RABBIT wrote:
STRO,
What exactly in the holy good god damn did you expect from all this? An exception or interpretation that benefits precisely your team?
Due to the deep drop in Buzztime locations, many players in many parts of the country have been orphaned. Look through the comments on the Buzztime Facebook page, and you see many instances of people saying, "We have no place to play!" Unsurprisingly, they are no longer playing. We from Mad River, with a little more technical knowledge and a lot more perseverance, have used electronics to continue to play. In the past few months, we have been able to come up with a workaround to at least contribute to playing Showdown. We seek nothing that would give us an advantage over other tournament. All this does is allow us to play in the tournament as opposed to not playing .
RABBIT wrote:
A policy that, if followed by a majority teams, will reduce patronage of the bars thereby leading to the end of Buzztime?
In sentence one, you condemn us for seeking a benefit that only benefits us. In sentence two, you condemn us that will be copied by so many teams that it will kill Buzztime. Which is it?
Let the person who created and runs this help you. Given the frequent cases of technophobia among senior citizens I have witnessed while doing this, I very much doubt this approach is going to become popular in Buzztimedom for Showdown. Setup isn't difficult, but it isn't brain-dead easy. It is clumsy to handle; you have to have at least a few people at the location pushing buttons, and people do not get the satisfaction of playing their own box. I think it more likely that we will be either the only ones or the first of very few doing this. A fully remote arrangement played through the Buzztime app is far smoother.
We have no place to play within a reasonable travel time of where we live. We get no inherent advantage from playing this way, quite the opposite. We'll swear the same oaths that we won't cheat that everyone else does, and I will shortly post draft rules for public comment that will restrict this kind of play to people in areas where there is no real choice and address reasonable concerns about this way of play.
So what is the problem? Please, spare us another recitation of tradition or lack of controversy, those are excuses, not reasons. After spending far too much time trying to make sense of this, I can not tell you the reason why this team has such a problem with this. Far worse, neither can they!! The "answers" we get have wobbled inbetween "Because I said so" to "We're afraid."
The issue is not between playing this way and playing in a bar. The issue
is between playing this way or not playing at all.
RABBIT wrote:
A swell from the “silent majority,” resoundingly voting you Trivia Tournament Commissioner For Life? And then everyone would start clapping?
No, but have you ever heard of the psychological term "projection?"
RABBIT wrote:
Once you come out of the gate with 5,000 words and name calling, you’re sorta putting all your eggs in one basket, aren’t ya? I negotiate for a living, and there’s no surer way to entrench your opponent’s position than to compare him to dictators of the ages and political clowns of the present. If you meant to win hearts and minds, this ain’t the way.
But what do you do when the opponent acts like political clowns of the present (petty tyrant also works well, maybe mini-Xi, too)? If someone responsible for running an activity consistently takes actions and makes secret decisions and breaks his own rules without informing those affected, what else do you call him? Yes, I know, you call him a saint, but that's not the term most of us would use.
There's even a bigger problem here, though. You talk about winning hearts and minds, but I think you have a different set of those in your mind than I.
RABBIT wrote:
ANON did present his team with your concerns. He did explain the 3+ hour round trip. He did provide the points you’ve provided (though it took him less than 5000 words). I waited to read this thread until after voting. My concern was and remains that zoom-assembling will reduce patronage to the locations and hasten Buzztime’s inevitable death.
Here's something we agree on: Buzztime's eventual death. I think I've given enough of a intro about the draft rules, better for you if I got them out and then you can take an informed whack at them.
But please, tell us more about this Fellowship meeting. When did this happen? Please tell us what the response was to the idea of requiring elderly players to travel up top five hours just to play a couple games? You say he mentioned my comments about his actions. Did your group approve of Anon breaking this beloved rule? Did they approve of his coverup? Back when he did them, did they authorize or order him to do these things? What did they know and when did they know it?
You said you voted, then you read my comments. Shouldn't it be the other way around?
RABBIT wrote:
But, now that I have read what you have to say…. Christ, this is sad.
Yes, it is sad that the patron saint of the Cuyahoga did what he did, or were you sad/mad that someone noticed it? I think you meant to say something that sounded bad, but didn't say anything at all. When you read something like what I wrote, the one and only question that should be in your mind is, "Is this true or not?"
RABBIT wrote:
Look, STRO, you’re welcome to assemble via zoom. And to play every game of Showdown and Brainbuster and Sportsball that you and your zoommates want to play. You’re even free to win those games. But, for so long as the team running the tournament at issue doesn’t permit zoom-playing, you’re not eligible to win the tournament.
In a previous post, I pointed out that Anon isn't doing this. The written rules do not say what you say and Anon certainly did not allow us to play at all in the Sandbag tournament last fall.
There's another contradiction here: Earlier, you said that you voted against us because you felt that remote play would hasten the demise of Buzztime. But here, you're OK with us playing that way 90% of the time, which would cause 90% of the damage, but for some unknown reason, it cannot be done for the other six weeks, because we said so.
This sounds like "leave my baby alone" and that brings us to the crux of the issue I find even more important than whether my team plays in this tournament or not.
It's not your baby. It's our baby. All you are doing is babysitting. A babysitter can do a lot to take care of the baby, but some actions need parental consent or at least awareness. That's where you have let us all down, as an individual, as a group, as something inbetween.
RABBIT wrote:
Lastly, for the record, there is no need for me to spend the same time defending and rehabilitating ANON’s character that you’ve spent spitting on it. ANON has been an exemplary human being, leader, support system, professor, and friend for the 20 years I’ve known him and for at least as long before then. There are as many people in the world who agree with me as there are words in your diatribe. You doth protest too much. Much too much.
From Wikipedia:
Compurgation . . . was a defence used primarily in medieval law. A defendant could establish their innocence or nonliability by taking an oath and by getting a required number of persons . . . to swear they believed the defendant's oath. The wager of law was essentially a character reference . . . and it was a way to give credibility to the oath of a defendant at a time when a person's oath had more credibility than a written record.
That's what this is. Wikipedia also says, "The taking of oaths was an eminently unsatisfactory way of arriving at the merits of a claim . . ."
As I said before, good people can do bad things, and the actions in question are supported by the record and the saint's own admission.
I will respond to any reply, but I will not do so until I have finished and posted a set of proposed rules.
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