Explanation on Rants, Ravings, Opinions, etc.
A couple of my readers and friends lately have pointed out a couple of web sites out there that are doing daily (or less than daily but still pretty frequently) “Rants” and so forth. One that Minx pointed out to me was Online Gaming World which features a thing called “BK’s Rant” done by KnightBK. Another one that sticks out in my mind is “Razor’s Rant” over at Planet Riva. I’m flattered that some of you care enough to look out for any possible “proprietary idea” or special feature of mine (Ravings of a Zealot) but those features on the other pages are essentially just when someone decides to display their opinion on the news page, and calls it something special. I won’t/don’t do that here, because I pretty much do what they’re doing every day, in every post. I simply don’t give it a fancy headline for the news page to make it SEEM like something special.

Web Wars
Shlonglor recently posted some views of his about “poor people” on his web site (Everything But Gaming). Those views spurred a lot of responses, both in agreement with and opposed to. One of my semi-regular read sites, run by a lady namedFrustrated (who has posted on Shlonglor’s page before and has been linked from there on occasion) posted one of the most notable responses on her own page entitled Trauma and Catharsis in which she says, amongst many other things, “I just read the saddest thing I think I have ever read Infact. I’m not even sure a human wrote it. It was the coldest most unfeeling thing…..God. God help us all.” Shortly thereafter (the next day I believe) a few things happened, all in a short period of time: “fewlio,” webmaster of Game of the Moment finally put up a forum on his site. A plain, stock, uncustomized WWWBoard forum. Shortly thereafter, he announces a new feature on his site entitled “Web Wars.” He describes it thusly:

I’ve decided to institute a new feature to GotM. I call it Web Wars! The idea is to have a war with a rival web page. Nothing nasty, just e-mails, dialogue and debate among the two opposing web pages. The page I currently deem to be an enemy of GotM is www.frustrated.org. The webmaster of that page has gone to great lengths to badmouth not only me, but also you the readers of this page! So head over to that page and post on the message board why GotM is the best and why frustrated.org is the lamest piece of crap ever!

What ensued afterwards, in apparently just a three hour span of time, is people flooding Frustrated’s own recently setup forum and posting all sorts of crap there flaming her and her site and her readers and so forth as encouraged by fewlio. People also posted on GotM’s forum, including people either posting as Frustrated who aren’t her, or fewlio changing the names on a couple of posts to make it look like Frustrated posted them. Frustrated took down her forum, and fewlio declared that as a victory for GotM. Frustrated had her own things to say about that, of course (even in one post comparing his attitude and tactics to that of a date-rapist) – check out her site (and the other sites respectively) to get the full sense of things.

Shee, and I thought the April Fools’ thing was a mess. So, for all of this, I’ve chosen a new Pointless Poll topic to get your opinions on this, and am also curious as to whether or not you all think I should step into this. Right now, I’m sitting on the sidelines watching it all. Part of me want to just go on and try to stay away from it. Part of me thinks it would be damned amusing to try to get fewlio to declare war on yggdrasil.net and be the next “victim” of his Web Wars, or to just declare war on him and his site myself. All in all, when it comes right down to it, this is extremely tempting to me, since it would be such a fun and wonderful exchange of opinions (perhaps it’s time I brush up on the banning and message deletion options for my forum script), and it’s also extremely frightening, since it could be such a huge pain in the ass flame-fest.

Overall, while I qualify this by saying that I haven’t read ALL the associated material (particlarly since Frustrated’s forum is down and some of it cannot be read) on this whole thing, I have to tend to side with Frustrated.

New Pointless Poll Topic
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: “It’s about time.” Yes, the previous Pointless Poll Topic (How long until 3dfx dies?) has been up the longest of any of the Pointless Poll topics. First, I had a hard time coming up with an idea for a new topic. My excuse is that my mind has been on far too many other things lately. Secondly, when the 3dfx/Glide Wrapper thing started to heat up again, I decided to leave the poll up to see if that affected things much. As it turns out, this is the closest of all the polls I’ve run thus far, with a fairly even split between “What are you nuts? 3dfx forever!” with 26.4% – (89 Votes), and “They’re dead before Christmas” with 24.6% – (83 Votes). As always, you can check out the full results of the last poll with thePrevious Poll Results page.

The new topic is “Site/Web Wars: Good idea or bad idea?” This one was inspired by my thoughts and ponderings over the entire GOTM/Frustrated/Shlonglor thing. The news post above this one should explain and clarify what I mean for ya.