Zseni: Warrior-Poet wrote:

What you have carved for yourself, the sum of all you are, is a single perfectly inappropriate being.

And how many people can ever perfect anything in their lives?

Not many, that's how many.

Oh god. Gutless little creep #958301 lines up for his shot at Zseni The Mighty. I like your solemn and deathlessly serious intonement, as if saying something VERY sincerely makes it inherently more incisive. I've had about enough of my fleets of miserable pedantic critics - actually I think it is no more than two people, and the chances are excellent that it is only one. But silly me, I think Kabuke Seme and Casual Observer are the same person, and them two cohabit with the dude who wrote about his jack-off escapades (the Mysterio jack-off escapade writer, I mean.)

Anyway here is a rant about anonymous criticism: I resent enormously that it is at least 90% of the responses to my posts. At this point it's automatic: I know that when I post, there will be a jackass with a new name around to lob ridiculous criticism at me. The only exception has been my Terri Schaivo rant! That's how enormous the power of my Justice Fist is: it drives off the unvirtuous, straight up.

But getting back to my rant: Believe me, I don't care what the cheap-shot-taking jackasses think my posts deserve; I am uninterested in social justice as applied to myself. What I find most objectionable is that there are so many rank cowards and unappealingly stodgy men among the Caltrops readership.

Let's take these in turn. The first is people who can't or won't bitch at me under a regular nick so that I can return fire; the effect is at this point like trying to defend a fortress under seige by hundreds of ninjas! Except they are armed with Q-tips and die as soon as you glare at them. The most annoying part is having a fortress full of ninjas and everyone else is always laughing at me at the Round Table, like, "ha ha, your fortress is full of ninjas all the time. Loser." But there's no source! It's like I built the fucking fortress on top of a ninja respawn point!! The obvious thing to do is up sticks and move the castle but.. you know... I have a lot invested in the place! I'd rather just kill all the ninjas. How do you kill thousands of ninjas?! It's so annoying. Ohhhhh how I'd love to just blast them all good and proper but they are so insubstantial. I could deal with the ninjas if people didn't keep thinking that ninjas in my fortress = bad fortress defense, because now lightweight posters keep attacking me and it always ends badly for them. I hate the loss of social cache; now that at this point the only tactic that reliably works - in that I can't come to your house and make you look dumb in front of your mother when you use it - is being a ninja in the fortress, it's getting so popular. :(

The worst part: I pushed the legislation to legalize ninjas through in the first place! It's all my fault.

Unappeallingly stodgy men: the two things that have always kept me coming back to Caltrops are that, in the first place, it is still the only forum on the whole internets where I can depend on people getting my references and, you know, reading complete sentences and all that. I've always had a tremendous amount of respect for the sharpness of the crowd around here. Number two is that it's still the best social experiment going, a fascinating and perpetually changing mobile of lightly tormented geniuses jockeying for postion. Splendid! Unmissable! Except that since Hokie Mokie, Monty Cantsin, Diotallevi, and - yes - Senor Barborito dropped out, the focus of topics has gotten narrower and, much more saliently, the spectre of "ha ha that's GAY" has come back in force. I HATE "ha ha that's GAY." Ha Ha That's Gay is intellectually sterile bridge-burning, the automatic rejection of whole fields of the human experience because of some reductio ad absurdum fault (one lightweight example was "Macross... doesn't that have SINGING in it? Ha ha that's GAY.") or because of hearsay or some other reason why nobody will touch the thing with a ten foot pole. Ha Ha That's Gay is pure schoolyard without subtlety and I despise it because it relies on social cohesion to preclude all possibility of discussion on a subject for some time into the future.

So there are several posters here who annoy me with their relatively slender field of discussion topics and zealous defense of Caltrops as a place for those topics alone. Please! Don't bore me by protesting that it's a video game reviewing website with some other stuff tangentially tacked on. I'm not interested in hearing about how I keep addressing content to the wrong audience. Never mind my general disconnection from reality. Once upon a time this was the right audience and if Hokie Mokie had started a discussion about something frou-frou like j-pop it would have become either a one-off post or a substantive discussion; if Monty Cantsin had opened up with a post about nihilism in the Democratic Party it wouldn't have been Monty and MM having a fruitless quibble after three posts followed by eight pages of lightweight insult-slinging by nobodies. But it's Zseni, with the fortress full of ninjas, and therefore inherently laughable. BombMexico has come out explicitly with throwing my nick around like an insult - Ha Ha That's Zseni.

While I do protest, violently, for this ridiculous mistreatment of one who should be the most treasured of the Caltrops regulars, I protest more about the descent of Caltrops forum culture away from the diversity heyday of OMM to the present Video Games, Autophagism, And Spit-Takes On News reruns. Please consider this a request for more gay in the forums. I made a whole forum safe for gay, but people are afraid of what I might do with their IP addresses (please see above complaint on cowardice,) so posting is spotty and infrequent at best. So more gay please and less running about like a herd and laughing at all the ninjas and whatnot. Good heavens.