History of RAR
To answer your question about the history of "RAR", here is a brief history of RAR written by @Stephen_Stanfield, who has established himself as one of the leading RARers in the RAR HieRARchy.
"
Having been a RARer longer than all of the newer members, and them knowing hardly anything about the history of RAR and Joseph Truelson, I get to tell y'all about the great RARing that happened before you joined! There are actually a whole lot of forums and notes from the early days so I probably won't be able to cover it all.
According to Joseph, RAR was discovered/created/entered Joseph's life on the night of January 15, 2016.
"That night, he questioned himself. What is the meaning of life, he thought to himself. What is the meaning of chess? Why am I hear? After that last question, he heard something in the distance. He opened his window, and heard a small noise. "Rar", it said to him."
And of course, the Anti-RAR was quick to follow. The first battle against RAR took place at a tournament the following morning.
"He went off in a usual lecture in the skittles room. "Well! So many people! Can't wait to get to know you all! As you know, I am the friendly and sociable Joseph Truelson, and you will all be my buddies; I call everybody(buddy) buddy! Keep playing chess, you will always have fun! I will help you have fun, because I am friendly and very humble! So... yeah... umm.. well yeah! Anyone want to do anything now? (silence), well... in that case I better give another lecture..." At some point, Jason Zhang was tired of all the talking from Joseph, and told him to shut up and stop being so annoying. This was the first attack of the anti-RAR."
It was seven more months before Joseph created this group and turned RAR into a movement instead of a personal philosophy.
When Joseph finally created the first RAR group he made the mistake of promoting @eirghoih (@hanqi) to SA. Joseph was demoted and the group name changed from "RAR" to "BURP". Now we know why Joseph doesn't promote any admins. Seeing that he wasn't going to get promoted back up to SA again, Joseph created a new group and has kept firm control of it ever since.
In the early competition between RAR and BURP both groups invited and advertised as much as they could to have more members than the other. To make their groups more popular, they started writing forums. @hanqi wrote:
"RAR SUCKs!!!!!! As you see, everytime at SCC when joseph says "RAR" heget's criticized and blunders big time at his game, also, when eh says RAR, you can here him from miles away. Fred always comes over and says. "Joseph, you're being loud again," so as you can clearly see, RAR is not very mature with bad humor."
It's not that big of a surprise that RAR won, especially with Joseph turning out RAR Tips.
"Make sure to bring your favorite phone, camera, or electronic device to your next tournament! This tip is just as effective as the others! In fact, it's the most simple to follow. When you see your opponent making the silliest faces, wouldn't you wish that you could share them with the world? The most natural thing is to take a picture with your camera! Of course, you could draw a painting, but that is a lot harder."
"Your opponent came to the tournament to play chess, if he doesn't get chess, he may very well get mad and leave. Especially if you say some of the following things:
Everyone's going to die, why are you wasting your life playing chess?
If he's an adult with a family, tell him that he should spend his time with them.
If they are an adult with no family, tell him that he shouldn't be single and should try to get married.
If they are a kid, tell them to go home and play video games.
If they are a person, tell them to socialize with people instead of isolating themselves in front of the chessboard.
If they aren't a person, take them to the zoo.
Also, before the game, inform your opponent that he is terrible at chess, because he is, and lower his morale as much as you can.
If you know them better this will be easier, since you can tell them all their embarrassing moments. However, even if you don't know them, you can still ask others what weird things he has done."
"Instead of taking from everyone, be a giver. Give them your snacks and other RARbed snacks from the skittles room. Or snacks RARbed from previous opponents. Then tell them to eat up. It will help if it's during their turn, but it isn't necessary.
If you really want to be evil, you could give them barely edible food, like very RARe steak, grass, or coconut (I hate coconuts!).
If they refuse to eat the food, then guilt them into it and talk about starving kids in India and Africa! If they still refuse, then put so many snacks in front of them that they have to eat the snacks to see the board. It won't hurt to take a few of their pieces off the board while doing this. Another trick is to ask them if they like seafood. If they say "yes", then tell them to eat the food, since they can see food.
After eating enough food, your opponent should start feeling sick. He will frequently visit the bathroom. Make sure their clock is running when they do! They may never return! Even if they do, they will be short on time, feeling terrible, and will probably forfeit. Plus, you'll have a new batch of snacks that they must eat."
Eventually BURP died and RAR grew bigger than ever! Joseph kept writing RAR Tips and joking about his hundreds of followers while loyal RARers like @RookSacrifice, @YoyoPuppy and @DKBRAO kept spreading the RAR. Everything was awesome, at least until RAR joined the Not-So-PRO Chess League.
The first mention of RAR that I found in the NSPCL notes was on March 18, 2017; in the middle or season 2 round 2, Joseph announced that "The RAR movement is making an uprising fortunately." This was apparently followed by @chessguy1012 deleting a bunch of notes and a forum Joseph made. A few days later, the other admins were introduced to RAR by Joseph and @RookSacrifice, they made the fatal error of taking it too seriously. There are 720 more pages of NSPCL history (notes) which I don't feel like going through, suffice it to say that they deleted almost everything that had "RAR" in it. It didn't help that the admins kept changing the rules and making it harder to do things. Many of the early RARers were around when the league was first formed, we remembered exactly how Not-So-Pro it was. When the admins made bad rules we argued but didn't get anywhere.
But despite all the resistance and negativity, being in the NSPCL has been extremely profitable for RAR. Nothing else has even come close to giving RAR as much fame/infamy and loyal members as the NSPCL.
But with many members comes the war against inactivity. As RAR approached 300 members, people started to realize that RAR wasn't actually growing that much. The member count was high but almost all of them were inactive and didn't do anything. Joseph did a number of things to keep RAR alive including RAR Quotes, bannings, RAR Blogs and recently revamping the RAR HieRARchy. The RAR Blogs didn't quite work but they were funny. The bans removed some of the inactive members (obviously) but didn't make the others active. The quotes are the best but only Joseph was able to come up with good ones. The RAR HieRARchy seems to be succeeding better than anything else that has been tried so far. The member count is dropping as a lot of inactives are getting kicked while there are more forums, notes and new members than before.
If you've read all of that, congratulations! Here are some RAR Quotes as a reward. You can find more at rar.host22.com.
"Life always offers you second chances. It's called joining RAR right now"- Joseph Truelson's 1847th recruiting effort
"If only common sense were less common! We'd have 5 times more members!"- Joseph's excuse for a low number of followers
"Silence is golden, except if you have RARers in your house, then silence is just plain suspicious"- Facts of life
"If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out?"- RAR's core idea
"All RARers are equal, but some are more equal than others"- Joseph Truelson
"He is so bad, I would beat him 11 times out of 10"- Joseph Truelson to RookSacrifice about someone else
"Making your opponent eat his clock is very time consuming. Especially when he went back for seconds" - Joseph Truelson
"
RAR!! to view the club click here!
