A Private Little War

About a month ago a blog post made its way onto my Facebook feed wherein a LARPer (Live Action Role Player) was explaining his thoughts on why his hobby wasn't more popular and what he thought other LARPers should do to rectify this.

The whole post was dripping in the kind of ignorance that can only come from loving something too much to understand how anyone could not love it. The author was clearly drowning in the feeling we all have sometimes when we can't get other people to appreciate a hobby or a book or a movie that is dear to us.

Originally I had thought to reply to him, and explain why I, as someone who has spent a fair bit of time LARPing but has no love for it, saw his ideas as a little naive, and perhaps perhaps suggest some better ones. But the discussion surrounding the post was a very positive one, and I thought my comments would be out of place, so I decided to write a blog post instead.

Then I had intended to just write a post about what I thought the LARPing community could change to draw in a far greater number of people. But even though it had been my intention to completely avoid discussing the huge open wounds that I still have twenty years later, I couldn't. Before long the post was far less a post of potentially helpful advice to people still participating in a hobby I left long ago, and much more a seething pile of hatred.

I honestly had no idea that I was still so angry about it. I had buried those feeling so deep for so long that I really thought I could talk about LARPing for a thousand words without mentioning them, but I couldn't. This post isn't about the ideas I tried to voice a month ago, its about the pain I couldn't restrain, and where it came from; maybe by writing about it, I can find some relief.

When I was in high school I was the founder and president of the school's role playing games club. Early in my last year of high school one of the members of said club, Eric Finley, talked a group of us into going to a LARPing event.

I did not have fun at said event, but I felt like I should have. The event was a fantasy themed event (as all the events run by the Live Role Playing Society were at that time) and I loved fantasy. The rules system was well designed and I love well designed rules. And yet I did not leave satisfied.

I can't get no . . . satisfaction

For the next three years I went to every event put on by the LRPS, and I left every event with that same feeling that I should have had fun, but didn't. Finally, I decided to take matters into my own hands, and become an event organizer; I figured that if things were done just a little differently I could have a better time. The event I organized was a complete failure at everything I had wanted it to be; rather than being a radically different event that showed what LARPing should be, it was at best mediocre. This was very disheartening.

Still, it was the first event I could ever walk away from saying that I had fun. Which was disheartening in its own way, because I knew it would be somewhere between years later and never before I would be allowed to organize again. And while being a referee at every event probably would have been enough to keep me going, I knew I was unlikely to be a ref again for a long time.

But as down as I was about all this, I was fully expecting to keep going to events; by this time my whole life revolved around the LRPS. I had no friends that weren't part it. Even when I was taking part in my other hobbies, or just going out drinking, I only did so in the company of LRPS friends and had long ago lost contact with any friends that had no interest in live role playing.

The first domino to fall in my eventual departure from LRPS was when I was expelled from the University of Alberta. I was raised to believe that if you didn't have a university degree then you were a worthless human being. My expulsion from the U of A was and is the greatest shame of my life. I came to hate going on campus because of all the horrid feelings it brought forth. This made it difficult to participate in LRPS in the way I had been because all of the official (as well as many unofficial) meetings were held at the U of A.

The next thing to happen was that I had a falling out with two of my friends, both of whom were active LRPS members; in both cases because they owed me money which they did not pay. Rob had bought a computer off me a year earlier, when it was nearly new, and after a year of not paying the money he had promised returned it decidedly used (plus a year older). Tony had asked to borrowed money from me to fix his car, supposedly to be paid back before the end of the week, but never repaid it.

The final thing, the straw that broke the camel's back, was when I was accused of stealing from LRPS. The guy who did the accusing, Bryant, was a known ass. Him making the completely unfounded accusation, while infuriating, is something I could have lived with. No, what I could not accept was that a baseless accusation was leveled at me (his grounds for suspecting me of stealing were that he thought it was suspicious that I didn't ask LRPS for a loan as most organizers did), and no one stood up for me. Instead it was decided that I needed to prove my innocence. I provided proof of my innocence, and then never again had anything to do with LRPS.

I also ditched that awful haircut.

I knew from the moment I decided to leave that I would be effectively ending every friendship I had. Oh sure, I was still on good terms with most of the members of LRPS, but by removing myself from regular contact with them, I ensured that in time all of those friendships would die. And they did die, some died the day I left, others a few months later, while three of them lasted a few years after my departure.

The last friend I had from LRPS was Todd, who had also been my roommate in university. My most vivid memory of the pain I lived with in the late 90s was when I went to visit Todd shortly after I got out from hospital from a failed suicide attempt. Since I had never told anyone why I had left LRPS, nor was I telling anyone about my suicide attempt, Todd gleefully told me about the incredible time he and others had at the wedding of Laura and James.

It was painful hearing about that wedding. I gave up more than I could ever have imagined when I left LRPS. Many of the friends I had back then, are still very good friends with each other; I have no such continuity with my past. During the years I was in LRPS I made some real progress towards being less of an introvert than I had been in my childhood, but leaving snapped me back and I have ever since been even more quiet than I was as a child. And I have never been able to think as clearly nor focus as well since the aforementioned suicide attempt.

And that is why, for me at least, "LARPing sucks monkey balls".

Names on My Brain

This was originally written in 2009 and is appearing here as part of Throwback Thursday.



I've got names on my brain this morning, and all the strange thing that result from them. Here is a collection of various name related incidents from throughout the years that have stuck with me.

My mother put on very little weight when pregnant with me. Apparently this led everyone to believe that she was carrying a girl, and so my parents were quite prepared (in many ways, including a name) for a little girl, but not for a boy. This probably led to them deciding to name me after my cousin John who was in town to celebrate his birthday, which I was born on; I was named Sean instead of John because I would have been the fourth John in my family, and my mother didn't want that. My mother has guessed that I would have been named Paul (my father's middle name) had I been born two weeks later (as expected) though obviously this is just musing after the fact.

Darth Vader

So I was born Sean Jamie Shewchuk, a name I wouldn't keep very long. My mother and father were separated when I was two and he died when I was three. Not long after his death my mother changed both her name and mine to her maiden name - Henderson. Strangely, a number of my Henderson cousins kept calling me Sean Shewchuk right up until I lost contact with them at the age of eight.

I suppose the fact I had a name change early in life has always limited the degree of sympathy which I have for women who feel they are surrendering their personal identity when they change their name for marriage. I can think of other good reasons to not change your name, but the notion that you are losing your identity rings false with me.

When I started at my first school I had my first experience with a Sean not spelled the same way as mine. There was a time when I held a great deal of resentment towards the Shauns and Shawns of the world, though the problem I really had wasn't with them so much as people who assumed that one or both of those were the only ways to spell the name. But somehow during my life time people have warmed to my spelling of the name. In my childhood people seemed shocked to hear the name could be spelled Sean, while now most people seem to ask the spelling rather than assume the wrong one.

At my second school I began running into another aspect of my name that was a huge annoyance in my childhood - people who pronounce it "seen". Of course, a big part of why I put up with that so much at my second school was that I was the brunt of a lot of teasing in my time there, and it was well known how much being called "seen" bugged me. I still get it occasionally to this day, though it usually comes now from ESL people, and I understand where its coming from with them; the one thing that does bug me as an adult about this is when people argue with me about the pronunciation. My mother didn't just invent the name or the spelling, both have been around for centuries, and someone arguing with me that my spelling is somehow wrong can really get me worked up (probably on some level it brings back memories of elementary school)

When I was eight years old my mother was engaged to get married to a man named Demetrios Zissos. I really liked him which probably played a big role in the fact I was looking forward to my mother and I changing our names to his. Just thinking again of my cousins who didn't know my name had changed to Henderson, I remember joking to my mom they would figure it out just in time for my name to become Zissos. Unfortunately he died shortly before the wedding, and as a result my name remained Sean Henderson.

At the age of eleven my mother actually did get remarried, to Clif Young. I did not like Clif, and so did not have any desire to have his name. My mother felt I was old enough to choose for myself what I would do with regards to name, and this all led to a very tense situation. You see, Clif was his father's only son. Clif and his first wife had some sort of fertility problems (I think this actually was part of the tension that caused their divorce). By the time Cliff and my mother met he was getting a little old to be having kids, but he assumed that I was going to be the answer to his prayers, that I was going to take on and continue the Young name for him. He was always very upset with me for not becoming Sean Young, and even more upset with my mother for not forcing it on me. There would be times that he would sign me up for things as Sean Young, but whenever I could I would ignore anything sent to Sean Young, even if it was something I wanted. I did not like Clif at all, and did not want to be associated to him, by name or any other means.

Another thing about Clif, Clif was very fussy about his names in ways I hadn't encounter before then. First of all his first name was Hubert, which he hated, and so went by his second name. Then there was that most people wanted to spell his name with two fs, which pissed him off because Cliff is short for Clifford, while Clif is short for Clifton. That he was an eccentric character in general made these name issue seem a little crazy.

In high school I had a friend who almost always addressed everyone by their last name. It was interesting, especially in how it stood out. I swear I remember more interactions with him then other people I spent far more time with precisely because of this. What was really funny was when a particular situation pretty much required him to use someone's first name, it always seemed to me that he spoke more quietly at the moment as if he were ashamed or uncomfortable saying it.

During the two years I was in university I had several friends who decided after one year of my knowing them that they were going to change their names. One in particular though always stood out in my mind. The name she decided she wanted people to call her was something I was not going to say. To me it was not a name, and what made it so much worse (in my mind) was that her actual name is one I think sounds quite beautiful. I have never once called her by the name she changed to, and during the year after the change I still knew her this resulted in some tension. I've seen her on some friends' friend lists on facebook, and it seems that fifteen years later she is still going by the name she changed to. Obviously if we had stayed in contact some sort of equilibrium would have had to be found.

I don't what to think of this situation. I feel in my heart that I was right, that the fact she introduced herself by the name she was born with and was fine with me calling her by that for a year means I had every right to keep on doing so. Yet logically, a person ought to have final say on what other people call them. A person ought to be able to decide unilaterally what is appropriate and what is not; logically I am completely wrong.

About the same time I got kicked out of university I started dating a girl name Shila. She had some interesting name issues. The first was that like me people always wanted to spell her name wrong (Shyla). Also like me, people constantly thought she had misspelled her own name (anyone seeing her name written down always though she'd forgotten the e in Sheila). We were engaged off and on for the last half of the three years we went out and one issue that was sticky when we discussed marriage was the last name thing. She didn't want to change her name. I had two thoughts about this. One is that I think a family unit ought to have the same name because it shows unity. The other is that I couldn't help but think of my experiences with Demitrios and Clif when thinking of name changes; specifically that I couldn't help but think that if she wouldn't change her name that she though of me as I thought of Clif. Interestingly, when she wouldn't budge on the issue I told her that a family having the same name was important enough to me that I would change mine if she wouldn't change hers; almost immediately her whole attitude changed. Though we didn't get married and I haven't spoken to her in more than a decade, a couple of times online I have seen her name (and it is unusual enough for me to suspect it is actually her) now hyphenated.

Shila and I breaking up was essentially the end of a death spiral my whole life had been in for about seven years. I started looking for ways to make breaks with my past, and one was my name. I pretty much decided to start going by my middle name, Jamie. The problem I had though was that because of feeling as I did about the name changes I saw friends make in University, I didn't have it in me to tell people who knew me to start calling me Jamie. But what really killed this plan was that I never remembered to tell people I was meeting for the first time the new name. After about six months I realized this was never going to work and gave up on it.

When I started working at Convergys I ran into something I never say coming, something that I have never been able to explain but yet has followed me through three companies and countless projects. For some reason, when I talk on the phone, many people hear my name as Jason. I have been called Jason about once per week for the last eight years. This phenomenon seems completely independent of the geographic location, age, culture, or phone line quality of a customer or the greeting I am required to give by my employer. I simply can't explain it. There is no other incorrect name that comes up consistently. I am Jason.

Another strange thing that comes up a lot in call centre jobs is irate customers who want a last name from the agent they are ripping into. To be frank there isn't really anything they could do with said information, even if they didn't know my first name more than enough is recorded to trace any call I take back to me, but they want my last name. I never give my last name to an irate customer, ever. Part of it is privacy, its none of their business what my name is. Part of it is because if they are irate I am probably a little pissed at them too (even if I am better composed), and this is a way I have a little bit of power over them. The funniest part of the clash over whether I will give them my name or not is the reason they want it (i.e. in hopes they can get me fired) is almost always a lost cause; I have taken hundreds of irate calls over the years and witnessed thousands taken by others; never once have I seen or heard of an agent being fired because of an irate customer.

My wife Margaret had a few things she had jokingly said for years that she wanted in a husband, many of which I had, at least one of which I did not; she wanted a shorter last name. Though I didn't make the situation any worse, her last name remains nine characters long, complimenting her eight character first name. Interestingly Margaret, like me, changed last names at an early age.

Another thing about Margaret, is that she has a name with many derivations, all of which she likes except one. For some reason Marge is a name that rubs her the wrong way, and she won't put up with people calling her that. In my head I call her Mags a lot, but in writing I always put Margaret and out loud I either say "Hun" or occasionally Margaret.

When Margaret was pregnant, we went through the same discussions that every couple does for names and suggestions really covered a wide range. Then I put forth a system for choosing a name, one that I thought would attach the name to someone worth attaching to and in short order Margaret used said system for picking a name from each gender. The system was that first names had to be derived from siblings (biological, adoptive, or step were all fine). We quickly settled on Grace Edith (named after two of Margaret's sisters) and Robert John (named after my step brother and father).

The only Robert born in Alberta in 2005.

Sometimes recently the dwindling contact we have had with Rob Dyer has made me wonder if it was right to name Robbie after him. It makes me sad that Robbie may not get to know the man he was named after. But then I remember the reasons Rob Dyer seemed like such a good choice four years ago; which were the same reasons he was my best man seven years ago. When I look at him I see someone who is very much like me, but is so much better at it than I am. Robbie is named after him because if Rob Dyer is someone I wish I could be more like, surely he is a great example for my son.

I do hope that when Rob's children have children of their own they don't in anyway resent us for having already named our son after their father. Not that anything is preventing them from doing the same, but I hope there is no ill will none the less.

Well, that's all the things I can think of for right now; but as this is such an expansive topic, perhaps I will revisit it some day.

The Great Data Dilemma

I love my new job - it is great for me in so many ways. But perhaps the way that it is worst for me, but I am best for it, is the insane mess that is its data storage. I swear I am going to clean this mess up, if it takes me a decade to do it, which it probably will. Just some of the highlights (lowlights?) include:


1. Obsession with hard copies.

For being such a small business (there are only 8 employees with computer access) my work has a very progressive server backup schedule. In addition to complete backups done every night, there are incremental backups done throughout the day. But that isn't enough for the owners to feel safe about our data, and so every document that is on our servers is also in our filing cabinets. My office alone has three filing cabinets (with a forth coming soon) plus about 25 three inch binders that are all just old document storage; every office is like this because we have 20 years worth of everything the company has ever done.




2. Absurd file structure

I know a lot of companies are guilty of this, but my current one is one of the worst, that is having files on the server laid out in a way that is completely nonsensical. All of the transgressions that you can have in file structure are committed here, from poorly named folders to empty folders to folders that contain a single sub-folder to data that belongs in one place being spread out over several places. I have already done some work to cleaning this up, but I don't see myself attacking any of the biggest issues for at least a year or two.




3. Drawing naming system

While a lot of files have very poor names, we have so many drawings and are so dependent on them the absurdity that is our system for naming drawing stands out as the worst. The structure was borrowed from a company where the two owners used to work together, at a time that drawings were done by hand. I can see how it could work in a filing cabinet, but it is a very poor structure to use with electronic files (because it makes it very difficult to find the file you want). I have already come up with a good alternative, but I am not going to proposing it for some time, both because I know they are quite enamored with the current structure and because I know the work involved in changing over would be gargantuan.

4.  Interlinking files

One of the reasons that changing the drawing naming structure would be insane is that the company loves having Solidworks files refer to other  Soildworks files. Sometimes interlinking the files this way is a perfectly sensibly way to ensure that any future changes propagate through all connected files, but it is used so aggressively in this company that it can have the opposite effect, that changes that are meant to affect only a small number of parts could make unintended changes elsewhere.




5. Poor choice of file type

My company has a whole lot of data stored in Excel files and Word files. This data is so full of relationships that even the Excel files are poor choices; what is really needed is a database. I decided early on that this was going to be the first of the data management problems that I tackle, but it is such a huge problem that knowing where to start has been troublesome. Originally I was going to start with moving the part numbers spreadsheet into a database both because it would be easy to do and because so much of the other data really should be linked together via the part numbers. However, I have since decided that the best starting point is with smaller data sets that are primarily used by myself; I suspect that there will be no resistance when I suggest moving those over, and once I have them up and running, they can be used to demonstrate the advantages of a database in selling my bosses on changing other information into a database format.

12 Years of Beating the Odds

Today, April 27 2014, is our 12th wedding anniversary. Even though I usually love coming with reasons a particular number is important, and twelve is an easy number to do this for (important to ancient cultures, smallest number with 6 divisors, lowest abundant number, its a sublime number, its a super factorial, and duodecimal is the basis for time), I have none the less found myself focused on a very different matter to do with our marriage in the past few weeks; how incredible it is that we have stay married for as long as we have because we have been and continue to be hugely at risk for divorce.

Here is a list of the risk factors we had before our marriage even started - things about our background that are known to greatly increase a couple's chances of divorce:

• Margaret is 5 years older than me (I suspect this causes marital problems because the wife starts running out of years she can have children before the husband wants them at all, which is exactly what happened in our marriage)
• Both of us come from families that got divorced.
• We have different religions. 
• We both suffer from depression.
• We lived together before marriage. (Admittedly we were engaged before we moved in together, but I've never seen anything that says this lowers the impact on divorce rate)
• We knew each other less than 2 years before marriage.

But in addition to our backgrounds, a lot of things have happened in our years married that are additional risk factors towards divorce including:

• We have been under constant financial stress for pretty much our entire marriage
• We have both had long bouts of instability in our employment
• We lost a child (particularly in the five years following the loss, this sends divorce rates through the roof)
• There has been constant tension between Margaret and her in-laws

For fun I ran through the questions on a divorce probability calculator and it told me this:

Sean your score is 82 which puts you in the Very Strong Probability category.

Very Strong Probability

The news is not good. You're amongst a demographic of people that have the lowest long term marriage success rate. What that means is that based on the factors that you indicated, there are many things in your life that significantly contribute to divorce and very few, if any, factors that contribute to a long term successful marriage.

So I guess we've been beating the odds, and continue to do so every day. I feel like in the last 6 months a lot of things in our lives have taken turns for the better; hopefully that will continue and all these risk factors will continue to be little more than curiosities.

243 New Alignments

This was originally written in 2011 and is appearing here as part of Throwback Thursday.

There have been a couple of sites taking interesting looks at the meaning of each of the alignments in the two axis, nine alignment system. All of this reminded me of an idea I had more than a decade ago, but at the time wasn't able to fully realize.

I have always been a huge proponent of alignments, even when their detractors have been most vocal. From my perspective, when I am DMing, alignments can be an invaluable tool for getting a very quick understanding into how a monster/NPC operates. As a player, alignments aren't nearly so useful, but neither have I ever felt restricted by them the way some people do.

Being that I see alignments as a great source of information, it always seemed logical to me that rather than do away with them (as some have proposed) we should be seeking to expand them.


The Two Ways To Expand Alignment

I had two ideas for how to expand alignment, both of which were stemmed from the concept that alignments could be represented by two axis with three possible values.

Expand the length of the axis from 3 to 5, thereby creating 25 possibly alignments. The alignments would still cover the same range as the current ones, but would give a more detailed notion of where a creature lay.
Instead add a third axis, giving a total of 27 alignments.
The first idea was easy to implement, but difficult to see the benefit of. While it makes sense that there might be some people who are a light good and some who are a lot good, from a game perspective describing an NPC as a little bit good raises more questions that it answers.

The second idea really appealed to me, but I couldn't for the life of my figure out what the other axis would be. The nine alignment system seemed so self contained, that anything else would just feel out of place. However, in preparing to write this article I came upon a possible answer.


The Big Five Personality Traits

In contemporary psychology, the “Big Five” factors (or Five Factor Model; FFM) of personality are five broad domains or dimensions of personality which are used to describe human personality.

The Big Five factors and their constituent traits can be summarized as:

• Openness – (inventive/curious vs. consistent/cautious). Appreciation for art, emotion, adventure, unusual ideas, curiosity, and variety of experience.
• Conscientiousness – (efficient/organized vs. easy-going/careless). A tendency to show self-discipline, act dutifully, and aim for achievement; planned rather than spontaneous behaviour.
• Extroversion – (outgoing/energetic vs. solitary/reserved). Energy, positive emotions, surgency, and the tendency to seek stimulation in the company of others.
• Agreeableness – (friendly/compassionate vs. cold/unkind). A tendency to be compassionate and cooperative rather than suspicious and antagonistic towards others.
• Neuroticism – (sensitive/nervous vs. secure/confident). A tendency to experience unpleasant emotions easily, such as anger, anxiety, depression, or vulnerability.

Now if you assume that Conscientiousness is represented by the Lawful-Chaotic axis and that Agreeableness is represented by the Good-Evil axis then you would be left with Openness, Extroversion and Neuroticism to make up three more axis.

Obviously having five different values being measured would mean an end to the graphical representation of alignment with axis; a suitable replacement would be five parallel lines, or scales.

Here is what such a system might look like:

Now admittedly, before this could be truly useful a few adjustments would need to be made – notably the terms need to be revised to avoid ones that start with the same letter (to preserve the usefulness of writing in the format LG). But otherwise I could see a more complex alignment system such as this being a boon.

Coo Coo Ca Choo

Though I was both a good student and a bad one at various times in my life, the one thing I always was was an honest student. Not only was I unwilling to consider tampering in the dark arts of cheating, but I was almost always unwilling to ask for or accept help of any kind; I would sink or swim on my own (I'm not saying that not asking for help was good thing, but it was my thing). But the one thing I grew accustom to asking for help with, was also the one thing I could be said to have cheated on.

Its easy to peek over shoulders when you don't have a nose.

I am a good speller, and I have a strong grasp of grammar (thanks in no small part to having an English teacher for a mother), but as anyone who has been reading this blog has probably noticed, when I get too interested in what I am writing I often write nonsense; I will write words out of order, and I will repeat sentence fragments, and I will drop in words that were from a previous incarnation of the sentence that is still lingering in my mind. I don't have any  reason to think I am dyslexic (at least no medical professional has ever suggested it), but I find that I make these mistakes frequently, and then am blind to them if I try to proof read my own work. So, with my writing issues being what they were, I came to accept early in high school that I needed to have my essays proof read, despite my normal stance on refusing all help, and luckily I had an English teacher in my home who was willing to do this for me.

Now, to be sure, even though I realized that I had little choice but to accept my mother's help in proof reading, I normally was very uncomfortable with anything beyond a small correction; if she fixed the spelling of a word or reorganized a couple of words, I would just use the correction she had made. But if she found one of my aforementioned nonsense sentences and completely rewrote it, I would throw out both my version and hers and try to come up with a brand new sentence.

You might think with the advantage I had in parentage that I would have gotten top marks in English, but the truth was that with each year they slipped a little further down. This brings me to grade 12, when my marks in English were in no danger of failing, but with little hope of honours either. Late one night I gave my mother what I had hoped would be the last draft of an essay that was due, and she handed it back to me with more red ink than I had ever seen. I didn't have it in me to basically rewrite the whole essay, so I took her changes at face value, and after one more check from her I was done.

When I got that essay back it was graded 100%.

Never before in my childhood had my mother put school work of my up on the fridge to be seen and remembered, but she put that essay up. I won't say that my mother rarely felt proud of me, but rarely could I tell that she was, however, after that essay I could see her glowing with pride.

But amoungst all the pride there once slipped a little joke. Wondering one night how anyone could get a perfect score on an English essay, she mused that my teacher probably wanted to sleep with me. Not that it matters, but 17 year old Sean would totally have slept with his English teacher because she was pretty hot (oh, and I was a nerd with no prospects). I probably wouldn't even remember that conversation or the feeling of wishing it were true if I hadn't used the exact same technique to get 100% on my next essay.

Although the second 100% essay got a place on the fridge too right next to the first one (that was still hanging there weeks later), after the second one mom started playing up the teacher must want to sleep with me to the max. Not only was this a frequent topic of conversation, but she went out and bought me the movie The Graduate.

The music of this movie aged well, the appeal of
Mrs. Robinson to teenage boys, not so much.

It suffices to say that I never again used a rewritten sentence from mom and I never again got 100% on an English essay. But looking back on this years later, I can't quite guess what my mom's angle was. I'm pretty sure she didn't understand her role in my getting 100%, because I don't think she ever realized that I normally didn't take her editing suggestions. I'm also pretty sure that she wasn't actually wanting her 17 year old son to sleep with his 30 something teacher.

You might think the obvious conclusion was that she was joking, but then that would be because you don't know my mom; I'm pretty sure she ran into Red Foreman sometime in the 70s and he said to her "Lady, lighten up. (plus something about feet and asses)" I suppose her boyfriend of the time might have come up with this and got her to play along, but no matter what the truth was, it was an odd end to an odd situation, with seemingly everyone acting out of character.

The Phantom Post

Next month it will be 15 years since Star Wars - The Phantom Menace came out, and yet somehow, all these years later there continues to be a steady stream of hate directed at that movie, particularly on geek sites. I have for many years done my best to ignore this hate, and even today I'm not really going to address it head on (though perhaps I will soon), but I would like to talk about a particular theory I recently heard about the origins of TPM hate.

Noah Antwiler, known to his many followers as "The Spoony One", recently explained his views about the history of TPM hate in order to make an analogy about how he expects WWE fans of the future to view Westlemania XXX. In short this is how he thinks the history of TPM hate goes:

• Before TPM came out it got largely good reviews
• When fans went to see the movie they were so shocked by how bad it was that they actually thought it was good
• Internet reviewers like himself were able to slowly open the eyes of Star Wars fans
• On opening night almost everybody loved it, but today almost everybody hates it

I'm not going to say Noah is wrong, because while I believe there is an alternative explanation for what he is witnessing (that in 1999 the majority opinion seemed to be that it was good, while today the majority opinion seems to be that it was one of the worst movies ever made), I am of the belief that the flaw in his logic is that he is assuming that the opinion of an insular community is representative of the world at large, and to insist that I know he is wrong  would be to make that same mistake myself. So, at best, here is a possible alternative explanation for why the overwhelming majority of the Internet seems to think TPM is amoung the worst movies ever made.

• Before TPM came out it got mixed reviews, though notably Roger Ebert had high praise for it
• TPM was such a popular movie that it stayed in theaters for almost 6 months, a feat almost unheard of in modern cinema for a May release (and essentially impossible for a movie without massive positive word of mouth)
• A small portion of viewers (though still a numerically large group) were very disappointed in the movie
• Star Wars fan sites became never ending flame wars as those hated the movie could not let a single statement of appreciation for TPM go unchallenged
• Over time those who loved the movie gave up fighting for it because it is much more draining to be the one who loves something than to be a troll
• Once the voices of those who loved it were silenced, it became "common knowledge" that everyone hated TPM

I don't know if my version of events is truly what happened on the Internet, but I can tell you with certainty that it is what happened with me personally.

When The Phantom Menace came out, I absolutely adored it; I saw it 23 times in theaters. I wanted more than anything to have a home on-line where I could talk to other fans about how much we loved it; but there was no safe place for fans of TPM. In every thread on every board on every site those who hated TPM would appear and bash it.

For me the real Phantom Menace was the Internet. For three years I argued every day with people who hated TPM. Then, just about the time Attack of the Clones was coming out, I realized something – reading their negative comments every day, and responding to them every day had killed my love of all things Star Wars.

I only went to AotC twice and RotS once. In the years since I have given away and sold the thousands of dollars of books and collectibles I once owned. I don’t own a single Star Wars thing anymore; not even the movies. Not because of anything George Lucas did, but because of Internet trolls.

People who hate TPM have (or had) all this pent up rage at George Lucas, ostensibly because this movie somehow wrecked their enjoyment of the others. But for some reason it wasn't enough for these people to hate the movie themselves, no they had to find every last place that lovers of the movie were hiding and try to make them feel miserable.

If you are someone who didn't like TPM, or thought it wasn't worthy of being a Star Wars movie, I disagree with you, but I can respect that. However, if you are someone who felt the need to go to a fricking TPM fan site and endlessly crap on the movie, then you are a troll. If you are someone who has felt the need to sneak in jabs at TPM into discussions that weren't even about the damn movie years after it came out, you are a troll. If you are someone who years after the movie came out felt a need to "prove" to anyone that the movie was as bad as you thought it was, then you are a troll.

This all too common phrase is perhaps the most damning
proof that TPM haters were nothing but trolls.

That is my story, of how haters wrecked one of the things I loved most in the world. I hope I can find the will to write a defense of TPM in the next month, but I would be foolish to promise it; trying to write such a piece is going to open up a lot of old wounds for me, though maybe if I can pull it off, it can help close them for good.