Message Board Administration

Here's some thoughts on what my two and a half years at IIDB taught me about running message boards, presented in unreadable block paragraphs. Forgive me, please, but I had to get it out somehow, but I couldn't make it comprehensible.

• Given a large enough population, there will always be some people that disagree with a change in policy.
  

IIDB had long term users that had joined before the board had formally codified its current rules, and some of them considered the less restrictive environment "the good old days" and longed for the time where calling people names was allowed. They chaffed at the new rules, and some of them were eventually banned when they violated the rules too many times. Making sure that your users have a comfortable environment is key to quality moderation, but that doesn't mean allowing your long term highly recognizable users to run roughshod over new users just because they were around when times were different.

Disagreement doesn't necessarily mean disruption or argumentation either. People can be polite in their disagreement. I've seen it happen and if someone says "I can't be polite and expect you to listen to me" then you should immediately disabuse them of that notion. Politely.

Also realize that there's a difference between a few people and a vast number of people. If people start complaining and are still complaining two weeks later, that's probably an indication that the change you made isn't going over very well. It usually takes people a few days to become acclimated to significant chance. Also, if there are 200 people complaining on a website with 1000 active members, that might be another sign that you should listen to what they have to say instead of dismissing their actions as unrepresentative of the feelings of the membership as a whole. That's a large chunk, and while there are people that always complain, numbers above 1 in 10 should be considered significant.

• Moderation is intended to present a clean, comfortable environment for discussion and debate.

With all due respect to Teresa Nielsen Hayden, I disagree with her practice of "disenvowelling" posts to make them nearly unreadable. Leaving incredibly unreadable and still possibly disruptive posts to indicate where disruption occurred can still be disruptive. On blogs with comments, such as BoingBoing, Making Light, and this one I would prefer to remove the disruptive post completely. Thus, space and attention isn't granted to people that need to learn how to make constructive comments.

This is a little more complicated in a message board situation. Our policy at IIDB was to leave as much of the post as possible undisturbed and insert special "edited" marks, and that's about as much disruption as I think is appropriate. If the entire post is provocative or problematic (i.e. a rules violation) then the entire post should vanish into the ether (but the moderator must let the poster know why it vanished). That allows people to know that an edit occurred without disrupting the flow of the conversation.

Also, IIDB mods were charged with cleaning up problems with the bbcode tags, especially the quote tags, which a lot of boards don't do but certainly contributed to the professional appearance of the board.

• Privacy relates to the personal and private information of users and everything else is simply a courtesy.

I first saw this become an issue at CF, where it caused huge problems in interactions between the staff and the general membership, but it had started to become an issue at IIDB when I was dismissed. IP addresses, real names, locations and anything else that the staff may be able to learn about someone through their higher level of access should be protected as "private." Anything else that is protected by the board's privacy policy is just a courtesy that the board provides according to the environment that the board wishes to cultivate. I would say that staff members shouldn't talk about infractions/warnings and edits required by users publicly unless those same users give you permission to talk about them, but that is up to the owner's discretion.

Under no circumstances, though, should staff have "privacy" from the users. Anything said about a user in staff forums, or pretty much anything said in a staff forum at all should never be considered "protected."

As soon as staff needs "privacy" in which to operate, problems occur. At CF, the staff cited privacy to cover themselves when they made mistakes and obfuscate issues in which they were clearly in the wrong. People couldn't defend themselves against unfair warnings delivered by abusive and factionalized staff members because the reasons behind the warnings couldn't be discussed with the person that had incurred them without breaking "staff privacy" even when the warnings were technically "official" correspondence.

• Promote staff due to competence, not ideology.

There is a certain acceptance of the goals of a message board that is necessary for a user to make a good staff member but I would much rather have someone calm and collected that can enforce the rules with equanimity that disagrees with me on who should be the next president of the United States than a hot head that thinks exactly what I think and enforces rules emotionally. IIDB was usually very good about this, but I did see the occasional problem with some staff members who seemed to be think that their rank gave their political opinions extra weight.

One of the requirements for inclusion on IIDB staff was the ability to let insults and personal comments slide off. If a staff member got mad or upset every time someone called them incompetent, then it wouldn't be long before someone upset them. When people are angry and emotional they make mistakes and so you shouldn't be moderating someone that is personally calling you a name, but you shouldn't let it get to you either.

A minor part of this emphasis on competence has to be a consideration of reliability. I noticed that there were a few people that handled most of the issues and could be counted upon to show up day after day, while other staff members might show up once every few days. Oddly, since input is important to being a moderator, those people that had irregular schedules weren't just holding up their own work but other people's work as well. This led to the delay in the resolution of complaints on multiple occasions.

I know that there's the old saying that the people that desire power should be the very last people that should actually have power, and that's partially true in moderating a message board. People that want to be moderators just so that can boss others around should never be promoted to those positions. In fact, I recommend making it clear that to be a moderator is a role of servitude: they serve the needs of the community. "With authority comes responsibility" to paraphrase the Spider-man movie. Be careful not to mistake people who want power with people who want to serve. Sometimes people that don't have the ability to consistently contribute discourse still have the time, ability, and inclination to moderate in order to make the message board a better place, and those people should be snapped up whenever available.

One final note on this, as much as I hate to use a phrase that's been used against me, sometimes good moderators are poor administrators. If you are having trouble with a new Admin but that person was one of the best moderators that you've ever had, consider explaining the situation and asking them to step back into their old position.

• Enforce the spirit of the rule, not the letter of it. Make this one of your rules.

If someone manages to insult someone else without actually breaking a rule, perhaps by way of comparison with something that most people wouldn't be offended by ("You are an Eagle" where "Eagle" is taken by the other person to be an insult), they've just broken your rules even if this specific instance isn't specifically mentioned in your rules.

This is a tough one, because experience with the American legal system is predicated in the exact opposite terms. Judges typically seem to uphold the letter of the law even if the result seems counterintuitive and users sometimes get upset that you are giving your moderators discretion to make their own determination of what breaks the rules or not.

This is exactly why I say that you should make this one of your rules, because each moderator action should be what the moderators understand to be a violation of the rules, not necessarily something that the violator understands it to be. I have my own understanding of trolling, and if I say "no trolling" then people could argue endlessly about what that prohibits or permits. However, this leads directly into the next point, which is:

• Allow moderators autonomy but review their actions.

Moderators shouldn't have to wait to do things. The absolute worst case of this is also derived from CF, where at one point you needed at least two people to sign off on any moderator action before the post was edited. I've heard unconfirmable rumors that at one point you needed two moderators and a supervisor before any action could be taken. Whether true or not, forcing currently active mods to wait for input before allowing them to edit problematic posts only cripples their ability to do their job.

Ideally, you should have a certain amount of trust in your moderators. Instead of waiting for multiple other people to weigh in, they should be able to take action as soon as they find a suspect post.

However, this doesn't mean that first impressions are always the correct impressions. I once edited a series of insults in a thread that I hadn't been closely monitoring only to find out that the insult had really been intended as a light-hearted jest. It wasn't the person who'd said the insult that complained about my edit, it was the person who'd been insulted. He was upset that I'd interrupted their friendly back and forth. When I re-examined the situation I found that the supposed insult really was clearly not a violation of our rules, and I reversed my edit and apologized.

Even though in the above example the insulted party complained, the first people that should be reviewing the moderator's action should be the other moderators. At IIDB, we had multiple moderators assigned to each forum, and they would review each others actions if they weren't quite sure that they'd done the correct thing. If they can't agree, that's when the Admins should step in and review the situation.

At IIDB if a moderator saw something problematic, such as a blatant insult or a copyright infringement, they could edit it as soon as they came across it. If you choose the correct people, you shouldn't have to worry that most actions are approved by handled by a single person. After all, if you can't reliably count on your moderators, then why are they moderators?

• Have a simple and clear way to complain or challenge moderator actions and never ever penalize anyone for using it.
  

Again, IIDB did this fairly well, especially for the first year and a half or so after I joined. There was no required format, only the requirement that you needed to provide a link to the post or thread that you were complaining about.

Once a complaint had been made, the other moderators of a forum would review the edit, and an uninvolved moderator of the same forum, or rarely an administrator, would provide a response. Now CF has moved to a completely transparent process where moderator deliberations can be seen but I don't necessarily think that's the better way to handle it because it can distract from the topics of conversation on the message board. As long as a board is well administrated (by which I mean run by people that understand that moderators can make mistakes which need to be corrected, and that prevents mods from forming cliques of moderators working together for mutual protection and support) I don't think that absolute and complete transparency is necessary to maintain a fair and working complaint system.

Granted, at the end of my experience with IIDB, this system had broken down mostly because there was no one overseeing it. In the ten days that I administrated IIDB two cases were brought to my attention of complaints slipping through the cracks, and more appeared to be on the way. However, when the system was working, it worked very well.

• Within reason, document everything.

When any edit is made, no matter how clearcut the violation is, the original text and state of the post needs to be documented somehow. When I started at IIDB as a moderator we used user notes to document any edit made by a moderator. Later we used the infraction/warning system that was inherent to vBulletin which had the added benefit of sending a PM to the user letting them know that they'd been edited.

There are always cases where this may be superfluous. If all a moderator is doing is correcting the formating tags of a post, I don't think that requires documentation. However, any time actual words are removed from a post, or a post is removed from place, that requires some note on what was removed and the reason why.

If a mistake has been made, or the other moderators or the administrators have determined that no rules were broken, the post should be restored with all possible haste, and the only way to do that is if the text of the post is saved somewhere.

• Term limits for moderators suck. Term limits for administrators are mandatory. (Only at big boards)
  

I haven't clearly differentiated between moderators and administrators, so let me do that here. Moderators are the people that handle the day to day work of editing posts, issuing warnings and infractions, and spend a lot of time on the public forums. Administrators are those people that make the decisions about what the rules are, how they are enforced, and they're the people a user would appeal to in a last resort for relief from an abusive moderator.

Moderators usually moderate forums that they love, and are invested in the topic. In my experience at IIDB, at busy boards administrators tend to have their favorite topics and forums as well, but they spend most of their working time in the staff forums making sure that things run smoothly. Or they should be doing that.

What that means is that moderators often have an emotional investment in the forums that they moderate, and if you were to remove moderators with term limits you would be removing the people that care most and are most knowledgeable of the forum subject. My experience at CF and IIDB has led me to believe that the administrator job is different. Administrators often don't have as much of an emotional investment in running the board as they do to contributing to it.

Eventually, when Administrators drift away and stop performing their duties, they tend to become entrenched. This happened all the time at CF, where the number of Supervisory moderators, Admins, and super-Admins eventually rivaled the entire number of moderators. At IIDB, some administrators reached that position and eventually stopped regularly contributing. Unfortunately, at that point, they had no one to review their activity or behavior and they would enter a fugue state where they wouldn't be contributing but they couldn't be removed either. Term limits, or perhaps just a non-staff governing body that reviewed the Admins could have prevented that from happening.

This doesn't make sense at smaller boards because usually they are privately run and the administrator is also the owner of the board. However, for large boards catering to large segments of the population such as CF and IIDB, making the top positions change is usually necessary, especially if:

• A council of equals should administrate your large board.

Erwin, the former owner and webmaster of CF, had almost no time to focus on the things that needed his attention because he did everything. Not only was he in charge, he did the programming, maintenance and set policy for most of his ownership of the forum. CF, with thousands and thousands of active members at a time was simply too large to controlled by a single person.

However, when things on the administration side went wrong (and they always go wrong) things had to be approved or fixed by Erwin which meant that he'd get slammed when he went online. And he was a busy guy, so he wasn't always online and things would take weeks or months to deal with.

At IIDB, the Internet Infidels Board of Directors created a circle of seven equal Administrators to run the board. Major policy changes were sometimes approved by the board, but the rules were written and enforced by the Admins, and they were the last resort in appeals.

A system like that is designed to prevent one person from getting too uppity. Major changes require votes, but the Admins can handle the more common administrative tasks on a medium to large message board by themselves, which means that no one is going to get overwhelmed. Just like the moderator actions are reviewed by other moderators, the administrators can review each other's work if there is a problem.

• People have different senses of humor.

I suppose that just thinking about this, I could shorten it down to "people are different" because that's certainly true. However, as it relates to message boards, I think that humor is a more important quality to be taken into account.

The upshot of this is that sometimes someone will say something intended to be funny which comes out completely wrong. I've definitely said the wrong thing and the wrong time and had my head nearly snapped off by upset users/moderators/admins. In the sort of situation where no one's really at fault, instead of telling someone "YOU BROKE A RULE, OMG!!!" it's much more effective to discuss the post with the person that's offended and the person that made the offending post.

Most good users (i.e. people with an ounce of compassion) will understand this implicitly and sometimes even agree to edit themselves or personally apologize to the offended party. Sometimes the offended person will calm down once they realize that what was said wasn't intended to be mean/nasty/rude. And if they don't understand, then you'll know that they're probably trouble makers that may need some further attention.

Oh, right, I forgot this when I proposed the "enforce the spirit of the rules" bulletin point: Enforcing the spirit instead of the letter of the rules means sometimes not enforcing the rules. After all, the rules are intended to provide a clean and comfortable place for discussion of the issues and sometimes you can bend a rule if its relevant to the conversation. Ask your moderators to recognize that sometimes the enforcement of a rule isn't necessary, but if they aren't sure to bring the matter up with other moderators and administrators to ask for their feedback.

• If you aren't having fun, then you're probably not doing it right.

There are a few odd people out there that can't deal with online socialization, and obviously this point doesn't apply to them, but running a message board is fun. If it isn't fun, then you're doing something wrong and you (and possibly your admins and mods) may suffer from burnout.

The most common problem I see that tends to lead to burn out is the driving need to make sure that you get everything done right now! You don't. If you're facing an overwhelming amount of work find more people to help Administrate and search for more good moderators to help them deal with their forums. More people equals more fun, as long as they're competently doing their jobs.

Besides, there's nothing special about the number 7. If you run CF maybe you need a group of 11 Admins or maybe 21. Maybe they do need to be divided into teams of administrators to deal with different sections of the board, but be careful. Large bureaucracies can turn a little bit of poor leadership into huge honking messes. The people at the top need to be the best of the best, regardless of what they believe. They need to be able to coordinate dozens and sometimes hundreds of people and make sure that they're all on the same page and getting work done at multiple levels. This is where you need dedicated HR people, dedicated moderator trainers, and a Super-Admin group, all of which can be interesting jobs, but need to be carefully watched.

Remember though, if you can't trust the people that run the site, you'll have problems. This is where its especially important to promote due to competence and not seniority because the temptation will be there. You'll certainly have people that will get upset when they're passed over for positions but you have to remember that these people don't deserve the positions, they earn them.

Finally:

• Any message board staff other than the owner are there to serve the interests of the users and the board, not the other way around.

This is sort of a big deal, and it has definitely been touched on before under "promote due to competence." CF eventually had people in powerful Super-Admin positions that took those positions not because they wanted to do them or were good at them but rather because they liked the feeling of superiority that they had over all of the normal members.

The didn't realize that Administrator is actually the lowest position on a message board. Yeah, it's an exclusive position and it offers a lot of benefits, but it requires mounds of hard work in the guts of the system, often dealing with angry people and upset moderators. It's hard and emotionally draining, and if you aren't up to dealing with all the pain and tough decisions you really don't want to get involved with it.

Administration means that you see everything, including all the worst facets of people. You'll deal with almost all of the porn, spam, fights between friends, stalking and internet spats that occur on the site. Every move that you make will be questioned and examined for a deeper meaning. People will consistently fail to treat you nicely.

And through it all, you need to remember that your position exists to serve the people that treat you like crap.

Uhg, IIDB Drama Llama

So, what went on today during my last eventful day as Admin at IIDB?

Today, one of our long time users and a Board Member was removed from her post and banned, and I was relieved of my duties as Administrator. I believe that both of these actions were problematic considering the IIDB charter. Below you will find my version of what happened from my perspective.

To begin, Janice (EverLastingGodStopper), who has a heart in the right place, told me that she was going to be voted off the Internet Infidels Board of Directors (sometimes referred to hereafter as "the Board").

This wasn't completely unexpected, because she'd been having problems, primarily with Michael (The Other Michael) and Scott (Maverick, also the II President). She'd already told me about how they didn't like it when she decided to go ask former IIDB users for their opinions on Board of Director matters.

I partially understand that. After all, most of these former users are banned at IIDB. However, this also includes a lot of long term users who put a lot of work into IIDB and were banned because they eventually racked up slews of warnings or user notes, and might have some good suggestions. Some of these people now run their own message boards, and might have insights from that as well.

Janice though, has more than twice the posts that I do and has been a user since 2002, and has invested a lot of time and energy into both Internet Infidels and IIDB. She's previously told me how upset she would be if she was kicked off the board because she cares so much about her secular activism.

Maybe twenty minutes, she was removed from the Board, and it was clear because they removed her "Board of Director" Access and custom user title. She posted twice that she had been removed from the Board, once in the fund raising thread that she'd been tending and once in the lounge.

These weren't big huge "I'M LEAVING AND U SUCK" posts that some times happen when a long time user leaves a message board. The first just noted that she was no longer a Board Member, so someone else would have to take care of tending the fund raising drive. The second one just noted that a line had dropped from her secular community "signature" because she'd been dropped from the Board. She didn't even start a new thread.

This is where bad things started to happen. Janice was very much well like, and even though I haven't always gotten along with her, there are a lot of users that care about her. One of the moderators got, well, very upset about her departure. It was pretty obvious that she'd been talking to Janice through IIDB's Private Message system because she seemed to have a pretty good idea of what Janice was saying.

Now, Mike and Scott are respectively the IIDB liaison to the Board of Directors and the President of the Board. Even in the ACR, neither Mike nor Scott originally commented on why she had been removed from her post. When it became clear that this was going to become a big deal, Scott eventually offered a vague post about previous mistakes Janice had made. Considering the furor that the recent banning on one of our long time contributors, Red Dave, made, it was obvious that without a more substantiative response, the issue was going to become problematic.

Michael's response to this upset Mod was very cold and dismissive, and it was immediately obvious to me that he was quite angry. So I quoted both the upset Mod and Michael and told them to calm down and be civil to each other. This all took place in the Moderator Conference Room (MCR), which is outside of the view of most of the users.

Now, Scott removed the first post Janice made after she was removed from the board right away. While the Board owns us, it has always been my understanding that the Administrators run the day to day operations of IIDB, and while they have Admin powers, they don't typically interfere with moderation. I didn't reverse his deletion, but I did point out that there are Admins on, and that we have a chain of command for a reason. At some point, I even pointed out that if he wanted us to take action, he could tell me what he wanted, and I would do it for him.

Then I got a PM from Michael absolutely fuming about me asking him to calm down in the MCR, entitled "Back Off." He told me that my action was out of line (although all I'd done was ask that everyone calm down) and at the end he said "Please indicate that you understand this." I interpreted this as a threat to my position. I wrote a response, again asking him to calm down, and pointing out that his response to the upset moderator was not going to improve the situation.

Soon after this, Michael removed Janice's second post out of sight. Around this time, I also noticed that Janice has been banned completely from the site.

In the ACR, I pointed out that, as per my understanding of what it means to be an Administrator, I should have been asked to vote on the banning of one of our users. I quoted a section of the IIDB charter that pointed out that all users are entitled to fair treatment, and that I don't believe that this has been the case in Janice's banning. Given her emotional state, she did not overreact, and there was no reason that I believe that she should have been banned. At no point today did she break any site rules, which is our condition for membership.

Michael then sent me a PM response to his "Back off" private message about how he was in charge of the Board, and that what he says goes. I tried to respond to this PM, but found that I had been removed from my position as an Admin. This means that due to my smaller PM box, I am no longer able to send further PMs.

This is, and has never been my understanding of the function of the "Board liaison" or IIDB Administrators. In the ACR's thread, "Administrator duties" thread, it specifically says that actions taken by the Administrators are done by consensus. Never before had I seen mention that the Board liaison had complete and utter control over the board, and control and administration over the other Administrators.

It has always been my understanding that Administrators should work together as a group, and calmly reach decisions together, to prevent single Administrators from doing exactly what Michael has; taken absolute control of the entire board in the heat of emotion. We have always struggled to remain impartial and fair. I believe that Janice's ban and my removal as Administrator are in direct violation of these principals.

I am a long time user of IIDB. Prior to being made Administrator, I was a Moderator-at-Large for several months, and prior to that, I was a moderator of various forums for more than two years. As an Administrator I have taken the initiative to clean up the Administrator Conference Room (ACR), reorganize and solicit real world contact information for our Moderators, keep both the MCR and ACR up to date. Additionally, I think that you will find that I am well respected among the IIDB moderation staff.

I am greatly upset by today's actions. It is my hope that I will be able to rejoin the IIDB Administration staff, but if Michael's assertions that he has absolute control over IIDB are correct, I am afraid that IIDB is not the organization that I thought it was.

Otherwise, it would have been my honor to continue to serve the II Board of Directors as an Administrator of IIDB.

My best wishes to all.

Spherical Time
former Administrator and Moderator of IIDB

Changes

I'm home from Viable Paradise. It was a lovely time, although I wish I'd stayed a little longer on the island. I woke up late my last day because I thought I was staying an extra night, and so I never did get around to swimming in the ocean.

I think I got a lot of good advice. Not only on Colony, the short story that I submitted, but on my book as well.

One of the best parts of the conference though was meeting the staff and listening to their stories. I "studied up" by reading a few volumes of "The Year's Best Sci-Fi/Fantasy" edited by a few different editors. I'm not exceedingly well read in Spec Fiction, but I definitely try, and I recognized more names than I thought I would.

It helps that a lot of the craziest stories were about Steve Brust, who I've found out is not only one of today's legendary genre writers, but a really awesome and crazy guy.

A few of my reactions to the instructors:

TNH: Hilarious. And super nice. And I'm her slave. She knows why. I worship at your awesome feet.

PNH: Someone told me not to be taken aback by Patrick, and not to think that he didn't like me if he was quiet. I didn't find him off-putting at all, he was always very nice to me. He's got this really interesting accent, a drawl of some kind. I've been thinking about it, but I haven't yet figured out where it comes from.

Laura Mixon: I need to read your book, but I also think that your storytron project looks very interesting, and I can't wait to see what comes out of it.

Steve Gould: Only a few days after the conference, and I have now read everything that he's written. Reflex is so good that I want more. The movie based on Jumper also looks good (although he says that they've changed the premise of the movie so completely that it's a completely different work).

Cory Doctrow: Okay, okay, I'd never heard of him before VP. Here's a funny story though. Traveling back through New York City, I went out to a party at a bar in downtown Manhattan with some friends. I just so happened to run into a gay geek at this party, and his name helped me get his phone number. Awesomeness. And he had a British accent. More awesomeness. I am in debt to him for the geek cred that your presence at VP has gifted me with.

James McDonald & Debra Doyle: The two of them have some of the most interesting writing anecdotes that I've ever heard. I could listen to them talk for hours.

Elizabeth Bear: What to say about Bear? She's got so much energy that it's hard to understand how it's contained in just one human figure. I have the feeling that if I poked her with a pin she would explode with creativity, leaving little bits of characterization and plot all over the walls. That description doesn't even do her justice because despite her geekiness I think she was one of the coolest people at the conference.

The only problem that I had with the conference is that I was sick for most of it. When you're only getting five hours of sleep every night, it's nearly impossible to get over a cold.

One of the highlights of the conference for me was the reading of Shakespeare's Richard III (I was Edward IV and the Duchess of York, incidentally). I'm trying to post some YouTube videos of the end (I'm not in it, unfortunately), but I'm having some trouble. If I get them up, I'll add a link here. (Note: February 08 and the video's still aren't up. I tried, and tried, and failed.)

I return home, and what's waiting for me in my inbox? An invitation to join the IIDB Administrative staff. I accepted, of course, and spent two days trying to get caught up on the new workload, and it's immense. The changes between being a moderator and being an administrator are significant. I still think they should divide up some of the responsibilities so that no one person has to cover quite so much terrain.

Still, this is a position that I've been working toward for a long time, and I'm very much excited by it. Hopefully I can make a positive difference to the site.

Incidentally, in his "How to blog" lecture, Cory mentioned that you should give blog posts more descriptive names, so I'm considering being more expressive about my post titles. No more one word titles . . . er, after this post, that is.

What's Happening

Yeah, I know I haven't updated recently, but then again, I know that those of you that read this aren't going to see it soon anyway.

What's been happening? In no particular order:

Well, I'm doing better. I'm mostly off of the neck brace now, but I'm still in physical therapy twice a week.

I'm worried about Viable Paradise. I don't really have the money to go, so it's going to be interesting paying off the debt that I'm going to have since I don't make enough money to cover my bills anyway.

The summer's beautiful. We've been getting some rain and some thunder storms, which are beautiful and stunning and everything that summer in NM typically is. Now that I'm thinking of leaving for good, I'm apparently going to miss this place something fierce.

The dogs are both getting very old. I'm worried about them. My dad's not doing too well either, and I'm worried about him too.

I have a crush on another cute internet boy. This one is straight, which fits right into my comfort zone. His name is Jamie Stroud, and he's a gymnast/martial artist from Cali. He's also a member of the Unification Church. Considering my interest in comparative religion, I find that awesomely cool, and I want to go ask him all sorts of questions about it.

Also, he's hotter than hell. *Cough* (<---Link removed due to brokenness, Feb 08)

I'm going to see Elliot in September when I go to Viable Paradise, which is going to be awesome. I'm going to finally bring him my "real" wedding present, which differs from the "from the heart" present that he already has.

Ah, right, I had a sort of mental breakdown about two weeks ago. I'm on prozac again, and I'm wondering about my mental health. I wish I didn't have problems. I wish I could be not-depressed like other people, so that I wouldn't have to be depressed about being depressed. Ah, the vicious circle.

There have been some interesting happenings on CF and IIDB. No promotion for me yet on IIDB, but they've allowed some non-Christian mods on CF for the first time. Raven got one of the positions and I'm rooting for her. Go Raven!

Oh, duh. I got the last Harry Potter book, and I saw the most recent movie. The movie was very good, the book was just good. Don't get me wrong, I liked the book, and I thought the ending was appropriate and in line with the entire theme of the series. However, the editing was poor. There were several internal contradictions that a careful editor should have fixed revisions ago.

(At this point, I'll warn you that there are spoilers in the next paragraph for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, although hopefully by the time its published you'll have read the book for yourself.)

Also, there's some interesting speculation on the religious nature of this last book. Yeah, there's the Calvary walk, the death, the resurrection, and even the crucifixion, but I still see lots of non-religious themes in the book. Some of the ones that strike me at this particular moment are Harry's reliance on his friends, the utter lack of betrayal that he suffered by someone close to him, and the fact that he lives through his "death" and goes on to live happily for a long time afterward.

Now that Rowling's done with the series, I hope she does the smart thing and allows others to expand on her intellectual property. Not me, per se, but I'm sure there are writers out there that will give their left nut to contribute to a series that will automatically guarantee that their works sells millions of copies.

All she'd have to do would be approve the plots, and let a new batch of writers take over. Even splitting the profits with the new writers, Rowling's sitting on a gold mine. Look at what Tolkien's son is doing with his father's old intellectual property (And Frank Herbert's son as well).

Some writers jealously guard their intellectual property, but sometimes they fail to recognize that sometimes letting it expand under their supervision but not their direct control can be just as effective.

Finally, there are frogs or toads croaking in the riverbed, which is not a usual sound for NM.

I think that's about it for now.

On the Rigid Topic

A link on Slacktivist brought be to a series on the Orcinus blog called "Cracks in the Wall." The three parts of it are here:

I. Defining the Authoritarian Personality
II. Listening to the Leavers
III. Escape Ladders

It's a very interesting look at authoritarianism in government (from the perspective of a liberal Christian, as far as I can tell). There's a couple of points in there that sort of describe what I've encountered at CF, where facts and logic can't possibly convince someone that they're wrong.

I think IIDB wants to be the sort of "Bigger World" that the author of the blog describes, and that makes me very happy for IIDB.

Anyway, these authoritarian people are the root of the idea that people who want to be in government are the last people that you would actually want leading the country.

Leavetakings

Last night I went to dinner at my brother's house. My brother's roommate cooked, and there were a lot of people there.

My mother, my father, Makoena and I all drove down together. My brother's roommates were both there, as were both of their significant others. Marge stopped by after work, and Piper's father stopped by as well. That's eleven people, if I'm counting correctly, and two dogs.

Today my brother is driving toward California, and tomorrow (Wednesday) he'll check in at the base in San Diego. Within a few days they'll fly on a charted commercial airliner to Kuwait (usually by way of Germany) and then wait for a flight into Iraq proper.

So last night was the last time I got to see him before he ships out for Iraq.

Last time, my brother was so horribly overqualified for grunt work that they assigned him to something called Force or perhaps FORCE and his job was to drive around the city at night and break down people's doors and search their homes.

This time apparently he's going to be a sniper. He's a darn fine shot with a gun, even though he really hadn't handled one with any regularity until he joined the military. I do remember playing GoldenEye on the N64 with him back in the day, and he was an unreal shot in that game. I lost to him 99% of the time, and that last 1% happened between the time that I memorized the layout of every level and before he managed the same thing.

He's an inspiring person to watch playing a strategy game. I tend to be extremely focused on my own personal situation in video games and I don't focus on winning until after I've maxed everything else out. I tend to play on the easiest difficulty on games like Civilization and Alpha Centauri (and nearly everything else). I'd much rather be city planning than leading troops (although I suck at Sim City, bizarrely).

My brother is action oriented. He leads his troops, doesn't emotionally connect to individuals, and focuses on achieving the goals of the scenario.

Back in the day I would occasionally watch him play games like Shogun: Total War for hours. I don't have to play myself, and I don't get bored either. I simply watch my little brother's actions, and try to understand the bigger picture of the impact of the battle and why he's making the decisions that he's making.

If I ever engage in territorial dispute, I'd choose my brother to be the general of my forces.

When we were driving back home, my mother spent the entire hour crying. She tends to be a wreck when my brother leaves, and apparently this isn't going to be an exception. We tried to point out that as a sniper, my little brother will be defended by an entire team of well trained marines who's entire mission will be to protect him, but she can't find consolation that being a sniper isn't all that most dangerous that an accountant.

I get pissed off at this miserableness. I don't really understand why completely. After all, I worry about my little brother too, and I don't like thinking about it.

I think that when I see my mother in shambles, leaving the porch light on as a vigil and avoiding news, it reminds me of my brother. I can put it out of my head as long as I don't see her moping around the house and worrying to the point where she's physically self-destructive.

I get angry at her when she's like this. In the car last night I wanted to slap her and yell "Don't you think you should be strong for him?" or "He needs support right now, and crying isn't f***ing helping him." Really though, it's about me. The crying isn't helping me.

The problem is that there isn't anything that we can do to help him. We can't keep him home unless we shoot him in the leg ourselves and apparently we couldn't bring ourselves to do that to him. He won't see us anyway, so she doesn't have to be stoic for him. She can do whatever she wants, and she wants to spend all of her time crying.

So he's off to Iraq.

Last time I asked him to keep a journal, and he didn't. We got a few letters from him, which was nice, but I did buy him a really nice journal and a couple of pens before he left. He said he'll probably write more this time, and I hope he does.

One last quick aside about him, he reads when he's in Iraq. He takes Proust and Nietzsche with him, and we ship him Aristotle and all sorts of other classic works that I couldn't sludge through even if I was stranded in the Iraqi desert. I've tried, and I think the two most classic works that I've read are Catcher in the Rye and the 1001 Nights. He's a much better person than I am, and it's why someday I hope to make him President.

I'm thinking of my own leavetaking, of a sorts. I'm thinking of taking a break from online (and television). I've already been avoiding IIDB due to Stiletto's suicide, and I haven't been to CF at all this month. I don't have any formal requirements to check in at WritingForums.org, and so I could just disappear for a week. I've been thinking about it for a month or so, and it seems like a decent idea.

Oddly, taking a break from television and internet during the day would probably mean that I'd be posting here at (Myspace/Blog depending on where you're reading this) more often.

If you're reading this at the Worlds & Time blog, you may have noticed that I already added a whole slew of new buttons at the bottom of each post. If you feel like it, you should think about hitting one of those buttons occasionally. I wouldn't mind the attention. I know I act sort of shocked when someone reads my blog, but it's actually a good feeling to see that someone is paying attention. I'm thinking of slicing up an image that's not me and putting it up as my profile picture to get the sort of attention that I know that Derrick was getting (although I think that was actually him).

I'm also thinking of trying to start up a weekly feature of my fiction writing. I've been considering journal entries by Jonathan, but I think that might be too confusing unless I start his own blog, and even then there are a lot of choices that I have to make. What stage of his life is the blog from, and is he here in our time or in whatever time period I choose in the future? It wouldn't really help me unless it was in the future, and posting it online would defeat the purpose of trying to get my book published.

The other option is 'Lex and 'Lia, the adorable tormented kids living in a vampire/wereperson/witchcraft novel. I just bought the Anita Blake series but I haven't started on them yet, so that would probably fit in with my frame of reference for the next few weeks.

I'm obviously leaning toward the Lex and Lia stories. I don't know what the format will be yet, so I'll certainly have to consider that. I also want to finish the hard sci-fi short that I've been working on first. So, keep a watch for something.

In the meantime, no one else do any leaving. I want promises from all of you.

Stiletto's Suicide

It's odd. When I found out that Stiletto One committed suicide, I mailed A. on Myspace fishing for a response.

I found out around fivish, and I'm just now crying.

Obviously, somewhere in my head, I'm really fucked up by this because I'm not thinking straight.

I knew Stiletto mostly from the photo gallery thread at IIDB. I got involved with that when I was briefly a mod of The Lounge, and I've been going back ever since.

Stiletto was a cheerful guy. He liked to take pictures of himself, and so he was one of the few people at IIDB that I recognized by sight. He was a young Chinese kid who liked guns, swing and ballroom dancing. I was jealous of him because of the ballroom dancing thing, actually.

He always seemed happy in the pictures. In fact, none of the site staff had any idea that he was depressed. Even now, it seems impossible that he would be upset about anything. The one thing about him was that you couldn't get under his skin no matter what.

I've been watching the threads for hours now, and I think I've basically pieced together what happened. (See here.)

Yesterday, his roommate found a will. That was worrying so they started to look for him. They called around to places where they thought he might be. He'd just got a new handgun, so they called a shooting range but they didn't know where he was . . . or where his new pistol was.

He'd never seen the beach before. He and his best friend would talk about how sometime they should drive out and watch the sun rise over the ocean. He mentioned this to his roommate before he disappeared.

The girl that he was sort of seeing got in her car and drove out toward the nearest beach. She didn't know where he was, but she figured that she'd at least try the closest and most accessible beach.

While she was on her way, the beach patrol found Stiletto in his car overlooking the water. He'd shot himself in the head.

Stiletto One (or Stiletto Null)'s real name was Frank Chen, and he died yesterday on Carolina Beach, North Carolina. He was 21 years old.

I may have only have known you through some pictures and words exchanged on a message board, but I'm going to miss you Frank. It's bizarre thinking that there won't be any more random posts from you in the Lounge or black and white glamour pictures of you looking handsome or serious in the photo gallery.

Every time I see the "Magic Brownies?" option in a poll, I'm going to think of Stiletto.

I don't believe in an afterlife. I believe that this is the life that we have and I don't think we go on to a better place. Stiletto is gone. However, he's going to be missed by me and a lot of other people who didn't know how much he was hurting.

My condolences to his family and friends.

You need to be a member to see the IIDB threads, but if you're a member, you can click here for the notice of his death and here for the photo thread.

Update, Feb 13, 11 am. There's an article in his school paper, here.