Part 100: The Boards

Some movements thrive when they lose a leader and gain a symbol, a spiritual foreparent, an infallible Founder, so that future historians are a always little bit surprised by how brief a time that key figure was actually around, as if his or her tenure was just a prologue to the actual story, which causes them to reflect on long shadows and Ideas superseding Reality and such. UNBAN was not one of them. Losing its head, it turned out to be less Hydra than run-of-the-mill chicken. Sure, they could have re-rallied around hELLrAISER as a martyr, but they already had two martyrs, and since hELLrAISER hadn’t been literally, gun-to-your-head banned it would require another name change, and plus it was getting late on the East Coast and most of them had school in the morning.

The OMB Squad, though, kept fighting valiantly: they added a new question to their FAQ, addressing the use of the Report to Mods button (“While we believe in the Report function in theory, we cannot fully support it as a solution until we feel confident that the Mods will apply the rules consistently and fairly,” which kerriewordFarewell read and privately agreed with); they responded to inane posts in GD and Letterati just to expose the people to their message. (OMB, being British, had gone to bed right after receiving her ban, and so missed most of this mentally as well as pseudo-physically.)

This continued until OMB’s ban expired after twenty-four hours, and she was invited to become a mod as part of the latest restructuring of the boards, masterminded by KFW (who was in college and finished with finals and therefore bored.) Under the new system, mods were no longer required to be neutral, and each sector would be policed by one of their own: OMB would have the TB boards; user (tapped for what KFW perceived as his latent TX sympathies) the TX boards; KFW would handle GD and Letterati; and xanthangum would be given full control over the boards reserved for the first three OBM albums. This meant she had more boards than anyone else, it was explained to her, which was a reward for her dedication. No, no, they only seemed like ghost towns because the moderators had been working so hard to preserve them. Yes, that means you have the exclusive rights to make all decisions concerning your boards; no need to ask permission anymore; you're free.

DERRiDA, having said everything he had come to say, never returned.