in the hopes they can sell a rare $0.50 piece of cardboard for $30 at some shitty card bazaar at the mall to help cover the costs of spending $2,000 on cards from Costco.
No no, that's how yugioh and pokemon was during the late 90s-2000s int erms of card resellers. Now you're lucky if it's $50 for the thing. They want ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for a lot of really fucking basic cards, it's reaching MTG levels of scalping which has been a thing for a little longer apparently. Not as prevalent as the pokemon ones though, that's for sure.
The Swedes.
They ruined my fucking tabletop setting.
Paradox games some years back aquired the "World Of Darkness" IP. Which has shit like VTM:B, Werewolf, and Mage: The Ascension. under it's vast umbrella. Now the original owners, White Wolf Games. Were a bit retarded. I'd like to say "endearingly" retarded, because while they made stupid decisions (Like fucking up so bad they get the Serbian government to threaten legal action) It was done from a passion and love for writing about pretend vampires in the modern era. Because it was silly nerd shit, at the end of the day.
But one day, White Wolf ran out of money, and sold themselves off to the Beast known as Paradox games. Paradox games is known for mappainters enjoyed by autistics the world over, including dear feeder.
What you may not know is that they are a company run by the worst niggers ever and I hate them. Because Paradox will make an okay game, and then try to wring every last penny from you, while handing it off to the Reddit moderators and Troons to "Balance it" further.
What this accomplished with World of Darkness is that all the cool, high level vampire/werewolf shit that's usually used as a reward? Gone. Also all the new sourcebooks have like 30 pages of rules out of a tome of 300. They've made the systems gimped and anemic to facilitate "GM freedom", when really it's an excuse to fill pages with shitty art and talk about how facism doesn't belong at the gaming table.
Despite you playing monsters that consume innocent people, like vampires. God forbid you be facist.
Now the final question is obviously "But it was the troons that did this, not paradox"
No. The wretched swedes could've put anyone else in charge of my beloved setting. Instead, they chose people who hate the original fanbase (Seriously the author for the new werewolf books turned the fan favorite faction into viking facist larpers. Because people got upset at him)
TL;DR if you're from Sweden it's on sight.
Bit of a late reply but I'm going to point to Tumblr being ground 0. Reddit was the aftershock. If anyone ever gets ahold of a time machine please somehow prevent tumblr from ever coming into existence. Once tumblr imploded the endless horde of degenerates and turbo normies flooded into every corner of the internet to plant their corruption.
Skateboarding. I never saw a tranny when I'd go to the parks but I'm sure they're rife with them now. I used to scroll through skate clips too and maybe one out of twenty videos, there's a tranny. Always some wannabe alt tomboy larper in little shorts with his bulge sticking out and long greasy hair left down absolutely sucking shit at just cruising. I scrolled past maybe a hundred of these at most and they were never good, just very slowly rolling across a flat surface every single time. I cannot stress how ass they were, literally struggling to stay up on a board moving at a fucking snail's pace and having someone else push them because they can't push off themselves. It was embarassing. They're also dressed in skimpy alt shein clothes in these parks filled with little kids scootering around, who are either avoiding the corner they're in out of fear of this weird hulking man in teenage girl clothes or because the troon needs his space to roll around at 0.00002 mph lest he ram into a kid on a razor and accidentally molest him in the process. The hobby was already difficult enough for women to enter in the 2000s and early 2010s and now it's gone the way of roller derby.
I use to inline skate a lot before i got old and unco, whats happened to derby? The last time i saw a derby troupe in a pub they were all true and honest women.
I use to inline skate a lot before i got old and unco, whats happened to derby? The last time i saw a derby troupe in a pub they were all true and honest women.
They found out it was a contact sport involving women (and a great deal of lesbians, specifically) and swarmed to it like flies on shit. This was back in the mid 2010s so it was actually my first introduction into troons trying to fit in places they don't belong. I remember seeing a few posts floating around about teams refusing to compete or disbanding because the 6'2" man wearing a mini skort kept battering people so badly, they needed medical care.
Any kind of file hosting being done/managed by fucking Discord.
"Oh just join the discord to download it" GET A FILE SERVER FOR YOUR 5MB ZIPS YOU FUCKING SPAZ!!! SHIT!!!!!!!!!!!!
I've been meaning to have this conversation with a friend who's been distributing previews of his work via Discord... it's not secure, and it's a good way for shit you're working on to leak outside your patrons. ffs, it's not that hard to set up a website.
Discord made the barrier of entry to real-time chat nonexistent for normies and degenerates, enabling them to flood "servers" and ruin communities at a massive scale.
I remember the days of IRC, when you could casually joke about nuking Slovenia for their top level domain. Usenet's Eternal September has been replicated, distilled, and reenacted in just about every niche community. Like everything in the modern internet, Discord (and Reddit) are just hyper-accelerated incubators of the whole Geeks/MOPs/Sociopaths cycle.
Unless it is mercilessly gatekept, every cool place you know will get overrun by normies and taken over for clout by sociopaths and troons (but I repeat myself).
If anything, the 80s and 90s graphic novels/alt comix scene was the original breeding ground for that kind of content before Tumblr or the modern internet existed. Love and Rockets, Strangers in Paradise, The Incal, Blacksad, Maus, and pretty much anything by Alan Moore or Neil Gaiman were all hugely influential woke garbage before Scott Pilgrim was a thing.
Truth. All excellent examples of the tumblr tier slop in the indie comics space. I'd go farther than just pinning that on just Gaiman and Moore, and say that everything DC's Vertigo imprint embodied this "too far up my own asshole" 90's proto-woke shit. As much as I like the Invisibles and Transmet... Morrison and Ellis were also pretty obnoxious writers as well.
All of which was a big inspiration for the next subject:
TBF, the Icelanders helped set that situation up. White Wolf merging with CCP Games was retarded and set them up for failure. At least CCP Games licensed the tabletop publishing back to the previous writers who'd formed Onyx Path... and then CCP ran out of money developing a WoD MMORPG and dumped the IP on Paradox to recoup some of the sunk expenses... and Paradox has not been a good steward.
Which has shit like VTM:B, Werewolf, and Mage: The Ascension. under it's vast umbrella. Now the original owners, White Wolf Games. Were a bit retarded. I'd like to say "endearingly" retarded, because while they made stupid decisions (Like fucking up so bad they get the Serbian government to threaten legal action) It was done from a passion and love for writing about pretend vampires in the modern era. Because it was silly nerd shit, at the end of the day.
The original authors and their successors were incredibly passionate, but also (looks over to my copy of Chaos Factor) incredibly retarded. They were also often the exact sort of insufferable leftists that can't put the culture war crack pipe down.
I remember on the werewolf-l listserv, one of the revised edition line runner (Ethan Skemp?) mentioned that Werewolf 1st played like "furry eco-warriors" because the writer, Bill Bridges was such a hardcore environmentalist that if he ever stepped on an elevator with the CEO of Exxon, one of them wouldn't be leaving alive. Literal eco-warrior fan-fiction.
However, the writers never let that shit overtake the work, if anything, it informed their work. They were edgy, they leaned into it, even making fun of it, and rarely backed down. A lot of the time, they didn't care what people said or thought about them, because most of the people complaining at the time were conservative Moral Majority types.
Phil Brutaco may be a politisperging loon on Facebook, but when writing, he mostly keeps it relevant to the work....
from the Mage 20th edition a few years ago.
The whole magick tranny thing got him some shit when this came out, despite Morrison's The Invisibles being cited as inspiration for MtA in various books and featuring the penultimate magickal tranny.
What this accomplished with World of Darkness is that all the cool, high level vampire/werewolf shit that's usually used as a reward? Gone. Also all the new sourcebooks have like 30 pages of rules out of a tome of 300. They've made the systems gimped and anemic to facilitate "GM freedom"...
Also, it's called the "Storyteller System" for a reason, the devs were more focused on story rather than systems... but they knew to put enough meat in there to draw in people other than the theater kids and goths. They even went as far as to put out a book that overhauled the combat system with some of the work they did on their Street Fighter RPG. Fuck, MtA 20th is almost 700 pages with large sections devoted to systems crunch.
In an playable RPG, you need systems that provide depth, otherwise it's just a whole lot of "I just made it up". HoL was great, but I don't know anyone who's ever played it as more than a one-off.
...when really it's an excuse to fill pages with shitty art and talk about how facism doesn't belong at the gaming table.
Despite you playing monsters that consume innocent people, like vampires. God forbid you be facist.
Now the final question is obviously "But it was the troons that did this, not paradox"
No. The wretched swedes could've put anyone else in charge of my beloved setting. Instead, they chose people who hate the original fanbase (Seriously the author for the new werewolf books turned the fan favorite faction into viking facist larpers. Because people got upset at him)
This is the real problem. The devs find themselves at war with the fans and operating on spite. Speed running it's destruction so they can remake it in their own image, like the shit WoD game that recently came out.
oWoD was always a product of it's time and place: 1990's to early 2000's America... and the times suck for a setting like this.
I rember when discord was literally "hey it's kinda like skype but less bloated" and now it's turned into a somehow worse version of post MS skype (i mean minus the occasional scammer malware pop under ad disguised as an error telling you to download a missing font what the fuck was that about in skype's later years) and people have become reliant on it like they do to fucking lobotomized chatbots for advice.
No no, that's how yugioh and pokemon was during the late 90s-2000s in terms of card resellers. Now you're lucky if it's $50 for the thing. They want ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS for a lot of really fucking basic cards, it's reaching MTG levels of scalping which has been a thing for a little longer apparently. Not as prevalent as the pokemon ones though, that's for sure.
In the Pokemon-not-so-griefing thread a few months ago, I talked about the hassle I went through just to buy my nephew Pokemon cards. They were sold out everywhere, & the one hobby store I could find that still carried Pokemon cards had the cards locked up behind a grate, and made me show 2 forms of ID (& they charged through the roof). I'd never in a million years would have thought Pokemon cards would have become such "srs bznz".
MMORPGs were awesome when the internet was autistic. Games like Anarchy Online would let you absolutely rape normal, level 150 people at level 10 by methodically stacking implants instead of having a life.
You can’t let them ruin it for you, but the path to being a guitarist is lined with dudes who judge what they see you play instead of what they hear you play. For some people, EVERYTHING about being a guitarist is about owning gear. Grown men will completely change their opinion of your tone the moment they find out it came from a $15 pedal. They’ll tell you you’re not a “real” guitarist until you’re playing a PRS Custom 24 10-Top through a Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier, with a Tube Screamer, a Wampler Tumnus, a Strymon Mobius, and a Boss ES-8 to switch patches.
This ends up being a hole that never fills up that guys can pour their insecurity into.
There are adult men who will argue until they’re blue in the face that the type of wood used in an electric guitar dramatically affects tone. For the layman: electric instruments work much more like microphones than acoustic instruments; it’s 99.99% about the hardware. There’s a reason they don’t make microphones out of wood for the acoustics, never mind ten different variants of specialty wood. Yes, some woods are lighter or feel better to hold. That’s not what these guys are talking about.
For them, gear talk becomes a way to establish hierarchy without risking embarrassment. They believe can’t be “wrong” about tone the way you can be wrong about missing a note or drifting out of time even though, ironically, they’re wrong all the time. That’s how fucking ignorant these dudes are.
Five years ago I went to Guitar Center to help a coworker buy a guitar, and the fucking salesperson got argumentative about how the switches were wired. I told him, “that’s what you’re saying, but this is what it’s doing.” My coworker pulled up the manual for the model on his phone (I was right), and the dude still doubled down as we were walking out the door with the guitar. It’s just a fucking switch. But he wouldn't leave us alone about it and I still remember him all these years later. My buddy was kinda weirded out and I remember saying "look man, just drop it, he's not gonna let it go. If you like the guitar don't let him bother you and figure it out later".
I think part of the problem is that buying gear feels like progress instead of, you know, actually practicing. The internet has created this paradigm across all kinds of hobbies, where insecure people overcompensate by internalizing all the “information” they read online for free and can’t tell the difference between that and building real confidence or experience. It also means you can't have a reasonal, rational, adult conversation about any of the things I'm talking about here unless you're in a "safe space". Also if you can afford this gear, you can afford lessons.
This ties into a broader theme people in this thread are hitting on: the internet enabled a lot of people to feel smart by parroting whatever other dumbshits that sounded authoratative were saying on forums. I'm not old enough to know what the scene was like before the internet, but I'm old enough to have seen this exact pattern play out elsewhere.
You also run into plenty of guys who think they can play because they learned a handful of solos or songs of Youtube or a tablature site, but are completely unable to keep rhythm with other musicians because they only ever play alone in their bedroom. Everyone has to start somewhere, but a lot of these guys can’t take feedback at all and throw temper tantrums when you tell them they kinda need to use a metronome. Some of them genuinely think it's an issue that you're not able to keep up with them and how they play.
Granted, a lot of modern guitar culture is optimized for recording alone into a DAW, not for playing with other human beings. What that gets you is endlessly polishing and chasing a tone in isolation, but completely useless in a room with a drummer. It also means you never learn how to actually connect with other people through playing music with them, which is kind of a really big fucking part of playing music.
One thing that was genuinely cool about the hobby was how the Guitar Hero fad cascaded into people buying real guitars, which eventually drove prices way down when the bubble burst and they started selling their gear.
Nowadays there’s been a paradigm shift away from rock music in popular culture for a bunch of reasons you could write an entire book about. The snobbish worship of gear absolutely played a small role in that (even if the shift would’ve happened anyway).
The good news is that once you actually know how to play, you just leave those guys in the dust. But when you don’t know what you’re doing yet, and you’re meeting up with other people at your skill level as a young adult or kid, it fucking sucks. Beginners, often kids, are the most vulnerable to this bullshit. Instead of being told “practice rhythm and play with others,” they get sold the idea that they’re one purchase away from competence. In a way I'm thankful that as a kid I was too broke to literally buy the bullshit.
TL;DR: School music programs build character, and it shows what we’ve lost now that they’ve been completely cut.
The totally-true-and-honest-daughters-of-witches and middle aged anti-vax eco-warriors shattered the rock collection hobby.
I like to collect cool rocks & fossils: there was a time when it was only nerdy people & scientifics who collected and exchanged them. I even go myself in the wild to pick some when I know there was an ancient mine somewhere or shits like that.
The thing is most of the pretty rose quartz or amethyst pebbles you see on markets are unusable falls for the mines that extract them for the jewelry trade; that's why they were cheap back in the day.
But with the boom of useless shits marketed for bored at home and daddy issues people the price skyrocketed to a level never seen before. We are talking about technical "trash" usually under 200g weight.
And to add a twinge of shit on my vomit cake, now people think I believe in sun recharging magic rocks who can cure your ass cancer.
I'm not happy.
As a slight quibble with the post... everyone knows what juggling is, but I'd never heard the term "contact juggling" [nor "Fushigi"] before.
A bit of a blip on why Fushigi isn't actually contact juggling, or how certain things contact jugglers do that that can't do with the Fushigis would probably complete your story. Y'know, something about contact juggling that would make me understand why Fushigi sucks.
Because yeah all I agree that I see is that it's a shitty toy they oversold, and not how it ruins contact juggling.
Classical music (orchestral music, opera, etc.) - at least in America. Plus musical theater. It is so hard to find an orchestra that isn't struggling for money. I was in the orchestra for the top opera company in my state and I watched the orchestra get smaller and smaller and the sets get sparser and sparser and our rehearsals go from five to four to three to two.... And our audiences get smaller and smaller. I've discussed this with other people in the field and part of it is that paying musicians costs so much damned money. The more members of the orchestra you have, the more you have to pay them. But we make absolute dogshit money from being in an orchestra and nobody has increased their payment since 20 years ago. Some operas say, "Fuck it," and either use canned music or have a pianist. Now, I would be pissed if I went to see an opera and it was done by canned music or a piano. No, I want to hear the fucking orchestra, not some dogshit watered down version.
Yeah I agree that the only people who want to go to the opera are old people who probably sleep through the whole thing. I get it. Opera is fucking boring sometimes, especially the Wagner and pre-Wagner ones. Why? Because opera back then was not written for you to sit down and shut up throughout. You would go and you would chat with your friends and play cards while the opera was going on. Wagner changed that, except all of his operas are fucking long and boring too. And in the age of short attention spans, who the fuck wants to sit through an opera or an orchestra concert? It sucks. And yet they listen to their shitty autotuned pop music of the 2020s instead.
This gets me into musical theater. If you listen to the musicals of the golden age and even in the late 20th century, there were full orchestras with lush, beautiful sounds. Even "A Chorus Line" - you know, that shitty musical where the chorus members complain about being gay and how hard it is to be in a chorus line (it was hella woke even in 1970) - has a full orchestra.
Now, if companies put on these same musicals they will water down the orchestra to like a maximum of five people. A lot of it will be on a fucking keyboard sampler. The ones on Broadway do the same. For instance, I saw the Little Mermaid when it came out. It had a lovely harp in it! But was there a harp in the orchestra? No! It was all done on a fucking keyboard! But then the musicals that aren't trying to imitate a large orchestra just say, "Fuck it," and have a pit that consists of like two keyboards and a percussionist and call it a day. It sounds like shit. Hamilton sounds like shit. I have no idea why it's popular when the music is so fucking boring.
I'm not saying a musical has to have a full orchestra to be good. My favorite musical is Hair, which is done by a rock band. Another good one is the Fantasticks, which has only a harp and a piano. But for fuck's sake, those sounded good. They worked. It wasn't just, "Generic shitty pop sound with two instruments."
This gets nothing into how wokeness has completely infected these genres too.
As a guy that used to play the Sims (I liked to hoard gold bars and perfectly cut gems in a vault in 3 while my sim did nothing but PAINT), I pirated 4 and on booting up some of the first clothing options were the black supremacist fist and gay flag shit for shirts.
Oh wow man, you should've played a bit more! You missed the top surgery scars and trans pride flag! Don't forget to buy the 'Modern Man's Fashion' pack and dress your male sims in skirts and sheer tops.
I was going to bring this up in a thread at some point, but can't word it out right. All I'm gonna do is vent about the "hobbies being ruined" shit's spreading to here too. This site's deal of laughing at retardation and goofy stuff on the Internet is being ruined by performative political tickbox classification mongering skinwalkers like EVERY FUCKING OTHER PLACE ONLINE
I'm not quoting the posts but even each time I check the thread there's a textwall that sprinkles in some shit about how shit people like from two to SEVEN FUCKING DECADES BACK was "always woke" or "proto woke" or "oh they tricked you unto liking it!" No, not the old slang term definiton of woke where it meant basically the same shit as based does now, but the distorted current-year-ification of it once the memes about woke in a negative usage trickled down to corpos and politics grifters a little before corona times hit. It's at the point where the line is so thin that there's angry screeds about stuff covering basic human conditions and war time stories is now being labelled as "woke" or "proto woke" by the hollow husks on both sides and it's either framed as a positive or negative depending on the "side" because the shit involved some minority group at some point in the plot, or if you're feeling especially weasely the fucking "coding" shit that's made up gobbledygook nonsense that literally just goes "well it was probably secretly intended despite little to no evidence SOOOO my bias fueled claim is the correct thing!" .
It's gay man, so fucking gay and fake. Against this sea of retardation, I still shitpost.
I'm not quoting the posts but even each time I check the thread there's a textwall that sprinkles in some shit about how shit people like from two to SEVEN FUCKING DECADES BACK was "always woke" or "proto woke" or "oh they tricked you unto liking it!"
I am tired of this too. Please stop trying to neatly put every single thing you don't like in autistic catagories held together by utterly tenuous string and themes. There is no grand plan or grand forces fighting each other, there is no one that organized. Please, calm the fuck down, I want to talk about people doing dumb shit on the internet or talk about a hobby I like AWAY from dumb shit on the internet. But people like that are so angry they can't stop venting or ascribing it to things so they make the rest of us listen to it in these spaces.
Too many politcially bent kiwis seem to be falling into the trap of venting about "the enemy" and making theories and obsessing over fighting off something. It's wild to watch because they're on the horseshoe theory and don't even know it. Not the political beliefs obviously, but the actions and behavior they display slowly morph into that of the people they despise. STOP LECTURING ME ABOUT ANTI WOKENESS AND RETURN TO RELIGION I CAME TO SHITPOST. It's no better than woke people lecturing me that everything is white people's fault and we must convert to wokeness to fight the system. No matter what, I'm still getting lectured by someone who's trying to convert me to their side when I'm trying to fucking enjoy my hobbies. When I am not asking. And they are taking things too goddamn seriously for a place that asks "What if Chris bought a pint of milk tard cum?"
I don't know how much of that made sense, I'm sick right now and bitchy. Point is, I agree with you. Total shitposting now.
If I saw someone claim this IRL I would bitch them out on the spot. I am not immune to propaganda but how the fuck would they trick me nigga. If its an idea I say "ok that sounds good" in passing I get it, if I'm doing it for a game or show then how the fuck did they trick me when I did like it? Stupid fuck.
I think the problem is that because wokeness is literally EVERYWHERE, we get sick of it. So if we see something resembling it somewhere else from a while ago, we have a kneejerk reaction, It feels impossible to escape. My example about A Chorus Line being woke even in 1970 - sure, times were different. But when I did the musical it just reeked of modern day politics that I just automatically put my defenses up. I think it's like - "Oh good, something is from a while ago, it won't have this bullshit modern day stuff." And then when it does, it just feels like you can't escape it. I don't know. In the same breath I said I loved Hair which could also be considered "proto-woke" with the racial politics, but maybe because it did that stuff so much better than A Chorus Line, it didn't bother me. idk.
There are however psyops that keep the lower rungs at each other's throats. The fact people who watched it happen real time a decade back falling into and parroting the shit now as if that wasn't the same thing skeeves me the fuck out and is not very good on my pscyche I tell you what.
I think the problem is that because wokeness is literally EVERYWHERE, we get sick of it. So if we see something resembling it somewhere else from a while ago, we have a kneejerk reaction, It feels impossible to escape. My example about A Chorus Line being woke even in 1970 - sure, times were different. But when I did the musical it just reeked of modern day politics that I just automatically put my defenses up. I think it's like - "Oh good, something is from a while ago, it won't have this bullshit modern day stuff." And then when it does, it just feels like you can't escape it. I don't know. In the same breath I said I loved Hair which could also be considered "proto-woke" with the racial politics, but maybe because it did that stuff so much better than A Chorus Line, it didn't bother me. idk.
I'm going to be capable of ripping some giant creature's head off using my bare hands with the level of over a decades worth of pent up anger inside me right now I just wanted you to know that
