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Whoa whoa whoa, now look it people, I intended this to be a thread that is serious discussion, not lists that that look at them from different angles. So please, if you have any interesting or artistic thoughts about this topic, please post.
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Let me spell this out for you. (in a lengthy way)
This thread is a flamewar waiting to happen, because people are bound to generalise and stereotype in such an environment. So many people are really ignorant of other cultures, or just misunderstand them. So they're going to go by what their friends or other unreliable sources have told them, or their own personal observations which may in some cases be incorrect. Then someone will take offense to that, they'll say something, and someone will retaliate, etc. Thus a flamewar is born.
That's not mentioning the fact that everyone currently IN high school seems totally obsessed and hung up on the fact that there are high school cliques and labels. Why on earth it always ends up getting discussed at some time or another on all forums is beyond me. It's irritating at the best of times and I'm sure at least one other person here is just a little annoyed at seeing yet another thread banging on about high school labels.
Even if we discussed this thoroughly and properly with the most intelligent members, we'd only conclude that high school labels are a result of personal tastes, popular culture, social heirarchy, ignorance, and various other minor influences all coming together to form a situation where students assign themselves to a certain clique but don't bother to understand or mingle with other cliques, and thus through gossip form stereotypes. This has been well known for a long time, and simply doing a bit of google searching on it is easily a better option for anyone genuinely interested. So there really is no need for a bunch of high-school-age forumers who don't know what they're talking about to discuss it.
But what's the likelihood that we'd ever get anywhere anyway? All that's going to be posted here is generalisations, stereotypes, stupid jokes, and boring remarks that fit into this thread but nobody will bother reading them or responding to them, and they'll be barely worth the time that was spent writing them. Maybe a few fights and curse words - and most likely the only interesting comments that might make this thread worth reading will be overruled by moderators for being "offensive" or "off topic". God forbid we would ever make the thread more interesting by the unholy means of off topic! There is an underlying, fundamental problem causing all this too.
Call me a pessimist all you want, tell me that my glass is half empty. But in my opinion the glass it's twice as big as it should be. This forum has turned into a total pile of arse, where the mediocre drivel of one group is pushed further into the setting grey mud by the other clique of individuals who piss around without fear of consequences, and take full advantage of either their moderator "do whatever I want" privelidges, or the fruits of their backstage administrator dick-sucking. People who are likely to say something interesting and spark engaging debates are driven away by this lacklustre discourse, and find that the few threads with subjects worth discussing either have depressingly few participants, or a moderator threatening to close it unless someone satisfies their desire to have an OWF user/slave build them a pyramid monument in their front garden, because they find some frankly pathetic pleasure in abusing their ability to dodge the law.
This forum is stagnating, because there aren't enough members here. Busy forums don't suffer from the problems that this forum is suffering, because they have enough intelligent people to keep the quality and standards high, as well as speak out with relative authority against people who're screwing the system. I'm now pretty much convinced that the reason why everyone wants to be a moderator here is so that they can do what they want; they can boss people around, get people they dislike banned, and close threads at will. I'm not about to get into the psychology of why they would want to do this, but I would conjecture that it has something to do with the fact that being nice and getting on with people is very boring in this environment.
Ban me if you want, warn me if you want, make stupid comments that don't really matter to me or anyone else if it'll make you feel like you're fixing something or driving away the insubordinate dissenters who challenge your manlyness. But the fact remains that what I've written above this paragraph is how I see the forums at this moment in time, as well as my opinion on why this thread won't work and how that's part of a bigger picture. OWI is dead, the world has moved on since Oddworld and is generally disinterested in or unconvinced of the existance of any potential of there being further releases in the series. I will stick around as long as I can to pick up on and add my thoughts to any decent discussions that pop up, but I doubt that I'll be visiting much more at the rate things are going. I've already found myself being less and less interested in what's going on here.
Huge post, yes. Big lot of whining? Probably. Insignificant anyway? Probably... but the way I see it a lot of work went into this community - if it's to die, it at least deserves to die a respectable death, and not end up something one is ashamed to've been associated with. If my post influences that, then it will've been worth posting, if it doesn't, then at least I've done the most that I could.