Clearing up misconceptions

• From: maqt_charlatan
• Date: Wed, 09 May 2001 06:54:44 -0700
• Message-ID: <000TFIJ14.000CFA7T5.12170551-quizbowl_at_...>

It's a shame that there are so many tightassed
people on this club nowadays. Who knows if NAQT would
have even been formed if people who found flamewars
offensive and opinions that deviated from the norm as
dangerous tried to tell everyone else what is important and
what isn't (#4997, among others).

Although
there are a lot of misconceptions in this message, let
me just clear up the important ones:

1) I am
not a professional, nor do I aspire to be. I am a
quiz bowl charlatan. I'm sure old-timers have plenty
of bad things to say about me. I thoroughly enjoyed
my years of playing quizbowl and have edited ACF
tournaments for the last three years as a way to give back to
something that gave me so much satisfaction. If I wanted to
be professional, I would still be teaching high
school instead of slumming at a dot-com. None of this
matters, though, since:

2) I am not ACF, and I do
not pretend to speak with authority for it on this
club, unless you count tournament announcements and the
like. It is not "my format," it is the people's format.
I certainly wasn't speaking for it during this
whole discussion, as everyone else besides you
understood. Although the fact that I am 1/4 of your quizbowl
universe is both intriguing and slightly disturbing, I
doubt anyone else feels similarly.

3) You state
that I, acting as 1/4 of your quizbowl universe, was
taking a swipe at the competition. Do you really think
that ACF and NAQT are in competition? I don't pretend
to speak for either organization, but I see now why
your world-view is so distorted. Things brings us
to:

4) In accordance with Sturgeon's law, 90% of what is
posted to this club is crap (I feel proud that I have
contributed more than my share). As you have already
demonstrated, getting most of your meta-QB knowledge from here
is a bad idea. But it's the anonymous postings,
blatant trolls, and rampant unprofessionalism (God
forbid!) that make reading it worthwhile. At this time,
props must go out to quizquasay and billbrasky01,
whoever they are, and to Vish and Matt Colvin, for some
old-skool mondo flaming that brought about a lot of change
to the circuit. 

Also, if you must insist on
hearing about a skeleton from an NAQT member's past, then
all I can say is "meow." Again, if you actually at
some point would like to reply to my original message,
go ahead, otherwise, feel free to continue flailing
and adding to that 90%.