Satisfaction
May 5th, 2019
For close to four decades, I've been working on various projects related to my nerdy hobby, the culmination of which you can find on my principal nerd site, Technohol 13. Through thick and thin, double overtime and unemployment, being married or single, health and near-death, I've kept at it, chugging away at the things I intend to wrap up before I die from old age, falling space junk, or whatever.
This has involved me primarily engaging in two distinct arms of the same project. The first is a rewrite, from the ground up, of a couple different game systems that are no longer supported. The second is a vast array of character references, each a comprehensive look at an incredibly obscure or criminally uncovered group of folks that are related, directly or tangentially, to the character of those game systems.
During this time, I have racked up a rogue's gallery of nerd foes that would do the Flash proud. A lot of them don't like the fact that I refuse to hew precisely to a bunch of books that have been out of print for over twenty-five years. Others feel the need to tell me what I should be working on, that what I'm currently doing (at any given moment in time) is utter crap, and that I ought to do something more to their liking.
Of course, the worst of my nerd foes are those nerds that like to drag down the entire community, however small it is, so desperate to bolster their self-esteem that they're literally willing to ruin it for everybody so they can feel... I don't know, something inside. Aside from the usual bout of overwhelming ineptitude that they experience when they aren't playing keyboard cowboy.
The latest batch of such characters have banded together to pool their resources, but have made a very specific point of informing me that my efforts are not needed, thank you very much. Yet, at the same time, they kept adding me to their nerd gang on Facebook, which continued incessantly until I vowed to post hardcore pornography all over their feed until they cut it out.
You may scoff, but it worked. For a good long while, at any rate.
While the people running this group ostensibly despise me and my efforts, they sure are perfectly okay with lifting my material wholesale - all while claiming it as their own work. One example of this deplorable bunch is the thieving loser I railed about last time, is a part of this bunch. He's just one of many such losers, though, so you can see why I'd not want anything to do with the lot of them.
I do hate that a lot of gamers I'm on generally good terms with have been swept up in their mess, though. Many of these are quick to point out when one of these hacks blatantly steals something I've written and plugs it into their own projects. Still more are happy to indicate when they've stolen my work, but given credit for it to someone who's previously stolen it from me, and never took it down.
And now, now a bunch of them have been quietly asking me for permission to use bits of my nerd research and products in their own efforts. All of them have promised to give full attribution, of course, with the last adding a page-long spread extolling the virtues of Technohol 13. While I initially was about to tell them where they could go, the thought of poisoning their well was too satisfying to resist.
You see, the brains (and I use that term loosely) behind this weird effort opposed to me loves my character work, but hates my original rules work. But, as it turns out, all of my character work utilizes my rules work. So, to use the former, they have to accept the latter - or rewrite just about every man, woman, child, robot, and miscellaneous implement I've described from the ground up.
Thus, no matter what happens, I win. They're forced to host links to my work, suffer the taint of my accursed name being plastered all over their precious group, and they can't avoid the the 'taint' of my crunchy rules revisions seeping into their 'sacrosanct' realm. And that's why, given everything else going on in my life lately, I'm willing to indulge in just a little bit of satisfaction.
And the eventual snackenfreude. (I'll fix that link eventually)