Harlan Ellison v. Mike Krahulik, 2005

It's been a long time since I looked at penny arcade. Good to know they haven't gotten funnier (although my immature younger self certainly found them quite clever). But I had to chuckle at the irony in this one: https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2024/05/17/muskovites

I have never heard the word foolscap before. I fear saying this aloud will summon the ghost of Harlan.

In a rare turn for the internet, I feel better now knowing this. Perhaps it is something in the telling...

kind of sad that an exchange like this couldn't happen today. Video and stream is too quick of a format for responding. It doesn't reward those that need to take time to actually settle on what they think before writing it. Similar things don't happen too often as they begin with a large post, and ended by "too long didn't read".

It brings me a weird amount of joy seeing Dan chuckle (still) at 20 year old internet savagery.

Both were snippy but Ellison was more entertaining about it.

This is the content I'm here for

To the extent that something so minor and ephemeral even requires taking a side, I still, all these years later, come down squarely on Mike's side. Both men are guilty of ascribing bad motives to the other and then failing to take the high road. But, you know, glass houses. Who among us has never been guilty of that? For me, it comes down to this. Mike correctly diagnosed Ellison as an insufferable elitist, a deeply petty man who harbored a seething contempt for anyone whose interests he considered insufficiently highbrow. Ellison, by contrast, misdiagnosed Mike as a dimwitted peasant whose lack of interest in the things he himself was interested in was evidence of a poverty of character common to his entire generation. Mike Krahulik may be many things, but stupid he is not. Nor is he uninterested in learning and personal growth, he just chooses to focus it on things that Ellison did not understand or value. In all the years I followed Penny Arcade, I never got the impression that Mike Krahulik was proud of his disinterest in literature; rather, he just wasn't ashamed of it. There's a big difference there. The former implies disdain for people who do choose to spend their time reading literature, and I frankly find it hard to believe that Mike would choose to be friends with someone like Jerry Holkins (of all people!) if that were the case. For Mike, I think this lack of shame comes not from ignorance or anti-intellectualism, but from an understanding that he doesn't have to prove anything to anyone, or pretend to be something he's not. He's just Ken, and that's enough. That shows a level of maturity that, apparently, Ellison never achieved despite his many long years on this earth.

Anyway, to answer your question, if this happened today, someone would have SWAT'd Ellison and he would have to make a Twitter thread for his clap-back.

By being Team No One, am I, in fact, Team Everyone? It's a possibility.

Love that Harlan's letter is basically the dril tweet: "and another thing: I'm not mad. Don't put in the newspaper that I got mad"

The chord on your hoodie makes me anxious.

I might timidly venture Mike Krahuilk as an example of a phenomenon I am seeing where, due to a massive cultural shift in how we discuss and address mental health, the way in which people change as they age is different for Gen X and following than it was for the generations before that. Mike has discussed his own seeking of help for his mental illness and his broadening of his ideas through listening to diverse views. None of this is to defend the individual, just a personal reflection on a theory. People are still assholes, I would guess that he's still an asshole. But maybe less of them will be assholes until the bitter end

I miss this

Having no idea about either really, Harlan lost* by writing the essay repeating "surly teenager" ad nauseum, imo. *Like a technical loss in sports.

18-year-old me was on Krahulik's side in this, but mostly, I think, because as a surly, callow youth myself, I had difficulty recognizing Krahulik's brand of self-aggrandizing assholeness, especially in text. I do think that if it happened today, I wouldn't have been on his side as much, because the first time I saw him on video (I think that artist contest show they made?) I had a visceral reaction that "this is an asshole who defaults to thinking that people are bullying him like in high school, and so is justified being really mean back." Of course, back when I was 18 I also thought being a professional jerk like Ellison was cool and witty, rather than just exhausting and unpleasant. Slightly less abrasive phrasing- "oh, it's a joke, this kind of paper is also called foolscap", when it's clear the other guy doesn't know that, even if you think it's a common term, would have saved him days of pointless drama. Old white guys making a personality of being dicks to people just isn't as clever as teenage me thought it was.

I think their respective fanbases would go out of the way to dig up old problematic tweets and stories and instead of trading insults based on surface level flaws, it would turn into a contest of who is a worse person, which would be then used to prove who must have been wrong in the original exchange. In that way, there is something almost quaint about trading schoolyard insults like this. Wonder whether some of our generation's biggest public beefs also originated in similarly petty slights.

I think that some kind of video record of the event probably would have been to Ellison's detriment, although not necessarily to Krahulik's benefit--at least 90% of PA's PR problems have been Mike shooting his mouth off and very reluctantly admitting (after a lot of pressure) that he was wrong. But Ellison seemed purely incapable of grasping the simple truth that, the more you try (or feel like you have to try) to explain or rationalize your actions, the less convincing you are. I used to be a serious Ellison fan when I was younger--literally every single time I went to the library, I'd go straight to the Es in fiction to see if he'd published something new--but then I started hearing other, less-adoring things about him about the time his new work started decreasing in quantity and quality, to be replaced by lawsuits.

Jesus, I get that Harlan was a prolific writer, so this is kind of his speciality, but penning half a novelette about a 2 minute spat you had with someone will NEVER be a good look. Usually, I dislike when people dismiss arguments out of hand with "I ain't reading all that", but there truly are cases where a rebuttal is unreasonably long. Anyway, as dumb as it may be, I do think there's a takeaway to be had from an incident like this. It's easy to idealise an author you respect as being a "biting critic", when sometimes, in reality, they're just being a petty twat over inconsequential nonsense. Even the coolest people are temperamental - don't glorify their emotional outbursts.

I remember getting annoyed when this happened that two people whose work I really enjoyed were getting into a pointless, stupid fight with each other. I think the primary difference we might see today is that there'd probably be a video of the event, so we might be able to see whose version was closer to reality. I'm not sure how much that would actually matter, though, since they'd have just found other grounds on which to prosecute this feud rather than arguing about the facts.

Somehow this aligned on the day my teenage interns found my copy of Shatterday by Ellison on the shelf. They were already sold by the description on the back. But now they’ve seen your video and they are sold with some epic old beed.

As someone who has been at the end of both Mike Krahulik and Harlan Ellison's ire, I'll take Krahulik's intellectually limp world outlook and half-hearted egoism over Ellison's self-immolating scorched earth attacks on a personal level.

my 15 year old self was totally on gabe's side lol. "who the hell is harlan ellison. who cares about that guy"

Harlan Ellison was such a notoriously a cantankerous dude, even before he became an old man (and a lot of this isn't without good reason his part). And I mean that as an utmost compliment. Harlan's contributions to literature and television and film are immeasurable but so are the stories of the arguments and fights he's had. To quote Wikipedia: Ellison had a reputation for being abrasive and argumentative. He generally agreed with this assessment, and a dust jacket from one of his books described him as "possibly the most contentious person on Earth." So greatly enjoying this.

whoa i just thought about this the other day. which means i have to watch this right now i guess