Advice for the Spiritually Callow and the Mendicant Pundits

[Physics Guy]

While I would also be happy to see this thread continue, I think we're being a bit hard on Shades.

We should keep in mind that there's probably a lot of spam that we mostly don't see because it gets removed. Those first few 7bellyofenoch7 posts read like a stoned chatbot. Especially to someone who sees more of the spam that targets these boards than we regular readers do, I'm sure they didn't look much different from a weird kind of spam.

Okay, the posts gradually became more articulate, and maybe Shades could have noticed that 7bellyofenoch7 had changed direction. Again, though, that's easier to say if you don't deal with much spam. If every weird new poster got a long grace period in which to reform, we'd probably have a lot more random weirdness.

[Kishkumen]

While I would also be happy to see this thread continue, I think we're being a bit hard on Shades.

We should keep in mind that there's probably a lot of spam that we mostly don't see because it gets removed. Those first few 7bellyofenoch7 posts read like a stoned chatbot. Especially to someone who sees more of the spam that targets these boards than we regular readers do, I'm sure they didn't look much different from a weird kind of spam.

I am sorry, but no A.I. is capable of that kind of learning.

[Physics Guy]

Perhaps not, but how could Shades tell that? At any rate I couldn't tell.

Somebody could post some unpunctuated screeds full of quantum mechanics buzzwords and maybe I might recognize that it wasn't actually nonsense at all but rather sophisticated humour. (Okay, that's a stretch for quantum mechanics, but bear with me for the sake of analogy.) I might beg Shades to let the posts continue, but I wouldn't blame anyone else for failing to notice their sophistication. The stuff would sound like gibberish to non-experts even if it was brilliant.

[Kishkumen]

Perhaps not, but how could Shades tell that? At any rate I couldn't tell.

Somebody could post some unpunctuated screeds full of quantum mechanics buzzwords and maybe I might recognize that it wasn't actually nonsense at all but rather sophisticated humour. (Okay, that's a stretch for quantum mechanics, but bear with me for the sake of analogy.) I might beg Shades to let the posts continue, but I wouldn't blame anyone else for failing to notice their sophistication. The stuff would sound like gibberish to non-experts even if it was brilliant.

You make a good point, PG. I blame myself for not stepping in to show how it is brilliant. Anyone who followed the Cassius University posts of Dr. Stak in the past, however, could have seen it a mile away. Add capitalization and punctuation, and it is essentially the same stuff. Unfortunately, I have been busy with so many different things that I did not think to intervene until it was too late. I mistakenly thought that Shades would pick up on the appreciation of Morley and me, and that he would trust our judgment. Instead, he didn't give a flying eff what we thought, which is, sorry to say, kind of typical for him. He has many virtues, but he can't have them all.

[7bellyofenoch7]

So here is the story.

I wrote up a fake diary about a Mormon apologist who tries to create his own system of apologetics and ends up suffering a mental breakdown. I would post a diary entry once a day and allow the story to develop slowly to kindle interest, curiosity, and tension.

The character (Jaxon) keeps two sets of diaries; one for public consumption and one for his own private thoughts. This ends up being a consistent theme as Jaxon ends up becoming obsessed Plutarch’s ‘Parallel Lives’ and some obscure issues of textual criticism send him down a conspiratorial rabbit hole that has him denouncing William Shakespeare as a crypto Anti Mormon (or “coyote”) because of how Cassius is portrayed in the play in the play ‘The Tragedy of Julius Caesar’(who also read Plutarch as source material for this play) and penultimately discovering a copy of Niccolo Machiavelli’s ‘The Prince’ (also used Plutarch for this book) with marginal notes in the hand of Blaise Pascal ( actually conjectured to exist in real life). While this discovery would cement his career, his inner life had become so consumed by apologetics that a rival at BYU scoops his discovery and takes the credit for himself. The story ends with the scoundrel receiving an award from DCP in Salt Lake City while Jaxon would be across the city at a homeless shelter being ministered to by Dean Robber and Dr. Scratch.

Now to play around with this idea of parallel lives and double meanings that happen within the story, I decided that I’d create this account and the big reveal would be that Enoch was actually Jaxon and he couldn’t recognize his own works even though he was posting them. This was going to be achieved by a series of strange posts that were simultaneously relevant to the thread they were posted in and a different meaning later revealed by the journal.

Right away my posts were moved. I wasn’t concerned then because I was totally fine with my posts being moved to a lower forum. The real trouble started when Shades threatened to ban me unless I passed some kind of Turing test. So I created this thread and let it develop for a few days and then I returned to Shades and started demonstrating that my posts were not incoherent spam text generated by an A.I.. At this point I was confident Shades would at least be satisfied that I wasn’t a bot and would give me leave to continue.

I guess there are sophisticated A.I. bots that post Mormon fanfic with esoteric references on the daily, because he was unconvinced and flatly stated I was being incoherent and that he intended to ban me. At the same time, he is wringing his hands about banning Rosebud because her floridly insane accusations could be considered “Free Speech”.

That is when it dawned on me, why in the hell should anyone invest any energy and time creating content for this place? I’m just going to get unilaterally banned simply because Shades doesn’t get it.

[drumdude]

a Mormon produces nearly three times as much feces as a catholic or protestant this hyperactivity of digestion comes at the expense of their ventromedial prefrontal cortex which is why they don’t see the divinity of the res bina or what the strangers call trans and thereby sin against alchemy when pioneers crossed with handcarts they left their path strewn with so much fecal matter that it fossilized and became used as currency by agate hunters in nebraska i know many bishops study basilius valentinus yet they never truly open their eye and i suspect most of the seventy suffer from bromhidrosis because they read without sight a curse from above and below it is whispered

That was your first post. No context, and very similar to a ton of the A.I. spam that the board is getting more and more of.

Can you really fault Shades for his initial reaction?

If you had started with the journal stuff from the beginning (which was great and entertaining!) Shades would never have had any reason to move anything. This all seems like a big misunderstanding.

I hope both you and shades can see each others perspectives and you can stay on the board, Enoch!

[7bellyofenoch7]

Can you really fault Shades for his initial reaction?

I don't and say as much in the post above. That post was made on Dec 4th, I'm talking about Dec 12th after the creation of this thread and Shades is still accusing me of being an A.I. bot.

[7bellyofenoch7]

That was your first post. No context, and very similar to a ton of the A.I. spam that the board is getting more and more of.

In fact, here is the thread with spam posts. How many posts can you find that exclusively use all lower caps and make no use of punctuation? How many harmful links had to be removed from my posts?

[Jersey Girl]

Haystak. Happy Christmas!

[Moksha]

Maybe you could start anew.

Premise - Hugh Nibley and Louise Midgley had a love child. He grew up in Orem, Utah. One day his identity was discovered by Daniel C. Peterson who was fearful this young child might be captured by the church and sold to the Soylent Green factory in Linden, Utah.

Dr. Peterson arranged for him to be shipped off to Southern Utah and raised under the identity of the anonymous apologetic poster Peter Pan. You can take the story from there...