On Monday, November 4, 2013 2:52:51 AM UTC-5, The Real Bev wrote:

It dates back to 1999. He thought that somebody had used
inappropriately the free lift tickets he'd given to him/her and it's
gone downhill from there.

Not really what happened. The lift ticket thing was just an excuse which he didn't think of until well into the blowup

What happened was that Schattie had gotten himself set up as a connection to free and discounted lift tickets for the newsgroup. He'd tell mountains that he was some kind of internet writer, and was influential, and that giving out freebies to the newsgroup would be good internet publicity for the mountain. Remember that the web was still a novelty back then. Of course, this arrangement as middleman benefited him. In return for passing "his" so-called "freebies" on to people, which were of course not truly "his", he expected status, reciprocal gift-giving by them, and of course a double helping of freebies for himself as a kind of droit de seigneur.

Back in '99, he helped arrange a modest group discount on Whistler lift tickets (for which some other guy fronted the money; he had none), and in return demanded that he receive his own compliment of the tickets for FREE, which of course cut quite a bit into the discount that others were effectively getting. There was a lot of negative reaction to this, as you can well imagine: it became quite clear that he was exploiting the group in the guise of being a benefactor. He didn't even have his own condo or hotel room; he wanted to sleep on someone else's couch for free! Very tacky guy.

Long story short, his image, or what there was left of it, or what there was left of his illusion of it, was shattered when people decided not to put up with him anymore. His swollen ego exploded in self-righteous fury, and flamers came from all over usenet to torment him. For awhile, he really was a "celebrity", albeit in a negative sense. Now, he's just a shell of himself.

Dave