You can’t blame Cory for thinking the maneuver was homophobic since, hmmm, isn’t it a coincidence that he was censored and removed immediately after a post in which he mentions his sexuality? With no warnings whatsoever that people were hating on his posts?
And who cares about the capitals and apostrophes? You can’t read his content through his style of writing? He specifically wrote like that to stand out in the blog feed.
His was a fun blog, and this community has proved to be nothing different than the elitist losers on World of Warcraft.
Use whatever you want as an excuse, it looks like homophobic censorship by uncomfortable people to me.
Oh, so it’s either because you want your text to be hard to read or you’re trying to stand out in some strange way. Either way, you should understand that it never endeared you to anyone. If you write illiterately, people will assume you’re illiterate.
Well, apparently someone did. And you overreacted so much that my impulse was to reply with full-force sarcasm. It wasn’t very nice of me, and I apologise for doing it that way. So we both overracted.
I do believe you’re a rebel without a cause.
This is exactly the kind of thing I mean about overreacting. I’m just a regular user, and I don’t come to this forum to watch posts about “wtf is up with the dance at bing crosby”, but I can deal with that. But overreacting so much to criticism, and to start insulting left and right, and throwing a tantrum?
I’ll be the first to welcome you with open arms when you change your attitude, and until then I’ll be glad to hold the door open for you to leave.
I stopped reading Letters From Lorthayn after a couple of posts, since the style was just too tiring for me. I know I’m not the best person to talk about English literary style, since I’m not a native speaker – yet I’m quite sure I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
The thing is, though, that I assumed that ezfreemann was a new not just to IF-blogging but to the IF-community in general, and so he would, after spending some more time surrounded by this discourse, modify his style to better suite the community. I never assumed the man was somehow less intelligent, I just thought he wasn’t familiar with the fairly strict norms that differ from those of “ordinary” discussion in the web. That’s why I was being patient about these hard-to-read posts cluttering the Planet-IF feed.
The question here is, of course, whether the norms are too strict. I personally don’t think they are. Interactive fiction is characteristically a very literary pass-time, so I think people do want to keep the community that way, too. A subject that divides opinions, I’m sure.
I’ve got to say, I’m troubled that a blog was removed without checking in with the author, and with reference to guidelines that don’t appear to be linked from the page, or mentioned. That seems like heavier modding than I expected from the aggregate feed.
Whether or not individuals find ez’s lack of capitalization and nontraditional grammar pleasing, or even readable, doesn’t seem to be the real point. I didn’t realize that there was a “chattiness” quotient, and I’m gobsmacked to learn that profanity is a monitored thing.
I don’t think all of these are inappropriate guidelines, but they’re somewhat arbitrary, and removal without prior notification or notice upon removal seems extremely harsh for rules that writers don’t know about.
That said, ez:
I cannot imagine why people might feel a little hesitant about doing that, given what’s currently on your blog.
I have no problem with the Letters from Lorthayn blog, and I enjoyed this topic which had the right title certainly. The affected text-speak annoys me but I can deal. (However, as some folks pointed out to someone else I think, there are non-native speakers reading this forum and text-speak makes it harder for them. I can read some French but I can’t read this.)
…I had more here, but gravel said it better than I before I posted, so I’ll just +1 to that. And add – when you posted your “Goodbye Cruel World” post about how the IF community is conformist etc. etc., you’d had a conflict on this issue with four people (two of whom had only offered constructive criticism or complained about your grammar). Why generalize about the whole community from that?
It’s true for me, and I’m a native speaker! (Er, English native speaker, not French.) I assume people who deliberately use text speak have weighed the pros and cons of this, although they may not realize how much extra effort I need to devote to decoding text that isn’t punctuated, capitalized, or formatted in ways that I expect. But that’s true for some of the more technical and/or academic posts as well, and nontraditional formatting isn’t entirely foreign to the literary world.
(But I should probably add flashcards on “text speak” for the foreign language I’m studying to the pile. Fantastic. More stuff to learn.)
Oh, I sort of assumed those were euphemisms for “extremely off-topic.” This is the sort of thing that might honestly be resolved by only scraping a certain tag of EZ’s livejournal for the feed.
Very true, and they are also not terribly conducive to starting a dialogue.
I don’t understand how you can think both those things. Surely the “humor” of the strip was based entirely on how offensive it was.
I suppose I could try to explain why a comic whose punchline is “HA HA RAPE” is offensive, but if you can’t figure it out yourself why should I bother?
(For the record, here’s the comic. I don’t think I’m mischaracterizing it.)
Indeed! That, coupled with my new knowledge that apparently the comic wasn’t as off-topic as I thought, is why I’ve no interest in continuing to wale on that particular transgression.
See, I had no idea it was related to IF at all, since, well, I have some sensibilities and also a short attention span for longer IF, so I’d never played The Undiscovered Country. From my perspective, having the comic show up in my usually-IF-related feed was just an off-topic-seeming slap to the face.
You two are not the new punk rock. Here’s the dialog you seem to want: writing like you’re the concussed AI of a meandering garbage skiff makes you and your buddy unreadable, not people pushing the envelope. I’m all for telling a community filled with stuffed shirts how awful they are, but white-knighting the lack of capitalization isn’t the way to go about it, f. u. cummings.
I feel guilty if I tag more than one post a week for Planet-IF. I have two forums that sometimes have threads on text games, but I don’t get them listed on Planet IF, because that’s not what it is for. Go make a forum and the people who like your stuff will be there. You can even use back-end regex to ensure that nobody uses punctuation, capital letters and paragraph breaks. Remember that the littlun’s name is Percival when the adults come to rescue all of you from the island.
Furthermore, since we’re all thinking it anyway, here’s general advice to anyone in earshot: nobody wants to see posts on Planet IF that aren’t about IF, that go into spasms of inexplicable rage or posts that otherwise fail to advance the hobby or make it more fun. It is very easy to set things up so that Planet IF only shows stuff you specifically tag. It being curated by radix is a good thing, because it stops it from becoming as awful as r*if became at the end.