I just read Demi's meltdown

That was epic and he did it all by himself.

You suck, Garak.

Yeah, that was pretty funny.

This guy is GARAK? Great. Someone else to put on ignore.

I guess I must have missed it.

Missed what? Demi's meltdown? It's in The Help Desk.

Very enlightening.

I found it more puzzling than enlightening myself.

Yeah. Gotta think there was more too it than that. Otherwise it's just kinda .

Now I remember.
Guess it didn't leave much of an impression.

To me, it showed a lot of his current psychological makeup. A guy who would make a big deal like that, out of nothing at all, is a guy who is dealing with personal problems elsewhere and can't really handle all the stress in his life.

Certainly it's "puzzling" in the sense that we don't know what those personal problems are, but it is enlightening in that it explains a lot of his apparently irrational reactions over the last couple of years.

If he ever comes back, maybe we'll find out what was troubling him. In any case, it wasn't Wordforge. No sane person is going to have that kind of reaction to such a minor problem, unless there are a bunch of other factors going on behind the scenes.

Maybe he was part of a human centipede against his will?

Maybe he was bump-fired.

Is that like when you lose your job 117 times in one day?

Ask Dayton.

I don't remember many of those - other than obviously his completely irrational disagreement with me on several issues.

Burn!!

I'm pretty sure what Async meant is that Demi went from generally disagreeing with you to often agreeing. Otherwise, he never seemed any less rational than the rest of us.

I think his wife turned him into a radical Islamic jihadist.

Stop dignifying the histrionic douchebaggery. He had himself a little hissy fit and ragequit. If real-life issues have you so emotional that you're on the brink of losing your shit on a damned message board, the thing to do is get the fuck off of the internet, go have a bong hit and a wank, then maybe go for a walk.

Is that what you did while you were away from here?

If I wasn't at work, that's what I'd be doing now.

5 years ago, I did all that, plus created Shmegalamonga.



..okay, not the bong hit.

It would probably be work better if you did the walk, the wank, and then the bong hit.

Well, unless you are Uncle Albert. and then it should probably be walk, bong hit, and then the wank. Because a rage wank could result in severe injury could result in severe injury or just not work out.

No, what I meant was not that he changed positions radically (we have had other posters do that; see Anna, John and Nova for starters) but that he used to be a fairly calm and level-headed guy, whereas lately he would sometimes post with an uncharacteristic vehemence -- swearing, insulting, and generally attempting to show that those who disagreed with him were totally inferior people, even when they were defending positions that he himself had defended up until a couple of years before. (Which, even though he had changed sides politically, should have shown him that those who held those positions were not evil, stupid people who should not be taken seriously.)

The random overreactions aren't anything new. I remember back in 2005 at TBBS, after someone called him a baby without getting a warning for it, he complained and complained publicly until they finally got warned. Then when I pointed out the irony of throwing such a tantrum in response to being called a baby, I got warned as well.

Oh, shit, thanks for reminding me!

You're totally inferior, and evil, and stupid, and shouldn't be taken seriously.

Phew, there, almost forgot to do that today.

Exactly. Somewhere around that same time he and I were arguing some issue, and suddenly he went from logical debate to neg repping 10 of my posts. He was always prone to sudden flip-outs, it isn't something that only emerged with his changing political views.

Well, then, maybe he always was an unstable character, and I just didn't notice it as much back when it was never aimed at me.

Nevertheless, I think the incredible overreaction to someone posting in one of his threads a picture that was acceptable on American television and the staff not doing anything about it shows that at that point, at least, he must have been dealing with some other issues as well. That kind of thing isn't rational, even for a guy who has always had a tendency to flip out.

His posts seemed to grow more and more...emotional...over the last year or so.

That's how it seemed to me, too, but maybe those who used to be on the opposite side of arguments from him, and came to find him more and more on their side (like 14thDoctor and gul) remember it differently.