i thought about grabbing just "bolt" as my url on here but i feel like that will only invite further comparisons to the 2008 animated john travolta comedy



boltgsr
@boltgsr
Anonymous User asked:

Any fun stories from your days running Court Records?

you asked for fun stories but i'm gonna use this to braindump a bit on what running a fandom forum in the mid 2010s was like. sorry.

court-records is a weird beast to me. i joined it in like 2006, 2007, left for a few years, came back 2010-ish, and somehow was a mod by 2012 and an admin by 2013. i say 'somehow' but the truth is that like almost all forums in the 2010s, the userbase was pretty rapidly sliding away and that means that the people who stay active and are helpful/nice get staff positions pretty quickly. c-r actually did quite a bit better than some other places i've been, since the ace attorney fandom is pretty self-motivating when it comes to fanworks and discussion, and at the time the series was still alive and well, as opposed to today where it's been like seven years since gaa2 and capcom just keeps shoveling out ports.

i say it was weird because in part despite winding up running the place for a while... i didn't really have any close friends there. don't get me wrong the rest of staff was nice, and some of them are my friends, and i have good friends now who were on court-records at some point... but i never really had an active friend group there at any time i was posting. i was really there for the love of the series more than the love of the people, and it should be pretty obvious that that's not the best recipe for staying energized to work on a site.

not really helping matters is that, honestly, a lot of c-r's historical userbase was born out of early ace attorney western fans, which had heavy overlap with like, 4chan in the mid 2000s. by 2013 or whatever a lot of the people involved had grown up and matured, but some hadn't. there were some people on that forum who cried bloody murder any time a mod said like "hey don't make jokes about sexual assault". there were some people on that forum that cried censorship any time a localization changed anything. i want to be clear these people were not the majority by any means, but they were often the loudest people in the room.

one thing about me is that i try to look on the positive side of people to a fault. i am the cognitive behavioral therapy enjoyer in da king of da highway tweet. this doesn't mix well with people who just like, fundamentally disagree with you on what "civilized human behavior online" looks like. and when some of those people seem to be your most vocal users, or are working on really anticipated fan translations for games that at the time seem to have no chance of coming out, well, you don't treat them with as stern a hand as you should, because you worry they'll make a huge fuss and make life harder for everyone.

so we let shitty behavior slide when we shouldn't and the end result is that by the time i left c-r it wasn't really an environment i cared about any more. maybe it's gotten better in the years since! i hope so. and nothing but respect for the staff who stuck around.

the other reason i stuck with c-r for so long is that i have gaming news reporter brain. i am simply not above being the first person to post news to an eager fandom, especially if it is something in japanese that can't be seen read by most folks. i also have a moderate case of fandom wiki brain, where i want the right information recorded in places. this led me to almost always rushing to get the first translation of news related to the series out, partially to get the dopamine of seeing people react and feeling like i helped make that possible, and partially to avoid bad translations/info spreading, which is like nails on a chalkboard for me. i still have this brain today which is why every two weeks you'll see me on reddit posting translations of the jp updates for the octopath gacha.

all of this combined into a funny moment about two years before i retired from c-r, which was when i was out sailing with my boss (my boss is the kind of person who sails recreationally) on the lake, it was a beautiful day, and the final AA6 trailer dropped. i excused myself and rushed belowdecks to tether my phone to my laptop to download the trailer and upload it to my youtube channel so i could sub it. i can't remember if i actually tried to sub any of it down there at the time. in any event, it turns out the capcom upload was corrupted, so i could've just waited until i got home and uploaded the fixed version. this story would work better if it had been a friend i was out with and not my boss but the core point of "why are you mirroring a japanese game trailer when you could be abovedecks enjoying a beautiful lake" stands and i try to remind myself of that.

"wow bolt this got kind of heavy" trust me compared to the shit that went down on the bionicle and advance wars forums this is nothing.


boltgsr
@boltgsr

how it feels to make this post and then tab over to tumblr and see in my inbox an ask that's "I used to check court-records every day when I was young, thank you for your service "


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