Less is More

[Hubris Boy]

The lighting inside the secret control bunker is subdued. Shades of red and amber flash malevolently in the semidarkness. Another shift, another hundred or so breakdowns. He pauses on his way into the room and looks forlornly at the the lights on the warning panel. So many. He reads the names with dumb amazement. Home Base. Current Events. Politics. IOTD. Comments and Suggestions. Food and Drink.

"Food and Drink?!? How the fuck can you troll Food and Drink?"

Hubris Boy staggers to his chair and collapses into it with a groan. He cradles his head in his hands. The incessant shrieking of the Mk.IV Troll Detector^™ causes his head to throb and his ears to ring like church bells. With bleary eyes he stares at the reset button across the room.

"Fuck it," he thinks to himself. "It'll just go off again in another 30 seconds."

He sips from his filthy coffee cup and wonders how it happened. It used to be so quiet here. He remembers a gentler time- a time without flashing lights and shrill alarms. A time of reasonable, sequenced arguments and lively debate. A troll-free time. Well, a troll-lite time, anyway.

He remembers, and is filled with indignation. Reaches for his for his keyboard and blows away the dust. He grins. "This oughta piss 'em off," he mutters.

Some time later, a new thread appears in Home Base; thread starter... Hubris Boy?? A handful of ancients blink with astonishment. "Hubris Boy? We thought he was dead."

The majority don't even notice. Why should they? "Who the heck is this Hubris Boy character? Never heard of him."



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Hubris Boy notes with dismay a change that has crept not so stealthily into the character of the Cellar in the past... oh... year or so.

Once upon a time, the Cellar was a witty, well-informed but not-stuck-up-about-it forum where people with widely varied backgrounds could discuss a wide variety of topics. Most posts were reasonable and reasonably well written- good grammar and spelling were the rule. (Okay... with the exception of Jaguar v0.9 beta. But they seem to have included a spellchecker in the release version.) It was a genuine pleasure to stop by and read what folks had to say about the topics of the day. GIANTS walked among us in those days, my friends. I used to live for new posts by tw. I rarely agreed with the man, but he was fun to read and even more fun to debate. People used to gather 'round to watch the sparks fly. [Yes, I know he's still here. I'm just making a point.]

Sadly, this is no longer possible.

Because the Cellar has been transmogrified into a chat room.

In place of well considered posts, we find ourselves inundated with a flood of messages that are semantically equivalent to "Heh. Me too." Or, "Oh yeah? Your mother." We're buried to our navels in drivel that looks like it was cut-and-pasted from the AOL "Tourettes Syndrome Singles #7432" chatroom. The sheer volume is such that it is no longer possible to separate the wheat from the chaff. We're drowning in chaff.

Some of this increased volume in posts can be attributed to the growth of the Cellar population- a phenomenon as pleasant as the Cellar is bound to expand by virtue of its own excellence. That's great. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is an exponential increase in the volume of posts made by people who have absolutely nothing to say. Don't believe me? Check out the stats. They're right under our user names for all the world to see.

&lt;OldGeezer&gt;
I remember waaaay back to the day when Sycamore's post count rolled over into four digits. That was fucking amazing. A thousand posts?!? I couldn't believe he'd done it. It took forever to reach a thousand posts. What an impressive achievement.
&lt;/OldGeezer&gt;

Fast forward to 2004 and prepare your senses for the assault. Waves of babble and blather break over our heads. There are new members who seem to make a thousand posts a day. There are old members who emulate them. Holy crap. Nobody is that interesting. Fer Chrissake, muzzle yourself. Anybody who breaks the thousand post mark in less than two years really needs to go outside more.

We're all guilty of it. And the occasional one line bon mot is okay... it adds zest to the soup. Every post doesn't have to be a "Summa Theolgica." But they don't all have to be "Beavis and Butthead," either.

Some people will be offended by this thread. I don't give a fuck. I'm just making a shoe. If you want to put it on and loudly announce to the world that it fits, that's your decision.

If you're smart enough to find your way here, you must have at least some capacity for critical thinking. Use it. Put your super-ego in the driver's seat and think before you post. Before you click the 'submit' button, stop and ask yourself: "Am I contributing anything to this discussion?" If that's too much for you at first, try: "Does it least have a noun and a verb?"

There are a lot of us crowded into this small forum. Practice a little self-conscious self censorship, won't you? And let the Great Unwashed stay in the chat rooms. Where they belong.