tl;dr:
http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010…cg-censorship/
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=vfxtalk
http://conradolson.com/why-i-removed…nk-to-vfx-talk
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Its one thing to blow your temper, to offend MANY users, rant and spew racist viewpoints, and effectively rip out the foundation to your own forum, all the while keeping it contained withIN the forum, but when you get an email from the moderator, using (read: abusing) their ability to send a news letter to all members of the forum and then to fill it with their justifications for their racist and hot tempered views, that is where I draw the line.
If you keep bringing up or reminding everyone of all the topics that were hotly debated by many of the prominent users of this forum, you’re going to keep opening up wounds for those who want to make amends and keep this site going.
I can not be a part of this forum any longer. You have crossed the line sending your bullshit lies and "justifications" for your "actions" to my email. I want so badly to keep supporting this site, passing on my knowledge that I have both learned from my own experiences as well as learned from being passed down to me through this very forum, but I can’t any more as the moral integrity of this site is crumbling and being left for crows to peck at.
Jah, your actions will cost you and everyone a part of this forum a heavy toll in knowledge and resources and this site will once again fall into a depression, with nothing but amateurs and "hobbyists" crawling around blindly spamming for help. India and China may be developing countries, but there is NO excuse for dragging them in to support your views and to use them as propaganda and justification for your beliefs. You’ve essentially turned the people you want to help the most, into the most hated because you have brought them into this, constantly referring to them, constantly blaming others for them and their problems, always speaking on their behalf as though you were their ambassador, not once considering that it isn’t "The Americas vs. the developing world", but rather, we’re all in this together and to share our knowledge with everyone pushes the cutting edge of our industry GLOBALLY. Did you ever stop to consider that those countries might use this site to access knowledge they’d never be able to either A) afford, or B) learn due to their geographical location? And where do you think most of the top-end talent is located? So how does alienating one and offending another help to bridge this world and help share knowledge? What happens now? You’re the apple of your developing country’s eye. They all love you, because you’ve opened up the VIP forums, and offered VIP Status to those in specific parts of the world who you have PITTY over because you feel they are being witheld benefits because of their nationality or financial status. So now you have a bunch of fresh people, who are still trying to get into the industry, still trying to learn, altogether just starting out, and now there’s no one here to give guidance. Just juniors and hobbyists leading each other, or metaphorically, the blind leading the blind. And whats going to happen? Someone is going to say "well shit, I’m not finding my answer here, i’ll try searching elsewhere". And where do they end up? At a tutorial site! On other forums, and bloggers offering their advice! And guess what. The majority of those sites they’ll end up running into? On the other side of their world. And THOSE people could of been here, helping, offering advice, guiding beginners, but no, we’ve gone right back to being fragmented again as this was one of the largest VFX knowledge-base hubs on the net.
To think, this site crumbled like the berlin wall in HOURS just because you decided to "crowd-source" for a project, and then when people called YOU out on the moral implications of that, your own pride and fear of being labeled as an abuser of labor, you decided to create a storm around you defending your views, justifying them by using other’s work conditions and nationalities as well as playing the race card foolishly, as fodder to feed the flame war, which soon spread like a wild fire, ruining everything this site once was, all because of your pride and temper. You’re an absolute perfect definition of a hypocrite. You’re doing all of this asinine "liberating" on the forums to help support the abused artists of developing countries, ONLY TO PROVE that you would NEVER abuse vfx artists, and this all originally stemmed from you trying to abuse your power and get a project done for cheap, with cheap labor (crowd-sourcing).
With all of this said, I regret none of it. And you would be wise to leave this here, untouched, and unmodified, as a testament against your ridiculous management and personality for others to read and voice their own opinions about your actions, in hopes that one of us will eventually break through your wall of ignorance and you’ll come to your senses. IF you delete this, or modify this in anyway, I WILL scatter this post as a screenshot into the net for the entire world to see and judge. Your views have already been logged in their entirety UNEDITED here: http://vfxsoldier.wordpress.com/2010…cg-censorship/ and you’ll never be able to remove that. Same can happen to this post. Thousands already know whats happened here, people are tweeting http://search.twitter.com/search?q=vfxtalk, blogging (http://conradolson.com/why-i-removed…nk-to-vfx-talk), and linking back to this, and the vfxsoldier post, and I guarantee you, there is no recovering from this. I hope you’ve learned something from this experience.
