It's the morning after the madness and I have the emotional equivalent of a
hangover. And I feel as if I owe plenty of people apologies and trust there will be copious
mea culpas and breast-beating all-around, but that comes later. Right now I'm going to admit a dirty little secret, I had fun. You see, I'd had a pretty terrible week and desperately needed to blow off so steam and a little
duplicity goes a long way in helping that.
I was Sophanda Peters.
My initial idea was to imitate the writing style of certain High School Students who reveal entirely too much about themselves on the web in a semi-literate manner. I actually spent several days preparing my character, perusing the entries at diaryland.com and deciding whether or not she'd abbreviate 'u' to you before coming up with a truly obnoxious stream-of-consciousness writing style that mimicked the speech patterns of the "bad" girls I knew in High School. I did not stop there; I gave my character a real name (Amber), slapped together a terrible webpage and gave her a hotmail address then created notes on her background and history to make sure that I did not give contradictory information in any of her writeups. Although most of her writeups were winged, quite a few were created as early as three days in advance including "why you shouldn't give head on a black sofa". And I will admit, it was fun to play this nearly mindless vulgar little bimbette.
And the first wave of the prank was fun. A little chaos after spending so much time imposing order was a nice way to let off some steam. And being in on the entire prank, I was able to see how cunnningly crafted some of the Editor-trolls were, although many were loud and in-your-face some were quiet and disturbingly clever. And the Editors and Gods played straight men shockingly well and Dis even went so far as to set himself up as the scapegoat for the entire thing. Hypotheses popped up as to what was really behind this ranging from it being a huge joke played on the Content Editors by the Gods to it being an actual invasion by Stile and company again to it being just an unfortunate result of our being slashdottted.
At first, the chaos was amusing and I enjoyed watching people guess what was really behind the insanity, but then it stopped being fun. It stopped being fun when people were actually getting panicked. It stopped being fun when users became offended and upset. It stopped being fun when people I consider friends came to me for answers and for the sake of the gag I purposely provided misdirection and outright lies. To those people, I apologize profusely, I have always considered myself a dependable guy but understand if you people have trouble trusting me after this.
In the end, I hope that no one was seriously hurt or offended or angered by this. There was no real malice intended. We just meant to have a little fun and did not realize that the "fun" would get so out of hand. The revels are over and we have taken off our masks and gone back to the task of cleaning up the mess we have made. Our only hope is that you will not begrudge us our night of madness.