a friend of mine reports today that new ‘guidelines’ have gone up at Wild Poets. for those who are not aware of it, i joined the site back about March on the recommendation of a friend from another creative commons collaborative.
initially, it seemed a good place and i think i even wrote a nice review of it here. but by April, things had gotten very bizarre and now, here, in August, i have departed in absolute disgust and horror for the choices and activities of the site’s owner and the manner in which he permits abuse of members.
i found a good bit of humor in the ‘revised guidelines’ they sent me, though… mostly because they’re little more than the owner’s passive-aggressive swipe. his version of things is decidedly different from the reality that i have archived in email and chat logs… but that’s to be expected, i suppose. best face for the public and whatnot.
my personal opinion of the idiocy and hypocrisy in play is found below… with relevant portions of the hypocrite’s words quoted for context. he writes:
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Unfortunately, due to the nature of the internet, on an open format site, it’s pretty easy for someone to come in and do a fair amount of damage to both individuals and the community as a whole. Whether this takes the form of personal attacks, or subtle manipulation is besides the point – the issue is that if artists feel uncomfortable workshopping here, they won’t submit.
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oh boy. hah! pardon me while i laugh my ass off for a moment. this would be an interesting piece of spin and politicking were it not for the fact that the place in question has been limping along for almost seven years while it’s owner plays the ‘do i really want to do this… yes…. er…. no…. er…. yes…. er….’ game.
add to this he’s managed to run off anyone who would be interested in posting regularly or helping out by making it all too clear that it’s more important for him and his on again, off again wife to be able to lambast members and play demigods than actually support an open, artistic community.
the humor of course, rests in the absolute hypocrisy of the owner, who himself uses oblique personal attacks, passive-aggressiveness, and not-so-subtle manipulation to attempt to “manage” those who stumble onto the place. when it fails to work, naturally, people are banned. just wouldn’t do to have it get out how people are targeted.
as for the site itself… the entire process of ‘workshopping’ is a joke. with a publication schedule that is more irregular than menopausal woman’s cycles and a owner who is more likely to be hiding in his shed drinking because of “how unfair his life is” than anything, it’s really no wonder the site has been choking to death for what… seven years now?
one should cruise those forums and take count of how many ‘gee, sorry, kind of got busy and forgot about you folks… but i’m back now, i swear!’ posts this fellow has made over the years. notably, he always blames events, never his own inability to balance anything that requires more than self-absorption.
as if no one notices.
but of course, the utter failure of the site to be more than a circle of friends social clique just can’t be anything other than that “someone” is making the place unfriendly by attacking people or being manipulative.
riiiiight.
someone needs to hand that boy a newsflash — the only folks attacking and manipulating people at that site are its owner and his wife. the guy actually makes alternate accounts to interact with people… how fucking sick is that? he really expects anyone to think he’s being honest now? pahhhleeze.
but oh… look… it gets funnier:
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It’s become sadly clear to me that there are people out there who would use a site like ours to inflate their own sense of importance by picking fights where none exist, and doing their best to manipulate others to fulfill their own need for psychodrama. Whether this is intentional or not is besides the point – the effect is the same – an atmosphere of fear, resentment, and mistrust – something hardly condusive to fostering a creative community.
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as if this guy actually knows something about fostering community. i love how he mentioned 15,000 visitors a month elsewhere in that post, but fails to qualify that by culling repeat visits by existing members (of the close to 400 registered, there are oh… 10 active)… or how he fails to mention how many of those hits are bots and spiders.
as if these folks know how to foster a creative community… it became very clear very quickly how legitimate THAT claim was…. (chuckle)
but look at the language of this paragraph. stars, can we say ‘passive-aggressive overload’? picking fights where none exist… hmm… would that be how this fellow repeatedly whined when i refused to support taking two young children under age 5 back to a woman who had already lost two children (permanently!!) for neglecting them?
or maybe he’s talking about ‘picking fights where none exist’ in reference to his psychotic wife’s stalking of users to that site… apparently, she’s allowed to snick and snark at people, but oh, if you reply…. you’re picking fights where none exist.
yeah. right. whatever you say, skippy.
but the biggest laugh in this paragraph comes from the line “doing their best to manipulate others to fulfill their own need for psychodrama.”
deliciously hilarious hypocrisy, that. you have to understand, this is a guy who spent three months… three months…. moaning and groaning to me about how horrible his wife was, how utterly psychotic she was, how completely incapable and unreliable she was, and how totally incompetent he was to raise two kids without help (currently being supplied by his parents… i’ve got it all in chat archives and emails).
oh, and need i mention he clung like freaking ivy to me? email, phone, chat… i offered to keep in touch to help him while he sorted through it all and he turned fucking ramora on me. ‘oh, i think you’re the one’…. right… as if… and as if anyone would or could actually believe such a line of horseshit from a 33 yr old married man with two kids under age 5 and who just had his not-yet-ex-wife abort what would have been a third.
er… yeah. right. but oh, that’s not all folks….
he’s living with his parents, and they’re taking care of his kids, for which he, of course, bitterly complains because they won’t actually RAISE them… and make him take care of them when he comes home at night… at age 33, mind you. a time when most people have actually matured to the point that they no longer expect their parents to take care of everything for them…
when my own situation fell into the mire in july, i made the mistake of thinking he might actually be capable of listening and caring. big mistake. well there just isn’t anyone in the world who matters as much as he does, doncha know…. and there’s just no one who has the kind of problems he does, doncha know…. and no one else’s hard times actually matter, doncha know.
by this time, he’s decided to go back home to his wife because he doesn’t have anyone else stupid enough to raise his kids for him or put up with his whining anymore… and he replies to my request for shoulder to cry on with a whine that basically was ‘my life is shit and i have nothing’.
mind you, i had just lost my job, my apartment, the job i thought i was going to had fallen through, the place i thought i was going to had canceled literally the last moment on me, my daughter had turned me down for a place to stay, and i had to give away everything but what i could fit in my truck.
but no one has it worse than him because everything he wants doesn’t fall in his lap. i wrote him back and pretty much bitchslapped him.
which of course, meant i was a horrible person and a bad friend.
so naturally… since he doesn’t “need me” anymore and he can’t whine to me anymore, what does he do? well, of course! he writes me an ugly letter and ditches me. and now… suddenly, this wad of passive-aggressive stupidity and his wife running around the site leaving little comments like ‘whew, i’m so glad that is over’….
psychodrama? sure, there’s a wad of it happening… have a look in the mirror, dipshit. physician, heal thyself.
my advice to those who even think about becoming involved at wild poets?
don’t bother.
it took me almost two weeks just to get him to remove my work from the site after i pulled what i could get to on my own and needed his help to remove the rest.
not to mention he has broken two ‘cease and desist’ requests to date and looks like if he can’t stop himself, i’m going to have to haul his butt into court. i’ve already had to ban his IP (and the IPs of his wife, who has been snooping here)…. but hey, just remember all the psychodrama is coming from everyone ELSE… not him.
er… yeah…. right.
whatever.
yeah, they’re wild poets alright… but not in any way you’d actually want to be involved with, trust me.