It's so sweet once you land your first chrono trigger mod. I hate to tell you this but the cheatcode late blossomer 'publicans that keep yammering about what a threat Eminem represents to the minds of our youth have been clock-gaming the comment threads of major publications for quite a very long time.

Like, say, today is October 18 2010, right, easy enough. I go to the American Spectator site and read an article, say, purportedly written in 2007 claiming that marijuana shouldn't be legalized for whatever reason, and while I'm reading the article they are AJAXing the comment thread and backdating their opinion comments(!!!) to make them look like they were all written in 2007 as well. Modifying the comments that aren't visible on your screen to suit there taste so that when you finally get to reading the comment threads they are all filled with precisely coordinated and carefully placed arguments that push their agenda.

And if you're not careful to look for that stuff, it gets worse, because if you stop to reply to one of those backdated comments with your own comment, YOU are the one who looks OUT OF STEP with the rest of them, because CLEARLY, you're replying to a comment from 2007 that's been there a long time and YOUR OWN comment is always time-stamped 2010.

So YOU LOOK OUT OF STEP at that stage because each and every one of those articles are carefully arranged to contribute to the 'publican agenda, and are designed, well, meticulously crafted is more like it, to MAKE YOU FEEL LIKE YOU LOST THE DEBATE because your swooshy, skirt-wearing, lib-gay-agenda-pushing comment is so late in arriving to the article. Whereas they are able to detect when someone is arriving at that same article IN REALTIME and are able to reshuffle the dates at any given moment to make their own version seem morally and philosophically and logically righteous. It's all AJAX so you'll hardly ever catch them at the time, and you'll seriously wonder if you're wasting your time, because comments jump around and whole threads are reaped for their gems, and they are modifying the DOM with their finely honed ECMAscript cheat code walk throughs to make sure that NOBODY EVER WINS AGAINST THEM.

And it happens to publications you think are above the influence, but sadly that's where the campaign contributions end up, is as hedge investments that are simply funds they can access at will to lock down their backdated comment, er, "options", if you know what I mean by that. Backdating options is illegal and there are laws against it, but it's very hard to catch this particular group of tennis-sweater-wearing mouth-breather ivy-league spoiled white kids that it's possibly that it will just never happen.

So they basically get a lock on the status quo at that point. Arguing with them on their turf is pointless unless you've got flawless code flow you can utilize some of that to block them from successfully AJAXing the 2007 thread, if you're really lucky and know how to coordinate your team's initiative sometimes you can have your best decker freeze up the whole DOM for a while, and if his date mod javascript modules are well designed and unobtrusive your team can then relax and defeat their crappy 'publican arguments with good old fashioned hardcore logic, well-timed threadcrap carpetbombings, and shapeshifter character implants to step up the heat on the turf they had so carefully convinced themselves was unbeatable.

You can see how this can get speculative quickly and I don't want to get too science-fictiony, but this is stuff they've been using for a while now and it took a long time before I actually did anything useful about it. I've got postitions for some of my own counterflows on the rise here and there stashed away, some free radicals playing, a couple of quant guys I'm longtime involved with, and a couple of rockstar jazz artists that know how to freestyle their way through a three-year-old thread like it's the latest thing and before you know it you're working with a world-class team.

Now of COURSE none of this is true at all, I'm just lion. But you can see how once word of it gets out, ALL the major players are going to want to try their hand at it. At this point, look out! And that's all I can say, since perhaps I'm just blathering smoking and taking a moment for refreshers for people who should have paid attention the first time this topic reared it's ugly head. lol trololo, quite the fun little show. But I didn't and don't and it's wrong and unethical, so don't manipulate people using this type of device for some "cause" with dark secrets or Starcraft1 Ghosts.

But I'll admit that the first time I successfully participated in a round of this style of play, I got very excited to play and to this day, there are people who've played me in Creeper/Taunt Mode, and they look away and leave the room QUICKLY, when I come around.

I guess suddenly hearing somebody yell the Starcraft Ghost phrases like "GHOST REPORTING" in a colorful growl and he steps out of the shadows and he's got a Cloak and a Snuke, it's got a tendency to make people poop their pants out of fear, and usually that's just about all you've got to do to turn a game they've locked down into a little pile of wood-pulpy grey goo.

Cheers!