Sarudak wrote:I never even thought of it from that angle...
You can't do what I do, and do it for this extended period of time, and allow yourself to give a fuck about public opinion man. There's just no way or you'll wind up a quivering mass in the face of people's demands.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I *am* human, and this stuff does hurt.
However, I love what I'm doing with this mod so much that I'm willing to endure that and I've adapted my personality with time to be able to cope with it and minimize the damage it does to me on a personal level. That has largely meant me becoming a more and more thick-skinned and vicious bastard with time, at least in terms of my online persona.
And again...I challenge anyone to find a mod author that has been at it as long as I have, and with such a big audience, that has been able to maintain this kind of direct contact with the community. My personality isn't just a personal oddity. The situation basically necessitates it.
In general, I really can't afford to be human in my online persona given the attention on it. To give you an example, in a rare moment where I let it through and mentioned the death of my cat, it took very little time at all for the trolls to come after me about it, and having looked over threads in a few troll hangouts, they're *still* going on about it, keeping it in their ammo bag to use against me at key moments.
I think if you take a moment to consider that, you'll understand that I simply can not afford to allow my humanity to play a role in how I act online. I simply need to act in the best manner that occurs to me at the time, move on, and deal with the consequences as they arise. I definitely make mistakes along the way, some which haunt me at a personal level, but at the same time, even showing that will inevitably be used against me and thus disrupt development of the mod.
