diy...or........die.......................

 
will democratizing control of media really solve all problems though? most people are awful and stupid and they create awful shit and/or want to push awful agendas just as eagerly as media corporations do. look at youtube. 90% of it is Epic Bacon Fail Zombie Ninja Carl Sagan Gets Hit In Dong videos. look at indie games. someone created a ron paul platformer game. bad as mainstream games are at least no publisher alive would bank on a ron paul game. not that i'm arguing against taking control of the media away from corporations. i'm just saying that alone wouldn't fix all the problems. 

the main thing you need to worry about is junk games flooding the market. take a look at xbox indie's marketplace for example. tons of trash like dating sims and fart games clogging things up, making it difficult for users to find actual good games and difficult for makers of good games to get exposure. 
 
a good way to combat this is to have some charts on the site's main page. like a top 100 chart of all-time best games, monthly charts for the best games of that particular month, charts organized by genre (best rpgs, best action games, etc). a game's position on the charts can be measured by downloads, sales, and/or likes (and just a simple 'like' - no dumb stuff like 5 star ratings or upvotes/downvotes). you can also have staff picks or a spotlight that features a particular game. 
 
another thing you can do is to have something somewhere on a game's page that's similar to what youtube does with recommending videos. like a box somewhere off to the side that says "you may also like..." and then a thumbnail screenshot of similar games (which are picked based on genre or tags, with preference for higher rated/downloaded stuff). although since part of what you want is for individual game pages to not have intrusive stuff on them perhaps you can have it so that users can disable this box from appearing on their game's page (with the downside of that game being disqualified from appearing on the recommendations box on other games' pages).

Quote from: catouak on January 27, 2013, 10:02:31 pm

I wanted to give her a speech on how she shouldn't raise a child in this world to think in such a way. But I have to shut my mouth to save face.

*mao bursts forth wagging his finger*

the ghost of mao giving me a thumbs up instead isn't going to make unemployment feel any better. i think he did the right thing.

 I wish there was something we could do to call for a change.

the only way to get change is to prove that there's a market for what you're arguing for. create something that's counter to the values espoused by the media and show everybody how profitable it is. 
 
look at tyler perry for instance. everyone likes to laugh at how shitty the madea movies are, but that dude is filthy rich and created a media empire for himself that's completely outside the mainstream establishment. and the secret to his success is because he knew there was an enormous market that was being neglected and that there was a ton of money to be made. granted the madea movies are shit, but they're important in that they blazed that trail and proved there was a market. now the next young black filmmaker who's more talented that perry will have something to aim for, and the status of media created for and by blacks can begin to elevate itself. 

it's not about niceness but rather maturity. but if you think you're handling this in a mature, grown-up way then godspeed.

i think you're reading too much into what i wrote. i was just pointing out what i thought was dumb about the image (that it equates being made fun of for being an awkward/nerdy male with actual sexism in media that women complain about).

Quote from: dada on January 20, 2013, 10:09:44 am

"a gamer guy physically shaking, weeping with rage as he thinks about feminism. this is the 21st century. here is your tron bike"

 
someone pointed me towards this image for how stupid it is, some guy trying to show articles on how men just as equally suffer sexism in gaming. i don't know what his point is but it's pretty lol anyway
 
http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18c3dg15i0riyjpg/original.jpg
 
i guess it might be trolling, it's pretty awful to think people are this bad!!

 
getting called a loser for fucking an anime girl body pillow is the truest form of oppression 

well, yeah, the dark knight was a lot more ambiguous than that. the movie wasn't overtly condemning superheroes, but then what you're suggesting sounds difficult to pull off without coming across as really ham-fisted.

saw the politically abominable 'skyfall'

it had the exact same politics as the dark knight. skyfall was heavily influenced by the dark knight (it that in many ways the stories are near identical). although at least batman wasn't unironic support for shitty war-on-terror politics, but instead was a watchmen-esque criticism of how dumb the concept of superheroes are.
 
i feel bad for daniel craig. layer cake was a great movie and he deserved a much better career than this bond bullshit.

Quote from: fucked up wastoid on January 12, 2013, 05:43:59 pm

does anyone have any of the old topic icons saved anywhere? because i lost them a long time ago and would have to make new ones.

http://web.archive.org/web/20090217213541/http://www.gamingw.net/forums/index.php?board=83.0

nah, those are the old ones. sometime in 08 i made a bunch of entirely new ones that looked much better and had a consistent style. it's gotta be somewhere. if we managed to save the fucking rotating pitchwhite head emoticon then we gotta have the post icons saved. 

i don't go to a proper gym but i have an elliptical machine and weight lifting bench at home. idk about any proper routines or techniques or whatever, but what i do is 1-2 hour workouts a day (30min if im being lazy), alternating between using the elliptical one day and lifting weights the next. one good tip: have an mp3 player and load it up with stuff. i got bored of listening to music all the time so i started putting movie podcasts and audiobooks about astronomy and all kinds of weird shit on there. for me the biggest hurdle with working out was how boring it could be, but listening to stuff on an mp3 player is a great way to zone out and makes the hour or two fly by in an instant. 

regarding the forum order stuff: the only thing i would deem necessary is to get rid of everything in the 'community' category. there hasn't been an announcement in over a year and nobody will ever go there to get the latest news anyway (like technically shouldn't a topic like this be in there?). the advertisement forum has always been stupid throughout the forum's entire history. intro/farewell topics can just go here in general chat. the feedback forum can be moved to the general category. everything else is fine, although again if it were really up to me i would condense everything into as few forums as possible and keep things as simple as possible. like even simpler than jamie's suggestions.
 
 
my ideal set of forums would be:
 
general
media (movies, music, tv, games)
tech/programming
game design
arts
feedback
 
+the archives and the other secret forums in their own separate categories

does anyone have any of the old topic icons saved anywhere? because i lost them a long time ago and would have to make new ones.

i'd remove as much useless clutter as possible from the layout. like if it were up to me posts would just show username, avatar, group. i'd also get rid of the shit at the bottom that links topics to social media sites.

looking through the smilies list is like a weird timecapsule of the forum's history through the last decade

hello 

it would help if anyone even knew what this place was supposed to be. assuming there will never be a mainsite and another misguided attempt at a revival, if it were up to me i'd just change the name to "gw" or create some new backronym that fits those two letters.

im the last carefucker standing.

glitchworlds p . cool
who cares though + who actually tells peope in real life about this place anyways?

it doesn't have to be irl people you're referring to the site. also that was more of a hypothetical situation should this place ever improve and you wanted to tell someone about it. like if i'm on irc and wanted to tell someone about this cool site with interesting people, i'd hesitate with a name as dumb as saltw. at the very least i'd have to preface it by saying "i know the name is stupid, just ignore it, trust me." i know it's not an issue right now, and hasn't been for this place in many years, but if the people in charge are serious about turning this place around then the name issue is definitely something that would hold it back.

ever see that simpsons episode when you were a kid that was about ned opening a store for left-handed people? and then homer encounters people during the day who could use left-handed products but hesitates to tell them about the store because he hates ned? saltw is ned.

like if you wanted to go the serious route and make a genuine attempt at reviving the site then i think ed's "glitchworks" name was probably the best one. it kept the old gw acronym (everyone always referred to gw as gw and never gamingw), made some thematic sense, and sounded serviceable at worst and good at best. of course i doubt that's an option anymore since glitchworks is now some project of his independent of this site.

i remember liking dday's (of all people) suggestion of "indiegestion" but then a lot of other people hated having the world 'indie' in there at all so idk.