Tuesday, March 4, 2008

loving the skew-er, hating the skew

Today, while looking for a few good blogs in the 500-750 top blogs list, I ran across the Pownce blogs of various players, so I checked them out. And there I found Rantz spewing more skew.

He asks indirectly if I remember the day I asked if he, BB, and I should exchange passwords so we could cheatypants.

ROFL. PIFFLE. SKEW.

Backstory: An age ago, Rantz, BB, Hildy, and a handful of others, including me, were playing in the trenches together against the coalition of super players who were and had been dominating the wee little bit of the Shares Market that was worth playing. We were hooking up in YM conferences all the time, we had our little blog where we communicated, tracked who owned what blog, and who owed whom money for arte uses. Yep, we were a regular little corp in the days before corps were created: friends, friendly, chatting with each other all the time while fiendishly hyping, buzzing, PRDing, slumping, PPing, passing blogs around among ourselves, and strategizing. We were having fun, working and playing together, and smarting off all the time. The language was fierce, as was the play.

Rantz' (indirect) question has reminded me of those times, and of a tough battle that had artes worn out and victors giddy, when I said something like "I don't suppose we should share passwords with each other, should we?" It was a rhetorical question, a bit of banter among players-in-arms and nothing more. I'd say I'm surprised to hear that Rantz took it as a serious request, a serious suggestion to cheat among Index Managers, but unfortunately I have to say I've learned, to my sadness, that Rantz has ways of seeing things that are at odds with the experience of my senses.

If I were anal, or a true geek, I'd have a copy of that YM, but I don't. (Yes, I looked.) To the extent I can even remember it, I remember something said in fun, in adrenalin overdrive, in jest. I suppose if I were really a cheatypants, there'd be lots of other players who could come forward and remind me of the day I asked them to cheat with me. Probably some other IMs, too. But there aren't. And they won't. Cause I didn't.

This charge is, well, sheer piffle.

And that's the thing. Rantz. Did you think I meant seriously to engage you and BB in cheating, when our primary connection was a joint venture of protecting and defending the integrity of the Index? Did you think that and not bother to discuss it with me? It's not like we weren't having weekly meetings where we discussed IM/Index things and personal things, too. Or did you just add this to an apparently growing list of dissatisfactions that you never mentioned to me, despite those weekly meetings? Apparently so, and how sad that is.

It's not the first glimpse I've had of your skew. In some blog post when you were pissed off at Island Dave, you said you left the game (the first time) because BOD wouldn't let you present your (whatever) case to them. Rantz, have you forgotten the meeting I worked hard to organize, the one that you, Dave, Rob, Jason and I all agreed to, and scheduled? Did you not understand that I went out of my way to make this happen, just one more of the many ways I supported you as Lead IM? Did you not understand that Dave went out of his way to agree to a meeting, when he had been rarely on site because of family and work demands? Did not the conversations you had started in the Water Cooler suffice, conversations that both Game Admins (and SubWolf, too, if I remember correctly) participated in?

Clearly not. And then, what did you do? You cancelled the meeting out of the blue, told us you were going to take the weekend to decide whether to continue with B$ or not, and then after that, you quit.

I still don't know why you quit in such bitterness and acrimony, but of course we've seen that happen again since then. You posted crap about me on your blog and refused to let me respond there. Why is that, Rantz? We'll never know, since there's only skew, innuendo, and gossip where there should be straightforward communication and confliction resolution, adult behavior among adults of good will.

If by some miracle you've read this far (any of you), I'd just like to go on the record as saying this:

Rantz, I love you. You'll never know how much I grieved the loss of our friendship.

Sage

4 comments:

Unknown said...

"Rantz, I love you. You'll never know how much I grieved the loss of our friendship."

ROFL. PIFFLE. SKEW.

Sage said...

Not. Kallisto can confirm. Grief.

nexy said...

This is absolute comedy. Brought tears to my eyes.

Sage said...

Comedy? For you, that makes sense. We differ on what should be taken seriously, and what not. Like the 150,000 to 300,000 chips you took for IM work you never did. For me, that constitutes unethical behavior; your sense of what's ethical and what's not differs from mine, so it makes sense that our perspectives on what's tragedy and what's comedy would differ, too.

Sorry I had to let you go as IM all those years ago; sorry you just didn't take a leave of absence while you were not available to do the IM work; sorry you've been mad at me ever since.