: I'm not the one being rude here. I can make whatever references I damn well
: please and you can't do jack about it. In fact, quite a few people here
: have made references in the past that I never got and couldn't be bothered
: to look up.
: If you were more civil about it and didn't make threats like you're doing
: here, then maybe I'd be more inclined to listen to your advice. Since you
: weren't, you can forget about it until you apologise.
The "threat" being that he'll ignore your posts? This reads like an editor pointing out problems to an author and the author saying "it's my book. Deal with it." And fair enough, the author holds the power. This kind of back-and-forth isn't anything new and it's a cycle that can break Amazon's comment limit.
For out-of-universe references, I think it's fair to be either established or common knowledge before you use them, and they should take up a percentage of the writeup that's small enough to not be intrusive. LOC explained that Ayakeshi and that other thing are each a kind of malevolent spirit from Japan and Sweden respectively, but we already had names for these monsters: they're Phantasms and Nightmares. That can get disorienting to read, but making up a name for the ancient Civilian s'pht makes sense to differentiate them from every other kind of s'pht that's shorter than calling them "useless unarmed s'pht thing with no outer shell."
It was from this forum that I randomly found Ra and that's where I first saw the concept of a dyson sphere. Some tangential learning doesn't hurt sometimes.
