It’s been a rough summer, and I was busily escaping from my real life misadventures in Missouri farm life by lurking in the DU forums when I was rudely banned. Needing something creative to do, I started plugging away at this site. It’s not like I had a concrete goal in mind. I just needed a project I could sink my teeth into, that would also let me vent my spleen when needed. Isn’t that what blogs are for?
This isn’t my first web site, nor my first blog. I’m a web developer/designer my trade, with a long background in print media. It’s just my first atheist blog slash news site, and it turns out to be kind of tricky to do this right. I read other atheist blogs, and most of the more widely read ones are collections of aimless posts loaded with personal color: A cat pic. Some meta angst about an upcoming conference. Hate mail. Etc…
Not that all atheist blogs are like this. Many decidedly aren’t — it just seems like the popular ones are, and, hey! I’m a writer! We want to be read. It hasn’t come easy. As a writer, I’m verbose. Twitter makes me mad, and puffery just annoys me, so I won’t be writing any.
But I knew I needed a hook of some sort — something to cover up that new blog smell. That’s when I remembered: Oh yeah! I’m a cartoonist!
I dug up some old toons (my Tractoon) to post, and that’s got me cartooning, again. And I do like to draw. It took a long time to learn how, but now that I know, I find it relaxing. I can think about other things, watch movies, or talk to people and draw at the same time. I can’t write a computer program or a mathematical proof and multitask. It feels natural to doodle. It’s more than a distraction or escape — it’s me; it’s integral to my character.
It’s also been beneficial to my hit stats. Check it out – zero to putt-putt in a couple weeks:
Most of that growth has been thanks to my toons — I’ve been posting them on r/atheism, Twitter and elsewhere on a daily basis. Not all of the views are pointed at web comics, though. I noticed this on yesterday’s referrer stats:
Heheh… DU’s sending traffic here. Hur hur. Cool. I couldn’t resist, of course, and clicked through to see which DUer I needed to thank, and in what context. Here’s the relevant subthread:
EvolveOrConvolve (4,564 posts)
17. One of the “biggest trolls to hit DU”
LOL, really? Who might that be?
Stop doing ugly things and we’ll stop pointing those ugly things out.
cbayer (109,021 posts)
19. Mark Charles, samg, etc.
You ought to keep your eye out for him.
He is a master and gets your group every time.
rug (38,743 posts)
21. He’s over here.
http://bannedatheists.us/
Democratic Underground is listed as a “playground”.
Oh, oh, oh!… Irony, you are a delicious treat. Thank you, ‘Rug,’ for sending some traffic this way. Also, ‘cbayer’, I’m delighted to know that I am a “master” and one of the “biggest trolls to hit DU”. That’s just awesome; though I can’t take credit for Mark Charles or samg, et al. Maybe banned atheists wouldn’t act so vengeful if DU didn’t give Christian bigot trolls a free pass, day after fucking day. Rug. CB. 8|
When ‘laconicsax’ got PPR’d, it was Rug who baited him. When I got the pizza, it was Rug, the Teflon Troll. I said elsewhere, and I’ll say it again: I’ll hand it to you, Rug, you win. I can no longer respond to any falsehoods in the Religion forum, that’s true. Now I have this here BFE web site, and here I can call Rug what he is — a barely disguised bigot and a serial-alerting troll — and MIRT can kiss my POS TOS.
The third DU link in the screen grab is just Rug’s post alone (not in-thread). The second DU link is to a post I wrote under the one-off ‘bassthump’ zombie a couple days after I was PPR’d. It was and will be my last zombie at DU. (This is far more fulfilling.) For the record, my sockmonkey army never existed. The only accounts I’ve had at DU under which I posted anything (IP logging gave me a couple false starts coming back as a zombie) have been ‘joseph8th’ (a bunch), ‘daaron’ (some), and ‘bassthump’ (one).
What’s more, I have no idea who else on DU is a zombie or sockmonkey. Could be anyone. Are ‘Starboard Tack’ (‘Right Leaning’?) and ‘cbayer’ really the same person? Is Rug being paid by the Vatican? We ask; you decide.
(Was that rambling enough for you, atheoblogosphere?)
While similarities between Starboard Tack and cbayer are not coincidental, they are different people.
I wonder whether anyone will start hammering rug (who clearlyover the fact that he knowingly funds criminal and bigoted activity. He knows what his church has done, what it continues to do, and still donates money. The fact that he’s a cheap Internet stalker when it comes to DU atheists somewhat pales in comparison to that, don’t you think?
Right. ST & CB are married, no? Or so they claim! (Bum bum BUMMM!) No I know, I was just being outrageous because I can, without fear of alerts on every utterance. I don’t really think Rug is paid by the Vatican, either. Like you said, it’s the other way around in his case.
He’s a classic enabler-bully — those are the toadie bullies that only bully when boss bully’s authority is being threatened. That he’s obsequious as Wormtongue no doubt has helped him avoid falling afoul of the TOS. I just doubt the two things — Rug’s Teflon and Rug’s Catholicism — are unrelated, that’s all. He has the former because he is the latter, is my hypothesis.
The most relevant factor is that the admins simply don’t care. There is no marginalized group on DU that doesn’t have problems with majority-backed bigots. DU is a safe-haven for racists, misogynists, homophobes, transphobes, Christian nationalists, and all other sorts of open bigots. The TOS has always been selectively enforced and it will likely continue that way.
Straight, white, middle-to-upper class men who follow a religion are able to enjoy much of the same privilege they do IRL because the admins don’t care one bit.
Bizarre. I guess as long as their hit stats are strong so they’re making bank on ads — to hell with ‘Democratic’ Underground, eh?
I wouldn’t have minded getting PPR’d if the bias wasn’t so blatant. Yeah, OK I violated their POS TOS – but as you say, the selective enforcement is the problem. Shit-can me when I call a bigot a “bigot” — fine — but shit-can the bigot, too.