Y'know, I have to say I've been feeling a lot like Janet lately. Not so much the trade-labor-stuff, but the... isolation, I guess?
I'll straight up admit that some of it is just plain jealousy, with the math discussions. Not jealousy of the knowledge itself, but of seeing this really strong of clique of people having fun forming, that I can't be part of and never will be. It's selfish, but I'm only human. Obviously I'm not going to ask anybody to stop, but that same sense is creeping up in other areas. The varying obsessions with martial-arts, or wilderness survival, or other subjects that I don't just not have an opinion about, but I start to resent because of the attitude of superiority to people who aren't in the loop. An attitude that is completely illusory - it's not really there, it just seems like it looking in from the outside.
Then there's the memes and shit. I rarely even click on the Forum Games section anymore, because I can't stand the Adventure threads, I've never been an RP guy, and I don't want want to play 3.5ed D&D. The endless flurry of worn-out Dwarf Fortress "jokes" and references don't bother me so much any more, except for the occasional "that's so dwarfy" stuff. I suppose in a way it's just because Dwarf Fortress doesn't make it's way down here much anymore, and I don't make it upwards much anymore.
Which brings me to Dwarf Fortress. A little revelation - back in March, Toady One put together a crew of people to play his development copies of the Big Release, to find and identify bugs and check out his work, to save him at least that bit of time and give him some outsiders' perspectives before he released it. Mostly either people he knew for a long time (i.e. pre-DF), or really technical people like Baughn, or Footkerchief who's basically DF's professional archiver. And me, I guess because of that donatathon thread I started.
Long story short - if you think the latest Dwarf Fortress, especially the military system is screwy now... Well, you can just imagine. Believe me, Toady was open to criticism. But as you can see, what you have is the result. Now, I'm not going to criticize his work as it is, having seen the development-version. But I can't be ignored that it just can't really be played as is, with all the added complications and systems that have never been properly streamlined. And having bashed my head against the wall that was the dev-version, I haven't been able to bring myself to play the released versions since April.
All that together is a big part of why I never post anywhere anymore except Happy, Sad, the occasional Games thread, and now MSPA all the time. By rights I belong over there, but that depresses the shit out of me. My only big discussion-muscle is politics, and I'm as sick of that as anybody, and it never even comes up anymore. I still hang around because I like you guys, but I increasingly find myself with less and less to say about anything.
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