Adric Antfarm Logs Off

I felt a disturbance in the magnetic forces of the Metaverse today and then I learned what it was -- the resident curmudgeon blogger Adric Antfarm had died in real life. Apparently his name was Dave, and this wasn't one of those fake deaths we see all the time in SL-- in Adric's case, a RL person with an email, a local memorial being organized and so on appeared and then an SL friend made the announcement. Evidently he died of a stroke - I'm glad he didn't suffer. Adric shouldn't have to suffer after suffering enough in wars, and now he won't have to suffer anymore.

It's a great loss for our blogosphere, because Adric was really the person I was always asking for, for a long time, to satirize SL with a lighter touch than compulsive bloggers like Crap Mariner, who has become vindictive and destructive, and certainly Pixeleen and the script kiddies at the Herald, which long ago went over the edge with malicious griefer and hacker cheerleading and endless banality of evil.

Adric didn't do that. He poked fun at everyone, including me, but I didn't mind it because it wasn't crazy-obsessive or persistent. It was a poke now and then, and I wouldn't think it was deserved, but I didn't bother me because Adric's center of gravity was about telling his own wacky narrative of SL, with all its characters and cats and funky scenes, like the one in this picture -- and you knew ultimately it wasn't "personal".

He would tell his wild narrative with the guns and the cars and the booze, keeping it short so it stayed funny, but then he would run a post with a knock on Hamlet, whom he called "Benedict Au" for his betrayal of SL running off to Blue mars, or he'd run a hilariously funny picture of his creepy Blue Mars avatar leering at you from above.

Adric took SL very easy, and made it work for him, making fun of everything the Lindens did, but not becoming an obsessive hysteric about it. He had a trenchant line for just about every pompous ass who came on the scene. If he mocked me over my own frequent condemnation of griefers and assorted FIC, it wasn't to make common cause with them, but merely to engage in his art. That is the distinctive and crucial difference between Adric and so many other bloggers.

Occasionally I'd talk to him in world, either following some wacky adventure of his, or laughing at pictures of me he sent to tweak me, or calling for help in determining if a kid calling himself an army vet was fake or not -- Adric had a very sharp eye. Then the hilarious convo would go like this:

"I can't come now. My date would shit and over 40 girls are hard to find."

"Well, bring him too," says I. "Er, her."

"Freudian slip," he says.

"Adric is not gay yet," he adds.

I will never forgot how he wrote about the BAN PROK pictures and said that in one of the photos at 9:28 pm when the Lindens greet the party bus, the BAN PROK isn't showing. What a sleuth!

His blog was always refreshing to read because the posts were short, the pictures good, and it was not laden with drama or vindictiveness like so many other posts on the planet.worldofsl.com

The role of satirist of SL -- which Adric played so much better than any of us, and really better than Second Lie or the few others -- is now sorely missed. The problem with SL is that it is so provincial, it so lacking in urbanity, that it doesn't produce many satirists. It takes itself so seriously, that satire has trouble getting started -- the slightest poke, and the prim divas and Edloe cat ladies dissolve into tears and rage and can't see the humorous side.

Adric on Emerald was delightful, precisely because he got *distance* on the characters in the story, and you began to see them as a spectacle on TV.

And here was vintage Adric on Hamlet and blogging in general:

Most of us piss-ant Second Life bloggers want the power of Hamlet Au.  Bitch can post about this thing he found under his fingernail that sort of looks like a biblical figure and in two minutes it would be on 200 twitter pages, 500 blogs, and all around the world in 30 minutes.  I could post that I was being stabbed to death, ask you to send help, and hope I had enough blood for the six and one half hour wait it takes Google to send someone here on a pedo keyword mis-search who was thank God is the good sort of child bugger who helps stabbing victims.   Power?  Yes, until he abused it by continuing to post his fingernail series or dared to do the little things we piss-ant bloggers take for granted.  Like telling you to go fuck yourself. You piece of shit.  I can do that because no one is reading this and the freedom of no power allows me.  He can't even make up a bloody crisis coverage graphic.

What's very strange for me to think is that right that night when Adric was dying in RL, I was reading his blog and his back pages for more than an hour, because I hadn't caught up in a while and had a lot of entries to read.

He was always making these great little stories, like graphic novels almost, that were hilariously wacky. They were an interesting combination of SL touchstones like Emerald or Ahern or newbs, and various gonzo journalism sort of memes of RL. I have no idea what Adric's real life is, or the people in it, but I hope they can save his blog online, perhaps they could put it into a book?

It does raise the issue once again for all bloggers -- how to preserve the endless posts, some better than others? Everybody can use an editor, how will it get done?

Adric once wrote on Crap's blog, in response to some raving and ranting about Crap about me (it really is psychic damage of some sort):

Your have something in your writing so very real that Prok or anyone else can't even touch - much less take away.

While a falsehood about Crap, it could have -- and should have been said about Adric himself -- and I never wanted to take a thing away from him because whatever damages he suffered in RL or SL, his heart was intact.

Adric would likely scold me right now for not being able to write an obituary about him without trashing Crap. Such is SL. He would have a dry and witty line for this. I don't.

*Waves as Adric teleports away..."

Comments

[Skylar Smythe]

Shaking my head.

Only you would sink so low as to taint a memorial post for Adric and use it as an opportunity to take pot shots at Crap who was far closer to Adric as a friend and who (wait for it) just might be suffering a tad bit more than you at the loss of his friend.

You are an insurmountable cow that really has no sense of tact or even humanity even in the instance of the loss of a friend.

I find myself wondering how someone so intelligent and articulate can be so devoid of common care and consideration when it comes to the feelings of others.

If this is your schtick... it sucks. There is no shortage of heartless cows in the world.

If this is not a schtick... I'm truly sorry for your RL family and friends.

You are an incredible jackass. Shocking.

Skylar

[Prokofy Neva]

Um, I'm glad you have such a refined sense of ethics and morality and taste that you can feel revulsion over me comparing Adric and Crap in an article on his RL death.

Perhaps you can muster some of that same sense of aesthetics to comment on how your dear friend Crap can write about his friend's death in the same post as his musings on his injured cat and his own fat ass on the scales. Yuh, I guess he was really broken up over the loss of his friend and stopped thinking of himself for a minute *cough*.
http://firstlife.isfullofcrap.com/2010/09/httpwwwadricus201009sad-on-the.html

I don't conform to the way most people think you should do things. If you need saccharine sentiments go on the other blogs.

I'm not a cow, I'm someone who makes apt and needed comparisons where they needed to be made. What better way to celebrate the fine aspects of the way Adric satirized and impaled the subjects of his blog postings by explaining forthrightly that he did this without becoming a crazed, malicious loon like Crap. It needs to be done.

Friend? Is this vain and self-referential asshole *really* a friend to anyone? I once thought he was, boy was I wrong.

Care and consideration? I'm sure Adric would understand.

I don't do shticks. Go speak to your friend Crap for shticks.

I write as I please, by the light of my conscience. I say what needs to be said. I'm not here to sustain your illusions.

Crap has been obsessively writing about me for weeks on end in the most outrageous and malicious ways. Let's remember why. I said in a tweet that he was getting Uncanny Valley the way his avatar was becoming more human and less robot. It was a joke, an apt one, and not intended as mean, and no one else but this crazed fucktard could see it that way, simply because of some brokenness of his own psyche. Since that time, he's been mounting the most crazy attacks on me, with total asshole abandon. I don't let stuff like that go by, I push back every way possible.

BTW Headburro, Adric's cousin, got it wrong. He said Adric "pissed me off"
http://headburroantfarm.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/goodbye-cousin-adric/

He didn't piss me off.I just didn't really engage with him. It obviously suited him to take potshots at me as a public target easily available to be skewered, but I understood, as I said, that he was doing this for the sake of his own art and not out of malice. His referencing me exaggeratedly as if I were crazy were understood, but it did mean that we weren't going to be friends if he was making me morally equivalent to the others. That's ok, I didn't begrudge him his fun at all. I'm not one of those people rushing now to pretend we were friends. I am just expressing genuine appreciation for the role he played in the SL blogosphere and what a gap is left now that he is gone.

[brinda allen]

OK Now...perhaps this isn't the time for the above, just sayin'.

As a personal issue I appreciated Adrics ability to play the gruff, grumpy curmugeon that at heart he didn't seem to be.
I will miss him.

[ichabod Antfarm]

I met Adric once in Moraine. Without pausing, he talked of our family history and how he and I were distantly related. It was one of those great SL moments of serendipity that only someone as creatively whacked as Adric could conjure for you. Never saw or spoke with him again but he made a bond in that moment that I will always fondly remember. Sad day.

[Viajero Pugilist]

"His blog was always refreshing to read because the posts were short, the pictures good, and it was not laden with drama or vindictiveness".

Again Prok inadvertently describes what her's is most definitely not.

Even her reply to the so-obvious criticism (above) of her hijacking the death of another human being for her own boring, ugly ends flies right by her, and her own reply to that criticism is more viscous small-mindedness (albeit with fancy words).

"I write as I please, by the light of my conscience. I say what needs to be said." That's Prok boilerplate for "At the end of the day, I'm an unapologetically egotistical, self-important and cluelessly self-referential asshole, so fuck you and anyone who doesn't share my thousand strange bitter antagonisms and hatreds."

But...still she spurts on, and on, and on.

[Prokofy Neva]

My posts aren't short, I think out loud and publish an interior transcript.

My pictures are crappy, I don't have a good video card or skills.

My posts are not drama-laden but on philosophical and political matters.

My posts are not vindictive but merely sharp criticism of public figures, and pushbacks to people who have attacked me for my views. I sometimes wonder if I should try to make up something I'd actually be vindictive on,so that people could tell the difference.

Strange bitter antagonisms? No, just normal reasonable and common sense criticism of stuff that is intolerable. Again, SL is filled with geeks, sectarians, cultists, and by contrast I seem like a crank and a loon. That doesn't bother me as the record stands.

The rest of the normal people will be along any day now : )

[Wol Euler]

It would have been nice if you had been able to keep your hostility under control for once; but perhaps I'm just old-fashioned. This was on the whole a fair and decently balanced obit. We should all be so lucky.

[Prokofy Neva]

Um,there's no hostility; the story of Adric, as I recollect it and from my perspective, especially with certain quotations, cannot be told without also explaining how Crap Mariner has been such an unholy dick. I'm happy to provide that public service. Adric would understand.

[cube inada]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20017638-71.html?tag=cnetRiver

sorry i missed the show... but ill try to google together enough clips to watch it...

here comes Ms Robinsons...:) a strangely different dynamic than in 1967... but the "what do we do now" look from the movies end scene will be soon found in the halls of facebooks campus....

IF wer'e Lucky;)

but I thought you like this bloggers post, saying the obvious, since i guess hes old enough to remember..oh... Yahoo...lol

[Amalia Broome]

This was a well written piece. Adric would have liked it. And probably been able to get a couple of blog entries out of the replies. He was never vicious or hateful in his skewering of others...he was honest and not afraid to speak his mind.

[phoenix town car]

Adric is a very good person. He was my mate back in middle school. I really miss him too.