What The Hell Was That? Fair & Ethical.

You said you forced Lolly to do what was fair and ethical. How'd you do that? Well, before I get to that, think about the position I was in for a moment. I had a Staffer from a different department harshing my peeps and there was nothing I could do about it except follow procedure, which is what I did. I didn't have the authority to make SI drop the issue, or the authority to make RS excercise HIS authority and make her drop the issue, nor did I have the authority to make Lolly make RS make SI drop the issue. God knows I tried, but that whole chain-of-command was fucked up. So I have an angry community gnawing on my ass from one direction and an unsympathetic, unmotivated, and unresponsive CommDev department on the other. All CommDev wanted was for me to tell Lit to shut up about it. So it was a losing proposition for me. I could either lose credibility with the Lit Community and no longer be an effective Gallery Director, or I could lose credibility, such as it was, with CommDev and be vilified for not being a "team player." Ultimately, I was ostracized for doing what I was asked by Angelo to do. And it was Angelo who ostracized me. How's that for good old-fashioned fun? You were behind an eightball that's between a rock and a hard place. That's the way I saw it. Politics is all about leverage and pressure, right? I didn't have any leverage because it isn't built into the GD position, so I had to get creative with the concept. The only play I could make was to take it public. First with the plantmatter journal, then when I got myself banned. It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you bring the public into an issue - especially when the issue is very clear and simple, and when the basic principle of fairness is under attack. People tend to get upset when they see something blatantly unfair happening. It's easy to tell three Lit GD's to shut up. Not so easy to tell a couple hundred people to shut up. As far as political leverage goes, that's all I had. But it is a powerful thing. I heard that. So you went public in an attempt to get him to resolve the issue? In a sense. I went public to pressure him into convening a meeting he had promised to have in order to straighten out the issue. And I wanted some leverage during the meeting to ensure that the Lit GD's didn't just have more "shut up or else" terms dictated to us. "Shut up or else" had already proven to be an unsuccessful strategy and its continuation, with no other definitive action thrown into the mix, was completely unacceptable. A meeting to discuss and resolve the issue? Sounds like the reasonable thing to do. Who was going to be at this meeting? Lolly, realitysquared, me, Toni, and Paul. When did he offer to convene the meeting? The end of August. When did the meeting take place? The middle of October. After the plantmatter journal went public and the heat started to rise he sent out a note saying, "We need to have a meeting about this. Immediately." Okay. Wait. The middle of October?!? That's a month and a half! Yep. After six weeks, after he ignored repeated inquiries about it, it became obvious that he had no intention of convening this meeting. He was content to issue "shut up or else" threats to the Lit GD's. Shut up or else? Yes. Shut up or there will be serious consequences. Of course, this only seemed to apply to the Lit GD's since SI and MK sure as fuck weren't shutting up about it. Where I come from that’s not considered dealing with a problem, it’s considered ignoring one. Sure. (laughing) See, even a dumbass like you can see that. Okay, I don't get it. Why not have the meeting? I can only speculate. Start speculating. If you were realitysquared, would you be thrilled at the prospect of explaining to the Lit GD's exactly why you allowed this situation to persist for over four months? No. Not at all. Exactly. I must say, though, in all fairness, Lolly moved out to California, which was part of the delay. Okay. It takes a few days, maybe a week to move. So he had five or so weeks to convene this meeting but didn't? More or less. And all your inquiries were blown off? Right. The only feedback you were getting was "shut up or else?" Right. So you went public with the plantmatter journal. Did I have any other option? Not from where I'm sitting. Let's talk about plantmatter since that was a big deal. A lot of people assumed that it was you. I know the truth but let’s pretend I don’t. So, was it you?

Force 1 - plantmatter

No. And yes. And then “no” again. (laughing) Explain. I got an email from someone named plantmatter. The subject line said "Regarding SI and DA - Urgent!" When was this? September. Maybe second week? Seems about right. I’d have to check on that. What did the email say? It said there were a number of Staff members and seniors who had read the wiki I had constructed and many of them were alarmed that a DA staff member could behave like that for so long without any repercussions. Through various and sundry bits of covert snoopery, they were laying 7:1 odds that I would get kicked off Staff or banned soon, or at the very least the wiki would get deleted. So they copied the wiki and put it on a non-public livejournal page…you know…just in case. A backup copy, really. Yeah. I thought it was a kook, to be honest with you. Why the hell would I get banned for this situation? That just seemed insane to me. So I wrote back and said that, while I appreciated the concern, I didn’t think it would be necessary to do anything with it. plantmatter said the livejournal would be left up should I need it. Which turned out to be wise. I guess. As the days ticked by and things continued to happen (except for the meeting, of course) with Lit and elsewhere on the site, and with no communication from Lolly or realitysquared or moonbeam13 other than more “shut up or else” threats, I started emailing new links to SI’s comments to plantmatter so they could be added to the list. After a few of those I was given the password to it so I could add them myself. Did you? Sure. I also removed the parts of it that were from the Staff Forum and the helpdesk tickets which caused some tension between me and the plantmatter spokesman. plantmatter wanted that stuff left intact, I wanted it removed. We compromised and left the links but removed the comments. By that time I was getting close to needing to make it public. So when did you start to consider using it? Late September, beginning of October. We were stuck in this terrible cycle. There wasn’t any “shutting up” and there wasn’t any “or else.” And there wasn’t any meeting. So during the first week in October I had plantmatter change the journal to “public.” I only told a couple of people about it and swore them to secrecy. At that point justthorne was serving as the conscience of the DA Community and had quite a following in his journal, due mainly to the brewing Submission Agreement calamity. He was experiencing many of the same frustrations that the Lit GD’s were. He was stuck in his own “hurry up and wait” cycle with Lolly and he and I had been commiserating. I gave him the link to livejournal and had him take a look. Jark, too. They were both appalled. So when did you drop the bomb? October 10th. I asked justthorne to put a link to it in his journal, which he did. Time to blow the lid off it. Try the case in the court of public opinion. Force them to answer to more people than just three GD’s and some irksome writers. And the results? What you expected? Oh, it was a real eye-opener all right. Some of it floored me. First of all, it changed the whole situation from something that was compartmentalized – something that was between SI and Lit, SI and seniors, SI and assorted deviants – as if they were three separate issues – into one big issue. In other words, the "proper context." You should read what Lolly went through in justthorne’s journal. [link] That was when we found out where his head was on the whole issue. That was when we realized he blamed Jark, the Lit Community, and me for the whole thing. His replies in that journal are nothing but attempts to cover his, RS's and SI's asses. He blamed you? So plantmatter was right? Yeah. Me? What’d I do? He says many times in that journal that the plantmatter page was ‘horribly one-sided.” And sensible people were sensibly pointing out that the issue only had one side – the behavior of one Staff member. He couldn’t see that. He couldn't grasp the causality of the situation – that what everyone was saying to SI was the result of her actions and not the other way around. That the situation had a genesis. It was her DD thing. It was her forum fights and her insulting journals and her insulting deviations. The Lit Community, seniors, various deviants - they didn’t just pick her name out of a fucking hat and decide to give her shit. He excused her behavior by saying something like, "she's been having to fend off over a hundred angry people." Oh really? Why is that, Lolly? Did you ever ask yourself that? (laughing) That's pathetic. So his excuse for her behavior hinged upon the number or people she pissed off? What, if the number had been smaller he would have quit covering for her? If the number had been higher he would have crowned her Queen of deviantART? This is unbelievable. Oh yeah. It was grotesque. He also said it was one-sided because the plantmatter journal didn't contain all the notes, helpdesk reports, and IM logs in which people were harassing her. That was also part of the delay in convening the meeting. He said he had to dope through all those first. Five weeks just to read notes and chat logs? Must have been a shitload of them. Not that many. But the question is, "why bother with reading them in the first place?" I don’t follow. Consider the Etiquette Policy at the time. It stated, “Personal issues between two or more deviants are to remain private.” That always meant that squabbles were to be taken off-site or to notes. The Administration directed people to take it to notes because it is a simple matter to delete a note unread. If you receive a note from someone and you know or suspect that you won’t like what it says, you just delete it. It’s not sullying up any publicly accessible space. Makes sense. It makes perfect sense. And the new Etiquette Policy explicitly states the notes part under the Discouraged Commentary section.

While not strictly prohibited we must insist that all personal arguments, disagreements, and other volatile “personal” issues within be confined to private communications such as Notes, emails, or Instant Messaging programs. Likewise we discourage public accusations and other similar situations;

I see where you are going with this. So, if notes are where squabbling belongs, and if the Administration makes a specific point about using the notes system for that…you know…if you must fight at all, how can people be held accountable for using it in the way they were directed? Right. So why was Lolly wasting so much time sifting through them? They were inconsequential. What was of consequence was SI responding to them in her journal and in the forums. And chatrooms. And on deviations. In a multitude of places where people could read it. DA policy says take it to notes or take it off-site, yet she kept responding to these things in publicly-accessible places? I may be halfway to drunk, but isn't that a violation of the Etiquette Policy? Technically, no. But you know what? I read many of those note exchanges. They follow the exact same formula as the forum threads and journal comments. Well-reasoned ventures met with defensiveness, aggression and insults. They degenerate from there. I wonder if he was looking at all the exchanges or just a carefully culled selection. Or whether those notes were edited prior to his review. Clearly he wasn't reading the same notes I was since they did nothing but cement the fact that SI was the cause of all the trouble. But no matter. He shouldn't have been reading them in the first place. I pointed that fact out to him [link] and, typically, got no response. So he wasted a month and a half reading notes that pissed SI off when she should have just deleted them in the first place? And during that month and a half that he was wasting, she was still going strong with her vendetta? You got it. But ultimately, because the shit hit the public fan, he convened the long-awaited meeting? Bingo.

The Meeting

So what happened in the meeting? Oh, that was quite a scene. realitysquared admitted that he hired a "naturally argumentative" person for his staff. (laughing) I’m thinking, “Oh my fucking god!” I asked, “Why would you hire someone like that to be on the PVA? That’s insane.” He said she would have been fine except he turned her loose on DA without proper training. Again, I’m stunned. I said, “You hire people who need to be trained to not fight with and insult deviants?!? This is un-fucking-believable.” It went on like that. He admitted that she caused and propagated a big fight that lasted months. He admitted he didn't put an end to it when he should have. And he admitted that several members of the Lit community were banned as a result. Whoa. So he fessed up. I bet you kicked his ass pretty good. No, no. Of course not. After the initial shock of him coming clean, we changed the course of the discussion to “where do we go from here?” Toni, Paul and I were IMing at the same time and Paul, being in China, had to go to work or bed or something, so we decided we were satisfied with the confession and wanted to move on. So what was the end result? Wipe the slate clean? Yep. Both sides made concessions in order to facilitate the wiping. I agreed to get three banned people to file their helpdesk tickets and Lolly agreed to give them a talking to and then unban them. And I agreed to try to get the plantmatter journal taken down. I couldn’t promise that since I wasn’t in control of it any more, but I said I would do what I could. Did you get it taken down? Immediately. Lastly, we all agreed to shut up about the whole issue and we agreed that anyone who couldn’t, SI and mirrorkills included, would be removed from Staff forthwith at the first infraction. Okay, let's go back for a minute. Did you ever find out who was part of plantmatter? Of course. Gonna spill the beans? I'll take that to my grave. All I'll say is it was a concerned collective. And I must say I was very surprised by who was a part of it. Not shocked, but definitely surprised. Lolly would be the one who was shocked. (laughing) Keep your secrets you cad. So...then that should have been the end of it. But it wasn’t. No. We thought it was, but it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. Where did it fall apart? First, they didn’t unban the last of vanquished writers until I threatened to post a transcript of the meeting in public. That was the thing in the Community Update? And that did the trick? Yep.

Force 2 - Under The Bus

That was early November, right? And you retired from Staff shortly thereafter? Yeah, after they unbanned the writers I figured the matter was finally over. And I was getting pressured by moonbeam13, who was getting pressure from elsewhere - not sure if it was from Lolly and RS or from Angelo - to go ahead and pick a date for my resignation. So I did. I was also told, point-blank, by moonbeam13 that, should SI and MK reawaken the whole mess, realitysquared would NOT remove them from Staff as long as I was on Staff. Huh? He needed a fall-guy. After he confessed that he was largely to blame? He only confessed in private. He never found the testicular fortitude to admit anything in public. And he and Lolly were cheesed off that I brought the public into the situation so, of course, I had to take the blame for the whole thing. Wow. Total assholes. The only promise left for them to break was the “shut up or else” part. And they broke that one too, didn’t they? Of course they did. The final straw was when mirrorkills dropped into a Lit Forum thread that had been closed for eight days and insulted me. Eight fucking days!! Can you believe that? And check this out: he closed a “Creatively insult the poster above you” thread on November 9 [link] and the reason he gave for closing it was, insulting other users in the forums is prohibited. And then, ten days later, on November 19, he drops into the locked thread entitled “Creatively compliment the poster above you!” and insults me. [link] Fanatastic! What'd he say? He accused me of practicing "favoritism" in the Forum. Remember, that's the same guy who rigged it so his girlfriend would get a Daily Deviation for a love poem she wrote to him. Ahahaaha hahahahha hahahahha! See? No self-awareness whatsoever. Favoritism indeed. Ahahhahaah...oh...Jesus Christ that's hilarious. I have to catch my breath. Whew. What a putz. Seriously. Are insults prohibited or not? Oh, that doesn’t apply to PVA, does it? Talk about "special treatment." There you have it. And ask youself this: if Lolly and realitysquared told him, as they promised they would, to leave the whole Lit matter alone, what the hell was he doing in a locked Lit thread? Of course, Lolly and realitysquared lied about everything else so odds are good they were lying about that too. I'd put my money on it. If not, then I'd say his self-control is vying with his self-awareness for the title of "Least Developed Personal Characteristic." And he called me a knob. (laughing) And they didn’t do anything to him? He wasn’t removed from Staff? They didn’t do a thing. So I commented on his page. And that led to SI publicly insulting all GD’s past, present and future. [link] So there you have the other one not shutting up about it in public, and she didn't get removed from Staff either. Someone, gunshymartyr perhaps, noted every single GD with a link that comment. SI had another situation on her hands. One that she created, of course, but this one was with Staff exclusively. The GD’s didn’t take kindly to that. I thought, “Welcome to the party, folks. See what kind of fun we’ve been having for six months.” Oh no! Pissing off more people just gives Lolly more reason to cover her ass. Isn't that the logic? (laughing) Here you had both of them not shutting up about it in public. And Lolly and realitysquared took no action. They weren’t removed from Staff. You weren’t shutting up either. Well, I wasn’t on Staff anymore, was I? Touché. I had one more trick up my sleeve and that was to get myself banned. You told me at the time you were throwing yourself under the bus. Correct. So you deliberately got yourself banned? Correct. How’d you do it? Why’d you do it? Walk me through it. I’d been told repeatedly by realitysquared that SI was allowed to insult the Lit Community in her journal for two reasons – journals are considered “private” and she wasn’t naming anyone in particular. That much was true. But I maintained that the people she was insulting knew to whom she was referring when she posted those journal entries and that should make a difference. realitysquared said, “No, it makes no difference.” Okay. So I decided to see how he liked it when the shoe was on his foot. I posted a comment in a journal – in JB’s journal - and I didn’t name anyone in particular, but it was obvious to whom I was referring. And he was one of them? Allegedly. I called some un-named people “douchebags” in a private journal. [link] And that’s why he banned you? Right on cue. But there is confusion about all that now – the “who pulled the trigger” part. I thought realitysquared did it. Then I thought it was Lolly. But now Lolly is pointing the finger at Angelo. [link] So who the fuck knows? When I spoke to Angelo on the phone right after I was unbanned, he assured me he had nothing to do with my banning. Someone is lying, aren’t they? No shit. Backing up a bit, you did what SI did, but she got a free pass and you got banned? Bingo. Was there any difference at all between what you did and what she did? Yes, I did it once. She did it repeatedly. What's even funnier is realitysquared awarded mirrorkills and SI Staff Merits on the same day! (laughing) That makes even less sense. That’s taking hypocrisy and making super-deluxe-ultra-atomic-mega-hypocrisy out of it. (laughing) But of course. Any damned fool could see that. And then what happened? The DA community, not just the Lit Community, but the DA community went completely bug-shit. It was spearheaded by the Lit folks, naturally, but it was pandemonium. All for little old you? (laughing) No, no. It was larger than me. It was a complete community rejection of the double-standard that was openly being employed by the PV Department. I was just the corpse in the street with the tire tracks on his back. So when you were banned there was a massive campaign on Angelo's user page and his various inboxes. Why did they target Angelo instead of the other two? Because Lolly and realitysquared were complicit up to their eyeballs in it and everyone knew it. What good would it do to appeal to the two guys who had already bungled the situation for months? Aside from Angelo, there were three people who could have, and who should have, stopped the situation. The first was subversive-imaginati. The second was realitysquared, the third was Lolly. Every minute of every day for six months was a fresh opportunity to put an end to it. There was a tremendous spammage on Angelo's page and we could all see that. I heard about the notes and emails that were fired his way. Do you know what was going on behind the scenes? I'm sure there was activity over in CommDev and AR. Well, you have to look at how Lolly and realitysquared tried to handle it. They went into their Keystone Cops routine. Their first tactic was to strong-arm everybody by banning people for "spamming" Angelo's page. They banned a bunch but that was like trying to stop an avalance with a wiffle bat. Then realitysquared appealed to Toni and Paul, telling them to "call the Lit Community off." (laughing) And Paul, God bless him, said, "You're kidding, right? What makes you think we have a prayer of stopping this?" (laughing) Lolly sent a note to Mark (kaujot) asking him to help stop it. Wait...he was asking a Lit Community member to help stop it? (laughing) Yep. Desperation will lead to funny things. I think the biggest blast fired was by moonbeam13 who, by that time, was completely fed up with the CommDev bumbling. She said she wasn't going to put her reputation on the line for two rogue police admins and that they needed to stop using me as a scapegoat because everyone and their mothers could see the issue wasn't about me or AR. I was proud of her for putting her foot down like that. Lord knows I nagged her enough about it while I was on Staff, poor thing. But she was being flooded with notes from other Staff who were offended by SI's insulting remarks about GD's. I remember that whole thing. That might have actually been the last time I rolled around DA. There was a thread in the Lit Forum regarding your ban and realitysquared came in and said you were banned for “exploiting a loophole in the policy.” I…and a bunch of other people…asked him why your comment was a policy violation but none of SI’s were. [link] Didn’t get an answer, did you? Fuck no. What kind of answer could he give? That, my friend, was the crux of the plan. (laughing) Don’t you love it when a good plan comes together? Yeah, but that was like slapping cripples. Cold blooded. It was dicey. But you know what? Angelo told me I "did a lot of good" by getting myself banned. Amen. He was obviously lying.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Addendum 1 - Debunked | Addendum 2 - Fair & Ethical | Addendum 3 - Step By Step | Addemdum 4 - The Whole Damned Thing