MORE REASONS FOR MILITARY SCHOOL [Author: lum]
It had to happen…
http://town.owo.com/cgi-bin/guilds.pl?g=ad3881c8fee72738:25
http://town.owo.com/cgi-bin/guilds.pl?g=3ffd1fe5eb97daed:7
(LATE BREAKING NEWS – Don’t bother clicking on the above two links — OSI has removed the guilds from the game. Both were named “TCM – Trench Coat Mafia”, one was on Baja and the other on Drachenfels. Ahh, the raw power of webmastery.)
On a related subject, I got a well written rant from a goth who plays UO last night, who took offense at my labelling the little pusbags in Colorado that layed waste to their school “goths who were pissy that jocks got all the cool shit.”
First off, I’m wasn’t saying “all goths are bad”. Hell, when I was in high school I did my share of dyed black hair and pancake makeup, but back then it was the 80’s and more of a fashion statement then anything else. Now it’s like a whole subculture that I somehow missed. However, at the time I wrote that, the mass media, always an impeccable source of correct information, was saying that the two or three or twenty shooters were goths who listened to the Cure one too many times and decided to end everyone else’s pain too. (Actually I made that last part up. To connect the Cure to Goths would have required actual research. Instead they just beat on Marilyn Manson for a while because he’s a strange little girlyman with man breasts. When I was in New York last year his album had just came out, and Interscope had purchased a HUGE billboard in Times Square with this 50 foot Marilyn Manson staring down at you with his nakedness. I blame that experience for the web page you are now reading.)
Now we’re going to hear for the next year or so that video games are bad for you and the Internet breeds killers because one of them posted a DOOM wad (man, you gotta love those iD guys for subtlety in naming conventions) on AOL.
Leaving aside for the moment that if I hear AOL referred to as the Internet ONE MORE TIME I may breed a killer inside of me my own damned self. And the fact that these two guys were so lame that they actually bought those godawful Doom “fiction” books.
We like to blame people. Hell, look at the MDK banning. A bunch of wastes of perfectly good air get banned for following some poor roleplayer around screaming “We’re going to A$zZ Rap3 j00!” It hits the boards and immediately everyone takes sides. The PKers, who spend much of their time picking on roleplayers, are frightened that OSI will start banning THEIR guilds. The roleplayers, who spend much of their time bitching at OSI about the roleplayers picking on them, are celebrating that OSI *are* starting to ban those PK guilds.
Sounds kinda like high school, hmm?
Just remember, as the media goes into Monica Lewinsky withdrawal and goes into full 24 hour ban-all-signs-of-violence-from-our-tender-little-babies mode, what apparently really happened at Columbine High School was that two kids, who had been picked on for being geeks their entire lives, finally snapped.
Not because they played Doom too much (um, they couldn’t update to Quake at some point?), not because they listened to scary music, not even because they were in a PK guild in UO, but because kids can be really, really brutal mindfuckers to one another.
Something to think about.