Well, that month was particularly tough for old Eric. He lost two fights he probably thought he could have won, and together with the fact he was apparently receiving an increased amount of hate mail, it probably opened his eyes to the fact he could no longer get by on just his name. Bearing in mind he had seemingly tried to retire a couple of times in the previous two years, before settling on a weird existence of just gnoming, while not talking to anyone. I think I called this his zombie period. He'd come out to that by November 2017, returning to more normal activity, which of course meant he was soon getting into trouble, leading to his May crisis.Carrite wrote:And here's your research question for the day, Mr. Crow... What changed in May 2018 that made the Manchester Mauler drop out?
At the time I had assumed he'd just finally lost the will to resist, those fights finally persuading him to cut his losses, with a likelihood he had created a sock as well, because cold turkey is hard.
It later came to light that around that time somebody had set up an alternate Wikipedia called Engole, and so now the most plausible scenario is that Eric had finally reached his Damascus moment. Was he going to carry on persisting with his failed methods just to piss them all off by merely existing, or was he finally going to put his money where his mouth was, join that breakaway crew and see if a Wikipedia built to his specifications, could be a success. Maybe he was even a founder, but I doubt it. He seems to have since taken over the domain, so perhaps he has forced all the other dreamers out with his characteristic charm.
That alternate wiki is still chugging away, but clearly it didn't satisfy some part of Eric that just needs to be starting fires, so on the pretext of telling people he wasn't dead, from July he was back on en.wiki in an extremely limited way, just to randomly drop snark and tell his tale of woe, like anyone gave a shit. Perhaps he was trying to get formally banned, to properly force him to commit to his new life, perhaps he just wanted a fight with former foes, but he was of course not banned for any of it, that would have required people to report him, so eventually he was persuaded by his former exploiters to do some worthwhile work between dropping turds, and so he quickly got sucked back in, part time grifter, part time sanction tester.
The rest, we know.