I really hate when things go nuclear. It happens all too often these days…especially online. Neither party wants to give an inch, each believing he or she is in the right and the other is a total git and knee-biting jerk. People start taking sides, arguments get heated, “evidence” is collected, and folks generally begin gettin’ real pissy.
That was yesterday.
JAMES HAMS and I went toe-to-toe, mano-a-mano for much of the day over what amounted to three words in a recent blog he wrote. Granted, they weren’t just any three words, but the point is that the world wasn’t ending. And yet, you’d never know from all the urgent text messages and e-mails I had to read and write throughout the day. I’m sure James had a similar experience on his end.
Enter VANCE MAJOR. Vance is a friend of both James and myself, and he’s also one of Trek fandom’s calmest and coolest heads. Think of Vance as Switzerland…only with a beard. Not liking the escalation of tempers he was witnessing between his two friends, Vance stepped in, spoke to us both separately, and negotiated a “cease fire.”
In short, James will be removing those three words from his blog (along with half a sentence that will no longer make sense with the three words gone). I’ll be telling the folks on SMALL ACCESS (and here on FAN FILM FACTOR) to stand down, secure from general quarters, cancel battlestations…whatever you want to call it. We’ve both agreed not to mention the other—or their blog(s) or Facebook group(s)—on our own blogs in any negative way on a go-forward basis.
We’re both in agreement on this, and there’s no hard feelings. There were definitely hard feelings yesterday, but it’s nice to know that things can, with a little give and take, be worked out without going to DefCon 1.
I’d like to thank James for being part of the solution…and also Vance for making that solution possible in the first place. I much prefer writing a short blog entry like this one over writing a long entry like yesterday’s!
