I used to be here a lot. Then I wasn't. Then one day a bit later I pulled all my stuff. In other words, I asamothed. Right?
Wrong.
Sometimes it's easy to make assumptions, especially if you don't know the whole story. If someone stops frequenting a haunt and then removes their contribution, it's easy to assume that it's because they've thrown their toys out the pram and then set fire to them so that no one else can play with them. And I expect that's probably what most people think I've done.
To be honest, I don't really give a flying fuck what people think my motivations and reasons are. But one thing that I have learned in the past few years is that a well-timed explanation will often make things go a little smoother. Not that there's anything that needs to proceed in a smooth manner, but I can't be doing with "so what happened?" messages. They will irritate me. Here're the answers to any questions that you might ask. If you have a question that isn't answered in the following piece of text, rest assured that I have no interest in answering it and save yourself the keystrokes.
"So, you had a big bust up with the rest of the staff and flounced off. Your ego couldn't handle being told 'no' then?"
Not quite. This answer has three parts:
1) It was all a long time ago, but if memory serves I once held very strong opinions about the direction in which site was going, management-wise, and when I had received all the passive-aggressive that I could handle (which is pretty much piss-all) in response, I called everyone a bunch of cunts and handed in my notice. If I could go back I'd do it all again, but probably more enthusiastically.
2) I handed in my notice because I have this big personality flaw: I care too much. Seriously, this is a personality trait that will one day kill me through stress ulcers or similar. I used to really, really care about this place. I wanted it to flourish, have life and energy, be all that it had the potential to be. In my honest opinion, when I was here last, it was slowly dying. I was also of the opinion that a significant proportion of my fellow admins seemed to be actively pushing towards achieving a new level of insipid blandness. It was a fight I was never going to win or draw and I'm learning to pick my battles. Not because I don't like losing, but because we all have a limited time on this Earth, and therefore what's the point in wasting any of it arguing futilely with a bunch of passive-aggressive cunts?
3) My ego ripped the 'N' section out of its dictionary years ago. If it had thought ahead a little it would probably have just used a bit of Tippex, as a surprising amount of useful words begin with 'N'. But "no" doesn't exist for me when negotiating: the answer's either "yes" or "there is a very good reason why this isn't going to happen, which I will be more than happy to sit and discuss with you so that we can come up some form of compromise." A refusal to consider compromise suggest far bigger ego problems than I possess, and that really is saying something.
"Yes, but your activity on this site stopped as soon as you weren't editor and had no power to throw around anymore. Surely that's no coincidence?"
Were you not listening? This place had become stale, it was no longer "doing it for me". As I think I described to someone at the time, I felt like a same-size fish in an ever decreasing pond. The same way you stop frequenting your local boozer when they stop serving your favorite tipple, E2 was no longer entertaining me. The coincidence is that at the time I had started working as a junior doctor and free time had become a precious commodity that I wasn't going to waste on a website that, in all truth, I had only spent the previous year visiting because, like some demented gambler, I kept thinking it was going to get better: all I had to do was give it time. Then my free-time situation altered dramatically and I had to spend it much more wisely.
Fuck me, there is way too much analogising going on here.
"So why did you pull all your stuff then? Not only did you request that it was deleted, you left empty nodeshells everywhere. That's just petty."
Much of my writings were out of date. I've wanted to prune the deadwood for a while, and update anything that needed updating. Problem is, I believe in the sanctity of "my writing, my copyright". There are some that don't, and some of these people have had admin status, and some of them may have occasionally abused their power to steal work. They probably think of it as preserving history, but until I'm dead I'm not history and I'd like the sole rights to my work, thank you very much. I'll not name names, but I remember from way before I was an editor, one regular at the site requested a complete nuke of all their writings and one editor took it upon themselves to save a copy of as many user's writeups to their own storage space as they could get to before the user was able to empty the node. That is stealing and the reason I emptied my nodes in one go was because I wasn't going to take the chance that someone might do the same to me.
I fully intend to replace some of these writeups to their rightful place. It's just that I need time to go through them, correct what I feel needs to be corrected, and so on. Unfortunately I have been spectacularly busy these last three years. I go months without talking to friends and family. I can probably count the number of social outings that I've had in the last six months using just my fingers. What I can't count is the number of important social get-togethers that I have missed in the last six months. I went two years without seeing my best friend in the world who I have known since I was ten. It was touch and go as to whether I was going to be able to attend the wedding of two of my favouritest people on this Earth. People have stopped inviting me to things because a) invariably I can't come in the first place because of work commitments b) they've forgotten that I exist. So, given this state of affairs, guess how high I prioritised combing through all my old writeups.
But enough of my slow metamorphosis into a poor excuse for a human being. The reason I'm writing this is because I, for the first time in three years, have had a slight reduction in the demand placed upon my time by people who have the right to do so, i.e., my employers and my patients. Therefore, I am now able to start taking orders for nodes that people want to have return to the nodegel. I make no promises to do this with any kind of haste, but I will do it all eventually. It is not my priority, so don't bug me. And some of my stuff will never reappear. Why? Because, ultimately, anything that I repost is something that I am willing, for all intents and purposes, to essentially become part of the public domain. I still express ownership and copyright of everything that I put up, but ultimately I have to be realistic that I have no control once something is posted here. Any writeups that I am not prepared to lose control over will not be reposted, no matter how entreatingly the request is made.* End of, no arguments, thank you.
To start the ball rolling, I have request that The Wicker Man be unnuked, because I know it was admired by someone that I admire.
"Oh, fair enough. when you put it like that, maybe you're not as much of a drama queen as I thought after all. By the way, will you be writing any new stuff?"
No. Now fuck off.
*To clarify: the reason that I would not want to repost is here is because I would like to potentially publish it elsewhere. It's quite difficult to get things published onto paper when the people that you want to be doing the publishing won't make any money because the world and his wife already have access to it here. Ultimately, a big part of having a medical career is being published in medical journals, and those bastards are very picky about what goes in. I wouldn't be doing myself any favours if an earlier draft of what I'd written was on here, especially since I'd struggle to prove that this account = me when faced with accusations of plagiarism.