I do not like to extend this yet again, but I do feel the need to spell out some background from my side.
We had the discussion about the necromancer two weeks ago, it was argued at length and ultimately he wasn't approached. So yesterday I came into the thread and read pages of discussion, yet nobody posting any plans. People even started to forlornly ask around for someone to do it.
This did put me into a pretty crabby mood right from the start. First, we were yet again doing a meeting without a plan. Something that had caused quite a lot of salt last turn, as people kept complaining about their preferred actions not getting screen time and some yelling at me for tacking up so much space with politics.
Second, it was about something I am quite opposed to. Third, I was completely unaware that this did at any point get entered into a vote. I don't know if I simply missed it or if it was edited in after the last time I checked the plans.
Either way, after getting the worst of the salt out of my system by some snark, I decided to try and salvage this by making a no-deal vote. Then,
@Goldfish told me I couldn't vote that way. This stung. Quite a bit. Especially coming from someone that I trust implicitly. From anybody else, I would probably would have ignored that post entirely, but from him, it felt like a betrayal.
My thoughts at that point could be summed up as: "What the hell are you trying to pull here?"
With the vote going for a while and ne being very late to it, I felt I had no choice but to go on the offensive if I wanted a chance to still affect it. So I've cut out the usual niceties and opened with a full broadside, catching
@egoo with the edge of it.
From there on, it went downhill fast, as Goldfish didn't budge from his stance and didn't seem to get my issue at all. To me, that looked as if there was actual, malicious intent behind it, so onwards went the offense.
As I've said then, as I've said later and as I want to say again: My issue was not the vote itself, but the perceived attempt to silence a dissenting opinion by meta reasoning.
I did take some posts way harsher then they were probably meant, compounded by the hurry to get a word in edgewise and the resulting imperfect information on my side.
@Goldfish,
@egoo, for what it's worth, I'm deeply sorry about how things went and it went downhill so fast not because I've had a bad opinion of you, but because the great trust I had in you was worsening the perceived breach.
I did what I did not to shut down a vote I didn't like, but because I felt I was acting in the best interests of the thread as a whole. To fight collusion and defend the right of every voice to be heard.
As for the specific accusation of
@das_slash, I never wanted these retcons. I even begged DP privately to not do it. At least Relath was thus spared from a dropped anvil, though Abery seems to have been hit by it.
As for the Dryad vote, I did stick to my previously reached compromise with
@Goldfish and
@TotallyNotEvil to support them. I had my doubts and was tempted not to do so, due to my perception of the previous night, I will admit that freely. But I kept my word specifically to not burn any more bridges by repaying betrayal with betrayal. I want to get on well with everyone here. We are not here to be enemies.
I would have preferred the CotF option, but I didn't celebrate when it won at first, simply because I felt sorry for TNE to loose this without having had a chance to say his piece. Doubly so because the had been hardly any discussion about the options up to that point and the vote was over pretty briefly.
I was thus quite happy that it was re-opened and a proper discussion began, even though it was rather vitriolic from the beginning. I also agree with
@das_slash that it is unfortunate that such a divisive matter got decided with such a small difference, but the vote was close the whole time, so it was unavoidable.
I was even thinking about intentionally tying the vote to provoke a stronger ship majority forming, but decided against it. I was worried that I might accidentally tip the scales in the other direction that way and didn't want to cost TNE this vote by flip-flopping for strategic reasons.
So yeah. That's my side of the past days. This got a whole lot more personal then I'm comfortable with, but specifically the people caught in my crosshairs deserve to know.
Beside the specific apologies, I want to apologise in general for having caused this much damage by trying to avert a small amount in a hamfisted way.
