
Originally Posted by
ersatz_cats
Hahahaha, IT JUST KEEPS HAPPENING!!
Whyyyyyyy????
My work was not in danger from deletion, and you know that.
At that point in time, my work was in three locations:
1) The original dispute thread, on page 340;
2) Your wall;
3) My wall.
Okay, you didn't know it was on my wall, that's fair. We can strike that one from the list. But it was still in the dispute thread in addition to your wall. You make it sound - TWICE over in those quotes - as if you deleting the wall post would scrub my hard work from the site, suggesting that was the reason why you wanted it moved, out of concern that my work would be lost. How touching. While these details may be fuzzy to you now, they weren't fuzzy at the time. You knew it was a re-post, and that nothing would be lost by deleting the re-post.
Why lie? Why make up bogus reasons for stuff? I don't get it.
I understood the entirety of the situation at the time. You wanted me to contribute, and you called me out to do so. Fine. I was interested in contributing anyway. You wanted to highlight the discovery of the old Mruczek MTV interview, and how that torpedoed Billy's nonsense legal threat. Your motivation in that is 1) Billy's threatening to sue you, and this is evidence in your favor, and 2) he's attempting to erode your public credibility versus his. Still no problem. You re-posted the work to your wall to give the material a single link-able location to which that material itself is the focus. Again, motivations are fine. You properly credited me as the author, which was all I cared about. I will say, I was surprised the moment I saw this re-post to your wall, given some inflammatory things I'd said about Billy, and your choice to put those things on your wall, but that's your choice. I didn't worry about it. As soon as you messaged me, offering to swap to my wall, I immediately understood why. You still wanted a link-able page for the damning Billy material, but you wanted to separate "liar", "cheater", "fraud" and such from your page. Much better to merely link to it and say, "Check out this compelling evidence over here." That way it's still up, and you can still point people to it, and with that link you posted to your wall, you can still promote and direct people to it without the inflammatory stuff appearing under your name. All of that, I understood. All of that, I was on board with. Totally fine.
The only thing I didn't understand was why you had to put forward this weird reason to go to all this trouble, when I was confident in the reason, and it really didn't require a reason anyway. Of course, now I see that this is just a thing you do.
Also, at no point did I suggest you were trying to "hide" the post. I'm not sure where that characterization came from.
Why would that be a problem? If you had deleted it from the actual dispute thread, which is supposed to be permanent and un-alterable, yes, after the work I did, I would've been quite incensed. But I don't have some given right to space on your wall.
Have I tried to fit everything I could into some narrative? I've said TGSAP is great, and that the Billy dispute was handled "impeccably". Why am I not rolling those into some projected conspiracy theory as well?
This all starts to get a bit existential. "Oh, if I'd done the other thing, I would've been criticized anyway, so what's the point?" No. The point is, you do a thing, a thing I can identify and point to, that damages your credibility. That's the point. You're dishonest. And given your actions in dispute adjudication, it's hard to tell where exactly the dishonesty ends.
If you really wish to turn this into a discussion about what you have done for the site that's positive, rather than the subjects I spoke of, then yes, you do get credit for actually opening legacy scores up for dispute. I have seen past pages with people's calls for a score dispute process, which only amplified after Omnigamer's May 2017 Dragster analysis, so I'm not sure how much longer you could have gone on without one, but we can set that aside. Also, we can set aside for the moment the fact that your evidence standard for score removal is laughably unreasonable. I'm not even exaggerating when I say people get the electric chair over less evidence than it takes to remove a score here (though granted we're talking silly video game scores here and not life and death).
You can take credit for opening the dispute system and agreeing to adjudicate it, but the fact that you had nothing to do with entering these scores in the first place is really irrelevant, if you are the one throwing roadblocks and obstacles in the way of what should be easy open-and-shut cases. Notice that I haven't tried to make a point of bashing TG for allowing easy dispute cases to linger untouched for several months before resolving, because I am reasonable, and I understand there is a lot to do, and it can't all be done at once. On the other hand, active derailment, active denial of objective evidence, just can't be overlooked.
I'm not sure that's important, but there is a reason I didn't ask you about these items. With this Rodrigo dispute, everything from my perspective went straight from "Huh, that's weird" to "Holy cow, what is this dude's effing deal!?"
I would illustrate this with a comparison to a man (and I use the term loosely) by the name of Patrick Scott Patterson. As I said before, I make my own judgments on people. I'd heard plenty of bad things about him, saw that a lot of people don't like him. I even heard people say he had fabricated evidence for a DK kill screen (off the leaderboard). But I wasn't so sure. He seemed like a good guy, and he was more than happy to talk about Billy and others being cheaters, so I listened. I followed him on Twitter. There was a moment where I noticed the contrast between how he promoted Billy's score in 2010...
...the contrast between that and his testimony years later that he didn't believe any of it and he only said those things because a paycheck was on the line. I'm an understanding person. Paychecks are paychecks. But his words in 2010 were so emphatic, as if to dispel any notion of the score's illegitimacy. I never asked him about it, but I definitely thought "Huh, that's weird."
Then, in 2019, he uses his "video game preservation" outfit to auction off un-dumped prototype cartridges, specifically pumping them in the auction as "un-dumped" to jack up the price. All while still touting himself as a "video game preservationist". This was a complete a-hole move. There was no reasonable explanation. PSP did try to offer a couple phony explanations, but those only made it worse. As soon as I saw that, I was done following him on Twitter. I never discussed it with him, I never asked him about it, because it went immediately from "Huh, that's weird" to "Holy cow, what is this dude's effing deal!?" It went straight from one weird thing to a firm pattern of entrenched dishonesty which would not ever be resolved.
I didn't reach out to you because there was nothing to discuss. The weird thing from before wasn't worth discussing by itself. (Even now, it isn't worth discussing, except that it helps to illustrate a pattern of inability to simply engage with people honestly. Thank you, by the way, for continuing to illustrate that.) This Rodrigo dispute nonsense wasn't worth discussing for an entirely different reason, that being there was simply no excuse for any of it. Yes, we are discussing it now, but here in this public context, this is more about defending what I've written, presenting evidence, and telling anyone interested in this subject to "Watch out."
Despite your characterization of me, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I truly don't know what your motivation is at times. For instance, I wouldn't say for sure that you sell people's info. (Don't suppose you want to address that specifically, pun intended?) I'm merely at a loss for ideas on what other purpose you have for emphasizing data collection the way you do. Is your style of dispute administration really because you wanted to defend Rodrigo, or is it because you believe the theatrics of the clown show are beneficial, either to the site, or to your own amusement? I don't know. I can only state that none of this makes any sense for the stated objectives, and it harms TG as a credible scorekeeping outlet.