He reminds me of “lolcows” of old like Christine Chandler or David Gonterman, whose particular blend of mental illness and neurodiversity made them an eternal subject for abuse. I don’t think B.K. Neifert is any different, just another person incapable of understanding their limitations who pours their creative energy into extremely ill-advised outputs.
In a way, I envy folks like that. If I had more of that unearned confidence I wouldn’t have struggled as much with my own creative output over the last few decades.
Mocking this Neifert feels too much like punching down. It’s good to point out the numerous flaws in their statements. But I don’t like criticizing a person’s creative works, even if I can’t appreciate them. Especially when that’s the best they can do. Everyone should have a creative outlet.
It’s not really the creative works, though, is it?
It’s the unbridled arrogance accompanying them.
One of the works is “How to Write”, which includes an admonishment to readers that editors are jerks and should be ignored. That says it all right there. It’s not the best he can do. It’s the best he’s willing to do. There’s a difference.
Especially when they didn’t publish or trumpet those works here. Like, ripping into good old SlackerInc’s French translation efforts was fine because he brought them up here. Stalking some ephemeral nutjob off-site for kicks is something else.
It’s a bit nonny, actually. And there’s places for that, but this thread shouldn’t be it.
Okay I was going to continue to defend him but apparently he does a podcast as well and the latest episode on Google Podcasts is titled “Everything I know” and it is one minute long. I listened to it, and a majority of the things he lists as known certainties are wrong. This is beyond my ability to defend.
Lack of gatekeepers is a good thing. The world is a better place when more people have access to publishing themselves and what others have published. Yes, even the dreck.
I put that poster on ignore after reading their second or third post. While whether they met some technical definition of troll is above my pay grade, obvious troll is obvious.
There’s no need to go searching out for more things to criticize them for. We have rules against board wars and doxxing; I’d rather stay well away from anything close to that.
That’s what mailing lists are (were) for. There was no gatekeeping, there was some pretty terrible dreck that was met with positive and corrective feedback.
But there were a small few who refused this feedback, and would insult those who attempted to help them become better writers. They were usually the ones who needed the most help.
There was absolutely nothing holding them back from publishing on the web or paying to vanity publish in print if they chose to do so anyway.
I mean, self-publishing PDFs on Amazon is piss easy, perhaps one of the easiest ways to publish your writing online. And these days publishing “paperback” versions is hardly more difficult, there’s a wide variety of print-on-demand services that make books as orders come in so there’s little to no up-front capital cost. His Amazon page is basically a blog that nobody can actually read.
There’s no doxxing involved when they openly identify themselves by name, and furthermore post their entire bio on their blog.
I have mixed feeling about this character. I’m happy to mock his writing because it’s truly atrocious, and mocking irredeemably bad attempts at creative writing is fun. That’s really the underlying basis of the Bulyer-Lytton contest even though the entries are contrived.
His efforts to be a polymath and prolific writer might be commendable if he wasn’t so insufferably arrogant about it while simultaneously so creatively incompetent and factually wrong. Still, other than having some fun at his atrocious writing, I say live and let live. Frankly I don’t even really see why he’s being banned – he’s wildly eccentric but has only posted in one thread and received one warning.
