Dok Reaches The End of the Road, Without YOU.

[Pæs]

I post when I feel I have something to contribute, but a lot of the things I post seem to get talked around, which makes me believe that I have contributed noise rather than signal.

The thing that's easy to forget is how easy it is for a post to get noticed and appreciated without anyone really wanting to reply to it. Of course it's better when people have something to say about it, but sometimes they just don't. But look around: most posts have at least like 70 views. There's probably several people that enjoyed your post, if you think it's good.

I tend to mostly reply to things when I have something to say, and usually I don't, so I don't usually reply. Doesn't mean I don't read.

It's right I probably don't reply to them as much, but I do recall enjoying your posts, PMZ.

I forget who were you again before, Paesior or Remington? Paesior right? Then where did Remington go?

I'm Paesior.

[Triple Zero]

Okay then, this "turn people into robots to keep them apart better even if they change avatar or screenname" plot obviously isn't working and I'm going to have to think of something better.

[Pæs]

I changed my avatar to your robot and have my old screenname under my current one. You need to change people into the avatar you associate with them most strongly, I think.

[Kai]

I see you sitting there, "viewing".  Viewing responses unread since you hit the refresh button 5 minutes ago.  Mindlessly slamming F5 over and over again, in the hopes that someone wrote something INTERESTING today, but TOO FUCKING LAZY to write something interesting yourself, or respond in a conversation-provoking way to any of the rants recently posted.

I see you conditioning yourself to hit the food pellet bar, even when no food pellets have been forthcoming in weeks.  I see you then getting BUTTHURT when someone DOES post, mostly because this place has become so BORING that any fucking chance at drama is better than the MIND-NUMBING SLAMMING OF THE REFRESH BUTTON. 

Oh, yes, The Spider lives here, too.

Well, I've got some news for you, Sunshine...The reason nobody is talking is because NOBODY IS TALKING.  Imagine a great big room full of really smart people, all standing around for WEEKS waiting for someone to say something.  That's what you have here.

The fucking place is dying.  I think everyone sees that...The only question is, should we let it die?  Should we all just go back to our offices or our cubes or our housework or whatever it is why came here to escape?  Because at the rate things are going, YOU MAY AS WELL.  Find another hobby, find another religion, maybe get around to counting the flowers on the wallpaper like you've been meaning to do.

Anything but staring at the fucking screen, mashing the F5 button, and getting more and more depressed because the ONE PLACE you used to be able to hang out with weirdos has become the internet equivalent of one of those corner "loser" bars, where aging barflies sit on their stools all alone in a room full of other barflies, drinking and staring into the mirror, and wishing SOMEONE would talk sports.  And carefully ignoring anyone who does, because hell, they'll all be here tomorrow night, too, right?  We can talk then.

Well, maybe you've noticed that the "who's online" list is getting pretty small these days, and maybe you've noticed that half of the people on it AREN'T really on it, they've been "viewing the index of principia.com" for 4 hours.  Their computer is logged on, but they're not there.  The fucking place is a waxworks, a museum visited only by those of us who haven't yet broken the conditioning that tells us that AMAZING THINGS used to happen here.

And maybe you've noticed that a whole bunch of our weird friends haven't been around in a really long time.  Remmy, Semaj, Iason, etc...I could go on for a page or more.  People USED to come and go, here, but now they just GO. 

Why?  Easy.  While we rightfully say that "weird pulls in more weird", it's also true that "nothing pulls in more nothing".  And yet here we sit, viewing.  Sort of like people viewing the television.  Or viewing the grass growing, paint drying, or listening to the sound of your breath wheezing in and out of the corpse you've become.  Anything but start – or continue – a conversation.  Fact:  CoG is back up, and they have damn near as much actual traffic as we do.  Laughing at TSC's lack of traffic, were you?  Having a giggle at the morgue that TCC turned into?  Ho ho!  It's like watching Johnny Cash's corpse laughing at John Wayne's. 

We've turned into a room full of spectators, with nothing to watch.  A Neilson Family in front of a teevee that plays only reruns.  And we have only ourselves to blame.

I'm not going to continue like this.  It's just too fucking depressing, and whatever fun mood I was in at the beginning of the day has invariably soured by 9AM, because instead of too much traffic to follow after a meeting or between scheduling work assignments, I come back to find things exactly the way I left them.  Frankly, I spend half of my time here wishing Poptard would raid us again, just so something would HAPPEN.

So, no, I'm going to bugger off and find something else to do, maybe check in at lunch each day, to see if anyone has written a rant or posted something funny in the politics section, and to see if any admin functions need to be done...At least as long as even THAT makes sense.  I'll still be posting rants, I suppose, but only because I must RANT OR DIE.  But as far as coming here for conversation, what's the fucking point?  I'll just hire a temp to hit the F5 button for me, and I can sleep in my office.

You finally killed me.

Okay forever,
Dok

I'm not here to make excuses. Hell, I don't need to. It's general knowledge I have a bad addiction to internet that's poisoning my social progress, so I'm actively cutting down on the time I spend on the computer. Text interactions has ruined my ability to "win friends and influence people", because I never trained how to look them in the eye and keep looking. I'm not around here often enough these days to sit around pressing refresh. Once a day is good enough. And, I think, a couple times a day is good enough for /anyone/. Assuming those couple times are spent reading /then writing/ instead of mindlessly surfing. I don't read all the threads, I don't even read half the threads. I read the threads that look like they are content in apple talk, read all the OKM threads, and glance at the top threads of the other subforums to see if there are any good discussions going on. Then I write. I write this, I write the post I put in the fractal thread, I write a rant or a vignette, anything less than an hour of time. Then I'm done.

I'm not going to spend my life sitting around here for people to say things because it's unnecessary. I can't force people to talk by sitting here. I can, however, force /myself/ to talk by sitting here with a new post or reply window open and hope that more than incomprehendable stream of consciousness comes spewing out. And if, after reflection, it's too shit to share, I delete it. About half the posts I intend to make on here, I press the back button before finishing. Hell, I had a fiction idea about a week ago based on some of the In Those Days stuff, and it came out so contrived and fanfiction-ish that I didn't even finish the first chapter. But at least I entertained the excercise of writing, so that next time an idea comes along I'm a bit closer to actually writing something worth reading.

So don't punish yourself, Roger. You can't force people to write. Every act of creativity is putting something out here and hoping that people will respond to it, or more importantly, be inspired by it to make more. I think you have the right idea.

[Triple Zero]

I changed my avatar to your robot and have my old screenname under my current one. You need to change people into the avatar you associate with them most strongly, I think.

It's not your fault! It's those other peoples with purple robots.