that's good.  i'm glad she's doing well!  i'm glad she's NOT HERE.  if you ever talk to her again tell her i said hello and that i think she had a very affable online persona.

also, did hundley post?  i'm not hundley, if that's where you were going.

maybe.  i honestly wouldn't know what it was like anymore, but from about the time i joined to about the time i left, it was like that.  it was a good chunk of its history.  even if it is a somewhat hospitable place now, i know rockman, for example, was around for a good bit of callous nerd-scoffing elevated to an artform.  maybe it's a case of selective memory.

note that i don't think this is in any way unique to gw, either.  what made it notable, i think, was that there was always this pretense in the community of being idk, a little bit above that sort of thing.  as in, better than 4chan, better than sa, having a concept of ethics with respects to interaction with people over the internet.  this, however, i don't think was actually the case as members would frequently engage in questionable behavior all the while maintaining some smug yet baseless sense of superiority to other communities.  whatever the line was  that people were very careful to draw between their own chatlogs and 4chan epic lulz shit, i don't think it actually existed.  it was tolerable in other communities because it was expected of them.  there was always the perception that gw had a higher standard, yet i don't think we ever actually held ourselves to it for the most part. in hindsight it was disingenuous to feign social awareness or compassion or whatever and still treat people like shit.  maybe this has changed; i don't really think it matters anymore.


p.s. teen titans and gaiaonline huh.  i see.  not judging, just surprised.  how is esiann?  do you still talk to her?  i always liked her a lot.

jesus.  no, not egocentric - just half-serious and a little hyperbolic.  more than thinking "oh god she's dead" i was hoping anyone knew if she was okay or happy at all.

with that said, ryan's predictably sarcastic post is still on the dumb side.  also, fairly reductive; this community was never primarily about game making, or even video games in general.  there were a lot of people for whom gw was a place they came, and stayed, because it offered something they couldn't find elsewhere.  there was no shortage of people around in the past who viewed gw as a bastion of identification, or as a sanctuary of sorts.  it shouldn't be all that difficult to understand that for kids who couldn't seem to connect with the people around them, at school or wherever else, and were dealing with the loneliness and alienation this comes with, a place like gw, that was welcoming and full of people like them with the same interests or perspectives or whatever, might have seemed like something of a haven.  call it just a videogame forum if you want, but recognize that this is you intentionally diminishing what it was for the sake of your boring one-liner.  videogame forum or not, it was a community, home to many people who couldn't seem to find one elsewhere, with all the significance that entails.


so no, not actually nailbiting over whether or not she's dead, but in all honesty i wouldn't have been surprised if she was when i made this topic.  to reiterate, this isn't about her leaving gw, per se.  when i knew her, she was depressed and clearly extremely lonely.  and again, had a notgood home/school life.  she told me she multiple times she didn't really have any friends or anyone to talk to at all in her life aside from gw people.  this is what bothered me.  given our conversations, the strange way in which they unfolded, the way she responded to her own problems, and her disquieting, highly emotional attachment to a series of one-dimensional anime characters, it didn't take much hindsight for me to see that she was struggling, and in need of help, professional or otherwise.  thinking about all this, and about what it means gw might have meant to her, yes, it does trouble me what we might have inadvertently taken from her when we drove her out.  i wouldn't want to take that from anybody, let alone someone like her.  there is a lot of value in that.  i think sometimes it is the only line keeping people from drifting off.  this is why i worried for her.


"yeah calling bullshit on that. this has been the nicest community i know"

yeah, no, he's right.  i spent enough time here and enough time in THOSE CIRCLES to know that it's completely true.  past a certain point the most recognizable thing about this place was the level of cruelty and cannibalism present.  being abrasive and insulting rather than friendly and welcoming was a point of pride, even.  its tendency towards insularity and habit of being highly resistant to new blood with new ideas was in part, i think, what led to its decline.

anyway, this is dumb.  i didn't want to start an argument or resurface old worthless drama, i just wanted to know if anyone knew what became of her.  so far chef seems to be the only one who's spoken to or heard from her in the past 3 years, and that's sort of promising.  thanks, i guess.

well, you can think whatever you like.  which is to say, this is all just based on my observations and interaction with her, and what she told me about her life.  i expect yours are based on the same.  i'd rather you were right than wrong, but that alone doesn't assuage my doubts that you're not.

i don't really know what you're expecting as a response, though.  sorry bud.  it was malicious and adolescent and i regret being involved, but that's about all i've got; i'm not going to argue or exchange retorts with you.  note, however, that the quote seems to have been misinterpreted.  thinking about something over the years doesn't necessarily mean it took years to come to any realization.  in this case specifically, it doesn't.  as for the insult itself, well, okay.

what's peculiar about your reaction to this topic is i actually specifically told you about this almost immediately after it happened on irc and you had much the same response.  it's strange that you'd forget this, but perhaps stranger still that you'd be surprised.  this wasn't an isolated incident - there was pitchwhite, mdn, fatty, sir, etc.  i would say this community has spent a majority of its lifetime as "absolute pricks", as you put it.  i agree this is bad but am surprised that your reaction seems to be one of shock mixed with outrage. this is not a critique or a barb so don't respond to it as though it is, but i genuinely thought everyone would be familiar with the long series of PRANKS that so defined the community for a very long time.

umm, it's probably a better idea to just leave this person alone and forget about her while moving on with your life

whatever.  i don't want to talk to her at all but i also think it's kind of a dick move to do something cruel and then just kind of forget about it.  actually i guess i would like to apologize if the opportunity ever arose but mostly i was hoping someone still had any level of contact with her and could say she hadn't just fallen off the face of the earth.  the more i thought about it over the years, the more i felt like she was genuinely troubled and that maybe ostracizing her from the community wasn't the best thing to do, considering.

to clarify, she wasn't intellectually stunted or whatever you guys are getting at at all, that i know of.  but i did spend a decent amount of time talking to her and she seemed to have a notsogreat home/school life and, you know, there was the whole hyperemotional attachment to otacon/hughes which kind of transcended normal teenage girl fancies of fictional characters and seemed to me, especially when coupled with the subsequent ceaseless sexual component some of us saw, to indicate legitimate psychological issues.  i don't want this to sound presumptuous or come off like i am giving some kind of professional diagnosis, because i could of course be full of shit, but in retrospect it seems obvious that there was something seriously wrong.  this is what bothered me, aside from the fact that it was a dumb thing to do to begin with.

what was all that bullshit?  I remember treesock but I don't remember why she disappeared.  was it the picture of her?

no.  it doesn't matter; it was dumb.  it's not worth knowing.  i was just hoping that someone had had some kind of contact with her since then.  she stormed off of irc and that was the last i ever heard of her.  in hindsight she had some very apparent issues and i don't like the idea of her just kind of gradually drifting further and further out while everyone mostly forgets about her.

hi.


does anyone still maintain any level of contact with her?  or really, has anyone spoken to her at all in the last, i don't know, several years?  she disappeared after all that bullshit and i don't know, GUILT perhaps makes me wonder from time to time.  basically i'd like to know that she's not dead.  so uh, yeah, thanks.

 

if this is not a joke i demand a cut of the profits for being such an outstanding contributer(sp?) to gw for all those years

*correction I can afford to pay $6.48 for this transaction(found a couple quarters and a handful of pennies just now)

i'll give you $5 to turn gamingw.net forums into the official forums for TARG WASTE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES

i bet you could suck the paint off a fire hydrant

mario teaches typing

that is correct

willow(nes)

fuck your bins, baby. i don't need any of that. i'm not a bin man. i'm a vaippa man. i go vaippa diving. you can't change me, you can't change who i am.

just learn to live with it. vaippa is everybody's past and everybody's future. the sooner you learn that the sooner we can stop this fucking charade.

i am going to remain hopeful that pneumonia is the super secret illuminati cure for cancer