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Subject: 
Mandroid (was: Re: Friendliest site on the Internet)
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.debate
Date: 
Tue, 24 Oct 2000 18:24:22 GMT
Viewed: 
91 times
  
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler writes:
In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Todd Lehman writes:
I don't believe it's a higher level anything, and to call it a meta-game
romanticizes it beyond the point of useful discussion.

I don't know what else to call it.  Any suggestions?

I think it's adequate simply to call it a game, without any implication of
loftier motives.  Otherwise, I would suggest (to recycle a phrase used
elsewhere) treemarking.

Ya, I meant higher-level in the math sense -- different playing field -- not
necessarily better or worse.  Meta topics -- topics about the community and
about people and how people react and behave.  Nothing wrong with that per se
as long as it's still on-topic, doesn't cause commotion for commotion's sake,
doesn't break any ToS, etc.  Anyway.


Say, do you remember "Mandroid" in RTL about 4 years ago?  I dug up a
passage from archives tonight that he/she posted -- it went like this:

  "While I empathize completely with you, surely you have been hanging
   around rec.toys.lego long enough to realize that the MAJOR FUNCTION of
   this group is the obnoxious pursuit of capitol gain."

Goodness! That takes me back--I had just started on RTL when that
unpleasantness began.  Wasn't that thread like a zillion posts long
and full of bile?

I think it was several threads over a many-month period.  Lots of upset
people.  Each thread was zillions of posts long and full of bile, yes.  One
interesting thing, looking back, was that most of the bile came not from
Mandroid him/herself but from the people he/she riled up.  I remember that
I was one of the targets one day and I got pretty riled up.  The whole thing
generally got pretty ugly -- uglier than I'm guessing most people could even
imagine if they haven't seen heated flamewars on Usenet before.  As a side-
effect, some people even turned against one another temporarily when they
were defending each other or free speech, etc.  It was bizarre to watch
unfold.  Yet it still wasn't half as bad (in size) as some of the religious
flamewars can get in some of the technical groups.  (Mac vs. Windows, Linux
vs. FreeBSD, emacs vs. vi, KDE vs. GNOME, etc.  :-)


p.s.  Did Mandroid ever tell anyone his real name?

I never saw it, though he might have dropped it in somewhere.  I wonder
whatever became of him...

I would imagine he(?) is still around, somewhere...  IIRC, the general
consensus at the time was that he was there to troll and was a very
disturbed individual, but also that he was fully capable of rational
thought and clear writing.  So he could even be here now and we might
not even notice.

--Todd



Message is in Reply To:
  Friendliest site on the Internet
 
(...) I think it's adequate simply to call it a game, without any implication of loftier motives. Otherwise, I would suggest (to recycle a phrase used elsewhere) treemarking. (...) Goodness! That takes me back--I had just started on RTL when that (...) (24 years ago, 24-Oct-00, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)

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