"BRING BACK THE DUEL!!!"

This exchange ^[1] serves as a neat illustration of something the internet does very well: matches up people who feel strongly about a particular topic, mostly:

  [A] the merely curious (slight danger to themselves),
  [B] creepily dedicated nutters (slight danger to others) and
  [C] outright fantasists (slight danger to parents’ utility bills).

Examples:

[A] “I don't know anything about modern duels, unless you include gang warfare, which sometimes comes to duels. However, a friend of mine will soon challenge a man who has been harassing his girlfriend to a duel if the latter man refuses to stop. That was why I looked up modern duels.”
Can idle curiosity be dangerous? Our special investigation at 11!

[B] “The current regime has certain fixed ideas about how people should behave and believe that go beyond the law. It is a de facto theocracy. Those who choose to duel in this environment will be preferrentally targeted for more severe punishment if they are guilty of heresy. Their real crime will not have ben dueling nor even murder but herest. Its probably not a good idea to creata a millieu in which the theocracy gets to hide behind anti-dueling laws to take out heretics.”
No, no, I like it here behind the sofa. Tell me when he's gone.

[C] “Should we duel today? Are our ‘modern’ times so different than yesteryear? These are questions that each of us has to answer for ourselves. So, that being said, would I stand, bare breasted in a long flowing skirt, my bare feet planted upon damp grass at sunrise, a sharpened epee in my grasp? Well, it would depend upon the reasons, of course, but I will say this, I do have several scars from real blades... Last night, I was in the Salle, alone, the sun was setting over the river, filling the wooden floor training hall with mystical light. With my epee in my hand, I twirled and danced with the unbridled passion of the [continues]”
It is time to move out from your parents’ basement.

Does the existence of this tiny forum increase by any meaningful amount the probability that someone somewhere will engage in a duel? No more than someone a bit fragile idly picking up a Scarlet Pimpernel novel. But if the site got bigger and enough people, for whatever reason, got interested in the idea, it’s quite possible you’d see cases start to pop up somewhere (probably in Germany; all those disaffected teenage vampires usually seem to be in Germany), most likely involving a combination of [A] and [B] above. But not, and I'll put money on this, [C].


^[1] The actual forum is long since defunct and doesn't appear to have been mirrored anywhere. In fact I suspect that this journal entry is the lone remaining repository for these illuminating contributions. It's a humbling responsibility.

Soth Park

There have been literally requests to provide a link to the much-maligned schizophr-epic Soth Park.

Here it is. Buckle up and "enjoy".

"Tally ho!"

Apologies if you were already fully aware of this, but I've only just noticed that the longlist has been announced for the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. As a public service, the Guardian has printed the nominated entries in full.

New Yorker Anti-Caption Contest

Re: the above, from Radosh.net.