LogFAQs > #963659288

Entity13 posted...

Like if you were to have moved the wrestling posts into a topic dedicated to pro wrestling, the Geek topics might have been left with people bumping them to keep them on life support until the day we all collectively gave up on it.

I think the real problem there is that it's becoming really hard to be a geek these days.

Mainstream comics have been terrible for like 10 years now, comic movies felt like they peaked with Endgame (with Marvel burnout and complaints about streaming-exclusive TV shows and SJW pandering kind of poisoning everything Marvel's done since), DC's been mostly trash for years (especially with Hack Snyder running things), Doctor Who went to shit when Moffat took over, Star Wars went into a nosedive once Disney bought the franchise, Star Trek has been actively pissing off its fans for like 20 years now, most other fantasy/sci-fi shows were either outright bad or harder to watch now that everything is spread out across a dozen streaming services, tabletop RPGs were always a bit niche... and it feels like almost every franchise with a dedicated fanbase has actively devoted itself to shitting on said fanbase in an attempt to court mainstream favor.

What's even left to be excited about as a geek?

So instead of being a place to geek out and be excited, all we really had left is a lot of bitter cynical complaints about everything. It became less "Hey fellow geeks, look at this cool thing, let's be excited!" and more "I am going to vent about this thing I hate".

I get why interest died off, but I still kind of mourn what was and what should have been.

And I blame the world in general. You suck, world.

I think the main reason why talk had kind of started centering on wrestling towards the end was because it was one of the few things anyone was still excited about (because the start of AEW was a really exciting time for wrestling in general, after wrestling had sucked for years). Not to mention that Wave and I had always been openly fans of wrestling. But there was still nothing stopping anyone else from bringing up topics. The problem was that no one was really bringing up topics that anyone else cared about (because again, see also burnout-induced apathy).



Entity13 posted...

It was clear no one in there cared about the #1 thing I was geeking out over for the last couple years I posted in those topics, so most of my last posts there were about other things in passing, which were ignored

Well, to be fair, the Geek topics were never really a place where everyone was going to feign interest in every single thing any one person wanted to talk about. The point of the Geek topics was more that it was a place to where you were more likely to get a positive response to a given topic than you would on the board at large. A sort of "Hey, I know some of you might be interested in this thing I saw/read/found/etc, so here it is in case you're interested" way of getting to see things you might otherwise have missed, hear opinions about things you liked, and generally interact. So you'd just sort of throw stuff out, and if people were interested and wanted to talk about it they would, and if they weren't interested they wouldn't. I know I passively ignored specific topics I wasn't interested in mainly because I had absolutely nothing to add, but I also didn't want to get in the way of other people talking about them. It was never a place where everyone felt obligated to reply or comment on every post/discussion. People weren't ignoring what you posted because it was you, more that they didn't care about/have anything to say about Final Fantasy XIV.

And hey, I never got bitter over the fact that none of you other than Shadow gave a fuck about tabletop RPGs (and he and I disagreed on pretty much every facet of RPGs) in spite of the fact that I would have loved to talk about them more. It was what it was.

(Though honestly, I never thought Final Fantasy XIV talk belonged in the Geek topics in the first place, because that was something where you probably WOULD get a more enthusiastic response as a separate topic on PotD, because we're on a video game message board. Even beyond me personally having literally no way to engage in a FFXIV conversation because I don't play it and never will, I never really felt like video game conversation in general belonged in the Geek topics. The Geek topics were more for non-video game related geekery that wouldn't necessarily get as much attention from the rest of the non-nerds of PotD. Because the average PotDer is obviously going to care more about, say, Breath of the Wild or Witcher 3 - which are games that relate to the interest that brought them to this board in the first place - than they are more niche geeky things that might be farther outside the gamut of video gaming.)



Entity13 posted...

The straw that broke the camel's back being when Wave missed my topic title suggestion

I'll be honest - I don't remember what it was. But I do remember thinking it was kind of lame at the time. So I remember I wasn't entirely sad that he ignored it.

But it's also not as if there was a system in place where Wave was obligated to try and use everyone's suggestions equally or anything (sort of like how back in the day the Rotation or Chestbump Squad would deliberately rotate who got to make the next topic) - it was always just Wave picking whatever suggestion he liked best (or making his own). Even if everyone else didn't necessarily like the one he picked as much as they might have preferred an alternative.

Wave skipped my suggestions all the time, and I never got pissed about it. I never took it as him disrespecting me personally or like a personal attack. I just shrugged and moved on with my life. It was never really that big a deal.

Especially since, towards the end, Wave was dealing with a lot of health issues and personal issues of his own. So if he missed someone's suggestion or just wanted to go with his own more, it was a minor thing in a larger context.



Entity13 posted...

Wave no longer coming to post here pulled the plug on the Geek topics, sadly.

I agree this is true. But on the other hand, I might have been more inclined to try and salvage them myself if they were still going strongly even without him (like I did a couple times in the past, when he wasn't around for a few days and I made the new topic instead). It was sort of the combination of Wave being gone and most people kind of having lost interest anyway that led me to shrug and go "ehh".

But it's ultimately just another symptom of PotD and GameFAQs dying. Fewer people overall means fewer people to concentrate into a single topic or sub-clique. Less interest in everything in general, fewer posts, lack of passion.

We're all just the old burnouts too set in our ways and too trapped by inertia to go anywhere else. We're here until we die because it would take too much effort to go anywhere else.