Is WordForge Really A Family of Friends?

While Enterpriser was always a smarmy fuck, it took a while for his creepy stalker side to manifest itself. (At least publicly.) I'm pretty sure I didn't pick up on those vibes until he started making them pretty blatant.

Weirdly, I don't remember all that much about Storm apart from his creepiness toward TKO.

The Storm persona boiled down..

I'm a cowboy!
Cowboy, cowboy, cowboy!


Taxes are theft!
Taxes are theft!



Cowboy!


Darkies!
Whoops!
Hahaha!
Just kidding!


Taxes, cowboy, taxes!


But seriously, darkies.

So Paladin then?

And the Irish.

"Is WordForge Really A Family of Friends?"

I used to think it was. Even the people who didn't agree with me on various subjects, I always felt like I'd have their back "in real life" if push came to shove, and that they'd have mine.

I don't feel that way anymore. Maybe the nature of the Red Room has taken its toll on me, but I really feel like a lot of people here would really count me as an enemy and actually wish me harm.

And I'm just a nobody who spends some time on an internet message board from time to time.

So storm and the rest were family?

I'm glad you don't feel that way anymore.

I only wish harm on anti-vaxxers, and they do the harming themselves.
Are you vaxxed?
Then we're good.

Trump broke their brains.

I did meet one person from TREKBBS in real life and we're friends on Facebook. We interact on FB once and a while. I don't have any other connections with anyone from here. I don't get out much except for vacations and hospital/doctor trips.

Yeah same but then people started thinking about what having someone's back in real life really entailed.

You'd fight to stop me or my friends or family from being able to marry someone I loved because of your religion? Nah, you're the one on my back.

You'd use the law to force a raped child relative of mine to go through pregnancy? Again, you're the one on my back.

You try telling friends or family struggling to understand their sexuality that their feelings are a sin and they're going to hell if they don't change their ways? You're the one on their back.

No wishing of harm to anyone, but over the last couple of decades how we view interactions online has changed.

We used to have a lot of sharing of information here, lots of posters shared nude photos behind a flimsy pretence of a private forum, extreme theories were debated because there was a real sense that what was here wasn't real.

Time, and examples like the subject of this thread, have shown us it's all far too real.

Interesting that Enterpriser specifically called out protofascists in that thread after talking about Storm and the concept of family.

I had a IRL friend join, Faisent, but he left years ago and is often being extremely responsible at adulting now. Which has given him a great life, which is awesome. I'm the fuckabout on the internet guy once again after adulting a bit too hard for a decade.

As for 'real', online relationships and family, it wasn't here but I met my wife when we both started writing stories on another site.

We've been married for going on 19 years and have a child that's going to go off to college in just a bit.

So yeah, it can not only be real, but absolutely life changing.

It can be great. I have had many wonderful meetings with people I have known from online groups and games. I have traveled all over the place to see them. It was even an online pereson who said meet me at Anime Weekend Atlanta that got me into anime conventions, and who cause me to move to AL twice. Some of those things did not work out great in the end, but they were good when they happened. @steve2^4 met with me and I think it was a great time that I will remember because it was an adventurous thing. Some people are not up for that, but I have met many a wonderful person in driving out to see people I met online. I remember those trips and times and it enriches my life to have done those things. I wish I could do more.

Venting some shit online is also better than consistently venting garbage IRL. Sorry for the pollution, but I can say my peace to the "world" and then be done with it. When I am around people IRL there is often something better going on. Yes, I do a bit of the same thing, but we are often there for different purposes. Here there is sort of a social contract that we are all going to put out things that are on our minds and discuss them, or let them fall off the page. I think there is something to a smaller group of familiar people venting their ideas. It gives us some connection and again enriches our life.

However, for the most part we do not "have eachother's back." Yes, there is a fondness for people we know and who know us, but how much can we really have another's back around here. You really do not know who is talking to who about what. It is a coincidence, but back in my usenet days I had trouble with a person who used the storm name also. That dude ripped people off across the US and Canada and really wrecked some lives of people I liked. Those same people did not want to hear it when I was telling them what he did. No one who supposedly was "family" wanted to hear the fighting and defend the online campfire against a criminal. Once he scammed them then it was all about getting him, but the trust never reformed between me and them. Things changed and the old bonds were gone and what was left was a guilty animosity between what were supposed to be friends who had each other's backs.

I cannot say this sort of wrongful expectation does not happen IRL relationships, but many people learn that online friends do not have your back, and many times will rip you off.

As for your Storm I assume I would have been one of the people he ended up fighting with. I would have also ended up an enemy of the board for the fights I got into because when I do an online war I bring scortched earth a new meaning. What you guys have seen is really not much from what I have seen done to some much larger more commercial boards. This storm dude you are speaking of is a wanker, but a good battle with him would involve much more than this place and even trekBBS. You would have to put your full mod shields up to deal with the collateral damage of the battles. In all honesty, it would probably end in a draw unless it went to Tiger King status where people were actually doing other illegal things that would have put them in prison.

Yes, I am bragging, but the real end to the huge battles is often the wasteland of some message boards who got over spammed and had to go full fascist with their rules to push the fighting out. Then there qwould be the DDOS attacks and password hacking. There would be attempted database corruption and attempts to crash servers or get the boards deplatformed. Been there, done that. There would never be any real justice to this storm fellow as destruction would seem to be his goal. The best things to do for the little trollies at places like TK is to simply ban them and watch from the distance as they have a pissbaby fit in your penalty box. Before anyone bitches about my bragging, what you guys have done with TK is the most awesome punishment to internet trolls ever. I have to admit this satellite boards thing allows the trolls to die as slow starving death in orbit for everyone to watch. That is pretty fucking cool IMO.

Tamar would dangle the threat of all that other shit in a sneaky plausibly deniable "it would be a shame if something happened " kind of way.

People used to speculate Enterpriser was multiple people using the same TBBS account since the average was over 100 posts per day at one point. The writing style was too distinct to believe that. I think he was just a sad, homebound incel with an unending hatred of women.

It takes some doing and some effort. It is not like you can just snap your fingers and that sort of thing happens. There is the chance of something viral happening, but it is not very likely. However, people have a way of being like gasoline. if you can do the right things for the particular situation you can do a bit of damage that might continue on.

I do not know this Tamar person, but if they thought they could go over to the chans and just point at WF and say sick em that would be an epic fail.

For instance, when I sicked a certain troll hive I knew on the customers suck site I knew the trolls that had a superiority complex vs retail workers and I spoofed a few nastygrams into their holes and the people running customers suck were so open for confrontation with other people it was just needing to introduce the fire to the explosive. Would it have happened without my intervention, maybe someday. A lot of destructive trolling is recognizing opportunity.

You also have to be prepared for the situation. It wasn't like I just happened to be around a huge troll hive. I was doing things at the time. I had multiple identities roaming about and playing around. Way back then the internet universe was a lot smaller. Those same tricks would not work the same today, but if you understand the concepts and why things worked the way they did back then you are more likely to be able to innovate something now.

I don't know these old people you speak of so I really cannot say for sure if they had actual connections or just saw things that happened. One thing I can say is there does seem to be the scent of an organized attempt to spread racist BS around here in the past. That does not mean much, but there is an effort by places like stormfront to recruit ideological people to their side from places like this. That is just part of their mode of operations, and not particularly specific to trekbbs, WF, or TK.

100 posts per day is nothing. It is a drop in the bucket. In the old days I would download my usenet feed onto my laptop and do 100 posts before the battery died while I was sitting in a diner. I actually was more wordy back then. I used to go through 10 accounts a day at times on gaia online. That means setting up 10 emails, registering both, and then using them to troll until they got banned. I was not using bots to create those accounts either.

It really was not that terribly hard. I used to do some of these things at work while I was bored.

These were interactive posts, though, not premade stuff. And not just one-liners - he'd respond with a short essay each time.

Oh God, is THAT what happened to Teya?! Given she'd left an abusive marriage , I don't blame her for not taking chances with that creep.

She called me out on a rather shitty C/7 ship joke and I always wanted to thank her for setting me straight on that, but alas...

Don't brag about this

Tamar found my real name on an Amazon review attached to my username at the time that I had unwittingly put out and had no way to remove and she would justify that with "your name is too common to do anything with!"

She also pulled that gaslighting shit anytime she was drilled about Meka and tell us it was our fault she left because we didn't let it die like she wanted it to. It's a damn shame we lost that thread and if I had a time machine, I'd go back to 2006 and throw it up on the Wayback Machine for posterity.

I don't miss her influence on board operations not one bit.

I had a lot of time on my hands considering I had given up on dating, keeping up with the neighbors home improvements, and paying attention to pop culture. You have no idea of the time you save when you just completely give up on those things and the people who are forever engaged in their persuit. Just giving up on dating and having to do home improvements to impress the neighbors is like giving yourself a second life. If you throw children out of the mix life can be a fucking breeze. You can have all the time in the world for cultivating your end of the world master plans.

Sure it does not impress others, but there is a lot of work keeping up with the normals. There is also not a lot of reward for a person like me. Seriously, what am I going to do with two kids, a spouse, and a mortgage? They just move my shit around, and my plushies are doing their best to be where they are.

Family? No. That word gets thrown around a little too fast and furiously these days. To me it connotes a much stronger bond than I'm likely to form with anonymous people I know only online.

But most of you are decent enough.

And many of you I like.

And a few of you I'd consider friends. If I've traded PMs with you, you're probably in that group.








And, alas, a (thankfully) small number of you are petty and hateful, and use anonymity as a cover and politics as a justification to let your pettiness and hatefulness loose, and I go back and forth between pitying you and being amused by you.

No you've basically told everyone you disagree with politically that they should kill themselves, amongst other things

And they all did it, because I have Bene Gesserit voice powers.
Oh, wait, no, they're all perfectly alive and well, because conservatives are toxic narcissists who'd never kill themselves, so telling them to kill themselves is meaningless.
May as well tell a cat to do fractions.

Mine was dividing my attention between scritches and reading my online class materials, so I came here.

You're a Trump supporter. End of story.

Q.E.D.

Yes, you are a Q educated individual. That is nothing to be proud of.

Interestingly, my friendship with her also began with her calling me out for something thoughtless I said. She was good at addressing those things firmly while also applying her own empathy to the situation. I hope she's doing well.