I am a huge atheist and a massive fan of the late Christopher Hitchens and I passionately loathe Sam Harris. Back in my 12-year-old Starcraft days I used to go out of my way to "debate" (if you can call it that) Christians and now I don't do that because I think it's missing the point of being an atheist, which is that there are more interesting things to talk about and religion shouldn't be divisive and that irony is what makes us better than religion (and Sam Harris has neither wit nor irony). This is vaguely analogous to the present situation in that anyone who wants to make a living from Magic has to pretend WotC is infallible, not necessarily in the sense of "Vamps are great in Cube" but at least in the sense that "Randy is trying, the good intentions are enough" and never disbelieving one's own good intentions is a great way to go completely insane, which is why I by contrast am a prick on purpose. At any rate, if any one thing (like WotC intentions) is sacred, then by extension everyone that believes in it is, which is why we get articles that never say anything negative ever even while the Pro lifestyle is sharing a double bed with your testing partner in a Motel 6 outside Knoxville and churning out propaganda and potboilers for a hundred bucks a week or what have you. All of this is a natural fit for nerd social biases (as mentioned above), in particular corporate culture is felicitous for nerds because that way you can do stuff passive-aggressively, pretend to have general interests in mind, and immediately dismiss anyone who tries to spark an active and direct conflict, as I do, as damaging to the polity, hard to work with, unreasonable, "unprofessional." Unprofessional? Yes I am! Yet it is incredibly obvious the milquetoast bland positivity, which is way, way more self-serving and solipsistic than I can ever be, and which negatively affects the culture more than I can ever affect it as myself, is what lets WotC get away with treating its pros like sharecroppers or NCAA athletes. Contrast the independent and empathetic mindset that playing card games ought to foster with the groupthink of Magic pros -- everyone is included, it is inclusive, as long as you don't do [certain set of bad things].
In short, it is the very notion of "professionalism" that ensures there are no real Magic pros.
The problem is you can't really get a big platform for airing your views unless you're "professional" about it, big platform being SCG or CFB or to a lesser extent TCG. Wadds can popularize certain Cube techniques in CFB articles, but you cannot change the culture of MTG with articles, or anything, really. MTG culture is sacrosanct, from the top down; Wizards, the depressing and depressed people who work there, dictates it. It's not a topic CFB or SCG will countenance, I've been told explicitly you can't write for SCG if you've ever criticized another SCG writer, I've been told by Frank Lepore that "the point [of the articles] is to sell cards," and when I balked he seemed genuinely shocked I would initiate a conflict, as if being "given a chance" and $25 per article was an act of noblesse oblige. A chance to do what, become like him? No thanks. People used to ask me why I stopped writing and the answer is that I got fired, but at that point I was coming off antidepressants and beginning to enjoy myself and judge things again, it was inevitable, as anyone who knows me now knows -- people say "don't you want to make positive content for the community?" but to me, having written for a major site, such a phrase is meaningless, no I don't want to do that, I want to have people over and draft three Birthing Pods and smoke a joint and have a bottle of wine and gossip. Indeed, Magic pros mainly get paid in Internet adulation, though nothing could be more isolating than that way of life. There must be thirty people on the whole planet Gerry feels he can talk to as equals. What a lonely existence.
So the most we can do here, really, is have sweet Cube articles, which is more interesting than going over the noxious and loserly culture of Magic over and over again. Again Wadds can change Cube for the better, which ought to be our focus. My main motivation in continuing to play paper Magic is the fact that I enjoy my friends, and I made them by being myself -- there is a place for irony and aggression and humor and free exchange in Magic, but it is as distant as can be from the commercialist aspect. Thus RiptideLab is the closest thing on the Internet we have to my real-life community. If the objective is to find more people like us for here, and I think that's the most worthwhile objective, then direct conflict with the commercialist set may be a good way to do that, though I wonder the extent to which this is just self-justification.
(FWIW I feel guilty about much of my past misogyny and am a huge believer in gender equality in the abstract and feminism, in retrospect this is a rather obvious corollary of my antitheism but whatever, people are more interesting than ideologies and labels unless they try to make themselves less so, which I think most every MTG pro is guilty of. I am often wrong and I am often a prick and I am happy to admit those things are true.)
Because I've seen you there!
