THE REAL WORLD (OF STUART)

Until early in 2004, I used to spend quite a lot of time on several internet discussion forums - because, y'know, when you're a freelance journalist not working in an office with other people, it's a sort of daytime social life. Eventually, however, after many unpleasant experiences with total idiots, I realised it's daft to expect any kind of meaningful or enlightening debate with people too cowardly to reveal their real names or identities, hiding instead behind juvenile pseudonyms better suited to being spraypainted on walls than attached to adult viewpoints. If you can't be held to account for what you say, it's easy to spout lazily offensive drivel from behind your coward's shield of anonymity and ruin everyone else's chances of any interesting and thoughtful discussion, and attracted by that easiness, slightly too many people chose to take advantage of it. So I gave up on forums, with the exception of the splendidly charming and civilised one attached to this very website.

Nevertheless, there were a few posts that it seemed a shame to leave languishing in forgotten or defunct archives, so I've rescued some of them here (and will be adding more as I recover them), for the benefit of anyone who, implausibly and bafflingly, might care what I think about politics and stuff as well as videogames.

If you are not such a person, now would probably be a good time to leave the page.

These posts are presented here exactly as they appeared on the forums, edited only where necessary to make sense of the words when removed from the original context, and to remove the names of any other users of the forum referred to, because clearly those names won't mean anything to WoS readers. (Where this has happened, the relevant name is replaced with the word [Poster].) Accordingly, and because I disclose my real identity on forums and hence feel able to express views with the force with which they're held, and because these posts often followed on from some intensely offensive provocation, there may be a little more swearing in them than you're used to. The real world's a rough place. 
 

STATISTICS OF MASS DESTRUCTION (December 2002)

CRIME AND CAPITALISM (May 2003)

FILESHARING AND MUSIC SALES (June 2003)

DESPISING YOUR AUDIENCE (Jume 2003)

GROUND ZERO PLUS TWO (September 2003)

TAXATION AND COMMUNITY (September 2003)

THE LEGACY OF THATCHER (September 2003)

VIDEOGAMES PROGRAMMERS MUST DIE (October 2003)

THE OLD FIRM AND THE PREMIERSHIP (November 2003)