Author’s note: This article will deal with the social aspect within Eve Online and how certain elements of our real world become entangled and misused for in game purposes. In it I will share a personal story to both address a bigger point…as well as settle the score on regarding some dishonesty that I have patiently been allowing to continue.
I’ve been playing Eve Online for about a decade now. I utilized EN24 as a platform in order to provide critique over a number of different in-game matters for most of that time. Whether it was commentary on the various conflicts, or analysis of how groups like NCPL and Goonswarm operated, my goal was to question and bring things to light, imperfect as it may be. My goal was never to make myself “space important” and gather some kind of video game clout. The idea itself seems particularly sad honestly. Your most notable attribute is you are important in a video game? I never held such notions regardless of what my outspoken detractors may have claimed. And detractors did abound because in every corp, alliance, coalition, there are those who are “true believers.” There are those who find their video game identity and their tribe to be an innate attribute to their very self. I abhor group think in all its forms which is why I tend to keep away from larger groups. Despite some of the push back I receive, I remain ever irreverent of the “powers that be.”
These detractors vary in motivation and content of their attack. On one end you simply have people that may say I am “bad at the game” whatever that means in Eve anyway. On the other end you have the aforementioned “true believer group think” detractor that go further. Either from a sense of insecurity or self-righteousness, often times both, they lash out. It’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. I like to fight. Anyone who has disagreed with me knows I’ll debate anything interesting. However some of these detractors rather than attack openly, do so indirectly through gossip and rumor mongering. As an example I have had people make discord accounts and even 3rd party forum accounts with my name. And with them they’ve gone on to instigate all manner of nonsense. Taking advantage of today’s hyper sensitive social politics they’ve attempted to incriminate me in all kinds of ways. I hate to even really get into it because although I do enjoy discussing and debating real world politics, I dislike mixing Eve with it. But when certain individuals attempt to combine the two in order to discredit me impacting my gameplay, I’m left with little choice. I’m not part of a massive coalition with a gaggle of sycophants following me to get a sniff under my tail. So instead I’ll use the tools that I have at hand.
Enter Timoxa Zero of Deepwater Hooligans. He’s become something of a media darling making the rounds from INN to Frost Ees OP. His alliance has been fairly effectively hitting the backline of Legacy Coalition during WWB2 and profiting rather well from it. I began talking to Timoxa in April of 2020 a year ago. At the time I had a vague recollection of him from Eve slack from several years further back but nothing more. I was in Volta during this period having recently left Thera to engage the alliances living in Vale of the Silent. Timoxa’s group was active in the area as a small gang entity. I had been in talks with a few other groups with the idea of teaming up against Fraternity’s encroachment. I networked some of these groups together and hoped to have them all form a sort of mini-coalition. Timoxa told a number of these entities that I was “just trying to become space important.” As dismissive as this behind the back gossip was, he would still talk to me almost daily asking my opinion on matters and if I can get Volta to help him out in this and that fight. This will become important later. I didn’t particularly get phased by the remark but I’m keen on remembering this sort of thing.
Volta’s campaign in Vale was not easy due to time zone differences and a tendency of the Vale entities to pull help from their friends in Tribute. In the meantime Deepwater was growing rather well having absorbed a few other corps. Timoxa nudged me about possibly pulling some people from Volta to join Deepwater. He was implementing the same thing regarding Forsaken Asylum, another alliance they had been working with. He wanted more members for his alliance even at the expense of allies. Personally I had no problem with that but I wasn’t really going to poach people out of Volta as I left. I departed because of different reasons, none of which were due to any negative sentiments toward Volta itself. But it seemed like there was a door somewhat left open to join Deepwater. More out of curiosity than a particular interest I accepted Timoxa’s invite to their recruitment server on discord and sat there quietly. Eventually people there noticed I was present and became hostile. Upon inquiry of what motivated such hostility, I was told that I had been “racist.”
For the record I oppose any kind of policies that favors any race over another, or the differential treatment of people based on their race, or hostility or favoritism toward anyone due to race. Individuals should be treated as individuals. But it is a fad of accusing others of this in recent years and I had encountered it before. Why is it a fad? Well you don’t need to address anyone’s actual points if you can just label them with the scarlet R letter. Get your friends to do it, have them tell their friends, and ta-da, the individual can be dismissed. No one in the server was willing to explain what specifically I had said or done and I was soon locked out of the channel. I reached out to Timoxa who had invited me to the server and asked him what it was about. This was our exchange:
“Probably politics…idk I’m just guessing honestly…”
Sheepish, evasive and refused to actually address anything. When I pressed him a little more he seemed to know exactly what it was…although inaccurate. To put this in context I have been part of political discussions with Eve players regarding various topics including the ever media present issue of police killing of black people in the United States. People had made the point that they are shot and killed at higher rates. My statistical point was simply that this higher rate could be explained in part or in whole due to the higher rate of homicide committed among this demographic. I made no remark regarding any race being better or worse, or anything of the sort. It would be the same remark I would make explaining why more men are killed by police than women: because men commit more violent crimes than women do. If men kill more people than women, they have a higher chance to interact with police within a lethal context. Apparently pointing to these figures which are corroborated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Justice and various other official government sources, as a possibility to explain a societal phenomenon is heresy enough to label me as persona non grata.
It is with disgust I even bring real life politics into this but again this has been brought upon me by others as an accusation which impacts my gameplay and I’m not going to shy away from addressing it and correcting the record. If others have the right to rumor monger and lie about me, I have at least as much right to defend myself from this slander.
“But wait a second Seraph…weren’t you in…dun dun dun….TISHHUUUUU!?!?!?!?”
Yes I was in TISHU from late 2015 until early 2016. The group made silly jokes about “gassing Space Monkey Alliance” another Eve player alliance in the context of a video game war. They also made jokes about being the Inglorious Bastards, and “getting those monkey scalps.” This was in reference to a Quentin Tarantino film about a squad of Jewish soldiers in WW2 hunting down Nazis and scalping them. TISHU also made jokes about being a Serbian paramilitary referencing 1990s Yugoslav Civil Wars because they had funny Yugoslav turbo-folk songs you could make memes of. Simultaneously they made jokes about being Jihadists, North Koreans, and the characters from the Matrix… because they too had funny videos they could make jokes of. The point was always to get a reaction out of those stupid enough to take any of this seriously. If you’re trying to ascribe any serious intent or ideology behind any of this, quite simply…you are an idiot and ultimately the butt of the joke itself.
In this political climate the ideologies of the world have become pervasive throughout Eve culture itself. And while I do agree with the sentiment that we should not treat people differently because of their race either by showing favoritism or attacking them, I do have a concern regarding how these accusations are used to attack others. I have written previously about others who had political disagreements with me throwing the accusation of racism in one moment and the next calling me a “Romanian N-gger.”
Not sure how you can claim to be standing up against racism and using these kind of slurs. Could it be because it has nothing to do with actually fighting racism? These people don’t actually care. What it actually is about is utilizing the social climate of the time in order to impose control over others. “I don’t like what you had to say about space ships and/or politics thus I am going to get me and my friends to label you as the worst thing you can currently be. Then we don’t have to address anything you actually say, we can just label you and move on.”
Getting back to the story, someone that was formerly in my corp, Outer Path had set out to build their own corp and alliance. This individual had been with my corp months ago for a short while mostly doing solo flying before moving on. We discussed the possibility of my corp joining his alliance but he remarked that it might be an issue. Why?
That’s right. Months and months after my expulsion from Timoxa’s discord channel for reasons he could only guess as to why, we have him informing people in a space ship fitting channel in the >10 server, about how awful I am. He’s been peddling this rumor mongering since we started talking in April of 2020 if not earlier, and yet I have him chirping in my DMs frequently posting kill mails or telling me about what he’s been doing in game like I were his friend. Here’s the best part. You wouldn’t believe it. But this brave crusader of anti-racism has made some interesting remarks that don’t quite match up with his own standards.
To put this in context this was during the time I was supposedly trying to be space important regarding Vale and I nudged some people in Volta to try to help Timoxa out. Irrelevant as I was (still am of course) Timoxa asked me to help him out asking our FCs to show up. Hustlan was a Volta FC at the time and was supposed to help with some timer. And when little Timmy didn’t quite get the space ship help he wanted…well the evidence speaks for itself.
“He’s (Hustlan) a f-ing n-gger dude.” – Courageous anti-racist warden against hate Timoxa Zero
How are you going to spend a year if not more running around trying to incriminate me as a racist because you disagreed with some statistics telling people not to play a video game with me and then do something like this? Only way I can understand this is projection in the same manner as a bully picking on others calling them “gay” to cope with their own sexual fantasies. If Timoxa has me to constantly accuse and bad mouth as being racist, maybe he can push down his own uncomfortable thoughts and tendencies. “Maybe if I constantly go around telling others about how racist Seraph is, it’ll make up for my own racism.”
Question now is how will his own alliance members who were foaming at the mouth furious at my mere presence going to react? If they were consistent they would certainly excise Timoxa showing their disproval. How could they have someone like him leading their alliance when the very notion of me even being considered to join provoked such a reaction? Certainly this outburst is far worse than even the most bad faith interpretation of my statistical analysis on the matter. Or maybe they won’t even care and dismiss it. “Haha you wrote a whole article about this. Suddenly we don’t really care about racism despite being very upset about it the moment before this became published.” Ultimately that would prove exactly what I suspect. None of this is real. It was never about standing up to racism and everything to do with utilizing a social trend in order to attack others. It is nothing but group think. If they do nothing they’ll be just as hypocritical as Timoxa himself was been proven to be.
Perhaps he will suddenly realize the error of his ways and after a sob filled apology it’ll go away. Not because he’s suddenly just become aware that his actions were racist…but because he’s been exposed and proven a hypocrite. To be honest I don’t really care what words he or other people choose to use. Regarding that particular term, it’s not something I would use or really find all that useful. I don’t engage with it. I also don’t think it’s this end all be all awful sin. In this hyper sensitive “woke” climate I’m not going to dance on egg shells just because some mob of mouth breathers feel worthless and have to imagine their gossip is somehow a meaningful fight against some existential threat. The crime here is hypocrisy and hopefully Timoxa can grow up a little. If you have a personal problem with me, put your big boy pants on and talk to me directly. I’m not hard to find. Hopping from server to server to gossip about me and lying behind my back, especially in such a hypocritical manner just shows how low your character is.
For the community as a whole I think we can tolerate each other’s differences and beliefs without resorting to this kind of thought policing. To those who feel inclined to hunt down every misused term, wrong pronoun, or whatever else, get over yourselves. You aren’t on some meaningful important fight against oppression. You’re tilting at windmills. And it’s not going to make your life more meaningful. Sorting yourself out and your own personal issues will. But of course being the thought police is just easier than actually addressing your own problems which is why such a large segment of our population participates in this behavior. Lastly if you’re going to swing at me, make sure your own accounts are settled and in order. Otherwise interest can accrue and the debt will be substantial.
Afterword
To be clear this article wasn’t written as a tattle tale to out someone for saying a bad word. It was in reaction to about a year of this individual stalking servers I was in, people I was on contact with and trying to churn up drama rumor mongering and lying about my character while they themselves did not live up to their own standards. And after a year I finally did what anyone in my position has the right to do: defend themselves.
