Comment by qohen | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qohen | Hacker News Reader

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Been to Fanfest, met Mittens (and Vile Rat, RIP :()

For those not aware, Vile Rat, AKA Sean Smith [0], was one of the 4 Americans killed by terrorists in Benghazi, Libya on 09/11/2012.

This is an excerpt from a Kotaku piece on him (which has some good stories about his EVE exploits as well as real life stories [1]):

For the State Department, he was an Information Management Officer. He was an expert IT guy who signed up for postings in places both safe and dangerous. He was in Pretoria and Baghdad, Montreal and The Hague and then—for what was only supposed to be a few weeks—Benghazi, Libya. It is in that last place where he and three other Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to that country, were killed on September 11, 2012, by anti-American militants. It's there that his story was cut too short.

In Eve, Sean briefly was in the top echelon of the game's player-run government. His influence in the game actually grew for more than half a decade. He rose from ordinary player to master spy to diplomat for the mighty GoonSwarm alliance. He toppled rivals with the soft nudge of verbal persuasion. He helped his alliance win a war among player alliances that raged for three years. He even made peace with the Russians.

Again, there's a lot more about him in that Kotaku piece [1]. This [2] piece in Forbes might be worth a look too, to see his diplomatic skills being put to use on reddit (EVE-related).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Smith_(diplomat)

[1] https://kotaku.com/the-extraordinary-mischievous-too-short-l...

[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2012/09/13/a-look-at...

And there's this memorial [0] from EVE new-service imperium.news which explains his contribution to the game :

An excerpt -- I added a few paragraph-breaks:

If you play this stupid game, you may not realize it, but you play in a galaxy created in large part by Vile Rat’s talent as a diplomat. No one focused as relentlessly on using diplomacy as a strategic tool as VR. Mercenary Coalition flipped sides in the Great War in large part because of Vile Rat’s influence, and if that hadn’t happened GSF probably would have never taken out BoB.

Jabberlon5? VR made it. You may not even know what Jabberlon5 is, but it’s the smoke-filled jabber room where every nullsec personage of note hangs out and makes deals.

Goonswarm has succeeded over the years in large part because of VR’s emphasis on diplomacy, to the point of creating an entire section with a staff of 10+ called Corps Diplomatique, something no other alliance has. He had the vision and the understanding to see three steps ahead of everyone else – in the game, on the CSM, and when giving real-world advice.

Vile Rat was a spy for the Goonfleet Intelligence Agency. He infiltrated Lotka Volterra; he and I cooked up a scheme where we faked VR blowing up one of Sorenson’s haulers full of zydrine in Syndicate – this was back in 06 when zydrine mattered – and that proved to Lotka Volterra that he had gone ‘fuck goons’. BoB invaded Syndicate, then shortly thereafter GSF went to Insmother, allied with Red Alliance, and plowed over Lotka Volterra’s territory, all with Vile Rat’s aid. He came back in from the cold and became one of the most key players in the GSF directorate.

His influence over the grand game and the affairs of Nullsec cannot be overstated. If you were an alliance leader of any consequence, you spoke to Vile Rat. You knew him. You may have been a friend or an enemy or a pawn in a greater game, but he touched every aspect of EVE in ways that 99% of the population will never understand.

[0] https://imperium.news/rip-vile-rat/

I had the distinct honor of being banned by him (at least once IIRC if not twice) in SomethingAwful's D&D when he was a mod because he didn't like me running my mouth about how useless Hamid Karzai was.

There's also this 10min podcast episode[0] with one of his friends.

[0] http://www.wnyc.org/story/11-rip-vile-rat/

Thanks for the link, emerongi.

BTW, this isn't just some random podcast -- TLDR was a podcast put out by "On the Media" [0], the (US) public radio show that dissects how news is presented to the public, how the media works, etc. This episode was released in Jan. 2014.

A month later, a version of this TLDR episode was broadcast on the actual "On The Media" radio show [0] -- basically it's the podcast-episode with some added introductory material about the Benghazi story, narrated by Bob Garfield, one of the show's hosts.

(BTW, if you listened to the podcast link from emerongi above, there's no real reason to listen to the "On the Media" link below [1], but as someone familiar with the radio show, I found it interesting to see how it was presented on the actual show).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Media

[1] https://www.wnyc.org/story/rip-vile-rat-2/

http://themittani.com/news/rip-vile-rat | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4509291 (Sep 2012)

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