The Shadowrun Situation

[Wageslave]

I wonder if I'm the only one looking at 4815162342's name as a cipher

[Crissa]

Actually, it reads very much more like someone who has a mental disorder such as attention deficit or psychosis; the choppy, dragging sentences are little bits of the conscious mind trying to form concepts that aren't tainted by their condition. They often don't have the attention span to return to their previous sentences and for paragraphs because they've already spent far more time trying to get these to form.

-Crissa

Of course, everyone falters from time to time...

[TheFlatline]

Actually, it reads very much more like someone who has a mental disorder such as attention deficit or psychosis; the choppy, dragging sentences are little bits of the conscious mind trying to form concepts that aren't tainted by their condition. They often don't have the attention span to return to their previous sentences and for paragraphs because they've already spent far more time trying to get these to form.

-Crissa

Of course, everyone falters from time to time...

No, it reads like a Sarah Palin speech if you make the entire thing a rambling, run on sentence...

[Crissa]

No, it reads like a Sarah Palin speech if you make the entire thing a rambling, run on sentence...

How does this contradict my point at all?

-Crissa

[The Vigilante]

I wonder if I'm the only one looking at 4815162342's name as a cipher

It's from Lost, apparently. Google it.

[erik]

I think that 48waystokilltheenglishlanguage understands English since he claimed something was funny, as humor is something a bit more nuanced, even if it is poor taste in humor. However he is still an idiot. No bones about that.

[The Vigilante]

I think that 48waystokilltheenglishlanguage understands English since he claimed something was funny, as humor is something a bit more nuanced, even if it is poor taste in humor. However he is still an idiot. No bones about that.

As someone's whose first language isn't English, I can tell you it is much easier for me to read it, understand it, even speak it than to write it.

His understanding of humor really doesn't say much about his affinity with the language.

[erik]

Okay, well I suspect that he at least understands English enough that I don't think he is using something like google language tools to translate his ideas into English.

[Wageslave]

It's from Lost, apparently. Google it.

ehh, well there goes that theory out the door....

[Username17]

Okay, well I suspect that he at least understands English enough that I don't think he is using something like google language tools to translate his ideas into English.

I don't know where you get that. Let's contemplate the finale:

The personal feeling, gut checks, when interacting with him will be what decides his projects.

Seriously, that's not English. That's not typographical errors, that's not letting the spell-checker over-correct, that's just not a set of English thoughts. Sure, the words, are English, but the sentence clearly is not. Let's count the ways:

• "feeling" is unpluralized. People do not have "personal feeling". They have a feeling, but that would normally be "personally" rather than "personal". If it's idiomatically associated with "personal" it's pluralized - the phrase is "personal feelings".
• "gut checks" is not actually a thing you can have. Like, at all. People have gut impressions and even gut feelings, but a "gut check" is an action that someone takes to assess a situation. In order to fit into a list with "feelings" it would have to be the past tense gut checks of something. It doesn't stand on its own.
• The list is missing a terminal "and". You do not make a list separated out by commas and trail off into the rest of the sentence with only a comma. That makes the rest of the sentence part of the list.
• The sentence has no subject. Personal feelings of who? Whose gut checks? The announced referent for the list is Ancient History, but the only pronoun in the sentence is a "he" that clearly marks him as the object of its judgment rather than the judger. You could rescue it with the addition of a clause "personal feelings and gut checks of developers of other game companies" but now we're adding as much as was there to begin with just so that the sentence will have a fucking subject.
• One person by definition cannot "interact". Who is "interacting with him" in that sentence? Again, there is only one pronoun. It could be the same person as the person performing the gut check, but it doesn't have to be (although it does have to be determined by language structures that are missing from this sentence). For that matter, why is that clause even there, considering that gut checks about someone are already an interactive verb and don't require that you mention the fact that you are interacting. It's kind of like saying "the things you see in him while looking at him" - it's clumsy language. Even aside from the fact that section is not written properly even if it wanted to say that.
• "projects" is the wrong word. Anything you or don't do is a "project". AWoD is a project of mine. So is KSF. Or SR Horror. Ancient History is an electrical engineer. The personal feelings of game developers actually have relatively little to do with his projects. The phrase he was presumably looking for was "writing assignments" which could have been shortened to "assignments" I suppose. But "projects" is the kind of word you'd grab out of a "Whatever to English Dictionary" rather than the mind of a native speaker.

The correct sentence would be this:

• The personal feelings and gut checks of developers will determine his future writing assignments.

Which still suffers from the fact that it is an empty fucking statement, but at least it's in grammatical English. The fact is that, as alluded to before, Ancient History already has writing assignments. So gloom and doom prophesies about him getting ostracized from the industry are too late - they already have not happened. If he gets the black ball in the future it will be because of something he does in the future. He walked away from Catalyst with people hiring him just a few months later - plainly in full knowledge of what he had done and what had been done to him.

Similar ones for me are also too late. I walked away from the industry in 2007 for three reasons:

• The pay is bullshit.
• Creative control is minimal.
• I have shit to do (medical school).

So people ranting about how I black balled myself in 2010 by any action or non-action are laughable. The industry sucks and I left it three years ago. Nothing I can do now can meaningfully influence the chances of me subsequently writing anything for any game company in any direction except positive. Because right now the chances are basically zero and have been for years. Zero percent chances do not go down.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Someone could argue the chances were merely miniscule, not zero.

And I have a letter from a crazy person ranting about atheists who speaks english natively that will argue against your word choice position.

-Crissa

[Kaelik]

Someone could argue the chances were merely miniscule, not zero.

And I have a letter from a crazy person ranting about atheists who speaks english natively that will argue against your word choice position.

-Crissa

Cent writes you letters? Is he macking on my woman! (Who was it who didn't understand the "beat your wife" idiom? That's relevant to the conversation right?)

[Ganbare Gincun]

Cent writes you letters? Is he macking on my woman! (Who was it who didn't understand the "beat your wife" idiom? That's relevant to the conversation right?)

I *think* that was Zinegata, but I may be mistaken.

[erik]

And I have a letter from a crazy person ranting about atheists who speaks english natively that will argue against your word choice position.

This.

Idiots writing on the internet have a hard time putting their thoughts to print. He may well have thought something like "The personal feelings and gut checks of developers will determine his future writing assignments", but he was not competent enough to frame it correctly. He does make plenty of mistakes especially with roving random capitalization of words and with misspellings of proper names, but that's a competence issue rather than a foreigner issue.

Usage of that idiom "gut check" alone, even if incorrectly, makes me think that he speaks english. His first sentences are more complex but sadly read awkwardly like a 13 year old who wants to sound big and smart rather than an adult who simply wants to get a message across in an intelligible manner.

He uses a few other idioms: "shakes out" "burned a bridge". I dunno. Multiple idioms in a single post screams to me that someone is a fluent speaker. I have no formal training in analyzing someone's background based upon their writings, but I have plenty of experience with people who don't use english at all trying to communicate through google babelfish, and it is a total clusterfuck.

I play an online game where people communicate essentially via BB PMs, and occasionally I take on new players to train and teach about the game, or I get messages from people who want me to stop attacking them. I can tell very quickly whether they are google-translator dependent. Google babelfish just isn't that good yet.

So my bet is that our lostnumberfriend is a fluent english speaker with no formal training in writing beyond a highschool level (and probably didn't do that well in highschool english either, B-/C+ student). Given the lack of an English degree, it seems unlikely that he would be involved in editing or writing directly.

Almost certainly he is a self-important forum poster (much like many of us!) who fancies himself "involved in a non-CGL system". Maybe he is doing a playtest and that is his "in" to the game industry. Or he submitted some ideas to Pathfinder. I very much doubt that either his involvement in other game systems or his "projects" are paying jobs.

[Zinegata]

Cent writes you letters? Is he macking on my woman! (Who was it who didn't understand the "beat your wife" idiom? That's relevant to the conversation right?)

I *think* that was Zinegata, but I may be mistaken.

The idiom? That was me, but I have the "Not first language" excuse. (I am fluent in English, but I don't live in America so I'm not familiar with all your idioms and nuances. I only have your TV shows and movies to base it from)

And frankly, for fuck's sake people, you're rambling over whether or not somebody can speak English. Has there been so little news about this topic that everyone is that fucking bored?

I mean, seriously, I have no idea anymore whether or not Catalyst even got the license back, and I'm not gonna go through all of the thread-crapping to find out.

[Koumei]

I don't live in America so I'm not familiar with all your idioms and nuances.

Consider yourself fortunate.

I only have your TV shows and movies to base it from)

...I take that back. I feel sorry for you.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

And frankly, for fuck's sake people, you're rambling over whether or not somebody can speak English. Has there been so little news about this topic that everyone is that fucking bored?

That's the impression I am getting from this.

[erik]

And frankly, for fuck's sake people, you're rambling over whether or not somebody can speak English. Has there been so little news about this topic that everyone is that fucking bored?

That's the impression I am getting from this.

Essentially, yeah. My understanding is there's not much new to talk about until mid-October, so it's all gonna be sound and fury til then.

[mean_liar]

STURM! DRANG!

[Ancient History]

<shrug> I finally got my last comp copies in the mail.

[4815162342]

Here are the accusations I referred to in my post.

CGL sexually harassed an employee? Are you referring to Jennifer Harding? She was done in this manner? Hmm…in all her statements she made publicly, she never made mention of this.

Dude. It was in public. Bull seriously made a series of demeaning and sexually aggressive forum posts about Jennifer Harding for the explicit and admitted purpose of disrupting debate and reducing the chance that she was going to receive compensation for her labor.

She doesn't have to make public accusations. The sexual harassment happened. In public.

Stop being such a fucking transparent shill for a moment. If you don't understand something, it's entirely possible that you just don't understand it. Not everything is cloaks and daggers and shadowy innuendo. Sometimes it's just a CGL employee being a skeevy and aggressive pervert in public places.

-Username17

The only thing perverted there, Frank, is your gross manipulation of the facts. While Bull may happen to be a freelancer for CGL, he was certainly not operating in that capacity when he made those statements, nor was it part of some grand plan by CGL to deny JH's claims. And when did he admit that his purpose was for "reducing the chance that she was going to receive compensation for her labor?"

Just because somebody who happens to be in the "pro-CGL" camp did something stupid and perhaps "wrong" does not mean you can transfer those acts onto CGL or other people in the camp. If that were the case, Cent13 would have sunk your guys' boat long ago.

[Kaelik]

Um... So?

Yes, it was in public. Yes it was by a CGL employee. Yes it was sexual harassment for a given value of sexual harassment which in this case includes (She's totally okay with it, I know from past experience that you couldn't possibly have access to.)

And it was for the direct purpose of preventing people from talking about how CGL doesn't pay people, which if you accept the premise that CGL only pays people when those people make CGL look bad for not paying them, means it has the effect of contributing to her not getting payed.

What I want to know is, Where the FUCK does Frank claim that Bull was doing this on behalf of Loren Coleman and Randall Bills?

So far, Tarq, you, and then you again, have all accused Frank of saying this, even though it's patently obvious to everyone who's not a retarded shill just looking for ways to lie about Frank that he didn't say that.

[Absentminded_Wizard]

edit: just curious but: how does a non-native English speaker write?

What usually sets warning bells off for me is when people make grammatical "mistakes" that you don't usually see out of native English speakers and lack of understanding of idioms.

Just a couple of examples culled from other people's quotes of lostnumbers:

A game many consider him to be one of the most expert minds on the History and Lore of the Game.

There's at least a phrase missing here.

What if he does not get along with the direction of the project he is asked to work on?

We've got a serious mangling of idiom here.

Now, in retrospect, neither of these really proves that lostcipher is a non-native speaker. That would probably take something like a complete ignorance of an extremely common idiom (e.g, this German guy on the WotC boards years ago who went on a rant about how how 3e fighters get feats "every second level" instead of "every other level"). At the time, I was going as much by superficial impression and gut feeling rather than by in-depth analysis, and I just felt like adding a little snark to the whole "is this person a professional RPG writer" bit.

In fairness, if this person does have a condition like ADD, it's possible that meds + time to edit could allow them to produce a finished manuscript orders of magnitude better than a hurried message board post.

[Crissa]

Getting people to stop and realize they can edit posts because those posts will be answered, like, tomorrow... Is harder than breaking their teeth.

-Crissa

[Orion]

Poor writing skills, or extremely hurried and lazy application thereof, will cause people to appear mentally ill. That's because mental illness is basically the inability to accurate perceive reality, and someone writing badly will be unable to accurately describe reality. I believe that in almost all cases a disjointed rant is a matter of someone failing to convey a rational (if retarded) chain of thought, not someone mentally ill.