Hey, Interactive Fiction Community, or what remnants of it remain here:

Conrad Cook is a blackmailing asshole.

He has accused me, on intfiction.org, of being Jacek Pudlo, and demanded
that I give him my interview correspondence with Mr. Pudlo as proof that
I am not--which seems a little odd, since surely if I had written the
answers as well as the questions, then coming up with both sides of the
conversation wouldn't be very difficult.

I wish to state, categorically and for the record, that I am not, and
have never been, Jacek Pudlo.

I also wish to apologize to Jacek in that I *did* forward the email
thread to Conrad Cook, because although I am aware that I hold Jacek and
his work in much more esteem than the rest of the IF community, I really
would rather *not* be thought to be him.  Although I would have prefered
to merely scream "publish and be damned," I did not, and am experiencing
some regret over that.

Note that my reply to my blackmailer on intfiction.org does NOT mean
that I will be moving my IF-related correspondence activity over there.
If you cannot cope with Usenet, you do not *deserve* text adventures.

However, all denizens of these august newsgroups be warned, lest it be
*you* that Cook's accusatory madness fixes on next: he is a blackmailing
asshole.

Adam

I don't blame you for saying such a thing - you got mixed up in a very
ugly thing, in a very ugly, public, mud-slinging way. But I would like
you to reconsider Int-Fiction. It's no worse that RAIF, in that Conrad
might just as well have posted his accusations here; and I for one
miss your posts for the entertainment value.

In article <9a1baa84-fe8e-4e54-bcd8-ff7fe08fd...@k10g2000yqk.googlegroups.com>,
Peter Pears  <peter_pe...@hotmail.com> wrote:

That particular comment was somewhat tongue-in-cheek.  I understand the
reasons people have fled the newsgroups, and the advantages in interface
that a web forum brings.  Really, I do.  Nevertheless:

I may start reading intfiction.org, but my heart still belongs to
Usenet.

Adam

In rec.games.int-fiction, Adam Thornton <a...@fsf.net> wrote:

Sadly, the heart of Usenet belongs to whoever is willing to stick
around in a newsgroup and keep talking. There's no guarantee this is a
bunch of people you want to hang around and talk to -- or, indeed,
anybody at all.

--Z

--
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
*

On 01/31/2012 06:35 AM, Adam Thornton wrote:

Amen!

Now, the reason this is so interesting is that I did *not* blackmail
Adam Thornton.  I blackmailed *Jacek Pudlo*.

On Jan 30, 8:35 pm, a...@fsf.net (Adam Thornton) wrote:

"Publish and be damned," huh?  Which email of mine is this man angry
about?

This one, to Adam Thornton:

Or, this one, to Jacek Pudlo:

--Now *that's* blackmail.

Or, is he angry at this one, later in that correspondence with Pudlo:

The relevant terms that Thornton is getting emotional over, blackmail
and publishing, are from my interaction with Pudlo.  Not Thornton.  If
Thornton were not Pudlo, he wouldn't be expressing himself in these
terms.

--Frankly, if Thornton weren't Pudlo, I don't think we'd be getting
this (put on) rage at all.  Thornton wouldn't be so remarkably stupid
about "someone showing up at PRIF and pretending to be him."  He
wouldn't be going out of his way to say that Pudlo might be a psycho /
he's not that bad / he's in Europe.  He wouldn't be talking about
emailing me a picture of his penis.  He'd just say:  Well, it's not
true.

Hell, it looks that way to me.  It looks very much like that.

Conrad.

Dear Conrad,

Slandering someone by posting on a public forum that he is a notorious
troll, and then sending him an email saying that you will only stop the
slander if he submits certain emails to you is *not* blackmail? You have
a truly warped view of the situation. The only thing your current post
proves is that you are possessed by a remarkable need to interpret any
data at all as supportive of your Jekyll and Hyde theory.

Let me repeat -- although I feel I am insulting Adam by doing this and
thus implying that there is any need for it -- that Adam Thorton is not
Jacek Pudlo. It's not just that you are accusing a valued member of the
community without any proof whatsoever. It is also that the personality
of Adam and the personality of Jacek are so radically different that
they could only coexist in a person with a severe case of dissociative
identity disorder. Which I certainly hope you are not going to attribute
to Adam in an ad hoc attempt to save your wild hypothesis.

Please stop this. You are mistaken, and you are damaging people.

Yours nevertheless sincerely,
Victor

No, they're not different personalities.  One is mean.  That's the
only difference.

And the notion that the accusation is prima facie lunatic *and that*
it's too dangerous to air in public is a bit peculiar.

You want to talk personality?  Have they demonstrated different areas
of competencies?  They have different personal philosophies -- but do
they express them in mutually incommensurable terms?  Does it not seem
to you that Thornton on intfic is playing the fool a little too
precisely? -- Rather than challenge a point directly ("What makes you
say anyone drove Emily Short off r.a.if?") he begs ignorance in
exactly the right way to raise the point -- "I haven't been reading
r.a.if" -- so he can't be Pudlo -- "so I didn't know that Emily
claimed Pudlo drove her off usenet."

These are troll strategies.

You tell me, Victor.  You live in the Netherlands, or something.  Does
"Jacek"'s voice sound more Swedish or American to you?

Does English seem his second language?  --Does he write American or
British English?

I can't tell, but I seem to recall that you can.  Based on spellings
and such.

Conrad.

...I just don't get how everyone is so shocked.  Did we imagine that
the troll does not post to the internet under his real name?  That he
isn't actually into i.f.?  That he does not do real work that he wants
to take real credit for?  Or that when he drops the troll mask he is
less intelligent, less clever, less inventive--?

Or was it, we were expecting the member of our community who is the
troll would be mean like "Jacek" is?  If he were mean in his normal
self-presentation, why would he need the troll mask?

Well, anyway, I've said what I have to say, and I'm well aware I
didn't make any friends on this one.  I encourage people to look at
old posts and draw their own conclusions.

Conrad.

(If this post shows up doubled, my apologies. Either Google or my
connection is acting up)

Conrad, since you hate Pudlo so much, I think you'll understand it if
I put it in these terms.

Somewhere, Pudlo is having the time of his life. He's the centre of
attention, he's the reason you've publicly accused a member of the
community, he's howling with laughter as you try to rationalise what
you did (basically, you seem to be on an anti-Pudlo crusade, which is
sorta fine if you have nothing better to do, but your methods are so
extreme you don't even seem to realise what you're doing).

And he never had to lift a bloody finger.

I don't think Thornton is Pudlo, though to be fair I'm not a close
member of the community - I'm fairly recent and I've yet to met any of
you face to face (which I'd like to, very much, someday). But whoever
Pudlo is, he's thanking you for doing what he does best - sowing
hatred, re-hashing old issues, and in this case even having a
sacrifical scapegoat: you.

I hate Pudlo with a passion myself. I try to ignore him, and sometimes
I let my emotions get the better of me and I feed the troll, with
probably better intention than grammar.

But I'll be damned if I let him control my life to the point where I'm
going to try tracking him down and making public accusations on the
grounds of "It seems so clear to me".

Also, I changed the title of the thread back. Not because I'm calling
you an asshole - but because you were digging yourself even deeper.
Even if you *meant* the asshole to be Pudlo, it really, really sounded
like you were calling Thornton an asshole.

Nevermind me, just changing the title's thread back to its original
form. It's not a very nice title, true, but Conrad's "suggestion"
reflects so, so badly on him, on top of everything else, that I think
we'd best agree to sweep it under the carpet.

First, as the headliner, I'm going to state, categorically and for the
record, once more:

I am not, and never have been, Jacek Pudlo.

In article <00685134-477f-4e4f-bac4-5899f7be2...@m2g2000vbc.googlegroups.com>,

So, let's start here.  I'm going to be quoting from some of Conrad's
other posts here, with no particular regard for the niceties of
message-ids and thread structure.

[...]

Yes, that one.

I responded as quickly as possible with the email exchange.  

This was wrong, of course.

I should not have given private correspondence to my blackmailer.
Regardless of its content, or the esteem in which I do or do not hold my
correspondent, that was extremely poor form on my part, and is the one
part of this exchange for which *I* feel some regret.

It also utterly failed to satisfy Conrad Cook, who went full steam ahead
with his accusations, and tried somehow to blame me for not responding
quickly enough.  Which, to be fair, did take me several hours.  I don't
check my mail often when I'm at work, and once I got home from work, I
spent some time with my wife, and cooked dinner, and played some Skyrim,
and only then got around to checking my mail again.  

I hate to break it to Conrad and the IF community as a whole, but it's
not actually at the very top of my list of priorities these days.

The whole sordid story, minus the Pudlo/Cook interview, can be found at:

http://www.intfiction.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4254

As I put it early on in that thread:

"I have responded to Conrad's blackmail attempt by:

a) calling him an asshole

b) sending the demanded correspondence, for which I apologize to
Mr. Pudlo.

It appears it was a successful blackmail attempt, as, although I hold
Mr. Pudlo and his work in rather more esteem than the rest of the
community, I do not wish to be identified with him.

I am not Jacek Pudlo.

I would cordially invite Conrad Cook to suck my hairy nutsack."

The offer still stands.

Your other letters, to Jacek, which I have excised from this post, since
they were not to me and are not my problem, are *also* blackmail.  Which
seems a strange thing to be proud of, unless, of course, you're an
asshole.

[...snip...]

Indeed it is.  As was your letter to me.

I think most halfway-educated humans are familiar with the concept of
blackmail, and many of them are aware of the Duke of Wellington's
response to attempted blackmail: "publish and be damned!"

Let me assure you, my rage is not a put-on at all.

Now, I will freely grant that it is disproportionate.  It is nonlinear.
I am far more outraged than, honestly, an inept blackmail attempt from a
bum--oh, I'm sorry, you prefer "hobo", don't you?--a hobo ought,
rationally, to make me.

An interesting thing about picking fights with total strangers is that
you don't get to act all surprised and victimized when not only do some
of them fight back, they unexpectedly escalate, for reasons of their
own.

Perhaps I have episodes in my past which make the threat of blackmail
particularly irritating to me.  Perhaps I'm merely having a bad
day/week/month/year/decade.  Perhaps I'm taking all the rage from the
rest of my life which I cannot express in the relevant contexts because
of the consequences I would face there, and delivering it to you
because, hey, you fucking started it, you asshole.

Of course, some of the reason that I'm particularly incensed by Conrad's
blackmail is that it is, in fact, a superficially-plausible
explanation.  I am one of the few people in the IF world who openly
admires Pudlo's work, and who, mostly, gets along with him.

That doesn't mean, though, that I don't think Jacek's an asshole--well,
that's too broad a term: Jacek is gratuitously cruel, and gratuitous
cruelty is a quality I do not find admirable, and which makes me very
uncomfortable to be around.  He has said many things to me that have
gotten under my skin, although in general, in aesthetic matters, he has
usually been right.  I find it valuable to have critics who don't
sugarcoat their criticism, and sweetness is not a quality Pudlo
possesses.  At least in his dealings with me; perhaps he's lovely to his
aged mother and small puppies.

In short: telling the world that I'm Jacek Pudlo is a fairly-effective
way to threaten me in this community.  I've spent twenty goddamn years
here, after all.  Almost everyone in the IF world only knows me through
my games and my Usenet posts.  There is a particular persona, a
particular identity embodied in that corpus of work, and I very, very
much resent an attempt to confuse that identity with someone I really
don't want to be thought to be.

In short, you *are* attempting to harm my name and reputation, and since
that's pretty much all I have in the IF world, I am going to object most
strenuously.

To forestall your immediate objection, Conrad: any cruelty I manage to
inflict upon you is *not* gratuitous.

Your delusions only become my problem when they begin impinging on my
life.

Let's move on to a couple more of Conrad's posts.

I, of course, would beg to differ.  And being Not Mean At Least To
People Who Haven't Earned It is one of the things I try to be.

What the *FUCK* are you talking about?  I've aired the accusation
everywhere I am able to, you fucktard (apologies if anyone out there has
developmentally-disabled loved ones, and double apologies if they are
employed in the sex-worker trade; I'm using "fucktard" here as a term of
art, with no disrespect implied to either the actual retarded or to
prostitutes, both of which categories, unlike Conrad Cook, have much to
offer society).  The only reason I haven't spammed Facebook and Twitter
with it is because I categorically refuse to get accounts on either of
those.  I want the *ENTIRE INTERACTIVE FICTION WORLD* to know what a
horrible, horrible person you are.

I'm pretty sure what I claimed was that I don't read intfiction.org:

"Did she post here that she had been 'driven off' raif? Since I *don't
read this fucking site*, I didn't see that; I figured, like all the rest
of the old guard, she finally gave up on Usenet, which makes me very
sad."

Now, if Emily *did* post to raif, "screw you guys, I can't handle the
trolling, fuck off, I'll be on intfiction.org," then I missed it.  I
*also* haven't been tracking the newsgroups all that much, honestly.
Other priorities.  But what I was trying to convey was that it seemed
plausible to me that Emily had written a "Why I Left Usenet" post on
intfiction.org, which I hadn't seen because I don't read
intfiction.org.  Although I guess I'm going to have to start now.  Let
me point out for the record that I *also* resent you having forced a
sufficient reason upon me for me to start caring about Yet One More
Time-Sucking Website.

Sure, buddy, whatever you say.

And then, finally, there's

Well, I must admit: I probably *am* less intelligent, clever, and
inventive than Jacek.  I am also, certainly, less mean.

But as to why I'm shocked?  I'm shocked because a perfect stranger
walked up to me and blackmailed me out of the blue.  Until yesterday,
all I could have told you about Conrad Cook was that he was some IF
dude.  I mean, here's our first
...

read more »

No, Peter.  And no one ever does.

On Jan 31, 3:45 pm, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Jacek's real name is Michael Lonc.

On Tue, 31 Jan 2012 15:19:47 -0800 (PST),
             Peter Pears <peter_pe...@hotmail.com> wrote:

Also even in Conrad's own viewpoint he is blackmailing someone, and does not
care who gets hurt in the crossfire.  Which I consider pretty shitty
behaviour.  I'm not a fan of Pudlo at all - he was an annoying arse.
However I don't see how resorting to such shitty behaviour would do anyone
any good at all.

--
Andy Leighton => an...@azaal.plus.com
"The Lord is my shepherd, but we still lost the sheep dog trials"
   - Robert Rankin, _They Came And Ate Us_

On Jan 31, 8:45 pm, Robb Sherwin <robb.sher...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does he live in Sweden?

C.

All right...  I've just been banned from intfiction.org.

They do have standards, after all.

In fact, I came to my senses after sleeping on it, and after
thoroughly going over the correspondence Adam sent me.

I don't know a better way to do this than to post my email to him
earlier today:

On 2/1/12, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:

So, Adam -- you're right on all accounts.  Your recent post about me,
going over my emails to you -- was entirely correct.

I admit, this is very shaming to me.  And I could quibble about what
"blackmail" means, but in its nature, what I did was wrong -- it was a
kind of a mugging -- and it failed to take into account your well-
earned status in the IF community.  And I was thoroughly fucked up on
this one from start to finish.

I just don't like Pudlo.  I don't like that he's mean for the sake of
being mean.  I don't like the fact that he gloats over a bad IF
writer's suicide.  There is to my mind no amount of cleverness or
intelligence that makes this acceptable.  R.a.if is a wasteland now,
and I have a hard time thinking this is not directly because of
Pudlo's trolling.

So...  I hope you'll grant that I have not had bad intentions during
this thing.  I just fucked up.

Conrad.

ps - And it is *very* peculiar to me that Pudlo gets a pass at
intfiction, but the moderators came after me for saying that a guy who
got a pass was you, Adam.  --Even with the understanding that I got it
wrong, it's not comprehensible to me that misidentifying you as him is
worth banning, whereas the actions and the behavior I falsely
attributed to you are not worth banning.

Anyway, if the moderators at intfiction are around, I'll ask them
kindly either to delete those two remaining threads, to add this
retraction to them, or otherwise to take steps to ensure that some
newbie searching the archives some months from now does not read my
accusations and become confused.

Sorry for the drama, guys.  Believe me, I know I came out of this with
shit on my face.

On Feb 1, 3:46 pm, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Yep. Lives with the young woman who went by the slow rain to Weedon.

Maybe they met there. Maybe he's the reason she thought she should go
back. Maybe he hid in her trunk. Who knows.

Sorry Conrad, but I did a bit of digging, and it appears as if Jacek
consistently uses British (or Canadian/Australian etc.) spelling,
while Adam uses American.

Proof
Jacek says 'theorising' instead of theorizing here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.int-fiction/browse_thread/th...

Adam says 'apologize' rather than 'apologise' in the first post of
this thread.

On Jan 31, 10:12 pm, Conrad <conradc...@gmail.com> wrote:

Sorry Conrad, but I did a bit of digging, and it appears as if Jacek
consistently uses British (or Canadian/Australian etc.) spelling,
while Adam uses American.

Proof
Jacek says 'theorising' instead of theorizing here:
http://groups.google.com/group/rec.games.int-fiction/browse_thread/th...

Adam says 'apologize' rather than 'apologise' in the first post of
this thread.

Apologies don't mean jack squat if you write a "but" after it.

        ...

... and "realizing" you've made a mistake, "apologizing" for it, and
then continuing to make the false accusation you know made the target
(rightly) very, very angry for the purposes of _trolling_ certainly
doesn't remotely sound like an apology.

At this point, you'd notice?

--
Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
  San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM/Y!M/Jabber erikmaxfrancis
   Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind.
    -- John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963