(Note: vaporware: interactive fiction normally sticks to technical topics, but I'm making an exception to respond to a post directed at me that doesn't allow comments.)
In a way, it's flattering. Pillars of the IF community like Zarf and Emily Short have had detractors following them around for years, sniping at them in one forum after another. Now, I finally have one of my own.
And mine knows how to hold a grudge.
Last week, that grudge led him to write a number of false, demeaning things about me. Most of those were on a forum thread, which has since been expunged for code-of-conduct violations. Some were on a syndicated blog, which is why (with some regret) I'm responding here.
This all started about a year ago, when I made a flippant remark in an interactive fiction chat room run by this person in response to a bit of language policing: after one person made an announcement to the room, addressing it to "you guys [and] ladies", a second person took offense to this idiom for addressing a group and chided him to be more inclusive. I responded, sarcastically, that I too was offended because the second person's language theoretically still left some people out.
The moderator of this chat room warned me that such comments were unwelcome there, so I didn't repeat them. I wasn't banned, but I haven't returned there since last year, because there are a number of things I find unappealing about that environment, including a clumsy web interface. ifMUD is more welcoming, more usable, and it has a parrot.
I haven't really thought about that episode again until this weekend, when I saw his posts, which were prompted by a discussion in which other people mentioned feeling alienated in that chat room as a result of hostile interactions with the same moderator.
I guess he's been stewing over it all year, because today, his account of it is couched in so much hyperbole it's barely recognizable: misrepresenting the content of our exchange, assigning me motivations that are insulting and divorced from reality, and abusing words like "deliberately" and "explicitly" to dress up false assumptions in the language of impartial observations. He even accuses me of an unexplained "pattern" of "nasty behavior" that, from what I can tell, refers to a couple times over the years when I've defended critics and competition judges against attacks very similar to the ones he's making now.
I won't respond point-by-point here, partly because those attacks don't deserve any more airtime, and partly because I hope this was caused by misunderstanding rather than malice. I'd rather not burden him with being forever linked to those remarks if he chooses to retract them.
He could have reached out to me at any time in the past year to clear this up, but maybe he's been busy. I know when I get into the groove working on Guncho or ZILF, it can be hard to find time for anything else besides sleep and work, so this could be a sign that something great is in the works.
(Now back to the usual topics.)
