High school is no fun

When I left middle school, many things changed. For one thing, I wasn't able to get away with murder — well, that was the only thing I was aware of until recently.

In your public library, I'm purely assuming, there's probably a section called Young Adult Fiction. A lot of this stuff consists of television fanfics and novelisations — Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Sweet Valley High — and dramatic kid novels that supposedly document a kid's adventure in seventh or eighth grade, or perhaps facing the impending age of seventeen. One book in particular at my library is modelled as a collection of blog entries and has a back cover that looks roughly like a profile you'd encounter on Bebo. This wasn't the thing that shocked me; rather, it was that the narrator was a thirteen-year-old girl. Just passed the COPPA clearance, a year away from eligibility on MySpace — and from the looks of it, one of many in a breed that's been hunched on the Internet so much that it partially governs their lives. Many of the teenage books on the shelf are in the same format — many girls under the age of consent blogging about their school life. (Now I understand why MySpace is taken so seriously.)

And this past Sunday I eavesdropped on some of the high-school freshmen that attend the youth summit with me chatting fervently about MySpace and comments made by boys they'd dumped or girls they'd faced off against. And there was me thinking that this was only supposed to be characteristic of high-school upperclassmen — how wrong I was.

These days, I'm starting to miss my old middle school days. I'm thinking that it should have remained the same through high school, but two things happened: There were three schools to which we could go without much hitch, and I went to the least popular of the three. On top of that, I'd decided that, after introspection, that it wouldn't be worth any effort to contact any of them thereafter, instead relying on chance encounters. As a result, I ended up where I had no support from anyone else except an uncle (who put pressure on me in his Physics classes). I was done with the graduating class merely because I was too lazy to attempt to connect.

When you compare my high school years to middle school years, it's no contest. Even though I had been in withdrawal for some middle school years, I couldn't love them more. It's probably due to the fact that I had people who knew me and admired me — probably for the wrong reasons, but I still had some sort of company. I was able to go to dances with them; we could simply trot down to their residences in cases of projects; secrets were few and far between. I only realised this when I looked through those books at the library — I found that my best years were back in the seventh and eighth grade, and they would remain the best as long as I lived. It doesn't matter to me that I had a big head back then but didn't realise it; I'm making this comparison using mind settings of those times for each one. Even if I hadn't been as big-headed, there still were dances and secrets. Someone was paired up and dances were always fun, even if you did get your helmet destroyed or got embarrassed trying to dance for the first time, later to sink so deep into it that you got a fetish for the next four years. The drawback, though, was that I had been hit in the face with a short anti-Pokémon spell, rumours going about that I was infatuated with a Muslim student, and (this killed the rumours right away) the stigma of having sworn at another student for spitting in the group's cheese dip.

In high school, though, this was not present. If it indeed was, it wasn't widespread. In my first year both major dances were cancelled due to attendance issues. Plus which, more anti-Pokémon sentiment was in the air, and it took four years to go away. It was only until year three, when the health sciences programme was in full swing, when anything started happening. Compared with the students who were either unhealthily obnoxious or immersed in their studies, the breed the nursing programme drew in was a mixture of the two. Sometimes you'd have a few who wouldn't really be learning to be a nurse (I wonder how their internships will go). All in all, however, they had some charisma; alas, since it's been three years since I started, I'm going to narrowly miss the real activity I could have had to rival the days of middle school.

And had those books mirrored what my life in seventh grade was like, I'd be a giddy little fish that James wouldn't stand — probably solely based on the possible ownership of a MySpace or Bebo account. But for my time, Kidz Bop did rule. At least that was enough.

Vote for your favourite member!

...not elected officials, as I missed doing as my birthday was on Election Day.

Rather, I'm talking about class superlatives. As seniors, we're involved in the creation of a student yearbook, printed and bound as well as video. on Thursday, we were handed out leaflets polling us on whom would fit for superlative categories. A few weeks earlier, though, I had approached the head of the yearbook development department and made a decision that shattered everyone: I asked her to omit and substitute my name if it were listed as a superlative. Only two weeks ago I had fought with my parents to not have my pictures taken, which I found to be extremely stupid in retrospect (I ended up getting them taken in the end). While the latter turned out to be calamitous for me, the former decision both surprised and infuriated the seniors. As people ticked off the leaflets, I found that my motive could have been justified by two details:

• Two members short-listed me as 'rudest'.
• I had, as I told Brandon on PC, done a right job of deceiving and berating people in a daze of thought of my own academic prowess. In reality, though, my grades were standard and I had been found to be unfairly advantaged by my middle school in the conclusion of a peer mediation session. I even found myself to be an entity apart from the rest of the class at times. Finding it hard to admit this, I simply wrote a short Word document and printed it to hand to my homeroom teacher in what was probably cowardice.

Not a decisive detail, though, was the declining respect I had for such a system. Back in middle school, when I was voted to be the most intelligent and artistic male, I saved face simply by not voting for myself or even skipping categories. These days, though, the desire to have a photo in the section became more and more compelling. One of the guys went around as we typed up paragraphs in the library and asked people to vote for him as the most attractive male; in reality, he was good-looking, but a pregnancy by him as well as his ostentation, which annoyed me chronically but not severely, beset him. One of the girls even shouted in response, 'If you go around asking people they won't vote for you!'

Point well made. Then, however, I realised that this was exactly what happened on forums, or could happen. As many readers know, the Pokémon Community manages to get away with Member of the Month threads without a mass of hype that would come as it did with the yearbook, even considering that there are less than 60 people in the graduating class. Some months, though, this is due to lack of interest or a narrowed field of acquaintance. Elsewhere, and I'm sure PKMN.NET has experienced this, such threads start generating 'VOTE FOR ME!' spam. Although such resorts indicate that the person behind it isn't nearly as qualified as those that would naturally be voted for (and it's a proven fact — do you see Forest Grovyle trying to champion her work?), they still do it, and the threads are eventually canned.

Although I don't like the system, I still go to the Member of the Month threads and vote. Over there, the honours are temporary and are unlikely to reflect the real person as known by real-life friends. In the yearbook, though, it'll be accessible to those in the family who want to inquire about the past, especially the kids. If it's seen in the yearbook that you were recognised as the rudest, it will reflect off anyone voting it. If it's seen that you were the most intelligent or artistic, they'll probably challenge it — and all they'll get is a subway or alley map. For that matter, they'll challenge you on your intelligence — Stephen Hawking, regardless of whether he had the honour in his yearbook, is probably challenged so many times. For me, the fact that I had made such a big point of my intelligence makes me cringe even today — I'm bombarded by questions even at the register, there are girls who appear to like me on the grounds of my supposed intelligence, and there are the guys at the corner who try to make me recall an image with my eyes shut or prophesy something. And I've done it for so long, sometimes arrogantly. And it needs to stop. But the cost of leaving it behind will probably mean the loss of many admirers, but maybe it is worth it if they're there to challenge me....

Four years on

Surprise, surprise. I actually didn't have any form of Internet contact until I entered ninth grade, when it was required in order for us to send any assignments to the teacher. And it wasn't until January that I actually registered for a web service — in this case, Super Cheats. And when I stumbled across the Internet, I had already observed, and decided not to subscribe to, the type of speaking that used abbreviations, pipes, and such. Now that it's been almost four years that I've been in the net, I've changed a lot — not much in real life, as I'm always the one who chooses to remain behind as far as that goes, but in the sense of communication over the Internet.

My first submission on Super Cheats was a hint about capturing Regirock, Regice, and Registeel as well as how to get to Rayquaza. (It may no longer be in the system since submissions were regularly pruned before the archiving programme that started in November 2004 or so.) The hint was typed out in a meticulous format, although it eventually was broken up by the editors' habits that preceded the new PRO-submitter system, and it reflected much of what my stance of speaking was: formal, abusive of big words, and haughty to a point. And when I pioneered the question-and-answer sections on the site, I pretty much kept the same sort of tone.

Then, PKMN.NET. In May I came across its Spanish extension looking for photos of Mirage Island. In July I found the main site and registered — this was the first forum I ever joined. My first posts were shallowly demonstrative, many of them being experimentation with BBCode and copying and pasting of Pokémon reports I had written earlier in my life. As a result, I was regarded with looks of 'wtf?' all over the board, but then again, I hadn't been on the scene that long and had much more to learn. And when the admins pulled their joke of September by censoring 'Muuma' (there was a massive team called The Muuma Army, led by Rex) and then responding to calls for the censor being lifted by replacing several common words with 'muuma', I became ever more frustrated. It finally boiled over when my name at the time, Vennblomster, was censored. This rage followed me all the way to the formation of TPL.

Then, it was back to Super Cheats. Their forums opened in September 2004, and the members that joined immediately made a joy of it (the rumour had been circulated a few months back). This was just what I needed to get my forum use on track. Over time I developed an understanding of how it worked, helped mostly by tooling the rules from PKMN.NET to provide examples of how I thought the forums should be run (until I found that the configuration of the forums made full application of those rules impossible, and it was eventually discovered that the rules had just been duplicated and modified, so we were left with a meshed list that survives to this day and was geared mainly toward issues that were at hand at the time of writing. Nevertheless, it helped me so much that I was able to experience the joy of being a moderator of a respected website in March of the following year, although the promotions unfortunately coincided with the PKMN.NET fallouts. But I can't forget the smaller forums where I would communicate with people and help run things. One of hese forums was the Crow's Nest, the first forum at which I became an administrator, regardless of the foundation of the forum (a failed roleplay on PKMN.NET). I was very harsh there, as I later would become at Super Cheats upon promotion.

As far as speaking went, I got a lot better. Normally I didn't think about the topic before I replied (and admittedly, I still don't sometimes), and I kept up the formal speech for a while. When I used MSN, I adhered to graphic smilies that are now abhorred where I am. I can probably say that the graphical smilies were something of a change for me — I found it difficult to convey emotions any other way. By the time I had come out of TPL and returned to PKMN.NET, I had lost much of the formality, but it would still be some time before I reduced my speech, became slightly more terse, started using asterisked cues, and then moved on to text smilies at the endorsement of Lily. Each time I would get a reaction of surprise from whoever witnessed it — as you can see, Lily was astounded and Shiny Zapdos was horrified to see me use 'XD'.

So here I am, a moderator at the Pokémon Community, a DCC regular, and an MSN hog. Who knows what'll come next? I have a LiveJournal, which is good, but will I probably migrate to using the tilde instead of the ellipsis? Only time will tell~

...Drat.

Macintosh

As you can guess, this is currently being typed on a Macintosh computer — my school has a few of them but they're all in one room.

Of course, it's now an opportunity for me to reminisce about old school days. I was part of an after-school programme in the first and second grades since I had wreaked havoc at the local daycare and really didn't have many places to go once school ended. While it was a time for me to do any homework that had been assigned, it also allowed me to go into a room full of computers, all running on the old, columnal Macintoshes. In fact, the fist computer I ever used was one of those. I remember the maze games and calendar setups I had used as long as the computers were there.

And for eight years, once the old Macs had gone, I was grounded on Windows. In fact, almost everything I used for some time, if there were versions available, were created by Microsoft — MSN Messenger, Streets and Trips, and Office. Then, three years ago, I stumbled across an iBook and started looking it through. I eventually stumbled across SuperCheats using that computer, looking for Pokémon Crystal hints. Two months later, I joined.

Although what I don't like about Macs is that you can't load MSN Web Messenger on them (sorry, Shadow), I liked nearly other aspect of it. One thing was the graphics capability, which had been pounded into my head for some time before. The other was the fact that I was getting to meet an old friend after eight years of lack of communication. To be honest, I probably want a Mac now.

Or maybe it's just me. I know, I know, I've been accustomed to Windows for eight years (and have used Linux a few times), and I like trying out new things. But there's a Mac right here for God's sake....

Freshmen

I remember how it was four years ago, when I first entered the school and wondered how I was going to survive in the domain. Already I had gotten the rumour that there were bound to be 'freshman fridays', events in which newcomers would be ridiculed by other groups for their lack of indoctrination into the scholastic system. Now that I've survived three previous years here, partly due to help from an uncle and students that came with me from Brigantine, I decided I was no longer subject to that. Indeed, when one of my friends, César, came up with the idea of filming a documentary exposing some of the supposed ills brought on by freshmen of the year such as the lunch line glut, I approved it with a nod.

But when I experienced a particularly bad glut that I figured was due to hold me up for at least fifteen minutes, I initially decided to just leave and eat at work before shift started. Then, some students and staff began to ask me why I wasn't eating — and soon enough, I spoke with two classmates that were employed by the kitchens and they decided that they would do something to regulate the line on the side that I usually got in on. That they did (although the other side is still subject to gluts, probably more severe than when flow control was established) — and they were quick to point out that the current freshmen were not posing the problem, but the current sophomores and juniors were.

Thus I came under the assumption that all of the hype about freshmen in this school was predicated on how the sophomores and juniors of this year — about eighty percent of whom I'm talking about are in the nursing programme — behaved. I remember saying that I wasn't really loved before until I had the blood taken, and I developed a bit of respect for those people, but now I feel sorry that I ever approved the film plan. Fortunately, I was able to have the plans revised — I ended up doing the storyboard myself — and as of now we are interviewing teachers about their experiences with the current freshmen. As I had expected, all of them were exceptionally pleased with the ones coming in this year — they had better academic and behavioural standing than any other age group in the school as of now (but it's still early in the year).

End another three-paragraph essay, all I can come up with during the school year.

Not gone

...and I bite my tongue at my thoughts since the last post.

Not only has Blaze initiated Shinou.com, touting it as a replacement for PC when it goes down due to intrusion or lack of funding, but PC was hacked yesterday. Last night I learned that someone had been using Steve's account on the sly, but now was when it was really time they did stuff: When the smoke cleared, all of the super moderators had been removed, all super mods except Jake had been removed, and the entire population fell to 225. That number remains at the bottom of the main index but is soon to be fixed. During that time, I admit I had no desire to return to the forums if they came back, seeing as it was, to me at that time, a summation of a horrible server and faulty practical security working as one. Of course, now that I realise that they could just go back and grab a backup of the forums as they had done two weeks ago, although it'd cost them records after 4 September, I now see myself as an idiot.

The first guess was that Blaze and BGTFamily, the owners of Total Pokémon, were connected to it as they had been hounded out of the Community and Shinou.com was opening right around the time of the hack. Yet both contended that they weren't, although Blaze foresaw the hack after a chat response warning him against a friend of the sender coming to take down the site and PPN, which is slated for removal from the fold soon anyway. The decision to remove PPN, though, and leave just SIVPH, was the genesis for Blaze's guess that Shinou would survive and eclipse PC once funds falter.

There was me thinking that PC would have to obtain yet another database, as they did in September 2003 when their old database failed. Instead, Kwesi insisted on moving house — the URL became www.theud.com/pokecommunity (the old URL will redirect — in fact, the URL was redirected the night of the hacking, right when the boards were ready to go public again; that may have been a factor) and mods had to fix up glitches that resulted from the move (which were generally confined to broken images). Of course, a backup of the boards from 4 September had to be put in — the boards were down completely for five days at that rate, so little difference was made.

Oh, and at time of writing Shinou.com was still closed. I'll say that by tomorrow night they should be open. I guess having bilingual forums and a hassled agenda went quite a way.

TPL all over again

If anyone remembers the PokéLab, you'll recall that it fell apart after the promise of a site with little posting etiquette and, in effect, consistency of administration. It seems that a site is starting to take a little ride along the same road: In the wake of Blue Mew and a few others being banned in connection with a spam threat, a new site has been formed.

Unfortunately, the accusation of being communists that the admins made to PKMN.NET instantly turned the place into a rough conception of that. The Delibird now says 'Everyone is equal but Delibird is more equal than others', the only member rank is 'Proletarian' (a rank Karl Marx didn't like!), and the members have taken titles such as 'Comrade'. To blast Salamence's Lair for inadvertently promting this, I drew up a post for them to read; I wonder if it's still there as they removed a threat made by Jeroen.

This is ridiculous.

I remember being part of a coalition similar to yours more than a year ago and have seen it fail spectacularly because of internal problems, i.e. the administrators, including myself, tried to separate from PKMN.NET and found a site based on hatred of Jeroen and laxity when it came to the appropriateness of content and copyright issues. Having recovered from such an act, I can only expect an issue such as this just to fizzle out in less than a year.

From what I gather, this arose from Blue Mew and a gang of spammers delivering a threat to the administration to try to seize control of the site by spamming and encouraging havoc. Believe me when I say this: We tried it before and it blew up in our faces, so spamming will get you nowhere if you want to establish a point, let alone a reputation for yourselves. It's nothing more than feces to clean off the cement, not a technical problem — this seems to be the delusion under which you all have been labouring.

Now to call PKMN.NET a group of communists was not only completely unequivocal, but exactly what James was waiting for. You've seen the user ranks and names change to reflect it. They're not declaring any kind of war. They're taunting you. They're taunting you because you evidently can't think of a way to bring your case to them without acting abberantly and thus are making yourselves just look stupid. This abberation is also evident in your deletion of Jeroen's threat and is compounded by hypocrisy resulting from removing William1's post for 'offensive material'. Honestly, I thought lessons were learned after the PokéLab, the site I was part of, fell apart for the very same reasons. Obviously, they haven't.

Unless you all can get over this enmity and renounce your position against us — honestly, as a member of PKMN.NET, I seem to be enjoying the changes made to the forums as a result of your comments, ha! — we're all just going to point at you and cry 'Look at those idiots trying to look cool by making a baseless stand against Jeroen!'. Take it from someone who's gone down the same road you have and crashed on uneven pavement.

Exit objectives

On 1 March 2006, a referendum on teams and clams was demanded as spam increased in every thread. The question was raised as to whether the Team and Clan forums were even necessary. When protests from regular users swamped calls for the removal of the board, a member's mention of a team purpose idea made it to my mind:

Exactly SGX, many people would be gone, including myself there, I rarely go to any Video Games board to tell you the truth. Also, people need somewhere to talk about other things, not only the so called "team purpose" because if that is the whole point of a team, why don't you allow teams to go back to the Video Games Board, I mean, they are specialized in that, aren't they??

I may have misinterpreted this, but in three days it culminated in the institution of a new rule that called for mission objectives. The idea was that having a valid mission objective, such as assisting new members around the forum, assisting in moderation, organising petitions, and arranging community events would drastically improve the quality of posts in the forum. Over time, though, resentment boiled until late last week, when a group called ~La Revolution~ used the petition objective to launch a campaign for the removal of the purposes. This morning Rich announced that, although the rule was intended to reduce spam, its unpopularity was grounds for abolition.

Looking back on the rule, though, there were a lot of problems with it that made it hard to enforce and eventually completely undermined it, rendering it a superficial burden. Forstly, I vigourously concocted and promoted this rule mainly because of the hatred I had for teams from the get-go; everyone wanted something to be done about the board without it being scrapped on the spot, but I reasoned back then that it would be better to institute a policy that would, at optimum performance, eventually destroy interest in the board and render it useless. What a stupid idea that was — what ended up happening was that people lost interest due to the sanction, which I had aimed for, but there ensued a longing for the good old days (old PC, anyone? I talked to old PC members about this).

Another issue was the ability to enforce the rule. For someone who's probably the only one given the power to ensure that purposes were adhered to, whilst other mods just checked to see if there was a valid purpose in the first post, and is at work with the rest of the forum and had a full-time job and schoolwork, keeping tabs on teams to ensure that the goal was being worked for didn't just seem impossible, it was impossible. The rule ended up being ignored once the forms had been filled out; it was an empty rule. Then we had the 'member assistance' effect: The purpose that teams found the most convenient to use was — you guessed it — member assistance. The purpose was just to provide a buffer for members that were caught up in a mod situation on the forums, but it was now being used for nothing; members new to the forum would naturally join up and the identity of a team was enough to be individual identity at their stage of life, which rendered the member assistance purpose useless altogether.

Two things, therefore, leave me awestruck. The first was, as I stated above, how blind I was to the possible consequences of instituting such a policy. The other is how long it took for dissent to build up to the point where Rich felt compelled to remove it himself. Then again, there are a lot of things he's done in order to make the forum run like a democracy — such as moderator applications.*

* The old PC, as I recently learned, had the same thing. Of course, it didn't take long for that to get out of hand.

Well into summer

Right, I've pretty much sensed that I have to update this to keep up with James' impressive record of blogging and the usual LiveJournal records set by others as well as find a crafty way to get the ads to pay (James had his Google AdSense account banned since he used methods to steer others to the ads — 'Please keep clicking every six hours', folks?) I've vowed to make posts more regular. Hopefully I'll be able to post enough to close the nagging five-day gap that usually separates the old post and the next exciting one.

What I regret not reporting on is my experience thus far with Windows Live Messenger with Messenger Plus! Live. I must admit that after four months of having to live without it I eventually got used to having long Messenger queues and restrictions on the length of messages. Thankfully, all that has been brought back, and I've finally been able to figure out how to create coloured names using the software. Even before then, though, those that had the time to notice would have seen Dark Mightyena and me staging a status bar and signature war — probably enough to admit that in the midst of having a pair on the Community as a publicity stunt (after I knocked it before) there was a mistress.

The online side of things aside, it's time to examine what's going on in the real world. Although summer has officially arrived, the new pattern that my workplace has been sticking me to has decided to scrap the tradition of hiring me at night, instead giving me morning shifts — this ensures that I don't have to painfully switch from the regime of getting up early and submitting to SuperCheats before going to school to sleeping late with little hours and back again two months later. Over the past three days, I've been given a challenge that everyone else has passed up: train two cashiers at once. A set of twins had been shunted from the deli department and were instead assigned to the front for reasons unknown, and from that point I had had to keep them from going insane enough to fistfight each other by strictly regulating who gets to work the register and who gets to pack (their mother would much rather prefer that they bag, as I had met her today). Today, though, a series of confusions and discrepancies in the computer had led to me running back and forth, exchaging items as I went along, and having to reteach how to handle WIC checks and most produce codes.

Seeing as work pretty much follows the pattern of school now, I'm left with almost nothing until I get home, which is going to an arcade that opened recently (the previous one at the end of the island was foreclosed due to the owner's involvement with a shooting and drugs gang). Yesterday I had been able to meet the old crowd from the northern end of the island as well as a girl that Mike had pushed in to request a map of the place (I'm known for drawing road maps). Today, though, I was tortured there by a girl that appears at the store occasionally with a family that usually buys $300 or thereabout of groceries.

...Well, that was an attempt to liven up the day. Seeing as I'm in a routine that'll be monotonous from now until 18 July, when I head up to Rhode Island for the next youth summit, I guess we all will have to live with the five-day gaps. Or will we?

Old PC, new PC

The underlying matter of the Wikipedia situation last month, as brought back to me when Paul himself contacted me yesterday, was not a simple matter of spammers going off and retaliating, as they had done when TPL formed out of a coup on PKMN.NET. Rather, it was about the Pokémon Community's past, one that many members have tried to hold on to in the midst of what seems to be the new administration.

If you look at the Pokémon Community forum index, you'll notice that there is a board called 'Pokémon Community Reference Library'. (Of course, you can also get there by clicking here.) This library actually is an archive of the old Pokémon Community board with most posts as of the migration still intact. (The board was commuted to SMF for archival purposes as, from what an administrator tells me, it was impossible to transfer a licence to the new board and leave the old vBulletin board up.) Here, according to conversations I attended with people that have become disgruntled in the face of the current administration, was what was often referred to as the 'soul' of PC — back then, they say, there was an administration that respected others on their time at the board. Indeed, the fact that more than 1,000 members were immediately shunted from this old board to the current vBulletin one (and a look at the member roster will match the ID numbers of the members there to the numbers on the new board, creating the illusion that the accounts were transposed) has caused a massive rift between the members shunted in to the ones that have just arrived.

Seeing as I joined in September 2005 (two years after the migration) and have no real experience with the old board, I can't really judge on how that board was; rather, I've had to interview mods and old members to get a view of it. But Paul was a remnant of the old board and views the administration as a shadow of its former self. Shinin, with whom the administration had a war about the Wikipedia article (and recently caught being Zone on PC), called the mods 'n00bish'. Even Kahoshi, who joined in May 2004 under Suzu (there were no name changes allowed then), was enamoured by the old life and eventually resigned after Kura was promoted to moderator on the Daily Chit Chat merely because she couldn't cope with the current administration what with Chairman Kaga on indefinite leave, so Kura got control of the Other Chat area in her place. With that being said, this distinction between an 'old' and 'new' PC is awful to say the least. These people don't change. They merely have carried on about how good the old PC had been and how incompetent the moderators today supposedly are.

I myself remember when Super Cheats went through the stage. Weeks after the forums opened, it came under attack by Gaming Update members — as it turned out, there had been a forum on the site before, as well as on PSXGamer (which was the most active out of the lot), and one on Gaming Update. The Super Cheats board in that day merged with the other forums and eventually became the Gaming Update board. As a result, PSXGamer's clientele has been sourly low, and when Super Cheats acquired forums once more it was regarded as a hotbed for immature spammers, which prophetically started to develop after the attacks stopped. Since then, we've had mod fights and even a massive dirt bomb shower by Ilovemissyelliott and Bleepman, both of which carried out the attack using Bleepland as a base after Dave criticised their administration and their comments on Super Cheats over there.

Here's something to chew on: Does it really matter how the forums used to be run? This is today, not yesterday; unless you manage it civilly, you won't restore anything. Plus which, you'll have to cope with anyone who becomes mod or is promoted once the years wear on. Anyone who is clinging on to the old PC needs to grow up and adapt or leave. While this is defence for Jeroen against Imperial Dragon, unthinkable in the past, it's also a little message I have for Paul and Shinin themselves.

Update: Kahoshi has been removed as the focus of this article due to a contradiction of conveyed opinion here.

Summer

I am lucky to live on an island that has a visible population imbalance. In the winter, only the native kids are out at night, and during the day the streets are usually desolate. Then comes Memorial Day, when everyone surges in from the south in order to keep their balance of environment temperature and thus occupy the mansions homes that have been bought to serve as a temporary residence. It started only today that the volleyball courts were set up on the sand and square sections were cordoned off as an inconvenience to sunbathers that park right by the sea and about ten metres away from the pickets. The Great Summer Migration has officially begon, although tomorrow is Memorial Day and summer doesn't officially start until 21 June.

I personally am scared. When school started, I had been bogged down by long lines of $300-plus food orders at the supermarket and I'd turned away from the beach to avoid the masses that had collaborated down there. I also had expected to be in a relationship and found out what I wanted to major in when I attended college. Neither prediction was correct, and this day marks the resumption of the long orders and the likelihood of being ambushed by the girls on the beach and being struck head-on by a discus. Well, it's not fair to be that damning about the beach; after all, I went down there today and walked from the store to the edge of the wildlife preserve as one of my customers had prescribed, and I did notice a few pretty girls as well as territorial marks in the sand that showed that the groups of co-eds were coming to invade the town. Yet, seeing as I'm still in high school and I'll be there for another year, there were no girls my age without men to be seen on the whole of my walk — but that's not to say I was exactly on the prowl; I was checking to see who would stop me as I walked to the preserve and then home to moderate for the Pokémon Community.

It's amazing that the school year has gone so fast. Throughout the year, a lot of notable things happened in a timeframe that seemed so small. In the beginning I took my PSATs and subsequently received information from many venerable colleges, including West Point. Later, TPL fell apart and I returned to PUK. After that, I attended a youth summit and fell in love, but due to distances I can't consider that a relationship. Later still, I became an administrator at Super Cheats and was required to watch over a mechanical baby for a weekend (it died on Saturday, after a friend of my brother's punched it and my little sister removed the battery — that had to be the luckiest day of my life). Now we have until 14 June to get out of school, a few weeks before my friend gives birth (she left school in April, ironically in the middle of our birth control course!), and one more year of high school to go through before I hit college and the fun really begins for me — provided I stay celibate (especially to Ms Abarno, that!).

For me as a native of an island with such a population imbalance, it surprisingly dawned on me that I've got a lot of new faces to meet over the summer. I had gone to youth summits to meet new faces, but my walk on the beach and the glimpse of things to come has made me rethink my assumption that the island was a boring place to be in.

'Treehouse Saga' reprisal

LOL! Gawd you are sooooo dumb. Now that I'm a mod, it seems like my rants get closer together. Anyway, as I was looking through the Kissshipping thread for SPAM, this person's sig jumped out at me. I clicked, and well, there ya go. Wow, how much more of a n00b can you get? There's warning for reasons - so that little kids won't have to see it if they choose not to. I don't know how much more clear I could have been. I announced that there would be sex and crap throughout the fic. Get it through your [expletive] head!!! And Serebii isn't doing a "bad job" at all! He's letting the authors have their freedoms and the readers should have enough of a brain cell to know what NC17 means. I can't believe people these days. Stop being stupid and deal with it, or you can just go kill yourself. If this is the sort of things you're saying about TS's "February" I wonder what you did about "April"? :P

Seems as if the author of this Freewebs blog was a little angry about the comments I made on the Serebii.net fic 'Treehouse Saga'. The entry suggests that the author was Encyclopika, the author of the actual fic, and that she had recently become a moderator at Serebii.net. Below the post were several other comments about her fic, including one that included a member that rated it badly for the content and another that praised it for its realism. This was the obvious mark of someone who had gotten drunk on the laxity there.

How she managed to get to the review was through the sig I had attached to my profile on Serebii.net, which I hadn't bothered to update ever since I shrank away from there to do work on Super Cheats and the Pokémon Community. At first I thought it was moot, seeing as no-one with the power to ban me came across the sig, but with this coming up I think I need to keep that link up there to see how other people react to it.

And as for 'April', that was when the two (Drew and May) had the actual sex. Shortly afterward, Drew is dead in the hospital of hypothermia.

The School Fades Away

Two days ago I was talking to Lottie about the decline of roleplays on the Internet. The discussion was initiated by the decline of the Crow's Nest, in which the regular clientele has finally been boiled down to just the people who started Silver Moon Boarding School: Leon, Lottie, Hershi, Dave, and me. The forum, as you will recall reading in my entry about forum teams, was created in response to the popularity of Silver Moon Boarding School, and as long as the roleplay was still active on PKMN.NET, the notation of our site was assured. However, the roleplay on PKMN.NET declined into frenzied violence and the administration was compelled to prohibit further activity on the subject. From that point, we were on our own, and the forum steadily declined. Today most, if not all, of the lower members of the forum have deserted, and some of the lesser roleplays we hosted fell into decline (we even had to decommission Silverwich Legends, the sequel to Silverwich University).

When I was first indroduced to forums, I saw that several forums were based on roleplaying. Eventually, some would go under and others would take their places. Silver Moon Boarding School was anomalous in that it had passed the life expectancy of most roleplaying sites of its calibre, and it seemed assured that it would go on forever when our registration peak hit. However, the roleplay's counterpart on PKMN.NET being closed and my departure from the site to work for TPL both delivered devastating blows, the latter probably being the fatal one (I was made an administrator in January, the same month of the initiation of TPL's campaign).

The fact that the Crow's Nest isn't the only one in the roleplaying world's cycle is a bit of comfort, but that comfort is obliterated when we find that some sites have turned the subject into an assembly line in Detroit. Three of the most prominent are Neopets, Runescape, and the increasingly popular Gaia Online. (Gaia Online also was listed as the most attended site ever.) I do not blame these sites for the decline of smaller roleplays — I blame the fact that there are too many of them out there now, a result of the popularity of roleplays way back when.

This trend swoop doesn't apply to roleplay venues embedded inside forums, however. There are many new roleplays created each week, although the extent of them tends to stay the same: thirty pages or so. The reason for the shorter life spans of roleplays on the forum are not due to popularity, but because of the length of the forum roster. On PKMN.NET, some teams that remain help compound the pressure on some of the roleplays.

Yet what all of these roleplays have in common is that they are based on forum threads. We have known for a long time that reading plays off book pages is rather unwieldy unless you can get some good actors in your school to take the roles that require their talent. Forum threads are just as unwieldy, since you have only printed word as a reference. What Neopets, Gaia Online, and Runescape have that forum threads don't have, and what they have in common with telecasts, is that you can actually see the character. In these roleplays you don't have to rely and constantly go back to written descriptions or abilities, and you don't have to broadcast updates on a separate post — they occur automatically and everyone that's on the forum can be made aware quickly. In effect, these new roleplays emulate games on your PlayStation, Game Boy, or Xbox (especially the latter and the Xbox 360 due to their online playing capabilities). The catch, however, is that these roleplays can't rely on simple HTML or even JavaScript; they require server interaction, which many people coordinating the roleplays on forums just aren't capable of. It's a case of survival of the fittest if ever I saw one.

I bear no animosity toward these sites, and I certainly don't want Silver Moon Boarding School to go away. I know that it's because there has been so much of this activity that it has inherently become redundant, and there has been need for a change. I completely respect that, and I see it as cause to go off to learn some Java.