth and it's easy to end up chugging. One thing I serve instead are liqueurs, which are full of flavor and people love them, but they've got so much sugar in them that if you tried to chug, you'd just end up puking. Thinking some of the saltier drinks might be good that way, too.
Not that I'm in favor of making people puke, just making them slow down.
If you're thinking this all sounds like a lot to mess around with, think about this - does the liquor ever last as long as you'd like it to? When they're eating, they're not drinking and that's going to stretch out your supply at any burn, and the food doesn't have to cost that much. You take a one dollar bag of lentils, soak it in water and you get more than two large guys can finish at one sitting and I mean BIG. One of the guys in our camp was 6 1/2 feet tall and 260 pounds. He was full.
I'm not saying that this is going to make the yahoo problem go away. Some people are a**holes because they like being a**holes. But some a**holes are good people who just didn't know their limits, and if we can keep them from going too far, I think we can help them and a few of the other burners too, so I'm giving it a try. It's worked at home, now I'm going to try it in the desert.
Anybody else trying anything sort of along these lines? How did it work out and do you have any suggestions?
Buuuuurrrrrrrrpppppp!!!!! « Result #69 on Mar 2, 2006, 11:59pm »
My playa name was gifted to me at a local burn, when drunk burners would start getting sober and cry out for me by name: "Where's That F***ing Barkeep?"
You can't just ignore love like that, so ever since then, I've been That F***ing Barkeep. But the TOS won't let me say that without asterisks, so I'll go by Deleted Barkeep on this board.
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 6 Location: Northeastern Illinois
Curmudgeon's introduction « Result #70 on Feb 27, 2006, 4:08pm »
Referring to oneself in the third person, yes, that's always a good sign.
The lightning avatar you see at the time of this writing refers to my likeliest area of future employment - electrical engineering. For the moment, job prospects are poor in that area owing to in large part to the H1B program, but I suspect that in any area of study in which one can make one's own product, such discomfort is temporary at worst. Once the downsized find their way into venture capital, market discipline should kick in with a vengeance.
In the meanwhile, I'm making ends meet through Math, which oddly enough has been bringing me more income than my other major. (Physics was a bulky minor in undergrad, which didn't follow me into grad school, a fact that I sometimes regret). Tutoring, to be exact. Work has been slow to pick up, for almost everybody, really, but it's cash, and one sort of patches things together, a little money here, a little money there, until better times can be successfully found.
The name "Curmudgeon" is job related, or job-to-be related. Engineering is what one would call a very strongly reality-based profession, and part of the problem with such professions is that urban civilization allows a lot of the population the luxury of leaving reality behind. If you're a farmer, and you decide that your personal self-esteem demands an affirmation of your belief that copper sulfate makes a great fertilizer, all that you're going to end up with are some barren fields. Shout at the dirt and get all of the attitude you want, you're still not going to see anything growing, and the repo man will be there for your stuff the next season.
That tends to make for at least a little common sense, and in some ways it makes life a little easier and people easier to be around, because when the crazies need to get some sense slapped into them, nature's doing most of the slapping. By the time another human being even needs to say a word, a lot of the needed lesson has been driven home, and pleasantly enough, usually not in the harsh way the hypothetical example I gave would end.
As you're probably guessing from that last paragraph, I'm a hick by upbringing. That's not low self-esteem talking, I'm proud to claim the title, noting with some regret that the small town I grew up in has since been swallowed up by suburban sprawl. What's different about both corporate and urban life, I think, is that while the farmer or small rural businessman is reliant on his own efforts, in an area where people are naturally inclined to give local businesses a fair chance, leaving him with nobody to blame his mistakes on but himself, the person working in a more urban setting finds himself in a more collective situation.
Not that the rural population is a group of antisocial isolationists, by any means, but out there, figuring out who's responsible for what isn't too hard. Get downtown, though, where there's less individual and more team effort, and when something goes really, really wrong, the question of who is reponsible isn't always as obvious. And then there are the industrious few who will scramble madly to clean up other people's messes - but the catch is that those whose messes are cleaned up can then be lest with the illusion that all just naturally worked itself out, not taking note of or appreciating the efforts of somebody who may end up being told in the most condescending tone that he needs to "lighten up", usually by the people whose messes he just cleaned..
If you're in advertising, maybe one can sort of get away with giving in and acquiring a lassez-faire attitude, and maybe even have some fun doing so. Maybe. But engineering, like farming, deals with the physical world, and while people may be swept up enough in the spirit of the moment to want to go along to get along, physical reality won't ever be so obliging. It doesn't care about how strongly you feel about something, or how many people are ready to back you up, it will be what it will be and it will flatten you and yours if you don't respect it.
No amount of attitude will make a frozen o-ring seal properly, or bring back the people who get blown to bits when that seal fails. An insufficiently notorious example of a basic truth about a lot of tech jobs - if we embrace easy comfort and turn into the big, warm, huggy, maleable people some in the softer professions want us to be, really bad things happen and lots of people are maimed or killed horribly and unnecessarily. It's a sobering thought, if one has even a speck of conscience.
That characteristic seriousness has been mocked in popular literature, perhaps because it goes against the postmodern trend that started taking hold during the 1960s. In one play that comes to mind, the overly serious engineer (who comes to his senses and realizes that emotion liberation comes from not making sense, later), who works as a structural engineer, starts talking about how management is imposing its will on the design staff for an office tower that's going up, and how this is the kind of thing that lead to the Challenger disaster. A vaguely stoned sounding Clinton-aged character then speaks up, and dismissively asks "so you're working on the space shuttle", as if to prove how absurd the comparison is.
Yes, perhaps it would be, because what happened to the Challenger wouldn't even come close to the horror that would result if a 50 story building collapsed in the middle of a major city in the middle of a workday. Figure, 10,000 dead in the building itself, plus how many in adjacent structures when the debris hits them, and how many crushed in the streets below? 9-11 would pale by comparison.
Yes, it's just a play, but it portrays prevalent cultural attitudes with an unpraiseworthy accuracy. Probably one of the reasons why people in my profession-to-be don't tend to come from mainstream urban American cultural backgrounds - very often we find ourselves in an antagonistic relationship with a population that just won't let itself understand that we can't be good sports about it all, because we mustn't be.
Among all of those mean and not-at-all cuddly techies is the meanest and the least cuddliest at all, as some would see him - the one who stands up for the others, and when the hipsters and yuppies alike get in the faces of anybody who tries to discuss serious matters sensibly, gets right back in their faces with as much anger as they choose to make necessary. Some people think of that as being "mean", but they also seem to think that about the police whenever they arrest somebody. Somebody's got to do it, has to be the curmudgeon who won't just go along to get along or pretend to respect the actions of the people who do, and I think it speaks volumes about how much prolonged adolsecence is floating around that so many have trouble accepting that.
I am one of those curmudgeons, so I might as well call dibs on the title, and I did. Trolls and flames will be subject to being summarily ignored, deconstructed or lampooned, whatever my twisted little soul is in a mood for at the moment. Everything else will be responded to in the spirit it is offered, at the very least.
Joined: Feb 2006 Gender: Male Posts: 6 Location: Northeastern Illinois
Bandera Volcano, New Mexico « Result #71 on Feb 23, 2006, 11:28pm »
Posts removed by author for reasons explained here, if you're curious. Let's just say that a lot of odd behavior that I had been encountering at the burns just got a lot more explicable. Nothing against anybody on TTBM. Burning just isn't something that I feel comfortable with the idea of being associated with, any more, and if you read I think you'll understand why.
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"Why can't I find the link needed to post?" « Result #72 on Feb 17, 2006, 6:30pm »
In order to post to any of these boards other than "the Peanut Gallery", you'll need to register. The Peanut Gallery, itself, is open to the general public, no registration required.
"Read this first" can only be posted to by the moderators, as it is being used as a place for general orientation.
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Please keep it clean and friendly « Result #73 on Feb 17, 2006, 6:21pm »
How clean? Let's keep it down to a PG rating, nothing that you would hesitate to say in front of a group of (probably stunned) high school students.
A little intensity is OK. Telling stories about your sexual exploits is not. Mentioning that people were naked is acceptable. Putting up shots of those naked people is not. Asking somebody else if she IS naked is straight out.
Try not to use profanity, or even used "softened" swear words - that business where some of the letters have been replaced by asterisks, as if that fooled anybody. If you're getting so worked up that you feel the need to swear, step back and ask yourself if this little board is the place for what you want to talk about. As I've said, this is not an official Burning Man forum; community complaints are better handled through ePlaya, where the general public can see the discussion and the accused parties have a better chance of knowing if they need to defend themselves.
Conservatism is OK. Liberalism is OK. Opposition to affirmative action is OK, if off-topic on most of the boards. Support for racism or any other kind of real (and unprovoked) hatred is not OK, and is good for getting one bounced without a warning or any second chances, and that cuts both ways. "Reverse racism" isn't any better than the earlier version.
No advocacy of violence. Did I leave anything out? Probably, people can be so inventive when they want to do each other wrong, but I think that I've made my meaning clear.
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This is NOT an official forum « Result #74 on Feb 17, 2006, 5:29pm »
I've said this elsewhere, but just to be safe, I'll say it here. I am not a member of the Burning Man Limited Liability Corporation (or BMORG, as some like to call it), and this is not an official Burning Man board. I'm just another Burner, who set up a specialized forum for those who might be interested. DIY.
I am not affiliated with the Green Tortoise. My nickname says it all, as far as that goes.
This is not part of ePlaya or 3Playa, and doesn't try to be like either. I understand that some people take the view that the first amendment guarantees them the right to be rude and "in your face" in the locations of their choosing, and I know that some admins in some places have supported them in that, in the name of "honesty". I don't buy into that; I think that's a messed up definition of honesty.
What I expect of those who post on these boards is civility. That doesn't mean "docility" or "political correctness". If somebody is giving you heat for no good reason, feel free to give him heat right back; standing up for yourself is good for your peace of mind. If you're giving somebody else heat for no good reason, don't expect that I'll support you just because you claim to have been "offended" or because his views don't fit in with your concept of progressive politics. The standard used to define civility is this: in basic, traditional, common sense terms, are you the one pushing or the one being pushed?
This is not a democracy. All conflicts are resolved by the mod staff, unilaterally. I think that most will find that they're resolved fairly, by somebody willing to listen with an open mind to both sides, but attempts to play power politics will get you nowhere. I don't do appeasement and I have no respect for anybody who does.
The bottom line, kids, is that I'm here to have fun, not to "succeed", and if at the end of a session I'm not feeling proud of the way I treated somebody, I'm not having fun. If people can accept that and are willing to give this place a try, great. If not, I lose my mighty financial investment of $0.00. My budget may well survive the experience.
As for yourself, the only thing you're probably risking is a few minutes of sign up time. I'm going to be very, very hesitant to delete a post. I know that's wiping out somebody's work, and unlike some moderators, I take that issue seriously enough to not do such a thing lightly. TOS violating posts have to be deleted, and flaming personal attack posts will be, but merely controversial points of view, even insane points of view, aren't generally going to be reason enough for me to play censor. Getting booted from here will be hard work; getting your posts wiped will be even harder.
I think that should cover it, but if not, once you've registered you can use the private messaging system. Give me a while to pick up my messages and think about what you were uncertain about, but I will be glad to get back to you. Eventually.
No worries. It's a mellow show around this board, and I intend to keep it that way.
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Goodbye anonymity. If anybody ever wants to do something official to this guy, you all know where to send the papers.![[avatar]](http://i8.tinypic.com/24yrced.jpg)
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