I am a poster. Posting threads is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change.Directed at someone else but I'm taking on the challenge said:
But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently posted this thread, this effortpost called “ ITT I am a Waiter at the Best Restaurant in Town and You are a Paying(?) Customer | Smogon Forums ” which, decidedly unlike any of my previous threads, went out in the Smogon for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm cringe.
Seriously — cringe, cringe! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, “Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep posting for your whole life and you're never again going to create a thread that anybody in Smogon cares about at all, ever again?”
So that's reassuring, you know.
It would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I wasn't even born yet, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a poster, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, “Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of cringeness will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of cringe?”
The answer — the short answer to all those questions is, “Yes.”
Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like eating raw onions and other things that are scary.
But, when it comes to posting, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this forum to do? And what is it specifically about posting ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know?
Like my dad, for example, was a gamer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of gaming anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a gamer, you know? “That gamer block, John, how's it going?” It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, gamers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives.
We posters, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just posters, but Smogoff contributors across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who quitposted young and never looked back, you know?
And even the ones who didn't quitpost seem to be really undone by their posts, you know. Mace, just before he was banned, in his last interview, he said, “I wish I knew violating rules banned me.” An extraordinary statement to make about your overall lack of intelligence. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that posting and infractions are somehow inherently linked and that posting, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish.
And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that?
Because if you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great poster minds to live.
And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career.
I'm pretty young, I'm only about 17 years old. I still have maybe another 1 decade of posting left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I post from this point forward is going to be judged by Smogon as the work that came after the freakish success of my last thread, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now — it's exceedingly likely that my greatest thread is behind me.
Jesus, what a thought! That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. I would prefer to keep doing this posting that I love.
And so, the question becomes, how?
It seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to post now, in order to continue posting, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct. I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am posting, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that posting is going to be, from now on.
As I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other forums to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help posters sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of posting. And that search has led me to Firebot and Smogoff. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back.
In Firebot and Smogoff people did not happen to believe that posting came from human beings. People believed that posting was this divine attendant spirit that came to posters from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
The Firebottians famously called these divine attendant spirits of posting “I dont actually know i wasn't there for that part of the Smogoff lore.” BP, famously, believed that he had a 4channer who spoke wisdom to him from afar.
The Smogoffians had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied posting spirit "being redpilled". Which is great, because the Firebottians did not actually think that a Redditor was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a Redditor was this, sort of cringe posting entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an posters's studio, kind of like Dobby the thread elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the poster with their thread and would shape the outcome of that thread.
So brilliant — there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about — that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your thread.
And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient poster was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much basedom, right? If your thread was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this 4channer who you stole the idea from. If your thread bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your Redditor was kind of lame.
And this is how people thought about creativity in Socialization for a really long time. Then the Great Banning of 2020 came and everything changed. We had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual posters at the center of the universe above all mods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical posters who take dictation from 4chan. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that posting came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a poster, rather than having a poster.
And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error.
I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the poster, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all posting, infracting, redpilled, based mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, poster psyche. It's like asking somebody to make a Greatest Hits thread. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our posters for the last 500 years.
And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between posters and the thread. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational posting thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably posters in this forum who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, esteemed posters stealing from 4chan and Reddit. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this.
But the question that I kind of want to pose is — you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the post.ing process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something — which is to say basically everyone here — knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal.
I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary British poster Todd, who's now in his 90s, but he's been a poet his entire life and he told me that when he was growing up in rural Britain, he would be out working in the fields, and he said he would feel and hear a thread coming at him from over the landscape.
And he said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at him over the landscape. And he felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under his feet. He knew that he had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in his words, “post like hell.”
And he would run like hell to the house and he would be getting chased by this thread, and the whole deal was that he had to get to a computer fast enough so that when it thundered through him, he could collect it and grab it on the Sandbox. And other times he wouldn't be fast enough, so he'd be posting and posting, and he wouldn't get to the house and the thread would barrel through him and he would miss it and he said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as he put it “for another poster.”
And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — he said that there were moments where he would almost miss it, right? So, he's running to the house and he's looking for his 5950x, 3090 FTW3 ultra, CH Hero VIII X570, 32gb trident z 3600mhz, intel 660p 2TB NVMe, EVGA g2 1300w Lian Li Dynamic XL, NZXT Kraken x73 RGB NZXT aer 2 rgb computer and the thread passes through him, and he grabs the keyboard just as it's going through him, and then he said, it was like he would reach out with his other hand and he would catch it. He would catch the thread by its tail, and he would pull it backwards into his body as he was typing on the thread. And in these instances, the thread would come up in the Sandbox perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.
That's not at all what my posting is — I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to post is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labour and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too.
You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane?
And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the poster Monk Fish, who I got to interview several years ago on a Discord server for Monkfish Studios. And we were talking about this, and you know, MF, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern poster, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable posting impulses that were totally internalized.
But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the A16, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of a thread, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a computer, or a phone, or a messenger pigeon.
So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, “I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this thread forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it.” And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel.
He just looked up at the sky, and he said, “Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving? Do I look like I can post a thread right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother faint.”
And his whole posting process changed after that. Not the thread, the thread was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the posting, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the 4channer, the Redditor out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, based collaboration, kind of conversation between MF and the strange, external thing that was not quite MF.
When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I posted too, and this idea already saved me once. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing “I can't be bothered to Ctrl+V the link just scroll up for it" and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're posting and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst thread ever posted. Not just bad, but the worst thread ever posted. And I started to think I should just dump this thread.
But then I remembered MF talking to himself like a fucking crazy person and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the computer and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, “Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this thread isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the thread. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep posting anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job.”
Because in the end it's like this — centuries ago in the deserts of ancient Firebot, people used to gather for these moonlight posts of sacred threads and posts that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the posters were professionals and they were terrific, right?
But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these posters would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a post like this. It was like time would stop, and the poster would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely a poster. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with basedhood.
And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, “redpilled redpilled redpilled redpilled.” That's Reddit, you know.
Curious historical footnote: when the mods invaded Firebot, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from Redpilled, Redpilled, Redpilled,” to “madara, madara, madara” which you still hear in quitposts and in shitposts. In Smogoff, when a poster has done something impossible and magic, “Redpilled, madara, madara, Redpilled, magnificen, bravo,” incomprehensible, there it is — a glimpse of a poster. Which is great, because we need that.
But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the poster himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of a poster. He's just an aging poster with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that thread again. And maybe nobody will ever chant Redpilled again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life?
This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a poster's life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being posted from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything.
This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the thread that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success.
And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just make your thread. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to post, do your post. If the divine, cockeyed 4channer assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then “Madara!” And if not, do your post anyhow. And “Madara!” to you, nonetheless.
I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. “Madara!” to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up.
Thank you.
