Where do we go from here?

[Leress]

I found my link so... So long and thanks for all the fish?

So long.

[Dogbert]

While I have never been accused of paying attention to the here and now. Wow.

I mean, I hadn't even realized Frank had left for this long already... and then, we all have had more pressing things on our minds... like immediate survival and impending societal collapse, so I just thought "the place is really slow as of late, figures." And then I notice the Trump thread is gone, get curious, check on the About subforum, and...



So, this is it.

It's sad to chalk the Den as yet another casualty of 2020. It was the last place with genuine dialog I knew. Hell, even when it was so d20-centric, most of the discussions applied to other systems too or could be extrapolated. I won't say Frank was the Den, but the community was a formula, a formula that required specific elements to work (even a Shadzar!). That formula is now gone, it was even before the owner slammed the last nail in the coffin acknowledging he no longer has the energy.

Oh well. I'll be at MPSIMS creating a no reason spam thread. I want to see at least what title was awaiting for me at 1000 posts.

See you on the flip side.

[Desdan_Mervolam]

I have not posted here regularly in six years

I have not posted at all here in two years

I have, about twice a year, poked in and looked at what's been going on, mostly to look at old threads and because a part of me gets morbidly curious or morbidly nostalgic. I have to admit that openly, because its obvious; it's why I'm writing this post right now, 802 days since my last post.

The reason I quit posting and also quit reading regularly is because the board has/had a community that I felt is toxic, which actively discouraged discussion and, more damningly to my mind, began to actively poison the interest I had in my favorite hobby. It was like this long before I quit. I had to take a long break from this board at least once before.

Honestly, I would love a place where I can go and talk about games, the campaigns I'm playing in and the campaigns I'm running, and get feedback and advice about stuff. I've never really found a place that's good for that, but the Den was certainly not that place, and really never was. This is the board where you tell people who have the bad judgement to like a game you don't and the bad luck of saying so in public that they are inherently morally deficient.

I have plenty of thoughts on Frank, most of them are... shall we say, uncharitable. I thought about writing those thoughts out here, but I think MoFo has made it pretty clear that he doesn't really want people to do that, and Frank clearly has no particular interest in other people's opinions of him.

[erik]

I have found more insightful game design advice and contributions on this board than any other. For the most part I’ve learned all I’m probably gonna learn without serious rededication and I have coasted for years on the enjoyment of discussions with personalities I’ve come to know. Sadly a lot of them have left or quieted, or become irksome enough that I don’t bother clicking to read their posts. But not all gone so I’ll continue to check in.

[srcs]

Pivot back to being about gaming, with the unspoken understanding that you must be at least this --> communist. I'd actually say that of those who left, CeilingCat was my favourite poster here and Frank was part of the reasoning for her leaving. We can still create gaming content, which once upon a time was the main reason people came here.

Capitalism is good and communism is evil.

[Kaelik]

Glad you caught up to July 2020 srs! Look forward to your cogent 6th post in response to a post from 2023 in 8 more years.

[Koumei]

Wait holy shit, that's their 5th post? I really assumed this was just a bot account.

[Thaluikhain]

Yeah, I was somewhat surprised at that myself.

[deaddmwalking]

I'd like to believe that srcs is on a manned mission to another planet, and it takes 8 months to wait for his log-in to work before he can post a reply. As his distance from Earth increases his responses will become further and further out of date, especially when he sees a 'a new response has been posted/post anyway?'

It must be quite a trial, but good luck and godspeed!

[Thaluikhain]

I'd like to believe that srcs is on a manned mission to another planet, and it takes 8 months to wait for his log-in to work before he can post a reply. As his distance from Earth increases his responses will become further and further out of date, especially when he sees a 'a new response has been posted/post anyway?'

It must be quite a trial, but good luck and godspeed!

8 months is going far beyond any planet in our system, and is an appreciable amount of the distance to the next star.

(Ok, it'd be 4 months to send a signal and another 4 months till the reply arrived, so not a full 8 light months out, but still)

[deaddmwalking]

I was originally thinking an Interstellar mission, but even if it had been very hush-hush there’s really no way to have gotten that far so fast. Voyager are coming up on 50 years and are just approaching a light day (like .75). But there’s gotta be someone at NASA trying to win a real-life Civ game by colonizing Alpha Centauri, right? We need more awesome completely fabricated conspiracy theories, so I'm taking that one.

[Kaelik]

Arguably that one already exists.

There's a whole conspiracy space war happening since the Eisenhower admin according to certain sectors.

Also the most evil alien species is the one that is Jewish coded and manipulating earth.

[deaddmwalking]

Is that Scientology or something even crazier?

[Kaelik]

Is that Scientology or something even crazier?

It's just some conspiracy theories about aliens. I learned about it from Project Camelot, which is a channel by a lady who interviews a guy in prison who explains he didn't do the crime because he was a member of the secret US mind spacefore and was doing astral projection battles with aliens at the time the crime was committed, and he explains all the different aliens or whatever, and then she (Carrie Cassidy(sp?)) writes down what she remembers from the interviews and tells it to her auidence like it's real and may be adding her own things.

Anyway, the Jew aliens are the worst enemy and are trying to replace humans with the black aliens and the only solution is to vote for Donald Trump because he really will protect humans from the alien hordes.

That's the final message she wants you to get from her show. It was a lot more in the woods back in the Obama years, because there was no solution, since all the GOP were also controlled by the jew aliens, but luckily since 2016 there has been one specific solution to the alien menace.

(She does interviews with lots of other figures in the alien sci fi grifter world and there appears to be a signficant conspiracy community that does this.)

[Omegonthesane]

I've heard of Kerry Cassidy second hand from Knowledge Fight - they used to dip into Project Camelot when they needed a break from InfoWars, culminating in some fans of theirs deciding to directly fuck with Kerry by calling in as a space military person to insert decolonial narratives for 3 episodes and then die of Covid-19 so that Kerry had to engage with the disease as a plot element.

[morgan13]

I've heard of Kerry Cassidy second hand from Knowledge Fight - they used to dip into Project Camelot when they needed a break from InfoWars, culminating in some fans of theirs deciding to directly fuck with Kerry by calling in as a space military person to insert decolonial narratives for 3 episodes and then die of Covid-19 so that Kerry had to engage with the disease as a plot element.

Those are some harsh plot-twists with the covid-19 and all, you really wrote that with a straight face?

[Omegonthesane]

I've heard of Kerry Cassidy second hand from Knowledge Fight - they used to dip into Project Camelot when they needed a break from InfoWars, culminating in some fans of theirs deciding to directly fuck with Kerry by calling in as a space military person to insert decolonial narratives for 3 episodes and then die of Covid-19 so that Kerry had to engage with the disease as a plot element.

Those are some harsh plot-twists with the covid-19 and all, you really wrote that with a straight face?

I'm just describing the actions taken by third parties unrelated to myself and not directly related to Knowledge Fight at the time they performed the actions, although they have since appeared on an episode to explain themselves.

[JonSetanta]

Where do we go?

Not in a circle or Downward Spiral, but perhaps simply preservation.

[morgan13]

Where do we go?

Not in a circle or Downward Spiral, but perhaps simply preservation.

Looks like a downward spiral to me, not much perservation happening around here

[deaddmwalking]

Preservation meaning the important conversations of the past remain as they were. Important may be overstating it, but I think there was some game theory discussion that was meaningful, and even if you reject it it's worth engaging in. If nothing else I think there's useful examples of how to discuss balance in a constructive way.

[silver877]

Absolutely agree. Preserving those conversations can provide valuable context and insight, even if opinions have evolved or changed. It's fascinating to see how game theory discussions can shape our understanding of balance and design. Plus, it's a great reminder that constructive debate and criticism are essential to growth and improvement.