>I heard about the Chris Warren/Scarab thing from Chris
>Warren, so I highly doubt I got a great picture of it. Care to
>ellaborate about it?

Sure! I don't know that I can pull the whole story together, but, as I said, there are a few things that I don't think I've heard mentioned in the retellings that have gotten back to me:

1) CW had a strange obsession with a number of imms for years.

Not just Scarabaeus, but all of the old school Shadow imms, although I infer Scarabaeus became his favorite.

We're talking in like... '96 or so, when the first characters I remember associating with CW were active. I remember Jullias showing me some of the e-mails he got from him and describing others, and it was seriously disturbing. Jullias would get home from work and check his e-mail and he'd have 6 or 10 from CW. The first might be pretty normal, if a little odd and excited, asking a bunch of questions or whatever. Then the next bunch would ask why Big J hadn't responded to the first e-mail yet, if he hated CW, why didn't he like CW, etc. We're not talking just game stuff either... it was like he really really wanted to be close friends with these guys. I hesitate to use the word stalking, but it didn't feel that far afield from that to me at the time.

I gather as a group the Shadow crew decided the smartest thing to do was just try to ignore him. For whatever bizarre reason he's desperately craving attention and intimacy with these guys and he's not getting it. For a while, he seems to go away.

This doesn't directly relate to the story, but I think knowing about this casts the lengths CW went to to get Scarabaeus to talk to him in a different and very scary light.

2) A few years later, CW presents himself to Scarabaeus as this false identity he concocted, wherein he's this woman with a lot of problems, including living with a boyfriend who beat her badly, and if things continued as they were, would probably kill her that way one day.

Now, I understand that not everyone here knows Scarabaeus the way I do. He has a certain kind of jackass forum persona. He has done some harsh things in the game. But, for all of that, he would have a harder time *not* doing something about someone in real life danger or need like that than almost anyone I know.

So there we have CW with leverage, so to speak, on Scarabaeus, a way to ask him all kinds of details about his personal life that he really would never tell almost anyone else. I mean, if you're basically a decent guy and a suicidal battered woman asks you to tell her a little about your family, would you say no?

In some versions of the story I've heard back, at some point in this period Scarabaeus cheats for CW... I can only say that I don't know what the details about this are supposed to have been, but I'm not aware of anything untoward that actually happened. If someone else knows that and wants to fill it in maybe we can figure out if it's true or not.

3) In the aftermath of the whole thing, CW admitted to Scarabaeus that he did what he did because it was the only way he could think of to get Scarabaeus to give him attention. He also said a lot of things that I personally found disturbing in the extreme, such as musing about what might happen if he came to visit Scarabaeus, and Scarabaeus wasn't home when he showed up, but his daughter was?

Frankly, I can't blame the guy for wanting to get as far away from CF as possible for a while. In his shoes... I don't like to think about what I might have done to make sure my family was safe from a nut who was obsessed with me. No one should ever have to make those kinds of choices.

It kills me, even years later, to hear versions of this story that make Scarabaeus out to be anything but the victim. It really does.

>Re: Cabdru, I made a post.

Don't think I've seen that yet. Was it on this thread?