Quote:
Originally Posted by Mat Sklansky
this is a good place for someone to succinctly explain the history of the user in question for anyone, including me, who doesn't necessarily have all of the story.
and then a justification of allowing what seems to be a crazy mob beating up on a guy above and beyond what might be deserved.
Babs, under his many aliases, is someone who started a thread in OOT asking people if he should quit his job. Because he's a degenerate gambler, the topic organically veered toward his sports betting, because he's convinced that he's a genius sports bettor who just suffers bad beats. You know the type. He loved having the thread have so much traffic, so much attention, and repeated often how proud he was of the post count.
However, he does NOT like being criticized. He doesn't even really draw a distinction between truly well-meant and helpful criticism and deliberate trolling; he just sees it all as negativity that threatens his self-image. He has been known to respond to genuine constructive criticism by wishing death on the person, wishing cancer on the person, etc. When I say that, I'm not talking about isolated incidents where he says the wrong thing; I'm saying that's basically his go-to. So naturally that built up some acrimony between himself and a number of the users.
His personal background, as deduced from his posting, is that he's a spoiled trust fund baby of some sort who has a consistent influx of free money being handed down from somewhere within his family. It's clearly not a lot at a time...it's just enough to keep him afloat and in the action. He will tell you that he has it hard, and when he says that, what he means is that he just sits around all day in a condo that his dad pays for, and watches sports and loses money betting on them. Occasionally he feeds his turtles. As he would describe it, this is "hell on earth." The job that he was talking about quitting at the beginning eventually fired him quite some time ago.
However, his sports betting hobby drives him, again it upsets him that people think that he's bad at gambling (he's not just a little bit bad, he's historically bad), and he's determined to prove to the world that he's good at it. He's also determined to squeeze as much undeserved money out of the world as possible to keep himself in the action as much as possible, because he'll always go busto on the spending money he gets from whoever/whatever his benefactor is.
It's basically like we've gotten to watch the "TAKE MANEY, THE F DO" guy operate over the course of a longer period of time. For better or for worse, it's fascinating.
That's my attempt at a basic background.