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Autisanal Cheese
Nov 29, 2010

Fajita Queen posted:

This is great to hear, I am fully in favor of you guys just carpetbombing TG with probes until posting improves.

I am an occasional reader of the TG forum but yeah I have been mostly lurking because of the lack of the above. Please go harder on the buttons from now on.

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Autisanal Cheese
Nov 29, 2010

Heath posted:

I will also vouch for my own part in that Toshimo's posting (though not solely his, mind) drove me away from reading the Commander MTG thread.

I've posted in no more than four threads in TG in my 15 years on this forum, not counting this one, and in that time I've gone down to reading two of them, the Mahjong thread, in which we are all too collectively sad to argue about things and instead functions like a support group for people who play this terrible game; and, the Flesh and Blood thread, which does not see enough posts to have anything resembling drama. Outside of these threads, my experience in this subforum has been basically miserable. The cliques and cults of personality surrounding certain posters drive acceptable discussion in such a way that it is frustrating to find a way to interact with other goons in the forum in a way that doesn't have the baseline hostility of walking into a local game store with an established community of regulars and trying to patronize the place. I'm not sure if that's ironic, or to be expected.

What drove me nuts about Framboise's response to Toshimo were several things.

1) "The more I've thought about this, the less I'm willing to let it slide." Frankly, Toshimo's post was, to my eyes, plainly in bad taste at best, and in my opinion, loving ghoulish. And the only reason I was aware of it is because I happened to look at the LC, see that Toshimo got probed yet again for yet another lovely Magic post, except this time it went beyond being merely aggro and crossed the line into being actively a hateful thing to say about someone who just literally died of literal cancer, over a literal card game for literal children. Dressing it up in the idea of some kind of labor solidarity thing is, baseline, cynical bullshit. I would have sent him to the shadow realm before I even hit the end of that post, let alone the insane "good riddance." Framboise did not have that kind of immediate reaction. He needed to think about it. That demonstrates a lack of judgment, not an abundance of it.

2) Twice in the probation Framboise obliquely praises Toshimo's general ouvre, not in tone but it content. Wildly unnecessary, but the phrasing reads very much as though the punishment is reluctant, when it frankly should have been enthusiastic.

There's something of a meme about Toshimo in particular, but one I suspect plagues this whole subforum, that Toshimo is frequently fundamentally correct in his assessments about things. Framboise isn't the only one to have praised Toshimo even in the immediate aftermath of that post. People have done it so often that it's practically cliche to include a little aside about "Nah man you're basically right" when responding to him. I don't frankly think Toshimo is correct about much at all, and he's an incorrigible rear end in a top hat on top of it, way more often than is warranted by the subject matter. But nerdy gamer sorts, and goons in particular, have always been privy to a sort of social phenomenon in which the person in the room with the biggest personality and with the most forcefully passionate arguments and/or the one most willing to be confident and dismissive of others is also right, they're just a dick about it. And herein lies the problem with this forum.

It is very difficult to disagree with people about matters of opinion on this forum in a productive way. Namely, because the prevailing attitude almost always defers to the biggest personalities, and people either fall in line behind them, or else they loving leave. Which is, I think, what happens, often. People just peace out because dealing with tedious dipshits like Toshimo becomes so exhausting that it isn't worth arguing about over a children's game and there isn't the overarching sense of urgency that might keep someone invested in, say, an actual political discussion for an extended length of time. So when Toshimo is the only one left standing because everyone who might have disagreed with him hosed off, it sure looks like he's winning a lot of arguments and nobody is disagreeing with him, and thus, he's right. And the moderation, perhaps up until recently, has generally been very supportive of this dynamic. Dipshit sex pervert former moderator Podima once probed me for saying that the card Mindslaver is a poo poo card for poo poo people (and I will stand by that forever), for example, and when I asked him what the gently caress, he told me that I was "sucking the air out of the room" as though there are certain opinions one is allowed to discuss or express about the game, or that one should not be negative about it -- unless you're Toshimo and then you can do whatever the gently caress you want and be as crude about it as possible. Shortly after that I just quit reading the thread, because interacting with it in any way is tedious.

Imagine my surprise when this all goes down and I see that frankly a great deal of people outside of TG have had similar experiences trying to post here or read threads and have simply gotten exhausted by it all and left because certain personalities are allowed and encouraged to run roughshod over discussions and certainly seem to get mod sanction to do so. You have a problem, and people do not feel comfortable expressing concerns. So you get this.

I would like to add that Heath is bang on the money.

Autisanal Cheese
Nov 29, 2010

Traditional Games: where Charisma is a dump stat

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