IcyCalm is making a game..

[charlie chong]

hey icy i thought eugenics was meant to breed out these undesirable traits like criminality and mental illness
oh yeah i forgot that only applies to poor people

[Skykid]

this thread is filled with so much hate, and it warms my heart

I'm full of joy currently!

I've been browsing Insomnia stuffs this evening with my Nescafe and Oreos. I was trying to figure out why all the open threads are a semi-blog rant where the only person who posts is icy. I thought maybe the other commenters were hidden until one popped up, so it's actually that he just goes nuts about stuff - as he has been with regard to these threads - in a kind of splurge of the psyche. It's weird and intriguing!

The thing that made me smile most of all is the member announcement thread. Ten people on the first page are banned lol! I didn't bother looking at pg.2 but I'm sure it's the start of a pattern. For your bemusement:

http://culture.vg/forum/topic?f=13&t=2289

[KAI]

[Casey120]

this thread is filled with so much hate, and it warms my heart

Not really hate .
I'm pretty sure we amuse him as much as he amuses us .

Must be fun being a paying member in his little palace called insomnia with him acting as the unpredictable Roman princeps .
Thread carefully my little ones .

[e_tank]

Is he as much of a lunatic in reality?

No, but this is before a certain event in his life. This comes to mind.

You know, he might be bipolar.

my money is on psychopathy/antisocial personality disorder, afaict he's pretty much a textbook case. these people are typically pretty good at blending in and hiding their mental illness from others, when they want to at least, but hang around one long enough and you'll eventually see their true colors.

[austere]

Yeah so my reply, to his reply, which debates (pretty well if you bother reading it) a point that you couldn't infer from what I wrote is quite straightforward. Here's the kernel of what I'm saying icy, summarised so that there's no way to dice it up and stir fry it. I'll number each point because I'm a mathematical nerd-type lol:

1. Your current modus operandi could very well be optimal for your intended tasks (writing your books, developing your theories). I don't dispute that.
2. If you want to make a game, an ambitious game, and have people work for you, the mode you're running with is not ideal and will most certainly lead to failure. Consider the act of banning someone because he made a mistake/didn't quite follow your instructions, rather than coaching him/managing him. It will cause routing and defections. Unlike posting on a forum, reading, forging an e-pal relationship with you, developing a game is a serious investment in time and you'll get mainly dimwits/inexperienced/extremely zealous people helping you out if you start firing away. There's not many zealous and useful (productive and experienced) people in this case. You need to be more fault tolerant, like you claimed you would be after putting up your pay wall. But you just couldn't for reasons I covered before.
3. If (1) isn't something that you seriously can sacrifice for the sake of (2), you should not be wasting your time (and other's time) which could otherwise be spent on (1) and leave (2) as a design document without developing it.

QED

I'm most certainly correct and time will prove that should you chose to proceed. I'm writing this for your own benefit and I know you'll read it on here, its not about "hanging out at shnupzfarm to the exclusion of icy". I already preempted that argument with my opening.

I do think though that developing a game would put everything you've written to the test and possibly grant you even more insight than you have now. So this is why I think (2) is worthwhile, which is why I wish you'd stop being such an asshole. But you won't because you greeks can be really really stubborn. I guess its a trait you inherited from us, the ancients who gave birth to Europe, but you've turned it into an art. This topic (genetics) that you touched on isn't appropriate for this thread nor communicating over two ban barriers lol.

How much money are you willing to bet on that? He robbed people of thousands of dollars, skipped the country, and now is singing his own praises about how he's the smartest fucking thinker ever whilst acting like a fuckwit. If Icy ever goes to see a psychologist, I guarantee you he's coming away diagnosed with something, if not a whole lot of things.

Haha, tough call on the betting odds, if he was sane he might just act out crazy to make a point to the psychologist or whatever. He's unpredictable. Remember though that was in 2001 and by 2005-2006 or so people who met him in real life, rather than online, claim he was an ok guy. He is fairly sociable outside this internet gaming thing according to his own claims. But the more he acts in this role the more it is going to seep into his very being until he will start wiping the floor with waitresses the moment they make a single mistake on his table. Which would be ok if he was a warlord, or whatever, but he doesn't have the resources to act out that role. At least not at the moment.

You know, he might be bipolar.

Don't discount it as an act to shake anyone he's debating with up. He just wants to win on the point, not on mannerisms. The more he gets people riled up, the less they can think. Doesn't work on me.

[dcharlie]

.

[Mischief Maker]

I dunno, after reading this thread and seeing icy examined from every possible angle, I'm beginning to feel sorry for him. He's living in a mental hell of his own creation and desperately wants to escape, but may never actually escape because the thing he needs to jettison is a source of cold comfort.

Basic psychology: when someone loses their sense of control over their world, they go into mental self-defense mode. Their empathy goes down, their worldview becomes more black and white, and their antagonists are pure evil. Unfortunately, the longer someone spends in this state, the worse it can get because they start alienating friends, which in turn makes them feel even less in control, which makes them even more self-absorbed, until it becomes a self-feeding spiral. However, there is also the basic desire to break that cycle by exerting some act that makes you feel in control so you can get out of that miserable mental state ASAP.

Icyucalm sunk the best years of his life into pursuing an ambitious dream of becoming some sort of aerospace engineer only for that dream to curdle, and his ego cannot accept the failure. It's a common story: kid who was top of his class in high school becomes mid-range in college, becomes low-rank in grad school, not because of any change in his own abilities, but simply because the selection window gets narrower and narrower. Icy found his status slipping and slipping even though he was putting forth the same effort, because the board was shifting under his feet. He was falling into the downward mental spiral, alienating friends and roommates, and needed to do something to help himself regain a sense of control

Unfortunately Icy made a terrible decision. Computer-literate people always can get a hit of superiority by laughing at people struggling with "the google," and Icy decided to turbocharge that sense of superiority by scamming money out of the computer-illiterate. I guarantee he rationalized that these people didn't deserve their money because it was so OBVIOUS the payment methods he demanded were scams. Unfortunately for him, it wasn't OBVIOUS that his victims included a sheriff's wife.

Now he's on the run from the law, god knows what his family's response has been, and he's been grasping at straws ever since to feel in control of his life. Shmups, philosophy, blogging, game development, etc, all have failed to fill the void because there's always someone better than him at these tasks. You may think his selective attention and circular arguments are crazy because they're rationally inconsistent, but they all serve a consistent emotional goal.

Sadly for him, he may never escape from this mental hell because he derives so much comfort from the very concept that oppresses him. Icycalm is a smart guy, smarter than a lot of people, and he can always comfort himself by finding reasons to define people as below him on the status chain. But that same reasoning also forces him to be aware of the people above him on the status chain.

He'll never truly feel in control until he realizes that the one-dimensional status chain is an imaginary concept he can cast aside at will. Even if he were to find some task at which he was able to find an excuse to rank all 7 billion people on Earth below himself, it still wouldn't solve the problem.

It's telling that Icy defines "immersion" as the most important part of a videogame. "Immersion" is another word for "Escapism."

[neorocker]

Basic psychology: when someone loses their sense of control over their world, they go into mental self-defense mode. Their empathy goes down, their worldview becomes more black and white, and their antagonists are pure evil. Unfortunately, the longer someone spends in this state, the worse it can get because they start alienating friends, which in turn makes them feel even less in control, which makes them even more self-absorbed, until it becomes a self-feeding spiral.

I've seen this happen to people first hand and how it affects the people around them and breaks social groups into pieces and it's awful. This entire post is dangerously on-point and to be perfectly honest, despite having read so much about this guy, I can't imagine it being healthy for anybody to feed into it.

[drauch]

If anyone feels sorry for such a drudge on society we might have some more psychological evaluations on our hands.

[Snake]

He's the gift that keeps on giving.

The gamengai thread is a must-read for any Insomnia fan:

http://www.gamengai.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3155

It's probably the last time you will get to see icycalm perform on an open forum. And seeing as it's the last, I might as well share the secret of my success with you.

The secret of becoming as awesome as I am in forum-sparring battles, is to be a genius.

It's amazing someone can swan into a forum flailing insults like a headless rooster, get absolutely bloodied during the course of three pages by higher wit, and still think he did a great job.

I like how he mocked GP for not having time to play games and talking about sex and partying, right before he mocked Shou for being good at fighting games, which icy said doesn't have time to master because he's too busy having sex and partying.

[Mischief Maker]

If anyone feels sorry for such a drudge on society we might have some more psychological evaluations on our hands.

Understanding and Agreeing are not the same thing, dude.

I'll never give my Credit Card info to icy, but that doesn't mean I can't extract a valuable cautionary tale from his story. There but for the grace of god...

[DMC]

Yes, although Mischief Maker speculates a lot it may not be so far off.

[drauch]

If anyone feels sorry for such a drudge on society we might have some more psychological evaluations on our hands.

Understanding and Agreeing are not the same thing, dude.

I'll never give my Credit Card info to icy, but that doesn't mean I can't extract a valuable cautionary tale from his story. There but for the grace of god...

Thanks for clarifying, doc.

[Mischief Maker]

Thanks for clarifying, doc.

Sorry! In cyberspace, no-one can hear your sarcasm.

[drauch]

Still love ya, buddy

[Skykid]

Mr Mischief, some astute observations there.

Whatever his condition, I think we can agree it's reasonably serious. After looking at the pattern of his posting, there are so many contradictions it seems as though he doesn't have a grip on his temperament or direction of his anger half the time.

I CTRL+F'd 'Banned' for a few more pages of that welcome thread, and basically everyone gets the boot. Are these paying customers?

Some even have footnotes:

"User was banned for not knowing that the acronym for "personal computer" should be written with capitals. --icy"

What a way to waste forty dollars.

[drauch]

"User was banned for spelling fagot incorrectly. There is only one G, fagot. --icy"

[The Coop]

Wait wait wait...

You have to PAY to post on the forum Icycalm runs?

[Skykid]

Wait wait wait...

You have to PAY to post on the forum Icycalm runs?

That's not the strange part. The strange part is that some people do.

EDIT: Okay I don't care if he's mentally ill, the guy's an epic twat:

Sounds like a good kid. Too bad I had to ban him because a good one-third of his paragraphs did not end with a period, which meant I had to add them, thus wasting a couple of minutes of my day.

Just want to let you know that whoever mentions Civ II as a favorite is a poser who most probably hasn't even played any of the games. (See here.)

No need to reply. Just letting you know that you've been spotted as a poser and that posing in this forum is strictly forbidden. Next time you are gone.

The guy replies about why he likes Civ II in a totally reasonable way, and:

[User banned 1) for replying even though I told him not to, 2) for dumpquoting, and 3) for being a 21-year-old who just miraculously happened to have played the ancient Civ II, became a huge fan of it, but somehow managed to avoid touching all its sequels which actually came out while he was playing the ancient etc. etc. etc., the posers simply never give up their tiresome charade. --icy]

[Banned for arbitrarily capitalizing random nouns. Also, lol at "difficult but forgiving" comment. --icy]

BUT I SAVEZ THE BEST FOR LAST:

[Banned for not knowing what a paragraph is and for the "game-play" nonsense. -icy]

On discovering this most joyous of hypocrisies, my face looks like:

Back OT: Everyone is banned. Insomnia must have about three active members, all on staff. He's banning people for their posts in the introduction thread ffs, it's ludicrous. Are these guys getting refunds? I'd be actively on for a Paypal chargeback the instant I realised I'd been duped out of $40.

[Mischief Maker]

Wait wait wait...

You have to PAY to post on the forum Icycalm runs?

That's not the strange part. The strange part is that some people do.

Like P.T. Barnum said, "There's an übermensch born every minute!"

[Specineff]

^^^Suddenly, I don't feel so bad about Icy probably having a mental condition...

[drauch]

But hey! If you get banned, you can always get back in:

So here's how to get a second chance at being part of our little circle, if you messed up your first chance: buy me 4 games from my Amazon wish list:

http://amzn.com/w/1TDT1HBILL6UI

It doesn't matter which part of the world you're from, since my address is in the US. All you need is a valid credit card, and you are good to go. Once you have placed the order and received Amazon's confirmation email, let me know about it by emailing me at icycalm@culture.vg, and once I've received the games I'll reactivate your account, as long as your subscription is still valid. If it has expired, you'll need to pay for that too.

And hopefully, after paying close to $200 to get your account back, you'll value it enough this time round to pay attention to the posting guidelines for being part of our little group here.

[KAI]

Oh god, I'm laughing so hard.

[GaijinPunch]

Don't discount it as an act to shake anyone he's debating with up. He just wants to win on the point, not on mannerisms. The more he gets people riled up, the less they can think. Doesn't work on me.

This. Totally. See the Bane video clip.

[Ceph]

This being an act does not mean he does not have mental problems; you are defined by your actions and if you play a role long enough, you become that role.
None of his past actions bore any semblance of astute intellect or acumen; he is obviously suffering from an inferiority complex caused by his earlier (academic) failures, which he is trying to compensate for with this persona he created.
Regarding his antisocial personality disorder and deteriorating mental health, would anyone be seriously surprised if one day he published a 1,000 page "manifesto" and went on a killing spree?

[Skykid]

Regarding his antisocial personality disorder and deteriorating mental health, would anyone be seriously surprised if one day he published a 1,000 page "manifesto" and went on a killing spree?

Worryingly, no.

But hey! If you get banned, you can always get back in:

Is that fucking serious?!

Did you make it up? Link plz. Need to see it with my own eyes.

[NTSC-J]

Someone actually took him up on it, only to be further berated.

[Ruldra]

How much of an idiot do you need to be to do that!? Jesus Christ!

I'm seriously disgusted right now.

[Ceph]

Food for thought: How do we know he's not writing all (or at least most) of these posts himself?