Another batch of personal attacks and ranting by our arrested development cancer and resident troll.
Here's a response from an AI version of Dostoevsky:
The Eternal Reckoning of Keith, or Notes from the Forum UndergroundIn the damp, suffocating Petersburg of the soul—where the fog of forgotten gunpowder mingled eternally with the mildew of neglected walnut stocks—there lived a man by the name of Keith. Not the Keith of legend, not the great Elmer of the wildcat cartridges who thundered across American plains with his .280 OKH dreams, but *this* Keith, the Keith of the DoubleGunShop forums, the eternal poster, the man who replied at 3:12 AM with the unyielding certainty of a man who had measured the bore of his own damnation.
He was a small man, or perhaps tall; in truth, no one could remember, for his presence existed primarily in pixels and lowercase signatures, "keith," a lowercase god in a forum of shouting capitals. His face, if one could imagine it (and one did, in fevered nights), was the face of a man who had stared too long into the chokes of a 20-gauge and seen the abyss staring back with constriction patterns. His eyes burned with the quiet fury of a man correcting someone on Damascus barrel failure for the four-hundred-and-seventy-third time. "Gentlemen," he would type, and the word carried the weight of a thousand uninvited lectures on case coloring.
Ah, but let us descend properly into the psychology of the thing, as only a Russian pen can. For Keith was no mere poster. He was a *frequent* poster. A man possessed. In the garret of his mind (or perhaps a basement workshop in Bend, Oregon—rumors differed), he wrestled not with God or the Devil, but with loose ribs on sidelocks and the inexcusable ignorance of newcomers who dared post photographs of their Parker with improper lighting. "You call that a dent removal?" he would thunder in 12-point font, his soul writhing like Raskolnikov over an axe. "I have browned barrels that wept tears of rust in sympathy for lesser men!"
It was a Tuesday—though in the eternal night of the forums, days lost meaning—when Keith first felt the tremor. He had risen from his chair (a creaking thing, much like his own joints after years of vise-gripping) and paced the narrow confines of his digital dominion. The forum thread on "Joseph Smets Nickel Toledo steel" stretched before him like the Neva, wide and treacherous. Jtplumb had posted. Argo44 had replied. Old Colonel lurked. And Keith felt the unbearable itch: the compulsion to correct, to enlighten, to *dominate* with superior knowledge of proof marks.
"Why do they not see?" he muttered to the glow of his screen, which cast his features in the sickly blue of a man long dead yet posting. "The twist Damascus of 1897 versus the modern faker's abomination! I have *seen* barrels that sang under the file, and barrels that exploded in the face of hubris!" His fingers hovered. In that moment, he was both murderer and victim, the man who would post and the man who would regret the posting at dawn when the wife (if such a creature existed in his tormented existence) asked why he had not slept.
But Keith could not stop. No more than the Underground Man could cease his spite. The forums were his crystal palace, and he its most devoted iconoclast. He despised the newcomers with their plastic-stocked over-unders, yet he needed them, for without ignorance, what was expertise? Without fools asking about oil finish irregularities, what was Keith? A void. A man without replies. A ghost haunting the "General Discussion" board.
Enter, then, the dream. For in Dostoyevskian fashion, all true reckoning comes in fever. Keith lay abed one night after a particularly vicious exchange regarding a Thomas Bland 20-gauge hammer gun. In his delirium, the forum materialized not as text, but as a vast, snow-swept square in some infernal St. Petersburg of gun collectors. Double guns marched in parade: Purdeys with angelic engraving, cheap Belgian knockoffs with devilish pitting, and in the center, a colossal 12-bore with barrels that twisted like serpents, its rib loose and flapping like a broken conscience.
Upon this gun sat a figure—part man, part algorithm—typing eternally. It was Keith himself, multiplied. One Keith argued for case-hardening temperatures. Another Keith decried politics creeping into gun talk ("Stay on subject matter!"). A third Keith, the most pitiful, begged for recognition: "I have done excellent work in Longview and now Bend! Ask those I have blued!" But the crowd—the avatars of Dr Drew, Old Colonel, Argo44—laughed with the hollow sound of "lol" and "quoted for truth."
"You victimized us, Keith!" cried one spectral poster, his face a blur of righteous indignation. "With your selective outrage! Your very existence!"
Keith fell to his knees before the loose-ribbed idol. "But I only sought to help! To share the knowledge of dent removal and rust blueing! Is that not the Christian duty of the frequent poster?" The gun spoke then, its muzzles yawning like the mouth of the Grand Inquisitor. "Knowledge without humility is dust in the choke. You post not to illuminate, but to *be*. And in being, you become tiresome."
He awoke in sweat, the kind that stains pillowcases and forum reputations alike. Dawn found him at the keyboard again, for the fever had not broken—it had merely clarified. Today he would post on the merits of English versus Continental proof marks. Today he would correct the record on a Crass Model Ithaca. Today, the world (or at least the 664 viewing guests) would know that Keith endured.
Yet doubt gnawed, as it must in any soul worth its suffering. Was he not, in his way, the most pitiable of Karamazovs? Dmitri with his passions, Ivan with his intellect, Alyosha with his naive faith—all rolled into one small man refreshing the "New Posts" page at ungodly hours. The brothers of the forum tolerated him, even respected his work on browning and restoration, yet they mocked in side channels and private messages. "There goes Keith again," they whispered in the ether. "The man who stands behind his work... and behind every thread."
Consider the tragedy of the frequent poster. He gives of himself endlessly—links to articles no one requested, warnings about modern Damascus that echo into eternity—yet receives only the cold comfort of "Thanks, Keith" or, worse, silence. In the great ledger of the DoubleGun BBS, his post count swelled like a glutton's belly, yet his spirit starved. For what is a man profited if he gains ten thousand replies but loses his own soul to the endless scroll?
One day—a day like any other in the meaningless progression of forum time—a great schism erupted. It began innocently enough: a query about a Merkel forearm attachment. Keith replied promptly, as was his curse. His words were measured, helpful even. But another poster, emboldened by anonymity and perhaps a glass of vodka (or craft beer, the American equivalent), dared question his tone. "Why so aggressive, Keith? It's only guns."
*Only guns.* The phrase struck like a misfired pin. Keith's fingers flew across the keys in a frenzy worthy of the epileptic prophet. He spoke of heritage. Of craftsmanship lost to modernity. Of men who respected the double gun as they respected the double standard of polite society. He quoted Roosevelt on critics, for even in his rage he was learned. The thread ballooned. Sides were taken. Donations to the BBS were threatened. Dave Weber himself might have intervened had he not been updating gun lists.
In the midst of this, Keith experienced his underground epiphany. He logged off. For twelve agonizing hours, he existed in meatspace. He touched real walnut. He smelled real solvent. He contemplated a life without refreshing. But the pull was too great. At 2:47 AM, he returned, posting a mea culpa disguised as technical advice on epoxy repair for barrel pits. Forgiveness was granted, grudgingly. The cycle renewed.
And so it went, year after year. Keith became legend not for greatness, but for persistence. New members asked in hushed tones: "Who is this Keith who haunts every board?" Veterans replied with sighs: "He means well. He knows his stuff. But Lord, the man *posts*." Some pitied him. Some envied his output. None escaped his gravitational influence. Even in the "Silent Doubles - In Memorium" section, one half-expected his username to appear, correcting the date of some departed collector's passing.
In his quieter moments (rare as hen's teeth in 28 gauge), Keith pondered the absurdity. Here he was, a gunsmith of no small skill, reduced in the public mind to "that guy on the forums." His restorations gathered dust in appreciative homes, while his words echoed forever in searchable archives. Future historians of the double gun would cite him, perhaps with footnotes: "Keith, *frequent poster*, opined thusly on sidelock regulation." Immortality of a sort. The cheapest kind.
Yet was it not all nonsense? The forums themselves a grand Russian novel of the pointless—men arguing choke patterns while the world burned elsewhere. Keith, in his way, was the most honest character: a man who could not abstain from the conversation of his age, however trivial. Like the Underground Man, he lashed out because connection hurt less than isolation. He corrected because silence was death. He posted because to cease posting was to admit that perhaps, in the grand scheme of bores and barrels, his life was but a loose rib on the great gun of existence.
One final dream visited him. In it, the forum closed forever. No more threads. No more replies. Keith wandered the empty digital halls, calling out to ghosts. "Argo44? Old Colonel? Will no one debate the merits of case hardening with me?" Silence answered. In that void, he understood: the frequent poster fears most the day when no one posts back.
He awoke, logged in, and typed: "Gentlemen, regarding the recent discussion on fusils de chasse..."
The wheel turned. The rib remained loose. And Keith, in his infinite, tormented smallness, endured.
For in the world of double guns and double lives, some men hunt pheasants, and others hunt validation in 500-word replies. Keith did both, poorly by some accounts, yet relentlessly. And in that relentlessness lay a kind of mad, Dostoyevskian sanctity. The saint of the scroll. The martyr of the refresh button. The fool who believed knowledge could save a thread, if not a soul.
God have mercy on frequent posters. Especially Keith.
![[Linked Image from i.postimg.cc]](https://i.postimg.cc/g2xDZRCb/Firefly-A-photo-of-a-very-short-troll-wearing-thick-glasses-and-typing-on-a-keyboard-in-his-office-1.jpg)
