I'll make this one quick. My participation on BE has dropped to zero over the last few months. Coincidentally, my excitement for MMA has also taken a huge hit. I'm missing events left and right and I'm not really that upset about it. Even though I've been in the middle of a major move and changed jobs, I was in the same position in 2009 and still found time to commit large amounts of energy and money to my favorite sport. What changed so dramatically in just 3 years?

I think, more than anything else, it's the UFC itself. Card shuffling is killing my desire to pay attention to the UFC. I know I'm missing out on great MMA, but that's something I've learned I can tolerate. I don't have the luxury of thinking about and getting excited for cards any more because they all change. Every single one of them. Every single fucking goddamn time. Forget about buying event tickets any more. I was at UFC 108 and thought that was the worst it could get. I was wrong. Plenty of people have gotten burned by the UFC's deliberate policy of watering their events down to the lowest possible level. Once the inevitable injury fairy flutters in and shits the collective bed, the card is fucked and unsalvageable. Fuck that. There's too much money tied up in a transaction that is basically guaranteed to fuck you in some way and not deliver. I guess that's technically a business strategy but no one can convince me it's a good one.

So that's the first part. The second part is that despite improvements from the first iteration the BE site continues to crash about every 15 seconds on my phone (HTC Evo). I know it's a few years old but the old design was at least functional on a Blackberry curve and my current one. I appreciate that this is a SB policy but it's not working. I don't see comments load most of the time. Lately, every other character of text is bolded, which makes the whole page look like the dictation of Mr. Mxyzptlk. It's disorienting and frustrating and makes it difficult to read anything before the crash 15 seconds later.

At the end of the day, I'm having a real hard time reading anything on BE. And when I do, it's usually bad news that pisses me off. And when I try to see if fellow contributors are as pissed off as I am, I either can't read their comments or the page crashes entirely. No part of this process is fun.

So if you don't see me around as much in the future and wonder why, those are the reasons. I'm not happy about it and would love to see both turn around but I cynically don't see that happening any time soon. I've had a great experience and learned a lot from the BE community; the contributions of the staff and commenters has been the best I've every seen on the Internet. But at this point in time the juice is no longer worth the squeeze. You all have a good one.