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Professor Fairfield
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Post by Professor Fairfield » Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:17 am

Professor Fairfield wrote:
IVhorseman wrote: Well wait hold on, this is a logical fallacy. It's a "Slippery Slope" fallacy, claiming that one thing will invariably lead to another to another, which isn't necessarially true.
No; not necessarily. Wait for my answer down at the bottom, though, for clarification.
IVhorseman wrote: Also Also, Benny, I've actually met this guy in person before.
Don't be too jealous, though, guys. I'm not nearly so menacing in person--and neither is he, for that matter. For example, he wasn't actually carrying an "orange, transparent chainsaw" when I visited him.
Almighty Benny wrote:
Professor Fairfield wrote:While I'm at it, why don't I forget that Legos necessarily connect at the studs and bases, and try to build things by stacking things side by side, sure that they'll fit?!
Good idea, then maybe you can make one of these

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You undoubtedly think that is a good refutation of my point, although I was obviously referring to vertical models. I, however, can just as easily interpret this as yet another example of how a good deal of premeditation, calculation, and organization can help when it comes to Legos.

Which brings us back to my point of contention. Undoubtedly, I am a little late in trying to make any sort of change to the collective mindset of these forums, but I still maintain my criticism on the valid grounds that we priggish, uptight, tight-lipped Vulcan snobs have every bit as much claim to Lego fandom as all of you do, and maybe it was not a good idea to form a group consciousness that might turn off a great deal your fellow Lego afficiandos. The greater purpose of Brikwars should have been to unite Lego fans of all persuasions, not to limit the game and its forums to people of a certain brand of humour.
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Post by Almighty Benny » Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:46 am

well first of all, that Mona Lisa mosaic would get it's ass kicked in a BrikWar

I think it's fair to say that until now, none of us has ever questioned the awesomeness of our "group consciousness" as you put it. In fact, I'm pretty sure that that is the reason why most of us are here in the first place.

I also don't know where you're getting this "everyone has as much right to LEGO fandom as you do" business, as if any one of us has called you out on being a LEGO fan. This is a forum for the game BrikWars, invented by Mike Rayhawk as a wargame for the less serious war gamer. I have never gone on a hardcore DnD forum just to start preaching about how I hate listening to the GMs.

Now I could try to explain again what exactly it is that we like about BrikWars, but it seems like you are too busy trying to be a condescending nerd. Go ahead and play BrikWars as if it were a serious wargame where the objective was to use logic and strategy to defeat your opponents, but don't expect any of us to agree with your methods.
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Post by Rayhawk » Mon Jun 01, 2009 2:46 am

Professor Fairfield wrote:Now that you're actually going and arguing with yourself, though, it's a new low for you.
Now I'm sad, I had such high hopes for that post. I knew even while I was writing it that it was really going to be more for everyone else's benefit than yours, but my girlfriend was cracking up all last night over it and she was dead sure you'd figure it out.

The truth is that arguing with myself isn't a new low, it's the low I've always maintained. Perverse self-contradiction is what BrikWars has striven for since day one, ever since I was first riffing off what the Lego Wars guys were doing. BrikWars is my response to intellectualism-for-its-own-sake the way Dada was a response to the powermongering that led to WWI. (I kid you not: that was the subject of my final thesis for my "Experience of the Grotesque in Human Psychology" class, years and years back.) You're of the opinion that the game is about wargaming with bricks, while I'm of the opinion that I combined open-ended Lego play with close-minded wargamer brutalism as a medium for expressing a specific philosophy.

The reason you've been able to maintain such superior condescension for the last couple of days is because you've continued to miss some very central points that are obvious to everyone else in the room, whether deliberately or otherwise.

Objectively speaking, I am not a stoner or a slacker or someone with a low IQ. If you want to reject what we're doing here by tossing around these labels of groups that you personally find inferior, I'm less interested in the fact that you want to reject my work than that you're so determined to find other people inferior. If you're finding yourself in the position that 'enough people call you a retard in all seriousness,' then I'd be willing to bet that acting superior is a big part of the reason. Whether or not you literally are a retard is less important than the fact that something about your behavior is inspiring people to label you as such. You should spend more effort figuring out why. (And don't kid yourself: it's never because anyone is jealous of how smart you are.)

A lot of harsh language and verbal roughhousing gets tossed around in these forums, but for all everyone's explicit insults I don't know if I've ever felt any of them to have been as genuinely and universally insulting as the patronizing condescension you express in every post. Speaking for myself, after what I've read in this thread, I would play a hundred games with any one of them before I'd want to play one with you. (Even james+burgundy, and I'm pretty sure he really is a retard.) I'm not surprised that when you met up with some random college girl, she felt the same way.

All of this is just a more direct way of stating what I normally try to get across through the perversion of common-sense logic and the subversion of conflict. I'll make it explicit: Trying to be superior to people is the worst thing you can do to yourself. (Especially by employing a metric as thoroughly worthless as brainpower.) You're pouring energy into creating divisions, while all the people around you are putting that work into creating connections, and in the long run, in all of the most important aspects of life, connected people succeed while isolated ones fail. My goal with BrikWars has never been to appeal to the largest number of Lego fans or engender any kind of unity; in fact it's about as completely opposite as it can be. My goal has been to offend as many people as possible, knock them off their high horses, and get them to think more consciously about their ideas about competition and conflict.

So yeah, you've missed the point. And so far I don't feel even a twinge of guilt about calling you a retard.

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Post by Rayhawk » Mon Jun 01, 2009 2:57 am

Of course, it's only this month that I finally read Catch-22 and realized that Joseph Heller did it all first.

On that note:
Almighty Benny wrote:I have never gone on a hardcore DnD forum just to start preaching about how I hate listening to the GMs.
Benny! Please! In DnD they're DMs, not GMs. If you preached about GMs people would think you had no idea what you were talking about.

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Post by Almighty Benny » Mon Jun 01, 2009 9:47 am

well that's because 90% of the time, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

I think my oversight actually enhances my argument, though I'm pretty sure that's what you were insinuating. Coming on a BrikWars forum to preach hatred for the very things that separate BrikWars from other wargames displays the same level of ignorance as going on a DnD forum to preach about what separates DnD from other wargames.

At least I'm not trying to martyr myself in the name of minifig fandom.

The bottom line, Professor Fairfield, is that no one is stopping you from making your own brik wargame. At this time, that seems like a pretty good option, because you have completely missed the point of BrikWars.
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Post by IVhorseman » Mon Jun 01, 2009 11:17 am

But DnD is a roleplaying game, not a wargame Image

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Post by Almighty Benny » Mon Jun 01, 2009 11:36 am

yeah, I guess I am pretty ignorant.
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Post by Natalya » Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:40 pm

Why the fuck did I walk into this thread?
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Post by IVhorseman » Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:42 pm

It was orange, and pretty.

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Post by Natalya » Mon Jun 01, 2009 12:56 pm

My mind is bleeding. :[ Rayhawk you need to put a DRAMA meter on threads so that even when they're orange and pretty they don't lure us into their bullshit drama trap.
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Post by Professor Fairfield » Mon Jun 01, 2009 3:13 pm

Let me clarify a few points. I won't even quote Mike here, since for him it'll be clear to which of his points I am responding at what time. To anybody who didn't read Mike's post, I at least have hopes that they will understand me better than they do.

I have for my whole life opposed any linear hereditarian interpretations of intelligence as unfair and unfounded, so your assumption of me espousing any is incorrect. Never have I felt myself inherrently more blessed with intelligence than most of my peers; I say "most" because in the schools I attended there were some children who genuinely were boneriffic, in the most clinical, non-insulting sense of the word, but I did not feel there to be some sense of cosmic justice for the fact that they wound up lower in intelligence than myself and their other peers. Also, I am by nature a quiet, rather private person, not inclined to make any bold announcements to random strangers, so even if I did hold a bit of a hereditarian superiority complex about myself, I would hardly be atop a soapbox tooting my horn about it.

Hence, your theory that people are seriously calling me a retard because I made myself out to be superior to them is incorrect. The reason various people have assigned me that label is because I am autistic, and there are some low-functioning autistic people that are indeed boneriffic, hence a bit of a hasty correlation is drawn. The most noticeable trait that people find "boneriffic" about me is my voice, which is a little bit like a mix between Krang and Darth Vader.

I do not believe others inherrently stupid, as I have said, but I do subscribe very heavily to the Forrest Gump labeling system. Stupid is, to me, as stupid does. Hence, the reverse of what you thought about me was true: I did not originally get labeled boneriffic because I proclaimed myself superior to people; I proclaimed myself superior to people only after they labeled me boneriffic, and only to those people that called me boneriffic, whereby I had done nothing of the sort to them, merely spoken in the voice with which I was burdened.

That is the outlook that I have carried with myself to the present, and that has now manifested itself here on this forum. In retrospect, I have been too hasty in allowing past scars to cloud my judgement of the forum's behavior, causing me to assume its members a great deal more mallicious than they actually are. I will also grant that I have, myself, saddled Mr. Rayhawk with unfair and slanderous labels, for which I extend to him all due apology. Lack of communication is more the problem here than anything else; had I been here long enough to know sarcasm when I saw it, things may well have transpired in a different manner.

I still stand by one key defense of my conduct here, however, and that is the fact that at its basis, it still has itself been essentially just defense; not a deliberate attempt at rattling anyone's chain. I have always held some disagreements with Mr. Rayhawk about the way a proper Lego wargame ought to be run, but I have also had the prudent courtesy never to grind an egotistical axe in the Rules forum (nor in any other) just to gratuitously express my disagreements in a deliberate and disdainful manner. It is, as I have said, only after I felt that I had posted nothing but a very pro-Brikwars thread, concerning my attempts to do nothing other than further the cause of Mike Rayhawk's brainchild, and saw my efforts get rewarded with nothing more than disdain, that I percieved (even if incorrectly) a need to react strongly in defense of myself and my intentions.

On a similar note, no, the girl I met to chat with about Brikwars did not become turned off to it because of my priggish mindset. In fact, she didn't know or understand nearly enough about the game for me to even be able to discuss rules, lack thereof, or my sentiments about such things, with her. In reality, the correction here is eerily similar to Mike's statements about maintaining the same standards all along. Rather than being disenchanted with Brikwars by any of my behavior, the girl I met at UCSD was, in fact, acting almost entirely out of sympathy for me and my attempts to just get permission to advertise it, something UCSD, for whatever reason (If you think I'm a stuffy academic snob, try looking at the UCSD administrators! On second thought, don't; you may die of shock.), would grant me.

Her actual interest in the game itself, however, was never enthusiastic enough to really belong, something about which she was very frank. You may say Brikwars is not for me, although with various modifications I hold that it can appeal to anybody who loves making things out of Legos (although as Mike said in a few posts prior, maybe not all of them at the same time), but I say I am at least more fit for the game than she was; I actually have continued to play with Legos and build grand things all the way up to my adulthood; her experiences were limited to building walls and towers from Duplo blocks, and she had not done even that for well over a decade.

Having said that all, I am locking this thread, or if users can't lock threads, I doubt the mods will see much reason to leave it open themselves. It has been derailed into a rather unpleasant flamewar, and it is, at this point, not likely I will get to play Brikwars at UCSD, afterall.
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Post by Blitzen » Mon Jun 01, 2009 3:17 pm

Malicious only has one L.
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Post by RoC77 » Mon Jun 01, 2009 4:24 pm

Wouldn't it be easier to say........ "Sorry all, my bad!"

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Post by stubby » Mon Jun 01, 2009 4:59 pm

Good enough for me. I'm locking it up and declaring Professor Fairfield the winner of the thread. GG everybody!
Natalya wrote:Wtf is going on in this thread?

Locked