A Rollercoaster Day Of Epic

Happy birthday, for yesterday, to Fuge and, for today, to AquarianPixi!

Last night, as I started to get tired and my mind circled, as is its wont, the day's events looking for something blogworthy, I was stumped. I commented into Canting that I could get about 12 blogs out of one day alone. It had been a rollercoaster day of epic proportions.

Let's start then with the most amazing moment of all. It all began unassuming enough. Eman was in his house and realised that a star was nearly hear. We had about 8 minutes and enough people were interested that we were able to have someone placed at each Karamja and Crandor location. This in itself was a first. I don't think that Canting has ever transformed into a star clan, however briefly! As it was, the star fell on the one place that we didn't have covered, the mine by the nature altar. I'd not been alone in Crandor though and the other person, Ritheskiller, was told by his clan where it was. He told me and I told Canting. So many of us descended upon the star that Full of Pie suggested a photograph, once it was done. We all lined up on the ridge. Full of Pie asked us to say our names. She did a countdown.

Then it happened.



(Full of Pie has a better photo than me, which you can see on her blog. Also Rafftank has a much better picture too, so please see his blog.)

Sparks began. Someone had obviously levelled, so I started to spin around to see who was behind us, as it patently couldn't be one of us. For a start, we'd have had warning; and secondly, we weren't training anything. The sparks carried on coming. They were the firework extravaganza of someone maxing out a skill. A 99! By now, I had the presense of mind to gush out a 'congrats' with no real idea of where that was being aimed. All around me, Canters were going, 'congrats', 'wtf?' and 'who's levelled?!' The response made my jaw drop. I think that all I said was, 'wow!' for whole minutes.

Dr Leviathan had brought a lamp with him. He had secretly been within a lamp's worth of xp from 99 Slayer for two days. He'd seen his opportunity for a lot of us to be gathered, then observed as the perfect moment presented itself in the form of Full of Pie suggesting a group photo. I asked him later what he'd have done if Pie hadn't done that. He said he'd probably have taken the lamp back with him and waited a few days for another good moment. The man is so laid back, he's practically horizontal! This is the most prestigious cape in the game! I think that just showed such style and class. Dr Leviathan is a legend, it has to be said.



He'd already made me laugh earlier in the day. I'd arrived in Ardy and saw a green dot in one of the building. It was Dr Leviathan pick-pocketing a Hero within. I made my report to Canting, 'I've just found Dr Lev mugging someone inside a building'. He rushed across, opened the door, said, 'Hi!', then quickly closed it and resumed his activities. I was just in bits. I guess you had to be there.

While we're on funnies, there was the conversation that occurred much earlier in the day. Xer Man1 was attempting to get me to try Nomad again. I really wasn't in the mood, but he was going on and on. At the time, the only people in Canting were all Welsh. I reached into my Cymric mythology to find a good reason why Nomad is so impossible for me.



I just found it hilarious that, after I'd painted this huge picture of why it's so much more difficult for someone with Welsh to fight with Gwrach-y-Rhibyn screaming doom in the background, Xer just asked Arct to go and prove it wrong. He didn't even stop to go, 'so how come no-one else is mentioning this entity, Merch?' Which, of course, would have given me pause and perhaps blown my whole cover. >.>

You should be able to see through the text to a botter standing by the rocks. Let me show you a close up of him:



You can see me mining where we should be, while he is standing just to the side. I know sod all about botting programmes, but there was some suspicious knowledge amongst the 100s of people who witnessed him. The perceived knowledge was that there's a dodgy botting programme going around, which hasn't quite got the co-ordinates right. It's supposed to bring the player to where I'm standing, but instead deposits them where he is. There he stands, because the programme has something which stops him logging out after five minutes of inactivity. He was confirmed there for five hours to my knowledge. I left with him still there, so I don't even know if he's logged out yet. This was in the living rocks world so, in that time, countless players saw him and the air was rife with newcomers spotting and announcing that they'd reported him. Mods assured us that he'd been reported hours ago.

Players attempted everything from using teleother to send him somewhere else to dropping gold ore around him, so that his programme would pick it up, to luring living rock protectors onto him. That worked with several other people using, apparently, the same programme, but not on this one. The wisdom around the ore was that he'd been there too long and so that tactic won't work. I watched it nearly work with someone else though. He'd been stuck there for quarter of an hour, when the protector was successfully lured onto him. He had some kind of safety thing on him, which healed him when a percentage of damage was done. However, that started to fail. He was nearly dead, when suddenly there was a real player there (some kind of alarm?). He berated those luring attackers onto him and stated firmly that he had just been afk for a couple of minutes on the toilet. In real life, I laughed aloud. I'd timed at least 15 mins!

I've not taken a huge amount of interest in the whole botting epidemic before. I hate it for what it led to in the trade restrictions. I dislike the fact that they swarm resources. I know that being caught using one means that your account is instantly and permanently banned. This incident, with the player stuck there for so many hours, did distress and fascinate me in equal measure. The fascination was partly my general interest in all things technical; but mostly it was watching how other players dealt with it. All the anti-bot things that they did, like the luring protectors. I only went into the living rocks cavern for 705 gold ore. I came out with 1.8k of the stuff! The extra was me watching hours of different people trying to do something to the trapped botter.

I say distress because I looked up his stats and saw what he was about to lose. This player has 10 skillcapes, 10 levels at 99; he's in the top 20k players; he has 185.6m total xp and 2072 levels. So much work! He's about to lose an account like that over a moment of stupidity? My heart was breaking for that, though I had others telling me that I'm way too soft-hearted and compassionate about such things. It was pointed out to me that, if he's botting now, then how did he get those skillcapes? In Canting, Simple was leading the charge on absolutely no sympathy for him whatsoever. I concurred that what he was doing was wrong, really wrong, but I still couldn't bear the thought of all that work gone to waste. Did I want a reprieve for him? No. I wanted him never to have been so stupid as to use a bot in the first place. ;_;

While we're lingering on unhappy things, then let me go onto one of the few moments in Runescape when my temper has risen. Fortunately not during the moment. I was deathly calm then, but after it was over. I'd been to Barbarian Assault and returned to Varrock via the spirit tree in the Gnome Stronghold. As I traversed the platform to check on my bids/sales, I saw someone making shapes with burning logs. At first, I though he was spelling out a h or maybe a y. Then he placed the last logs and I knew precisely what I was looking at.



I was very calm. I thought I would give him the benefit of the doubt, after all, that symbol was stolen from the Hindu people in the first place. It might not be what it's come to mean in the West. I asked him first if he was Hindi. He didn't know what a Hindu was. I informed him that it was a religion and a way of life. I then moved to stage two of his get out clauses. After all, he might be very young and ignorant. I asked him if he knew that that symbol meant. Yes, he did. It's a 'Nasi' symbol and it's 'funny lol'. Despite the fact that he'd spelt Nazi incorrectly, it did inform me that he knew precisely what this was. I did not share his view that it was 'funny lol'.

The GE is really not the best place to be arguing facets of history and social politics, insofar as it's difficult to follow a conversation over the cries of people selling stuff. It is, though, probably the best place for getting your message across to a large crowd. You end up with conversations like these:





Sorry that the screenies are a bit random. I was concentrating more on the discussion itself. Ddawg4750 stated, variously:

* that this was his clan's symbol and that they show it whenever they mass. I suggested that he ought to educate his clan leader as to its meaning and state that it's getting the members into trouble. I would be happy to discuss this with his clan leader on his behalf;

* that you take the power out of a symbol by ridiculing it. He was using it here with humour. I agreed with his original statement, but did not share the view that using the swastika here, in this way, was humourous. I did not see how it was ridiculing it;

* that the Holocaust didn't happen anyway. The facts keep changing, including the number of people killed. When he told me the figures that he'd heard, I reminded him that there wasn't just a Holocaust here (that relates solely to the Jews, as it is a cultural/religious term), but also millions of others killed there. The Porojomas is the term used for all of the gypsies killed at the same time, while the death camps also slaughtered political people, disabled people, homosexuals, Catholics, prisoners of war etc etc. This accounts for the differing figures (which will always only ever be an estimate anyway, as record keeping got a bit sketchy during the final push), as he was originally looking just at the Jews, not everyone else;

* that, even if it did happen... I stopped him there. I used to organise Holocaust Memorial Day. I have personally met several survivors. I told him about one of them, Eva Moses Kor, who had entered as a very small child with her twin sister. They were experimented upon by Mengele, in Auschwitz. I saw, with my own eyes, the tattoo on her arm. I heard her story first hand, as she related it. You cannot fake the look in her eyes. In fact, if Ddawg4750 had waited just a minute longer before teleporting off, he would have been challenged by CJR. He was en route ready to explain what his own grandfather had experienced.

* that, even if it did happen, then the Jews deserved it. You only have to look at what they do with money, finding all of the loopholes and stealing billions from the American people. Here's where it got a little messy, as I didn't know the reference and the text was moving so fast with the general discussions in the GE. I did, however, know the history of the Jews in the West and so informed him about the laws in so many countries, which forbade Jews taking any other work except money-lending. That job was forbidden to Christians and so it was a nice loophole for the Gentiles. Ddawg4750 stated that I had to check out aigs CEOs. I've since looked this up and it appears to refer to the American International Group. This is an insurance company which went under a couple of years ago. The CEOs surnames do seem to be Jewish. Therefore, in retrospect, I think that Ddawg4750 was saying that the Jews deserved to die in the death camps 60 years ago, because their modern day counterparts caused an American insurance company to go under in 2008. He also mentioned 'look what happened to the Americans in the desert', but didn't elaborate on that, even as I questioned it.

* that it's ok to burn symbols like that in Runescape, because most people just ignore it or say 'lol'. I am the FIRST PERSON EVER to challenge him on it. That finally left me speechless and Ddawg4750 left.

I looked around then. Though this was a busy evening, peak time on a Saturday in the GE, he was right. I was the only person kicking up over this. All around me, wares were being traded as normal. True, no-one else had rushed to Ddawg's defence either, but certainly no-one else was telling him that this is acceptable. Do they not see what they're doing?

SILENCE MEANS APPROVAL!

By their silence, every person there was tacitly implying that this was fine. That he can say, in a crowded place, that the Holocaust did not happen and that he can burn swastikas into the floor. This is fine, says the crowd, because by their silence that's what they said. CJR arrived then, but too late. TheArcturus1 also came to say his peace, but also too late. I was trying to talk with them, but it was so noisy that I suggested we move to Edgeville. We ducked under the short cut and resumed on the bridge. Arct had challenged Ddawg4750 via pm, but had been called a Jew and basically told to shut up. Why is 'Jew' hurled as an insult?

It's at this moment when my temper, held tightly with a leash deep inside, finally erupted. Why had I not taken a screenshot when he'd said that the Holocaust didn't happen? Why hadn't I reported him there and then? Could I still report him? I charged away, towing Arct behind me, into Edgeville Bank, shouting, 'Is there a Mod in here?' There wasn't. I repeated it. There still wasn't. I streamed into the smithy and asked again. 'Is there a Mod in here? I need a Mod!' Kortjakje disentangled herself from the spot by the furnace and asked what was up. I gushed out that someone had just been unacceptable in his behaviour and language, being extremely racist. Could I still report it after the event? She asked how long it had been and, when I said '10 mins', she said that I unfortunately couldn't. I told her that I'd got screenshots, but she explained that these would be inadmissable as evidence, as they could be faked. She further apologised for me having to encounter such an individual within the game. It wasn't her fault though. I thanked her for her time and let her get back to her game. By now, half of Canting was already attempting to report him nontheless and I was amongst them. Kortjakje was right though. The invisible narrator kept telling me that I couldn't report anyone for such things, if I hadn't recently talked or traded with them.

Several of us were also congregated in Edgeville by now. I had a dance with Full of Pie, then sat with Karl and Raven, watching up to 8 woodcutters (including Arct and Sam) sychronise the skillcape emote. By stages, I calmed down. I may not have been able to report him, but that was solely revenge on an opposing point of view anyway. In retrospect, how I did do it was probably better. I argued the case with reason, historical referencing and statistics. I did it, at the time, extremely calmly. I made the point, in front of a lot of witnesses, that this was unacceptable behaviour. I was not silent.

Onto nicer things now, in the form of Daisyjake1. This beautiful Irish lady is possibly even now drying her hair as she reads this blog. Dia duit, Daisyjake! Yesterday though, she entered Canting Away in the wake of all that upset and tracked me down in Edgeville. There she handed over the trade limit's worth of Sara Brews and ruby bolts (e), in thanks for this blog and to aid the fight against Nomad. Tears were pouring down my cheeks! I tried to pay her for them, in gold bars, which I'd been smelting for much of the time between coming from the caverns and playing BA/arguing with Holocaust Apologists. She refused point blank to accept any payment. That was for the enjoyment that I gave her each morning, as she dried her hair whilst reading my blog.

She hung around in Canting then and was lovely. She even travelled out to where Isaac was farming and gave him a load of seeds; as well as simply sharing herself in conversation in the chat channel. Even without the gifts, she'd be welcome there anytime. Then, much later on, as we gathered in Dr Leviathan's house for his impromptu 99 slayer party, she turned up again. This time she had even more Sara Brews and ruby bolts (e) for me. I didn't know what to say, other than thank you and furthermore thanks for reading my blog. I don't write this for free stuff. I write it because I enjoy writing it. To have this happen is wholly unexpected and extremely touching. Thank you.