Ed's Top 360 Users of 2009

Ed made a huge ass user list like everyone else, and the mere mention of Ulti equals an auto-deletion of this page!

Introduction
Lifted from Icehawk, who took Smurf's idea and made an art out of it.

Here's the 360 users I felt made enough of an impact on me personally throughout 2009 to write a few sentences (or, in some cases, paragraphs) about. Like Icehawk, this is solely being judged off 2009. I already did my top 60 favorite users earlier this year; this is a different list because, as the Steiner-appointed KING OF BOARD 8, I am the arbiter of objective user quality. Basically, if I could decide User of the Year, here's how I'd like it to go down.

This is pretty much a glorified "talks about the users" topic, in as much depth and scathing criticism as I can muster. Should be fun!

'''360. [MichaelWClark]
Write-up currently missing

'''359. Ulti

If Board 8 is Paradise Lost, Ulti is Satan: the fallen angel, exiled from the graces of the Kingdom of Heaven, left to stew in his own juices and plot bitter revenge against those who have wronged him. Unlike Milton's Satan, Ulti doesn't get any good lines or sweeping monologues. Instead he just gets “snappy” one-liners and paragraphs lashing out at people's lack of a life.

No proper writeup on Ulti can truly exist without recounting the dude's history. Ulti has been here since the beginning of the Board, part of the avid Stats crew back in the days when the term “Stats crew” was an honor and a prestige and not something Smurf used as a pejorative insult. Go back and read some of Ulti's Analysis Crew writeups, his stats posts, his Post-Contest Analyses. They're really damn good. His argument for Halo vs. Starcraft is among the most compelling arguments I've ever seen on the board.

Then he won the 2004 contest. I don't think Ulti necessarily “changed” in the sense that his personality became fundamentally differed; instead, I think that different aspects of Ulti began to show. His low self-esteem and perpetual need for validation, for instance, manifested itself in the personas of numerous alts he created to votestuff his own contests and rating topics, perpetuating a web of lies around which he was the center. His need to feel superior showed itself when he would get into arguments, callously dismissing people who disagreed with him and claiming to have “inside information” and mod contacts and such. He was still an excellent writer and analyzer, but now his PCAs were filled with little acerbic asides about, say, how much the Mega Man series sucked, or how bad a character Frog was. Little things that had nothing to do with the topic at hand.

By the time 2007 rolled around, Ulti had devolved from the most popular user on the board to a mere shadow of his former self, still harping over past glories. He would post obviously fabricated sex stories. He wouldn't shut up about how Shadow of the Colossus was the worst game of all time. And when he called a contest prediction correctly, it led to days of gloating. And that's not even counting the feuds over who gets to make the stats topics, possibly the dumbest, most trivial thing I've ever seen people fight over on Board 8.

2009 was the year I lost it with Ulti. After seeing yet another topic of his degrading women, I put him on the ol' ignore list and I've never looked back since. I know he's been asking why I dislike him, and I chose to ignore him rather than give him the satisfaction of validating his existence, which is what I do with people who attention-whore. Which led him to take a potshot at my depression (and naked body) in one topic. Go figure.

The thing about Ulti that I've always understood is that he's had a difficult life. I think he was a victim of parental abuse, or at the very least neglect. Obviously there's been physical problems between he and his wife, which I would never mock. And while I would never judge somebody by the problems they've had to face, I would never let said problems excuse their behavior either. Ulti has some severe psychological issues that he really needs to work through, and I am more sympathetic to them than most on the board probably are. At the same time, his behavior and attitude are utterly appalling regardless of their origin.

To Ulti's credit, he's never come out and said any of this. He's never publicly – to my knowledge at least – blamed his personal problems for his attitude. But I think that's because he doesn't think or realize that it's a problem. >_>