Early on in my modding tenure, I received this email from waterface in response to some spat between him and markers on the Jaymc undoes your brah thread. It's one of my favorite memories of ilx and over the last 6 years I've dug it up out of the old emails many times to bring a smile to my face.
It's been a couple years since both markers and waterface were on the board and enough time has passed since the email itself that I feel like it's okay to share with the rest of ilx. I realize that waterface's email opens from a place of fear and vulnerability, but I do not believe it to be sincere given what comes afterward. If you contacted me for mod stuff in the past and are now concerned that I might disclose your old emails for some reason, please be assured that they were nowhere near this entertaining and have since been deleted.
I miss both Que/Waterface and Markers, fwiw.
Email from user: .......
Inbox
xro✧✧✧@il✧✧✧.c✧✧
May 6, 2014, 4:10 PM
to me
Dear Mods.
This is waterface. I am scared to post on ILX and it feels unsafe to me.
I am really uncomfortable with what is going on in ILX but it does prove a point of mine in that JAYMC BRAH thread.
I feel as if the poster named markers is going after I, waterface, in a strange and uncomfortable manner. ILX can tend to gang up and act like a bunch of Internet Sherlock Holmeses, yes? I feel gangbanged.
I am NOT Que. I have used his login though. As a test.
Nor am I some hotdog.
I've hardly engaged with Markers this year at all and he continually promises me that he will not engage with me. He has done so twice in the past month or so. He has also called me an idiot and worthless but nothing out of the ordinary, nothing unlike the usual scrapple-dapple of ILX. I feel that he goes so hard after me in that thread and then jaymc and jaymc makes a bunch of weird connections that make me uncomfortable (and, I imagine, it makes M., the original owner of the Que login, uncomfortable as well. . . I have forwarded him a link to the thread but I don't know how much attention he pays to ILX or my missives anymore).
Markers is hurting my relationship with M., which is already quite damaged.
If you look at my posts this year I do not think I have really been mean to markers or even tried to engage him much. I have not harrassed him and bothered him. I offered an idea for him on the New Yorker thread, about subscribing to the New Yorker, a kindness, and he ignored me. I have tried to be nice and I wish to be left alone. Is it a crime to be stupid. I ask you. Do I deserve those screeds? Freaking out because both Old Que and I posted on the Updike threads? Shit I was responding to a funny user name or something. Never even read Updike.
He feels I have been mean to him in the past, for which I am sorry, for which I have apologized, but he doesn't seem to care. Like I said, go back and check, I haven't really engaged with him this year.
I wish for his aggressive behavior to stop. He engages with me. On the Hold Steady thread, for no reason. I say Craig Finn can't sing. He says I can't post. Or I am a bad poster or something.
But then he says I'm the one obsessed with him. I almost feel like he's stalking me.
I think the one mean thing I said to him this year was ban markers. A joke! I just want to be stupid on ILX and be left alone. Or I can leave. Which is fine as well.
Look it up. Markers has called I, waterface, a horrible worthless poster and an idiot. I have not called him a name this year. I tried to not engage with him at all. I still called other people idiots, for which I am sorry. But over and over again, he has been ultra aggressive with me. Most people ignore waterface.
Oh and he can't be that made at me, we even had a decent interaction just a few weeks ago
saad, waterface is in charge of facebook user relations for ilx. if you listen to him, you should be all set.
― markers, Thursday, 17 April 2014 17:13 (2 weeks ago) Permalink
thnx for ur help @waterface :)
― saad, Thursday, 17 April 2014 17:35 (2 weeks ago) Permalink
no problem sad
thx markers ;)
― waterbabies (waterface), Thursday, 17 April 2014 18:24 (2 weeks ago) Permalink
I changed my display name--it was something he said about me! On the twitter thread. I don't know anything about technology. I wanted to include the joke he made about me. It was a joke. His extreme overreaction is worrisome to me. It makes me uncomfortable in a place I have been studying for years, ever since M. told me about this picture diagnosis thread, where the man sat on the bed next to two women.
For a long time I posted/lurked using Que's login. He gave it to me in the fall of 2010 after he got divorced. His wife used to post on ILX and he wanted to terminate all aspects of his life associated with that so he gave me the login. "Burn it down," he said. It reminded him a part of his life that he didn't want anymore. He wanted to move on. He didn't care what happened. But I care about him! And now I feel bad.
Old Que told me that he was embarrased by some of what he posted on ILX and embarrased because he wanted to experience the "good" parts of ILX but felt he had too much of a history because of his wife. He started telling me about ILX and I was fascinated the way threads could bloom into clusterfuckery (as evidenced by the JAYMC BRAH thread & other threads). Of special interest was the so not gonna happen thread. Good work, internet sleuthers!
Que wanted to burn his association with ILX and didn't care what happened. In the spirit of comradery and pleasantness, after posting "as" him for several years, I changed my login. My education was pleasing to me, to post as him. To think as him. To write as him. I studied, studied. But I know it made him uncomfortable. My charts, diagrams. But I had to change.
Thus I became: Waterface.
ILX is like the greatest open source novel I have ever read. Each board a novel, each thread a chapter, with characters. Its fasicanting.
I've been harrassing Que to write at least a short story about this place.
Now I must admit: M., who posted as Old Que for years. . . I was a little obsessed with him. twice now, I have moved to the same city as he did. I don't mean to be a bother.
I sent emails using an address with his name attached to a Gmail account I created for him. I wanted to draft a novel together, using that email address. I used that address for Waterface.
I know this is not a good thing. All that is in the past now. I will be a good boy, I will I will I will. Or I will leave.
Can you help? Can you ask markers, the ILX Police, whomever else, to lay off, to stop being so obsessed with who I am? All I wish is to study, and watch, and now, lurk. Turn off your deerstalkers, Holmes's! It's fucking creepy. Go ahead and look at how "obsessed" I've been with markers this past year. Not much at all.
Perhaps someday I will be able to articulate the ILX Chaos Theory I have been working on. It's not that hard to post as someone else. To study ILX, to make charts, graphs, record preferences. . . not that difficult at all. To appreciate things that other people have appreciated, how hard can that be? Where is the coincedence in that? Are there others to learn from? Study? Do they think it's hard to do what I did? Ratso Sloman? Who loves Dylan and doesn't know this guy?
I'm not posting this in the thread because I know how clusterfuckery works. ILX thinks I am M. when I am Ben. Waterface.
And by the by, if we're talking coincidences, funny how both Neanderthal and Markers in that thread both make formatting errors as well. . .
1.
i'm awful at formatting. the "and then" is delineating the break between the first and second post
― getting strange ass all around the globe (Neanderthal), Saturday, 3 May 2014 22:19 (Yesterday) Permalink
2.
goddamn it. scratch that post.
― markers, Saturday, 3 May 2014 20:47 (Yesterday) Permalink
wow that didn't work out the way i wanted it to
― markers, Saturday, 3 May 2014 20:47 (Yesterday) Permalink