Thank you, trolls and troglodytes!

Disclaimer: I did not write this. A friend of mine posted this on my Facebook wall and I found the message contain within of utmost importance. I wanted to share it with the world.

My friends, if you are reading this it is probably because Trolls and Troglodytes have somehow negatively affected your life. (A Troglodyte is someone who is being deliberately ignorant or old-fashioned with the intention to spite others). Through their callously immature whining and cajoling, they have merely pointed out an area in our psyche that needs refinement. For this, we must thank them. This area is the tendency to engage in pointless argument, and it is greatly harming our mental and physical health. Transcend it!

Whenever you engage a Troll and Troglodyte (hereafter, TnT) in argument, you lose, they win.

Know what is at the root of all TnT behavior: fear. They are afraid of being ignored, passed by, overlooked, rejected, and they desperately crave your attention. If they make you angry or upset in any way, they win. They will do anything to press your buttons and get a reaction, including lying, slander, name-calling, crafty video editing and photo-shopping, etc. etc. etc. And they will also occasionally pretend to be nice and agree with you, just to keep you interested.

Whenever you post and discuss their videos and/or pictures, you give them power and energy. This presents them with exactly the attention and acknowledgement they ache for. They win.

Especially if you take apart their arguments line by line and point out all their mistakes, flaws, lies, and so on. Doing this means that you are devoting your time and energy to careful consideration of their twisted thoughts.

You lose, they win.

Perhaps in your youth, like most of us, you were teased by children at school, and/or your sibling(s) at the dinner table, and/or your parent(s) at the sports field. You felt hurt, ashamed, alone, and you wanted to fight back. Sometimes you may have, or maybe you never did. Your ego took a beating, and the need for revenge still burns within you, yet to be soothed.

Conceivably, you may also feel an extra impetus to ‘fight back’ because you think you should defend some particular philosophical idea, method, system, or Movement. Maybe you think you need to defend some person, or some people, within said Movement.

You don’t.

Remember: It is TnTs character flaws that inspire their actions. Do you think you can somehow enhance their level of communication and understanding, or advance your Movement by taking a morally superior and logically correct position? Can you help spread the truth by engaging TnTs in lengthy explanations and the presentation of scientific evidence?

You can’t.

Maybe you are under the delusion that you can offer them some much needed counseling service, and heal their wounded soul. Maybe you think if you just give them one more try, accept their ‘friendship’ request just one more time, they may come around and see that you were right all along. Possibly you feel that you are doing them some good, by helping them see the errors of their ways.

You aren’t.

The only way you can win with TnTs, THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN WIN is to completely ignore them. Completely. Delete their posts on your Wall. Remove them from your Friend list. Refuse to watch and discuss their videos. Ignore their cries for attention and character defamations. Completely. They will wither and shiver alone and frustrated in their cold, dark bedrooms, clenching their angry fists and wondering why nobody is paying attention to them. And they will band together in clumps and clusters of squirming and slithering TnT hate groups, constantly re-infesting each other’s thoughtforms with cancerous memes. Let them.

TnTs are of no concern to psychologically healthy people. Our mental attitude is vitally important to our health and wellbeing, and our psychological state must remain positively in the light. Clean up and dust off the altar of your mind. Update your files and delete all programming that slows down your processing. Re-claim your power and re-focus your creativity. Thank the TnT’s for their reminder, and ignore them. Completely.

With love and respect,
Crispy

What is Valucre?

Valucre is a play-by-post roleplaying forum. What does this mean exactly? It means that one "plays a role", primarily but not solely through the perspective of a single character (some play a number of characters, such as armies and battalions, some play out the passage of setting).

The "game" of roleplaying here is that you play a character, having thought out their personal history, personality, attitudes/perspectives/biases, and the content of your writing will be that character's reaction to other characters, to settings, detailing their emotions and personal growth, making new relationships with the characters played by other people. One can have the character move through political office, acquire unique weaponry and armor, or maybe their life is already too full of mystery and intrigue and they open up a café.

These are the factors that make up our game. In all honesty, it's pretty fun. Some people consider the act of roleplaying to be pretty nerdy, and rightly so. The elements that run rampant on any roleplay message board can be found in media that, for a long time, appealed to a very small niche. From the elves and dragons of D&D and DragonLance to the spaceships and lightsabers of Star Wars and Starship Troopers and everywhere in-between.

These things, their parallels, and their constant reference by people like Urkel and the cast of Revenge of the Nerds has caused some roleplayers to consider roleplaying a dirty little secret. They're cool and not at all nerdy in their day to day life, so they don't want to fess up to the love of writing.

For the purposes of something easily defined, I'd like to use boxing as an example. Consider the gang of childhood friends that like to go to the local gym, put on the gloves every now and then and mess each other up for the hell of it. Fine and dandy. Now consider the boxer that trains at the gym every day and competes constantly in amateur circuits. Both are boxers but one engages in the act as a transient hobbyist while the other dedicates him or herself to honing the craft.

I'll refer to one as "rpers" and the other as "roleplayers", the first being your leisurely hobbyists and the other being the committed enthusiast.

RPers are welcome by the bus load. Valucre is the gym and the doors are open to any and all. But it is important to know that Valucre is here for the roleplayers, for the people that want to flourish, that want to sweat and flex their brain in connecting storylines, making plots, testing the limits of your characters, refining your writing skills, and taking part in the closest thing to immediate satisfaction that one can achieve in the literary realm.

Witness: Diner Coffee

For those of you that weren't already aware, I like to listen to rap and hip-hop. To be honest, I have a hard time differentiating the two when talking to your average man, but the common consensus seems to be that hip-hop is more serious and lyrical. Confusing as I've also been told that rap means Rhyme And Poetry.

Whatever the case, Witness was my very first foray into what is commonly termed "underground" or "conscious" rap. Up until that point my only knowledge of rap was what you heard on the radio. Now granted, as I was born in the late 80's, this meant that my first few tastes of rap were legitimate artists. Tupac and Biggie, et al. Ludacris. Xzibit. Eminem. And so on and so forth.

But Witness introduced me to a new kind of rap. He's an amazing lyricist with a smooth voice that delivers his punchlines, or sets up intricate metaphors as you'll see in this song, and provides one with plenty of food for thought.

Give it a listen.

Science can answer moral questions

"Questions of good and evil, right and wrong are commonly thought unanswerable by science. But Sam Harris argues that science can -- and should -- be an authority on moral issues, shaping human values and setting out what constitutes a good life."

Do I agree with the video across all points? No, not at all. There are some indiscretions here and there, moreover with the use of "science" in the title of his work as most people understand "science" to be the modern scientific view and not "science" as a process, which is in a state of constant change. This can lead to confusion.

But that aside I myself live by a doctrine of "virtue is logic", and that many of the "gray areas" or "sticky situations" in terms of morals or ethics, I find can be reasoned through or put through a rigorous filter of simple logic and an answer be arrived at. Not only morally feasible, but optimal in all regards.

Harris is eloquent, decisive, and keen in his word use and analogies. It's a brilliant dissertation.

The American Dream

I posted this on the forum, but I wanted to reiterate it on the blog so that it gets maximum exposure. I find this video to be very well thought out. It's fun, very amusing and entertaining, but undoubtedly informative. It's the kind of video that I feel everyone should one, both the ones that are completely uneducated in the subject and the ones that have already heard the information a hundred times. It's that good.

Newsletter: January 1st, 2011

The first newsletter of the new year!

Valucre Forum Roleplay Newsletter

This newsletter covers the Classifieds, Rosinder's update, the Status's coming back, attention is brought to the Forms we have available and a recently added division to Valucre staff known as Outreach posted in Valucre Jobs. This newsletter has both a roleplay spotlight and an MVP.

Leave comments!

User status

One of the mods we had installed on Valucre earlier allowed for the users to give themselves a "status", that would be visible both on their profile and in the side panel display of their profile with every post made. After we updated the VBulletin core this mod wouldn't work anymore.

We found a new one that works with the updated version.

Valucre Status Updates

BBCodes

BBCode (Bulletin Board Code) is a markup language that message boards use to format posts. The tags are done in square brackets [like these] and then parsed (the text is analyzed basically) before being translated into a markup language that the browsers understand, which for Valucre is HTML.

BBCodes are how you bold and italicize, how you implant images and videos, and some other neat stuff. Now that you know what a BBCode is, in detail, you're probably wondering the kind of BBCodes available on Valucre. We have some pretty nifty ones, and the following link will detail most of them. Expect more to be added.

Valucre BBCodes

How to: Ignore user

This is a guide for anyone that doesn't know how to add a user to their ignore list. The ignore list is a handy feature that can solve a lot of inter-personal problems, as a person annoying you can go on your list and you  never have to worry about reading their posts again. Ignore the trolls and leeches. Happy ignoring, Valucre!