Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

I’ll warn you all in advance, this post isn’t particularly entertaining. You may just want to skip it.

This blog serves several purposes for Ironfleet. Entertainment of the audience is surely one of them, but it’s only one.

Obviously it’s useful to have a propaganda arm where we can spin the Ironfleet side of the story and control the dialog — I expect and assume that goal is obvious to everyone. I aim for truth, because truth is persuasive, but obviously it’s truth the way we see things — for objective reporting, buy a newspaper. (Er, on second thought, good luck with that.)

Another thing I use the blog for, is to serve as a prosthetic memory. Months later, these accounts help refresh my memory of personalities and events. That’s saved my butt several times now.

Related to that, the blog tends to fix ephemeral behavior in amber, preserving and displaying it for history. So much of what we do in EVE is fleeting, and gone as soon as the screen changes. When my enemies behave in ways that do them no credit, it strikes me as a worthy project to document that here, in their own words, where the search engines (and their next set of enemies) can find it forever. To me, someone who treasures words, that seems a far better revenge than blowing up yet another soon-forgotten virtual spaceship.

And that, my friends, is why I’m bothering to reproduce the evemails that follow. In them, Chebri seems almost to plead for trust, demanding that she be believed because (she says) her word is good. And then, in bitter irony of which she seems totally unaware, she tries to justify failing to extend that same courtesy to others (namely me and my corpmates). She knows she’s truthful so we should believe her, but if we tell the truth the way we understand it, she disagrees so we must be liars. It’s like she lives in a black and white world in which she, and only she, can know the one truth. She’s obviously never heard of the parable of the blind men and the elephant:

Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, ‘Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men of Savatthi who were born blind… and show them an elephant.’ ‘Very good, sire,’ replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, ‘Here is an elephant,’ and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.

“When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, ‘Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?’

“Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, ‘Sire, an elephant is like a pot.’ And the men who had observed the ear replied, ‘An elephant is like a winnowing basket.’ Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.

“Then they began to quarrel, shouting, ‘Yes it is!’ ‘No, it is not!’ ‘An elephant is not that!’ ‘Yes, it’s like that!’ and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.

Toward the end of the EVEmails that follow, the exchange bogs down in specifics, and gets very repetitive of the same factual disputes that have been hashed to death already in the comments on this blog. If you care enough and read that far (I don’t recommend it) you’ll see that Chebril still can’t seem to distinguish between facts (did an event happen?) and semantics (what the undisputed event should be called, how it should be characterized, what it should be named).

——————–
Marlenus,

Two weeks and neither of us has lost a ship to the other. Good match! I enjoyed the challenge.

Shame you involved ACME though. They really never knew about it until it was started. They did eve mail me intel from time to time but for the most part I used my own locate agents.

I enjoyed the creativity of your blog and ‘role play’ of your character which is what drew me to you. However, when it became apparent that you were blurring fact and fiction to the point that it affected other players, I lost respect for your writing.

ciao

Chebri

——————–
Hey, got your mail yesterday, but was just wondering whether all that past tense was intended to indicate that you were going to let the war lapse.

As for the rest, I’m not too concerned. Your respect for my literary talents isn’t exactly my top gaming priority, and your concern about ‘fiction” became hilarious to me when you kept labeling my honest opinions and intel estimates as lies and fiction. I DO thank you for the implied threat of a lawsuit, though — that was genuinely the most entertaining communication I’ve ever gotten in EVE.

See you in the spaceways, if one of us is unlucky —

Marlenus

——————–
Your twisted perception never ceases to amaze me. I say apple…you say orange and so it goes.

Chebri

——————–
At least I can tell when I’m in Jita — TorpedoTed still swears he saw you in local, and I know the man personally, he’s very truthful.

— Marlenus

——————–
I swear, on my great grandmother’s grave (very personal here) that I never jumped the gate into Jita. There are a lot of pilots in Jita and I can see someone getting confused between red stars and red skull n crossbones.

I have been completely honest with all players in game and I hate to be accused of having done something (like get backing from ACME, etc.) that I haven’t done. Every time I tried to get the facts straight talking to you you twisted my words. Frustrating.

And yeah I figure two weeks with no points on either side is a draw.

Chebri

——————–
With an equal level of sincerity and honesty, and leaving all gaming posture aside, I tell you that (a) that’s what he told me, and (b) that’s what he believes. Of course, he could be mistaken.

When I first reported this, you IMMEDIATELY called it a lie. It wasn’t. It’s a true account of the data I have.

Don’t you see the irony in you expecting to be taken at your word, while shouting “LIAR’ at others?

You don’t seem to comprehend that other people see the world differently than you do. You don’t seem to understand that it’s possible for two people to look at the same data and reach different, HONESTLY different, conclusions.

I’ll send another email about the gaming matters. This is a different topic entirely.

— Marlenus

——————–
On the contrary. I do know that two people can observe a scene and have two different perceptions of what happened. However, there are also facts to be considered that are not subject to perception.

Fact (game logs to support) I never jumped to Jita.
Fact (game logs to support) I never got funding or support otherwise from ACME
Fact (game mechanics) ore theft is theft – not salvage

You toss accusations around without bothering to address the facts. That’s what I don’t have an appreciation for. Add to that the perception that others have that you seem to enjoy making miner’s lives miserable by stealing from them and yeah…I think you’re a lousy person. You enjoy hurting others. I have no respect for that.

Chebri

——————–
OK, back in gaming mode.

You do know I saw you fleeted up with Sparkiec the first day of our war, and you were using him as a warp-to at a non-standard place outside my station, right? That’s support. I saw it with my own eyes. That’s backing. For that reason alone — and it’s only one of my many examples — I simply don’t believe your claims to have been acting alone. I saw it with my own eyes. Why should I believe otherwise?

And that has colored my willingness to believe other things you’ve said.

Without any desire to give offense, the credibility you want to have with me, is not present.

As for the draw, I agree — I’ve made no effort to hunt you, and you have failed to catch me. I never wanted war with you, remember? You could cancel it any time.

— Marlenus

——————–
As Cordus said on your blog, can you blame them for not being willing to provide information when you’ve stolen so much from their players? A few players helped from time to time. The CEO and directors had no idea what was going on until it had already happened. So you blame an entire alliance for the action of two players.

I don’t seek credibility with you. LOL I gave up on that. I was just trying to end the shooting amicably. I still have my credibility with people who matter.

Your war with ACME and their alliance is between you and them. I’ve no say in it as they’ve had no say in mine with you. I’ve asked the alliance leader if I was causing them problems and her reply was “do what you want – Ironfleet is just a blip on our screen.” LOL

Chebri

——————–
all this and I’m still not clear — do you plan to end the shooting, or not?

— Marlenus

——————–
Doesn’t really matter what I say at this point, does it? I mean, you’re just going to assume that the opposite is true. Assumptions can be such a bitch. I’ll just let the facts speak for themselves.

LOL

Chebri

There’s an old farmer’s saying that goes “Never try to teach a pig to sing. It just wastes your time, and annoys the pig.”

That’s how I feel about trying to talk about truth with Chebri. Note how it’s a “fact” if she saw it, but it’s a lie if me and mine saw it (TorpedoTed saw her face icon in Jita local. He just did.) She hates to be accused of doing something she says she hasn’t done (“like get backing from AC-ME”) but doesn’t mind accusing others of lying when they haven’t. Then when she admits she did do what she said she didn’t do (“A few players helped from time to time”) she tries to redefine “get backing” by saying “I never got funding”. Truth is a slippery thing indeed in her hands, and in classic human fashion she’s quick to accuse others of her own sins: “You toss accusations around without bothering to address the facts.”

Friends, I have addressed the facts. I have addressed them until I was blue in the face. I had to nail them down and chain them up, they were so tired of being addressed they were trying to sneak away for beer. (Yeah, they saw that’s where the audience went, and they were jealous.)

A waste of time for sure, and I apologize for boring you with it. But if this blog post saves just one person, ever, from making the mistake of trying to discuss truth with Chebri, it will have been worth my time.

And meanwhile, Chebri’s war is now in its third week. So what was all that “enjoyed the challenge” and “I figure [it’s] a draw” and “I was just trying to end the shooting amicably” stuff for? Unless I’ve counted my dates wrong, she paid her war bill before we started talking last night. I guess it’s more truth, Chebri style.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 9th, 2008 at 9:29 am and is filed under EVE Essays, Name And Shame, Notable Smacktalk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.