No Frills My @$$ -- Update by QuakeGodOkay, SteQve's "No-Frills" Quake Mods Page has reached 20k in hits. That's not the really newsworthy part. He also wrote a little (okay, big) article in defense of his "No-Frills" motto. "We can identify a frill as something that is decorative and nonessential." In that case, was the article really essential? And if it was not, was not the whole article, in a sense, a frill? I may have to address this in full later.
*Sigh*.
I spent about 2 days' (OK, nights') worth of effort building up a near-perfect defense of my No Frills label - complete with graphics and a special illustrative Frill-O-Vision Bizarro-world counterexample - and QuakeGod has to go give me pause by writing an offhand little paragraph claiming that maybe, by my own interpretation of the definition of "frill," a posted defense of my use of the "No Frills" label might in fact be nonessential, and therefore a frill. That would be true irony (Alanis Morissette fans, take note.)
I suppose "journalistic integrity and objectivity" is not a prerequisite for reporting news related to ultraviolent video games, but I had thought that QuakeGod would be more aware of the potentially devastating impact of his pseudophilosophical criticisms.
In case you didn't have the attention span to read it, one of the most basic elements of my thesis (which was more complete than 85% of the theses of 7th year grad students, mind you) was that in the World Wide Web, efficient access to information is a primary goal. In Quake terms: less time spent cruising web sites for important stuff means more time gibbing friends and strangers alike.
By being openly critical of my use of the "No Frills" label, QuakeGod may in fact have dissuaded some Telefragged readers from accessing my site. The aforementioned readers may be the very people who need it most, such as mappers or server ops who want a nice quick way to futz around with entity manipulation and placement (not that this example is an unabashed p1mp of DynaMO - oh no, not that.)
The act of implicitly discouraging potential readers from visiting the site on the basis that it has more frills than it alleges, has a direct impact on those people who may have visited it otherwise by effectively eliminating the access to information which I so painstakingly articulated was an essential ingredient of the WWW. This is in direct violation of not only my No Frills philosophy, but (I would think) of any news site that claims to offer "A World of Gaming." Therefore a refutation - however frilly it might appear on casual inspection - is required. The No Frills philosophy is not as rigid or simple as one might surmise.
Oh, I suppose QuakeGod will respond with yet another brief "sound byte" argument that makes sense on the surface, but his comments on November 10th should forever be remembered in the Quake community as the penultimate example of a red herring: he didn't address a single issue I so painstakingly described in my thesis, instead choosing to perform some neo-existential equivalent of throwing up his hands and not even bothering.
And who are the real victims here? We may never know. They've skipped my No Frills page and gone on to some site that describes a total conversion that will never be released, whose web page requires 1024x768 resolution and IE 6.0 or Netscape 5.0 to view properly, and you'd better make sure you've kept up your payments on that cable modem or else, bubba. I weep for them.
Slightly more sincere than a Bill Clinton apology or a 17 year old boy on prom night,
SteQve