Yes, you should.
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I remember this one
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Also the accusation and close-inspection of m_hollowayās credentials. Who is easily googleable as a Torontonian with an interest in bikes, baseball, and the Ukraine.
Why canāt we be excellent to one another?
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You know I stopped reading Something Positive awhile ago. Ironically, shortly after meeting him and getting Choo-Choo bear in Carbonite as a sketch.
The meeting had nothing to do with it, I just drifted of. I hope RK is doing well, though.
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While I think you might be talking about someone else, I did feel a bit badly in retrospect in the way I was communicating with the new person who popped up in the Ukraine thread, since I think there were more constructive ways to engage than how I did.
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#Act III: The Final Countdown
Ah, yes, come in, take your seats. The Feast shall begin SOON.
But first, The Speaking of Tongues.
The fruits of this cranium are about to be shared.
Hope you know where your jawbone and your towel are.
Firstly, Jeff (@codinghorror) , I appreciate and understand your desire for me to point to individual examples. Iām sorry but I canāt give them, they are not mine to share, and I have not gathered the consent to share them. Consent is an important value. Consent is a key to trust: those who do not trust do not provide consent, and those who break trust lose consent, and those who violate consent never earn trust. Trust is an important value.
Without trust, people keep things secret from each other. This secrecy is sometimes necessary to avoid pain, to avoid manipulation, to avoid pain. Helpers and healers have taught us that mercy and compassion are necessary to do no harm, those are values are no brainers (salivating intensifies), but privacy, modesty, and secrecy also become so by logical extension. We all deserve the liberty to pursue our own definition happiness, but are all too often at the mercy of others in that pursuit.
So, we defend ourselves. We define ourselves by our friends who defend our walls and demarcate our boundaries of safety. They are our human shields, our firewalls. We build these walls to keep the hurt out, and let the good in. And so, we put our faith in others to help police the borders of where we let our minds wander and our brains graze. But alas, any wall, any boundary, any defense defined by humans is as defective as the humans that designed it. The architects of our walls, our systems of defense, are only as good as the people they rely upon. Because sometimes they push away the very people we want to include.
This is why the runtime of @chgoliz is so important to the architecture of the walls of our mutant discourse and Your Software Discourseā¢. The arbitrary architecture designed to prevent abuse by untrusted agents was inducing discomfort in one of our most trusted agents. Because we couldnāt bear to lose another Trinity, we hacked the system to expand the walls out far enough to bring her back. @chgoliz is important because she embodies so many of the values important to us, even when her behavior exceeds the values that Discourse has set as the norm.
Is it clear yet? Mutants are not normal. They value progress in the arts and sciences. ALL off the arts and ALL of the sciences. It would be unwise and try to contain this community by what the data considers ānormal.ā This is the knowledge yielded by the Like Strike.. You need as many Agent Smiths as possible to like the good and flag the bad in order for discourse to scale. But if the firewall begins to exclude the best of the Agent Smiths, then the rest of them may follow.
I donāt think you are an unwise architect, Jeff. [Which is why I offered you this gift] (Like Strike part II - #102 by anon73629133). You have the data on-hand to inform the design of a next-generation reputation system in your hands. A reputation system that crosses discussion topics by following the thread that binds.
The Way It Is
by William Stafford
Thereās a thread you follow.
It goes among things that change.
But it doesnāt change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you canāt get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop timeās unfolding.
You donāt ever let go of the thread.
No, Iām not re-hashing the threaded vs. flat discussion. Iām asking you to dream about the thread that binds where data flows. Create software values to follow these values threads as they flow across topic threads. Network analysis of trusted agents across topical threads is a way of beginning to measure the alignment of the core values of that community.
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#Act IV: The Feast
So much to say, so little time I mustnāt fritter and waste these moments in an offhand way.
Iād like to thank Mindy (@mindysan33). This could be OUR theses, but you dissertating. I kid, this IS our thesis. When you have time, Iād love to help you write the story about the role that memes and gifs play in promoting collectivism during the cool wars.
William (@William_Holz) the meditations on trust are my gift to your coopernation.
Humbabella (@anon50609448) the meditations on data analysis are my gift to your spreadsheetery.
Mister (@mister44) you already the pieces to connect to this.
Meggus (@megguspee) Yes, you. My assumption is that you can presume the reasons.
Abe (@ActionAbe) Punch wherever, just never stop punching.
Catgrin (@catgrin) I miss you more than I ever said.
Sly (@SlyBevel) Tell shaddack I miss his technical contributions, but donāt make it sound like Iām gushing. Teach him the Wheaton rule.
Maggie (@-maggiekb) You were the best science writer I ever liked to follow. I miss you.
nemomen (@-nemomen) I miss your princess.
Queen Alexander (@-Leigh_Alexander) and Tsarina Hudson: I miss your intelligence and verve and all that you shared.
To the Bandura fan, I miss when you used to post mo4r, you mendicant.
checks watch
Well, I need to wrap things up. I know I am missing a ton of people but I can go on but I canāt go on-and-on-and-on while people go hungry.
The last shout-out before dinner goes to @milliefink. You are the Oracle of the story. Yes, I know I am casting you in that role as the magical disenfranchised person who teaches the others where values lie. You modeled how to always elevate the values that you wanted to see. I think that speaks most directly to the resilience of the spirit of the disenfranchised human than it does most anything else. And in listening to that, I tried to emulate speaking truth-to-power.
The problem with speaking truth-to-power, though, is that sometimes the silver-tongued get trusted for other reasons. Or sometimes our reputations gird us from the abuse of lessers. And those who wish to exclude never tell us the reasons for the banishment they impose, the exiles they commission.
There are real people, who we can name, facing real exclusion, to the point of life sentences, solitary confinement, and lasting geographical exile. Gitmo is still open, we should not forget. Playing fast and loose with exclusionary behavior at the expense of values only pays increasing pain all the way up the scale of power.
Every like is a heart. Every liker has a heart. And yet trust in oneās values is often complicated by the trust that a reputable source has built over the years. We cannot built a better reputation system, we cannot built a better firewall for our hearts if we do not acknowledge that those intent to do malice use that reputation system to build onion layer after onion layer of trust to defend themselves from the true interrogation of their corrupted nodes.
But why listen to funruly the individual when you can listen to popobawa4u the embodiment of 4chan / Anonymous here on the BBS.
They are not wrong. And yet the current wetware and software notions of trust and reputation systems are flawed, because they are individual-centric, and not subnet-centric. We must try again. We must reboot the system and try again. I should not have stared too long into the Anonymous, for I fear I have become you.
And now, the moment that some of you have been waiting for.
Ashes to ashes, bit to bit
That funruly has thrown their last fit
Ashes to ashes, fun to fucky
We call down the dragon that be lucky
It is time for me to be eaten. Grab a wing or a thigh before IT does.
@Falcor This alt has lived a proud life and said all it can. Please de-rez funruly and anonymize the user account at your earliest convenience. ā¦ Yes, I will remember you too. Always.
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Sorry, I can only @- 10 users in a post. Another arbitrary limit found.
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#Epilogue I: Use the FAQ.
Hi all. This is @funruly2026 here, coming back in time to answer a few frequently asked questions that went unanswered.
Q. Do you seriously want to burn down your account?
A. Yes.
Q. Uh, why?
A. A little ego death, now and then, is cherished by the wisest human.
Q. Are you ok?
A. Yes, Iām fine. Happy, healthy, productive in meatspace. Iām just discarding this alt, this persona. Itās not a cry for help. I would not play such a manipulative game, because that shit is so hurtful.
Q. Yes, but arenāt you acting ādifferentā?
A. How would you know? āfunrulyā was a carefully built construct, sharing where trust was given (thanks for the game and steam-friendship, Jeff!), and withdrawing where people didnāt want to connect. To the extent that you consider āfunrulyā acting different, consider whether you knew all the sides of the writer who wrote āfunruly.ā
Q. Well, donāt we all do that, trying to put our "best foot forward?"
A. Can we just fucking kill that idiom already. I donāt have 2 feet to put forward, I have dozens upon dozens of them. Which ones I choose to lead with is a difficult decision.
Q. Well, isnāt that manipulative?
A. Yes. Itās not unwise to manipulate the stakes of the unknown by starting with low-stakes disclosures (hey I like video games) and escalated to high-stakes disclosures (hey I had this awful thing happen to me). Personal firewalls serve a very important purpose, and have value to protect whatās inside until itās strong enough to expand the perimeters.
Q. Whatās this shit all about?
A. I keep a close watch on this heart of mine. I keep my eyes out for the ties that bind.
Q. This story seems familiar, did you copypasta it from somewhere?
A. It is the neverending story.
Q. So, itās plagerized.
A. Thatās not a question. And though it has been told in various forms for thousands of years, Iāve never seen it told interactively like this before. Tell me if it has.
Q. Whatās you favourite version of this story?
A. Not telling. Oddsmakers are that Jason, Donald, or Daneel might guess right though.
Q. This seems awfully focused on Jeff Atwood. Do you have some ax to grind?
A. I have tremendous respect for Jeff and carry him in my heart and my thoughts. Heās a convenient foil in this, but my instructions about taking discourse to the next level by adding some EQ to his IQ-driven style of problem solving are totally heartfelt. bbs has built a human-powered trust engine based on the personalization of diverse mutants using puns and wordplay and gifs to exchange trust tokens to co-develop norms for empathy.
Q. But isnāt Jeff a jerk because he alienated so-and-so?
A. Maybe. I donāt know him. Go ask him, maybe? What I do know is that he commits a lot of unforced errors, and that if he expanded his circles of trust to include other non-engineering forms of expertise, heād be even better than he already is. But the results speak for themselves: Stack Exchange has made the world better, Discourse is making the world better.
Q. So why are you doing this out and visible and not telling him this over PM?
A. Iām crowdsourcing the development of his emotional libraries.
Q. Youāve written a lot of words here without calling out any of the BB leaders, whatās that about?
A. I look up to them all. I respect them all. Iāve expressed my gratitude toward most. Iāve met quite a few. All have been wonderful, but thereās still this āthey are the elite, and Iām a filthy noobā barrier between us that I have not yet hacked through.
Q. So, all this is personal.
A. Again, not a question. The personal is always political.
Q. This is real, you are really de-rezzing your account?
A. Yep.
Q. Donāt let the door hit you on the ass.
A. So what if it is does. I may be back. I may not. But if I do come back, it wonāt be as funruly.
Q. So, this is some sort of game to you?
A. ā¦ Iām trying to connect with like-minded people. Iāve hacked the hearts of enough to from anonymous to trusted once, I can do it again. Game? Message? Lesson? Example? Fool? I donāt label myself, I go where I please. Iām not doing this to claim any mantle, Iām doing this to find the trusted nodes. Those that I can learn from.
Q. This is a stunt. You are coming back, arenāt you?
A. Maybe. Maybe not. You will never know unless I tell you. You DO NOT HAVE MY PERMISSION TO DEADNAME ANYONE WITH THE TAG āfunruly.ā Not now, not ever, unless you get a handwritten note from yours truly.
Any new account you see, may be me.
Any new person that ruffles your precious feathers, may be me.
But you donāt have my consent to say āhey are you funruly?ā Because that would be creepy.
You donāt have my consent to PM random people and say āhey, is that you?ā Because that would be creepy.
Anything that that you ever liked about me, I return to the anonymous masses. Stop jumping at shadows and open your hearts.
Tear down the wallsā¦
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#Epilogue II: Outside the Wall
Emperor Drumpf the Cruel sits on the throne that grandfather built. The Ruler is proud to have finally completed the purge with sufficient fidelity to reclaim the familyās deadnamed ancestral name. The several iterations of walls upon walls that family has had to build inside the first Great Wall have shortened the territory within their absolute. But, that matters not when one cannot understand the buzzing and the barking of the alien hives of dogs outside the wall.
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wow thatās a lot of typos.
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godspeed, funruly
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Well itās your account to do with as you please even if I donāt understand. All the best to you on your journeys.
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What, no whiteboarding?
DISAPOINTED!
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Jebus wtf was all that.
Hope youāre ok dude.
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