BackSet

BackSet

The Great Thief Yatagarasu! From Camp Half-Blood, Half-Blood Hill, Farm Road 3.141
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  • BackSet
    • The Law of Cherry Picking: If a user posts his or her side of an argument, and a number of other users try to refute it with well-thought-out posts and cited sources, the original user will only respond to the easiest replies to argue with, ignoring all of the others.
      • Corollary: If a posts demands a source for a claim, and a source is produced, the next post invariably attacks the credibility of that source. Usually, this is solely on the basis that the source of a specific argument they disagree with also happens to disagree with the poster in general.
      • Corollary: No matter how many sources a post cites, someone is still bound to think they know better than the original poster based entirely on the fact that the original poster has a view different from their own.
      • Corollary: If a user says "call me X, but..." in a post, as the number of direct replies to that post increases, the odds approach one that one of those replies will consist of "You're X." and contribute absolutely nothing useful whatsoever, yet the poster of that reply will still somehow think that completely refutes the original post's argument.
    BackSet
    • Conservation of Intelligence: For a well-thought-out post, the longer it is and the more sources it cites, the more likely replies to it will consist of only one sentence that dismisses the entire argument through use of a straw manand/or logical fallacy, usually both.
      • Real life application of the Law of One.
      • The Storm Shelter Corollary: Waiting until the initial wave of pointless replies passes by and then bumping the thread is a recipe for success.
      • The "OK" Corollary: If two consecutive troll replies in a thread are exactly the same, every subsequent reply will be exactly the same as well as people flock to the bandwagon. Once this happens, the thread is impossible to salvage, but a new forum meme may emerge.
    BackSet
    • Harkster's Law of Logical Backfire: If a logical pattern or law is proven and defined as true, the law will more often be cited in support of ambiguous statements or falsehoods which appear to resemble the pattern, than it will be cited in support of the truths which it actually defines.
    BackSet
    • +b Coherency: The topic of every chatroom, regardless of the site it is affiliated with, is randomness. Anyone who attempts to start a meaningful conversation will be disregarded or scorned for going off-topic.
      • If two or more users attempt to start a meaningful conversation of any sort during a session of randomness, they will be directed to take their discussion somewhere private.
      • If the site has multiple affiliated chatrooms, with one "general" chatroom and the rest dedicated to special topics or on-topic conversations, the "general" room will be devoted to randomness and all chatter will take place there, while the other rooms will remain mostly silent and/or empty.
    BackSet
    • The Time Sink Theorem: A forum with an associated chatroom, IRC channel or similar will be less active than it would have been if it had no chatroom.
      • The Twin-World Hypothesis: Over time, the forum and the chatroom will develop into separate communities, as the members of the chatroom eschew the forum and the members who join the forum remain unaware of the chatroom's existence, as the people who could have introduced them to this chatroom have left the forums for that very chatroom. Any joining forum member who joins the chatroom will inevitably leave shortly therweafter due to the Lock-The-Gates phenomenon mentioned below.
    BackSet
    • The Loser's Fallacy (The First Law of the Special Olympics): 95% of all disputes on the internet are settled by maneuvering the losing party into a position where further dissent of any nature, correct or incorrect, demonstrates that they have no life.
    BackSet
    Claude: You ever want to talk about your emotions Edelgard?
    Edelgard: No.
    Dimitri: I do.
    Claude: I know Dimitri.
    Dimitri: I'm sad.
    Claude: I know Dimitri.
    BackSet
    • The Private Clubhouse Effect: If a small, tight-knit community gathers around a forum, as time passes more and more postings will have little to do with whatever is the forum's subject and instead will be just the regulars chit-chatting and hanging out with each other. This also applies to individual threads, which will go on pages-long tangents.
    BackSet
    Party on the Totem Pole Law: If a forum is made of a small group of tightly-knit friends, over 60% of the active users on the board will have moderator powers.
    • The CoSC Corollary of Stubbornness - If the forum in question is a Role-Playing Forum, then this group of staff is often the only thing that keeps a site alive in periods of slow activity. Which may or may not be all the time.
    • An Armed Society Is A Polite Society Theory - As the number of moderators as percentage of the forum population grows, the less their mod powers will see actual use.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • Corollary: As the population size of a forum increases, the less likely the group is to be tightly-knit, and the proportion of the members who have moderator powers decrease. This in turn causes each moderator to spend more of their posts keeping other members in line, and the proportion of mod posts written for that express purpose will approach one.
    • Corollary to the Corollary: Under no circumstances should you search for all posts by a mod on a large forum and browse through the list. The sheer amount of stupidity and Epic Fail the mod has to squash will make you facepalm hard enough to bruise yourself.
    • IRC Topic Corollary: If such a community has an IRC channel, every regular will be given some level of op powers in it, if only for the express purpose of letting them goof around with the channel topic without also opening it up to abuse from spambots or trolls.
    Kaerri
    Kaerri
    Corollary to the corollary -- You have no idea. ^;3^
    BackSet
    • Gideon's Rule (The Red Flag of Masochism): If a user openly invites opposition to themselves — be it competition in a video game, criticisms of their works, or counterpoints to their arguments in a debate — and qualify it with something along the lines of "I always welcome being beaten/proven wrong/criticized, I enjoy it, it's how I learn"... it's your cue to run far, far away. This is because, 85% of the time, what the user really means is "I dare you to try, because I don't think it's possible". Either they're right, and they will pummel you into submission with their expertise, or they're wrong, and they will throw a tantrum when they are beaten. Either way, it's not someone you want to be caught disagreeing with.
      • Note: If the user is part of the forum staff, this is probably an illustration of GreenCobra's Law.
      • Corollary: If the user is part of the small percentage that is genuinely seeking healthy competition or honest feedback, someone else will still wander into the conversation and start the war instead.
    BackSet
    • GreenCobra's Law: "Arguing with the mods is allowed. Winning an argument against the mods will get you banned." When the staff of a forum is strict, mods and admins will allow people to argue against their points in order to shoot down the counterarguments and strengthen their own opinions. When this fails and a user's rebuttals become increasingly difficult to counter, expect the staff to start pulling out topic locks, demerits, and banhammers.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    Once again, apologies to the mods and admins.
    BackSet
    • McHabe's Rule: The mods are generally decent folks just trying to do their jobs. The forum creator is all but absent. However, the administrators' level is home to all the petty tyrants on the board - in the rare instances that they can resist the allure of the banhammer, they'll still have no mercy in jeering you out of your insolent deviance.
    BackSet
    • The Killing Joke:
      • When more than two admins or big-name mods start to adopt "for the lulz" as their core guiding principle, the forum is on the verge of dying an agonizing death in a raging flame inferno.
      • The Backfire Safeguard: If said admins and big-name mods are capable of admitting a mistake, this trend may be nipped in the bud by the initial flare-ups.
    BackSet
    • Visual Zombification Postulate: The more images are used as discourse in any given thread, the less said thread will tolerate independent thought. Imageboards, being at the very extreme of images-as-discourse, are hive minds that instantly detect a nonassimilated psyche.
    BackSet
    • "This is Not 4chan" Rule:
      • As the length of any "random/humorous image thread" grows longer, the probability of somebody getting the thread locked by posting an image that flagrantly violates forum rules approaches 1. They will then be angry about it after the fact.
      • If the forum has no rules regarding images, the thread will eventually degrade into porn.
    BackSet
    Have you ever wondered who Nala's dad is? The only male lions we see are Scar, Mufasa, and Simba.
    Idea
    Idea
    Yep, known about that one for a while now.

    Sweet home Alabama
    BackSet
    • Paula Bean's Law: If a project goes for an unusually long time without being updated, and the project creator continually posts progress reports that are vague in nature ("It's going great!") or tiny inconsequential scraps of material without any specific references to the project or any solid evidence that they've made progress, they have almost certainly done absolutely nothing. If this happens from the start, the project itself might not even exist. This is especially true if the person is known to frequently post works-in-progress without actually finishing anything, showing that they are desperate for attention in any way they can obtain it. If they have something to show, they would have shown it by now.
    BackSet
    Team Rocket: *Puts on fake mustaches*
    Ash & co:
    29d.jpg
    BackSet
    • Back of the Mind Theorem: If a project or web site goes for an unusually long time without being updated, and the creator has not explicitly announced their resignation (or invoked the Nail in the Coffin Law), they are almost certainly still intending to post again at some undetermined time in the future — no matter how long it's been.
    BackSet
    • Nail in the Coffin Law: If a project or web site goes for an unusually long time without being updated, and the creator returns after the extended length of time to assure everyone the project is not dead, and they have not returned with one or more updates, the project is now officially dead. Exception: if the post contains absolutely no exclamation points, there is still a small glimmer of hope for the project to continue.
    BackSet
    • Default Career Path: Everyone on the internet wants to be a game developer.
      • Corollary: Those who don't, instead want to be a graphic designer.
      • Corollary: Their credentials are usually limited to "I played a lot of games and I have feedback for the developers" or at best "I enrolled in a game design course".
      • Corollary: Everyone who manages to point out a single mistake made by a professional game developer, or notices that the game developer can't actually play the game as well as they can, will feel entitled to the position of game developer.
      • Corollary: As in any career field where supply vastly outnumbers demand, most game developers work very long hours for very little pay doing mind numbing grunt work.
    BackSet
    • The Great Law of Amateur Game Development:
      • If a person creates a thread about a game project in order to recruit help or otherwise advertise it, and they haven't started it yet, it will never be finished.
      • If a team project/community project is started by a group of forum members, the chance of said project ever actually being completed falls to the same likelihood of Half-Life 3 being released. The sheer level of expectations of said idea, and the sheer production values level will also rise dramatically before it inevitably dies out. Therefore, the probability of the project being completed rapidly rises to 1 after fourteen years.
      • Corollary: As soon as one member of the project quits, the project will fall apart even if finding a replacement would be trivial.
      • The DeskStar Corollary: A suspiciously large number of amateur game developers suffer a fatal disk crash shortly after promising the moon and stars.
    BackSet
    • The Inverse Confidence Law: The more confident someone is in their belief, the more likely they are misinformed or just flat-out wrong. Conversely, the more doubt one expresses in their belief, the more likely they are right. See also Million-to-One Chance.
      • This is known as the Dunning-Kruger effect in academic circles. See also Know-Nothing Know-It-All.
      • The Loudness Corollary: The louder someone expresses a belief, the less likely they are right.
        • dril's Corollary: The more people disagree with someone, the louder they become.
      • The Condescension Corollary: The more condescending someone acts while expressing a belief, the less likely they are right.
    BackSet
    The Law of Image Overcompensation: The amount of effort a person, group, or organization puts into projecting any image for themselves is inversely proportional to how accurate that image is. This is especially true of politicians and advertising campaigns. For example, it's always the biggest homophobes who turn out to be Armoured Closet Gay. Likewise, the "pro-family" politicians are always the ones who have been cheating on their spouses, and "this is not your grandfather's car" means it most definitely isyour grandfather's car.
    • The Nickname Corollary: If a person's chosen screen name contains positive self-descriptive adjectives, it is safe to assume that the exact opposite is true of them.
      • The Left Hand Corollary: 39.6% of all kids between the age of 10 and 15 will have a username containing a reference to demons or death.
      • The Marvin Corollary: A similar proportion of young adults between the age of 16 and 20 will have a username containing a reference to mental disorder or prescription medication for same.
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • The Euphemism Corollary: Much like "good neighborhood" is real estate advertisement code for "this property sucks, but there are some good ones adjacent to it", 90% of all uses of the following words or phrases will actually have the following meanings:
      • It is a known fact that...: "I believe..." (credit goes to this page)
      • Many/most believe: "A couple other guys agree with me" (credit to the above link)
      • Experts agree: Same as above.
      • Expert: "Someone who agrees with me"
      • True fans: "People who agree with me"
      • Thought-provoking: "Blatant propaganda for my side"
      • Honest: As in Honest John's Dealership.
      • Hard-working: Either "I/He/She sucks at it, but I/he/she tries hard!" or "very enthusiastically barking up the wrong tree."
      • Clearly: "If you don't agree with me, you're an idiot"
      • X is in denial: "I'm in denial about X being right."
      • Leading X(s): "My favorite X(s)" or "(An) X(s) I cherry-picked"
      • Common sense: "My opinion"
      • Mistakes were made: "I/We screwed up royally but don't want to admit it"
    BackSet
    BackSet
    • The "I Don't Mean to be Racist, But..." Corollary: The amount of effort someone expends trying to preemptively establish what they're about to say or do is not X is directly proportional to how egregiously X the next thing they do or say will be.
    BackSet
    • The Illusions of Grandeur Principle:
      • The more someone calls attention to their talents, the less they will accomplish with them.
      • Corollary: The more someone calls attention to their lack of talent, the more likely it is that they are actually quite talented.
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