Updated management.

[hackslayer]

As recent posts reflect, our former community owner, Quenbolyn, has stepped down from management. Her several children require care, you see, as well as her burgeoning career -- past a certain point, juggling online needs and offline needs becomes untenable, and offline needs will always be the priority. She and I have discussed it at length, along with foaming_beast,

Comments

[hackslayer]

Look, I'm real fucking proud of my ability to upset people on the internet as a teenager, and I'm proud of the things my staff and I accomplished. It's not every day you get stalked by the Paolinis and their head fanboy over at Shurtugal.com. And yeah, Epistler was never the one in the line of fire. She came late to the party and demanded an extra dose of anonymity and respect from us because she was already a published author. Fair enough. We gave her that willingly. But she drained our resources and never gave anything back: we spent hours up late every night developing our content, building our website, responding to fans and haters, and developing strategies to combat legal threats.

I was the one who got doxed with my home address, phone number, etc., when I was 15 years old. I was the one who dealt with the legal threats, the late nights, and the downright obnoxious people who never understood the point of AS -- despite our focus on critique, we wanted to build a community to highlight the GOOD parts of fantasy and create a generation of discerning readers and writers. And guess what? We succeeded. So yeah, I feel entitled to what I built. Don't like it? Go build your own thing.

But it's folks like you and the Epistler who couldn't help but take the negativity of critique and TAKE IT TOO FAR.

I was 15 when I started this thing. I'm 29 now. How many years has it been? My staff and I, by turns, have done a lot of incredible things in that time. Things to build lives, build families, build careers. We've succeeded in breaking into the publishing market in a way that few indie and self publishers have. We've taken what we learned here and applied it to the other parts of our lives.

But I come to this community regularly to see what people are up to (and have for years), and it's turned into a self-congratulatory circle jerk. How many ways can we spork and roast and burn the same material over and over and over? How many ways can we fawn over our resident bully, whose chronic memory problems have segued into plagiarizing from other people's personal history in order to feel relevant and maintain her street cred?

I will never turn over the legacy of Anti-Shurtugal, what we worked so hard to build, to small-minded sycophants of a bully who would rather continue to denigrate an author who had his 15 minutes of fame and has now faded into relative obscurity. No sense of vision, of looking toward the future -- something we talked about in almost every staff meeting we had.

We were relevant when Paolini was relevant. The truth is, he's no longer relevant. And neither are you. Consider this us granting you your freedom. You're free to go forth and create something new. Don't blow it.