I have been posting on billiards forums for 15 years.  I can still remember how excited I was back in 1996 to find Rec.Sport.Billiards on the internet.  Wow, really cool, a place where people from all over the world can hang out and talk pool.  I jumped right in with helpful advice and reporting about pool where I lived which was Germany at the time.  

Then at some point not too long after I had been there I was embroiled in my first argument.  If I remember right it was over the way that Adams Balabushka brand cues were being advertised.  Adams had chosen to use the line "the way George would have made them if he had lived" or something close to that.  I felt like this was really over the line in some way and voiced my opposition to it.  Someone insulted me personally or maybe I did the insulting first and just like that I discovered the dark side of internet forums.

Namely that anyone can be a dick at any time for any reason.  No one gets a free pass and if you become someone's target then they will do everything they can to antagonize you, bully you, push your buttons and generally get a rise out of you.  They do this for two main reasons, one is for the pleasure or the LOLs (lulz as the trolls call them) and two because the chances of them actually having to face the people they torment is practically zero.

Over the years I have discovered that there are various levels of trolls.  While most are anonymous and much more apt to be extremely hateful when protected by a veil of anonymity there are some who will happily tell you who they are and dare you to "do something" about it knowing that the odds are highly unlikely that they will be confronted in reality.

Basically anyone who is disagreed with can turn into a troll.  While there are those who do it primarily for the sport the ones who are worse for forums are the members who can't handle being told that they are wrong.  And this is where industry people will stay away from forums.  There is a tremendous amount of misinformation and speculation bandied about on Internet forums.  When someone from the industry who does have the facts comes in to communicate those facts it is often the case that someone will disagree with them to the point of argument.  Then it escalates into personal slurs and hateful accusations.  Most industry people have the good sense to withdraw at that point and either not return or be very very selective when they post and very careful to not offend anyone.

Not me.

I am a troll magnet.  My personality is such that I will not allow people to bully me.  Which means I fight back just as hard or harder.  And this has created a loyal fan base of trolls for me across a few message boards.  It has taken me a long long long time to finally understand the dynamic at play here.  These people have nothing to lose while I have everything to lose.  While they are stealing time from their employers to troll me I am stealing it from my customers when I play into it and respond.  My energy validates them in their eyes and they can lose nothing by continuing the insults and outright lying.  

Do not feed the trolls is now an old internet adage.  And it's never been more true.  Unfortunately this means that the internet kind of belongs to the ignorant and the trolls because the true professionals withhold their participation from message boards due to trolling behavior.  People with a lot of great writing skills and experience to write about simply stay away from places where they can be personally attacked.  Oh sure, you can find places where good writers and pros hang out but those places are generally well moderated and some cost money to get into.  Two things that work like bug spray to kill troll activity.

Unmoderated and undermoderated forums like AZB tend to attract trolls.  As such the forum remains much less than it could be.

So anyway where is this going?  If you are in the industry and you read this my advice is to be very selective when you post and remain as neutral as you can.  Don't respond to personal attacks and slurs because the response is what feeds them.  In other words don't do what I have done for 14 years which is to take it all personally and spend at least a whole year typing responses to people who aren't fit to drink my toilet water.  Don't give them a second of your time and ignore their comments as if they were as inconsequential as a dead leaf blowing past you.   And maintain at least two accounts, one for your professional face to handle company business and one for your personal interaction if you really want to participate without someone being able to use your professional and personal life against you.  Keep that account anonymous.

Then you will never find yourself using your personal blog to rant about them like this.

 

Update:

You know how people talk about being on someone's shit list?  You never actually see one though do you?  Well for a while I think I am going to keep one here just for the fun of it.  This has no value except to be therapeutic for myself.  The forum name, real name and reason are listed.  

Michael Lalumiere – mlalum – stalker, instigator, and liar and likely perjurer since he said he would report me to homeland security as a terrorist for telling him I'd kick him in the nuts.
Jamie Wormsman – Worminator – instigator, defamer and jealous cue seller.
Lou Figueroa – antagonist and defamer
Jim Brennan – Jimbo – liar, instigator, hypocrite, defamer.
Lenny Marshall – instigator
Eric Hu – internet bully, instigator, liar, antagonist
Mia (only know forum name) – stalker, instigator, defamer
MonsterMash (Tom??) – liar, stalker, instigator, defamer
Hierovision – Zachary Nichols – instigator, stalker

These are the ones that come to mind off the top of my head.  Probably all cool dudes in person except for Lalumiere who I hear is as much of a dick in person as he is online.  He got himself banned from AZ for life though and hopefully it stays that way.  Most people are cool in person because the innate fear of getting their ass kicked keeps them civil.  (me too).  But as it is these people are on my shit list for whatever that is worth.  

And the moral of this story is if one keeps their activity to a bare minimum and goes out of their way to be congenial as Dale Carnegie advises then one doesn't end up with a shit list full of trolling antagonizing lying defamers and the need to list them publicly.

These are examples of 2×3 cases we have made which are in service and holding high end cues:

Doc's Case – 3 years old now:

 

Art's Case – 2010

Classic 

Melissa Olsen – 5-2008  http://www.jbcases.com/melissa.html

The Ranchero  http://www.jbcases.com/ranchero.html

Tillman's Patience - http://www.jbcases.com/tillman.html

The Tropics http://www.jbcases.com/tropics.html

 

Now folks, these are the interiors I developed for my custom made JB Cases which are sold to the most knowledgeable consumers on the Earth when it comes to pool cues.  Collectively my customers own tens of millions of dollars worth of cues.  Millions of dollars' worth of cues are carried in my cases every day.  And when I say millions I mean on average cues that are $1000 and up.  Protecting cues is my core business and my bedrock principle.  

This interior was carefully developed.  It looks simple enough, just some fabric and foam.  But it's actually a carefully tuned amount of fabric and foam and sewn in a special way to function as a strong and light protective barrier for each cue part.  Each one of these interiors takes hours to construct properly.  In contrast most similar looking interiors with flimsy fabric dividers take less than 30 minutes to make.

I took this interior and and all the interiors I developed for our high end customers and put them into the cases we designed for Sterling Gaming so that consumers across the board can benefit from the same protection that the custom case buyers get.  We aren't in this to win beauty contests.  We are in it to be the best performer.

So whether you spend $500 and up for the cases above or $130 or less for the cases below you are getting the same super padded protection.

Images courtesy of http://www.sterlingcuecases.com

We take cue protection very seriously.

 

You know, sometimes you get so busy you don't take stock of what you have done.  Along the way I have spoken about the things we do here and there but each feature kind of gets lost in the grand shuffle.  Then someone copies our innovation and everyone praises them.  That's kind of a downer in one way but also a postive in another when people like something you created even if they aren't giving you the credit for it.  Doesn't pay the rent either but that's another topic.

Anyway, I thought I should try to make a running list of the things we created to make cue cases better.  Sort of for my own sanity and to have an archive and handy reference.  Also to simply boost my ego a little and claim credit for the things we worked hard on.

Let's start with what I feel is the biggest accomplishment, the padded interior for tube cases.  Honestly this one seems like it shoudl have been a no-brainer for my predecessors but they went from thin nylon separators to moisture absorbing felt and back to thin cloth with out thinking about putting a little foam rubber in the tubes to hold the cue snugly and securely.

That was pretty much the whole point for me to get into case making.  To pad the tubes and make sure my cues never fell out of a case again.

So this is what we did and Instroke cases was born:

Padded Cavities

Padded Fabric Interiors

From there I moved into the fabric divided interior and improved that greatly.  I like this method much better than individual tubes because I can play with the amount of padding and configurations to make specialized setups according to customer's needs.  And the stock setups are also very flexible, allowing for different sizes of cues easily.  It also allows me to be much more efficient with the space and get more cues into less space with better protection.

 

 

Custom Configurations

3×8

 

2×4 With Cue Reach 18" Extension inside

 

Bottle stopper plug style seal:

 

From here I turned my attention to the soft and semi-hard cases and reconfigured them so that no more annoying flaps would be needed and the cues would be protected and easy to insert and remove.  Improving these cases had been on my mind for quite a while.

And the benefit to doing it this way aside from better protection and more convenience is that we can adapt it to just about any preference.

Here the cavities are sewn directly to the body

Then I extended this concept to back to the tube case and made a different kind of semi-hard case, with drop-in cavities;

 

So that's it for the moment, I will continue this post with more examples of our innovations as I have time to do so.