Part 62: The Boards / The Play

The ban on “speculation on any kind” backfired, as all the seasoned moderators knew it would. The last line of the banner had been added by a rookie mod, who had just crossed the threshold from regular poster to moderator (and had asked to be made a mod, no less, which you just didn’t do, because it put the admins in a very awkward position) and was eager to test out her new powers. And there was a sort of code among mods: you didn’t delete something a fellow mod had written. If you had a disagreement, you settled it in the Mods Only room, and there was a post in there that, diplomatically, wondered-aloud if banning “speculation” was a “proportional response,” but the rookie mod had not acknowledged it, despite making several other posts in the Mods Only room in the interim.

There was also another Mods Only room, which was accessible only to the OG mods, those who had been mods before Black Carousel came out or so. Forum moderators are all equal along the lines of Orwellian animals. In this room, there was a less diplomatic thread, entitled “rookie mods abusing power,” which didn’t use any names because it didn’t need to. The consensus here was that it was best to learn by experience, to allow the rookie mod to reap what she had sewn, hang herself with her own rope, and so on. Each contributor added his or her own idiomatic expression in lieu of a new idea, since they all agreed with each other.

And learn she did. Soon, the General Discussion board was full of sentences like the following:

i’d love to agree w/ you that bc is the darkest obm album but i’m afraid that would count as speculation, right mods???!?!11

Or: i used to love it here but i think it’s going down hill. must be all the SPECULATING

Soon, “speculate” was an all-purpose rallying cry, far removed from its original meaning. By Wednesday evening, you were seeing users brand themselves *Proud Speculator* and write things like: i’m so SPECULATING sick of this whole SPEC board and even go spec urself. This latter was adopted as a screenname, with some underscores to stretch it out, by one poster, still upset over what they had done to her beloved home state (slash country when she was feeling particularly patriotic.)

The last line of the disclaimer was soon removed, by the offending mod herself, after she had a good, long shower-cry and a pint of Ben and Jerry’s, but the Speculation Wars lingered in the institutional memory of the boards for a long time, until it became a shibboleth for those who had been there in the Old Days, before everything got ruined by the new wave of fans who came onboard after the release of The K_________ Chronicles.

*

“The problem with my mother,” Elizabeth began, rising from her seat, spotlight on her, speaking to the circle, during the group-therapy-session slash semi-improvisational live stage performance of The Problems With Our Mothers, where each performance was different to reflect the continually changing nature of human understanding and therefore truth and also to save the time it took to write a script, and the audience was smaller than the cast to communicate that we are all actors in this world more than spectators and because no one ever showed up, “is that she is a sociopath. Not a psychopath, mind you, who derives pleasure from the pain of others, but a sociopath, which means merely . . .”