Moderator interviews/Andkat
From RelicWiki
- This interview is transcribed from the original thread.
Hey y'all, today we're talking to Andkat, one of the new moderators for this section. I'm Obtuse and I'll be interviewing today along a couple of moderately (geddit?) SPECIAL GUESTS!!!1!oneonetwo. They're not actually moderators, but they sure are 'special' (looks shifty). This series of brief interviews will hopefully give some people a little bit of an insight into the folks that help keep law and order around their neck of the woods and hopefully be mildly entertaining at the same time.
Today we're interviewing one of the Tabletop section mods, Andkat, whose yearbook entry can be found at the following location:
http://relicnews.com/yearbook/2006/427/
He may look innocuous, but behind that placid visage is a heart of iron and a liver of terracotta.
Anyway, enough of my rambling, on to the interview:
Obtuse: Super-brief bio.
Andkat: Male, originally Hungarian but immigrated to the U.S. in '94 at the age of 4 and am currently 16.
Obtuse: Okay, being as you're one of the moderators of the Tabletop forum, I've gotta ask: favourite TT army?
Andkat: Daemonhunters, most definately and indubitably.
Obtuse: And how did you come to the Relic forums, and ultimately the TT board?
Andkat: Oddly enough, I cam in with the WA crowd. I have hardly heard of 40k before DOW, and only joined the forum because I was hankering for some WA info when the guy I had purchased WA from off Amazon sent the game several weeks late.
Obtuse: The bounder!
Andkat: Indeed. At this point I was a complete and utter n00b. I denounced the Imperial Guard's capabilities without taking into account the factors present within other races, had a stint as a DowPro fanboi. I ultimately found myself in Boardwars and Backstory section, and Backstory is what drove me to actually become heartily interested in 40k and provided plenty of my initial fluff knowledge. Meanwhile, I met many of my current forum friends in Boardwars in addition to maturing my style of roleplay/writing. In the course of a single year I pretty much contrived to go from completely uinitiated to fluff guru.
Obtuse: Wowsers.
Andkat: Well, one year and quite a few sourcebooks and codices...
Obtuse: Nice one. So, coming to most recently, could tell me about you finding out out that you'd become a moderator?
Andkat: I had just returned from school and was absolutely drenched from the unanticipated precipitation I had encountered as I had departed the building. As I huddled around my computer, freezing and shivering, and opened up the Relic forums, I was hit with a massive "wtf" moment, comprising of me finding myself staring directly at a forum I had never perceived before: Forum 12.
Obtuse: Which now enters the popular mythos
[Side-note: During the following, if you don't understand any of the excessive amount of long words Andkat is insisting on using, just replace anything you don't understand with 'bannana']
Andkat: After about a minute or so of stunned silence wherein I verified my own lack of deliriousness I finally delved in and, with great trepidation, found myself observing the announcement pertaining to the new TT moderators. Following that, I began to shudder and shake quite extensively, though this may also well be due to my rather drenched and miserable superficial condition. After mustering my sanity, I promptly proceeded to overview staff announcements, guidelines, etc. After this and the transfer of correspondence to my new mod-mentor, I reverted to my old routine of checking every thread in the Backstory forum in addition reviewing the statements of Fleet Command every couple of seconds to verify that I was not hallucinating, for I had not anticipated to ascend to moderator-hood, especially seeing as how I had never been a senior and that multiple individuals of fairly substantial repute had additionally applied for TT positions.
Obtuse: Could you tell me about your mod-mentor?
Andkat: My mod mentor is Ap0k, and he has been quite thorough and beneficial in his instruction, in addition to being rather judicious, level, and logical in his deductions, instructions, and advising in pertinence to my moderating. Chris (cfoley) and I had a couple of sessions with him on IRC wherein he extrapolated upon our queries and generally provided further advice, in addition to a rather thorough (albeit belated) introductory PM.
Obtuse: Ok, so what was the first thing you did once you knew the score?
Andkat: Is that in terms of knowing my precise duties, guidelines, reccs, etc?
Obtuse: Yeah.
Andkat: It was over the course of two days that I ultimately became enlightened overall to my new status and responsibilities, so a definitive immediate course of action wasn't quite possible, but, in effect, I just reviewed the pertinent forums and repeated my nigh-daily act of assessing the entire fluff forum. After the period of instruction was over, I resumed my general fluffiness and in addition engaged in my new duties when required, i.e., warning and deleting spam, locking redundant or illicit threads, etc. Of course, it was not without trouble, and I did make a couple of superfluous or excessive warnings and deletions within my first couple of days on the job
Obtuse: Okay, so starting out proper, did anything about the job surprise you?
Andkat: Hmmm....nothing major really comes to mind here. It was a bit irritating that I couldn't (or shouldn't) rampantly edit posts for spelling, grammar, and veracity, but hardly surprising.
Obtuse: Aye, I’d have thought the same, but once you started doing that it'd never stop
Andkat: Muhahaha!
Obtuse: So what kind of things have you learnt actually doing the job as opposed to just reading about it or, as you were before, seeing other people do it?
Andkat: Well, that RNStaff, surprisingly enough, isn’t composed of autonomous killbots...
Obtuse: Anything else?
Andkat: Other than learning about the unrepentant humanity of the staff... well, I learned just how ambiguous certain instances of inappropriate content may be; not everything is clear-cut or evident. I often seek opinions from other Staff or my other TT co-mods/mentor before embarking upon certain courses of action.
Obtuse: Is that common amongst the staff?
Andkat: Not to an excessive degree, but in the first few days for us newbies and in issues of severity/ambiguity that we find awkward or questionable
Obtuse: Well yeah, better than running in and hitting everyone blindly with the banstick.
Andkat: Mods lack one...unfortunately
Obtuse: Ok, if it's cool with you I'm going to bring in a couple more folk who're going to ask some questions
Andkat: Let the interrogation progress!
[[[Tiresias]] and DatonKallandor are dragged in, Daton snoozing gently]
Tiresias: How weird was the initiation ceremony? On a scale of 1-11.
Andkat: 15.35. Let’s just say that I did not anticipate that quantity of leather or chains.
Tiresias: I think they buy the leather off Vaarok.
[I look blank]
Tiresias: (smoking a pipe) do you think the mods could do more to bring about a climate of fear and obedience? I think they've been slacking on the terror front recently.
Andkat: Clearly. The dearth of oppression here quite is severe; indeed, I suspect it was desire for superior oppression capacity that catalyzed the recruitment drive.
Tiresias: And lastly, if all the forum staff were in a hot air balloon, and it was plummeting, who would you throw out first?
Andkat: I think Soulblighter would have thrown us all out by the point at which we would begin to meditate over it.
Tiresias: So it's official that everyone is Soulblighter's bitch. I think the message to the forums is a collective 'bend over'.
Obtuse: Owch.
Tiresias: You may want to edit that last part out.
Obtuse: No no, it’s all good.
Andkat: Who do you think performs the initiation ceremony?
Obtuse: *scream*
[Daton is woken by my girlish shrieks]
DatonKallandor: (shaking his head to clear it) When will you try to start a coup d’état against Frazer and dethrone him as the God of the 40k fluff forum?
Andkat: Shh…. *bashes Daton's head in with a copy of Realms of Chaos*.
Daton: Final question - when will you take your hat and leave the moderating to the people who know how to scare the forum-dwellers?
Obtuse: Ooh, feisty.
Andkat: When Khorne becomes the god of khandy and lollipops.
Daton: That soon?
[Much merriment, well, a small amount. Maybe just a little.]
Tiresias: Also is it true that if you click on forum rules (seeing as no-one actually seems to) it actually takes you to a secret stash of porn?
Andkat: Perhaps...perhaps not....
Obtuse: Very Buggo-like answer.
Tiresias: Also, where is Lincoln's gold?
Andkat: The Boardwars forum. No-one would ever think to look there!
Obtuse: Okay, I think that’s enough for now. I hope anyone listening is duly warned. (Shoots everyone with tranquiliser darts and leaves them to the wolves)
### Transmission ends ###
