Be Excellent To Each Other

He's turned up in RLLMUK, and lasted about 24 hours before going into a full on deranged rant.
Unlike a lot of people I've got no past history with him so can only base my opinion on how he's behaving now, and he comes across as a complete twat with absolutely no self awareness at all.

http://www.rllmukforum.com/index.php?/t ... rs/page-22

That link isn't working for me. Do I have to be a member of something?

Looks like the thread's been canned, which is a shame as I was looking forward to being entertained there.

Oh my God, he gets absolutely smashed to bits then throws his toys out of the pram. What a dick.

Rllmuk's OT forum is only for signed in users.

Share some highlights, guv?

"Look at you. Look at the fucking state of you. A grown man in his 50s, still hanging around playing the big shot in this rancid wee sewer of 10th-rate 4chan wannabes, whipping them up because at heart you're just a griefer like them who finds other people's suffering hilarious, then trying to blame ME for what they might try to do to an innocent party after you've set them on a witch-hunt.

I'm going to walk away, because it always takes me two years to forget what scum you are and I always kick myself for it. Standing up to the demented, shrieking hatred of this place is like trying to reason with the tide."

Ah, yes, it appears you do need to be registered.

I'm signed in now but don't have permission to view. I wasn't that interested but then I decided to have a bath and sign up whilst soaping my nips. Now the bath has got cold I've lost interest again.

However, it should be mentioned that this was caused by a couple of people going on about his thinking on Hillsborough, while most (some? Most, probably) people wanted to ask him questions about current stuff (including an AP book for the 25th anniversary, which I would be more than happy to get my hands on).

There's what led up do that:





Edit -- fixed formatting.

Is this a forthcoming thing? Or a nice dream?

Heh. Incredible to think that wee Stu, as a man in his late-40s now, still has the stamina and rage left in him for this shit? You'd think that scraping £330,000-plus off readers of his blog in one year would make him happier? Still, vintage reading, there, except I have to remind myself that it's actually, ahem, freshly minted, not circa 2002.... I guess some things just never change, much like his opinions and world-view?

(One thing did make me particularly laugh; the very notion that he especially values friends who tell him when he's talking bollocks? Fuck me, they'd surely never shut up... he's so renown for graciously and gratefully taking on board expert criticism after all. Pre-GCSE Physics anyone? )

I'm in now. Wow. He went fucking ballistic after his clever post about someone called Em was instantly dissected by other members.

And the Bloodborne thread is over 300 pages long? Facking hell, screw you guys I'm flouncing over there.

I also like the idea of a book about AP, and would buy the book, but there's a worryingly high chance of Stu alienating the relevant people before the idea could come to fruition, unfortunately.

What a deeply unpleasant bell-end he is.

See, I'm being nice about him.

He's kind of lost me a bit with this whole politics thing, but I still think he was a fantastic videogame journalist, and a lot of the stuff he did for free on his old World of Stuart site was a fuckload better than anything that remained in traditional games magazines at the time.

It's also perfectly possible to work with him and get on fine, we did the Cheating Fruit Machines Fairplay campaign together, which required extensive communication over an extended period of months, and I found him to be a diligent, gentlemanly, and hard-working partner in that endeavour.

(I would also note for the record that JC's recounting of that campaign contains so many blatant inaccuracies I'm not even going to attempt to correct them all. I mean, even the opening line that Stu was a 'thick cunt' for not knowing that fruit machines cheated implies it was common knowledge, when in reality the vast majority of the fruit machine emulation scene at the time (almost all of whom were current or ex fruit machine players) was genuinely astonished to learn that this was the case. I've still got the relevant threads from Fruit Forums archived, so I'm not making it up.)

He posted iOS stuff for me on SavyGamer back before I had an iThing and wasn't really informed about that area of the market. No money changed hands, but I (gladly) let him plug his excellent Free App Hero. I don't remember exactly how we parted ways, but I think it coincided with him no longer doing Free App Hero, and around that time I got an iPod touch and started covering that stuff myself.

I had no complaints whatsoever about his contributions. It wasn't a massive time commitment, just the odd deal here or there, but it was nice to have broader coverage on SavyGamer.

Hearthly and LewieP, able to read the title of threads since 2008.

That's the key point there. Never did anything for anyone where he didn't directly benefit. 'Free' articles on WoS? He produced a tiny amount of entirely average output with occasionally bits and pieces if you paid him a sub fee, mostly links to other free things ripped off from elsewhere. All the while carping about the 'ingratitude' of the forumites.

And the forum, where he asked you to sign up for pyramid referral scams so he could get free consoles, or made you go in with him so he could get multi-packs of crisps on the cheap. Never responded to posts requesting for help with anything (unless it was to derp some arrogant opinion on something) whilst posting loads of topics asking for help himself. Once you answered him he never said thank you or otherwise showed gratitude.

How some of you can continue to hold him up as some kind of decent bloke, if you squint at him a certain way, is fucking beyond me. A selfish egotistical cunt to the very core who would, as demonstrated, drop you as soon as you stopped being useful to him.

The invective that's still so readily directed at him, even after all these years, says more about the cunt-callers than it does him.

Paging Mr Godwin to the Stu thread please. That's Mike Godwin, to the Stu thread. Thank you.

Nope, I really don't think it does.
If the majority of a group of reasonable people all call someone a twat, there's a good chance they are a twat.

That people still think that the [insert hideous thing from the past] is a bad thing says more about the people who dislike bad things than the bad thing.

That's really bad logic.

Whatever, some folks need to get a bit of a grip when it comes to Stu, anyone would think he'd committed a series of terrible crimes against humanity or something.

He's lovely.

Given you seem to have no trace of anything that could even be considered empathic (and that you always followed Stu around like a lost sheep) I find it hard to take anything you say very seriously.

I also realise that given we were on opposing sides over the cheating fruit machines thing that your recollection of it will remain the polar opposite to mine.

Your lack of empathy hurt and upset many people over the years. I look back at the whole FME nightmare sometimes and I physically cringe at my actions. You were no saint.

Cheating fruit machines? Sorry, like any gambling if you don't realise they're bent and twisted then you'd have to be a little on the thick side of the word cunt. An industry born from hardened street criminals isn't going to be fair. Now on the other hand knew this but couldn't help yourself because at the time you were a gambling addict and you were mentally ill I would understand and even offer my empathy. But not to know that gambling isn't a bent and twisted industry and to think that you actually stood a genuine chance is just shit thick.

I worked that out pretty quickly.

Finding you brown nosing Stu is nothing new though.

And why you shouldn't try to post more than one line from a phone... Will sort it later.

The invective that's still so readily directed at Stalin, even after all these years, says more about the cunt-callers than it does Stalin.

Godwin averted.

Before he realised he could convince thick Nationalist cunts to part with their benefits money, you might recall that he banned me from WoS because I argued with him about how easy it was to get a mortgage, at the height of the pre-market crash in 2006 when they were literally giving out 100%+ mortgages like candy. He was very grumpy because as a self-employed scrounger he didn't have the paperwork to demonstrate he'd be able to afford one himself.

I'd watched WoS prior to that and saw how literally everyone backed down when he forcefully disagreed with them and I'd decided I'd had enough. So I argued back, and got banned. About mortgages. Fucking Hitler, me.

This fine for failing to disclose campaign spending shows that his paperwork is no better organised today, although I'm sure he's now stuffing very expensive crisps into that paedo-beard gob of his.

It wasn't the topic that caused him to ban you.

I don't know what his line of argument was, but it is extremely hard to get a mortgage if you are self employed.

Remind me, as I'm getting old.

Shame he deleted the original forum otherwise we could possibly wayback and check. No money in keeping it though.

He accused me of saying that getting a mortgage was easy, even after I clarified it wasn't, and he was talking in terms of London, whereas I was specifically talking about the North West.

I wouldn't mind so much but I earned about £20k at the time and had no deposit, so it *was* pretty easy for me back then. He declared this to be an exception to the rule and to suggest anything else was patently unreasonable. Something something rich/poor divide.

There was also a bit where he defended the BBC as having to report fairly on the balance of house-buying opinion or something. Even more amusing since he's spent the last few years raging about how the BBC and mainstream press are all biased and in bed with the capitalists, and whatnot.

Stu: our communal fondly remembered crazy ex.

It was common knowledge. I pointed out to you on numerous occasions that fruit machine ROM code contained some nasty shit, you just didn't listen. Pacman Plus for example on Impact and the fabled "One in ten thousand" chance of a repeat. Seriously though, if you played fruit machines for that long without realising they were a con then I genuinely feel sorry for you, especially some one as intelligent as you are. Maybe you should have listen to reason a bit more (lol asking a gambler to listen to reason... hahahahaha).

Any way, without muddying it and making it all cloudy (because this isn't Fruitforums it's BEEX and we've all grown up and learned since then) you were asked not to use the emulator in your campaign. In case you forgot this please feel free to load up MFME 2, where you will see a forced about screen that you can't disable asking people not to use it for means other than it was designed for.

So that should have been it. Chris Wren asks you not to use it in your campaign, you respectfully grant him his wishes, end of story.

The fact that you didn't listen and didn't have any respect probably explains why you have been suspended from your job for similar antics on the internet.

Seriously, do you really mean to tell me that at (ooo, got to be) 40 years old you are still the same as you were back then? that respect means absolutely nothing to you and "it's only words on the internet". Even after you have had a child?

I may not be a literary genius dude but I know when some one asks you not to do something and you deliberately ignore them and do it any way that it doesn't really gather you any fans, especially when you do it with your fingers shoved in the air and call them a cunt to boot.

Who is Chris Wren?

He built London

Vodafone has asked you not to use that iPhone on any other network, but you're still trying to jailbreak it to work around. How is this different?

From context, I'm guessing the guy who created the emulator.

Funny, I can think of an example far closer to home.

Oh come on old chap, let's keep things at least vaguely on the right side of reality?

I have a massive amount of respect for Chris and what he did with MPU3/4 (later MFME), but let's not forget that he used large chunks of MAME code in those emulators from day one, completely ignored the well-known requirement to feed back all projects that depended on any of MAME's code back to the project itself, and charged real money for the resultant emulator, and bundled in masses of copyrighted ROMs onto CDs that he was knocking out for £50. (Because of course, I bought one of those CDs off him.)

Seriously, we can do this if you want, I still have the emails archived out.

(And indeed he has subsequently been forced to release the source code for MFME after it was proven that he was using MAME code and breaking the terms of its open-source licensing.)

The one and only time Chris came under any legal pressure whatsoever over his emulators was when Barcrest told him to stop because he was charging money for the emulator bundled up with their ROMs, everything else is just what people have made up retrospectively.

The emulators were used in the Fairplay Campaign because they provided genuine proof that fruit machines cheat (the hidden 'LIMIT' code on the gambles in Tropicana Club was a real doozy, which astonished many folks at the time, even fairly hardened gamblers), and in reality there was never any threat to anyone because as has been established a million times over, emulation in and of itself is not illegal. (As long as you don't sell copyrighted ROMs with your emulator, which is what Chris actually did.)

Anyway, thanks for bringing the stuff up about my job and family and home being imperilled because I took part in a campaign to make fruit machines fairer, that's a classy touch, because it's always nice to be reminded about things like that.

(And for the record, and again, because you have a habit of rewriting history to suit, at the time of the Fairplay campaign I was routinely making a decent chunk of cash out of fruit machines, which led in part to the hatchet job that Coinslot carried out on me and Stu - here it is!)

*Stands up*

-APPLAUDS-

Heh.

It was Stu's birthday last week. Happy birthday stu.

i had some work to do today.. now i will have to spend it reading an internet forum.. thanks i guess..

Just one problem. Fairplay was when? 2003/2004? something like that?

http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.c ... inslot.htm

Chris's code was found to contain MAME code in 2011 was it? And that was done out of spite too.

As for the rest? no, I really don't feel like getting into it either. I don't blame you for Fairplay because Stu would have carried on regardless any way.

You can have your side of events, I can have mine. However, since those days I tend to try at least not to be a colossal prick to people.

I wasn't saying 'We used the emulators in the Fairplay campaign because we knew they contained large chunks of pinched MAME code' (although it was known by several folks even back then, of course), the argument we used at the time was that the public interest angle of the campaign outweighed other considerations.

The point I was making is that with the benefit of hindsight it was a bit rich of Chris to make demands on what the emulator could and couldn't be used for, when he knew full well that it contained big globs of MAME code that he'd incorporated into a commercial product and not made his source available back to the project, or indeed even acknowledged that the MAME code had been used. (All big no-nos of course.)

I know the campaign was ridiculed at the time and still is today because 'all we got is a sticker', but that's an informational/warning message that's carried by every single AWP in the country to this day, which is more than had ever been conceded by the industry to anyone for its entire existence.

It was explained many years ago that whilst it "may" (because no one had any proof at the time) contain MAME code it was practically useless before Chris got his hands on it. It wasn't designed to interface with a fruit machine. It was pretty much rewritten completely.

It was only proven at a later date by a very sick, twisted individual who had it in for Chris since day one.

However as I said, I really don't want to get into the ins and outs of it because it will get us absolutely nowhere (kind of like where FME stands now.. Nowhere)

Stu made his choices and put simply, without throwing large handfuls of shit around (and I apologise for doing so yesterday and am very angry at myself for letting FME piss me off for the first time in many years) I didn't and still don't agree with those choices.

And it really is as simple as that, and even after all of these years having gone back and evaluated the circumstances I still feel exactly the same.

Once again like many of the nasty, spiteful things he's done he simply went about it the wrong way. He did not contact Chris first and ask permission, and once he'd begun steam rolling every one who opposed him he then resorted to insulting both of the developers. The old classic "Cunt" I believe.

I gave up trying to reason with any one and anything even so much as FME related. Now? if I feel a certain way I just say what I've got to say and then draw a line under it and leave it there. The last thing I want to do is sit and argue over it for weeks at a time with some one desperately trying to change my mind.

FME is a sick, twisted place. That's why all but the completely insane have managed to leave it behind and move on with their lives to something less sick, depraved and upsetting.

Heh. These type of threads always give rise to a wry smile from me; Stu's shadow is still cast long after his departure, best part of 10 years ago now. Was there ever a more adept person at riling people?

From my POV I am entirely ambivalent about him. I suppose I take the view that if nothing else, the man certainly gives me a much-needed good chuckle or three on a weekly basis, though I doubt that's his intention and nor do I suppose he'd thank me for saying so? Still, watching him so effortlessly winding up his detractors and yet himself getting so aerated over (to me) absolutely nothing worth even thinking about for a granddad knocking on 50, well, it's all just so damn amusing and well worth my £2 monthly contribution to his coffers. There's a sort of poetry about it and when life throws a few curveballs, it's all most cathartic I must say, like a long-running soap opera!

As for the whole FME/Fairplay thing, well, all done to death and ancient history etc., but I will permit myself to say the following:

(1) Anyone who can't distinguish between, say, the (nominal) infringement to some megacorp, say by unlocking their phone years after it was supplied, and some private individual on a forum, bricking it in case they get sued, is being a bit silly really.

(2) The old "yeah but he was selling his software for £50" chestnut that always gets trotted out, like this was some awful revelation? Well, that seems like a damn sight more understandable - if misguided - attempted "monetization" of hundreds if not thousands of hours of work, unlike, say, charging people £2/month to post on a freeware forum?

(3) Anyone who thinks 99.999% of the FME "scene" gave a toss whether or not MAME's precious rights had or had not been asserted is off their head; they just wanted to play fruities on their PCs (and by all accounts, IIRC MAME have laughably failed to cash even a fraction of the cheques their dev team appeared to be writing to said scene ooh, what, 5 years ago now? Mind you I'm well out of touch now)

(4) Finally, anyone who thinks that the "Fairplay campaign" achieved anything other than a very minor moral victory needs to have a quiet word with themselves IMO.