Revised Post: Decay

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2.18 - http://eightyearsinazeroth.blogspot.com/2012/11/2-18.html

keep it from drifting back to the pain back in the recesses of my jaw.

Remove the second “back” as it is a bit redundant and the “recesses of my jaw” covers where the pain is located well.

think twice about dropping some racial slurs your way.

Maybe “…tossing some racial slurs…”?

had once again demonstrate

“demonstrated”

That may have worked to a degree in Vanilla, when my guild was bursting with officers and people-friendly role models whom it came naturally to.

I may be wrong about this but I think the subject of this sentence is the practice of letting someone take over on an issue from the previous sentence (it is what “That” and “it” are referencing). So then shouldn’t “whom” actually be changed to “which”? I feel as though the subject is changing incorrectly from what “That” and “it” are referencing to “role models” by using whom.

Not passively by the sidelines, watching as members chose their own path, used their own interpretations of my unwritten rules to excuse their inappropriate behavior toward one another – and their laziness upon setting foot in our raids.

I think this is a large fragment because when I ask myself “not passively by the sidelines, what?” there isn’t an answer. I think you can fix this by adding the “not passively” bit to the prior sentence and then starting a new one:
“I had to own up to my responsibility in leading the guild, not doing so passively on the sidelines. I couldn’t watch as members chose their own path, used their own interpretations of my unwritten rules to excuse their inappropriate behavior toward one another – and their laziness upon setting foot in our raids.”

Yes, they were hard, but they were hard because we weren’t exploring every option, weren’t looking at the minutia that we once held as gospel, the tiny bits of theorycrafting that would reveal great secrets in performance gains.

This is a tad run on and might work better if you put a colon after gospel as the “tiny bits” are the focus of the sentence.

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I re-read this entire post, and agree that these last three edits in particular needed further love. I’ve done some re-writing here to clean it up.

The only other significant change is to the outcome of the conversation with Annihilation on why people continued to follow Bru. This is now correctly addressed/wrapped up in the Epilogue, as the reader (by this point) has yet to read the chapter in which I field my own in-office abuse, both of which are correlated in the aforementioned Epilogue. I felt it was important to clarify and separate these observations in the timeline, because they referred to by a psychological effect in the most recent post, The Illusion of Truth. I didn’t get it then, but I get it now, and it’s important to ensure that the reader doesn’t feel like I knew what the cause was back then, and simply didn’t act on it.