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About The Barbelith #496 thread... (PICS)

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Matthew Fluxington

17:16 / 17.11.03

It's not real. I'm sure that none of you needed to be told that, but just in case you were concerned that Barbelith was really about to be taken over by Mob Hackers, you need not worry about it. We're writing a story, and I'm sure all of you who regularly read the Conversation forum (or have been involved with Barbelith in even the smallest way over the past few months) are aware of our fictional NYC adventures.

One would think that the inherant ridiculousness of our previous stories combined with the silly presentation in the #496 thread ("Lo! There Shall Be A Reckoning!") would be major hints that it was all a fiction, but Tom Coates and Nick have strong doubts about how smart/gullible the lot of you are, so I'm spelling it all out for you over here for everyone's benefit.

17:32 / 17.11.03

Yeah, but you should stop this now. I'm sick of it, it's not cool and you're making Tom and Nick drop whatever important things they are doing just to put you back in the crib. Stay in the crib, Flux! That's what the crib is for! There's nothing funny about the mafia taking over web-sites or domains being hijacked or mummies made of pashminas. I insist that you stop this and stop dragging the good name of NYC barbelith through the mud with you.

ONLY NICE THINGS

18:41 / 17.11.03

Anyone mind if I move to have it relocated to the Creation, then?

18:45 / 17.11.03

ah, you guys crack me up.

that is all.

Matthew Fluxington

18:54 / 17.11.03

Please don't move it to the Creation, since it is a conversation thread and is hardly disrupting a sub-forum intended for fluff and less-than-serious threads. It really has nothing to do with the Creation forum at all, and that's why these threads have never been there. If you moved the thread, it would wreck things somewhat. No one ever really thought that I was a Life Coach and on Oprah, right? This is not different.

Tryphena Absent

18:54 / 17.11.03

Baby leave the light on for me. Lalalalala. Lalalalala lala lalala give you all the love that you nee-ee-eedd.

Matthew Fluxington

19:09 / 17.11.03

Also: I really think that the urge to compartmentalize everything is one of the reasons this board has been so dead for so long. (Well, that and the fact that we don't let new members in.) Why do we have to have a little place for everything? It leaves out so much, and it is stifling. We need fewer borders. Why must every creative endeavor on Barbelith be relegated to the dusty old Creation forum? Sometimes it is just more fun to have things mix together - identity and fiction, fiction and reality, reality and message boards, fiction and message boards.

Why are we (or, um, three of us) so eager to stamp out every last trace of fun and imagination on Barbelith? It isn't surprising to me that the three people who are reacting the worst to this particular situation are all people who have not been active in this community lately and can rather easily be accused of being very out of touch with the current culture of Barbelith.

19:14 / 17.11.03

toooom, flux is accusing haus of oppressing him again!

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:17 / 17.11.03

Well, if it's an imaginary story, it seems to be as well fitted to the Creation as anywhere else. What you appear to be saying is that it is no fun if people do not watch you being clever with your chums, which is fair enough but a bit obvious in terms of this being a ploy for attention.

Simply put, I'm not sure why you, Flyboy, todd and Qalyn seem to be devoting so much energy at the moment to demonstrating in public that you are chums, listen to the same radio stations and read each other's weblogs. We get it. It's the sort of desperate mutual self-advertisement that I expect from some of our slower members, not people with thousands of posts under their collective belt who should probably have a better grasp of the idea of the concept of community.

People indulging at length in closed-shop, just-us injokes rather than contributing anything of interest to anyone outside their friendster list strikes me as rather a telling proof of morbidity.

Matthew Fluxington

19:22 / 17.11.03

Well, right there I think you don't really understand what we're doing. We're just making a fictional world on Barbelith, and part of it depends on it being ridiculous and contradicting much of our identities that already exist on Barbelith. There's meant to be a certain tension there. But it's a big fun story that we can do within a community site, and some people can play along, and others can just watch and read it as it goes along as an audience. It's just a weird experiment with collaborative fiction in the context of a message board, which is a bit of an uncharted territory as far as I know. I'd argue that it's the most interesting and innovative thing that's happened on Barbelith in a loooong time, but I'm biased.

Surely there's more to Barbelith than what goes on in the Headshop and posting threads about sports and personality quizes in the Conversation, right? Let us be. I don't go into your threads and wreck them, and I'd like it if some of you would step back and leave our project alone. If you don't like it, then don't read it.

Tryphena Absent

19:27 / 17.11.03

Christ I'm sick of this.

Right, fine, I've been avoiding shooting my mouth off for hours now but if you want it than fucking take it.

This is a community, people can have in jokes, it just so happens that Flux's in jokes include quite a lot of people. Not only those who know all about them but anyone who enjoys reading the damn things... like me. I didn't get it because someone told me about it, I read the thing, picked up the references from earlier threads and ran with them. I'm sorry if you lot don't pay enough attention to the board to get it but you're going to have deal with that. Why should you stop our fun or criticise it?? I know some of us read these threads and don't contribute and still want to read them. Why should it be in Creation when all the other threads it refers to have been allowed in conversation?

Finally- fuck off and play with your football thread, something so entrenched in reference that you can't join in or enjoy it if you don't already know it!

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:28 / 17.11.03

Of course. And generally these threads have been fairly harmless, and reasonably benign. This time round you managed to piss off Tom, who is one of the people who *have* been subject to threats as a result of their involvement with Barbelith, and are now going to tell us that your idea of Barbelith is better than yours, that you are on Barbelith more than us and that we are not really proper members of Barbelith insofar as we are disagreeing with you. It's going to get very dull very quickly.

What you are doing, as far as I can tell, is trying to turn a bulletin board into a MUD. It's an extended version of the ever-popular "virtual bar" or "virtual joint-smoking". Which is fine, but I would suggest not attempting to describe it as ground-breaking or accusing people not amused by your threads of being a) stupid, b) ignorant c) conservative or d) everything that is wrong with Barbelith, inasmuch as these suggestions do not come too late.

Matthew Fluxington

19:29 / 17.11.03

And yeah, having some people know what's going on and others be in the dark is a crucial part of making the project work. It's kind of like how everyone who goes to see a play isn't made part of the cast - some people get the script and have roles, and the rest can participate in their own way as part of the audience. But you don't go to improv theatre and yell at the actors and tell them that they are faking it, right? You just kind of know. Everyone was able to figure out what we were doing in the previous threads, and there was no problem. I can understand why there was an initial scare this time for those of you who have absolutely no idea what's been going on and didn't pick up on the Purple Horse thing, but it's really not anything different now that it is common knowledge that it's a big goof. Why do some people have to insist that a) some people here are gullible idiots with no ability to suss out reality from completely preposterous fiction and b) it's not fun(ny) because it bugged them at first?

Regrettable Juvenilia

19:37 / 17.11.03

Dude, Qalyn hasn't even posted in the thread in question. Let's keep this accurate. (I kinda feel my own role is also being overstated, but I don't expect people to believe that...)

And if we're being serious, then the big issue seems to be whether there's any place in the Conversation on Barbelith for humour or horseplay that does not advertise itself immediately as such. Putting an absurd topic abstract is apparently not a clear enough indicator. It is quite possible that a thread title should contain the indicator (HUMOUR) if there is going to be humour involved. Now, Haus seems to be arguing that the problem with the #496 thread is that it refers to material with which only a small number of people are going to be familiar, so perhaps we should also include the indicator (IN-JOKES). Nick and Tom, on the other hand, have objected to thread as far as I can tell because the subject matter is considered taboo: the idea of Barbelith being threatened in any sense is too close to home, even for light humour. How do people feel about this?

Matthew Fluxington

19:40 / 17.11.03

Well, obviously we have to mark everything, because apparently we're a bunch of drooling idiots around here.

ONLY NICE THINGS

19:49 / 17.11.03

I seem to recall my comment being that it was autistic and a bit dull. That was an aesthetic judgement. Not being particular interested in MUDs, on a selfish level I'd rather you were contributing something a bit more interesting and less insular, but it's your choice.

19:49 / 17.11.03

Jesus fucking Christ. Sorry really does seem to be the hardest word around here...

Matthew Fluxington

19:53 / 17.11.03

Like what? What do you want us to do instead?

I can't speak for the other folks involved, but for me this is in some part an attempt to find something new and fun to do on Barbelith since so much of the other forums have been boring me. I could either walk away, or I could make my own fun. I'm trying to do my part in making Barbelith exciting if just for a segment of the board's active population.

I think that it would be a given that not everything on Barbelith is going to interest/entertain/engage every person. Should I derail your football thread because it's not relevant or of interest to me? Should someone else muck up threads in the Head Shop or Switchboard because they aren't into it? Come on.

19:53 / 17.11.03

Well, FTR, I think Tom was a little oversensitive on this. I think that the thread was clearly a send up. Having said that, Tom does have reason to be oversensitive and I can see that while the thread and its relatives are benign, it could start to get irritating if there were lots of threads like this.

I see no indication of that, however, and I'd be inclined to leave people be. Posters here seem to be having fun and I see that as a good thing. However, I do think that the responses to Tom have been a touch insensitive. That strikes me as counterproductive, if nothing else.

Personally, I'm not a big fan. I don't really find the threads that funny and think they come across as a bit too cliquey. But so what? There are lots of threads I'm not that interested in. As long as they are harmless I don't see an issue.

19:58 / 17.11.03

Bloody hell trust me to post in the first one of these that causes a shit storm - but to be fair it's not just a 2 or 3 people that have been posting in these threads, the last one had input from quite a lot of the regular posters.

Tryphena Absent

20:00 / 17.11.03

I would like to publicly apologise to Haus for telling him to fuck off. It was a moment of rage and kind of wrong and he's okay just... Haus.

Rather more to the point I see no other reason to be sorry. This place is going to go to the shit if everyone gets upset if we mention mobsters or legal action.

We're The Great Old Ones Now

20:05 / 17.11.03

Fly:

As I said in my message to Flux, which you appear to have read, I care about this for a fairly simple series of reasons: I wasted time I didn't have to find Tom and alert him to the fact that there might be (another) problem with the board. He then investigated, found out that there wasn't, and that this was some kind of involved game/prank. Tom expressed a degree of displeasure at this, and that apparently is unreasonable. The cry is going up, as ever, "What, you can't take a joke?"

This strikes me as obviously and simply rude. If your reality game includes a threat to Barbelith, it de facto includes a threat to Tom. He's first in the firing line. Anything which has consequences for the board in general - anything which implies that anyone should be scared - must first and foremost affect him. It would have been a simple courtesy to say, in advance, that there was no real threat. Certainly, having fucked up someone's day for no particularly good reason, it seems appropriate to say sorry.

Barbelith is a community, and this strikes me as akin to ringing 999 for a laugh.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:06 / 17.11.03

As it happened, the fourth wall had been broken in that thread, Tom was upset and I was finding the whole thing a bit tedious and attention-seeking, which is what I expressed. If I had seen this thread beforehand, I might have expressed that belief here, and I am sorry I did not. However, disagreeing with Flux is never a terribly profitable game, and he is now abrading my considerable respect for him with some pretty nasty comments, which is a shame.

FWIW, once he asked me not to move the thread I was never likely to do it. That's why you ask. Likewise, since Flyboy is a moderator in the Conversation, I rather felt that the rhetorical status of the question was pretty obvious.

20:08 / 17.11.03

ok, maybe flux made an error in judgment, considering the heightened level of anxiety around here (justifiable as well as not). perhaps he shouldn't have assumed that people would read it as a joke. his method of making things right was to make a thread to explain himself and his original thread, which should have allowed the original to continue on its merry way and created discussion in this one.

I think we can all also agree that this place is LOUSY with injokes, and that often, someone is left out of the mix. I think that threads devoted to these jokes, as long as they are restricted to conversation, should be allowed to run their course. so maybe haus is being unfairly harsh by singling out the new york bunch (plus flyboy).

I can see both points, but right now I think you’ve both stated your cases pretty clearly...we're friends here, right? haus, flux, kisses, huggles, bottom pinches?

20:10 / 17.11.03

(sorry, took a bit too long writing that and posts were made after the fact...)

20:13 / 17.11.03

Well i've found 'the project' to be profoundly tedious, boring and, in short, the complete antithesis of fun. Now does that make me a drooling moron, a crybaby or simply borecore (because one cannot place oneself outside of Flux's other fun dichotomy remember).

Tryphena Absent

20:15 / 17.11.03

Oh god, I'm stepping in to shifting territory.

Look. We can't always do what Tom wants us to. I'm sorry, it's not that I don't respect him because I do, him being our benevolent and pretty sorted creator but he created a moderation system that gave us say over the board and attempted to spread the power structure. He may have been threatened by some disturbed individual(s), a few of our moderators might have been as well and that's a bad thing but why should it hang over the place to this extent? If we disagreed with Tom but just took everything he said as gospel- Tom has decreed so we shall do- we'd be pathetic and totally unworthy of being around here because I don't think that's the place he wants, he's never given that impression. He's done a good job with this place, I think we all appreciate it and I certainly don't want to seem an ungrateful bitch but he's not my god, he's a nice human being and I'm fucking treating him like another person and not my messiah (hi Tom *waves*).

Matthew Fluxington

20:15 / 17.11.03

Tom didn't investigate anything, I PM'd him immediately after his first post and informed him that it was part of our continuing story, and gave him an overview of our projected storyline.

I'll admit that it was very insensitive for me to work out this plan and not realizing that Tom may take even a ridiculous and clearly unbelievable threat to Barbelith seriously. I don't know whether that's because I wasn't taking into his feelings into account, or if I was just giving the guy too much credit. Either way, I'm sorry that I did anything to wreck Tom's morning. It wasn't my intention at all.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:15 / 17.11.03

Oh, and no worries, Tryphena. I seem to have come in late on this one. And people keep interposting, so I keep saying "indeed", "yes" and "I quite agree" to the wrong people.

This whole situation could surely have been avoided with some shrewiness. The reproachful beady eyes of the shrews would have possibly had Flux warning Tom in advance of this, or for that matter showing a bit more consideration subsequently than continuing the line in-thread, involving Tom in a narrative he clearly didn't want to be involved with, while starting a new one essentially saying "Duh! It's a game, der-brain. The shrews might also have proposed to Nick that maybe he should have talked to Flux by PM before sounding the alarm. The shrews would also have admonished me to find a suitable place outside the thread itself to comment on the whole tiresome situation, if I really had to do so.

Shrews are wise.

Tryphena Absent

20:18 / 17.11.03

It's because they're cute and don't bicker so much.

ONLY NICE THINGS

20:22 / 17.11.03

...and shrews would not have "apologised" with such bad grace and rudeness, which I sincerely hope was not the tone taken in the PM to Tom. Ah well. As I say, not a profitable pursuit.

Matthew Fluxington

20:29 / 17.11.03

Well, it was a sincere apology just now. I'm just not going to deny my concerns about Tom, that's all. It doesn't mean that I'm not sorry about making things difficult for him.

20:30 / 17.11.03

Nick and Tom, on the other hand, have objected to thread as far as I can tell because the subject matter is considered taboo

wouldnt you have avoided the whole thing by sending a PM to tom letting him know before hand?
like when you tell the city you are performing street theatre so as not to get arrested?

i dont think it is taboo subject matter, it's just that it was NOT obvious that you were taking the piss. as you have said your intention was to fool some people, and somehow you let tom be one of those people.

Murray Hamhandler

20:45 / 17.11.03

Although I'm hardly even tangentially involved, I'll apologize on behalf of the "troupe". Sorry, Tom. No harm involved.

Everyone else: Maintain a sense of humor. Please. By which I certainly don't mean that you have to find everything (or anything) in the thread funny or even the slightest bit amusing, but try not to take it so seriously. You'll give yourself ulcers and shit.

20:53 / 17.11.03

One point worth making is that I am, perhaps mistakenly, getting the feeling that Flux and others see the joke as transparent since it references previous joke material. Now while I think the #496 thread was clearly not serious, I think it is worth bearing in mind that not everyone is going to read all these threads and get all the references. So the joke will not be equally obvious to everyone.

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