Harlan Ellison was a lolcow in his own right. He was like Fatrick, but successful:
- Gigantic asshole
- Vexatious litigant
- Told a fan that sent him a letter "if you wanted to thank me, you wouldn't have interrupted me with this letter"
- Mailed someone a dead gopher
- Got banned from the campus of Texas A&M for calling their cadets Nazis
- Groped a woman on stage at a convention
Yes, but he also had this:
* Wrote some of the absolute best short stories ever written
* Wrote the script for the best Star Trek episode, which won a Hugo (when that meant something)
* And shit-talked the episode and said it was shit and his original script was better
* And his original script won a Writer's Guild award for best episode of TV period
Imagine that. You're enough of a genius to write the best single episode of the best SF media franchise of all time. The episode comes out to broad acclaim, immediately recognized as a work of genius. You then immediately start shit-talking everyone involved and say your original script was better.
The episode itself is showered with awards.
And then your original script also is.
How many people could claim that? While being mammoth dicks about it?
Also he didn't just mail someone a dead gopher, he mailed them a dead gopher and a recipe for dead gopher stew. And many of the people at the receiving end of his massive assholery were entirely deserving of it.
The man was an absolute master of the short story, a difficult and often unrewarding medium. He may have been one of a half-dozen or so people in the SF field capable of making a comfortable living writing nothing but this form.
I'm not going to justify the pathetic and embarrassing Connie Willis groping thing, which was definitely pure lolcow material.
I'm just going to be blunt. The man was a genius, one of the best writers the field has ever had. He has no equal in present time.
Fat Rick may have unlocked the achievement of being an even bigger asshole than Harlan Ellison, but he has neither a jot nor a tittle of his talent.
In other words his mother turned him into a clinical narcissist.
Behind every lolcow is a lolmom.
Whenever Patrick puts "child" in a post, I end up mentally reading the whole thing in the voice of a sassy black grandma.
I hear it in his actual faggy, gay voice, after listening to the supercut of him saying it in that interview. He has the voice of a man who takes lots of wangs balls deep.
