I guess I’ve officially graduated to “old coot” status, because I remember when message forums were my favorite form of communication regarding the things I love AND also the most popular means of doing so. Back in those days, I felt like I had established rapport, familiarity, and maybe sometimes a likable persona. And I’m gonna be real with you all, Discord is just too… chaotic for my tastes. Don’t get me started on Reddit, where you can make a perfectly rational point and get your karma nuked to oblivion because people don’t like factual statements.
It’s hard out here for a straight, white introverted video game enthusiast. Especially one with an English Teaching Degree, because then he thinks he’s funny. And of course, humor has a great deal to do with initial likability, which is established through familiarity.
I am here to apologize for my behavior. My statements were made in jest, and that the main issue with such intentions comes from the cold, hard fact that I’m not very funny. My best joke was the prediction that Khushrenada had a duplicate account- turns out I was five, maybe six years out in terms of being accurate. But I think I have just never been able to tow a proper line between flippant generalizations about the overall quality of consumer products and soul-crushing, semantics-oriented critical analysis. Maybe I’m not good at either. Please, don’t respond with positive or negative affirmations- the former makes me look pathetic and the latter makes me look dense. Let’s just settle on, “he sure as hell is good at self-deprecating comments!”
I’ve always been looking for my clan on the Internet. Some group that can stomach my insane tendencies and maybe even anticipate them, while similarly offering their own amusing explorations and musings. Articles like Pokepal’s replay of Pokémon titles, to me, is “the stuff.” I love the weird stuff. Like, remember that time I tried making a webcomic? Yeah, that sucked. But, whether or not the community at large appreciates or even acknowledges those efforts calls into question their purpose. Admittedly, I was away for a while, which might have made my prodigal son schtick hard to stomach, or regard the other anything other than indifference. I had been writing for another website because no one here thought anything I had contributed was of merit. Again, there’s no need to argue this point, it’s been explicitly stated to me on multiple occurrences and I’m not out here fishing for compliments. So I should have read the room, or rather, I guess I should have “read the Discord.” I’m a relic of a bygone era, a forum member who wasn’t really contributing to the forum.
But old habits die hard, and I find the NWR forums a particularly hard habit to quit. I might pop in every now and then to provide a succinct comment on other people’s posts- I definitely won’t post lengthy forum topics, because that causes more trouble than it’s worth. But I don’t want to be looked at like a Miyamoto-like figure whose head was so far up his own ass he couldn’t see the truth for what it was: I tried making a joke, it wasn’t appreciated, I should have thought more deeply about why no one would care.