shuyung wrote:
I'm with you on Metallica, but what did David Brin do?
Back in 1999 he wrote
an article about George Lucas having an agenda. Was this agenda "Make long-time fans seriously pissed" or "Ruin Star Wars fans' childhood (childrenhood?)" or "Make more money by not even caring about his franchise anymore"?
No. His agenda was, in Brin's mind, propaganda of Ayn Randian proportions.
I read the article, and saw that his email address was attached. Back then, I was known to email celebrities every so often without ever expecting them to even read/open my mail. Some celebrities were actually quite cool (During the filming of the first X-Men, I corresponded with Sir Ian McKellan).
Well, I fired him off an email stating how wrong he was. I don't remember the whole thing, but it basically had geek movie evidence to the contrary of his theory and it wasn't in an angry uncomposed manner. This was the sort of thing I shot down all the time back on theforce.net forums. And you all know how geeks get when they get in arguments over movies like this. And the really funny thing is, he had invoked Godwin's Law in his own article!
Apparently, he not only read my email but he's not a fan of being proven wrong. So he fired back a very scathing email with some personal insults and attacks. The type of response I usually received on theforce.net forums, in fact.
I was kind of in shock. I wasn't expecting a reply, and I certainly wasn't expecting such an angry, trollish response from the author of The Postman. I wish I still had the email, but my ISP had a blow-up.
But the gist was I was an "idiot and a blind, brainwashed follower of Lucas' cult."
I crafted another response, one with an even more respectful tone than the first (seeing as how he actually read and responded to it) but still proving him wrong. He never responded.
I guess it turns out that I was not the only person to email him over that article. And he apparently responded to the first couple dozen emails he received before realizing that it would take him several hundred years to angrily respond to all emails he was getting. This was 1999, the internet was still new to many people (including celebrities). Putting up your personal email wasn't something they thought they shouldn't do. But it was taken off the article within hours.
He wrote a sequel to that article, basically saying how he got emails from idiots like me and how we proved his point or some such bullshit. And then blanketly insulted us all again.
I realized that I now had a personal enemy in a celebrity, and I figured that was something I could put on my "That's kinda cool" life checklist.