Tea Leaves

Note: Because of the formatting used in this article, it likely won’t look quite right in an RSS reader. I suggest reading the entry in your web browser.

When I first invited psu to be a co-blogger, the thing he was most leery of was the fact that Tea Leaves had support for comments. His previous blog didn’t. Pete claimed that he didn’t like comments because he didn’t want to read what people had to say, because most people on the internet were crazy anyway.

But really, the true reason that psu’s old blog didn’t have comments is that he is a gay lamer who doesn’t know how to program and is stupid and gay and lame and probably uses a Mac.

Oops, sorry — I was channelling some of our more crude visitors there. It happens. In any event, psu is not alone in his opinion. I showed my sister what I think is one of my better pieces, and when she read the comments she asked, “Why are you letting these people put their words in a space meant for your work? What do you get out of it?”

That’s a good question, and I am deeply ambivalent about the value of comments. On the one hand, we have a number of regular visitors who regularly contribute thoughtful commentary. For example, Green LA Girl manages to point out where I’m being a closed-minded snob about fair trade issues. Chris from Only a Game often points out some of the deeper reasons behind the videogame mechanics we complain about. There are too many to name here, really, but when I see that there are new comments by Adam Rixey, or Christina, or Brian Hook, or Zarf, or any of the ex-CMU Zephyr crew, I’m always confident that I’ll read something intelligent, something thoughtful, something that brings a new perspective to the issue. Even when I disagree with them.

On the other hand — well, the other hand makes up the rest of this article. It turns out that the more you write, especially if you are an opinionated asshole ardent critic, the more you find people willing to hate you. Here are some of our “favorites.”

People Who Love P.F. Chang’s

Read the original article: PF Chang’s: Why It’s Evil

psu doesn’t like the chain faux-Chinese restaurant P.F. Chang’s. This is because he is a gay hippie intellectual loser.

and…

People aren’t shy about getting personal:

People From Iceland

Read the original article: Björky Had A Little Lamb

I wrote an article urging people to buy local produce instead of meat shipped in from another country. In return, the descendants of Erik the Red came for me. Most of them were polite in their disagreement, but one guy in particular took it very personally:

We did. It turns out Americans don’t kill the most whales, and if you exclude the aboriginal catch, we don’t kill any. Frailty, thy name is Guðmundsdöttir.

People Who Have Sex With Their Cousins

Read the original articles: O Cousin! My Cousin! and Cousin-Lovin’ Haiku

We were mean to people who have sex with their cousins. They fought back!

And…

This thread took a turn for the seriously weird when some people read the article and apparently didn’t understand that we were mocking them cruelly, and began actually asking us for advice:

Snow White and Other Fictional Characters

Read the original article: Idlewild

I wrote what I thought was a thoughtful reverie about childhood, growing up, and the nature of perspective. A bunch of people who worked at “Storybook Forest” decided I was a hateful bastard who hated all children. I can joke about it now, but I was truly scarred by this — for literally weeks I was saying, in wonderment, “Jesus! Snow White is yelling at me.”

To Snow White’s credit, she wasn’t actually yelling all that much — in retrospect, she was quite polite — and she didn’t call me a gay lamer who probably uses a Mac. Her manager (Cinderella!) was a little harder on me:

Others agreed with the manager:

Vegans Who Feed Their Cats Vegan Diets

Read the original article: Vegan Cats

We’re often a little bit mean to vegans, in a sort of offhand Tony Bourdain way, but frankly we’re not that brutal; having to eat what they do is punishment enough. But an article I wrote pointing out that feeding a cat a vegan diet was immoral and unethical apparently touched a nerve. Like Snow White, the vegans were reasonably polite. The one comment that stands out is that of the person declaring that by recommending that cats be well-fed and healthy, I was simply projecting my bourgeois morals on to the poor carnivorous creatures:

People Who Like (or Hate) Some Game We Said Bad (Or Good) Things About

Original articles: too numerous to list, but some of the better examples are Gran Turismo 4, Metal Gear Stupid, God Of Bore, and the sine qua non that inspired this article, Dumb and Dumber

It turns out that in certain circles, it is safer to call someone’s mother a crack addict than it is to say that you disliked their favorite videogame. For instance, these fans of Gran Turismo 4, a game I panned, were quite clear about what they wanted to see happen to me:

Bugs Bunny?

“Go kill yourself” is one of the more popular sentiments.

I actually liked this one:

Metal Gear Solid fans are quite eloquent:

God of War:

Usually people are offended when you say a game sucks. Recently we discovered that people can get incoherent and screechy when you say a game is good, too:

The Punchline

Well, if you’re still reading after all of that, I am impressed. You are truly hardcore. I think, on balance, the interesting people and their positive contributions to the comments threads here matter. I don’t plan on shutting down the comments any time soon, for that reason. Rather than letting the bad chase away the good, it’s important to find a way to let the good rise to the top.

To that end, we are, as of right now, adopting a rule from one of our favorite web sites, Gamers With Jobs. To wit:

“4) You Must Attempt to Follow English Standard – This is not a rule meant to squelch the voices of those who do not use English as a first language, but to remove those for whom English is their primary language but can not be bothered to form coherent sentences. We won’t ban you if you choose to haphazardly split infinitives, but the basic conventions of the language are a requirement, I think, for intelligent discussion. That means employing punctuation, capitalization, sentences, paragraphs, subjects/verbs, and the recognized and proper use of alpha/numeric characters (meaning W is not \/\/).”

In other words: you may disagree with us. You may disagree strenuously with us. You may even make ad hominem arguments, up to a point, and call us gay lamers who probably use Macs.

But while doing all that, you have to spell correctly.

This post violates several of the meta-rules I have for the site: it is, quintessentially, “blogging about blogging.” But sometimes it’s important to take a break and review what you’ve done. If the quality of one’s writing can be judged by the number of people it offends, then psu and I are kicking ass and taking names. We’ve been at this for a few years now, and it’s still fun. Thanks to all of you who have come along for the ride.