Edit: Gamingonlinux has not shut down, but has lost it’s Editor.
A Great Resource Lost
Gaming On Linux, a popular online portal for Linux gamers, shut down today. And it’s a shame. For all intents and purposes, The Powerbase is shut down as well — but not for today. Gaming on Linux has shut down because of the incessant troll behavior of the Gaming on Linux Podcast. It upsets me that the Editor of Gaming on Linux can’t just ignore it — but that’s beyond the scope of this rant. I am not so much reporting the news today as I am speaking out against the rampant, virus-like stupidity that is the Linux Game Cast. The crew at Linux Game Cast are some of the most unhappy, loneliest, skill-less vagina repellants I’ve ever encountered on the Internet. And I’m mostly just talking about Pedro…
You see, in 2011 Pedro Mateus was a vocal, and somewhat visible advocate of Fuduntu. Fuduntu was a semi-popular distro-darling that sold itself as sort of a fusion of Fedora and Ubuntu. Pedro was excited to get the word out and start contributing to the Linux community, and thus in 2011 answered my call on Google+ to join The Powerbase’s editorial team. We were happy to give him a shot! The first article he submitted to our website was a review for the popular indie hit ‘Penumbra‘, which had recently been released in an early Humble Bundle. I read the draft, made a couple of changes so that the article met our editorial guidelines and promptly published the piece.
Little did I know I would have to take the article down the very next day…
Why? Let me give you a little back-story before-hand. The Editorial process is something we always prided ourselves in at The Powerbase. We always made sure to hold ourselves to the highest standard in every degree, whether it be grammar, featured artwork, or simply accurately naming our sources. This high-standard in the editorial process, coupled with the fact that I (the editor) have a high-paying day-job involving Linux, are paramount in this website’s demise. Articles here were often late to the news party, or never saw the light of day before we knew time had run out. So you can probably imagine that the last thing we needed was plagurism! Well, that’s just what we got from Pedro Mateus. Pedro worked for The Powerbase for about 8 hours… His review of Amnesia was nearly an exact copy of a review for the game from a major media outlet. How did we find out? Associate editor Tom Nardi simply pasted a couple of sentences from his article in a Google search. That’s how blatant his plagiarism was.
So what am I trying to say? I’m trying to say that Venn Stone is not Linus Torvalds, by any stretch. Venn Stone is someone who has a lot of free time on his hands and has learned to play video games, really, really well. He’s learned to make those games work in Wine — likely by copying and pasting commands into a terminal from other blogs. I’m saying that he is a skill-less, vile human-being like Bryan Lunduke who really doesn’t have any practical skills, and can only employ the assistance of lesser human beings like Pedro Mateus, who cannot even utter an original thought within the confines of a simple blog post. Venn Stone has created his own cult of personality within his podcast where his underlings who cannot think for themselves, follow his lead by blindly calling everyone on the Internet a cunt whenever their skill-less lady-fingers can muster the energy to type the letters.
