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I guess this is more of a rant than anything, but have you ever been very disappointed by a hobby? The guy pictured is Tom King, a comics writer. Over the weekend he levied some kind of claim of racism against artist Jae Lee. This led to a lot of harassment of Lee, who revealed this happened on the day he was going to put to rest the ashes of a beloved pet dog. King responded by showing pictures of his own dog, happy and pampered. King didn't apologize or take down his tweets until after the weekend when, I'm guessing, someone with power told him to knock it off. That was bad enough, but yesterday I read about Jud Meyers, who was made publisher of IDW and then put on administrative leave after just 5 days. It turns out that he ran a bunch of comic shops and left a lot of fraud and theft in his wake. It appears that during this time he ditched out on Diamond Comics, a comics distributor, and left them hanging for $30k. No one knows why he was put on leave, but a company generally does that pending an investigation on something, so IDW must have become clued-in to something about him. I remember hearing that comics started as a way for organized crime to launder money, but after becoming an institution of pop culture, I would have thought the fraud and pettiness would have been left behind. I guess it just festered behind the scenes. I guess it just seems like the industry has become more vitriolic and overt in its dysfunction over time. It gets harder to ignore when stuff like this becomes more frequent in the news feed or during in-store conversations. Maybe I'm just slowly drifting away from the hobby, but it feels more like work these days than personal enjoyment. Anyone have experiences like that?

>>18700 The ills of the modern word are affecting everything in some way, including My Little Pony. For the past few months, there have been people vying for control by influencing those who run the largest websites. It started with the recent riots, and then this was published: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/06/my-little-pony-nazi-4chan-black-lives-matter/613348/ This was such a blatant hit-piece at least two other newspapers responded to it: https://www.rt.com/op-ed/492858-bronies-atlantic-racism-censorship/ >It’s easy to mock the trials and tribulations of the bronies, forced to undergo a political reckoning they neither wanted nor, to be fair, needed; indeed, that’s the aim of much of the media coverage of groups like them. But this thought-policing ethos – jamming an ultra-rigid form of political correctness into spaces that have become safe havens from it – is never satisfied with anything short of total control. >Before you laugh at the grown men drawing pictures of pretty ponies, remember: first, they came for the bronies. Next, they could come for you. https://quillette.com/2020/06/27/is-the-my-little-pony-fan-community-really-full-of-nazis/ >The article creates an impression that the alt-Right is using seemingly-innocent cartoon fandoms as a Trojan horse to conceal and spread a sinister ideology, but the truth is that the only thing these guys are interested in hiding inside a horse is their dicks. I know this is a thread for disappointment, but two weeks ago an art pack was released protesting this censorship, and has raised more money than any other charity art pack ever revolving around the show, so it's not all bad: https://www.marenheit451.com/ Currently, the largest booru is slowly dying. The third image here shows a recent development. People threatened to report the booru's Patreon account if it didn't censor how they wanted, and the irony in the last sentence is hilarious: >For those not in the know, since April of last year Patreon has moved against any non-vanilla NSFW work, with all anime related artwork derezzed earlier this year. Just this week, we learned that they've started asserting ownership of artists' work and activities outside of Patreon. Soon after, they demanded Derpibooru be "cleaned" of a vast amount of content, including relatively innocuous themes and plenty of safe-rated content; and we have no interest in complying with such content purges at the behest of companies leveraging their positions for misguided moral crusades. It's been a real show to watch this mess unfold. It's not great that it happened, but it does show that the beaten horse isn't dead yet.

>>18700 Nearly everything I enjoy has been ruined by these types of people. >Video games >Music >Programming >Hacking I miss the socialization I would have with people under these subjects. Alas, now I can only enjoy them in solitude in some cases. It is very rare for what would be considered a "decent" video game to come out. So, I rarely play new video games anymore. The music scene is butchered to hell and back. I can listen to music, still thankfully. But good luck making any without running into some stupid divisive bullshit. Programming likely does not even need to be elaborated on, neither does hacking. I still do both, in solitude. However, its rare to find a location where I can discuss these things, and I have lost almost all interest in both. I actually was a top ranking CTF player in college and I completely left because all the women got invites to fuarrrking Chicago for simply signing up and all I got was an email telling me my rank. Theres my rant. Now I can go back to ignoring it for another 6 months.

>>18706 Careful lainon, blaming things on scheming progressives is what made /g/ fall. Not saying you have to agree with them, but it sows a malicious seed that poisons people and online communities.

>>18703 If "crazy Americans" is your thing, it gets more interesting. There's a someone in Florida trying to get into Congress. As part of his platform, he wants to deal with manga and anime and their "unhealthy sexual" depictions. His top-of-the-list example? Dragon Ball Z. Apparently people who throw fireballs and yell a lot is too sexy to put in front of children.

Some more ranting about a different topic. Im what you might call an indie gamedev, obviously neither successful nor known, outside of some small circles. I was always a gamer and liked games but now i am so sick of gamers and games, if it werent my passion and purpose in life id ditch it all. I have a few fellow gamedev friends, really talented amazing people who devoted their life to their craft and nobody gives a fuarrrk about what they do. There are these game publishing sites, theres about 10 or more games coming out each day, most of them have 0 effort put into them, even no description or pictures most of the time. Why do people do this, i imagine nowdays bots can do this, but why would you write a bot just to spam on game sites? Whats the worst is modern day gamers, i see people playing those really cheap bad games with adverts in them. No gameplay, terrible graphics and forget about plot or story or anything remotely intellectual, people play those things on their phones, instead of reading a book or just enjoying the outdoors. People waste their time on those commercial clickbait soykaf, even though they have 3d capable phones and there are tons of good free games, people grab the first worst soykaf just to kill time because they have nothing at all better to do. Then there are the fanbois who wage slave really crappy games even though there are better alternatives if you bother doing some searching. And i watch these people really excited about by all standards bad games while me and my friends for years do horrible grinds to stand up to some self imposed standard while the standards in the real world is about as low as dog soykaf. Also "gamergirls" and all these other people who think they are gamers because they have nothing better to do at the bus stop than playing games that are worse than stuff we had in 1990. Not to mention the general whinery and crap you always have to put up with like the bs with gaymergayte. Plus most games nowdays are those crappy generic pay2win soykaf that take up 30gigs of space, but the gameplay is mostly soykaf and with small variations the same. Im just so sick of it all.

>>18724 There was a group that made good money with a bot for generating slot machine games on the apple store. Basically a random name generator that would google search images to the name and use it as images for the slot machine. This way it could target niche demographics nobody else would even consider. I.E. one of their best selling ones was a dolphin themed slot machine. It all only stopped cause apple derezzed them for spamming their store.

I used to be really big into retrogaming in my teens, since the computer I had back then was such dogshit that the most advanced thing it could do was SNES emulation and ZDoom. Luckily there were tons of 16-bit RPGs (officially- or fan-translated) and Doom wads to keep me from getting bored. But the community is the cliquiest damn thing I've ever seen. In the past it was just because they made their home on forums like Starmen and Doomworld, and forums themselves are cliquey enough as it is. You can't really make yourself known unless you were there from the early days. Now in the present day you've got politics thrown in the mix, so every mod and admin wants to ban anyone they disagree with personally (I don't mean edgy "i sed n-wurd loal" idiots), and you can't have one thread without it derailing into owning teh chudz. It's too bad for me, because I've been wanting to make some games similar in spirit to the ones I played in my teens. Hell, I've been wanting to since my teens. And I'd like for these games to reach the biggest audience they possibly could. I also know that the creators of successful games in this style (e.g. Shovel Knight, Undertale) were well-connected within these cliques. Seeing the success they had makes me want to try to be part of this scene, so I could build up a few connections and have a shot at some level of success. But I just don't have the patience to deal with all the bullshit, especially because it just gets worse with each passing year. I realize success isn't everything, but if few/no people played my game then I'd feel like I wasted my time

>>18724 this isn't the vent thread

>>18734 It does seem relevant with respect to disappointment with our respective hobbies. If nothing else, the idea that the hobby of choice is discovered to be filled with people who make things worse to a degree not everyone is prepared for. Sometimes those people turn a hobby into a chore (usually, hopefully, temporarily)

>>18700 I didn't read any of this cape comics celebrity stuff but the state of all storytelling media like movies, comics (actually a great medium completely squandered from the start), literature, is nothing short of suicide inducing. Our society is more obsessed than ever about "stories" and "narratives" yet storytelling is pretty much dead in favor of the endless repetition of corporate memes or the most masturbatory dopamine bait. If you actually care about stories, you don't treat this as a hobby but something you draw your life's value from, if you need those extra situations and imagery to enhance an otherwise unbearable life, it's like living in a nightmare. We will never have a Kurosawa again, we'll never have real artists that legitimately care and whose standards are excellence instead of a box office record or making sure not to step on anybody's feet. The endgame is shaping to be all safe consumeristic stuff and propaganda and porn, literal or otherwise, all containing ads containing ads, like Matryoshka dolls.

>>18724 Itch.io's comment section is the saddest stuff. All wannabe pewdiepies who just played your free asset flip game and put an advert of their stream on your page.

>>18750 I hate videogames but in the grand scheme of the universe what is a real hobby? shooting birds for sport? collecting products? writing novels, whose purpose today is basically text videogames for young girls? I can respect the opinion that someone shouldn't have hobbies and focus their life entirely on their job if that's what you mean.

>>18718 If you are trying to say "keep it to yourself" - I share my disaproval at the time of things happening and leave it alone as I actually do have better things to do than enjoy anything. >X is what made /g/ fail Not to break a rule here by complaining about another website or anything - But I disagree with your perspective. /g/ was never good, overall. I would even say this is with almost everything that is social - You have to deal with stupid soykaf time and time again, until you get a breath of fresh air and see one decent or even good thing, then its back to stupid soykaf until the next decent or better quality thing. This is just how things tend to be already... But now there is nothing good. Everything is just bleak and all the nice things have erroded. The people we are calling "progressive" are not progressive - They are regressive. They stamp out anything that is actual progress and demand equity. Someone with 85 IQ is just the same as someone with 149 IQ, and if you disagree you can leave. >just make your own X And then you do. But no one comes because there is already an established area and few people want to take part in building up something good. There are off-shoots, but lets be real. How often do you see this? You know how fuarrrking discouraging it is to apply for a job and they ask you for your github and you tell them "I dont have a github - But I do store my programs on my website / my own git repo." Instead of asking what that is, they usually ask "why?" and you know that moment when you did not get a job? Its that moment, when they ask "why" in a shocked way, rather than a curious way. The latter has nothing to do with progressives, but the feeling is the same. Oh well, at least I have academia---Oh wait... Well, when I die at least I won't likely be bothered by the issues here, and the world won't have to deal with me either. Weird how we were supposed to be friends but ended up being adversaries because the people who can barely show up needed to be pampered... Oh... Not "we" as in you and me. You know what I mean.

>>18753 I think what Lain is implying, although I might be projecting, is that designing a spook and blaming everything on it - be it right or not - can lead to a knee-jerk nonculture which is just as poisonous as a ruined culture. The only solution to this problem is taking the hard way and trying to foster and promote the things you want to see as well as make things you want to see instead of identifying as an opponent of whatever is in charge. It clearly doesn't work.

>>18755 Actually I am sorry, I said something I didn't believe in. I think there is no real solution, you just have to accept this is the way things are because you can control your own behavior but not the behavior of the remaining 7 billions, especially those who have a wallet or strings to pull.

>>18752 (Unironically) weaving baskets, carving wood, making computer programs, building bird houses, writing poems and short stories (whose purpose today is basically text videogames for boys with imagination and slow computer). Anything that involves arrangement of matter into it's less entropic form. What's up with this American attitude again: kill somebody or "consume" product? I believe you can do better than that. Remember, Terry Davis said: Men don't play games, they write games.

>>18793 >making computer programs Is a video game not a computer program? >Remember, Terry Davis said: Men don't play games, they write games. So why did you say that making/writing games is for 9-year-olds and isn't a "real" hobby?

I recently wrote about a related topic. Don't let people take loved things away. If a series turns bad, or something bad happens, try to ignore it; don't let it ruin something.

A thread like this only comes along once in a very long time, I relate very strongly to the gamedev post and for so long I thought I was the only one...

I don't believe this discussion should die yet.

>>25024 Then say something of consequence, rather than just bumping it three months after we were done.

>>18700 Look at his eyes. You can tell his mind doesn't work right.