This is Rick: His one true love is organic gardening, and, Elaine explained, he’s extremely talented. As his small house disappears under years of unopened mail, his backyard thrives. What does he do with the excess vegetables? The same thing he does with the leftover doughnuts from his job as a dishwasher—he takes them to a food bank.That's a human being: fucked up, complex, unpredictable, inifinitely more interesting than the straw men we invent.
This is Rick: He spends much of his time rocking in an old rocking chair. The slats are broken from overuse. Rick has worn through the carpet, through the floor, and polished the concrete with his rocking, and the image stays with me. As I read about autism, I learned that rocking is a classic, comforting behavior.
This is Rick: He doesn’t quite understand or accept change. When he was growing up, Rick’s mom had a rule that no one in the family could spend more than $2 on Christmas or birthday gifts. Four decades later Janis, Allen, and Elaine all say he still doesn’t spend more than the $2 limit.
While you are correct that there is nothing very hacktastic about his magical "ability to open" her mail client, you also stated that it can't and won't “try to send a mass-email from your personal account”. Without getting bogged down in quibbling over details, it should be noted that when I visited the "Welcome To Desolation" link, it did indeed launch my fantabulously secure Outlook Express, and autofill in a grand total of 33 email addresses in the To: field, all just by opening the site, not clicking a "Email Me!" link or anything. These are not addresses from my own personal Address Book, but rather are pulled from a list in the source HTML using a bit of Javascript. I'm no expert on the subject, but that's where the addresses are coming from.Now, do you see how I could, if I wanted to treat you as you treated Sarah, make that (and similar errors/exaggerations I could come up with) into a damning indictment of your honesty and integrity? "Looks like saveourskyline is willing to say anything to smear this woman!" If you're willing to give yourself a pass because you just didn't phrase it well or didn't think of the possibility your reader brings up, have the basic honesty to extend the same courtesy to Sarah.
One, there's no strong reason why, after two years of pursuing Richard, she simply decides to give up, without talking to his family, and write her first article about it. People were screaming in the forums, "How could you publish this without closing the loop?!" because it seemed so artificially concluded.From this perspective, if she'd had all of her information up front, and still chose to write both of those articles the way she did, I would consider that unethical. But again, it could all just be a big coincidence.
Two, it allowed her to make Richard out to be a lot creepier in her original article than she could otherwise have done if her readers had all of the information up front.
Three, it created an amazing "cliffhanger effect".
Four, it allowed her to paint herself as the victimized scared college student in part one, and the benevolent big-hearted bearer of forgiveness and understanding in part two.
I hope at some point you recover from your fit of whatever it is that's making you obsessed with this and have the decency to take it down.If it's so uncompelling, why do you care who reads it?
I'm old enough to remember the days when senators ranted about "communist sympathizers" and claimed to have lists of names in their pockets, and I don't like your style here, not one bit.Wow, I'm getting compared to Joseph McCarthy now - hyperbole, anybody? :)
posted by cortex (staff) at 11:34 AM on May 8, 2007