THE #EARTHBOUND REPORT
The Supreme Council of Lubyland has by unanimous resolution charged me with writing a full report on #earthbound from its move to dynastynet to the present, along with areas of improvement and any criticisms.
#earthbound, which was formerly known as #starmen, moved to dynastynet late in 2001. The reasons why this move happened have been a topic of debate, so allow me to clear this up a little bit. I made the decision to move to dynastynet in consultation with a couple of my more trusted ops. SLing had first mentioned dynastynet to me sometime during the summer, as I recall it, and both he and FlatFace (mainly FlatFace) had continually bugged me to go check it out. Finally, I did, and found it to be a pretty cool server, and it seemed to be stable, and very small, which I liked. I put it on the back burner, though, because there was really no reason to move away from austnet at the time.
Well, as the autumn hit, there were two straws that broke the camel's back pretty much simultaneously: First, the quality of services at austnet took a sudden plunge. When we first moved to austnet in early 2000, the services were excellent. They very rarely split, and when they did it was usually minor and short-lived. Well, as time went on the network grew steadily bigger and the services grew steadily worse. It had always been tolerable, but as the services continued to get slowly but surely worse and worse during 2001 I began to grumble about the possibility of looking for another network, and even told a couple of people to start poking around for a good one to possibly move to in the future.
The second factor was that the severity and frequency of the lamer attacks took a sharp increase right around the same time. Lamer attacks had always been a fact of life; way back in the undernet days they were carried out mainly by non-EB community h4x0r-type dudes and were very infrequent. But after Saboten and, a few months later, godofcows went insane, then things came into being the way we think of them today. Over the months, a few others joined in that sort of thing (Ratboy, GreenTom, etc.) Anyway, time and time again I told everyone to stop paying attention to them and they would go away, which was and is true. But everyone complained and yelled long and loud at and about the lamers, which of course was giving them just the attention they wanted, so the "attacks" and etc. just kept getting worse and worse. The lamers, particularly godofcows, would love for you to believe that we up and moved just because of them, but that's only partially true. The main reason we actually sought to move to an entirely different network wasn't to evade them, it was to find better and more stable services. I never once thought that by moving to dynastynet we'd be leaving the lamers behind; I knew they'd follow us there, because we're the only source of entertainment in their otherwise depressingly dull lives, and even before the move was made I warned the dynastynet administration and opers that the lamers would be around soon.
The dynastynet administration, for its part, seemed to be tickled pink that we were moving over, and for good reason. Dynastynet was, and is, a very small network, which is kind of weird because it has EXTREMELY high-quality services. Anyway, the EarthBound community moving there represented a major increase in traffic for the network, and the admins and opers there were very friendly and helpful towards us as we got settled down there.
As part of the move to dynastynet, thanks to the wonder of customized levels for certain commands, I finally devised the system that would get rid of lamers once and for all: The channel on +i, and only people to whom I gave access could use ChanServ to invite themselves in. Initially, this was a lot of work for me, but once it was done it resulted in exactly what I had in mind: A lamer-free channel in which people could just sit back and CHAT instead of getting wrapped up in politics and mudslinging.
There was, as there is with everything, a drawback, and that was that newcomers who wanted into the chat got the short end of the stick. This is because the morons who aren't allowed in #earthbound like to masquerade as newcomers and say "hi can i come in???" Probably 9 out of 10 people who msg me saying something like this are really morons who have nothing better to do. So the vast majority of these are ignored and/or rejected... the problem, of course, is that sometimes that 1 out of 10 ends up being a newcomer who never ends up getting into the channel because of it. And believe me, I do feel bad about this. It's the price we pay for peace and security, and it's a high price, but I've chosen to pay it, and most of the chatters in #earthbound would agree with me.
So now let's get to the meat of the report. How is #earthbound? My humble opinion is that it's better than it's been since late 1999 -- the best it's ever been since the website earthbound.net became starmen.net. Yeah, it was great back in the "good old days" you hear the old-timers talk about and the new-timers complain about. But those days were before the site really grew. You have to realize that the lamers didn't just come on their own. They came with the growth of the site. The only ones that were around way back then are Napalm and godofcows -- and godofcows was a good chatter and even a good op before he went crazy. The massive growth the site experienced after it moved to starmen.net resulted in a few of the real idiots we know and love today coming around. And this doomed #earthbound.
So what choice did we have? Not a whole lot. Most people -- not all, there are quite a few that liked having the lamers around, but most -- were desperate to get rid of the morons, and a lot of people, especially ops like myself, were really sick of the awful services at austnet. So we moved, and I set up the system we have now. The basic principle of the current system is this:
#earthbound is a private chat room.
Yes, it's true! It's a private chat room that belongs to starmen.net. I run it on starmen.net's behalf, and on starmen.net's behalf I decide who to let in there. There's no one who was allowed in the channel in austnet who I didn't let in the channel after we moved to dynastynet. NO ONE. Everyone who isn't allowed in now that was allowed in before did something stupid to lose their privelage. I would like to preach again on how chatting in #earthbound is a privelage, not a right, but it's been done a million times before and if you don't realize that by now you never will. That being said, there is probably a fair amount of honest newcomers who have been excluded because of the system that's been set up, and for that I'm sorry. The fact of the matter is that the evolution of starmen.net forced the chatroom into the system it uses now.
Tomato has advocated for quite some time now cutting the chatroom off from the site, rather than running the private one we have now. reidman refuses to let this happen; he firmly believes the chat room is a vital part of the site. I think the only real purpose #earthbound serves is to move some of the pervasive pointlessness away from the forums and let people air it out there. Let me state something that will probably surprise a lot of people: I agree with Tomato that the chat should be cut off from the site. My reasoning is as follows:
First off, I don't believe the site is benefiting at all from being connected to #earthbound, but that it DOES have costs. What does it gain? One could argue that it gains a sense of community, and one might be right about that -- I think there is a little bit of a stronger bond between most of the people who are in #earthbound. However, I do not think this is because of #earthbound; I think it's because most of the people who go there know each other fairly well anyway, and get along well on the forums. Look, whether you realize it or not, the starmen.net community (it no longer should be called the EarthBound community; that died years ago) is full of cliques. Schools are full of cliques; workplaces are, too. Congress has cliques all over the place. So do the Milwaukee Brewers. Cliques are a social fact of life, and starmen.net, I've found, is a nearly perfect representation of the real world (which is something most people don't realize.) So the feeling of "community" or whatever, it seems to me, isn't affected much by #earthbound's existence. What other useful purpose could the channel hold?
On the other hand, #earthbound has definite costs. Bickering. Complaining. Whining and moaning. The forums get the short end of this deal. Every few days, you see some lamer post on the forums "ZETH IS A (censored) COMMIE NAZI HE WON'T LET ME IN LET'S HAVE A REVOLT", or some such thing, and it tends to degenerate into either a) pointless, stupid posts, or b) a totally unnecessary, violent argument. Does the site really need this stuff? The forums are in bad shape as it is -- beginning with the fact that no one runs them and the moderators don't do their jobs -- and they don't need this additional stuff. (I realize the forums are a LOT more work than #earthbound is; I know this because I ran them for a period of time too, when they were maybe 70% as active as they are now. But if anyone ran them with the dedication with which I run #earthbound, they'd be a WHOLE heck of a lot better off.)
One more thing: If #earthbound WERE cut off from the site, I wouldn't close it, by any means; it would stay under the same system it's under now. However, I'd be a LOT more lax about letting people in, letting every alleged newcomer in and just kicking them back out later if they turn out to be a lamer,) I'd drop the no-mild-swearing rule (which I only enforce these days because starmen.net IS, and increasingly so, a site that caters to kids,) I'd quit worrying about ops being lazy and stupid stuff like that.
But as I mentioned before, reidman does NOT want to cut #earthbound off from the site. And I realized a long time ago that reidman knows a lot more about these things than I do, and more than Tomato probably does in this case, so I trust his judgment. And I continue to run #earthbound on the behalf of starmen.net. Why, a lot of people ask, do I run it if I make it out to be so much work? Well, here's the thing: it's really NOT that much work. Yes, it's a major time commitment, but I don't mind that as much as I used to, because it's fairly fun to chat in there now. But no, especially now that the idiots are (mostly) gone, it's not that much actual work. And I do enjoy running #earthbound. If I didn't enjoy it anymore, I would have left it go a long time ago. And the final point here -- nobody believes me when I say I'm the only one who can run #earthbound adequately, and that's absolutely true.
I'm not trying to take on a big head here (although some people will say that I am, that I'm just an egomaniac and etc. etc.) I think I'm pretty qualified to run the channel, with vastly more experience than anyone else. I think the only person who could do a better job is reidman himself, who obviously doesn't have the time for such a thing. And let me say this, too: I've made a LOT of mistakes in the past, some worse than others, some that have seriously hurt #earthbound. But I learned something from each and every one of them. It was a mistake to keep and maintain a long, detailed list of rules. It was a mistake to keep giving obvious career morons second and third and fifth and ninth chances. It was a BIG mistake to turn #earthbound into some kind of political model. Yes, I'm at fault for #earthbound dissolving into complete politics over the past two years. I've fixed that now, the politics is gone. But #earthbound suffered greatly because I played political games with it, even when I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing. I took it waaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously in the past; even after I claimed I realized my mistake, I made it again. But not a third time.
For those of you who are #earthbound veterans, just ask yourself: How is the channel doing? Aren't I doing a pretty decent job with it? When you're done doing that, I'd appreciate any input you can give me. Email me and let me know what you think. If you think there's room for improvement in how I manage things, now's the chance to let me know.
I have a reputation for ignoring and cold-shouldering pretty much everyone; it's obvious to see how I earned it. I get msg's every day from people who were long ago banned from the channel who just keep whining and whining and whining; I ignore them. I don't use the /ignore command, I just don't look at the /msg windows. But I do pay attention to people who are trying to tell me something. When people are complaining on the forums and stuff, or even in the channel, I usually don't comment on it, but I almost always do read and think about it. I'm not the mean-spirited, ignorant person most of you think I am. I try my best to be thoughtful and honest, and I honestly believe I'm doing the best job I can with the channel. If you disagree, tell me how it can be improved, and if I don't think you're right about that, I will explain why. I don't have, and never have had, anything to hide.
NOTE TO LAMERS: You know who you are. Don't bother. I'll still be ignoring your msg windows and I'll still be deleting your emails.
Do you want to know the sad truth? The lamers, the idiots who hate me, will probably read this article a lot more closely than most of you will. Most of you will probably skim it, and if you do skim it, then you have no right to complain about the channel. So don't come to me complaining that I don't pay attention to you; I've spent a long time here writing all of this, and you didn't play attention to me.
Yeah, I realize I come across as nasty, bitter, all of that. Some of you understand why that is; most of you don't. My job requires a certain amount of cutthroatness. I have to be able to just ignore things, shut things out, to avoid going crazy (this is something I learned because I HAVE gone crazy, twice, and it won't happen a third time because I've learned how not to.) I don't care about things that simply don't matter. It doesn't matter to anyone that lamer X thinks he deserves a twelfth chance; I ignore it, and most of you ignore it. A lot of people get really irritated at me when they tell me something or ask me something and I respond with "who cares?" or "makes no difference," which happens often. Well, I realize that's a pretty rude thing to do sometimes, and I'm trying to change it, at least a little bit. But realize that I'm not really trying to be rude, that's just my personality. If I don't think something matters, I'll tell you. So here, for your convenience, is a list of things that don't matter:
earthbound.net doesn't matter. godofcows and Captain Napalm and Saboten and Saturn2K don't matter. I don't matter. Luna doesn't matter. It makes no difference to you whether or not waffy is an op or whether or not SLing is doing his job as an op. (If people minded their own business instead of someone else's, what a great world we'd live in.) Zipcode Ness doesn't matter. The fact that you hate the people who post 100 useless things a day on the forum doesn't matter. The fact that you hate Buzz-Buzz doesn't matter. The fact that you hate me doesn't matter. The fact that you hate dynastynet, or austnet or undernet, doesn't matter. You, however, do matter -- to yourself. But not in the big scheme of things. If being told this really makes you mad, then you aren't ready for the real world.
As I said a million times before, #earthbound is a privelege, not a right, and not a responsibility. If you want to chat there, chat there; if you hate it, don't chat there. If you don't like it, but want to chat there because you have nothing better to do, then don't act like a moron to amuse yourself. You have no one to blame but yourself if you get yourself kicked out. So don't be surprised when I don't take the time to worry about your msg window.
I was going to write a little section about how YOU can make #earthbound a better place, but I would be wasting my time. You already know that stuff. If you haven't stopped caring about stupid stuff, haven't stopped acting like a moron, or haven't taken two seconds to try and be civilized towards other people, you never will. Can #earthbound get any better than it is now? Maybe. I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
C'mon guys. Let me know how I'm doing. If you don't like something I do, or if you don't like the way I run the channel, or if you just plain don't like me, you should email me and let me know.
This report will continue at a later date.
Accepted by the Supreme Council of Lubyland 4/4/01.
The Supreme Council of Lubyland has by unanimous resolution charged me with writing a full report on #earthbound from its move to dynastynet to the present, along with areas of improvement and any criticisms.
#earthbound, which was formerly known as #starmen, moved to dynastynet late in 2001. The reasons why this move happened have been a topic of debate, so allow me to clear this up a little bit. I made the decision to move to dynastynet in consultation with a couple of my more trusted ops. SLing had first mentioned dynastynet to me sometime during the summer, as I recall it, and both he and FlatFace (mainly FlatFace) had continually bugged me to go check it out. Finally, I did, and found it to be a pretty cool server, and it seemed to be stable, and very small, which I liked. I put it on the back burner, though, because there was really no reason to move away from austnet at the time.
Well, as the autumn hit, there were two straws that broke the camel's back pretty much simultaneously: First, the quality of services at austnet took a sudden plunge. When we first moved to austnet in early 2000, the services were excellent. They very rarely split, and when they did it was usually minor and short-lived. Well, as time went on the network grew steadily bigger and the services grew steadily worse. It had always been tolerable, but as the services continued to get slowly but surely worse and worse during 2001 I began to grumble about the possibility of looking for another network, and even told a couple of people to start poking around for a good one to possibly move to in the future.
The second factor was that the severity and frequency of the lamer attacks took a sharp increase right around the same time. Lamer attacks had always been a fact of life; way back in the undernet days they were carried out mainly by non-EB community h4x0r-type dudes and were very infrequent. But after Saboten and, a few months later, godofcows went insane, then things came into being the way we think of them today. Over the months, a few others joined in that sort of thing (Ratboy, GreenTom, etc.) Anyway, time and time again I told everyone to stop paying attention to them and they would go away, which was and is true. But everyone complained and yelled long and loud at and about the lamers, which of course was giving them just the attention they wanted, so the "attacks" and etc. just kept getting worse and worse. The lamers, particularly godofcows, would love for you to believe that we up and moved just because of them, but that's only partially true. The main reason we actually sought to move to an entirely different network wasn't to evade them, it was to find better and more stable services. I never once thought that by moving to dynastynet we'd be leaving the lamers behind; I knew they'd follow us there, because we're the only source of entertainment in their otherwise depressingly dull lives, and even before the move was made I warned the dynastynet administration and opers that the lamers would be around soon.
The dynastynet administration, for its part, seemed to be tickled pink that we were moving over, and for good reason. Dynastynet was, and is, a very small network, which is kind of weird because it has EXTREMELY high-quality services. Anyway, the EarthBound community moving there represented a major increase in traffic for the network, and the admins and opers there were very friendly and helpful towards us as we got settled down there.
As part of the move to dynastynet, thanks to the wonder of customized levels for certain commands, I finally devised the system that would get rid of lamers once and for all: The channel on +i, and only people to whom I gave access could use ChanServ to invite themselves in. Initially, this was a lot of work for me, but once it was done it resulted in exactly what I had in mind: A lamer-free channel in which people could just sit back and CHAT instead of getting wrapped up in politics and mudslinging.
There was, as there is with everything, a drawback, and that was that newcomers who wanted into the chat got the short end of the stick. This is because the morons who aren't allowed in #earthbound like to masquerade as newcomers and say "hi can i come in???" Probably 9 out of 10 people who msg me saying something like this are really morons who have nothing better to do. So the vast majority of these are ignored and/or rejected... the problem, of course, is that sometimes that 1 out of 10 ends up being a newcomer who never ends up getting into the channel because of it. And believe me, I do feel bad about this. It's the price we pay for peace and security, and it's a high price, but I've chosen to pay it, and most of the chatters in #earthbound would agree with me.
So now let's get to the meat of the report. How is #earthbound? My humble opinion is that it's better than it's been since late 1999 -- the best it's ever been since the website earthbound.net became starmen.net. Yeah, it was great back in the "good old days" you hear the old-timers talk about and the new-timers complain about. But those days were before the site really grew. You have to realize that the lamers didn't just come on their own. They came with the growth of the site. The only ones that were around way back then are Napalm and godofcows -- and godofcows was a good chatter and even a good op before he went crazy. The massive growth the site experienced after it moved to starmen.net resulted in a few of the real idiots we know and love today coming around. And this doomed #earthbound.
So what choice did we have? Not a whole lot. Most people -- not all, there are quite a few that liked having the lamers around, but most -- were desperate to get rid of the morons, and a lot of people, especially ops like myself, were really sick of the awful services at austnet. So we moved, and I set up the system we have now. The basic principle of the current system is this:
#earthbound is a private chat room.
Yes, it's true! It's a private chat room that belongs to starmen.net. I run it on starmen.net's behalf, and on starmen.net's behalf I decide who to let in there. There's no one who was allowed in the channel in austnet who I didn't let in the channel after we moved to dynastynet. NO ONE. Everyone who isn't allowed in now that was allowed in before did something stupid to lose their privelage. I would like to preach again on how chatting in #earthbound is a privelage, not a right, but it's been done a million times before and if you don't realize that by now you never will. That being said, there is probably a fair amount of honest newcomers who have been excluded because of the system that's been set up, and for that I'm sorry. The fact of the matter is that the evolution of starmen.net forced the chatroom into the system it uses now.
Tomato has advocated for quite some time now cutting the chatroom off from the site, rather than running the private one we have now. reidman refuses to let this happen; he firmly believes the chat room is a vital part of the site. I think the only real purpose #earthbound serves is to move some of the pervasive pointlessness away from the forums and let people air it out there. Let me state something that will probably surprise a lot of people: I agree with Tomato that the chat should be cut off from the site. My reasoning is as follows:
First off, I don't believe the site is benefiting at all from being connected to #earthbound, but that it DOES have costs. What does it gain? One could argue that it gains a sense of community, and one might be right about that -- I think there is a little bit of a stronger bond between most of the people who are in #earthbound. However, I do not think this is because of #earthbound; I think it's because most of the people who go there know each other fairly well anyway, and get along well on the forums. Look, whether you realize it or not, the starmen.net community (it no longer should be called the EarthBound community; that died years ago) is full of cliques. Schools are full of cliques; workplaces are, too. Congress has cliques all over the place. So do the Milwaukee Brewers. Cliques are a social fact of life, and starmen.net, I've found, is a nearly perfect representation of the real world (which is something most people don't realize.) So the feeling of "community" or whatever, it seems to me, isn't affected much by #earthbound's existence. What other useful purpose could the channel hold?
On the other hand, #earthbound has definite costs. Bickering. Complaining. Whining and moaning. The forums get the short end of this deal. Every few days, you see some lamer post on the forums "ZETH IS A (censored) COMMIE NAZI HE WON'T LET ME IN LET'S HAVE A REVOLT", or some such thing, and it tends to degenerate into either a) pointless, stupid posts, or b) a totally unnecessary, violent argument. Does the site really need this stuff? The forums are in bad shape as it is -- beginning with the fact that no one runs them and the moderators don't do their jobs -- and they don't need this additional stuff. (I realize the forums are a LOT more work than #earthbound is; I know this because I ran them for a period of time too, when they were maybe 70% as active as they are now. But if anyone ran them with the dedication with which I run #earthbound, they'd be a WHOLE heck of a lot better off.)
One more thing: If #earthbound WERE cut off from the site, I wouldn't close it, by any means; it would stay under the same system it's under now. However, I'd be a LOT more lax about letting people in, letting every alleged newcomer in and just kicking them back out later if they turn out to be a lamer,) I'd drop the no-mild-swearing rule (which I only enforce these days because starmen.net IS, and increasingly so, a site that caters to kids,) I'd quit worrying about ops being lazy and stupid stuff like that.
But as I mentioned before, reidman does NOT want to cut #earthbound off from the site. And I realized a long time ago that reidman knows a lot more about these things than I do, and more than Tomato probably does in this case, so I trust his judgment. And I continue to run #earthbound on the behalf of starmen.net. Why, a lot of people ask, do I run it if I make it out to be so much work? Well, here's the thing: it's really NOT that much work. Yes, it's a major time commitment, but I don't mind that as much as I used to, because it's fairly fun to chat in there now. But no, especially now that the idiots are (mostly) gone, it's not that much actual work. And I do enjoy running #earthbound. If I didn't enjoy it anymore, I would have left it go a long time ago. And the final point here -- nobody believes me when I say I'm the only one who can run #earthbound adequately, and that's absolutely true.
I'm not trying to take on a big head here (although some people will say that I am, that I'm just an egomaniac and etc. etc.) I think I'm pretty qualified to run the channel, with vastly more experience than anyone else. I think the only person who could do a better job is reidman himself, who obviously doesn't have the time for such a thing. And let me say this, too: I've made a LOT of mistakes in the past, some worse than others, some that have seriously hurt #earthbound. But I learned something from each and every one of them. It was a mistake to keep and maintain a long, detailed list of rules. It was a mistake to keep giving obvious career morons second and third and fifth and ninth chances. It was a BIG mistake to turn #earthbound into some kind of political model. Yes, I'm at fault for #earthbound dissolving into complete politics over the past two years. I've fixed that now, the politics is gone. But #earthbound suffered greatly because I played political games with it, even when I wasn't aware that that's what I was doing. I took it waaaaaaaaaaaay too seriously in the past; even after I claimed I realized my mistake, I made it again. But not a third time.
For those of you who are #earthbound veterans, just ask yourself: How is the channel doing? Aren't I doing a pretty decent job with it? When you're done doing that, I'd appreciate any input you can give me. Email me and let me know what you think. If you think there's room for improvement in how I manage things, now's the chance to let me know.
I have a reputation for ignoring and cold-shouldering pretty much everyone; it's obvious to see how I earned it. I get msg's every day from people who were long ago banned from the channel who just keep whining and whining and whining; I ignore them. I don't use the /ignore command, I just don't look at the /msg windows. But I do pay attention to people who are trying to tell me something. When people are complaining on the forums and stuff, or even in the channel, I usually don't comment on it, but I almost always do read and think about it. I'm not the mean-spirited, ignorant person most of you think I am. I try my best to be thoughtful and honest, and I honestly believe I'm doing the best job I can with the channel. If you disagree, tell me how it can be improved, and if I don't think you're right about that, I will explain why. I don't have, and never have had, anything to hide.
NOTE TO LAMERS: You know who you are. Don't bother. I'll still be ignoring your msg windows and I'll still be deleting your emails.
Do you want to know the sad truth? The lamers, the idiots who hate me, will probably read this article a lot more closely than most of you will. Most of you will probably skim it, and if you do skim it, then you have no right to complain about the channel. So don't come to me complaining that I don't pay attention to you; I've spent a long time here writing all of this, and you didn't play attention to me.
Yeah, I realize I come across as nasty, bitter, all of that. Some of you understand why that is; most of you don't. My job requires a certain amount of cutthroatness. I have to be able to just ignore things, shut things out, to avoid going crazy (this is something I learned because I HAVE gone crazy, twice, and it won't happen a third time because I've learned how not to.) I don't care about things that simply don't matter. It doesn't matter to anyone that lamer X thinks he deserves a twelfth chance; I ignore it, and most of you ignore it. A lot of people get really irritated at me when they tell me something or ask me something and I respond with "who cares?" or "makes no difference," which happens often. Well, I realize that's a pretty rude thing to do sometimes, and I'm trying to change it, at least a little bit. But realize that I'm not really trying to be rude, that's just my personality. If I don't think something matters, I'll tell you. So here, for your convenience, is a list of things that don't matter:
earthbound.net doesn't matter. godofcows and Captain Napalm and Saboten and Saturn2K don't matter. I don't matter. Luna doesn't matter. It makes no difference to you whether or not waffy is an op or whether or not SLing is doing his job as an op. (If people minded their own business instead of someone else's, what a great world we'd live in.) Zipcode Ness doesn't matter. The fact that you hate the people who post 100 useless things a day on the forum doesn't matter. The fact that you hate Buzz-Buzz doesn't matter. The fact that you hate me doesn't matter. The fact that you hate dynastynet, or austnet or undernet, doesn't matter. You, however, do matter -- to yourself. But not in the big scheme of things. If being told this really makes you mad, then you aren't ready for the real world.
As I said a million times before, #earthbound is a privelege, not a right, and not a responsibility. If you want to chat there, chat there; if you hate it, don't chat there. If you don't like it, but want to chat there because you have nothing better to do, then don't act like a moron to amuse yourself. You have no one to blame but yourself if you get yourself kicked out. So don't be surprised when I don't take the time to worry about your msg window.
I was going to write a little section about how YOU can make #earthbound a better place, but I would be wasting my time. You already know that stuff. If you haven't stopped caring about stupid stuff, haven't stopped acting like a moron, or haven't taken two seconds to try and be civilized towards other people, you never will. Can #earthbound get any better than it is now? Maybe. I wouldn't bet the farm on it.
C'mon guys. Let me know how I'm doing. If you don't like something I do, or if you don't like the way I run the channel, or if you just plain don't like me, you should email me and let me know.
This report will continue at a later date.
Accepted by the Supreme Council of Lubyland 4/4/01.
