Nowadays there are all these cute little squads of gamebreakers – Dreamers, Octopi, whatever. A few of them even bother writing up their findings for the unwashed masses.
And yet I see a lot of f-gs whining about how FAQs aren't good enough, about how all they discover these days is dumb bullshit and all the good gamebreakers are dead now. Whiners couldn't find their dicks if they had a map.
You should be grateful these squads exist at all. Once upon a time, “gamebreaker” wasn't a profession. It was the only way you could survive.
-- “You're All a Bunch of Pussies”, enturbulatedOccupation
cM, you didn't really know Myra right. at least you arent trying to play her as a villain like some people would want to.
I was... after her time. Much, unfortunately, is lost to history by definition; there is nobody who can understand a historical figure nearly as well as the historical figure themself. And living memory is lost unusually quickly among Replayers, compared to in the vast majority of presession cultures; even our oldest rarely broach 40 years old. I am, maybe, twenty-eight, and I’m already old by Sburb standards. And Myra lived and died before ever I touched a Replayer network.
So... I guess you could fault me for not being literally immortal here, but there really isn’t much I can do about that.
Sorry I can’t read the minds of people who are already dead.
Millions of words have been written on the topic of Myra LeJean, cofounder of Sburb.org and probably the person who did the most to move us from the Age of Beacons into the Age of Replayer Networks. So I would not write an essay if I did not know that I had something to say. Fortunately for us all, I'm pretty sure that I actually do.
Myra LeJean was not just someone who wore anonymity, she wore emotional and moral commitments to the concept of anonymity. It is important to consider this in any analysis of her personality and actions.
I: The Anonverse
To create a Waste one must start in presession.
We should first consider Myra LeJean herself: though we never heard many of the specifics, it is clear that her ability to maintain relationships, trust, and emotional stability was compromised at a very early age. Abuse early in childhood can produce what the official books often call personality disorders; personally, I think that borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, developmental trauma disorder, and a variety of other diagnoses of this nature describe different manifestations of the same internal state. While Myra LeJean appeared to be a survivor of psychiatric abuse and as such refused to let anyone use these terms in relation to herself, and I am wary of narrowing it down to any specific "diagnosis", it is generally accepted that something happened [1, 2].
While Myra was never particularly forthcoming about her native world, some of her conatives were. Most of our extant documentation on the subject comes from scrollbackAntacid, who wrote a full series of articles for Transamphibian under the name "Why Revolution Is A Terrible Idea, Except When It Isn't" [3] explaining the political and social structure of what is sometimes called the Anonverse.
Myra was a member of a militia that appears to be an exaggeration of a social trend visible along the seams of a significant minority of politically otherwise stable Earths; namely, that of large social movements organized via the Internet and infused with Internet culture [4].
Myra was a member of one such culture: one premised upon the concept of anonymity (thus the name Anonverse), where self-aggrandizement was looked upon as the highest sin. Furthermore, as the Anonverse drove groups like this to an extreme, Myra was heavily indoctrinated into this and related principles. It probably increased her brittleness.
II: The Waste
It is clear that Myra LeJean did not adapt well to Sburb.
For those of you not familiar with the details of Sburb title assignment, holding the belief that self-aggrandizement is the highest sin is a one-way trip into rolling the Waste title [5]. Furthermore, Sburb titles are generally designed to correct these ostensible personality flaws by indoctrinating one in behavior opposite to that of one's "flaw". This means that Myra was forced into attracting and seeking attention.
It is clear from contemporary written evidence [6] that Myra LeJean enjoyed this attention. It is also clear from similar evidence that Myra LeJean believed that seeking such attention was morally wrong [7], that seeking such attention would bring doom upon her head [8], and that seeking such attention was her giving in to Sburb's attempts to erase her personality [9].
As such: unlike most Sburb players, the struggle against Sburb took on a moral dimension to her. Because she was culturally expected to bow to the needs of the collective, she faced several of the same pressures that face other Replayers coming from collectivist cultures [10], despite the fact that most people do not consider Anonymous a collectivist culture [11].
III: A Hill To Die On
In the words of the eternal gentlemanMannerism, "one must pick one's own hill to die on" [12]: meaning, everyone decides for themselves which principles they choose to uphold as sacred, and it is the utmost in discourtesy to attempt to argue against someone else's Hill unless they actively solicit such arguments.
Myra did not pick the hill that she was going to die on. Sburb picked it for her, by making her a Waste.
That Myra conformed to the expectations of Sburb with such alacrity, despite her morals being so adamantly opposed, would perhaps surprise most presessioners, but that's the nature of Sburb. Being forced to the brink of death clarifies one's values immensely, after all. Myra decided that she was better placed among the living, despite the increasing self-hatred that she accumulated over the years in remaining that way.
But the moral conflict of being forced to act against herself did not dissipate over the years. Though we have little writing from Myra's late period, secondhand accounts from close associates and coplayers verify that her difficulty in dealing with this dilemma obsessed her up until the end [2, 13].
Furthermore, Myra LeJean remained committed to the concept of anonymity long after she gave up trying to maintain it herself; see the Guest boards of Sburb.org, which to this day can be posted on under any name, in theory. In practice, the concept has been heavily compromised, but to this day the "Relationship Help" thread and other Guest Board fixtures remain culturally involate except in extreme cases like spamming.
(Around Timestamp 63, after much debate, the ability for moderators and admins to associate Guest posts with Sburb.org timetrav and forum accounts was added... and it should be said that Myra did not make doing this easy. I should know; I volunteered developer time trying to make it happen.)
Conclusion
Myra lived and died a Waste, tangled up in the notion of anonymity and attention-seeking with a moral dimension that most of us would never think to assign to it. It's something she couldn't transcend, but she tried her hardest despite it.
I guess that's a conclusion for both Myra and her boards: our original values may have been compromised, but we still try. There are worse hills to die on.
Note
Immediately after I posted this, I got an email from a nonexistent Pits account stating that "I may be dead but I can still see this, you know."
Make of that what you will.
References
[1] enturbulatedOccupation. "Brainwashing, Torture, and the World of Sburb", PT0000/FAQ/ts51. See section titled "Psychological Effects".
[2] ringlessOrdinateur. "Waste of Mind: A Retrospective, 20 Timestamps On". PT0000/Articles/ts55.
[3] See PT0000/TA/scrollbackAntacid/"Revolution" series.
[4] catalogTruisms. "Interuniversal Correspondences, Part 5 of Inf." PT0000/Collections/Interuniversals/ts52.
[5] You should be able to find more information in any Comprehensive FAQ, but I recommend wedgeIssue's "Sarai's Sburban Guide", sections 157A-H.
[6] Corpseparty Archives, /b/, pages 183, 201, and 433
[7] Ibid. pages 185, 247, and 252
[8] Ibid. pages 186 and 325
[9] Ibid. pages 413, 486, and 499
[10] For further information, see indifferentBem's book "On Non-Western Cultures and Sburb" (PT0000/Collections/ts67).
[11] That was a joke.
[12] gentlemanMannerism. "Etiquette Guide." 15th Edition. Book IV, Section 6.
[13] scorpionSting. "Interesting Interviews" podcast series. Episodes 5 (epinephrineElectrified) and 18 (tingedCharacterization).
I didn’t know she knew how to speak Shipyard, thought Ross. It was either a lucky guess from her part as to Telescope’s formative years, or her research had found an interesting file in his ‘net presence. Either way, Myra had managed to surprise him - or, rather, both of them - with the depth of her experience yet again. Would wonders never cease?
Setting: Bubble (w/ Epi's realself), ring voyage after Cataclysm Session
Word count: 3,745
He’d tell himself, “I’m doing it because these are important secrets, and they can hurt people.” But if he’d never stayed quiet for the sake of arbitrary rules before, why would he suddenly be doing it now?
For a long time, he thought it was a sign of his maturity.
It was only after rolling Heart that he realized it was the other way around.
What I say now is going to be difficult to believe. But I have to be quick about it.
Find the other five who were born children of meteors. Get them copies of the Game, Sburb, by any means necessary, legal or otherwise. The existence of our future depends upon it.
When Rain told me she was from Ivy Crest, I immediately asked her if she'd participated in the unrest there. She stammered something - no? - and then ran.
Stan asked the same thing, much later. I don't know what her response to him was, as Rain and Stan then agreed to move too far away for me to hear what either said, but Antie told me that he suspected that she sympathized and was merely afraid to admit it.
It turned out he was right.
I don't know what would've happened to her if our world had gone on.
I think she was too close to be above suspicion, but that it would take something she couldn't deny - a death, perhaps? - to force her to make up her mind about whether she supported us or not.
Conveniently, something of the sort did happen. Inconveniently, it destroyed our world in the process.
About the way the agents called them a "she" and groped through their bags to make sure there was nothing there that could possibly endanger the country or, God forbid, the free trade agreement.
About watching the window, of late-late at night when the murmurs of talk and texting had finally quelled, watching the lights of some faraway, anonymous city sparkle in the distance.
About the helios stations, the hundreds upon hundreds of mirrors in the deserts, polished to a clean bright shine on one side and a dull heat-dissipating gray on the other, with tracking software and motors to ensure that they distilled the sun into a few sizzling-hot droplets of infrared light, to boil the water to run the generator that produced maybe enough electricity to run a hundred McMansions. Theoretically, at least. In practice, the mirrors kept having animals climb into them, or birds dumping into them, or the wind itself with a thousand little cutting pieces of quartz sand carried along to abrade the surfaces into uselessness.
Antie says there's a metaphor somewhere in there, but I can't be bothered to write it.
Theory and practice are the same thing, in theory. They're two different things, in practice.
