• Re: Whither Oxyaena?

    From *Hemidactylus*@21:1/5 to erik simpson on Thu Nov 28 22:25:07 2024
    erik simpson <eastside.erik@gmail.com> wrote:
    On 11/27/24 6:17 AM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
    Does anybody have contact information for Oxyaena? I'd love to send her
    a note and say hello. If I recall correctly, she posted with a false
    email address, so if you know the real one, I'd prefer you email me
    directly rather than post it here. My own spam filter should be quite
    easy to evade, at least for anybody who was online in 2001.

    Thanks!

    I believe Oxyaena disappeared from TO long before Google abandoned us.
    She may be smarter than all our remaining participants.

    Hopefully Oxy is ok. It has been quite some time since I recall her
    posting.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From *Hemidactylus*@21:1/5 to erik simpson on Wed Dec 4 20:31:22 2024
    erik simpson <eastside.erik@gmail.com> wrote:
    On 12/4/24 11:04 AM, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
    On 04-Dec-24 13:03, erik simpson wrote:
    On 12/4/24 9:45 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
    On Tue, 3 Dec 2024 15:49:46 -0500, Kestrel Clayton
    <richZIG.e.clayZIGton@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 03-Dec-24 13:54, Martin Harran wrote:
    On Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:34:31 +0000, Martin Harran
    <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

    [...]

    Glenn was exceptionally nasty
    to her about the whole thing.

    Bad choice of words ... nothing exceptional about Glenn being nasty :( >>>>>
    I presume you meant "Exceptionally nasty even by the exceptionally
    nasty
    standards of Glenn."

    (Glenn's posting history shows decades of slowly growing angrier and >>>>> more paranoid. I feel a little sorry for the guy, even though I know >>>>> it's at least partly self-inflicted.)

    Towards the end of the 'old' TO, I began to take the notion that Glenn >>>> might be a sock puppet for Nyikos. Despite some indicators, I didn't
    have enough evidence to call it out and I also doubted whether Nyikos
    actually was capable of being able to maintain such a level of
    subterfuge for so long.

    I believe Nyikos and Glenn were separate cranks, neither sock puppets
    of anyone else.

    Yeah, my bellyfeel is that they were separate people. Peter Nyikos was
    already pretty spiteful; I don't know that it would have made sense to
    create a sock puppet just to be abusive when he was already doing that
    on main. Besides, Dr. Nyikos clearly wanted to be seen as formidably
    intellectual, which very much ran counter to Glenn's style.

    I suppose it's not impossible he rolled a sock puppet just so he could
    post the occasional smugly lowbrow "Says you" and "Neener neener," but
    if he had, I doubt he would have been able to resist praising himself
    with it, or rushing to his own defense when challenged.


    Nyikos was an excellent mathematician, albeit in a deadend branch of mathematics. This excellence made him pretty unique as a crank, and I stupidly interacted with him for a long time, not recognizing his crankhood.

    He had a bunch of energy for someone his age and cocksureness. I think his topology background made him think he was uniquely qualified to quarrel
    with experts on embryology like PZ Myers back in the day. Or maybe he was motivated by his views on abortion to engage in such topics.

    Weren’t he and Glenn not on the same page about the directed panspermy
    thing? Glenn could have been his gadfly alter, but they had such disparate styles of communication. To Nyikos Glenn was one of the many renegade
    underdogs he felt a need to protect.

    The newsgroup would be far more active if Nyikos were still posting. I
    assume he had the tenacity to have managed the migration from Google Groups
    to an alternative posting method. His death coincided with the passing of Google Groups. Did Glenn post using Google Groups? I can’t recall if he continued to post after it discontinued. We lost Nando too. He’s not
    present to see us survive the many COVID shots we received.

    Nyikos did cause far more activity on the paleontology group too.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Ernest Major@21:1/5 to Kestrel Clayton on Wed Dec 4 21:10:33 2024
    On 04/12/2024 19:04, Kestrel Clayton wrote:
    On 04-Dec-24 13:03, erik simpson wrote:
    On 12/4/24 9:45 AM, Martin Harran wrote:
    On Tue, 3 Dec 2024 15:49:46 -0500, Kestrel Clayton
    <richZIG.e.clayZIGton@gmail.com> wrote:

    On 03-Dec-24 13:54, Martin Harran wrote:
    On Tue, 03 Dec 2024 18:34:31 +0000, Martin Harran
    <martinharran@gmail.com> wrote:

    [...]

    Glenn was exceptionally nasty
    to her about the whole thing.

    Bad choice of words ... nothing exceptional about Glenn being nasty :( >>>>
    I presume you meant "Exceptionally nasty even by the exceptionally
    nasty
    standards of Glenn."

    (Glenn's posting history shows decades of slowly growing angrier and
    more paranoid. I feel a little sorry for the guy, even though I know
    it's at least partly self-inflicted.)

    Towards the end of the 'old' TO, I began to take the notion that Glenn
    might be a sock puppet for Nyikos. Despite some indicators, I didn't
    have enough evidence to call it out and I also doubted whether Nyikos
    actually was capable of being able to maintain such a level of
    subterfuge for so long.

    I believe Nyikos and Glenn were separate cranks, neither sock puppets
    of anyone else.

    Yeah, my bellyfeel is that they were separate people. Peter Nyikos was already pretty spiteful; I don't know that it would have made sense to
    create a sock puppet just to be abusive when he was already doing that
    on main. Besides, Dr. Nyikos clearly wanted to be seen as formidably intellectual, which very much ran counter to Glenn's style.

    I suppose it's not impossible he rolled a sock puppet just so he could
    post the occasional smugly lowbrow "Says you" and "Neener neener," but
    if he had, I doubt he would have been able to resist praising himself
    with it, or rushing to his own defense when challenged.


    I remember that once Glenn was a creationist, but he stopped arguing for creationism and turned into a troll. (That's when he acquired several
    entries in my killfile.) There was once instance where Peter went lower
    than usual, and (even) Glenn called him out. I also recall seeing
    anti-papist comments from Glenn. I don't have any doubt that Peter and
    Glenn were different persons.

    One "conspiracy theory" that did cross my mind was that his account had
    been hacked by the FSB. The other is that he was an atheist false flag
    trying to make Christianity look bad.

    --
    alias Ernest Major

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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