camwyn | Nationstates and idiots.

I'm not talking about real-world politics today. I try to avoid that when I can. I know what I think and I hear what other people think, and my opinion may or may not change based on what I hear and read, but I don't argue about politics with people because in the end it's ultimately stupid. Arguing or debating implies that you have a snowball's chance in hell of convincing the other person that their opinion might need some changing, and these days it seems like nobody is willing to admit that there might be holes in their beliefs/opinions.

I run Tuonela, which is technically the mythic-era Finnish afterlife. I wanted Louhi's territory from the Kalevala when I created the nation, but I forgot the name (it's Pohjola, for the record) and didn't like the English translation I knew, so I grabbed the next-remembered place name. Tuonela is a decent place to live in if you don't mind a somewhat barren landscape - my first decision as ruler was to allow a little bit of uranium mining in our forest regions and next thing I know WHAMMO, barren. The national animal is the reindeer (we use the local word, porot) and we have no crime rate. Sure, our citizens are required to serve at least a year in the military and voting's compulsory, but the Electoral Commissions' tasers stop where the voting booth begins. We're working on bringing our economy up to speed, but there's a decent safety net in place for those who get the butt end of the deal.

Tuonela is located in the Arctic Circle region. A while ago, people in another region - 'people' is debatable, there's some possibility that these nations were all played by one person - took an intense dislike to one of the other Arctic Circle nations, the Free Land of Non-Political Mac Fans, and began telegramming vicious and vituperative things to them. Mac Fans, which is a nation run by a very sensible and decent person, nearly left the game after some of the abuse. Wound up coming back, and recording as much of what the idiot nations said as possible to post off to the admins. Mac Fans briefly bounced into idiotboy's (not the name of the nation, I just don't plan on publicising the name) region so as to be able to make the telegrams public...

I gotta say, this is not an idea I would have recommended. That's pretty much troll feeding. But it was a fait accompli by the time I heard about it, and Mac Fans was back, so all seemed good, right?

Nope. Idiotboy has now joined our region and is attempting to fill up the posting board with slanders - half-literate at best - about Mac Fans. Idiotboy has also attempted to bring 'friends' into our region, although I suspect they're just other incarnations of the same player. I had heard that such 'region invasions' happened to other places in the past, but was never inclined to suspect they might happen to us. Bleah...

For the record, my response to the idiot was lifted out of "The Rats In The Walls" and left at that. I found this phrase and its translation once and it was just too good not to use, given that idiotboy and his friends claim to be located in Galway, Ireland:

Dia ad aghaidh's ad aodaun... agus bas dunarch ort! Dhonas 's dholas ort, agus leat-sa!

Translation is left as an exercise for the reader, although one may be found in an online zine called Iron Harp - along with the source of the quotation and Lovecraft's own comments about it. It's in an article about Robert Howard's horror writings*, of all things.

*I have really got to find a volume of these somewhere. One could never in a million years entitle a truly serious horror story 'The Pigeons From hell' any more, but he apparently pulled it off.