EDIT EDIT. Okay, after calming down and having a looksee at The Debutante's Editor log, I suppose I may as well put in my two cents since I'm already in here.
E2 is phenomenal, to my mind, when it comes to moderator-user communication. Despite being here for a year, I'm still used to other sites' methods, which usually boil down to: 'You are users. You are here for free. Quit your bitching about the way things are run, or we ban you. Shut up, sit down, and go play.' That's if they're present at all. Some places I've been too just have them totally behind the scenes, with maybe one puppet account between the whole horde of them for announcements. Which is one of the reasons why I like E2 so much. Not only do the mods here actually log in, but they talk to people, and play silly /egg games, and act like people. So, yeah. That's the background where I'm coming from.
As for disturbances and the like. One of the odd things about E2 is the reluctance to thump someone with the banstick. Other places, someone stirs up shit on purpose, they get forcibly removed from that part of the internet. Accounts terminated or at least suspended so they can't log back in for a week or so. Here, instead, you guys have a lighthearted little thing called borging. It's a nice quirk. After a warning from the chat moderators, if someone doesn't clean up their act- whether it be a rant, drunkenly threatening another user, or just posting COCK COCK COCK in a giant, catbox-flooding wall of text, then yeah, borg them. It's not like it's permanent. I agree with Sam512: it should be public and obvious. Maybe a little message from E2D2 or EDB pops up. SO-AND-SO has been BORGED!
If it was an honest user who just wouldn't take the warnings, maybe it will give them time to calm down. If it was a drive-by-troll, they won't care and will just move on to the next place.
So, yeah. My $.002 on that matter.
EDIT: It occurs to me that there's some sort of catbox thing going on. Fuck it. I don't care at the moment. Pardon the harshness of tone, but right now, I find myself not giving a damn about anything else at the moment.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fucking fuckidy fu-diddily-uck. Yes, there's going to be a lot of cursing. Some situations call for gratuitous emphatic expletives, and few carry the needed amount of dammit-all-to-hell-and-back that the word fuck supplies so readily.
Beaky's dead.
The little mutant baby in my homenode pic? The picture I put up fucking yesterday? The baby who had a vet appointment scheduled for Saturday to get his eponymous beak trimmed? The same baby who was crawling all over my shoulder yesterday and the cause of a humorous mismessage, who I bottle fed not even twenty-four hours ago and made 'om nom' noises to as he awkwardly glugged down baby bird food, and was just starting to get the hang of the whole 'flying' thing?
Yeah, he's dead now. I don't know why, other than he's always been a sickly little thing. Maybe it caught up to him.
I don't know.I just got done digging a little grave for him - one foot by one foot by one foot for all four inches of him. Fuck. I already buried him. He's out there, now, beside the aviary. I just told my mom to cancel the vet appointment.
Fucking hell fuck fuck fuck.
I usually try really hard Not to get attached to the birds. They aren't pets: they're breeders. I feed them and take care of them and talk at them while I'm out there, and give them toys to play with and can even tell most of them apart, but except for the occasional exception, they aren't pets. They don't have names, and if they do, it's usually a generic nickname that can be applied to at least three other birds.
"Hey, Mama Blue. Hi, Bitey. Hi, Slapper."
But dammit, I liked Beaky. He was born with a crooked beak, so we were sure he'd die young. Instead, out of the four eggs that had hatched, Beaky and his two yellow sibs made it to fledgedom while the healthy looking one that might've been green if it had grown up died in what I can't help thinking of 'his stead'.
Then we started handfeeding the little mutant bastard and he just looked so fucking ridiculous with that baby food gruel dribbling down his face. And he looked so happy when he got to perch on our heads. Sometimes he'd try flying around the room and instead of going straight from point A to point B, he'd make a slow descent downwards until he finally landed on the ground. Then he'd look around giving off the impression of "What? How did this happen?!" when he found himself standing on the floor beside where point B ought to have been.
Fuck. I got attached to the little monster.
Dammit. I adored the little monster.
We weren't going to sell him. Obviously. I mean, nobody'd want a little mutant bird like him, even if he did have the prettiest coloring I'd ever seen in any of the birds we'd raised. Depending on what the vet said on Saturday, we weren't going to put him down, either. We have a giant cage in the rec-room: about a foot wide, four feet tall, five feet long. It would have been all his. And maybe a friend, so he wouldn't get lonely when we were gone.
The bastard was playing in my hair yesterday. He expelled himself on my fucking Where's Waldo shirt. I really tried not to like him, and just when I was starting to let my guard down and embrace it, the little bastard decided he'd had his fill and leaves the table.
Manipulative bastard. I bet he did it on purpose. I'm gonna miss the little fucker.